Postcolonial Past and Present: Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies 2018042509, 9789004376533, 9789004376540

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Postcolonial Past & Present

Cross/Cultures Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English Edited by Gordon Collier Geoffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek Advisory Board David Callahan (University of Aveira) Stephen Clingman (University of Massachusetts) Marc Delrez (Université de Liège) Gaurav Desai (University of Michigan) Russell McDougall (University of New England) John McLeod (University of Leeds) Irikidzayi Manase (University of the Free State) Caryl Phillips (Yale University) Diana Brydon (University of Manitoba) Pilar Cuder-Dominguez (University of Huelva) Wendy Knepper (Brunel University) Carine Mardorossian (University of Buffalo) Maria Olaussen (University of Gothenburg) Chris Prentice (Otago University) Cheryl Stobie (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Daria Tunca (Université de Liège)

volume 206 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc

Postcolonial Past & Present Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies Essays for Paul Sharrad Edited by

Anne Collett Leigh Dale

leiden • boston

Cover illustration: Unknown artist. Detail of table napkin. Embroidery on cotton cloth. Port Moresby Women’s Collective/Red Cross, c.1964. Collection Paul Sharrad, Photographer, Diana Wood Conroy. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018042509

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-37653-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-37654-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Foreword  vii Albert Wendt Illustrations and Appendices  ix Notes on Contributors and Editors  xi

Part 1 Collision, Connection, and Change 1

Textiles from the Sea of Islands Sacred Heart Nuns and Craft Advisers in Papua New Guinea and Australia  3 Diana Wood Conroy

2

Reading Across the Pacific, Reorienting “North”  30 Diana Brydon

3

Nationalism from Below Folk Nationalist Formations of Mukunda Das  48 Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay

4

Xavier Herbert’s Enlightenment The Solomon Islands Nightmare, 1928  61 Russell McDougall

5

Regime Change Literature and Transitional Justice  84 Tony Simões da Silva

Part 2 Case Studies 6

Laughter and the Indigenous Trickster Aesthetics of Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing  103 Anne Brewster

7

Claude McKay and the Pestilential City The Metropolis, the Clinic, the Crisis  121 Anne Collett

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Bodily Cloth The Making Process in Artworks by Elsje van Keppel and Jane Whiteley  134 Kay Lawrence

9

Overseas and Underground Travel and Travellers in Janet Frame’s Fiction  150 Dorothy Jones

10

“Indias of the mind” Maps, Mothers, and Ethnicized Wonder Woman Outfits in Australian– Indian Fiction  167 Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan

11

Singing the Spiral of Time Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela  183 Bill Ashcroft

12

Comparative History in Polynesia Some Challenges of Studying the Past in the Postcolonial Present  196 Teresia Teaiwa and Tekura Moeka‘a Afterword  215 Lydia Wevers Index  222

Foreword Albert Wendt Paul Sharrad is one of Oceania’s pioneer and most influential researchers, scholars, and teachers of Pacific literature in English especially by indigenous writers. To understand and unpack that literature he had to study the colonial literatures and histories and the cultures of our region. A huge, difficult and tricky undertaking. From the late 1970s to now, he has observed, studied, added to, and promoted the growth, development and understanding of that literature and through it our understanding of Oceania. Over the years Paul has produced a very impressive body of essays, lectures, papers and books about our literature: publications which have fundamentally changed the ways we look at and teach that literature and look at the cultures out of which that literature has come. Every literature needs a critical commentary to go hand in hand with the creative body of fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Paul was one of the first to teach courses in Pacific literature and used them to promote the study, writing, and teaching of that literature. Many of his post-graduate students went on to research and teach that literature in high schools and tertiary institutions. And expand the literary criticism of it. I will always be grateful to Paul for researching and writing the major book about my literary life and work: Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void, published in 2003.1 It looks at my life and writing up to 1999. Normally I am resistant/hesitant about critical examinations of my work. But over the years of reading his views on my writing and knowing him I have come to hold great respect for him. The book is thorough, caring and careful, insightful and original, and offered me other interpretations and ways of looking at my own work, ways which opened up other ways for me to look at the work of other Pacific writers, and literature in general. The authors of the essays and papers in this book openly admit that their work, research, and teaching have been greatly influenced/informed and inspired by Paul Sharrad’s scholarship, teaching and publications. The essays cover a wide range of topics and research interests. I find them fascinating, stimulating, and they have expanded and deepened my knowledge of Oceania and literature, and other ways of reading those. 1 Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003).

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I thank Paul, profoundly, for his work, example, and friendship all these years. Ia alolofa atili mai pea atua o le Pasefika ia Paul Sharrad ma tusitala ma faiaoga o le Pasefika. Maualaivao Albert Wendt Work Cited Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003).

Illustrations and Appendices Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 4.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Wives of Pacific Island Regiment soldiers  6 Women’s group, Taurama Barracks  7 Mother Genevieve’s road into the Highlands  10 Image of the Sacred Heart in pearl-shell mosaic  11 Table mats and napkins with varying designs  13 Mother Genevieve, Archbishop de Boismenu, and Papuan nuns  14 Sister Eucharia holding a Tiwi Designs printed vestment  15 Sister Eucharia at a sewing machine in Bima Wear  16 Tiwi women wearing skirts made in Bima Wear  17 Tiwi Designs seamstresses  18 Article in the Daily Telegraph  19 Marie Taita Aihi, “Man, Horse and Snake”  23 Detail of embroidery on table napkin  24 Map of Nggela Islands  66 Elsje van Keppel, Heartbeat  138 Elsje van Keppel, Breath  142 Jane Whiteley, still life 2002  145 Jane Whiteley, My Mother’s body 2010  146 Jane Whiteley, My Mother’s body 2011  147

Appendices Appendix 1: pasi 201 Enrolment Data  211 Appendix 2: pasi 201 Student Results Data  212 Appendix 3: pasi 201 Course Learning Objectives  213

Notes on Contributors and Editors Bill Ashcroft is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A founding exponent of post-colonial theory, he is co-author with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin of The Empire Writes Back (1989), the first text to examine systematically the field of post-colonial studies. He is author and co-author of fifteen other books, variously translated into five languages, including Post-Colonial Transformation (2001), Post-Colonial Futures (2001); Caliban’s Voice (2008), and Intimate Horizons (2009). He is the author of over 150 chapters and papers, and is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay is Vice-Chancellor of Bankura University in Bankura, West Bengal, as well as an Honorary Research Associate at Monash University and Visiting Fellow at the University of Wollongong. He is co-author of Re-Inventing Australian Literature and Culture (2007) with Debamita Banerjee, co-editor of Landscape, Place and Culture: Linkages Between Australia and India (2011) with Paul Brown and Christopher Conti, and co-editor of Remapping the Future: History, Culture and Environment in Australia and India (2013) with Raelene Frances. Long-time colleagues of and collaborators with Paul Sharrad, Deb and Raelene are currently engaged in the joint project Diasporic Home Communication and Cultural Diplomacy. Anne Brewster (BA Adelaide, PhD Flinders) is Associate Professor in English at the University of New South Wales. Her research and publication fields are Aboriginal literature, critical race and whiteness studies, Australian literature, women’s literature, feminism, fictocriticism and experimental writing methodologies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Singaporean and Malaysian literature in English. Her books include Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography, Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism, and Towards a Semiotic of Postcolonial Discourse: Singapore and Malaysia, and she is the editor of Those who remain will always remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing. Diana Brydon completed her MA at Toronto and her PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. She is now Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Globalization

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and Cultural Studies and Director of the Research Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba. Diana was the first Robert and Ruth Lumsden Chair of English at the University of Western Ontario from 1999 to 2006, and has taught at universities in Australia, Brazil, and Canada (including Toronto, Ottawa, Guelph, and UBC). She is the author of Christina Stead (1987), Timothy Findley (1998), co-author (with Helen Tiffin) of Decolonising Fictions, and co-editor of Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (2012), Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (2008) and Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere (2002), as well as sole editor of Routledge’s five-volume Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2000). Her current research examines the cluster of meanings attached to concepts of home under the pressures of globalizing processes within the contexts of postcolonial cultural studies and discourses around globalization. Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan is a lecturer in academic language and literacy in Learning Development at the University of Wollongong, where she specializes in providing effective responses for students dealing with issues in English language teaching, doctoral writing, and communication across disciplines. After undergraduate studies SIES College, University of Bombay, along with a First Masters and Graduate Diploma in Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, Meeta has completed a Masters of Education, an MA (Hons) and a Doctorate in Education at the University of Wollongong. With Paul Sharrad, Meeta has edited an anthology of short fiction and poetry titled Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia (2018), and is also working on a collection of her poems. A respected writer, reviewer, and commentator on Indian writing in Australia, Meeta has had her work published in venues such as the Mascara Literary Review and Southern Crossings, a journal dedicated to “Reimagining Australia, South Asia and the world.” Anne Collett was editor of Kunapipi, the leading postcolonial journal of creative writing and criticism, for more than fifteen years, after taking over the position from founding editor Anna Rutherford. A graduate of Queensland (BA [Hons] and MA) and London (PGCE and PhD), she has taught at the universities of Copenhagen, London, Tokyo, and Wollongong, holding the visiting Professor of Australian Studies position at Tokyo University in 2011–2012. She is the author of more than fifty essays on postcolonial literatures including Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand and South African, as well as essays on Romanticism. Anne has a strong interest in women’s writing and in poetry, and is currently

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working on a monograph on Caribbean poetry. Her most recent edited collection (with Louise D’Arcens) is The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting (2009). Leigh Dale completed honours in English at the University of Western Australia, followed by an MA and PhD from the University of Queensland. In an interim in her postgraduate study, she taught for two years at Fukushima Senior Girls’ High School. In her academic career she taught literatures in English at the Universities of Southern Queensland, Queensland, and Wollongong, where she is now Honorary Professor. She is the author of The Enchantment of English (2012) and Responses to Self Harm (2015), as well as articles and chapters on postcolonial literatures (especially Australian), higher education (especially the history of teaching English), and more recently, on self harm and the competition for disciplinary authority in higher education and research. She was editor of Australian Literary Studies from 2002 to 2015 and has co-edited special issues of other journals, most recently of Modern Language Quarterly with Jennifer McDonell and Marshall Brown (2014). Dorothy Jones joined the English Studies Program at the University of Wollongong in 1971, after completing studies at Otago University in Dunedin and at Oxford. She retired in 1996, after gaining an enviable reputation as a teacher, scholar, and administrator. Dorothy laid the groundwork for the University of Wollongong’s reputation in studies of women’s literature and postcolonial literatures, having introduced comparative Australian/Canadian studies, and developed foundation subjects in Women’s Studies. She was also one of the first female heads of a Department of English in Australia. Among her peers, Dorothy Jones is recognized as one of the major critics of Australian and postcolonial women’s writing, being a leading authority on the work of Marion Halligan, Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, and Aritha van Herk, to name but a few. Kay Lawrence AM is Emeritus Professor at the University of South Australia where she had a distinguished career as an educator in the visual arts, becoming the first woman appointed to head the South Australian School of Art in 2002. She has an international profile as a tapestry weaver with work in many public collections including the National Gallery of Australia. In her visual art and writing practices she critically engages with matters of personal and community identity, exploring ideas of loss and connection through the materiality of textiles. She

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has completed a number of major commissions for public spaces in Australia and overseas, and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1989 for service to the arts as designer of the Parliament House Embroidery. In 2002 Telos Press in the UK published a monograph on her work. Her scholarly writing has been published by Berg Publishers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, the University of Sydney, and Melbourne University Press. Russell McDougall completed his BA at Newcastle University (Australia), his MA at the University of Adelaide, and his PhD at Queen’s University Canada, and is currently Professor of English in the School of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education at the University of New England (Armidale). He is a long-time member of ACLALS and EACLALS, as well the Caribbean Studies Association, the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies, and the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific. Currently, he sits on the international advisory board of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English). Russell has longstanding research interests in comparative Australian, Caribbean and West African literatures in English—on all of which he has published widely— as well as in post-colonial theory and Indigeneity. He is especially interested in post-colonial subjectivities and the writing of biography; the relationship between anthropology and travel writing; stories about objects; literary geographies; and the new piracies, especially bio-piracy and geo-piracy. Tekura Moeka’a from the Cook Islands, has completed a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), followed by a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Pacific Studies. She is working as the Pasifika Learning Adviser in Student Learning at Victoria University of Wellington. Tony Simões da Silva is Professor and Head of the Department of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Previously he taught at Wollongong, James Cook University and Exeter, after completing his PhD in postcolonial literatures at the University of Western Australia. Tony’s research focuses primarily on contemporary world literature in English, notably Afro-diasporic, southern African and Nigerian literature and life writing, also encompassing African writing in Portuguese. This work traces migration flows ranging from the slave trade to the mass displacement of peoples in the present, and their impact on cultural production. He co-edits the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

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(JASAL), with Brigitta Olubas (UNSW). Tony’s current research examines representations of refugees in literary fiction and considers the role such works play in creating and redefining a ‘refugee identity,’ the ‘refugee experience,’ and the figure of the refugee as a key agent in global discourses of displacement, nationalism, belonging, and hospitality. This work also considers the impact of literature in the development of public policy through its deployment of affect and empathy. Tony’s books include Dissenting Lives, co-edited with Anne Collett (2015), and a monograph, The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: The Fiction of George Lamming (2000). Teresia Teaiwa was an I-Kiribati and American poet and academic, born in Honolulu to an IKiribati father and an African-American mother, and raised in Fiji. In 2001 she obtained her PhD in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz with the thesis “Militarism, Tourism and the Native: Articulations in Oceania,” after completing an undergraduate degree at Trinity College Washington and a Masters at Hawai‘i. Teresia taught history and politics for five years at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, before moving to New Zealand to teach Pacific Studies at Victoria University, Wellington, where she was Programme Director of Va’aomanū Pasifika. Teresia supervised a range of PhD and MA theses in Pacific Studies and was the winner of university and national awards for teaching. Her essays appear in influential collections such as Theorizing Native Studies, Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay and Other Pacific Islanders (both 2014), Tangata o le Moana (2012), Remaking Area Studies (2010), Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (2010), Rethinking Security: Gender, Race and Militarization and Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific (both 2008), as well as the journals Asia and the Pacific (2015), Asia Pacific Viewpoint (2011), International Studies Perspectives (2013), PMLA (2010), Pacific Studies (2009/2010) and The Contemporary Pacific (2006). She is the author of Searching for Nei Nim’anoa (poetry; 1995), the co-author (with Vilsoni Hereniko) of Last Virgin in Paradise: A Serious Comedy (2001), and co-editor (with James Liu, Tim McCreanor, and Tracey McIntosh) of New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations (2005). Teresia’s research interests included militarism and gender in the Pacific, contemporary issues in Fiji, feminism and women’s activism in the Pacific, contemporary Pacific culture and arts, and pedagogy in Pacific Studies. Albert Wendt is a novelist, poet, and short story writer who has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and scholar. His books include Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961 to 1974 (1976), The Best of Albert Wendt’s Short Stories (1999), and Leaves of the

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Banyan Tree (1979). He was appointed to the first chair in Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, and later took up a chair in Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland. Albert was appointed a member of the Order of New Zealand in 2013. Lydia Wevers is Emeritus Professor and recently retired Director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University, Wellington. She has published widely in the fields of New Zealand literature and Australian literature, with particular attention to short fiction, travel writing, and writing by women. Her book Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (2010) has been influential in the fields of book history, reception studies, Victorian literary studies, and postcolonial studies. She is also the author of Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809–1900 (2002), co-editor of On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies (with Anna Smith, 2004), and a prolific anthologist. Lydia currently chairs the Humanities and Law panel of the Performance Based Research Fund, and is a Governor of the Arts Foundation. Lydia Wevers was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature in 2006 and won the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Pou Aronui award in 2014. Diana Wood Conroy (BA [Hons] Archaeology [Sydney], Doctor of Creative Arts [Wollongong 1996], became a tapestry weaver in the 1970s, and has research interests in archaeology and anthropology. Her exhibitions and publications explore relationships between classical, Aboriginal and personal worlds in tapestry and drawing. Her involvement with Aboriginal communities began in 1974 when she was coordinator of Tiwi Designs, Bathurst Island, Northern Territory. She is a member of the Council for the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Athens, and since 1996 she has worked at the Paphos Theatre Excavations in Cyprus (University of Sydney) in the area of painted plaster and textiles. An archaeological approach informs her critical writing on textiles and tapestry. She is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and Arts at the University of Wollongong.

Part 1 Collision, Connection, and Change

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Chapter 1

Textiles from the Sea of Islands

Sacred Heart Nuns and Craft Advisers in Papua New Guinea and Australia Diana Wood Conroy Once not so long ago at Darwin airport, in northern Australia, I was waiting with a group of people to catch a plane to a remote community. A Yolngu man tentatively approached me, “Hey sister, you look like you from a mission? Can you give us some help?” He thought I might have been a nun, seeing that I felt comfortable sitting with his mob of family and was wearing a plain skirt and T-shirt with sensible sandals. With the familiar visual acuity of Yolngu to different types of balanda (white people), he sensed that I might have been familiar with Catholic missions. This had been so, many years before. I did what I could to help his family (the plane was delayed; they had been waiting for hours and were hungry). In many ways, I thought, arts academics do mimic a theological severity in mien and garb. Without exactly being a missionary, like others I have had a constant drive, emotional as well as intellectual, to search out ways of understanding the nuances of Aboriginal arts and wider histories. “A sort of secular missionary” can exist, writes Tom Keneally in his novel of African Eretria, Towards Asmara, with a “strange humanist miscellany of safeguards, kindnesses, embargoes, confusions and clarifications.”1 This essay explores the confluence of textile arts between two sets of white people arriving to “assist” indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea and Bathurst Island in the Northern Territory. Missionaries came first, from 1885 to png and 1911 to Bathurst Island, and then, in the 1960s and 1970s, arts coordinators. Fathers, brothers, and nuns in Nguiu on Bathurst Island and in png were bound to the community for life, although occasionally they would return to Europe or southern Australian cities for holidays or medical treatment. Unlike government workers and administrators, they stayed for decades, and the people they served became family. Their long sojourns and hard work in

1 Thomas Keneally, Towards Asmara (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989): 132. Keneally, a renowned Australian author, has had a remarkable international career, which has been the focus for Paul Sharrad’s most recent research. Like Paul, he has a buried background of Christian endeavour.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_002

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remote places have sunk into obscurity.2 The number of vocations seriously declined after the second Vatican Council in 1962—the nuns I knew among the Tiwi in 1974 would have entered the church between 1930 and 1960. Howard Morphy, a renowned authority on Aboriginal and colonial art histories, has pointed out that both missionaries and government officials had a reforming brief to eradicate Aboriginal custom, and missionaries in particular tried to suppress language and ceremony, although their regimes became more liberal after 1960.3 When I became an arts co-ordinator for the Tiwi on Bathurst Island in 1974, supported jointly by the then Australian Council for the Arts and by the Sacred Heart Mission, I went with deep antagonism towards missionaries in general, believing them to be oppressors of Aboriginal culture. Even though the two groups were often opposed, forty years or so later the differences between arts co-ordinators and missionaries become less clear, as witnessed by my misplaced identification as a nun. Both sets of interventions—religious and artistic—came from convictions about modernity that held that an enlightened universality was at the heart of the human condition. Members of both religious and artistic groups had a passionate belief that an individual should reach his or her capacity in exploring possibilities through education, and thereby advance a whole community. Building on Mission arts and crafts, mostly secular art advisers believed that individual creative selfexpression and personal development evolving from the vibrant traditional art forms would lead to professional and cultural identity. The missions were wary of traditional “primitive” arts, but they did want worthwhile community craft that would support economic progress. In 1974, I was working as a co-ordinator of Tiwi Designs, a textile workshop on Bathurst Island set up through the lay missionary Madeleine Clear by Bede Tungutalum and Giovanni Tipungwuti. Although I was paid (with my then husband Joseph Conroy) a joint salary as project officers for the Australian Council for the Arts, Tiwi Designs had been started and funded under the auspices of the Catholic Mission. Consequently, I worked closely with the nuns of the Sacred Heart, especially Sister Eucharia, renowned for her initiative in setting up a “sewing factory” called Bima Wear around 1970. Artists who set up and managed collaborative workshops, such as Georgina Beier and me, might feel indignation at the lack of respect shown by some missions towards 2 The historian Hilary M. Carey asked in 1998, “Why has so little been written about missionary nuns”: see Carey, “Subordination, Invisibility and Chosen Work: Missionary Nuns and Australian Aborigines c.1900–1949,” Australian Feminist Studies 13.28 (1998): 252. 3 Howard Morphy, “Colonial and Post-colonial Scenes,” in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000): 87.

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extraordinary local art, yet admire the consistent ethos of individual nuns and brothers. And Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton has made the unexpected observation that current Aboriginal art, sourced in very ancient connections to country, relates equally as much to the conflicting engagement between Aboriginal religion and Christianity since the late eighteenth century.4 Paul Sharrad experienced the interactions between people in png, colonialism, and missionary enterprise. Between 1960 and 1964, in the last years of Australian colonial administration before Independence in 1975, Paul attended the recently set up Port Moresby High School. His father Rex was Chaplain to the Pacific Islands Regiment, while his mother Phyllis and grandmother Julia Lomas worked with the soldiers’ wives and children in community development activities that included domestic crafts such as dressmaking and embroidery. Subsequently, Paul’s years of research in Pacific literatures and extensive publications led to an exhibition, Gift/Exchange: Sustaining and Translating Pacific Links with Local Lives, at the University of Wollongong in April 2012, which he curated in association with the fourth biennial conference of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies.5 “The transmutability of craft to art, history to fiction, and textile to text may be a saving grace” wrote Paul in 2004.6 The book from which this quote is taken explores the ways in which scholarly analysis can be combined with textile practice through considering potent hybrid origins and issues of translation between mediums and cultures in a postcolonial British context. The desire to “transmute” is at the heart of the influx of white people into indigenous communities: an influx which was “to alter or change in nature, properties, appearance or form; to transform, convert, turn” the existing way of life.7 Such transmutations can be shown in the context of a set of vibrant red tablemats and napkins collected by Phyllis Sharrad in Port Moresby about 1964 and exhibited in Gift/Exchange (cover image). Each tablemat has a right angular band of white and black embroidery in stem stitch, two centimetres wide, 4 Marcia Langton, “The ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Works of the Devil’,” in Holy Holy Holy: 13 Contemporary Artists Explore the Interaction between Christianity and Aboriginal culture, comp. Ian W. Abdullah, Vivonne Thwaites & Ian W. Edwards, Catalogue of Exhibition Curated by Vivonne Thwaites at Flinders University City Gallery, State Library of South Australia (Adelaide SA: Flinders University, 2004): 22. 5 Paul Sharrad, Gift/Exchange: Sustaining and Translating Pacific Links with Local Lives, exh. cat., Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong, 2012. 6 Paul Sharrad, “Following the Shawl: Text and Textiles in Rushdie,” in Re-inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004): 21. 7 “transmute, v.,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, December 2016) http://www.oed .com/view/ Entry/204937?redirectedFrom=transmute (accessed 5 March 2017).

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Figure 1.1 Wives of Pacific Island Regiment soldiers, Port Moresby, c.1963. Phyllis Sharrad far right; her mother Julia Lomas (formerly a professional seamstress) far left; Lady Rachel Cleland, wife of the Territory Administrator, holding baby. Note: Paul Sharrad, Private collection.

in opposite corners, and was accompanied by a napkin in the same design. Paul documents the ways in which his mother and grandmother assisted with urban women’s groups, such as the sewing club associated with the Pacific Islands Regiment; the white officers’ wives worked with the wives of the native troops to bring cross-tribal groups together, giving an “informal education in modern domestic culture” through “exchange of recipes, sewing patterns and some English language coaching.”8 Village crafts were adapted to make commercial products for community development. Later, the artist Georgina Beier, working with her husband Ulli Beier in the new University of png, gave tremendous impetus to the quality and depth of textile design. She also adapted village designs as book covers, notably for the Papua Pocket Poets series (also displayed in Gift/Exchange). The red table mats and napkins could have come from the efforts of Mrs Gray, a London Mission Society (lms) worker at Veiru, 8 Paul Sharrad, “Translations: Texts and Textiles in Papua New Guinea,” in The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, ed. Susanne Küchler & Graeme Were (2005; Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2014): 124.

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Figure 1.2 Women’s group, Taurama Barracks, Port Moresby, c.1963. Note: Private collection.

who copied tattoo patterns from the skin of women onto paper, those patterns then used “to produce tablemats and other domestic items.”9 Understanding the ambience of the embroidered cloths requires some insight into the background of Christian missions in png. The lms met for the first time in 1795 as a “visible union of ministers and Christians of all denominations.”10 C. Sylvester Horne describes how the meeting resolved that the establishment of a society for sending missionaries to the “heathen and unenlightened countries, to spread knowledge of Christ,” was highly desirable.11 The Pacific was the first target. Missionaries sailed to Tahiti on 10 August 1796, taking more than 2,000 days to reach the islands. The stages of the conversion foreshadowed many subsequent missionary experiences: after much resistance and loss of life, the missionaries learned the “wild Tahitian tongue,” prepared a catechism, and began to teach the children. A dictionary 9 10 11

“Translations,” 124. C. Sylvester Horne, The Story of the l.m.s. 1795–1895 (Second and revised edition, completing fifteen thousand; London: London Missionary Society, 1895) at https://archive.org/ details/storyoflms1795horn (accessed 2 August 2018). The Story of the l.m.s. 1795–1895.

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was compiled, so that the Bible could be read. In 1812 the Tahitian king Pomare requested baptism and Christianity began to spread, especially with the arrival of John Williams in 1818. Williams came from an artisan background, and famously built his own boat in local materials to bring the Gospel to the islands of Fiji and Samoa. “Making do” and teaching the pattern of work in the European mode were fundamental to mission settlements: progress is defined through the acquisition of language, the written word, and education; material ingenuity is prized. Nicholas Thomas, an anthropologist of the Pacific, underlines the mixture of Pacific peoples who took part in this transformative process of conversion to Christianity. “This was as much a project of Islanders as of white missionaries […] male and female Islander ‘teachers’ frequently led or crucially supported the effort of evangelization in communities distant from their own.”12 The dedication of Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, and other Polynesian missionaries in various parts of Melanesia caused both religious change, and a certain cosmopolitanism, through a mixing of Oceanic experiences.13 In 1875 Mr Laws from the lms established the Port Moresby Mission from a base in Cape York on the Australian mainland. He came with Pacific pastors, who, along with their wives, suffered and died from the fevers of png, just as the Europeans did.14 By 1881, the first church had been built in Port Moresby.15 Soon after, in 1885, Father Henry Verius m.s.c. founded the Catholic Mission at Yule Island, thirty miles (fifty kilometres) along the coastline northwest of Port Moresby.16 The first nuns of the Sacred Heart arrived in 1901, embarking on a life of hardship, and a long trajectory of teaching and operating clinics. There was no homogeneity among missionaries in either png or Australia, who came from all denominations and many countries. As the academic and writer Susan Cochrane points out, “The establishment of Christian missions was a profound catalyst for change in Papua New Guinea societies.”17 Cochrane’s mother Renata was closely involved with the French missions, especially Yule Island, from 1949 to 1965. 12

Nicholas Thomas, “‘We Were Still Papuans’: A 2006 Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 24.1 (Spring 2012): 120–21. 13 “‘We Were Still Papuans’: A 2006 Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” 119. 14 Horne, The Story of the l.m.s. 1795–1895, 401. 15 The Story of the l.m.s. 1795–1895, 401. 16 Item 26, Cochrane Archive, Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong. The Cochrane Archive holds the records—letters, photographs, brochures, articles—of Percy and Renata Cochrane’s years in png. In this instance, m.s.c. stands for Missionarii Sacratissimi Cordis. 17 Susan Cochrane, with Michael A. Mel, Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997): 21.

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Renata Cochrane, Susan relates, was inspired by the spiritual and material benefits brought to indigenous people by what she called the ‘Pilgrim Church’ […] and was an advocate of work performed by Missions in Papua New Guinea which she saw as bringing progress and enlightenment to the people.18 She wrote articles and obituaries for Catholic newsletters and newspapers in png and Australia from her personal knowledge of the place and the people. Before considering the different perceptions of Papua New Guineans of these events, I would like to outline the approach behind the missionary nuns of the Sacred Heart, a name that conjures an emotional intensity that contrasts to the approach of the Protestant lms ministers (and incidentally to my own Presbyterian upbringing). 1

The Sacred Heart Nuns 11 July 1974 Sister Anastasia came to tell us the school children were dancing—so we went to the school where a crowd was gathered on the grass. Great screams of approval, hilarity and enthusiasm came from the audience as the ‘painted up’ children did their dancing. All seemed so amicable between nuns, children and adults.19

This order was founded in 1874 as the Congregation of the Daughters of our Lady of the Sacred Heart by Jules Chevalier, who twenty years earlier had also founded the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in France. From 1869, Chevalier became interested in foreign missions through the invocation “May the sacred heart of Jesus be everywhere loved.”20 The Sacred Heart was an emotional emblem for devotion, a symbol of living love. Father Andre Navarre (1836–1912) wrote a Handbook for Missionaries which lists the core of the sacred Heart approach: respect for the local people and their customs; the importance of learning the local language; the necessity for compiling dictionaries and local grammars; the need for trained teachers and for the use of visuals; and the 18 19 20

Susan Cochrane, “Black and White Family Album: A Personal View of My Parents’ Work in Papua New Guinea 1949–75,” Kunapipi 29.1 (2007): 89. Diana Wood Conroy, Bathurst Island Journal, 1974 (unpublished). Quoted in Marie Venard, The Designs of His Heart: Marie Louise Hartzer and the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (Cork: Mercier, 1966): 151.

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Figure 1.3 Mother Genevieve’s road into the Highlands. Below the picture is a letter by Renata Cochrane that begins, “Every year Mother Genevieve set out on a long journey across mountain country to visit her daughters.” Note: Cochrane Archive, Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong, Item D160–13–019.

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Figure 1.4 Image of the Sacred Heart in pearl-shell mosaic, Beagle Bay Church, Western Australia, built 1914. Note: Photo by Diana Wood Conroy, Private collection.

importance of learning English as a lingua franca.21 He emphasizes that the missionary �must not set himself [sic] up as master, as he is nothing more than a foreigner.” Instead, “He must be distinguished from other Europeans by his kindness and charity, as he was coming among the people to give them the great benefits of Christianity.”22 21 22

Andre Navarre, Handbook for Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Working among the Natives of Papua New Guinea, intro. J.F. McMahon, tr. Sister Sheila Larkin (Manuel des Missionnaires du Sacre-Coeur parmi les sauvages, 1896; Kensington, nsw: Chevalier, 1987): 7. Handbook for Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, 24.

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In 1884 Father Navarre had written to Mother Marie Louise about the importance of clothing for her nuns settling in New Britain, an island the size of Taiwan, to the northeast of Port Moresby. The first task and one to which they will be able to give themselves wholeheartedly, even though they have renounced the vanities of the world, will be to introduce fashions in dress among our lady parishioners for the sole fashion which they have up to this observed is far too primitive and calls for instant change. As for the rest, the new fashion of dress will demand little regard for modern styles […] the colour is more highly esteemed than the form. So if the material be turkey-red or yellow, so much the better.23 Renata Cochrane records another textile moment after Archbishop Alain de Boismenu had established the convent at Kubuna, Yule Island in the late 1940s. The “sleek women from the villages under the coconut palms changed their grass skirts for the quiet grey dress and veil.”24 By 1957, two “Australians from Melville Island, Sister Mary Mercia and Sister Dorothy,” possibly Tiwi women, were accepted into the convent at Port Moresby, relocated from Kubuna in Yule Island after the war.25 Miriam Wright, in a 1956 pamphlet, describes the duties of nuns, which included “wearing apparel,” as well as “nutrition,” “infirmary,” and “religious vigils.”26 Wright’s idealism and hope extend to quoting from Alexander Pope’s The Messiah: “Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend / And white robed innocence from heaven descend.”27 Sacred Heart nuns had arrived on Bathurst Island to serve the Tiwi people in 1912, not long after the noted French priest Francis Xavier Gsell had founded a Mission on a position by the Apsley Strait that streams between Bathurst and Melville Islands.28 Sister Eucharia, once Olive May Pearce, had entered the order in Kensington (Sydney) in 1933 at the age of twenty-one, after having worked in her father’s cake shop and in domestic service.29 Her biographer, Suzanne Parry, relates that the girl did not come from a particularly devout 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Quoted in Venard, The Designs of His Heart, 157. Cochrane Archive, Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong, Item 9c. Cochrane Archive, Item 9d. Miriam Wright, Introducing the Vigils of the Sacred Heart (n.p.: 1954). This useful pamphlet (11 pp.) in the National Library in Canberra has no page numbers. Alexander Pope, “Messiah: A Sacred Eclogue, in Imitation of Virgil’s Pollio” (1712), quoted in Introducing the Vigils of the Sacred Heart, n.p. John Pye, The Tiwi Islands (Bathurst Island Mission, 1977; Darwin NT: Coleman’s, 1998): 34. Suzanne Parry, “Sister Eucharia (Olive May Pearce),” Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography (Darwin NT: Northern Territory UP, rev. ed. 2008): 172. Further page numbers are in the main text.

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Figure 1.5 Unknown artist. Table mats and napkins with varying designs. Port Moresby Women’s Collective/Red Cross, c1964. Stem stitch embroidery in black and white twisted cotton on cotton cloth, hand hemmed after drawing out threads. Each mat 24 cm × 42 cm approx. Napkins: 26 cm × 27 cm. Note: Paul Sharrad, Private collection.

family, but had an experience in her late teenage years that led her to become a nun: she had dreamed about a dying girl she had looked after while in service; that “on being asked what she would do if her life [were] spared, the girl had replied with great conviction that she would become a nun in the Order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart” (172). Sister Eucharia became convinced that she was being called to take the girl’s place (172). Artists, too, follow dreams. Because she had “highly prized skills in cooking and household management,” when she visited Bathurst Island in 1935 Sister Eucharia was asked to stay on, to “assist with caring for the hundred or so children resident in the mission dormitories and to teach the older girls to cook” (172). From June 1941 she helped run the home at Garden Point on Melville Island that had been established for children of mixed descent (172). After the threat of invasion increased, she was evacuated (with the children) to Melbourne. She fulfilled a

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Figure 1.6 Mother Genevieve, Archbishop de Boismenu (appointed 1947), and Papuan nuns. Note: Cochrane Archive, Item D160/13/010.

long-held desire to work with lepers when she was assigned to the Channel Island Leprosarium near Darwin in 1945 (172). Returning to Bathurst Island when she was nearly sixty, in the early 1970s, she applied successfully for one of the new government grants to establish projects that would provide work and skills for Aboriginal people. Bima Wear became a longstanding sewing workshop, beginning with eight treadle sewing machines to become “a self-supporting industry over which Aboriginal people finally took control” (173). In 1981, Sister Eucharia was awarded an mbe for her life’s work in the Territory (173). Her name, in Greek, means “pleasing, engaging, gracious”. Outwardly, I saw her as constantly tired in the heat, bundled in her heavy white dress and veil, hobbling stubbornly on her swollen legs between the Bima Wear building and the Tiwi Designs workshop a few hundred metres away, both in old mission buildings. With her sister [sic], Bertha, Sister Eucharia energetically managed a group of “girls” to make school uniforms on sewing machines for all the mission schools across the Northern Territory. Although my aims in encouraging vibrant traditional designs to be printed in all-over patterns on cloth were very different to the practicalities of Bima Wear, Sister Eucharia organized women to do hand

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Figure 1.7 Sister Eucharia holding a Tiwi Designs printed vestment, in Bima Wear, c.1973. Note: Tiwi Designs Archive, Tiwi Designs, Nguiu, Bathurst Island. “Tiwi Designs” began as “Tiwi Design”; for consistency the latter name is used in this essay, albeit that such usage is occasionally anachronistic.

sewing for Tiwi Designs, kindly provided sewing machines, and collaborated in ordering reams of cotton and linen cloth to be brought in by barge. Nuns in belted white dresses and veils taught schoolgirls on Bathurst Island embroidery, crochet and basket-weaving, as was common not only in missions, but in all schools across Australia. A woman in the early twentieth century who did not sew, argues textile historian Barbara Burman, was “potentially disruptive”: “The acquisition and practice of domestic skills including sewing were […] a necessary constraint and social cement.”30 Such “social cement” required the skills necessary for domestic service and motherhood. “Lengthy and finely hand sewn seams continued to be promoted in the schoolroom long after 30

Barbara Burman, “Made at Home by Clever Fingers: Home Dressmaking in Edwardian England,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (New York: Berg, 1999): 47.

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Figure 1.8 Sister Eucharia at a sewing machine, in Bima Wear, possibly with Benedicta Palipuamini, c.1970–73. Note: Tiwi Designs Archive.

the sewing machine rendered them redundant.”31 The underlying theme of domestic sewing was adherence to the value of whiteness and cleanliness. In 1974, the linen tablecloths and tablemats printed in Tiwi Designs were passed to the women who were an essential part of the workforce. They sat outside in the garden and slowly fringed the cut edges of the cloths in an Irish hemstitch, to add value to items that had no currency among the Tiwi but sold well across Australia. Later, women would become notable designers and printers in Bima Wear, but at this point (in 1974) they had no interest in generating designs, preferring to sit sewing as a group outside. The accounts of some Tiwi women who grew up in the Mission demonstrate the influence of the nuns.32 Christina Puantalura was born in 1921 and was brought to the nuns as a little girl, staying in the dormitory until she was married. She said she didn’t know much about Tiwi culture, as no traditional ceremonies were allowed in the Mission, though people still held them in the bush. (By 1974 the Mission attitude towards the performance of Tiwi ­ceremonies had softened a little.) Christina was taught to weave pandanus

31 32

“Made at Home by Clever Fingers,” 45. Biographies of artists, Tiwi Pima Art, 1983–84, Tiwi Designs Archive. All biographical information on Christina Puantalura, Patricia Babui, and Leonie Tipiloura, from this source.

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Figure 1.9 Tiwi women wearing skirts made in Bima Wear; printed in Tiwi Designs, c. 1970. Note: Tiwi Designs Archive.

baskets by the nuns in St Theresa’s school, and could sew very well, “making skirts, dresses and […] church attire such as habits veils and everything for the convent, and [she] even did the mending for the fathers, brothers and nuns.” Patricia Babui, a Tiwi artist born in 1935, also grew up in the school dormitories of Nguiu, helping in the garden and in milking goats. “She was taught to weave table mats, floor mats etc. by the nuns using pandanus palm and then was taught by older Tiwi women to weave traditional ceremonial objects, and learned by watching them.” Leonie Tipiloura, born in 1938, slept in the dormitory with many other young girls. “The nuns taught her how to weave baskets, place mats, fancy work, knitting, crochet.” Her meticulous work with pandanus was particularly fine, with a “delightfully light delicate quality.” 5 July 1974 Foggy cool morning. Finished packing up exhibition goods. Sister Eucharia came, endlessly talking and looking very tired. She liked everything, obviously so pleased with the vestment designs, also the tablemats. Bede printed a circle with flowers around, it looked lovely. I want so much more for Tiwi Designs than the Mission.

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Figure 1.10

Tiwi Designs seamstresses: Benedicta Palipuamini, Antoinette Orsto, Miriam Babui, Annunciata Pilakui, with hand-hemmed printed cloths outside Tiwi Designs 1974. Design by Bede Tungutalum (red circles) and Giovanni Tipungwuti (yellow circles). Note: Photo by Joseph Conroy, Conroy Archive, No 74.9 Group, Diana Wood Conroy, Private collection.

As in the later years of the Catholic Mission on Bathurst Island, some Christian missionaries in png allowed that the path to salvation could include traditional religious and “heathen” practices—practices that included creative expression in the visual and performing arts. Yule Island Mission of Central Papua was founded by the Order of the Sacred Heart in 1885 and from 1916 was joined by nuns of the Order of Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. It had, according to Susan Cochrane, a “gradualist and integrative approach.”33 The French nuns taught their Papuan sisters fine needlecraft, choosing decorative elements and colours from local art styles to be incorporated into embroidery designs. Sister Joseph Mary’s work at Yule Island Mission was featured unusually in an article by Ron Saw in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (7 July 1970), with a suggestive headline (Figure 1.11). Saw wrote: “Mary Afaisa painstakingly copies the mosquito on Rose Apau’s hand. Margaret Opu reproduces the bands around Elizabeth Maneba’s waist, and Elizabeth Maneba catches every detail of the 33

Susan Cochrane, with Michael A. Mel, Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997): 24.

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Figure 1.11 Article in the Daily Telegraph (31 July 1970), by Ron Saw.

deep purple bib on Therese Eki’s splendid bosom.” The drawings were made into silkscreen prints in Charles Bannon’s studio in Sydney. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph on 31 July 1970, Renata Cochrane protested the innuendoes of Saw’s piece, particularly the snide line “Missionary nuns are ­selling the bodies of girls in New Guinea,” which she said caused great distress

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in the Yule Island mission. She put forward her understanding of mission activities in regard to tattoos: On the south coast of Papua women of the Rigo, Motu and Mekeo tribes have used tattooing as a means of enhancing beauty and adding to their bride price. The long painful process begins when the girls are about ten with marking on the lower part of the abdomen and the front of the thigh; sometimes on forehead, chin and hairline. At puberty the girl is tattooed all over the back from armpit to breast and the arms. […] when she reaches marriageable age continuing over the chest, the abdomen and inside the thighs. The final mark was a V around the neck to indicate marriage. Tattoos in the centre of the face and the lower leg have a special significance such as the giving of a great feast by the girl’s father. Patterns vary from clan to clan and are a means of identification. Describing the tattoos as “flowing and delicate,” she points out that tattooing is dying out, except in the remoter villages. She writes that she is inspired by the identification of the expatriate priests and nuns with the people they serve on a lifetime basis while bringing western culture to Papua. They have made efforts to preserve local artforms, music and handicraft realizing their importance for well-adjusted development. She wrote another letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph on 4 August: Sister Joseph Mary is a vital person, a trained nurse. Her life’s work in Papua has been for mothers and babies, establishing and running clinics, training nurses, improving health. […]. It is a battle to find funds […] now she suggests using tattoo designs to raise money—2/3s to artist, 1/3 for education. The use of traditional designs in this way is not wildly original—they have been featured on both printed and embroidered designs including vestments. A letter from Sister Marjorie Mary of the Carmelite monastery on Yule Island on 15 August 1970 thanked Renata for her defence of Sister Joseph Mary, a tireless worker who has a real flair for developing artistic talent. For ourselves too, for we too have started screen-printing and it looked like a possible source of much needed income. Obviously we couldn’t touch it if it was dirty money and it would be a shame for our indigenous Sisters

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who do it well and with keen interest. We have been particularly careful about the designs used. A few records from the individual Papuan perspective show warm collaboration in wanting to learn skills. One is a carefully-written letter to Renata from Mary T. Parau in 1959, thanking her for her help in selling pots on behalf of the Chiria Women’s Club. “I’m lending the Club women an old foot sewing machine so as I could teach and show the women how to sew dresses.” From the beginning, clothing was a pre-eminent sign of conversion to Christianity, and hybrid nuances of pattern, material, and colour demonstrate the ways in which Pacific Islanders dealt with change.34 Graeme Were, an anthropologist, has in fact argued that the processes of conversion to Christianity in the Pacific can be fully appreciated through an analysis of pattern in the region—he argues for the dynamic role of pattern in shaping colonial and settler relations.35 Although the habit of tattooing started to decline in the 1960s, tattooed girls were accepted into the Yule Island Mission.36 The tattoos of skin, like the intricate painted and ochred ceremonial skin designs among the Tiwi, take on a different meaning when the same patterns are applied to cloth.37 And the cloths—mats and napkins—formed part of the fellowship of the table central to the introduced Christian society. Incorporating traditional patterns on previously unfamiliar articles, and new activities such as embroidery, could create frameworks for thinking through the new ideas. Syncretic art forms might carry traditional ideas into the future, in order to use old and new resources.38 But the difficulty for png artists in coming to terms with the introduced culture is heightened in the story of a young textile screen-printer fostered by Georgina Beier a few years before the exchange of letters described above.39 As mentioned, the well-known artist and teacher had come from intensive work 34

Suzanne Küchler & Graeme Were, with photographs by Glenn Jowitt, Pacific Pattern (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005): 28–29. 35 Graeme Were, Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2010): 64. 36 Cochrane Archive, Item 31. 37 I have explored the relevance of textiles to painted skin in “Between Colonial and Postcolonial: Tiwi Design: An Aboriginal Silk-screen Workshop on Bathurst Island, Northern Territory,” in Postcolonialism and Creativity: Re-Inventing Textiles, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Winchester: Telos, 2004): 141–56. 38 Were, Lines that Connect, 8. 39 Ulli Beier, “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society: The Tragic Story of Marie Taita Aihi,” in Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in

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with artists in Nigeria to take part in the new university with her husband Ulli Beier in 1967. For png artists, the three-way pull between the individual contemporary artist, the mission, and the village is poignant. In 1968, Georgina met Marie Taita Aihi, an artist from a Roro village in the Central District, who had been “adopted” by the Catholic mission from the time she was five years old.40 Ulli observed that Sister Joseph Mary was notable in encouraging the young women nursing assistants in her clinic to paint. “She admitted that she knew little about art, but she felt instinctively that it would be wrong to impose Western imagery on the girls, and she encouraged them to look at traditional designs: from tattoo patterns to hohao boards.”41 Georgina later spent a week at Yule Island Mission introducing the girls to tie-dye and dyeing techniques; among hundreds of drawings of tattooed animals she found four that had promise, all done by Marie Taita Aihi.42 Marie was released by the mission to work with Georgina in July 1968, in a cottage industry in Port Moresby called Hara Hara Prints, to produce screenprinted textiles from local designs.43 She learned to sew her own clothes from the textiles she had designed, and these were much in demand. However, Ulli recounts how the older men in the Roro community in Port Moresby began to “regard her behaviour as unseemly”; they felt she should stick to cooking and gardening, and get married. Marie had hoped to be able to pursue her career as an artist, and to be re-integrated into her Roro community. In the end, this was not possible, and after an incident she experienced not as an accident but as the effect of witchcraft, she felt “she had been called to order and punished for attempting to elevate herself beyond the other members of her community.” Both Ulli and Georgina had been very aware of the dangers of taking an individual artist away from the security of village custom, and Georgina comments on one successful artist falling into depression: Every human being goes through the traumatic experience of growing up, but in a recently colonised country like Papua New Guinea, a man goes through this agony twice: he may be a man in his own culture, but he is a child in the superimposed foreign culture.44

40 41 42 43 44

P­ apua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus/Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 2005): 107–17. “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 108. “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 108. “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 110. “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 110. Georgina Beier, quoted in Ulli Beier, Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus/Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 2005): 85.

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Figure 1.12

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Marie Taita Aihi, “Man, Horse and Snake.” Screen print based on tattoo designs of the Roro people, c.1968. Note: Repr. in Beier, “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 111.

Despite the ultimate failure of Hara Hara, Georgina felt the gamble had been worthwhile in demonstrating the adaptability of traditional designs. “It made people in Port Moresby and elsewhere aware of the need for a national identity and so contributed towards the evolution of a national dress that reflected this identity.”45 And a Nigerian artist, Mutu Ahmed, comments on working with Georgina (being taught skills she had learned in png): “She can inspire your artistic work because she has confidence in you. She believes in you and makes you try harder.”46 Papua New Guinea is in Melanesia in the Western Pacific, and Bathurst Island is part of Australia, but these two places have been linked by the sea: by a flow of people between Sacred Heart Catholic settlements in both places. The Pacific anthropologist and writer Epeli Hau‘ofa places a contemporary view on this history.47 Born in Papua to Tongan missionary parents, and having lived 45 46 47

Georgina Beier, quoted in Beier, “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society,” 117. Georgina Beier, quoted in Beier, Decolonising the Mind, xvii. Geoffrey White, “Foreword,” in Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008): xiv. Hau‘ofa acknowledged that Ulli and Georgina Beier had

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Figure 1.13

Detail of embroidery on table napkin, artist unknown, collected by Phyllis Sharrad, c.1964. Note: Paul Sharrad, Private collection.

all over the Pacific, Hau‘ofa “chafed against the Eurocentric view of islands as remote, isolated, and dependent.”48 He argued that the huge Pacific should be conceived of as oceanic in its reach, and its islands not on the periphery of civilization, but part of the matrix.49 He writes, “‘We never thought of ourselves from small places […] we spent most of our time by the sea [where we] could see this vast ocean.’”50 Growing up in the Milne Bay area, he witnessed the “elaborate exchange systems involving highly prized shell valuables and

48 49

50

been a great influence on him and other artists and writers at the University of png and Institute of png studies in the 1960s and 1970s. See Nicholas Thomas, “‘We Were Still Papuans’: A 2006 Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 24.1 (Spring 2012): 123–24. “Foreword,” xv. Epeli Hau‘ofa,’ “Our Sea of Islands,” first published in Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell & Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993); The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 6.1 (Spring 1994): 147–61. Epeli Hau‘ofa, quoted by White, “Foreword,” xiv.

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impressive voyaging canoes,” “vivid early experience with an Oceania in which the sea was more of a highway […] than a barrier.”51 Hau‘ofa’s collection of essays The Sea of Islands, published in 1993, was written to exorcise the “ghosts of belittlement” caused by colonization, and especially, “the predicament of island students caught up in academic practices that continually decenter [their] own sense of self.”52 To re-invent assumptions about art as well as about the indigenous, Hau‘ofa called for the creation of a local aesthetic through making contemporary work inspired by living in Oceania.53 And he stressed the need for imagination: “Innovation is very important to stop us from reproducing the same things […] I think the values from the West are essential for creativity.”54 Likewise, John Dademo Waiko, a png historian, quotes the Melanesian identity Bernard Nairokopi, who in 1975 described contemporary arts as “What lies deep in our hearts, a longing to be new, yet rooted in our rich and ancient past”; the search is for modernity and authenticity together.55 The “deep heart” is almost a distant salute to all those missionaries of the Sacred Heart. The missions looked for honest craft that could bring economic stability to a community, whereas the arts advisers desired the electricity and excitement of new forces in contemporary art, centred on individuals. Both ambitions were grounded in a humanist approach that was equally relevant, whether in Africa, the Pacific or Australia. Both missionaries and art advisers travelled across hemispheres to work with people who did not travel to Europe; but the missionaries stayed for decades, whereas the advisers spent much shorter periods of time in these communities. I came to admire the nuns for their practical kindness and tireless work. I also came to understand how little education many of them had received as part of large, often poor, Catholic families. An old nun, born in Ireland, who had been in Sacred Heart missions in northern Australia all her life as a religious, told me in 2004: I wish I’d known more about the people—we were told nothing at all when I arrived just after the War, and there we were, barely eighteen years old, with a hammock and an earth floor in the tropics, so homesick, and no understanding of them at all. 51 52 53 54 55

“Foreword,” xv. “Foreword,” xiv. “Foreword,” xvi, xvii, xix. Nicholas Thomas, “‘We Were Still Papuans’: A 2006 Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” 130. John Dademo Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993): 216–17.

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My point in this essay has been to accentuate the wide-ranging and complex ideas arising in the conjunction of westerners with Pacific and North Australian people, ideas implicit in Paul Sharrad’s writing. In my experience, there was common ground between white missionary and white art advisers, for members of both groups imposed other languages: one the framework of a religious liturgy within a given time and space, the other the concept of an individual artist using new materials and techniques. Susan Cochrane quotes her mother Renata’s doubts, feelings that resonate with many white people, including me, who have thrown themselves into the task of colonization: Each time I returned to Papua it was with a little fear in my heart … the fear of facing up to myself again, of being brought face to face with my own insufficiency, of measuring and sifting the values I had once taken for granted.56 In retrospect, the emergence of independence in both png and the Tiwi ­Islands of Bathurst and Melville, touched on here through stories of arts initiatives, was a time of uncomplicated fervour compared to today. Complex issues—social dysfunction, disease, and loss of culture—now face those same communities. Indigenous advocates of Aboriginal culture in Australia plead for a “humanist reasoning” (Langton) or a “universal and timeless humanity” (Pearson) that permit the imagining of “Aboriginal life with all the normal trappings of modernity.”57 Ironically, this is an ideal of human progress like that evinced by the best missionaries. The last time I spoke with Sister Eucharia, we stood beside the Strait in the shade of palms and mangoes planted by missionaries years before, children darting about us. I was thirty years old, and felt then that I belonged to a different, secular, intellectual world, a world I was returning to, a world she had left forever to be committed here in this island edge of Australia. Yet her solidity and purpose were like those towering introduced trees. We parted sadly and warmly. The Tiwi who remember today those distant years of the 1970s talk of the unvarying pattern of the days as an order that is now gone, like childhood. The notion of a “saving grace” referred to by Paul Sharrad was much heralded 56 57

Susan Cochrane, “Black and White Family Album: A Personal View of My Parents’ Work in Papua New Guinea 1949–75,” Kunapipi 29.1 (2007): 90. Ellipses in original. Marcia Langton, “Foreword,” in Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus (Carlton Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2009): x; Noel Pearson, “A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth,” Quarterly Essay 55 (2014): 11; Langton, “Foreword,” x.

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by Catholic nuns; it is imbued with the idea of a miracle, that might erupt when all seems lost or mired beyond help. In today’s white and black worlds, grace is unpredictable, and may come from the most unlikely sources. Paul’s great legacy of writings, coloured by his early years in Port Moresby, is itself a “saving grace” for re-invigorating current issues by offering thoughtful and lasting insights. Works Cited Beier, Ulli. Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus/Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 2005). Beier, Ulli. “The Modern Artist in an Egalitarian Society: The Tragic Story of Marie Taita Aihi,” Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus/Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 2005): 107–17. Burman, Barbara, “Made at Home by Clever Fingers: Home Dressmaking in Edwardian England,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (New York: Berg, 1999): 33–54. Carey, Hilary M. “Subordination, Invisibility and Chosen Work: Missionary Nuns and Australian Aborigines c.1900–1949,” Australian Feminist Studies 13.28 (1998): 251–67. Cochrane Archive, Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong. Cochrane, Susan. “Black and White Family Album: A Personal View of My Parents’ Work in Papua New Guinea 1949–75,” Kunapipi 29.1 (2007): 81–93. Cochrane, Susan, with Michael A. Mel. Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997). Conroy, Diana Wood. Bathurst Island Journal, 1974 (unpublished). Conroy, Diana Wood. “Between Colonial and Postcolonial: Tiwi Design: An Aboriginal Silk-screen Workshop on Bathurst Island, Northern Territory,” in Postcolonialism and Creativity: Re-inventing Textiles, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Winchester: Telos, 2004): 141–56. Conroy, Diana Wood. Private collection. Horne, C. Sylvester. The Story of the L.M.S. 1795–1895 (London: London Missionary Society, 1895) at https://archive.org/details/storyoflms1795horn (accessed 2 August 2018). Keneally, Thomas. Towards Asmara (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989). Küchler, Suzanne, & Graeme Were, with photographs by Glenn Jowitt. Pacific Pattern (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

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Langton, Marcia. “Foreword,” in Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus (Carlton Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2009): ix–xii. Langton, Marcia. “The ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Works of the Devil’,” in Holy Holy Holy: 13 Contemporary Artists Explore the Interaction between Christianity and Aboriginal culture, comp. Ian W. Abdullah, Vivonne Thwaites & Ian W. Edwards, Catalogue of Exhibition Curated by Vivonne Thwaites at Flinders University City Gallery, State Library of South Australia (Adelaide SA: Flinders University, 2004): 22–35. Morphy, Howard. “Colonial and Post-colonial Scenes,” in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000): 81–102. Navarre, Andre. Handbook for Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Working among the Natives of Papua New Guinea, intro. J.F. McMahon, tr. Sister Sheila Larkin (Manuel des Missionnaires du Sacre-Coeur parmi les sauvages, 1896; Kensington, NSW: Chevalier, 1987). OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, December 2016). Parry, Suzanne. “Sister Eucharia (Olive May Pearce),” Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, ed. David Carment, Robyn Maynard & Alan Powell (Darwin NT: Northern Territory UP, rev. ed. 2008): 172–73. Pearson, Noel. “A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth,” Quarterly Essay 55 (2014): 1–72. Pye, John. The Tiwi Islands (Bathurst Island Mission, 1977; Darwin NT: Coleman’s, 1998). Sharrad, Paul. “Following the Shawl: Text and Textiles in Rushdie,” in Re-inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004): 15–24. Sharrad, Paul. Gift/Exchange: Sustaining and Translating Pacific Links with Local Lives, exh. cat., Michael Birt Library, University of Wollongong, 2012. Sharrad, Paul. Private collection. Sharrad, Paul. “Translations: Texts and Textiles in Papua New Guinea,” in The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, ed. Susanne Küchler & Graeme Were (2005; Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2014): 123–34. Sharrad, Paul, & Anne Collett, ed. Re-inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3 (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004). Thomas, Nicholas. “‘We Were Still Papuans’: A 2006 Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 24.1 (Spring 2012): 119–33. Tiwi Designs Archive. Tiwi Designs, Nguiu, Bathurst Island. Venard, Marie. The Designs of His Heart: Marie Louise Hartzer and the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (Cork: Mercier, 1966). Waiko, John Dademo. A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993).

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Were, Graeme. Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2010). White, Geoffrey. Foreword, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, by Epeli Hau‘ofa (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008): ix–xx. Wright, Miriam L. Introducing the Vigils of the Sacred Heart (n.p.: 1954).

Chapter 2

Reading Across the Pacific, Reorienting “North”* Diana Brydon Paul Sharrad’s long career sets an enviable standard for modelling locally inflected, postcolonial reading strategies, which work out from his Australian place to read across the Pacific and into the wider world, illuminating literary history, transnational entanglements, and a specifically Pacific literary aesthetic, incorporating both texts and textiles. In this essay, I seek to honour his achievements by reading back across the Pacific, from my location in Canada, to address current representations of the North in Canada and Australia within global contexts of lived connections across cultures. Thinking about the many lessons Sharrad’s work offers about cross-cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial times, I raise some agenda-setting questions here. What would it mean for North American literary studies to shift its gaze from still dominant transatlantic imaginaries toward the transpacific? Heather Smyth suggests such a move could challenge “the unidirectionality of diasporic circuits,” enabling a shift away from seeing Pacific imaginaries as “a detour of the black Atlantic” toward seeing them in their own terms as locally generated.1 Her interest remains, however, in seeing Vancouver as “a Black Pacific node of the black diaspora.”2 What other ways of seeing might be generated by reading Canada through Pacific eyes? Here I follow Edward Said’s stress on beginnings and the orientations they generate, to ask how we might read the Cree writer Tomson Highway’s representation of the Canadian North through the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s representation of the Australian North.3 For both writers, these Norths are doubly colonized homes, first conquered * The research for this essay was conducted, in part, with support from the Canada Research Chairs program. I want to thank Paul Sharrad for first drawing Carpentaria to my attention, and sending me a copy when it was still unavailable in Canada. I also wish to thank the audiences who responded to early versions of the essay, at the meeting of the American Association of Australian and New Zealand Studies in Toronto in 2012 and at the “Canada and Beyond” conference at the University of Vigo (Spain) later the same year. 1 Heather Smyth, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Black Pacific: Multimodality in Kamau Brathwaite and Wayde Compton,” Callaloo 37.2 (Spring 2014): 389. 2 “The Black Atlantic Meets the Black Pacific,” 390. 3 Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic, 1975); Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998. Toronto: Anchor, 2005); Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_003

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by European invaders and then subordinated to colonial regimes located in the Souths of their respective countries. At the same time, these Norths have been shaped by trading histories beyond colonial encounter;4 they have generated rich cosmologies and locally inflected aesthetics. In reading these texts together, I wonder what it might mean for postcolonial studies in Canada to follow local indigenous initiatives in building connections across the Pacific with their Hawaiian, Māori, Pacifika and Australian indigenous counterparts. Others have begun to pursue this line of thinking. In the chapter “Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Claims of Time” in her wide-ranging book PostMulticultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators, Sneja Gunew pursues Gayatri Spivak’s idea of planetarity to address the work of Highway and Wright, drawing attention in particular to the synergies between Indigenous thought and posthuman imaginaries, particularly in relation to the ways in which concepts of “deep time” restructure conventional notions of time and space.5 It seems that Gunew and I are thinking along concurrent lines in seeing the decolonizing potential within such texts. But where Gunew’s interest lies in renewed forms of cosmopolitanism, my focus falls on the potential for decolonizing national imaginaries. For Gunew, these questions arise in relation to the challenges posed to ideas of the nation by twentieth-century multiculturalism. For Sharrad and myself, the genealogical trajectory grows out of the entanglements of the postcolonial and the settler colonial. These questions shape my revisiting of the sub-field through which I first approached Canadian and postcolonial literatures (and first met Paul Sharrad): that of comparative Australian–Canadian studies. This field flourished throughout the 1980s, yet gradually diminished as race- and identity-based postcolonial studies successfully argued that settler colonial studies had no place within postcolonial theoretical or literary study, and as ­ iramondo, 2006). Further page references to the novels by Highway and Wright are in the G main text. 4 See Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2005); Nicholas Jose, “Deconstructing the Dumpling: Australia, China, Lived Connections,” Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 116–29; and Richard J. Martin, Philip Mead & David Trigger, “The Politics of Indigeneity, Identity and Representation in Literature from North Australia’s Gulf Country,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 20.4–5 (2014): 330–45. 5 See Sneja Gunew, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators (London: Anthem, 2017). For my own thinking on planetarity, see the following two chapters: “Earth, World, Planet: Where Does the Postcolonial Literary Critic Stand?” in Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocations in a Global Age, ed. Chris Prentice, Vijay Devadas & Henry Johnson (Cross/Cultures 125; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 3–29, and “How Emergent Cultural Imaginaries of Autonomy and Planetarity Can Reframe Contemporary Precarity Debates,” in Precarious Spaces: The Arts, Social and Organizational Change, ed. Katarzyna Kosmala & Miguel Imas (Bristol & Chicago: Intellect Press, 2016): 15–33.

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nation-based studies addressing multiculturalism within the nation-state assumed priority.6 Now, almost two decades into a new century, Indigenous, Decolonial, and Settler Colonial Studies are leading to a revival of interest in the particular dynamics and institutional structures of invader-settler colonies around the world, while postcolonial understandings of who is indigenous and what it means to be indigenous continue to evolve. Part of this turn toward indigenous imaginaries involves a revival of interest in the literature and knowledge systems produced by indigenous peoples globally. That revival of interest, in turn, is leading to questions about how to write and read across cultural differences, and how we ought to read across such differences. These questions about the practices and ethics of meaning-making emerge in the context of sovereignty claims, which remain to be resolved. The literacy required to read aesthetic and sovereignty claims together requires new forms of attention to difference, to politics, and to literature. Norms of understanding that make sense within imperialist imaginaries and their nationalist descendants are being challenged by indigenous fictions that cast old questions in a new light. At the same time, the scholarly turn in many disciplines from continental to transoceanic imaginaries is sparking a new set of questions about the frameworks through which knowledge and value are produced. This article will not revisit the question of value. I agree with the general Canadian consensus that Highway’s novel is a masterpiece, and despite the more polarized reception Carpentaria may have received, I agree with Adam Shoemaker (cited in Sharrad) and Sharrad himself that this novel is a work of genius.7 Instead, my article takes up James Clifford’s reminder: Native Pacific conditions are importantly different from those generating North Atlantic cultural studies […] if Black Atlantic and South Asian diaspora theory is to travel well in the Pacific, there needs to be a significant adaptation to a different map and history.8 6 It may be necessary to clarify here that settler colonial studies is not confined to the period prior to nation-state independence. Indigenous theorists in former colonies such as Australia and Canada argue that these nation-states practice an ongoing colonialism. Such insights are gaining currency in many other parts of the world, where Indigenous peoples have been subjugated in the name of a centralized and homogenizing nationalism. 7 Paul Sharrad, “Beyond Capricornia: Ambiguous Promise in Alexis Wright,” Australian Literary Studies 24.1 (May 2009): 52. 8 James Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson & Christopher Leigh Connery (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2007): 30.

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What might that different map and history look like if they were approached from a Canadian location reading across the Pacific? Paul Sharrad and Elizabeth DeLoughrey have led the way in rethinking transpacific engagements in both Pacific and postcolonial contexts.9 This essay builds on their work in an effort to revitalize the research sub-field of Australian–Canadian studies by comparing the aesthetic and imaginative breakthroughs achieved by Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Wright’s Carpentaria, each of which resituates the iconic North of their respective continents and nation-states within larger global contexts. These fictions problematize Western assumptions about time/ space relations; expression and representation; and claims to knowledge, expertise, and authority. They do this through pluralizing, but also reconceptualizing, modes of knowing and belief. 1 Chronotope I choose chronotope to signal that “different map and history” to which Clifford alludes in the statement just quoted. Bakhtin describes the ways in which the chronotope operates “as a formally constituted category of literature,” as “the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied,” and where Time becomes “palpable and visible.”10 For Peter Hitchcock, an inspired reader of Bakhtin in postcolonial contexts, Chronotope is not any old coordinate of time and space but that figural semantic process allowing narrative to proceed to form. In every space of postcoloniality, marked by nation or locale, movement or embeddedness, inscription or orality, culture refracts duration: not just that colonialism was endured, but that its figures of time did not absolutely displace or dismantle local forms of temporality.11

9 10

11

Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003); Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2007). M.M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–38) in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki [Problems of Literature and Esthetics] 1975; Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 84, 250. Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2009): 4.

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In The Long Space Hitchcock sets himself the challenge of taking “chronotope as a constitutive problem of transnational narration, a knot that is a key to the ways through which postcoloniality can be expressed” in order to intervene in current debates about world literature, postcoloniality, and narrative form.12 My goal is considerably more modest and my thematic and formal focus is different. Nonetheless, I am inspired by his argument that Transnationalism of this kind seeks to link writers beyond a spatial and epistemological divide not because their histories are the same but because they speak to a logic of time that remains dissatisfied with ‘posts’ or ‘eras’ or linearity or representing at best through sociological/ anthropological content.13 Highway in Kiss of the Fur Queen and Wright in Carpentaria speak to alternative logics of time/space that work through chronotopes that are formally transformative in just this way. Kiss of the Fur Queen takes as its second epigraph the powerful statement made by Chief Seattle of the Squamish that “the dead are not altogether powerless,” proving that statement through moments that erupt through the narrative that follows.14 The prelude to Champion/Jeremiah’s birth is marked by the moaning and whispering of the ancestors, including his mother Mariesis’s mother, among them—despite her death twenty-one years earlier—shortly after Mariesis’s marriage (19). When Mariesis’s sons, the two brothers Okimasis—Champion/Jeremiah and Dancer/Gabriel—return home from residential school, they hear “a lone wolf’s howl […] touching off a vague shudder that brushed the surface of their hearts, in perfect unison, like the ice-cold hand of someone waking after five hundred years of sleep” (90). This is the island where Father Thibodeau’s men caught Chachagathoo, a woman the brothers have been told was evil because she held a frightening dream power. She becomes linked in Dancer/Gabriel’s mind to the winking white fox who appears at key moments to throw the text’s realism slightly off-balance (196); as they learn more about her defiance of the church, their interest in her grows (197). Through her power, Chachagathoo testifies to other modes of knowing, and forms of authority alternative to the church and residential school. 12 13 14

The Long Space, 4–5. The Long Space, 19. As reported by Henry A. Smith, Seattle Sunday Star 20 October 1887, reprinted in Walt Crowley, “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” 28 June 1999, Essay 1427 of Historylink: http://www .historylink.org/File/1427 (accessed 28 April 2015).

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Carpentaria’s narrative also repeatedly shows that those outside the limits of verisimilitude and associated realist understandings can intervene in the lives of the living: among other moments, when the “fairy-like people […] the strange Yanngunyi tribe […] the yinburras” intervene to help Normal Phantom save his grandson Bala; when the rock, after waiting centuries for this moment, trips up the mine’s employees who are pursuing the mine’s opponent, Norm’s estranged son, Will Phantom; and when Will, alone in the pub during the cyclone, encounters “other presences” (472) and the “baggity old Queen of the Pricklebush,” who addresses him “Countryman, hello” and commands him to “Remember the real people of the Gulf” (475). At these moments, Time becomes both palpable and visible, and narrative knots are tied and untied. Indeed, the Yanngunyi disappeared, the old people said, at a time no one remembered “because no one was keeping a look at the clock” (297). The moment was not noted but the explanation was known: “they did not want their histories contaminated with oppression under the white man’s thumb” (297). Wright explains the temporal logic behind the telling of her text: “The idea struck me that if I were to tell a story to our people, I would also be telling a story to our ancestors.”15 That expanded sense of audience, transcending time, necessitated a story, in her words, that was “written like a long song, following ancient tradition, reaching back as much as it reached forward, to tell a contemporary story to our ground.”16 Those simple lines issue a challenge to Western assumptions about audience, ground, time, progress, narrative, and value, which starts with the title of Chapter 1, “From time immemorial.” 2 Song Carpentaria writes, or more correctly “sings,” against the situation described in its opening lines: “A NATION CHANTS, BUT WE KNOW YOUR STORY ALREADY” (1). The story that follows tells an alternative knowing, reframing the Australian nationalist story in terms of songs sung in recognition of an indigenous imaginary. In describing the task she set herself, Wright asks a question that is more complicated than it seems at first reading: “What songs should be sung in recognition of our national collectivity?”17 The potential ambiguity in such a question—which national collectivity?—continues to haunt invader-settler societies in very particular ways, even as the question assumes new 15 16 17

Alexis Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria,” heat, NS 13 (2007): 85. “On Writing Carpentaria,” 85. “On Writing Carpentaria,” 92.

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dimensions for many different parts of the world as twentieth-century nationstates find themselves increasingly ill-suited to adapt to the demands of the twenty-first century. With that recognition, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak frame a related question in their small book, Who Sings the Nation-State? in which Butler begins their dialogue by asking “What are literary scholars doing with global states?”18 The ambiguous referent of that word, “states,” seems deliberate. Which states do they mean? Nation-states as conventionally understood, or global states of mind? A similar question challenges the Okimasis brothers in Kiss of the Fur Queen, as they explore Western art and their Cree traditions for narrative forms and a language that can do justice to their mixed experiences. In turn, the brothers’ quest mirrors Highway’s in writing Kiss. Carpentaria and Kiss resonate in different ways for the different audiences they reach. The two epigraphs to Highway’s novel set up a tension between the edict of the state, forbidding dancing to a particular community at a particular time in history, and the claim of Chief Seattle, to an alternative understanding of community, which can defy that edict beyond the grave. Music, dance, and theatre shape Highway’s story. Dancer/Gabriel is punished for singing in Cree (85). Champion/Jeremiah, taught to fear his heritage, finds himself at a Pow Wow, “frightened of this dance, this song, this drum, ‘the heartbeat of our Mother, the Earth’ […] it […] made his blood run cold” (243). But Dancer/ Gabriel knows “he had to learn this dance” (245). As the ceremony progresses, the brothers realize that Chachagathoo, labelled a witch by the priest, was actually a great shaman of their people (245–47). She died, the “last shaman in that part of the world” (147) but her power lives on (252–53). Eventually, the brothers reclaim her centrality to their cultural view in their production, “Chachagathoo, the Shaman,” described as “a show so controversial that the cardinal of Toronto had snuck [in] dressed as a Rosedale matron, so Indian rumour rabidly insisted” (295–96). Here the tables are turned. The Roman Catholic church, which earlier condemned Chachagathoo, now finds its representatives summoned, in drag no less, to witness her rebirth and the triumph of Cree laughter over Christian frowns. This successful production coincides with Dancer/Gabriel’s death. His death is described as a race across the northern tundra, in a repetition of his father’s winning the world championship dogsled race with which the book began (303). In his death, on the closing night of the play, Dancer/Gabriel Okimasis assumes the role of his father, the caribou hunter racing to meet his fate in the person of the trickster Fur Queen (304, 305). What are readers to make 18

Judith Butler & Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull, 2007): 1.

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of this juxtaposition? Chachagathoo’s shamanic role in Kiss, and that of the wind-swept tundra, have been overshadowed in much of the critical response to this book by readerly pleasure in its trickster dynamics and camp play, and shame and anger at the horror of the residential school system it describes. As a forbidding presence, with her own tragic story, Chachagathoo has received short shrift, and the skills of the caribou hunter have been downplayed in favour of those inherited by his sons. It was Carpentaria’s description of Normal Phantom as “a scholar of the sea” (491) that caused me to look again at Abraham Okimasis’s ways of knowing, for each father navigates a forbidding Northern landscape with absolute confidence and love. 3

Ways of Knowing

Each novel reframes the ways meanings get made, renaming potentialities, and imagining possible futures beyond solely Eurocentric imaginaries. Others have devoted attention to the astonishing linguistic range and verbal play in these novels. Here, I accept what Sharrad describes as Wright’s undercutting “the foundations of any canonical desire for a singular language, genre or mode of reading” as an apt description of the mode of both fictions, seeing both as equally polyphonic in their range.19 Each is grounded in love of the land and indigenous ownership through that love, while opening from there to embrace the wider world. Carpentaria tells the story of “traditional lands taken but never ceded” (6). Aileen Moreton-Robinson explains “Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded, but this is denied by Australian law.”20 The situation is complicated in Canada, where some treaties were signed (if almost always under duress), but not by all indigenous nations in all parts of the country. ­Moreton-Robinson’s ­introduction to Sovereign Subjects describes the logic enacted within Carpentaria: Our sovereignty is embodied, it is ontological (our being) and epistemological (our way of knowing), and it is grounded within complex relations derived from the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land. In this sense, our sovereignty is carried by the body and differs from Western constructions of sovereignty, which are predicated on the 19 20

Sharrad, “Beyond Capricornia,” 52. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Introduction” to Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007): 3.

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social contract model, the idea of a unified supreme authority, territorial integrity and individual rights.21 In this description, there seems potential for pursuing a conversation between Moreton-Robinson’s understanding of these entangled concepts, and Karen Barad’s coining of “ethico-onto-epistemology” and the conceptual shift involved in moving away from theorizing interaction to thinking about intraaction in her Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.22 Canadian indigenous nations often hold what seem to be similar views. Humanist categories placing humans at the centre of the universe are now concurrently being challenged by versions of posthumanist and Indigenous thought (at least in Australia and Canada) in ways that at first glance seem compatible but require further investigation lest important distinctions be lost. Although treaties were signed in Canada, Kiss presents a similar view of indigenous sovereignty, the threat of mining to the land, and the ways in which “colonization is a living process” that is difficult to exorcise.23 The fragments of conversation the brothers hear at the ballet resonate with more ominous notes of threat when read alongside Carpentaria’s more overt opposition to a mine in the Australian North. The boys hear: “‘Northern Manitoba … Ripe for the plucking … Uninhabited. … Or might as well be’” (141). The dream these words inspire momentarily seduces the boys with its comical extravagance, income from the land that will make “Cree Indians so wealthy they could commute to Las Vegas for blackjack every weekend” (141). But these dreams are elaborated to be mocked. Facing death at the end of the novel, the brothers return to visions of the land as they remember it from their childhood. Contemporary Indigenous texts in Canada and Australia are often read within the discursive conventions established by international trauma studies and Derridean notions of hauntology. Although Kiss and Carpentaria may be read productively within such terms, it is likely that in setting their own agendas, which begin from different places and experiences of a genocidal colonialism approached from within their own understandings, something could be lost if they are recuperated into pre-established categories too quickly.24 21 22 23 24

“Introduction,” 2. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke UP, 2007): 185, 381, 139. Moreton-Robinson, “Introduction,” 2. For an elaboration of this idea in relation to Highway’s text, see Diana Brydon, “‘Difficult Forms of Knowing’: Enquiry, Injury, and Translocated Relations of Postcolonial Responsibility,” in Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking,

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Both novels disrupt linear notions of chronological time and common-sense distinctions between life and death at key points. The narrator of Carpentaria addresses the reader: If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here. (11) This is exactly what Chachagathoo does in Kiss, once the brothers have learned to hear her story. In Carpentaria and in Kiss, the “real story of what happened here” emerges gradually, as a story combining frontier violence and childhood sexual abuse condoned and often perpetrated by the forces of the law and the church. But the “real story” is also one of how intimately connected are land, mind, and soul in these disregarded Indigenous worldviews. 4

Scorched Earth in the Mind

Wright concludes her essay “Where to Point the Spears?” by suggesting: “I think that I have been able to reach a point where I can imagine a world from the ‘hell that is within,’ as I believe was once said by Nietzsche. It is not all scorched earth in the mind.”25 Nonetheless, there is a great deal of it in Carpentaria, and even more in The Swan Book, her third novel. These books take readers into intimate and deeply violated spaces, while enabling glimmers of hope to survive. Highway’s novel has generally been received as a redemptive text, yet reading Wright reminds me of the many ways in which Kiss continues to testify to how much “scorched earth in the mind” remains. Both novels are funny but the humour functions in complex ways, to demonstrate resilience and to highlight terror. Wright expresses faith that “It is possible to imagine difference, and it is possible to live the opposite of being shackled.”26 Carpentaria performs those possibilities of freedom through recreating a knowledge that remaps the landscape according to indigenous understandings. This is a world that literally overflows Western systems of mapping, remaking the land through tornado

25 26

ed. Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein & Silke Stroh (Cross/Cultures 156; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013): 3–28. Alexis Wright, “Where to Point the Spears?” in Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, ed. Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi (London: Routledge, 2011): 42. “Where to Point the Spears?” 42.

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and flood, just as Wright remakes story through her diversity of linguistic and affective registers. Nonetheless, how to understand that remaking remains contentious. The reader’s challenge is to remain open to Wright’s expansive indigenous imaginary without slotting it into any of the categories currently available for making sense of difference. It is neither entirely unknowable nor fully knowable, not completely incommensurable to Western understanding nor easily assimilated into formalist categories such as “magical realism”. Stereotypes of Australia as “the timeless land” take on new resonance in light of contemporary literary theorizations of global “deep time”. In her introduction to Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock questions “the analytic adequacy of the sovereign state,” in its subordination to “the rule of the mechanical clock” for understanding Literature’s refusal of such measures.27 Just as Highway mocks capitalist dreams of conspicuous consumption, so Wright mocks Western obedience to the rule of the clock through Angel Day’s ecstasy at finding a clock at the dump in Carpentaria. The clock inspires fantasies of a future in which No one in the Phantom family would be guessing the time anymore from where the sun sat in the sky. In the new sweet life, the Phantom family would be marching off to bed at the correct time, just like the school thought was really desirable, then they would march off to school on time to do their school work. (22) Wright’s mockery of the kind of seduction wielded by the regimented life, half-internalized here as a form of Foucauldian biopower, can be productively compared to the seductions of capitalism experienced by the Okimasis brothers on their first joint visit to the Polo Park Mall. Whereas the brothers escape the Mall, ultimately described as “Grey and soulless” (121), Angel disappears “into another world” (450), becoming “hearsay” through a letter received in the mind by a member of Mozzie’s crew. Mozzie feels her cold and watches her inhabiting a “twilight world” (452) before rejecting both her and the dream-letter from a place and a life he can barely imagine. For Dimock, the analytic of “deep time” replaces the mechanical regimentation of clock time with “a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric.”28 From this 27 28

Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension,” in Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2006): 3, 2. “Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension,” 3–4.

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perspective, Carpentaria’s chronotopes might seem to fit a broader universalized imaginary now embraced by canonical comparative literature through its newly discovered affinities with geological time. The danger with the global scale of such a perspective lies in its erasure of the alliance Carpentaria sets up between this expansive long view and the sovereignty politics of this time and place: it is a particularity underlined by the novel’s title, which locates its voice as emergent from, and “unique, to the Gulf region” called Carpentaria.29 At the other extreme to “deep time” universalist perspectives, critics such as Alison Ravenscroft wish to hold to the incommensurability of Carpentaria’s indigenous vision at all costs. Ravenscroft is critical of those who seek to understand Carpentaria by anchoring it to “big names among white Australian novelists.” She argues: “Such moves presume to make Wright indebted to these literary masters, assessing the significance of her text by its proximity to theirs.”30 It is wise to be cautious about such moves, but alternative avenues for interpretation of what is happening at such moments exist. Wright is a well-read author who feels entitled to shape her material out of everything she knows, while respecting the protocols of her own culture as to what can and cannot be told. To note Carpentaria’s intertextual engagements with a multitude of texts from Australia and elsewhere is not to diminish the novel’s ­authenticity as a Waanyi indigenous text nor necessarily to pull it away from its politics into conformity with white desires. Nonetheless, Ravenscroft accurately describes some of the interpretive traps that lie in wait for the critic, traps set by the dominant protocols of reading in our times more than by the text itself. Ravenscroft asks, “How to resist the call to bring this novel into the white Australian literary canon on one hand, or into an imperialist magic realism on the other?”31 But these traps are not exactly commensurate. As T.S. Eliot pointed out, each new text that enters the canon changes its shape, nature, and criteria for inclusion. Entering a canon is not the same as forcing a text into a pre-set model of what qualifies as either Australian or magic realist. Ravenscroft is critical of those she believes fail to escape these traps, as well as of those who find either anthropological lessons in the text or too easy a hybridizing of Western and indigenous traditions. Certainly, Carpentaria refuses to act as a “native informant” or an “otherness machine” for its readers, and Ravenscroft is surely correct in praising the novel’s destabilizing insistence on undecidability in relation to any such attempts to defuse 29 30 31

Alexis Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria,” 88. Alison Ravenscroft, “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics,” Cultural Studies Review 16.2 (2010): 194. “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics,” 205.

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the power of its generic innovations. However, I do not see that undecidability extending to the novel’s central political message, which in my view, clearly demands recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty, Aboriginal law, and its foundations in a place-specific epistemology. Carpentaria makes aesthetic and political interventions into a serious matter of public urgency and there is no doubt where the novel stands on questions of indigenous sovereignty, colonial violence and racism, abuses of the law, Aboriginal deaths in custody, white racism, and the environmental degradation caused by mining. Anne Brewster acknowledges both these politics and the novel’s aesthetic achievements by implying the novel holds different kinds of lessons for different groups of readers. I see no contradictions between identifying a central political message for Australian society in this novel and recognizing its openness beyond even authorial intention to a variety of interpretations. This is not to say that there cannot be any misreadings, but that the novel is rich and complex enough to welcome many approaches and to remain intriguing to many different readers outside its own time and place.32 Brewster suggests Carpentaria has “given debates about Australia’s troubled legacy of racism new currency and new forms.”33 For her, “the novel […] lays bare the complex disavowals and denials of Australian postcolonial whiteness.”34 By establishing “indigeneity as the default ontological and epistemological position,” she argues, the novel “renders white authority fragile and challenged, documents the anxiety of the white nation, and performs the work of defamiliarising whiteness.”35 For Brewster, “the novel’s representation of indigenous cosmology and sovereignty as normative impacts upon and problematizes whiteness because indigeneity and whiteness are intersubjectively constituted.”36 This final observation establishes a key point of difference between her position and Ravenscroft’s. For Brewster, the problem for white readers is not indigenous incommensurability, because cultures do not exist as separate containers of pure identity; they are always under construction through relations actual and imagined. While Carpentaria documents the ways in which white and indigenous subjects perceive and represent one

32

33 34 35 36

This clarification comes in response to one of the book’s reader reports. What I see as a central political message within a larger aesthetic whole, this reader seems to have read as an insistence that the political message is the book’s central–and only correct–message, which was not my intention. Anne Brewster, “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,” Australian Literary Studies 25.4 (October 2010): 85. “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness,” 86. “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness,” 92. “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness,” 92–93.

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another, from indigenous perspectives, the subject position created for readers is more open than an attention to racial politics alone might suggest. Wright insists that in writing Carpentaria, she “was not bowing to an expectation that I can only look through the glare of the narrow prism of colonialism to infinity.”37 Carpentaria was to be a “work of art,” derived from “the full complexity of the contemporary Indigenous world,” not suited “to a tourist reader,” but rather written to question the idea of boundaries through exploring how ancient beliefs sit in the modern world, while at the same time exposing the fragility of the boundaries of Indigenous home places of the mind, by exposing how these places are constantly under stress and burdened with threat.38 Wright wanted her “reader to believe in the energy of the Gulf country, to stay with a story as a welcomed stranger as if the land was telling a story about itself as much as the narrator is telling stories to the land.”39 To read Kiss in such a light, is to see the northern landscapes of the brothers’ childhood and their father’s expertise as a hunter as more central to the novel’s vision and its ethical grounding than they might have seemed to readers more concerned with the residential school experience and the contemporary plight of urban natives. Episodes such as Champion’s birth (before he is renamed Jeremiah) and his singing to the rampaging caribou herd assume new power when conceived as “the land telling a story about itself.” Both stories set the land within cosmic settings. Each seeks hope. Carpentaria looks for hope “IN THE STORIES; THE BIG STORIES AND THE LITTLE ONE IN BETWEEN” (12). It sings the land and silenced histories of its people. From the perspective of the land, colonial encounter, however brutal, is but one episode. In Kiss, the weight of the balance falls differently. If Carpentaria leans toward epic and allegory, Kiss is more recognizably a novel with a smaller cast of characters and a tighter focus. Yet each creates new connected global imaginaries from local indigenous space. The Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith begins her now classic study Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by stressing “the constant interchange between the scholarly and the imaginative.”40 I have 37 38 39 40

Wright, “Where to Point the Spears?” 39. Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria,” 83, 85, 87, 81–82. “On Writing Carpentaria,” 87. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999): 2. I identify this author Māori to stress her book and her approach as early examples of Indigenous critique developed from within a somewhat comparable settler colonial nation-state.

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tried to model that process here. When Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests the planetarity she seeks is “best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of this planet,” she hypothesizes an outside to the current impasses to which contemporary capitalism has led our world.41 Carpentaria and Kiss each write out of the collision of precapitalist and capitalist imaginaries through novels that strain and stretch understanding. Kiss ends with a wink and Carpentaria with the allegorically named Will Phantom searching for his lost wife, Hope. Emergent critical vocabularies such as Spivakian planetarity may seem potentially receptive to Carpentaria’s world view, but in that world, Hope and Will remain elusive. They are embodied AND they are Phantoms. The ending of Highway’s novel is similarly ambiguous. Dancer/Gabriel dies, but he leaves with the Fur Queen and not the priest. Through their stories, readers struggle to read across the histories that separate us. What readers are to make of these moments depends on us. Both fictions strain national boundaries, focusing instead on shifting the balance of power between urban and what have variously been considered hinterland, outback, or wilderness environments, to challenge the accuracy of those labels and the assumptions that underlie them. Earlier Australian studies stressed the Outback as the iconic national signifier of identity even as most Australians lived in cities huddled along the coast. Carpentaria’s tropical North reframes that iconic Outback identity, claiming it for the Gulf world in which sea and land interact in unstable configurations. Canadian studies continue to stress the Arctic North as the imaginative heart of Canadian nationalist identity, even as scholars have shown how variably situated Canada’s norths might be, referring to just outside Toronto to beyond the Arctic circle, and everywhere in between.42 Highway’s North, like Wright’s, is intimately inhabited and interactive with its indigenous caretakers. It is not an empty space upon which colonizing forces may impose their fantasies. Wright speaks to the boundary-crossing potential of literary creativity in claiming: I believe it will increasingly become the role of literature to explain what is happening in the home of humanity, by speaking honestly to the world where those who represent us politically do not.43 41 42

43

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003): 101. See Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001); John Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (Toronto: Anansi, 1994); Aritha Van Herk, Places Far From Ellesmere (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1990); and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015). Alexis Wright, “A Question of Fear,” in Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear, ed. Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh & Alexis Wright (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 169.

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In its performance of indigenous knowledge in interaction with global routes, Carpentaria joins texts by a range of thinkers and writers from around the globe, such as Highway, whose articulation of non-Western modes of knowing is helping to de-parochialize Western paradigms of knowledge production. If Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell is correct in suggesting that “One of the fundamental problems that social science now faces is to connect different formations of knowledge in the periphery with each other,” then comparing these fictional texts from what have long been considered the peripheries of peripheries can help us think “more carefully about the circumstances of intellectual work”—and the material implications of such work—within settler-colonial texts and nation-states in which decolonization is just beginning.44 Works Cited Bakhtin, M.M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–38) in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki [Problems of Literature and Esthetics] 1975; Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 84–258. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke UP, 2007). Brewster, Anne. “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,” Australian Literary Studies 25.4 (October 2010): 85–100. Brydon, Diana. “‘Difficult Forms of Knowing’: Enquiry, Injury, and Translocated Relations of Postcolonial Responsibility,” in Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking, ed. Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein & Silke Stroh (Cross/Cultures 156; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013): 3–28. Brydon, Diana. “Earth, World, Planet: Where Does the Postcolonial Literary Critic Stand?” in Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocations in a Global Age, ed. Chris Prentice, Vijay Devadas & Henry Johnson (Cross/Cultures 125; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 3–29. Brydon, Diana. “How Emergent Cultural Imaginaries of Autonomy and Planetarity Can Reframe Contemporary Precarity Debates,” in Precarious Spaces: The Arts, Social and Organizational Change, ed. Katarzyna Kosmala & Miguel Imas (Bristol & Chicago: Intellect Press, 2016): 15–33. Butler, Judith, & Gayatri Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull, 2007). 44

Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2007): 213, 108.

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Clifford, James. “Indigenous Articulations,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson & Christopher Leigh Connery (Berkeley CA: North Atlantic, 2007): 13–38. Connell, Raewyn. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Crowley, Walt. “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” 28 June 1999, Essay 1427 of Historylink at http:// www.historylink.org/File/1427 (accessed 28 April 2015). Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2005). DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2007). Dimock, Wai Chee. “Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension,” in Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2006): 1–6. Grace, Sherrill E. Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGillQueen’s UP, 2001). Gunew, Sneja. Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators (London: Anthem, 2017). Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998; Toronto: Anchor, 2005). Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2009). Jose, Nicholas. “Deconstructing the Dumpling: Australia, China, Lived Connections,” Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 116–29. Martin, Richard J., Philip Mead & David Trigger. “The Politics of Indigeneity, Identity and Representation in Literature from North Australia’s Gulf Country,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 20.4–5 (2014): 330–45. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Introduction” to Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007): 1–11. Moss, John. Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (Toronto: Anansi, 1994). Ravenscroft, Alison. “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics,” Cultural Studies Review 16.2 (2010): 194–224. Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). Sharrad, Paul. “Beyond Capricornia: Ambiguous Promise in Alexis Wright,” Australian Literary Studies 24.1 (May 2009): 52–65. Smyth, Heather. “The Black Atlantic Meets the Black Pacific: Multimodality in Kamau Brathwaite and Wayde Compton,” Callaloo 37.2 (Spring 2014): 389–403. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003).

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Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999). Van Herk, Aritha. Places Far From Ellesmere (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1990). Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. The Right to be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet (London: Penguin, 2015). Wright, Alexis. “A Question of Fear,” in Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear, ed. Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh & Alexis Wright (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 129–69. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006). Wright, Alexis. “On Writing Carpentaria,” HEAT, NS 13 (2007): 79–95. Wright, Alexis. The Swan Book (Sydney: Giramondo, 2013). Wright, Alexis. “Where to Point the Spears?” in Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, ed. Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi (London: Routledge, 2011): 35–42.

Chapter 3

Nationalism from Below

Folk Nationalist Formations of Mukunda Das Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay i Late nineteenth-century proto-nationalist consciousness in Bengal was largely negotiated in terms of a distinctive moral absolutism. There had been an increasing debate on national cultural forms;1 with the gradual spread of English education, after the recommendations of the Hunter Commission in 1882,2 debate on the East/West rival alignment set a new cultural politics in motion. In many quarters, a supportive stance for mimicry of the West was looked upon as opportunism, negotiated through the agency of Bengali elitists. Contrastingly, the orientalist segment of nationalist thought encapsulated a position of alterity; this was in the context of the enigmatic (as well as invasive) proliferation of Western cultural production. This implosive design formed part of the indigenous project of dismantling an appropriated culture. The attempt to get beyond this boundary between national and imperial involves a cultural re-orientation, or a process of ‘de-amnesia,’ that articulates and repairs the historical consciousness of a pragmatic nationalist community. This explains the necessity of forming a counter-discourse, constructing a heterogeneous praxis in terms of popular cultural modes. Against the Western models of liberalist philosophy, enunciated through religious and cultural movements of Bengal in terms of figures such as Brahma Samaj, Arya Samaj, Prarthana Samaj Ramakrishna Mission etc., indigenous folk forms like Bratakatha (narration of religious stories forming part of ritualistic practice), Laxmi Panchali (narration of stories related to Laxmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth), Palagan (narratives in the form of indigenous songs), and jatra (an 1 Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné & Michael Mann (London: Anthem, 2004); see also Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/ Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). 2 See Ram Nath Sharma & Rajendra K. Sharma, History of Education in India (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005); see also N. Jayapalan, History of Education in India (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_004

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indigenous form of theatre), continued to express an indigenous model of nationalist discourse. This essay seeks to address the question of the nationalist strategy explicit in the popular swadeshi jatra or nationalist plays of Charan Kavi Mukunda Das (1880–1935).3 ii Mukunda Das was primarily interested in the indigenous folk dramatic form jatra. His first performance, Matripuja (1905), was considered highly ­anti-imperialist; this was especially true of some of the songs. After the play became very popular, Mukunda Das was imprisoned for more than two years. His later plays like Samaj, Palliseva, Brahmacharini, and Karmakshetra may be regarded as distinctive cultural forms, significantly contributing to national consciousness. These works largely criticize Western constructions of the orient that are based on, to borrow Abdul JanMohamed’s phrase, a “Manichean allegory” which negotiates a pre-disposed opposition between the Western and the indigenous or orientalist cultural formation.4 Mukunda Das attempted, instead, to articulate an indigenous identity, reclaiming the self-image against the imperialist disruption of Indian history and its value systems. In order to prioritize nationalist assumptions, Mukunda Das adopted two distinctive folk forms: swadeshi jatra, or indigenous open air folk theatre, and Milan Gan, songs trying to establish communal harmony. In his use of jatra, he moves away from the traditional thematic content, religious mythology and ancient history. Instead, he uses the jatra form to propagate and popularize the swadeshi (patriotic) ideology, in terms of socio-moral absolutism. This problematic of social and moral development largely intersects with a nationalist formation of self-imaging. In doing so, Mukunda Das shows impatience with the principle of moderation that had been pursued by the Indian National Congress in its early phase. He argues instead for a total commitment to the cause of social and moral development, which designates a complex site for substituting traditional ­ethico-religious ideals for the complex of cultural forms and aspirations identified as Western. 3 All references to Mukunda Das’s plays are from Mukunda Daser Granthabali (Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, 1978). All translations from Bengali to English are mine. 4 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., special issue of Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 59–87; reissued as “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1986): 78–106.

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The activities of the Congress between 1885 and 1905 were largely controlled by the elitist, English-educated segment of Indian society—Rob Jenkins claims that “India’s initial crop of political parties was dominated by English-speaking professionals from elite backgrounds.”5 While Jenkins is essentially concerned with the immediate post-independence Indian political system, Sumit Ganguly takes us back to the pre-independence period. Commenting generally on the gradual growth of the democratic principle, Ganguly points out that Indian nationalists from the late nineteenth century onward successfully appropriated liberal-democratic principles from the United Kingdom and infused them into the Indian political context. Under the towering influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi in the 1930s, these beliefs and principles were disseminated to a broad swath of India’s population via the Indian National Congress (Congress party), the leading nationalist political party.6 But the liberalist principle of moderation was considered incompatible with the more aggressive ideology of the extremists with whom Mukunda Das identified—he considered the Congress to be engaged in a ludic performance of pedagogic expediency. In his play Palliseva (‘service to the village’), the character Nitai blames the lack of constructive political activism on the Indian National Congress. He says to Rajen: “‘I have in my mind a special feeling which I would like to share with you. There was a huge flood of Indian consciousness, but the plan of constructive work lies sleeping in the files of the Indian Congress Committee’” (7). He also accuses the nationalist leaders: The leaders should be the pathfinders, but what are they doing? It is now a revolt of lectures. But the programme of their constructive work of All India Congress Committee is confined to files. Constructive work is not a matter of lectures, but a matter of constructive action. (34) Liberation by itself is a contentious term. As against the traditional forms of revolt, Gandhi’s formulation of Satyagraha came to replicate the indigenous Indian values of moral absolutism, dependent on the correlation of protest and peace. This novel method may be termed (as Johann P. Arnason refers to it, albeit in a different context), “intercivilisational encounter.” Arnason c­ omments 5 Rob Jenkins, “Civil Society versus Corruption,” in The State of India’s Democracy, ed. Sumit Ganguly, Larry Diamond & Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007): 161. 6 Sumit Ganguly, “Introduction” to The State of India’s Democracy, ix.

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that “a new variant of European civilization was built on the ruins of indigenous ones”; he further suggests that “the discovery of India became […] a part of the history of European self-understanding.”7 Yet Mukunda Das was obviously immersed in the new pattern of Gandhian thought, something explicit in his repeated celebration of indigenous Charka (hand-made spinning wheels) politics, initiated by Gandhi as a protest against British economic imperialism. As a form of swadeshi jatra (indigenous dramatic form), Mukunda Das’ plays began to spread the message of Gandhi: Wheels of Charka, spin more and more Sound of your wheels heralds Chariots of swaraj at the door. Wheels of Charka, spin more and more Whirling of wheels repels Sleep and trance with a roar. Wheels of Charka, spin more and more. (45) This long poem celebrates the Charka as a symbolic referent for Indian independence. The sound of Charka, as replicated in the original Bengali song, seems to resemble a folk incantation dedicated to sacred Deshmatrika (‘motherland’). Alliterative consonants striking hard against one another seem to prompt the folk imagination into an active engagement with swadeshi. Mukunda Das’ song deliberately responds to the Gandhian call for renouncing the European machine-made goods. While explaining this new economic environment, A.R. Desai comments: “The influx of cheap British and nonBritish machine-made goods into India was the fundamental cause of the decline of village artisan industry.”8 But the Gandhian resistance brought about a measure of check and balance: “Subsequently the decline was partly though not effectively retarded by propaganda in its favour, by such leaders such as Gandhi and organizations like the All-India Spinners’ Association.”9 The mode of resistance was largely opposed to violent action; Louis L. Snyder explains Gandhi’s subject position in terms of “soul force”:

7 Johann P. Arnason, “Understanding Intercivilizational Encounters,” Thesis Eleven 86.1 (August 2006): 43. 8 A.R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, rev. ed. 1954): 77. 9 Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 78.

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Through Gandhi the nationalist movement reached India’s more than half a million villages, penetrated into the urban factories and slums and became truly a mass movement. The people scrupulously followed Gandhi’s admonition to boycott all foreign-made goods. Only in this way, Gandhi insisted, could swaraj (self-determinations) be achieved.10 Mukunda Das projects this new enthusiasm through the characters of his plays. Thus, in Palliseva, Rajen decides to establish a Charka factory. Mukunda Das’s negotiation with Gandhian Charka is contextualized principally in terms of the role of women. Sulabha, at the end of the play, endorses the Gandhian principle: “‘How delightful! The Mahatma’s command is to use Charka and wear Khaddar (hand-spun cloth)’” (48). And the girl students in Gargi’s schools in the play Karmakshetra (“the place of work”) celebrate the significance of Charka in their life: Charka is my protector Charka is my friend We eat and live by Charka And wear marital bangles Charka is my friend We wear Sari from Dacca Weave threads Wear ivory bangles Why should we leave Charka (78) While the Indian women enshrined in the male politics of pardah (veils worn by Muslim women) and ghomta (veil to cover the face of Hindu women), or sankha (bangles made of conch shell generally worn by married Bengali women) and sindur (a vermilion mark on the forehead of married women) representing the kulalakshmi (chaste women) image, Gandhian politics set in motion a distinctive protest movement. Charka politics comes to be largely correlated to the domestic space represented by women. Aparna Basu, trying to configure political participation, points out that it had brought about a change in the position of Indian women,11 while Vina 10 11

Louis L. Snyder, The New Nationalism (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1968): 151. Aparna Basu, “The Role of Women in the Indian Struggle for Freedom,” in Indian Women: From Purdha to Modernity, ed. B.R. Nanda (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976): 39–40. See also From Independence Towards Freedom: Indian Women Since 1947, ed. Bharati Ray & Aparna Basu (New Delhi & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), and Visalakshi Menon, Indian Women and Nationalism: The UP Story (New Delhi: Har-Anand, 2003).

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­ azumdar suggests that Gandhi had been important to a politics which upM graded “women’s roles in society, and their personal dignity as individuals.”12 But the question of politicizing the image of women could not be flatly radical. Samita Sen has tried to locate a dominant masculinist cultural politics in domesticizing women: In the nineteenth century, the Bengali elite was engaged in elaborating an ideology of domesticity. They located a newly constituted notion of ‘tradition’ in an increasingly sharply defined domestic sphere, providing the bedrock for the emergent ‘nationalist’ discourse. It was she who created and protected the sanctuary of home where the colonized elite sought refuge from negotiations and collaborations with alien rulers.13 Sen further argues for the “construction of a domestic space” in which women were working as “custodians of the spiritual autonomy of the subject race.”14 It was a world of male fabrication of “mothercraft,” through providing women with a utilitarian education in subjects like primary geography, grammar, hygiene, etc.15 It is true, as Parama Roy points out, that the spinning on the Charka came to be transformed into a distinctive form of political activism; to that extent, Roy argues that Gandhian Satyagraha politics significantly feminized the movement of Swaraj.16 But the Gandhian ideology could never really get beyond the imaginary borderlands created by the ethico-moral imperatives explicit in Gandhi’s iconic representation of Indian women in terms of Sita and Draupadi, the celebrated characters from the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata respectively, who iconicize chastity and integrity. This central paradox was helpful in legitimizing a male-oriented, bourgeois form of nationalist movement. It is nothing but an elitist, masculinist cultural affiliation that governs the entire trajectory of nationalist discourse. The tradition of Kulalakshmi

12 13 14 15 16

Vina Mazumdar, “The Social Reform Movement in India: From Ranade to Nehru,” in Indian Women: From Purdha to Modernity, 58. Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 56. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India, 56. Samita Sen, “Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal,” in Gender, Nationalism and National Identities, special issue of Gender and History 5.2 (Summer 1993): 231–43. See Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).

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(wife representing the well-being of the family) as against the emerging figure of Bhadramahila (gentle womenfolk) begins to form a cogent synthesis in the nationalist ideology. There had been distinctive cases of conscious interpolation in traditional religious texts—for instance, Gandhian Charka politics in Lakshmi Panchali, a ritual song sung in praise of Laxmi: Follow thou Mahatma’s tenets Work at Charka and weave out threads It is sure to bring Your country’s well-being17 Lakshmi Panchali has been an age-old sermon on the duties of a woman. But the nationalist movement conduced to such conscious interpolations, in order to domesticate Charka politics. This approach or understanding was a form of double demand on women, tied to the simultaneous claims of home and the world. Partha Chatterjee considers this dichotomous relationship in terms of the spiritual/Ghar and material/Bahir problematic. In The Nation and its Fragments, he argues for the Indian consumption of modernity in terms of “certain modular forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas.”18 He thinks that the period from Rammohan to Vidyasagar has been a parody of the emergence of the New Bengali Woman, made explicit through the changing patterns of education, dress and manners. It has been a period of crucial transition characterized by the defence of tradition and rejection of new modular forms. With the development of educational facility extended to girls, the concept of New Bhadramahila emerged, as against the parodic perception of the Memsaheb. In “Whose Imagined Community?” Chatterjee’s contentious claims on the development from the Memsaheb to the Bhadramahila class, for all practical purposes, refer to a distinctive segment served and nourished by an academic, literate, urban society: Bhadramahila was nothing but a reformed, Indianized/ Hinduized reformatting of the earlier Memsaheb class. Chatterjee faintly acknowledges this in his contestation of Benedict Anderson’s thesis on imagined community. While considering ‘family’ the “inner domain of national culture,” 17 18

These lines are quoted from the Hindu text Laxmi Panchali (in Bengali) that is sung or recited during the worship of Laxmi every Thursday in every Bengali household; translations mine. As it is a traditional text, no reference to publication is available. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1993): 5.

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he considers the “change in the world of the nationalist middle class.”19 He therefore concludes: “The ‘new woman’ was to be modern, but she would also have to display the signs of national tradition and therefore would be essentially different from the ‘western’ woman.”20 In other words, the new woman should subscribe to the radical as well as conservative cultural formations. It was, however, a demand that could only be met by women belonging to the elite and the middle class.21 The vision of women belonging to interior gram/gunj (villages/mofussil towns) seems to be beyond the scope of Chatterjee’s critical analysis. iii One central nationalist project has been to reform the women of lower classes, but the real project of activism has been evident in the formation of folk nationalism, something largely independent of the autonomous, elitist nationalist agenda. In fact, an Indian nationalist programme has been largely disseminated through a distinctive form of folk nationalism. Unfortunately, however, Indian nationalist historiography seems to have ignored the rich body of folk material that contributed to the formation of nationalist culture. For instance, Lakshmi Panchali may be regarded as a unique signifier of nationalist consciousness. It is a traditional religious text that presents three distinctive episodes showing the spread of the worship of Lakshmi. In the episode of Dhaneswar—in some versions Ratneswar, the names being synonymous—the text suddenly begins to advise women to weave thread in hand-made spinning wheels (Charka) and to follow the dictates of Mahatma. It appears that these lines were interpolated during the time of the Gandhian nationalist movement, to propagate nationalist activism among women. There has been escalating tension between the traditional Kulalakshmi and the modern English-educated Bhadramahila image of women. Despite the prevalence of the Bhadramahila image as part of the nationalist agenda, the traditional social structure of Indian society could never forsake Sati/Savitri (iconic Hindu images of chaste women). The Bhadramahila concept of women could only explain a small category of women; it was hardly compatible with Indian 19 20 21

Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (1996. London: Verso, 2012): 217, 220. “Whose Imagined Community?” 220. See also Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16.4 (November 1989): 622–33.

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womenfolk in general. This divisive ideology must have generated a ­social bifurcation. Mukunda Das was largely concerned about the place of common women in society, but he seems to construct a paradoxical subject position by projecting women at different levels of identity politics. In Palliseva, the discussion between Sulabha and Bimala seems to be a thoughtful critiquing of the position of women. Bimala represents the elite women trained in the Eurocentric system of education, while Sulabha represents the archetypal ideology of Indian womanhood. Bimala says: “‘In modern India, a large group of women demand the position of leadership and realize their aspirations’” (44). But Sulabha considers the problem of leadership highly contentious: “‘They can do that, but remember Bimala, the motherhood of women should be placed higher than everything. We should consider if this quality of motherhood is reflected in their women who claim leadership’” (45). While Bimala points out that modern education makes women efficient and self-reliant, Sulabha criticizes modern education on the grounds that it takes away women’s craving for motherliness: “‘In ancient India women used to marry at an early age so as to multiply. But the modern educated women decline to marry in order to avoid the pains of childbirth’” (45). This debate is also evident in Sulabha’s emphatic assessment of women as Grihalakshmi—the presiding goddess of the interior of the household: “‘Women have nothing to do outside, they should work inside. Firstly, they should establish their life of religion, then should work elsewhere’” (48). Even while accepting Bankim Chandra as the Mantraguru (the sacred teacher) and admiring his nationalist writings like Anandamath and Devi Chowdhurani, Sulabha considers the ancient epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata ideal texts for education. She further contends that the true aim of education is to arouse Matrishakti (the power of Motherhood), which can be accomplished through indigenous models: “‘We should remember it is not Europe, but India. We should therefore arrange for things on the models of our ancient ideology’” (17). She believes that modern education can only produce a handful of memsahibs. Look, the length of Sari is never less than 5.5 metre, because they now wear the Sari like the memsahib’s gown. They cannot wear their Sari properly without at least ten safety pins. They have no vermilion mark on their hairs. (17) It is not that rural India remained unaware of the messages of freedom movement, but that the uneducated rural mass seemed to be partially conscious of its ideology. Mahatma Gandhi or Surendranath Banerjee were iconic demigods representing the freedom movement. The concept of Deshmatrika so

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­ onderfully substantiated by Bankim Chandra, or the problematic of resisw tance so forcefully dramatized in Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (mirror of indigo planter), despite their immense popularity, gradually articulated a nationalist discourse. But rural Bengal needed to be addressed in a language of its own, within a frame of culture that was its own. This social bifurcation is evident in an advertisement published in the Bengali newspaper Sambad Prabhakar on 13 January 1857 regarding the admission to Bethune School: “None but the girls from the elite caste and class can be admitted only.” It is relevant, then, to discuss the problematic of Indian nationalism. Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World discusses the topic at great length, attributing three distinct stages of progress to Indian nationalism.22 Chatterjee identifies these distinctive phases as a form of derivative discourse, iconicized by specific cult figures drawn from cultural and political realms. The first phase, identified as the moment of departure, is well represented by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee; the second phase by such measures as Satyagraha, non-violence, Charka politics, etc. The third, identified as nationalism in arrival, is represented by Jawaharlal Nehru. These three phases may be categorized in terms of pedagogy, then activism, then formation. Chatterjee makes an extensive investigation of these stages that might provide us with a systemic norm, and thereby remains focused on postindependence parameters of experimentations with nationalist thought. For example, his analysis of Bankim Chandra, who, in trying to formulate a Western/rational-Indian/spiritual combine, is in the final analysis ostensibly apologetic, insofar as he makes for a pre-emptive acceptance of the rational/liberal imperialist form of nationalism. But it seems that Bankim Chandra, despite his apologetic stance, starts a pedagogic debate, thereby signifying the moment of departure. The Gandhian form of nationalist thought has been marked as a phase of manoeuvring, in that it begins a process of activism and polemics. The third phase substantiates a moment of arrival by resolving the tension between the ‘national’ elements of culture, and the post-Enlightenment ideology of rationalism. The basic problem with Chatterjee’s analysis lies in his attempt to iconicize phases of Indian nationalism in terms of individualist, iconic representations of Western, post-Enlightenment phases, appropriated through an elitist form of political ideology. It is a problem symbolized by the way the argument is tied down to certain cult figures like Bankim Chandra, Gandhi, and Nehru. Instead, I argue that, despite the elitist dissemination of ideology spread over 22

See the discussion in Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed/United Nations University, 1986): 54–130.

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a substantial body of educated community, nationalism gradually seeped into the lower stratum of society through an overall ethico-moral impact on Indian society in general. The Indian mindset, so traditionally based on ethicomoral consciousness, sought to interpret and then transform a strictly sociopolitical ideology into an ethical and moral postulate. Bankim Chandra’s dharma as against ‘rationalism,’ Gandhi’s Satyagraha as against ‘violence’ implicit in political freedom, Rabindranath’s Bharat Tirtha (pilgrimage that is India) as against homogeneity in cultural and political units, and Vivekananda’s Lokayata Dharma (service to community) began to set in motion a new nationalist paradigm. It was therefore three-dimensional: 1. Ethico-religious: Ramakrishna and Vivekanada Movement 2. Ethico-literary: Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath, and Nazrul developing a philosophic and creative movement 3. Ethico-moral and political: Gandhian Movement The combination of these three layers of the new nationalist paradigm gave a new character to the nationalist agenda. Desh (motherland) became the ‘mother’ and the ‘goddess,’ while swadeshi (patriotism) became the new religion. While pure religious fundamentalism can be divisive, leading to factionalism, the ideal of swadeshi could be the only perceptible solution to the p ­ olitics of religion. It was swadeshi that could bring Hindus and Muslims together on one stable harmonious platform, though hardly ever relinquishing ethical, moral, and spiritual values. But the ideal of swadeshi could not be accessible to ‘common folks’ through political training or moral sermonizing, especially in a country in which illiteracy was rampant. Women hardly enjoyed equal opportunity in a masculinist scenario, and a line of religious demarcation existed between Hindus and Muslims. The eradication of social evils had therefore been a major agenda, which should have been prioritized before realizing the meaning and implication of nationalism. Mukunda Das’s folk plays or jatra were more discussion plays than representations of situational high drama. The title of his plays—Samaj (society), Palliseva (service to the village), Karmakshetra (place of work), B ­ rahmacharini (the woman practising true celibacy)—were essentially ideational, insofar as they raised social issues which intersected with the nationalist ideology of colonial India. The community songs that Mukunda Das composed for his plays literally became household songs, being sung all over Bengal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The song that he had written, “The rough cloth given unto us by our Mother should be kept aloft on our head” as a form of resistance to the foreign cloth produced by Birmingham Mills—to the cost of the indigenous cotton industry of Bengal—was more comprehensible to members of illiterate rural communities than the dry, ideological lectures of the ­nationalist leaders. The song “Why fear death / While the Mother Goddess

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herself descended into the battle / For protecting her loved ones?” that Mukunda Das composed for his play Matripuja (‘worship of the mother’) sought to iconicize the spirit of Motherland as the goddess Kali; he was imprisoned for it. Just as organizations like Bratachari or Anushilan Samiti began to inculcate the nationalist spirit in young minds through the practice of dedication, sacrifice, and bodily exercise, so also Mukunda Das brought a distinctive mix of nationalist ideology and populist entertainment. It seems that between the agencies of propagating nationalist thought and ‘the common folk,’ another layer existed, a set of cultural forms which functioned in simplifying the nationalist ideology. It was this layer, existing between the elitist agencies of nationalism, and the illiterates—the downtrodden, the superstitious, the subalterns—that came to play a significant role. The jatra, traditional folk forms, began to make the meaning of nationalism perceptible to their audiences. Mukunda Das’ folk forms of theatre thereby contested the formal conceptual politics of elitist nationalism. Works Cited Arnason, Johann P. “Understanding Intercivilizational Encounters,” Thesis Eleven 86.1 (August 2006): 39–53. Basu, Aparna. “The Role of Women in the Indian Struggle for Freedom,” in Indian Women: From Purdha to Modernity, ed. B.R. Nanda (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976): 16–40. Chatterjee, Partha. “Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16.4 (November 1989): 622–33. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1993). Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed/United Nations University, 1986). Chatterjee, Partha. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1999). Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (1996; London: Verso, 2012): 214–24. Das, Mukunda. Mukunda Daser Granthabali (Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, 1978). Desai, A.R. Social Background of Indian Nationalism (rev. ed.; Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1954). Fischer-Tiné, Harald, & Michael Mann, ed. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem, 2004). Ganguly, Sumit. “Introduction” to The State of India’s Democracy, ed. Sumit Ganguly, Larry Diamond & Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007): ix–xxvii.

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JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., special issue of Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 59–87; reissued as “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1986): 78–106. Jayapalan, N. History of Education in India (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005). Jenkins, Rob. “Civil Society versus Corruption,” in The State of India’s Democracy, ed. Sumit Ganguly, Larry Diamond & Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007): 161–75. Mazumdar, Vina. “The Social Reform Movement in India: From Ranade to Nehru,” in Indian Women: From Purdha to Modernity, ed. B.R. Nanda (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976): 41–66. Menon, Visalakshi. Indian Women and Nationalism: The UP Story (New Delhi: HarAnand, 2003). Ray, Bharati, & Aparna Basu, ed. From Independence Towards Freedom: Indian Women Since 1947 (New Delhi & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). Sen, Samita. “Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal,” in Gender, Nationalism and National Identities, special issue of Gender and History 5.2 (Summer 1993): 231–43. Sen, Samita. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). Sharma, Ram Nath, & Rajendra K. Sharma. History of Education in India (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005). Singh, Jyotsna G. Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). Snyder, Louis L. The New Nationalism (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1968).

Chapter 4

Xavier Herbert’s Enlightenment The Solomon Islands Nightmare, 1928 Russell McDougall Before the appearance of his first major book, Capricornia (1938), the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert published approximately forty short stories under different names in a variety of magazines and newspapers.1 These are generally regarded as immature, written before he discovered either his voice or his theme, when he was experimenting with different audiences, genres, subjects and pseudonyms, and trying to establish a literary career. Of these early stories, about one quarter have maritime settings, mostly in the Timor, the Arafura, or the Coral Seas. Only two are set in Melanesia: “The Ape-Men of Mobongu,” in what was then commonly known as Dutch New Guinea, and “The Other McLean,” in the Solomon Islands. The first appeared in The Boys Weekly in 1927, the second in the Australian Journal (and the Northern Standard the following year).2 In this essay I intend to take a small step toward addressing the fiction of disconnection between Australia and its Pacific neighbours that, until the recent transnational turn in the humanities, Australian scholars have for the most part maintained simply by preferring national to comparative contexts of enquiry. Paul Sharrad has done more than most to extend the Australian frame of reference to include Pacific and south-east Asian cultural production. For that reason, I am pleased to take the opportunity provided by this publication in his honour not only to revisit the facts of Herbert’s experience in the Australian-mandated territories of the Pacific in the 1920s, but also to ask what influence it had on his formation as an Australian writer in the 1930s. In 1927 Herbert set off overland searching for a subject and found himself in a place so isolated that many Southern visitors felt they had left Australia 1 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (1938; A&R Classics, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974). Further page references are in the main text. 2 Xavier Herbert [as Herbert Astor], “The Ape-Men of Mobongu,” Boys Weekly 24 June 1927: 12–15; repr. in Papers: Explorations in Children’s Literature 12.3 (December 2002): 10–18. Xavier Herbert [as Herbert Astor], “The Other McLean,” Australian Journal 58 (1928): 1341–46, 1383– 84; repr. [with author as A.X. Herbert] Northern Standard (2 July 1929): 6; (5 July 1929): 6; (9 July 1929): 6; (12 July 1929): 6; repr. in South of Capricornia: Short Stories 1925–1934, ed. Russell McDougall (Melbourne: Oxford UP 1990): 242–61.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_005

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already when they arrived there. It was Darwin, Australia’s “front door” to Asia and the Pacific, through which all “the wonders and wickedness of the East” blew in on the sea-wind: prospectors from China, pearlers from Japan, trepang fishermen from Malaya.3 But the door swung both ways, and it was also “Australia’s jumping-off place,” where dreams took flight with fugitives and all kinds of adventures sprang into action.4 It was a place of trade, where, as Beatrice Grimshaw wrote, “the last breath of the Pacific world” came to die, but where also one might look to the stars and feel inspired to launch forth like Ulysses into the sea-world.5 In Darwin, Herbert could find no work to feed himself. The Vestey brothers had closed the meatworks and the town was a cauldron of industrial turmoil, kept astir by the mutual denunciations of allegedly rapacious employers and worthless idlers. Herbert was a qualified pharmacist and the hospital was understaffed, but he had none of the social connections he needed to land a job there. So, when his half-sister Kathleen Jackson telegraphed from the British Solomon Islands to say there was a job as dispenser “going begging” at Rue Hospital in Tulagi, he did not hesitate.6 He had thought his sister “very brave” originally when she went there, and even more so after he read about the murders on the island of Malaita.7 But after his experience of Darwin he could see the Solomon Islands might be the perfect nursery for his literary ambitions. It was a British Protectorate after all, aided and abetted by the Australian mandate in Bougainville and Buka; if he were lucky, the Malaita uprising might prove the stepping-stone to full-scale revolution. Of course, by the time Herbert arrived, the process of pacification was virtually complete, traditional warfare was almost extinct, and the Solomon Islanders had been absorbed into the cash economy of a plantation society in which they were pawns to the commercial interests of their colonial masters. As Judith Bennett explains, The government had institutionalized the exploitation of labour— by fixing wages in employers’ favour, so choking market forces, and by

3 4 5 6 7

Beatrice Grimshaw, “A Darwin Story,” Northern Standard (13 May 1927): 5. “A Darwin Story,” 5. “A Darwin Story,” 5. Xavier Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris, 22 May 1979, Townsville. Xavier Herbert, Interview by Andrew Martin, Sydney, 1976; “Terrible Massacre at Solomon Islands: Australian Warship Speeding to the Scene,” Northern Territory Times (19 August 1927): 3.

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i­ntroducing a head tax that made it imperative for men to take up some employment or break the white men’s law.8 For the first four years on Malaita they paid the tax. In the fifth year, the Kwaio chiefs of Sinalaggu staged a protest, flourishing their weapons and dancing in a circle around the tax house where Commissioner Bell sat recording the payments. The next year, he warned them, they would have to surrender their rifles. But the carrying of arms was a proud tradition among the Kwaio, and this was an insult to their ancestor spirits, to whom the weapons were consecrated. At a meeting of the chiefs, one of the leading warriors of the Gounaile clan, Basiana, declared “The Government is now at Uru. When they come to Kwai’ambe [i.e. Gwee’abe] we will kill them.”9 Basiana was a powerful “devildevil” man and much feared ramo (bounty hunter); when he pronounced this “big swear” there was no man willing to resist.10 This was how the Malaita Rebellion started. On 4 October 1927 at Gwee’abe Basiana had smashed the Commissioner’s skull with his rifle, after which his warriors rushed the tax house from all sides, trapping and killing all but four of the native police and the boatswain who accompanied him. 8 9

10

Judith A. Bennett, Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800–1978 (Pacific Islands Monograph Series 3; Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988): 166. Peter Corris, Naismith’s Dominion (Sydney: Bantam, 1990): 113; Office of the Resident Commissioner, British Solomon Islands, Tulagi, 2 June 1928, Enclosure ii, Western Pacific Despatch 273, 4 July 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122A 155834. There were other possible motives for rebellion too, as Commissioner Moorhouse observed in his Report to the Colonial Office of 22 September 1928, Correspondence Files, Alphabetical Series, 1 Jan 1821–31 Dec 1970, Australian Archives, Canberra, A98/1 sol 2: “the Government […] had interfered with their playful habit of promiscuous murder […] arrested and hanged their people for what was in their eyes justifiable homicide […] substituted a paltry fine or short term of imprisonment for the death sentence for adultery […] were endeavouring to clean up their villages and force their pigs into stys [sic] where they had to be fed.” However, as Ranajit Guha has shown in India, and as Roger Keesing demonstrates for the Solomons, the British habitually sought the origin of political struggle in specific acts of provocation: see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999), and Roger M. Keesing, “Colonial History as Contested Ground: The Bell Massacre in the Solomons,” History and Anthropology 4.2 (1990): 279–301. Contrary to popular opinion, the Kwaio were not so naïve as to think that Bell was the sole representative of colonial power: Kwaio men had laboured on the cane fields of Queensland and Fiji. In the view of Roger M. Keesing, “The attack on Bell and his party was above all a political act, a last, desperate assertion of sovereignty,” Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1992): 3, 71. The nature of the curse (lulu fa’abua) is explained in detail in Office of the Resident Commissioner, Enclosures ii and iii.

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Less than two weeks later, an Australian warship carrying the members of the punitive expedition arrived.11 Some collapsed on the long march into the mountainous jungle interior. Others succumbed to whisky and disease. By the middle of November, the party had managed to kill only two natives, and the volunteers had come to resent bitterly the government’s discipline of their sport.12 By the time the ship departed, a substantial number of its crew had been stricken with malaria and dysentery; most of the volunteers were grateful to leave with them. They left the native police unrestrained to deal with the killers.13 Some had regarded them as heathens and murderers even before the killing of the Commissioner; others harboured ‘traditional’ grievances toward them, the prejudices of an emergent ethnicity fostered by the planters as well as the colonial authorities; some were simply chafing for vengeance for their kinsmen slain with the Commissioner at Gwee’abe.14 So the Sinerango War began.15 The massacre of men, women and children. The taunting of Kwaio ancestors, the hacking of their bodies “as though they were fish,” the spectacle of severed hands and legs placed upon useless, limbless torsos.16 The pack rape of Basiana’s niece, who later hanged herself in shame. The poisoning of the taro gardens, the cutting down of the coconut groves, the slow starvation of orphans lost in the jungle. “To devastate the garden” of an enemy, or to lay a curse upon his clan, was traditionally an honourable act.17 The native police, Christian converts for the most part, defiled the shrines of their enemies with religious dedication. As Christmas approached, however, they grew anxious to return to their families. They had been told to produce prisoners. So they made a decision: they would arrest all the men of the ‘bush kin groups’ and send them to Tulagi, including many who had played no part in the killing of the Commissioner. Those arrested included “a number of elderly men, tired of hiding and weakened by hunger and exposure.”18 But the “most wanted fugitives” also 11

Roger M. Keesing & Peter Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind: The Malaita Massacre (Melbourne & New York: Oxford UP, 1980): 159. 12 “Massacre at Malaita, October, 1927,” Solomon Island Malaita Massacre, Correspondence Files, Alphabetical Series, 1 Jan 1821–31 Dec 1970, Australian Archives, Canberra, A98/1 sol 2. 13 Keesing, Custom and Confrontation, 71. 14 ’Auekwa’a of Furi’ilai, quoted in Roger M. Keesing & Peter Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 170. 15 “Sinerango” (“Sinarango” or “Senerango”) was a common anglicised corruption of Sinalaggu (pronounced “Sinalangu”). 16 Keesing & Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 126. 17 Corris, Naismith’s Dominion, 68. 18 “Massacre at Malaita, October, 1927.”

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s­ urrendered, to halt further “wanton killings of innocent women, children, old men and other non-participants.”19 Survivors consistently reported the massacre of two hundred men, women, and children.20 Predictably, the official estimates are much lower. But by the time Herbert’s steamer docked in Tulagi, almost two hundred ‘Malaita boys’ had been removed from their homeland and detained for trial. The last batch of detainees had just been landed. The Black Hole of Tulagi was a crowded death-camp of unutterable squalor.21 But the British government needed survivors to stand trial, so that a warning could be sent to any other intending rebels; death by disease was no substitute for an exemplary hanging. The town of Tulagi was only one street, with a hotel at one end. On the harbour side stood the Secretariat building, surrounded by luxurious gardens. On the other side stood the church, the police barracks, and a few Chinese trading stores. The highest point was the resident commissioner’s bungalow, above which the Union Jack waved in the breeze.22 The compound, too, had a view of the harbour, seen through a high barbed-wire fence, as well as native police sentries at the gates, with rifles and bayonets.23 Behind the fence, four large huts had been hastily erected to house the rebels, fifty to a hut, chained to the walls within.24 Otherwise, the only natives permitted into Tulagi were men imported from the island of Florida to work; at night, when not working, they too were herded into the compound.25 Herbert had charge of a temporary hospital in the compound for six weeks, with as many as 180 patients at the height of the epidemic.26 He took their pulse and he measured their temperature. To find a pulse, he sometimes removed their handcuffs. But otherwise they remained chained to the wall. “To bring up their blood volume,” he mixed salt-water in a can and administered 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

“Massacre at Malaita, October, 1927.” Keesing & Corris, in Lightning Meets the West Wind, estimate the number of deaths as between sixty and sixty-five. H.B. Hetherington [Senior Medical Officer], Enclosure 1, 8 March 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122 XC 155814. G.J. Connor, “Tulagi,” Walkabout: Australia and the South Seas (1 May 1935): 42. Peter Corris, Naismith’s Dominion, 24. Xavier Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris, 22 May 1979, Townsville. Connor, “Tulagi,” 43. “Florida” is the name given to Nggela Sule, the larger island against which Tulagi is nestled; it can also refer to the group of islands to which both Tulagi and Nggela Sule belong. Xavier Herbert, Letter to Secretary, Department of Home Affairs (Canberra), n.d. [rec. 31 January 1929], “A.X. Herbert. Appt. Dispenser Dresser N.A.,” Australian Archives, Canberra, A1 37/1718.

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Figure 4.1 Nggela, [Detail from] Map of the Solomon Islands, compiled and published by H.E.C. Robinson, 2nd edn, 1941[?], State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Map Collection, Z/M2 924/1941/2. With thanks to the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

the saline solution through “the long serum needle.”27 In many cases the patients were too weak to lift their arms and the orderly had to do it for them. There was no sterilizing system apart from a cotton swab doused in methylated spirits; of course, there were no disposable needles. The intravenous work was difficult, and Herbert was not trained for it. Often, he could not find the vein, and the tissue around it blew up “like a balloon.”28 But all he was doing in any case was preventing death by dehydration. Otherwise, the Sinerango prisoners received no medical treatment at all, wasting away in their own blood and faeces.29 Outside the compound, in his substantive position as dispenser, Herbert worked in the native ward of the hospital, assisting with surgery, administering anaesthetic, dispensing medicines, and supervising the treatment of venereal 27 28 29

Letter to Secretary. Letter to Secretary. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris.

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diseases (although officially, incidences were very rare).30 There were separate wards for European, Oriental, and native patients. The conditions were luxurious compared to those in the compound, but as the epidemic took hold in the compound, more and more detainees came into the hospital; the native ward became known as the ‘house of death.’31 The annual medical report shows that 173 of the Sinerango detainees admitted to the native hospital were suffering from bacterial dysentery. The Senior Medical Officer (smo), Harry Hetherington, went into damage control, trying to persuade the Colonial Office that he had the health and hygiene of the detainees under control, and that they would survive for trial. Dysentery was normally endemic among the Islanders, he said, and the disease was “not particularly severe.”32 Most of the prisoners were old and feeble anyway; ready to succumb to “even the mildest infection.”33 The investigative Commissioner dispatched from London agreed, concluding that almost a quarter of the deaths were the result of senility!34 The evidence is contradictory. The smo reported that every prisoner had his own eating utensils, which were boiled immediately after use, and the prison quarters were cleaned and disinfected daily. The latrines were also disinfected and kept covered when not in use.35 But in Herbert’s memory, the place was “slimy” with “dung everywhere […] people lying in it, people dying, utterly weak, too weak to do anything at all.”36 26 March 1928. The fearless warrior and revered Kwaio leader Tagailamo (or Noru), described in official correspondence as “one of the principals in the massacre,” dropped dead.37 He had denied all knowledge of the murders, and before his death Basiana had publicly insulted him, branding him a liar 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

Herbert, Letter to Secretary; also “Solomon Islands I. Part 2,” Australian Archives, ­Canberra, A98/1. Annual Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year Ending 31 December 1928, Colonial ­Office, British Solomon Islands Protectorate: Sessional Papers, Public Records Office, ­London, CO856 15/1928: 1. H.B. Hetherington [Senior Medical Officer], Enclosure 1, 8 March 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122 XC 155814. Enclosure 1. Annual Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year Ending 31 December 1928. See also ­Commissioner [H.C.] Moorhouse, Report to the Colonial Office, 22 September 1928, Correspondence Files, Alphabetical Series, 1 Jan 1821–31 Dec 1970, Australian Archives, Canberra, A98/1 SOL 2. Roger Keesing states that thirty-one of the Kwaio warriors died in custody, in Custom and Confrontation, 71. Hetherington, Enclosure 1. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris. Keesing & Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 22 (n.); Acting High Commissioner for Western Pacific, Letter to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 31 March 1928, C ­ olonial

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and a coward. It was thought that Basiana had placed a curse on him and that Tagailamo died of fright.38 Basiana himself was very ill by this time, though like Tagailamo he showed no symptom of dysentery; his keepers made little attempt to diagnose his condition, or to communicate with him before his trial. He spoke neither English nor Pidgin much. In any case, he was not afraid to die. Basiana was a professional executioner, who had always considered it his moral duty to punish transgression. He was the fiercest warrior of his time, answering in his mind to a higher law than that of the colonialists who condemned him. Even today the Kwaio remember him as a killer and collector of “blood bounties, fearlessly challenging the strong and mercilessly executing the weak—men, women and children—often for the sins of their relatives.”39 This was the man whom Herbert liked to jolly along, to hear him laugh, “to show there was no ill feeling.”40 Basiana was not a big man—just five feet high, and weighing six stone and ten pounds. To Herbert he was an “odd little man” with a strange smile, more of a grin really, which easily differentiated him from the other understandably sullen and scowling prisoners.41 His Britannic Majesty’s High Commissioner’s Court, Tulagi. 13 April 1928. Basiana appeared in court before the Judicial Commissioner, R.C. Higginson, to hear the charge against him: that he “did feloniously, wilfully and of malice aforethought kill and murder one William Robert Bell.”42 To which he responded with a smile and said—“It is true.”43 The Sydney solicitor assigned to his defence entered a plea of ‘not guilty’ anyway. Five witnesses were called, all for the prosecution. Three were native police. Their testimony was uniformly brief. The entire proceedings could hardly have taken more than an hour; the court’s assessors took only five minutes in retirement to return a unanimous verdict of guilty. The judge asked the prisoner if he had anything to say before sentence was passed. “‘I meant to kill Mr. Bell & I killed him!’” Basiana said.44 He then gave a short factual history of the planning

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Record Office, London, CO225/225/54122 XC 155814. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris; see also “Island Murders: Chief Dies of Fright: Report from Tulagi,” Sydney Morning Herald (23 April 1928): 12; “Brave Confession: Island Chieftain: Mr. McCarthy Describes Basiana,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 April 1928): 11. Keesing & Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 88. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris; “Brave Confession,” Sydney Morning Herald. Hetherington, Enclosure 1. Enclosure 1. Enclosure 1.

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and execution of the crime, after which the court sentenced him “to be hanged by the neck” until he was dead.45 By the end of May five more Kwaio killers had been condemned to the ­gallows—Fiaria, Fonaringa, Luita, Tolia, and Fufuae—and sixteen more were sentenced to prison terms ranging from twelve years to life.46 They were taken from the compound, divided, and crammed into four small prison-cells. Some were so ill that they had to be carried on stretchers—they lay at the bottom of their cell doors sucking for air.47 The head of the native ward in the hospital was an elderly man who had grown obese through twenty years of incarceration and inactivity. One day, after he had been caught out in some alleged impropriety and marshalled to receive his punishment, Herbert was ordered by the smo to give him a flogging. At first, Herbert thought it was a joke. But it was part of the job. Every man in authority had to take his share of responsibility for disciplining the natives. It was a spectacle: the fat old man with the shaved head trembling in his calico loin cloth, the crowd gathered to watch, the hospital dispenser flexing the lawyer cane. Herbert tried to make a joke of it. “Now, which is your arse?” he said, circling around him.48 If he couldn’t tell his arse from his belly, how would he know where to hit him? The crowd laughed, and the old man was spared, to some degree at least. Later, the doctor asked: “‘Did you do that job?’” Yes, said Herbert, “‘to the best of my ability, but I’m not too good at it’.”49 By fudging the flogging, however, Herbert had drawn attention to himself as a misfit and potential trouble-maker, a man who liked to poke his stick in the ants’ nest for the sheer pleasure of watching its residents swarm. There had been other evasions of duty too. Most of the time he could not be bothered with the paperwork. He was supposed to oversee the distribution of rations to the native staff, convicts mostly, who were working out their period of punishment under the supervision of the native police. They were shamed men, like the man he had flogged, symbolically shorn; he insisted on giving them more rations than they were allowed. Gradually Herbert’s sympathies and eccentricities placed him further and further beyond the pale, until eventually he had alienated himself from almost everyone who officially mattered.

45 46 47 48 49

Enclosure 1. Hetherington, Enclosure 1; “Tulagi Massacres,” Sydney Morning Herald (8 June 1928): 12. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris.

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Protest in such a disciplined and hierarchical society was useless; only once did Herbert complain.50 A native woman came into the hospital with pneumonia. Her breathing was very laboured and he thought she was probably suffering from tuberculosis also.51 In fact, she was dying. She lay on the floor at the top of the steps leading to the dispensary and the doctor came out to attend her on the veranda. But soon he was interrupted, as Herbert tells it, by the Deputy Commissioner and his dog with an injured paw, whereupon the doctor left the woman and her family waiting out on the veranda while he attended the dog inside.52 “What are you going to do with the woman out there?” Herbert demanded. “What woman?” asked the doctor. She died on the veranda while the dog lay on the operating table.53 That year, forty-four patients died in Tulagi hospital, only one of them non-native.54 In Herbert’s account, the man with the dog comes to the hospital directly from the golf course. It is worth noting then that Herbert hated golf—the gentleman’s game—with its perfectly manicured links laid out and maintained by native attendants.55 It was a potent symbol of a society that relied upon gamesmanship and cronyism to function (“favours done and reciprocated”).56 Still, he decided to try golf, perhaps to improve his situation. But when he turned up in shorts, bare-legged, the club sahibs chased him off the fairway.57 It was not uncommon for unwanted visitors to be expelled from the protectorate, even for minor infringements against government regulations. The official reason, in Herbert’s case, was that he had contracted malaria. But he blamed his illness on his state of mind, which was a function of his social circumstances, feeling trapped “in a strange corner” where one “false step” could

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Interview by Peter Corris; see also Peter Simon, “The Bionic Raconteur. Part 2,” Northern Territory Newsletter 1.6 (1979): 16–17. Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris; Blue Books of Statistics, British Solomons Protectorate, 1928–29, Colonial Office, British Solomon Islands Protectorate Miscellanea, Public Record Office, London, CO723/9 155834. Interview by Peter Corris. G.J. Connor, “Tulagi,” Walkabout: Australia and the South Seas (1 May 1935): 42. Peter Corris, Naismith’s Dominion (Sydney: Bantam, 1990): 22. Xavier Herbert, Letter to Harry Heseltine, 30 April 1975, Papers of Sadie and Xavier Herbert, Sadie and Xavier Herbert Collection, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane, UQFL83, Box 33.

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alter the entire course of one’s life.58 Malaria was by far the most common cause of illness among the Europeans, and his smo was contemptuous of how poorly Herbert coped with it. He had the shakes; he couldn’t rid himself of the fever. So, on 31 May 1928, he resigned.59 By Herbert’s account, the smo then offered him the lowly post of sanitary officer, to which he responded: “you only give it to people when you want to kill them.”60 He rejected the offer, he says, because all previous incumbents had died within a year of their appointment. But this cannot be true. The fulltime position had only recently been created and he would have been its first appointment.61 What could be the point of this deliberate misinformation? Herbert resigned just two days after Mrs Myrtle Keeble had resigned her position as housekeeper of the single officers’ quarters.62 As Kim Strutynski points out, “Usually [government] gazette notices are brief and to the point, with the only mention of one’s health being made in one’s death notice!”63 The notice of Herbert’s resignation, then, is unusual because it specifies “health grounds.”64 58 59

60 61

62 63 64

Xavier Herbert, Letter to Drs Karl and Paula Schubert, 18 September 1973, Papers of Sadie and Xavier Herbert, UQFL 83, Box 33. Annual Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year Ending 31 December 1928, Colonial Office, British Solomon Islands Protectorate: Sessional Papers, Public Records Office, London, CO856 15/1928: 1. See also Western Pacific High Commission Gazette (Fiji) 9 (April 1928): 107, Notice 142, although Table 1 on page 6 gives 1 June as the date of Herbert’s resignation, and Letter to Drs Karl and Paula Schubert, in which Herbert claims that a violent allergic reaction to quinine gave the colonial authorities their excuse to be rid of him. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris. While the threat of disease was real, so was Herbert’s penchant for over-dramatizing the danger of his situation. The previous dispenser, Charles Havelock Gordon White, had (according to Herbert) succumbed to the tropic damp-rot of booze and malaria. In fact, White was seconded to the Rockefeller-funded Yaws and Hookworm Campaign on 16 January 1928. Until that time, he was also the sanitary inspector. Whereas he retained his substantive post as dispenser throughout the entire period of Herbert’s employ, he relinquished the job of sanitary inspector upon secondment, and it was gazetted as a full-time position in April 1928 (see C.H.G. White, Personal File F58/38, National Archives of Solomon Islands, Honiara). Herbert told another interviewer that it was the police force in which the authorities tried to put him to die: Peter Simon, “The Bionic Raconteur. Part 2,” Northern Territory Newsletter 1.6 (1979): 10–18. Western Pacific High Commission Gazette (Fiji) 9 (April 1928): 106, Notice 136. Kim Strutynski, Letter to Russell McDougall, 26 March 1998. Letter to Russell McDougall. Frank Keeble was still in Tulagi when the first great allied counter-offensive was launched during World War Two. Martin Clemens, the British district officer who helped shape that offensive, recalls him as a man from whom you had to keep your liquor under lock and key. Martin Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal: A Coastwatcher’s Story (n.p.: Naval Institute, Blue Jacket, 2013): 72.

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It is possible that this was code, used to preserve reputations and dissipate scandal. The end to the housekeeper’s service was as sudden as it must have been inconvenient, for she had been in the job only four-and-a-half months, and it would take more than a year to replace her. Meanwhile the sanitary inspector’s position went to her husband, Frank Keeble.

...

In Capricornia, when Mark Shillingsworth is called before the resident commissioner, he learns that, for all his “petty airs,” he is no more than “a slave shackled to a yoke, to be scolded when he lagged, flogged when he rebelled with the sjambok of the modern driver, Threat of the Sack” (19). But it is not sympathy for Aboriginal people that brings him to the end of his administrative career: it is his relinquishment of the boiled shirt and mess-jacket, and his drunken debauchery among Asians and Pacific Islanders. He becomes a ‘waster.’ Still, sustained indifference to privilege and power requires more strength than he can muster, and he continues to struggle with his social inhibitions. The British Civil Service kept a clear division between its ‘routine’ workers and those of the administrative class who either formulated or implemented policy; an educated man with a professional qualification indisputably belonged to the latter. Kathleen had warned her brother about the consequences of his becoming a traitor to his class and culture. Similarly, in Capricornia, there are two brothers: Mark is the waster, obviously; Oscar, on the other hand, is like Kathleen, “honest, decent, and intelligent [… his] faithful service […] pearl cast before mean, gutless, brainless, up-jumped swine” (21). By this contrastive characterization of siblings, Herbert projects himself into the colonial narrative as both the exploited mimic man aspiring to insider status (Oscar), and the Disturbing Element (Mark) whose resistance places him outside the system. When Mark loses his job, he gains precisely what Herbert lost in the Solomon Islands—his self-respect—but he also gains his freedom. The British authorities did not permit beachcombers and wastrels to stay in the protectorate. Herbert said he could not leave without the payment of his steamer passage. If he did not go voluntarily, he was told, he would be deported.65 So he went looking for a job on Makambo, a tiny island across the harbour towards ‘Florida,’ where Burns Philp ran a trochus shell export operation. It is possible he worked there briefly, overseeing the sorting and loading of sacks of shell. But when he returned to Tulagi to see his sister, the smo bailed him up in the street. “‘You were told to get out’,” he said. “‘When you are told to get out of 65

Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris.

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here, you’ve got to get out!’”66 Eventually, although he did not have a seaman’s ticket, Herbert managed to talk himself onto the “Maianbar” working bunker coal and water for his passage home.67 The last Tulagi saw of him, on 8 June 1928, he says, he was dancing the hornpipe, sticking it to the whole hierarchy of immaculate whites gathered at the dock to stare good riddance.68 Three weeks later Basiana was led from prison in chains to see his fourteen-year-old son, Anifelo, for the last time. The only indigenous audience permitted at the gallows—apart from those who placed the hood and pulled the lever—were his two sons, the youngest just seven, who were forced to watch.69 Later, the bodies of the rebels were taken down from the gallows and ferried across the harbour to the island that served as a dumping ground for native corpses. They had hardly time to rot before, as local legend has it, they were rooted out of their shallow graves and devoured by crocodiles.

...

When Herbert returned from the Solomon Islands he was broke, and lived for a time with his parents in Melbourne. There he wrote “The Other McLean,” a domestic fantasy of sorts, working through his relations with his mother and father, but also working through his recent experience of British paternalism in the Pacific. For the hero of the story, Captain McLean, the voyage to the Solomons marks a passage into manhood. He runs into a storm that whips the sea to madness, “black as the oblivion of death.”70 But this tempest is a romantic 66 67

68 69

70

Interview by Peter Corris. Interview by Peter Corris; Agreement and Account of Crew No. 181, “Maianbar” 3.1928 to 6.1928, Australian Archives (NSW), Sydney, SP 2/1, Box 13; North Coast Steam Navigation Company Minutes, 14 March, 19 May and 23 June 1928, North Coast Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. Records, 1857–1954, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML MSS323, Vol. 15. Interview by Peter Corris. Anifelo and his younger brother Laefi; the scene is described by Laefi in Keesing & Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 187, 188. See also Sir Eyre Hutson, High Commissioner for the Western Pacific (Suva), Letter to Rt. Hon. Secretary of State for the Colonies (London), 4 July 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122A 155834; and Hugh Michael Laracy, “Catholic Missions in the Solomon Islands, 1845–1966” (doctoral dissertation, Canberra: Australian National University, 1969): 66. Xavier Herbert, “The Other McLean,” in South of Capricornia: Short Stories 1925–1934, ed. Russell McDougall (Melbourne: Oxford UP 1990): 259. In his autobiographical accounts of the voyage of the “Maianbar” the ship runs out of coal and the captain has to make “a frantic touch-and-go dash for Brisbane” in bad weather. The ship did in fact arrive in Sydney a day later due to inclement weather. See Xavier Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris; Biographical Statement, n.d. [February 1940], Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty Ltd

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contrivance to reunite the captain with his estranged family. In this way, Herbert managed to translate his nightmare Pacific experience and his prodigal return to Australia Pacific into a personal mythology. Paradise Regained. But Paradise really was lost, and in Capricornia, he rewrote the family romance accordingly. The moment of the crocodiles rooting the corpse of Ned Krater out of its shallow island grave looks back ironically to Basiana’s burial site. The man who first appears as a god, who the Islanders think has “come from the sun,” soon shatters the cargo-cult perception of his invasion; the thrust of the narrative subsequently is to diminish and degrade him to the point of the consumption by crocodiles. After that, the anti-millenarian patterning of the plot kicks in, a paradigm shift in the master narrative of colonialism, modelled as though on Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.71 Krater is not Eros. He is Thanatos, the colonial hero of a romantic tragedy, the European dream of Paradise in the Pacific.

...

Herbert was big news after the publication of Capricornia: the award-winning author of what many considered to be the long-awaited Great Australian ­Novel. In an interview with a Sydney Morning Herald journalist, he recalled his time in the Solomon Islands. It was “the time of the rebellion, and I found myself in charge of 750 prisoners; I used to pull the black cap over the heads of condemned men before they were hanged.”72 “Solomite” responded with a letter in the Pacific Islands Monthly branding him a liar. That there was a ‘rebellion’ will come as a surprise to Solomon Islanders […] and there will be keen resentment that they have been kept in the dark all these years about the grave crisis that took place in their midst without an inkling of the fact being made known to them.73

71 72 73

Business Records, 1935–1974, Angus and Robertson Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML MSS3269, Box 127; Camden Morrisby, “Xavier Herbert and the World He Knows,” Australian Book News and Library Journal 1.2 (August 1946): 42; “Darwin’s Physic from AuthorAdventurer,” Northern Standard 11 June 1929: 3; Xavier Herbert, “Return of a Wanderer” [Letter to the Editor], Australian Journal 68 (1 April 1933): 486; Xavier Herbert, “The Man behind the Story” [Biographical Note], Australian Journal 76 (1941): 390. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Arthur Helps & Helmut Werner, tr. Charles F. Atkinson (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1923, tr. 1926, 1928; New York: Oxford UP, 1991). “Author Lumping Wheat. Contest Winner. Life of Adventure,” Sydney Morning Herald (2 April 1938): 17. Solomite, Gizo, b.s.i., “A Rebellion That Wasn’t! Author as Hangman’s Helpmate in b.s.i.,” Pacific Islands Monthly (15 August 1938): 54.

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Solomite poured scorn on Herbert’s inflated estimate of the prison population in Tulagi – 750 prisoners; blood-thirsty rebels to a man, no doubt! Small wonder that he passed unobserved in such a crowd. Some day, perhaps, he will enlighten us as to where he parked that mob—and himself—so secretly and inconspicuously.74 His claim to have served as the “hangman’s helpmate” fared no better. It was obviously “another of Mr. Herbert’s public spirited activities” that had gone unmarked.75 Herbert did not know who Solomite was, but he suspected he was a stooge acting on behalf of his enemies in the Solomon administration, and he took the attack as a warning. In any case, Solomite succeeded in making the Malaita Rebellion seem nothing more than the self-serving fiction of an Australian author, and it would be forty years before Xavier Herbert spoke of the Solomons again. In the ten years since he had been in Tulagi, Herbert had fought a huge battle to see Capricornia into print; the last thing he could afford now was to have his credibility destroyed. So although it hurt, he bit down on his tongue, hard. The unrecognized irony of this situation is that the novel that had made him famous had been heavily influenced by his experience in the Solomon Islands. A common assumption in biographical accounts of Herbert is that his writing of Capricornia drew upon his experience as superintendent of the Aboriginal compound in Darwin. In fact, although the novel was not published until 1938, it was written before he acquired that position. It was the Solomon Islands that gave him his first real “insight into the Imperial mystery,” and Herbert’s depiction of indigenous incarceration in Capricornia owes more to the Malaita detainees than to Kahlin Compound.76 Similarly, it is the savagery of British justice in the Solomons, which he had not only witnessed but participated in, that informs the depiction of the legal proceedings against Norman Shillingsworth. The racism Herbert had seen at work in the Solomon Islands had neither rational foundation nor national boundaries. It was, he had come to realize, simply a coded manifestation of the deep psycho-social (dis)order produced by elitism—and the worst form of elitism he could imagine was a hereditary monarchy, such as the British one. Why? Because it licensed men like Lord Leverhulme in the Solomon Islands, and Lord Vestey in Northern 74 75 76

“A Rebellion That Wasn’t!” 54. “A Rebellion That Wasn’t!” 54. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris.

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Australia, to operate as privateers, instigators of coercive labour regimes like slavery and convictism. It gave them a sense of entitlement that allowed them to dispossess ‘others’ based on the justificatory ideas and ideologies of class and race.

...

Robert Dixon observes, in Writing the Colonial Adventure, that despite suburbia and modernity having become prominent themes of both literary and historical analysis in the last decade, we still have far too few studies that seek to relate Australia’s domestic experience of modernity to its colonial or sub-imperial role in the Pacific.77 The corpus of critical work on Capricornia is a case in point, for it has been generally indifferent to the novel’s transnational contexts despite its rather liminal setting (the “jumping-off place,” the “front door”) and multiple references to Papua, Java, Batavia, Sourabaya, Fiji, Manila, Singapore, and so on. Similarly, the novel is generally characterized as rather old-fashioned, premodern, Dickensian, the very opposite of Patrick White’s international modernism—in other words, nationalist realist. This is despite the novel’s explicit referencing of ‘modern’ motor transport, ‘modern’ warfare, ‘modern’ law, ‘modern’ building materials (asbestos), and definitively modern events (the first aeroplane flight from England to Australia). Perhaps the novel’s most potent symbol of modernity is soap; it is the commodification of cleanliness that connects Herbert’s book to the plantation economy of the Solomon Islands. The Solomons were dominated by English soap-manufacturing company Lever Brothers Ltd,78 aided and abetted by the governments of Britain and Australia. As Herbert saw it, soap was “a racket,” and it was run by Lord Leverhulme.79 Lever Brothers—founded in England in 1885 and incorporated in Australia in 1894—established a mill to extract coconut oil from copra in the inner Sydney suburb of Balmain in 1897, from where the oil was shipped back to England. In 1900, to avoid Australian import tariffs, the company opened a factory next to the mill, dominating the urban landscape and providing significant employment opportunities in Balmain for 77 78 79

Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (1995; New York: Cambridge UP, 2009): 10. This is the company that in 1930 merged with Margarine Unie to form Unilever. Herbert, Interview by Peter Corris.

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the next eighty-eight years. Once the factory was in place, the company began to explore ways to establish a monopoly over the raw materials it needed from the Pacific. To this end, it established Levers Pacific Plantations Ltd, managing to secure a ninety-nine-year concession to collect copra from the Solomon Islands.80 The Company’s holdings there expanded rapidly: by 1910 it held 400,000 acres and was by far the Solomons’ biggest employer. But the labour supply was problematic—even after the mass deportation of indentured Pacific Islanders from Queensland at the close of the external labour migration system—and it had too few workers to expand cultivation beyond the five percent of the land that it held. Lever agitated first to be permitted to import Javanese labour, then Indian, Chinese, and finally Mauritian, but he failed to persuade the British Colonial Office on all counts.81 In England, he was known as a progressive employer, a benevolent industrialist who took a keen interest in the condition of his employees, even establishing a model village of 600 houses around his factory on the banks of the Mersey River. He called the village Port Sunlight, after the trademarked soap that made his fortune. But the conditions of the company’s workers on its plantations in the Belgian Congo and the Solomon Islands were a far cry from Port Sunlight. In fact, Lord Leverhulme’s attempts to improve the lives of English factory workers relied upon radically inverse exploitation of labour in the Solomon Islands and other colonial places. He had raised a storm of controversy during his visit to Australia in 1924 by advocating the importation of black labour to develop the Northern Territory. But the Money Power behind Capitalism, as Frank Anstey had put it, was “a monster with a thousand lying tongues.”82 Men like Lord Leverhulme, the Vestey brothers, and all the others of the financial oligarchy that ruled the great financial houses of the world from its home in London, spoke with different tongues but shared the heart of a single beast—the beast of Money Power. By 1927, Levers Pacific Plantations was facing a desperate situation in the Solomon Islands. It was completely dependent upon an indigenous labour pool of men who were increasingly unwilling to work on its plantations.83 The introduction of the head tax was the obvious solution, making it almost 80 81 82 83

Judith A. Bennett, Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800–1978 (Pacific Islands Monograph Series 3; Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988): 128. Keesing & Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind, 32–33. [Frank Anstey,] “Editorial Mill. The Money Power,” Worker (Brisbane; 5 January 1907): 2. The death rate was double the average for plantation employment. Although conditions improved throughout the 1920s and a measure of legal protection was introduced for labour, these advances were really handicaps for the government. See Bennett, Wealth of the Solomons, 166.

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i­mpossible for an indigenous man to withhold his labour. If he did not work, he could not pay the tax, and if he did not pay, he was breaking the law.84 If he signed a contract and absconded, he could be sent to prison. Lord Leverhulme imbued soap with a missionary capacity and embarked upon a civilizing mission to take ‘sunlight’ to savages, at immense profit to himself and considerable improvement to the condition of English workers. But soap served other, more insidious purposes. In places of Aboriginal incarceration, like the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, it operated as a weapon in the war to stamp out Indigenous languages, being used to wash out the mouths of anyone caught speaking in the devil’s tongue. In Capricornia, despite all the “callousness and the timidity” with which he has come to see his “half caste” child, Mark Shillingsworth cannot bear to see him unclean—a “lump of squealing squirming filth” (53). Indeed, he feels contaminated after handling him, and insists that his mother scrub him clean. After that the boy is bathed daily, sleeps under a blanket, and is dressed in the whiteman’s clothing—modernity ­incarnate—“as clean as a little prince and smelling sweetly of Life Buoy Soap” (54). Herbert knew better than most the origin of that soap. It came from the pure, unbleached, red palm oil and the white coconut oil of the Solomon Islands, and from the sweat and blood of the Solomon Islanders themselves. It was marketed by Unilever with the promise of social improvement.85 But for scrubbed-raw jumped-up colonial princes like Norman Shillingsworth, that was a cooked-up promise. Norman remains, in the eyes of European settler society, unclean—hence excluded from modernity. It is the soap, in a sense, that makes him (and ‘others’ like him) unclean, much as the marketing of Lifebuoy Soap produced the modern anxiety about body odour, making the acronym B.O. famous. In the Solomon Islands Herbert saw the shadow work that went on behind the production of the commodity fetish. He saw how capitalist enterprise colluded with colonial administration to produce a form of modernity that was exported all around the world to register blackness as filth, and whiteness as civilized cleanliness. By this means, ‘coloured’ peoples were persuaded to buy the lie that, to be healthy and socially acceptable, all they needed was the European enlightenment. As the 1899 Pears soap advertisement put it (borrowing 84 85

Wealth of the Solomons, 166. In Africa, for example, as late as the 1950s and 1960s, advertisements targeted black men specifically with the line “Successful Men use Lifebuoy.” See Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1996): 151.

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from Kipling), the global circulation of the soap bar was “the first step towards lightening the white man’s burden.”86 Norman Shillingsworth’s enlightenment proves false, but it also prevents him from reconnecting with his indigenous heritage. At the end of his journey through the wilderness, he is confronted by a complete confusion of colour— an Aboriginal man who is painted hideously white from head to toe. Like soap, shoe polish is an icon of modernity—in fact shoe polish is often marketed as shoe ‘soap.’ Norman at this point is filthy, after scrambling through the mud and dirt of his tragically false Aboriginal awakening in the wilderness. A policeman gives him a bar of soap, even allows him to use his shower-bath, and soon he is “clean and spruce”—which makes him so cheerful that he is able to ignore being given his meal on tinware—and he is sent out to the back veranda (273). It is an account that looks back to Herbert’s experience in Tulagi of watching an indigenous woman die on the hospital veranda, while the doctor inside tends a white man’s dog. The manuscript of “Capricornia” is compiled from a number of drafts, so that it is impossible to trace the process of the novel’s revision in any accurate detail. But there is some evidence to suggest that, before its publication, either Herbert or his publisher, P.R. Stephensen, removed any non-national reference that risked its reception as the Great Australian Novel. The dominant social discourse in the novel by which low-class white men justify their “love of lubras” (12) focuses on the absence of a viable alternative—that is, the small number of white women in the Territory. In the manuscript there was originally an explicit analogy here with “the cannibals of the South Seas who eat human flesh because their domains provide no other red meat to satisfy their strong & carnivorous appetites.”87 The omission of this cannibal logic from the published novel obscures its sexual politics. But it also obscures the connection between Australia and other allegedly ‘cannibal isles’ such as New Guinea, Fiji, and, most famously of all, the Solomon Islands. This is perhaps what Solomite would have wanted, and it is an indication of what it meant to be an Australian writer in the 1930s. But today the fiction of disconnection needs scrutiny. In 2003, Australia led the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (ramsi). A report prepared that year by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute opens with reference to an obscure clause in Australia’s ­constitution, which assigns managerial responsibility for “The relations of the Commonwealth with 86 87

Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage & Open University, 1997): 280. Xavier Herbert, Manuscript of “Capricornia,” 20, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 758.

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the islands of the Pacific” to the federal government.88 The report goes on to consider why this power is reserved independently from external affairs. In fact, as Edmund Barton explained at the time, when it was written, “A very large number of people looked forward with interest to the Commonwealth undertaking, as far as it can as part of the British Empire, the regulation of the Pacific Islands.”89 When that happened, “he implied, Pacific Island affairs would not be external, but internal.”90 Obviously things have turned out very differently, but in the 1920s that sub-imperial desire was still very much alive, and its vestiges remain. By re-routing literary history through literary geography, we might bring the shadow work of that desire—like that forgotten clause in the Australian constitution—into clearer view. The reception of Capricornia in 1938 as the Great Australian Novel, and the critical heritage that descends from it, should not blind us to the fact that its domestic vision relied as much on voyaging outwards as it did on looking inwards. It is a more modern novel that we have been prepared to acknowledge. Works Cited Acting High Commissioner for Western Pacific. Letter to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 31 March 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Record Office, London, CO 225/225/54122 XC 155814. Agreement and Account of Crew No. 181, “Maianbar” 3.1928 to 6.1928, Australian Archives (NSW), Sydney, SP 2/1, Box 13. Annual Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year Ending 31 December 1928, Colonial Office, British Solomon Islands Protectorate: Sessional Papers, Public Records Office, London, CO856 15/1928. [Anstey, Frank.] “Editorial Mill. The Money Power,” Worker (Brisbane; 5 January 1907): 2. “Author Lumping Wheat. Contest Winner. Life of Adventure,” Sydney Morning Herald (2 April 1938): 17. Bennett, Judith A. Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800–1978 (Pacific Islands Monograph Series 3; Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988). “Brave Confession: Island Chieftain: Mr. McCarthy Describes Basiana,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 April 1928): 11. 88 89 90

Elsina Wainright, Our Failing Neighbour. Australia and the Future of the Solomon Islands. An ASPI Policy Report (Barton, ACT: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2003): 1. Our Failing Neighbour, 1. Our Failing Neighbour, 1.

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Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1996). Clemens, Martin. Alone on Guadalcanal: A Coastwatcher’s Story (n.p.: Naval Institute, Blue Jacket, 2013). Connor, G.J. “Tulagi,” Walkabout: Australia and the South Seas (1 May 1935): 42–43. Corris, Peter. Naismith’s Dominion (Sydney: Bantam, 1990). “Darwin’s Physic from Author-Adventurer,” Northern Standard (11 June 1929): 3. Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (1995; New York: Cambridge UP, 2009). Grimshaw, Beatrice. “A Darwin Story,” Northern Standard (13 May 1927): 5. Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999). Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage/Open University, 1997): 223–90. Herbert, Xavier [as Herbert Astor]. “The Ape-Men of Mobongu,” Boys Weekly (24 June 1927): 12–15; repr. in Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 12.3 (December 2002): 10–18. Herbert, Xavier. Biographical Statement, n.d. [February 1940], Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty Ltd Business Records, 1935–1974, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Angus and Robertson Papers, ML MSS3269, Box 127. Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia: A Novel (1938; A&R Classics, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974). Herbert, Xavier. Interview by Andrew Martin, Sydney, 1976. Full transcript in the author’s possession. Herbert, Xavier. Interview by Peter Corris, 22 May 1979, Townsville. Full transcript in the author’s possession. Herbert, Xavier. Letter to Drs Karl and Paula Schubert, 18 September 1973, Papers of Sadie and Xavier Herbert, Sadie and Xavier Herbert Collection, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane, UQFL 83, Box 33. Herbert, Xavier. Letter to Harry Heseltine, 30 April 1975, Papers of Sadie and Xavier Herbert, Sadie and Xavier Herbert Collection, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane, UQFL83, Box 33. Herbert, Xavier. Letter to Secretary, Department of Home Affairs (Canberra), n.d. [rec. 31 January 1929], “A.X. Herbert. Appt. Dispenser Dresser N.A.,” Australian Archives, Canberra, A1 37/1718. Herbert, Xavier. “The Man behind the Story” [Biographical Note], Australian Journal 76 (1941): 390–91. Herbert, Xavier. Manuscript, “Capricornia.” National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 758.

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Herbert, Xavier [as Herbert Astor]. “The Other McLean,” Australian Journal 58 (1928): 1341–46, 1383–84; repr. [with author as A.X. Herbert] Northern Standard 2 July 1929: 6; 5 July 1929: 6; 9 July 1929: 6; 12 July 1929: 6; repr. in South of Capricornia: Short Stories 1925–1934, by Xavier Herbert, ed. Russell McDougall (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1990): 242–61. Herbert, Xavier. “Return of a Wanderer” [Letter to the Editor], Australian Journal 68 (1 April 1933): 486–87. Hetherington, H.B. [Senior Medical Officer]. Enclosure 1, 8 March 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122 XC 155814. Hutson, Sir Eyre. Letter to Rt. Hon. Secretary of State for the Colonies (London), 4 July 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office (PRO), London, Co 225/225/54122A 155834. “Island Murders: Chief Dies of Fright: Report from Tulagi,” Sydney Morning Herald (23 April 1928): 12. Keesing, Roger M. “Colonial History as Contested Ground: The Bell Massacre in the Solomons,” History and Anthropology 4.2 (1990): 279–301. Keesing, Roger M. Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1992). Keesing, Roger M., & Peter Corris. Lightning Meets the West Wind: The Malaita ­Massacre (Melbourne & New York: Oxford UP, 1980). Laracy, Hugh Michael. “Catholic Missions in the Solomon Islands, 1845–1966” (doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1969). Map of the Solomon Islands, compiled and published by H.E.C. Robinson, 2nd edn, 1941[?]. State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Map Collection, Z/M2 924/1941/2.​ “Massacre at Malaita, October, 1927,” Solomon Island Malaita Massacre, Correspondence Files, Alphabetical Series, 1 Jan 1821–31 Dec 1970, Australian Archives, Canberra, A98/1 SOL 2. Moorhouse, Commissioner [H.C.]. Report to the Colonial Office, 22 September 1928, Correspondence Files, Alphabetical Series, 1 Jan 1821–31 Dec 1970, Australian Archives, Canberra, A98/1 SOL 2. Morrisby, Camden. “Xavier Herbert and the World He Knows,” Australian Book News and Library Journal 1.2 (August 1946): 42–43. North Coast Steam Navigation Company Minutes, 14 March, 19 May and 23 June 1928, North Coast Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. Records, 1857–1954, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML MSS323, Vol. 15. Office of the Resident Commissioner, British Solomon Islands, Tulagi, 2 June 1928, Enclosures II and III, Western Pacific Despatch 273, 4 July 1928, Colonial Office, Western Pacific Original Correspondence, Public Records Office, London, CO 225/225/54122A 155834.

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Simon, Peter. “The Bionic Raconteur. Part 2,” Northern Territory Newsletter 1.6 (1979): 10–18. Solomite, Gizo, B.S.I. “A Rebellion That Wasn’t! Author as Hangman’s Helpmate in B.S.I.,” Pacific Islands Monthly (15 August 1938): 54. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, ed. Arthur Helps & Helmut Werner, tr. Charles F. Atkinson (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1923, tr. 1926, 1928; New York: Oxford UP, 1991). Strutynski, Kim. Letter to Russell McDougall, 26 March 1998. “Terrible Massacre at Solomon Islands: Australian Warship Speeding to the Scene,” Northern Territory Times (19 August 1927): 3. “Tulagi Massacres,” Sydney Morning Herald (8 June 1928): 12. Wainright, Elsina. Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of the Solomon ­Islands: An ASPI Policy Report (Barton, ACT: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2003). White, C.H.G. Personal File F58/38, National Archives of Solomon Islands, Honiara.

Chapter 5

Regime Change Literature and Transitional Justice Tony Simões da Silva ‘Bearing witness?’ Dear God. In the face of such desolation, what more witness could be needed?1 In an essay entitled “Regime change fiction—a genre without a name (yet)…,” the British novelist Patrick McGuiness proposes some interesting ways of looking at the kind of “novels that collapsing social orders produce.”2 Reflecting on the breadth of political change that overtook the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011 he writes: There’s no genre called ‘regime change fiction,’ but there is a common theme in many novels about revolution or upheaval where the individual is placed, like a paper boat, in the slipstream of history. What’s interesting about this is the way the novelist exploits the question of scale: you can have the weight of history crushing the characters, but you can also have the characters’ daily travails trumping the world-changing events around them. It’s like raising your hand to block out the sun: it works not because hand and sun are evenly matched but because perspective matches them evenly. If, as McGuiness persuasively posits, “regime change fiction” is a category that describes “the novels that collapsing social orders produce,” postcolonial critical theory too has sought to come to grips both with the initial process of ­regime change, and the repeated betrayals that follow. Postcolonial fiction has played a pivotal role in the process of making sense of the period that follows on from political and social change in the postcolonial nation-state. In novels such as George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, writers 1 Peter Matthiessen, In Paradise (New York: Riverhead, 2014): 30. 2 Patrick McGuiness, “Regime change fiction—a genre without a name (yet)…,” Guardian (6 September 2011): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/05/regime-change-fiction (accessed 1 February 2017).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_006

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think through and beyond the status quo inherited from colonial occupation.3 These books address collapsing social orders, and, in many ways, actively work to collapse certain kinds of social orders. In Lamming, this work takes the form of identifying, understanding and undoing the complex structures of interpellation that hail the individual into being as a colonized subject. For Achebe, resonating with Lamming, the change of regime is about recuperating forms of knowledge and selfhood laid waste by colonial oppression. In Gordimer, ‘regime change’ is much more literal: July’s People anticipates and rehearses the leadup to the end of Apartheid. In all three cases, regime change is principally about modes of thinking and being, and then acting. Using readings of Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and Fatima Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, this essay will expand on McGuiness to assert that the conceptual category “regime change literature” offers a useful way to approach imaginative writing that overlaps closely with transitional justice agendas. Working through and with concepts from the social sciences such as ‘transitional justice,’ ‘failed states,’ and ‘burdened societies,’ I propose that novels such as Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and Fatima Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon constitute an important supplement to the formal work of reconciliation, justice, and reparation performed by commissions or other such bodies in the aftermath of regime change.4 This kind of novel works with and within a transformative process that extends beyond the parameters of the law. In this respect, “regime change literature” operates in tandem with formal institutions of transitional justice, in that both seek to reinvest the nation-state with some of that legitimacy and authority eroded by corrupt and dictatorial regimes. The essay thus proposes that regime change fiction engages the transgenerational trauma that results from the collapse of social orders. ‘Regime change literature’ focuses on the micro world of the nation-state in a way that shines a light on the after-effects of local changes on a global setting. In this way, it is also part of a global discourse of human rights and justice. Hence my claim that regime change literature aims to intervene in ­notions of “transitional justice,” borrowing in this context Chrisje Brants’ view that such justice “is concerned with both settling accounts after violent conflict and repression, and coming to terms with the traumatic damage 3 George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953); Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958); Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). 4 Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010) and Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (London: Penguin, 2014). Further page references are in the main text.

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i­nflicted on individuals and society.”5 Her argument, that transitional justice “is inextricably bound up with history-telling and attempts to develop shared collective memories, for it looks towards a viable future by making a certain specific sense of past events,” is especially relevant to a discussion of regime change fiction.6 The work of memorializing events and experiences, personal and collective, inherent in transitional justice, is pivotal to “determining the immoral elements of the past and the requirements of the future.”7 This is work usually undertaken in the aftermath of regime change, though close enough to it to ensure that crucial evidence is not lost. As I will be arguing here, regime change fiction is broad as a category, but it can be made to work by the fact that it is closely delimited by the boundaries of the nation-state—it focuses on and/or examines historical phenomena such as revolutions, coups d’état, internal conflicts, or invasions. It is in this dynamic engagement with the (ant)agonistic relationship between the nationstate, civil conflict, and transitional justice that regime change fiction becomes especially productive, as sites of journeys towards and processes of healing and reparation. Regime change fiction captures moments in history, turning points that begin in hope but frequently result in catastrophe and widespread suffering. I want to stress that regime change does not require that a regime be on its knees, as it were, or that a society be clearly defined as being in a post-conflict situation. The force of novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin resides in the way they depict societies living under colonial oppression but resisting it, anticipating therefore a regime—of thought, of knowledge, of political structures—beyond colonial occupation. As will be seen in Bhutto’s novel, regime change can take the form of an emergent process of change, of subversion that will or might lead to the collapse of a political and/or social order. Although regime change literature might not be a new category, I suggest that it has gained increased importance in a world in which the work of historians and political scientists is being hampered by political instability, civil conflict, and widespread corruption. These are, in John Rawls’ words, “burdened societies,” straining under the weight of institutional and structural disintegration. For Rawls, such societies “lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how, and often, the material and technological

5 Chrisje Brants, “Introduction” to Transitional Justice: Images and Memories, ed. Chrisje Brants, Antoine Hol & Dina Siegel (Farnham & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013): 1. 6 “Introduction,” 1–2. 7 “Introduction,” 7.

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resources needed to be well-ordered.”8 Rawls’ concept may reflect a Western view of the ordered society, and of neo-liberal democracy, but it remains a useful way of thinking about societies dealing with regime change, or its aftermath. Thence the link I want to establish between regime change literature and an explicit concern with setting in motion processes of reconciliation and transitional justice. In Mengiste’s novel, the collapse of political and social order epitomizes ­McGuinness’s thesis. Dramatically, spectacularly, the old Ethiopia is dying, and a new one struggles to assert itself: It was September 12, 1974, the first day of the new year, and Adis Ababa’s dreams and frustrations lay bare. Finally exposed to a hot sun that seemed brighter and more powerful than it had ever been before. (58) Over a period of decades, corruption, drought, political collapse and famine have brought Ethiopia to its knees, but in his palace the emperor has remained oblivious to it all, alone with the ghosts of his noble ancestry. When it dawns on him the end is nigh, it is framed as a personal tragedy: “‘Our era is over,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ He stared into the dark, his back rigid” (53). Incarcerated by the rebels, he reflects on his own end: He’d been overcome for a moment by the sheer force of life and energy in this country he loved so much. He wanted to embrace it, open his arms and let children run to him, let men and woman kiss his hands. If he could have, he would have paused long enough to let his people bow and prostrate before him, and he would bless each and every one of them, and shed tears with them. (57) When Ethiopia faced a famine so extreme it almost required a new vocabulary to speak the full measure of the misery unleashed, the emperor’s increasing alienation sees him accused by his subjects of a total lack of humanity. Mengiste recreates some of the media imagery that dominated coverage of the famine in the 1970s: The family sat together in front of the television, their cups of tea untouched in front of them. They were leaning forward towards the screen, repulsed and transfixed by what they were seeing. […] The steady glare 8 John Rawls, Law of Peoples (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1999): 106.

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of the sun shot balloons of light into the lens, forced shadows to skulk back into the sky. Under the vicious heat were flesh covered skeletons that breathed. Covered in rags the colour of dust, children crawled on all fours. Grown women with bones for breasts clung to emaciated b­ abies. Defeated men let ravenous flies feast on their eyes. Naked bodies lay crumbled on cracked earth, scattered like ash. (50) The shocking evidence divides the family like nothing before, the older generation inclined to side with the emperor, if only in recognition of the role he played in the fight against the Italian colonizers, while the younger grows ever more radicalized. Ironically, when it comes, Selassie’s fall is almost unremarkable, memorable most of all because of the horror of what rises in his place. In telling the story of a family, as the reign of the man known as the King of Kings, claimant to a lineage 3,000 years old, falls apart, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze uncovers, albeit as work of imagination, a powerful narrative that is vital to Ethiopian society. In The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto turns her attention to Pakistan’s ongoing stages of internal conflict, in part a legacy of the 1947 Partition but even more the result of its ongoing indebtedness to the usa. In Bhutto’s novel, regime change remains an incipient if powerful hope, but the regime itself shows little sign of collapsing, other than, perhaps, in its ongoing betrayal of the Pakistani people. Here too the narrative revolves around the experiences of a family, and like Mengiste, Bhutto uses the family as an allegory for the nation-state. Regime change literature ­presents the nation-state in a state of flux, undergoing a rehearsal of different modalities of governmentality; it is a time in which conventional, seemingly unproblematic relations of being between nation and state are unravelled and reconstituted anew. Using the motif of the family enables the writer to explore and critique the impact of social and political dysfunction unleashed by regime change on everyday people, citizens, witnesses to the nation’s pain and helplessness. In McGuiness’s words, the individual is placed in the slipstream of history. In both Mengiste’s and Bhutto’s novels, the violence the family endures allegorizes the violence enveloping the nation-state, an aimless pawn in broader geo-political relations. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson offer an apt observation when they assert that from the macro world of geopolitics to the micro of familial relations, the recognition of trauma as trauma is crucial because it gives name and shape to a form of experience that is a rupturing of the capacity to make

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sense of the world; it recognises the impossible event as existing, lived in the catastrophic, the everyday and every gradation in between.9 In her “Author’s Note” to Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (303–305), Mengiste stresses that her novel makes no claim to historical accuracy but acknowledges that historical and political sources underpin the story it tells. Selassie is presented as himself, for example, but his nemesis, in real life Mengistu Haile Mariam, is fictionalized as Major Guddu. The emperor’s last prime minister, Aklilu Habte-Wold, makes an appearance, but the rest of the characters are imagined. At one level, such narrative devices are typical of historical fiction, but Mengiste’s novel is not concerned with challenging historical records, nor does it set out to record silenced or marginalized voices. Rather, in a setting in which the nation’s institutional apparatus has collapsed, the novelist offers what is in effect the only work of history. Regime change literature aims to offer a counter-narrative of hope, at least in its gesturing towards a complex agenda of testimony, historical revisionism, and transitional justice. In particular, it sets up a more or less explicit link between setting, events, and the individual caught therein. Contrastingly, the regime change fiction imagined by McGuiness maintains a kind of paratextual relationship with historical accounts—it complements the unrecorded and unverified narrative of the end of regimes. Mengiste and Bhutto address themselves instead to a (re)thinking of the postcolonial nation-state, notably in considering the arbitrariness of colonial borders. The strength of Mengiste’s novel resides not only in the themes it explores—notably the decline and fall of Selassie’s regime, with its mix of equal parts of absurdity, magic, and cruelty, and the regime of horror that replaced it, led by Guddu—but in the balance Mengiste brings to that portrait. The writing combines a spare and precise style with an intensity that borders on the melodramatic. Human bodies in pain dominate the narrative, whether it be those of the patients treated by Dr Hailu; the abandoned victims of torture; the mother crawling on her knees over broken glass in a covenant with God that will save her daughter; or, the young boy disfigured beyond his mother’s recognition. In these vignettes, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze foregrounds the extent to which regime change is written on the body of the nation. The novel’s opening immediately brings this dimension into focus, as Hailu operates on a young victim of Selassie’s troops:

9 Meera Atkinson & Michael Richardson, “Introduction: At the Nexus,” in Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson & Michael Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013): 4–5.

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A thin blue vein pulsed in the collecting pool of blood where a bullet had lodged deep in the boy’s back. Hailu was sweating under the heat from the bright operating room lights. There was pressure behind his eyes. He leaned his head to one side and a nurse’s ready hand wiped sweat from his brow. He looked back at his scalpel, the shimmering blood and torn tissues, and tried to imagine the fervor that had led this boy to believe he was stronger than Emperor Haile Selassie’s highly trained police. (5) The passage presents the concrete, measurable ways of science side-by-side with the ineffable matters of the heart, the love of family. Hailu’s perspiration, natural in the conditions he works under, reflects the increasing fear he experiences that his own son could be one of his next patients. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is characterized by a carefully sustained polyphony, a central dimension of the intervention as transitional justice: the stories of Selassie and Guddu are set against each other without judgement. This disinterest is reflected also in the tone of the depiction of figures such as Selassie and Guddu. Selassie, for example, is neither fool nor monster; towards the end of his life he emerges confused and vulnerable but also very much aware of the power he exerted, even if others took advantage of it and of him to inflict unspeakable abuse. A leader increasingly deprived of power, and in fact almost uninterested in its exercise, Selassie allows his god-like status to be used by a coterie of officials and aristocrats obsessed with their own. Mengiste’s Emperor Selassie is not innocent of the suffering imposed on Ethiopia in his name, but he emerges as a victim in the manner of the comprador elite identified by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Similarly, the regime that replaces Selassie’s is humanized when one of its key actors, the colonel responsible for the most unspeakable acts on his fellow Ethiopians, is confronted with the consequences for his own family. Intent on obeying orders to eliminate all dissent against the new Marxist regime, one of his men tortures nearly to death the colonel’s daughter. She, too, will be taken to the ­family ­patriarch Hailu; when he kills her, rather than making her well enough to endure further torture, Hailu himself falls victim to the colonel’s men. Danger and fear spread like a plague, setting family members against each other. As Hailu remarks, “By the end of all this, who’s to say any of us will be blameless” (146). Transitional justice operates by complex rules, not always entirely discernible and understood within conventional legal discourses. Perpetrators will be brought to account and punished or pardoned, but the form such processes take can require that the society in which such individuals existed and thrived also come to terms with its role in the perpetuation of such regimes. As Jacques Derrida remarks, “We are all heir, at least, to persons or events marked,

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in an e­ ssential, interior, ineffaceable fashion, by crimes against humanity.”10 Accounting for such complicity means bearing witness and ensuring that evidence is recorded for posterity. As the anti-Guddu guerrilla leader Solomon tells Dawit, “‘We’re building a case. […] One day there’ll be a trial, these people will be brought to justice, and everyone will know what really happened’” (244). Building a case means collecting the evidence of the various actions committed by the regime against Ethiopians, a macabre process that sees Dawit and his fellow dissenters collecting the many dead bodies strewn throughout the city. At times, in attempting to steer between opposing but complementary versions of a story, the novels leave open the possibility of a sense of nostalgia for times gone by, implicitly endorsing previous regimes as better, more humane, and less inefficient. This is less the case in Bhutto than in Mengiste, perhaps because the former remains much more explicitly rooted in contemporary Pakistan, where official complicity with the usa in the so-called ‘war on terror’ inflects every aspect of the nation’s life. She negotiates between the desire to expose the brutalization of Pakistani society at the hands of a number of more-or-less militarized political governments, growing radicalization of religious dogma, and pride in the nation-state that is (or, better put, could be) Pakistan. Mengiste, in contrast, presents Ethiopia well after the event, and is therefore able to offer a reflection on the progress, or lack thereof, made since the fall of Selassie, and indeed the fall of his successor. Even Guddu, the fictionalized version of the man who, in the mid-1970s, redefined the meaning of violence and brutality, is afforded a modicum of dignity. For a fleeting moment, he symbolizes, and is allowed to symbolize, the hope and possibility that will replace Selassie’s despotic and decrepit rule. While Mengiste looks back on history, reviewing, revising, and filling in for the lack of a historical narrative, Bhutto writes of contemporary Pakistan. In The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, the focus on regime change is less clearly aligned with a collapsing social order. However, Bhutto offers a scathing and overtly political examination of the way chaos has come to dominate the ­everyday life of Pakistanis. This focus on what is also a routinely militarized Pakistani society enables the analysis of a broader set of political factors that account for Pakistan’s status as a de facto colony of the usa. Just as Beneath the Lion’s Gaze has as its backdrop African postcolonial nationalism in the context of Cold War politics, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is set against its present-day variation, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of

10

Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” in Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, tr. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001): 29.

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civilizations.”11 At the mercy of shifting geo-political alliances from without, Pakistan is also caught up between warring religious and ethnic factions from within. Throughout it all, the people bear the brunt: Bhutto depicts a society dominated by danger and fear. At the start of the novel, when three brothers decide to attend three different mosques for their Friday prayers, they do so because they take for granted that at least one of those will be attacked with mortars or targeted by suicide bombers: “It is too dangerous, too risky to place all the family together in one mosque that could easily be hit. They no longer knew by whom” (3). Yet to be seen not to attend prayers will also place them at risk. Although sympathetic to the views of Ghazan Affridi, a character who makes a fleeting appearance early on before disappearing, it is hinted, to join radical Islamists, the narratorial voice remains cynical of the motives of such positions. Before leaving, Affridi remarks that “‘The coming years will bring Pakistan to its knees’” (11). The comment reflects his view of the regime’s complicity in the war on terror, but the cliché has a deep resonance. The brothers’ decisions about where and how to pray reflect a life lived on their knees, as much literally as metaphorically. As their light-hearted banter reveals, the threat to the three brothers evolves from day to day—the hits could be made by anyone: “By drugged-up Saudi pubescents trained in the exact extermination of Shias,” ventures Aman Erun, the elder brother. “No, it’s not just Saudis,” protests Sikandar, the middle of the three as he looks around the kitchen for his wife. “Sometimes there’s politics ­behind it, not God.” She is nowhere to be seen. He swallows his sugary tea uncomfortably. “Yes, yes, sometimes they’re pubescents from Afghanistan. Still Sunnis, though,” jokes Aman Erun, folding a paratha into his mouth as he stands to leave. (3) Bhutto writes about a situation unravelling around her. However, as the conflict between Sunni and Shia demonstrates, the clash that Huntington theorized as one of ideology now overlaps with ethnicity. The immediacy of their experiences is indicated by the brief temporal span of the novel, a period of three hours between nine in the morning and noon (223). Told as the brothers prepare to leave for prayers on the day in which one of the most spectacular attacks on the Pakistani regime is being planned, the story’s ramifications are 11

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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elaborated on via each character’s interiorized recollections. The microscopic treatment of the conditions faced by the people of a small village in Mir Ali allegorizes Pakistan’s pivotal role in a web of power relations in which it is merely a pawn. A “burdened society” in the phrase’s most potent sense, the setting of Mir Ali, the contested borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, serves as background to the real-time geo-political power games in a postnine-eleven world. Brought into being as a desperate attempt to avoid a bloodbath in the leadup to the end of the Raj, Pakistan embodies the tension created and perpetuated by arbitrarily imposed colonial and postcolonial borders. Nominally in Pakistan, united by religion as much as riven by differing interpretation of Islamic precepts, Mir Ali’s status complicates both its place within Pakistan, and within Pakistan’s national borders. Mir Ali is seen as a threat to Pakistan’s integrity: forced by colonial borders to be Pakistani, yet drawn to Afghanistan by their tribal allegiances, the people of Mir Ali take up arms against the state. When the Pakistani military retaliates, the people turn to increasingly radicalized movements that fuse politics and religion. Bhutto presents the principal character, Aman Erun, as both an individual on whom these conflicts leave a deep imprint, and a bellwether. He is victim and perpetrator, sufficiently desperate to leave to betray the woman to whom he had declared his love, before leaving for the usa. As he receives a phone call from a traumatized Samarra after she has been beaten and raped by the same Pakistani security forces to whom he has been releasing information about the nationalist rebels, Aman Erun, for the first time, is confronted with the consequences of his betrayal. Bhutto does not pass judgement, Aman Erun’s complicity in the destruction of Mir Ali as a society being unveiled through his own eyes. The complications depicted in The Shadow of the Crescent Moon relate in great part to the way the tribal peoples living in such places feel betrayed by the nation-state, left at the mercy of constantly shifting military campaigns by American troops. In common with similar situations in contemporary Libya, Syria, and Iraq, among other places, the Pakistan of Bhutto’s novel serves as a testing ground for competing ideologies, international relations, and nationstate governmentality. In this political climate, the state takes on the role of oppressor, the people under threat from the very apparatuses designed to protect them. “The state did not wait, this time, for a rebel band to cross a frontier and plant a flag or issue a proclamation of independence and self-rule. This time they came to us first” […] Doors were broken down in the dead of night, men were kidnapped from their streets, women were widowed

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and children were orphaned to teach the town its most important lesson: there was no match for the ruthlessness of the state. Another generation of male warriors would not grow in Mir Ali. (17, 18) Humour enables the brothers to make sense of the horror they now take for granted. For Bhutto, this is inextricable from an international relations paradigm that conflates security and exceptionalism, the actions of the state explained away no matter how extreme and brutal. Bhutto writes of a Pakistan facing the multiple threats of a militarized state and an increasingly intolerant religious view that has put an end to a time “when poetry wasn’t dangerous if read by an unchaperoned eye and replied to with a touch of the lips” (26). In this world, “No one prays together, travels in pairs, or eats out in groups” (21). The Shadow of the Crescent Moon uses an incantatory prose style, alternating between a parataxis that echoes machine guns and bombings, and longer, freer, almost rambling sentences that afford the reader insight into the characters’ thoughts, to sustain an intense rage. The plight of the people of Mir Ali is emblematic of a malaise affecting the whole of Pakistan. In contrast, Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze treats perpetrators and victims, but also perpetrators as victims. That, after all, is one function of transitional justice, which “is concerned with the damage inflicted on individuals and society: with the definition of heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators.”12 Guddu’s regime goes out of its way to set Ethiopia on course towards a realignment of time and history, back to Year Zero. Like Pol Pot in Cambodia, and to a lesser degree Hoh Chi Minh in Vietnam, Guddu seeks to control the state, the people, and the temporal vectors framing their existence. Figures such as Guddu (and Pol Pot) anticipate the kind of political and ideological moments that have seen US-led interventions in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan work to turn the clock back to a form of Year Zero, to wipe the slate clean, as it were, to enable the seeding of neo-liberal Western political models. The point a novel such The Shadow of the Crescent Moon makes is that in its response to internal contestation of its raison d’être, in some respects, Pakistan has embraced the ‘failed state narrative’ as a means of securing special support from the usa, and of getting away with persistent human rights abuses against its own people.13 In his discussion of the concept of ‘fragile states,’ which he finds “problematic and detrimental to effective policy and action,” Derick W. 12 13

Chrisje Brants, “Introduction” to Transitional Justice, 1. Pakistan is not a ‘failed state’ by any measure, though it might qualify as a ‘troubled state’: see Charles T. Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’,” Third World Quarterly 29.8 (2008):

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Brinkerhoff makes the case that often such terms are deployed by nations on the brink of disintegration, as a means of ensuring the support of the international community. Frequently, the “fragility message resonated with international actors’ concerns over security and stability and led to continuing support for civilian and military assistance, despite human rights abuses,” a situation that Charles T. Call suggests is true of Pakistan.14 To an extent, Bhutto suggests that this narrative has now become so dominant that it has come to serve both the Pakistani government and military, as well as the very forces it struggles to defeat. In this perverse state of affairs, people are left powerless, largely victims of a brutal apparatus that overwhelms them, and at times, turns them into perpetrators. This is true for Mina, the wife of the second brother, Sikandar, and a university lecturer. Mina has abandoned her job and withdrawn from public life, filling her days by days by reading the obituary columns and then making her way to the house of any young man being buried that day. Absurd, irrational, and inexplicable—her behaviour is first introduced as Sikandar receives yet another phone call from a distressed family begging him to take Mina away—Mina’s actions are soon revealed to be the delayed and ritualized response to the loss of her son, victim of an explosion aimed at hurting the government’s delivery of medical services. Her reaction and her behaviour are a perfect illustration of Cathy Caruth’s view that trauma frequently recurs as a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event.15 Mina’s screams into the face of the three Talibs, who stop her and Sikandar as they travel to attend to a tribal woman giving birth and who are prepared to kill them on the grounds they are ‘kafir’ [infidels] (175), thus serve both a therapeutic function, and a political one. They disrupt the cold, irrational language of

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1491–92. However, it remains the product of seeing the state as an institution largely able to run its own affairs. Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “State Fragility and Failure as Wicked Problems: Beyond Naming and Taming,” Third World Quarterly 35.2 (2014): 337; Charles T. Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State’: Toward Conceptual Alternatives,” European Journal of International Relations 17.2 (June 2011): 315. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: Trauma and Experience,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 4.

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violence that has come to dominate the lives of the people of Mir Ali by speaking back in an equally terrifying language of rage and despair. Moreover, this deferred utterance of Mina’s trauma speaks of a broader, collective trauma; in that sense, it acts as a first step towards a transitional justice, one that will bring together the various political and warring factions towards reconciliation. Faced with what Sikandar describes as “the exclusive power of [the Talibs’] faith” (188), their visceral hatred of all Shias, Mina retorts with the weapon of the powerless, a manifestation of her most intimate self. Her scream utters a grief that has been repressed for fear of being seen to belittle the actions of the enemies of the Pakistani army; these are heroes, but also murderers. It was fear that first led the brothers to disperse on their way to prayer; afraid to offend by seeking not to give offence. Now, in Mina’s case, repeatedly, the line that separates them blurs. As the Talib prepares to execute Sikandar, and then Mina—“The Talib tightens his hand on Sikandar’s head. He straightens himself and chambers a round in the Kalashnikov. ‘Kafir,’ he sneers once more” (191)—“he is interrupted by a scream” (191). “The gaunt commander’s face contracts with the scream. Startled, he lets go of Sikandar, whose hair falls out of his clenched fist, and looks at his comrades” (191). Mina has now left the van in which she and Sikandar were travelling; in a fit of grief and rage she pushes the men: “She pushed him hard, touching him against all convention” (191). Gaining the upper hand, she continues: “‘Zalim!’ she screams, standing under the rain. Unjust! Mina screams till her voice is hoarse” (191). The viewpoint now turns to Sikandar, who describes his wife’s actions and accounts for what it will take to make people risk all they have: He moves. There is no greater slur Mina could have levelled. These men are students of justice. They can be accused of being violent, of being rash, of anything but injustice. They have built their war around the battle of the just against the unjust. People misunderstand them; they assume it is a war against the unbelievers, against disbelief. That has nothing to do with it. Their war was always about justice. They bear its mantle and they drape themselves in its banner. (191) Mina’s grief, personal, repressed, delayed in its expression, takes on a distinct importance for its transgressive nature: as a woman, as a mother, and as a wife, Mina claws back the language to voice her trauma and her suffering, that she has witnessed in her role as ‘mourner-in-chief,’ available to wash other people’s boy-children, to sit and pray with them. Works such Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon thereby mourn the unspeakable suffering of people, the death of a nation-state, and the death of the hope associated

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with postcolonial independence. Simultaneously, they mourn the impact of civil conflict on the individual’s humanity. I want to suggest that in their ‘praxis,’ postcolonial novels like Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon give the theory of transitional justice a degree of materiality. For in the aftermath of profoundly destructive and destabilizing political and social conflict, the work of effecting a praxis of transitional justice must inevitably take on unconventional forms and processes, central to which are the telling of events past, of deeply impressed experiences of trauma, and of a ritualized rehearsal of those phenomena. That is the work of fiction, and most pointedly, of postcolonial fiction. Indeed, Catherine Turner’s emphasis on a deconstructive approach to transitional justice, aimed unravelling the concept’s overtly dichotomous assumptions—war and peace, justice and injustice, punishment and atonement, and democracy versus oppressive regimes, for example—and the direct link she establishes between transitional justice and law, falls back on its own set of limited parameters for an understanding of the forms such justice might take.16 Regime change literature that intervenes in the work of transitional justice creates the setting and the conditions for a more genuinely transformational encounter between theory and practice. The experiences of victims and perpetrators are brought into being, and as they are documented in a form that survives what frequently is the deliberate destruction of formal records and collective memory-making that ensues after the collapse of political or social structures. Bhutto and Mengiste show the function and the value of fiction to the act of bearing witness, and documenting—albeit through imagination— a series of events or situations that might otherwise fall victim to collective amnesia. In that respect, their work stands as evidence that the kind of exhaustion evident in Peter Matthiessen’s comments used above as an epigraph, which refer to the Holocaust, are almost meaningless in those settings—such as Ethiopia, Pakistan, or indeed much of the postcolonial world—in which the novel is the principal, if not the only, means for recording events. At one level though, regime change fiction could be seen as inherently nostalgic, for by bringing into relief the sheer horror of contemporary horror, it sets up an obverse image of a less troubled and troubling time, a time in which the nation-state was settled and thriving. The regime on the way out suddenly appears less terrifying, more secure than its replacement. The crisis depicted in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, clearly triggered by the emperor’s unconcern for his people, begins to pale in comparison to the actions of the political model 16

Catherine Turner, “Deconstructing Transitional Justice,” Law and Critique 24.2 (July 2013): 193–209.

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emerging to replace him. Yet, at another level, regime change fiction is pivotal to a discourse of transitional justice to which it subscribes, in its documenting of the kind of actions and events frequently left out of the history of revolutions. Transitional justice, as a process aimed at accounting for specific situations, and perhaps eventually bringing to account certain individuals, demands complexity and depth in its narrative forms. In Mengiste as in Bhutto, the safety and security symbolized by the family stand in sharp contrast to the growing danger and violence family members face in the body politic, a situation that is emblematic of the threats assailing the nation. Regime change, and the chaos and disorder that often accompany it, are lightly woven over the depiction of the extraordinary lengths ordinary people go to when faced with conditions beyond their control. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Atkinson, Meera, & Michael Richardson. “Introduction: At the Nexus,” Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson & Michael Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013): 1–19. Bhutto, Fatima. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (London: Penguin, 2014). Brants, Chrisje. “Introduction” to Transitional Justice: Images and Memories, ed. Chrisje Brants, Antoine Hol & Dina Siegel (Farnham & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013): 1–14. Brinkerhoff, Derick W. “State Fragility and Failure as Wicked Problems: Beyond Naming and Taming,” Third World Quarterly 35.2 (2014): 333–44. Call, Charles T. “Beyond the ‘Failed State’: Toward Conceptual Alternatives,” European Journal of International Relations 17.2 (June 2011): 303–26. Call, Charles T. “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’,” Third World Quarterly 29.8 (2008): 1491–1507. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction: Trauma and Experience,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 3–12. Derrida, Jacques. “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, tr. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001): 27–60. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961, tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953). Matthiessen, Peter. In Paradise (New York: Riverhead, 2014).

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McGuiness, Patrick. “Regime change fiction—a genre without a name (yet)…,” Guardian (6 September 2011): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/05/regime -change-fiction (accessed 1 February 2017). Mengiste, Maaza. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010). Rawls, John. Law of Peoples (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1999). Turner, Catherine. “Deconstructing Transitional Justice,” Law and Critique 24.2 (July 2013): 193–209.

Part 2 Case Studies

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Chapter 6

Laughter and the Indigenous Trickster Aesthetics of Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing Anne Brewster The trickster features in a wide range of folkloric, mythic, popular, and literary texts. Spanning antiquity and the contemporary world, tricksters appear in African, Arabic, Asian, Caribbean, European (including Greek, Norse, and Slavic), Pacific, and South American cultures, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in settler nations. Literary trickster figures include the Odyssean wandering hero, the animals in Aesop’s fables, the Shakespearean wise fool, and the confidence man in nineteenth-century novels by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. More recently, trickster figures have been deployed across a range of minority literatures. Jeanne Rosier Smith, for example, discusses the trickster’s recent resurgence in the fiction of what she terms ethnic American women writers.1 Trickster figures have also appeared in Indigenous writing from both the usa and Canada. Postcolonial analyses of trickster figures in various Indigenous and minority literatures, notably texts produced by American, Canadian, and Caribbean authors, flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, the trickster has not featured in critical studies of Australian Indigenous literature.2 Although they have not attracted critical attention to date, there are numerous trickster-like figures in Australian Indigenous fiction, such as Norm Phantom in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Charlie and other characters in Alf Taylor’s Long Time Now, Bobby Wabalanginy in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, the characters in Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman & Fleabag, and Nevil in Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back.3 1 Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997). 2 In an adjacent field, black Australian writer Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo’s work has been analysed from this perspective: see Maureen Clark, “Unmasking Mudrooroo,” Kunapipi 23.2 (2001): 48–62, and Annalisa Oboe, “Introduction” to Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Cross/Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): vii–xxi. (My thanks to Maarten Renes for this information.) 3 Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006); Alf Taylor, Long Time Now: Stories of the Dreamtime, the Here and Now (Broome, WA: Magabala, 2001); Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (Sydney: Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2010); Gayle Kennedy, Me, Antman & Fleabag

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This essay focuses on Marie Munkara’s first book, Every Secret Thing, and, in particular, on a central character, Pwomiga.4 Of Rembarranga, Tiwi, and Chinese descent, Marie Munkara was born in Arnhem Land and spent the first few years of her life on Bathurst Island, off Darwin. Although she was brought up in Melbourne she returned to the Northern Territory to live in the late 1980s. Her first book, a collection of stories, won the David Unaipon Award. Pwomiga, in Every Secret Thing, has much in common with trickster figures in other world literatures and, in typical trickster style, combines humour with a “seriousness of purpose.”5 As a figure of “cultural strength and rebellion” he plays a trickster-like role in several of the stories in Every Secret Thing.6 Conventionally the trickster performs comic mediation in both worldly and spiritual realms.7 Pwomiga is a “clever man” (65) with access to spiritual knowledge, a “wise medicine man” (65–66) whose business involves “speaking to spirits and bringing rain” (28), and making love spells (30). But he also operates in the mundane world of a rural Indigenous community threatened by the encroachment of colonizers on its land. His comic work thus takes place in part at the cross-cultural interface of Indigenous and non-Indigenous exchange. If tricksters have been characterized as survivors and transformers,8 then Pwomiga is heavily invested in the maintenance of cultural practices and knowledge, and in protecting his people and culture from the depredations and appropriations of the people invading his country. He does this by directing his trickster humour at the colonizers, exposing the fissures and contradictions of the discourses that rationalize their occupation of Aboriginal land. Munkara describes Pwomiga both as a trickster (72) and a larrikin (66), the latter descriptor positioning him within a wider irreverent and iconoclastic Australian tradition of disdain for authority, propriety, and the social norms of the white middle class. Pwomiga shares many characteristics with other (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007); Vivienne Cleven, Bitin’ Back (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001). In film we see Indigenous trickster figures such as David Gulpilil’s eponymous character in the film The Tracker, dir. Rolf de Heer (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Australian Film Commission, Australian Film Finance Corporation, 2002). 4 Marie Munkara, Every Secret Thing (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009). Further page references are in the main text. 5 Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction” to Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 2. 6 Smith, Writing Tricksters, 155. 7 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford UP, 1993): 61–62. 8 Smith, Writing Tricksters, 3.

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literary tricksters and larrikins who are variously liars, jokers, con-artists, and storytellers. He is essentially a prankster, adept at making people laugh. This essay will analyse the nature of that laughter,9 and the ways in which humour works differentially in its choice of targets (variously the white mission mob and its visitors, and the Indigenous bush mob). It is based on the assumption that all humour is a social transaction, located within specific cultural and historical contexts, and that humour therefore has the power to reconfigure social relations. I draw on the work of Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor, to argue that, although the trickster is often thought of as a character, it can also be understood as a narrative style and principle.10 Vizenor describes the trickster as figuring “comic nature in a language game.”11 Tricksters index a complex “trickster aesthetics” which mobilizes multiple narrative points of view and perspectives, parody, inversions, and slippery affective dispositions.12 We could say that the “trick” that trickster characters and the aesthetics in which they are embedded perform, is to “elude [colonialist] historicism [and] racial representations.”13 They thus represent the multiple and polyvalent agencies of Indigenous peoples. Additionally, trickster aesthetics can work to facilitate a decentring of the colonialist world, thus exposing the psychical and discursive instability of whiteness. The book targets the narcissism of white people and their refusal to recognize the substantive complexity of Indigenous culture and history. Aboriginal humour addresses a range of different audiences and in doing so undertakes a range of different kinds of cultural work. The kind of critical scrutiny of whiteness we see in Every Secret Thing is particularly resonant for white audiences. Lillian Holt has suggested that Aboriginal 9

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I use the category laughter to encompass (1) the expressive (and often excessive) bodily reaction as it is figured diegetically within the text (as various characters laugh) and also as it may be prompted in readers in response to Aboriginal literature (for example, in an interview Munkara describes people laughing while reading Every Secret Thing [in Anne Brewster, Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia (Amherst NY: Cambria, 2015)]) and (2) the traces of this bodily response within the textual aesthetics. Laughter in this latter form is without direct expression or visibility/ audibility. It is not reducible to content; it is rather a general attitude towards the world— a condition or predisposition. Tyrus Miller, for example, talks about the ways “physically embodied laughter [can] become virtual in language […] sedimented in textual forms,” in his Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: U of California P, 1999): 55. Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). The Trickster of Liberty, x. The Trickster of Liberty, x. The Trickster of Liberty, xi.

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humour is a vehicle for conveying “unpalatable truths” (to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences), and through comedy, Aboriginal literature is able to critique entrenched practices and habits of whiteness in white audiences.14 Focusing on the literary and cultural debates around trickster figures in the 1980s, Vizenor argues that the comic worldview of trickster aesthetics is in opposition to and counters the tragic discourses of the Western academic enterprise which have conventionally represented Indigenous cultures according to a loss paradigm. In Australia this loss paradigm is clearly evident, for example, in the so-called “doomed race theory,” a hegemonic paradigm of scientific, legal, philosophical, and bureaucratic discourse prominent from the early decades of the nineteenth century until the period between the two World Wars.15 The idea that authentic Aboriginal people and their culture were inevitably “dying out” in the face of the superior cultural and civilizational resources of the white race has persisted in Australia. If colonialist discourse—in both populist and academic forums—has characterized Aboriginal people and culture according to tragic loss models that suggest that authentic Aboriginality can only decline, along with the apparent decline of traditional culture, trickster figures and trickster aesthetics overturn this paradigm to revivify and revitalize Indigenous cultures by affirming cultural continuity and reinvention in a wide range of contemporary cultural forms. Vizenor suggests that for Indigenous peoples, tricksters are “embodied in imagination and liberate the mind.”16 They dispense with conventional representations of shame, defeat and victimhood. In this essay, I speculate about (1) the role Pwomiga’s tricksterism performs intra- and extra-diegetically for Indigenous audiences and (2) the ways in which Munkara’s trickster aesthetics rhetorically address and critique whiteness for white audiences. Within the textual worlding of the stories, Pwomiga’s audiences are mainly Indigenous. He plays a prominent role within his community in provoking laughter. This humour is not wholly benevolent nor benign. It is often marked by Schadenfreude and aggressivity, and usually takes place at someone’s expense, often, but not exclusively, that of the muruntani.17 Within the Indigenous community of the bush mob, Pwomiga’s pranks and the laughter they give rise to are nonetheless often healing. For white characters 14

Lillian Holt, “Aboriginal Humour: A Conversational Corroboree,” in Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour, ed. Fran De Groen & Peter Kirkpatrick (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009): 86. 15 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton South Victoria: Melbourne UP, 1997): ix. 16 Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty, x. 17 This means ‘white people’. There are numerous spellings of this word in Every Secret Thing. This one seems the version most often used.

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and the book’s white readers, I argue, trickster humour functions somewhat differently than it does for the Indigenous audiences and can be challenging, because the assumed authority and entitlements of whiteness, and its depredations, are often its target. Much of the humour in Every Secret Thing plays on white ignorance and narcissism. In the story “Wurruwataka,” for example, Pwomiga, as a practical joker, resorts to the humour of a trickster aesthetics in response to the invasive visits of a patronizing anthropologist, Dr Colvin Curry (named “Wurruwataka,” the rat, by the bush mob). The story parodies white anxiety as the anthropologist adopts ridiculous mannerisms to assert his control over the people he interviews in order to reduce them to manageable objects of knowledge: “he had been told by this peers that it was essential to show dominance over these simple and childlike people or else they would think you weak and try to kill you” (69, my emphasis). The scenario outlined by Wurruwataka’s “peers” is presented at face value as preposterous and far-fetched and the caricatured portrait of the bumbling Dr Curry—who is patently far from authoritative— appears to be affectionate, depicting him as a clumsy naïf in the presence of the patient and long-suffering bush mob. However, the issue of killing (casually referred to by the narrator) and the threat of violence remain an undercurrent that does not allow readers to become too complacent about Wurruwataka’s ignorance nor too presumptuous about the endless patience of the Aboriginal people he interviews. We are informed that the bush mob allow Wurruwataka on their land only under sufferance and according to a certain code of civility that dictates that it was “bad manners to be rude and ungracious towards visitors, otherwise Wurruwataka would have had a spear in him by now” (66, my emphasis). We cannot read this spearing as an idle threat as we have already had evidence that the bush mob are more than capable of lethally dispatching those who annoy them, as the example of Perraka, one of Pwomiga’s brothers, demonstrates. It is revealed that Perraka’s death from eating “a dodgy oyster” (28) was actually the result of an “accident” organized by his wives (33).18 We are also aware that Pwomiga himself is capable of “murderous intent” (32), having burned his wives’ huts from which they barely escaped alive. So the apparently light-hearted humour does not totally conceal or mitigate the potential violence that lurks beneath its surface. As a trickster Pwomiga is not only a very funny man and practical joker, he is also potentially deadly as his name, “death adder” (28), reminds us. 18

Another potentially deadly prank that occurs within the community is when the bung is removed from Kumwarrni’s canoe (68). As he flees the sinking canoe Kumwarrni must outswim a tiger shark, much to the amusement of those witnessing the event.

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When the bush mob lure Wurruwataka away on a fishing trip, they have the opportunity to reverse roles and seize “the upper hand” (71), delivering a blow to the anthropologist whose fear of crocodiles makes his dignity and composure desert him altogether. In this situation, faced with the collapse of his hierarchized world view and the subordinated place of Indigenous people in it, the anthropologist replaces one paternalistic colonial fantasy of the bush mob—as “a kindly race [of] decent people who had welcomed him warmly into their midst” (72)—with another, equally phantasmatic racialized stereotype of them as “spiteful,” “cunning” and “conniving” (72). In order to retrieve what remains of his dignity and to reconfigure his authority (in his own eyes and those of his peers) he falls back on a self-righteous and indignant assertion of his own white “professional ethics” (72). Throughout the course of the stories, white ethics, including those of the mission mob, remain unexamined by the muruntani who profess them. As the enabling myth which subtends the authority and entitlements of whiteness, this sense of white moral superiority is hegemonic and sacrosanct. Other options—such as recognizing his own gullibility or even laughing at it—are impossible for the anthropologist and, indeed, for most of the other non-Indigenous characters in Every Secret Thing, who seem incapable of laughing at themselves.19 For the muruntani who are the butt of Pwongia’s pranks, to laugh at the compromised situations in which they find themselves would be to concede that they are fallible. A disinclination to laugh, as Victorian novelist George Meredith points out, can constitute an assertion of moral superiority; the “non-laugher,” he observes, invariably “dignifies his dislike as an objection in morality.”20 If Every Secret Thing depicts the mission mob’s refusal to laugh, a refusal which works to maintain their distance from the bush mob, it conversely demonstrates Indigenous people’s inclination to laugh. White people’s ignorance—of both themselves and of the bush mob—as I have suggested, provides the bush mob with more than one opportunity for laughter at the muruntani’s expense. It enables the trickster to reverse roles so that it is the anthropologist, for example, who is caricatured as a “gullible fool” (66), not the Indigenous people he infantilizes. Wurruwataka’s fascination and desire provide the means by which he can be tricked. In a strange reversal of Scheherazade’s storytelling, Pwomiga and the senior men make up stories about their culture (68) to tell Wurruwataka, to relieve the tedium and resentment of being pressed for knowledge by this acquisitive “unwanted visitor” on their 19 20

An exception is the hippies. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877; London: Archibald Constable, 1905): 9.

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land (64). For them, humour and laughter are powerfully enabling. If bodily escape from the demands of the intrusive anthropologist is virtually impossible, Pwomiga is able, through cunning and storytelling, to escape Wurruwataka’s predations psychically and comically to confound the anthropologist’s attempt to appropriate Indigenous language and knowledge. This is a matter of spells. The anthropologist is enchanted by the “untouched beauty and secrets of [Aboriginal] civilisation” (64). He conceives of the “ancient” knowledge he seeks to appropriate and commodify as secret and therefore believes that his own method of extracting it from his informants is skilled and artful. However, it is Pwomiga’s cunning that triumphs as the “unsuspecting” (67) anthropologist falls under the spell of his storytelling. The deception entailed in the hapless Wurruwataka’s gathering of language from his native informants is an occasion of hilarity for the bush mob. The introduction of the names of body parts and functions into the anthropologist’s lexicon of everyday items produces a bawdy, scatological humour. Kenneth Lincoln observes that disrespectful laughter is permitted through the licensed trickster.21 In Wurruwataka’s absence Pwomiga’s recounting of his pranks generates a bodily explosion of laughter among the bush mob at Wurruwataka’s gullibility. The mob are laughing so hard “they could barely breathe” (68), sniggering and coughing (69). The bodily bawdy humour that arises from the insertion of scatological terms in the anthropologist’s lexicon flies in the face of what Smith calls the “western aversion to disorder.”22 Against the backdrop of a painful narrative of Indigenous subordination and suffering, bawdy laughter is a liberating bodily imperative for the bush mob as they witness the disruption of oppressive scholarly and religious discourse. Later, when Pwomiga similarly deceives Father Macredie in his translations of the mass and hymns into language, the Indigenous congregation have “enormous difficulty [holding] in the laughter and the cheers that threatened to spill forth” (73) in the solemn church. While Father Macredie has not the “slightest inkling” (73) of what is happening, the bush mob have an excess of knowledge and a bodily excess of laughter as a result. This portrayal of white people, from the bush mob’s perspective—as haplessly unaware in interpersonal relationships, and unaware of their own loss of mastery in intersubjective space—and of the absurdity of their situation, is a characteristic of trickster aesthetics. It recalls Keith H. Basso’s early work on Western Apache joking imitations of Anglo-Americans, in which Basso 21 22

Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 291. Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 8.

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describes the Apache jokes as portraying Anglo-Americans as so deeply absorbed in themselves, and self-centred, as to be “gross incompetents in the conduct of social relations.”23 Apache jokes often depict “the whiteman” as an “improbable buffoon.”24 Caricature is also deployed in Every Secret Thing as a powerful weapon to undermine the racialized hierarchy of the colonizers and to assert the agency of Indigenous people. If the muruntani are unaware of and incompetent within the dynamics of intersubjective relations, and oblivious to the reactions of the Indigenous people, the bush mob on the other hand are allknowing. In spite of the concerted efforts of white experts to study them, they seem to understand whiteness better than the white people. The muruntani become the object of the ironic, scrutinizing narrative gaze. If the anthropologist is one of the people who “made a living trying to figure out what made the bush mob tick” (73), Pwomiga the trickster demonstrates that the bush mob are one step ahead of the colonizers in the sense that they are very much aware of what made the muruntani “tick” and deftly use this knowledge to their own advantage. For example, as the book’s title suggests, the bush mob are the custodians of the secrets of the mission mob’s disavowed sexual misdemeanours, which, for the mission mob, are the source of anxiety. The trickster aesthetics, playing on these fears and taboos, render the colonizers objects of scorn and derision. The stories deploy stereotype and caricature—devices that have been used historically to demean Aboriginal people—to assert Indigenous people’s agency, and sabotage representations of white authority. The trickster aesthetic of Every Secret Thing demonstrates how the bush mob are able in some measure to resist the incursions into and appropriations of their knowledge base. Munkara’s depiction of the bush mob recalls Martin Nakata’s description of Torres Strait Islander people’s strategies of resisting colonization—their “refusal via disobedience, indifference, and minimal co-­ operation with the emerging order as they tried to negotiate the new on their own terms.”25 In Every Secret Thing the bush mob resist the Mission’s incursions and maintain a sphere of privacy in effect by camouflage, by mimicking what they know the muruntani expect of them.26 They seem to have perfected the art of telling muruntani what they want to hear (65) thus ­deflecting the 23 24 25 26

Keith H. Basso, Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache (New York: Cambridge UP, 1979): 54, 58, 48. Portraits of “The Whiteman,” 64. Martin N. Nakata, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007): 207–208. See Katherine E. Russo’s discussion of camouflage in her Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 136.

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invasive will to know and classify them, and maintaining a level of autonomy. Nakata describes the Queensland government’s understanding of the “co-­ operative” Islander as being a “reasonable” person who could see the logic of his administrators. The “unco-operative” Islander on the other hand was someone who refused to assimilate to this logic. Nakata suggests that these two Islanders could be one and the same person “responding to different circumstances.”27 In Pwomiga’s case, I would suggest, we see the same person viewed from different perspectives. While the mission mob might read him as co-operative, his subversive tricksterism is plainly visible to the bush mob. In the trickster aesthetic of the stories we see that Aboriginal frameworks of knowledge are actively and assertively maintained. We have seen, in the instance of Father Macredie’s translations, that Aboriginal knowledge remains preserved through lingo which remains inaccessible to the mission mob. Father Macredie’s translated mass comprises a record of the bush mob’s exploits and tributes to its people (73). Despite the Western systems of naming, moreover, the bush mob retain their own naming practices which defy the Western system. Dr Colin Curry’s assigned name, Wurruwataka, remains secret from the mission mob, for example. Pwomiga’s proper name, Ponkiwutjumaybruguduwayu, and the multiple “Munungas” in another family threaten to destabilize Wurruwataka’s notational apparatus. The muruntani’s system seems odd and illogical from the normalized narrative perspective of the bush mob. For example, having become habituated to seeing Pwomiga through the bush mob’s eyes, when we are belatedly introduced (in an aside, in the last story) to the name Father Voleur bestows on him, “Joseph,” the incongruity between the biblical cosmology and the Indigenous one is comic, especially since we know that his Indigenous name means “death adder” (28). I have observed that the trickster became a dominant figure in postcolonial literary studies of the late twentieth century. In an important recent study, NunatuKavut scholar Kristina Fagan argues that trickster figures within this body of critical work became normalized and idealized as “fixed and static signs of Indianness.”28 The figure of the trickster in the critical discourse thus came to function as a strategy of containment, reducing the Indigenous “other” to “pan-tribal” archetypes which elided the complexities of Indigenous peoples and their histories.29 As an antidote to the culturalist trend of the 27 Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, 208. 28 Helen Hoy, paraphrased in Kristina Fagan, “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster? An Introduction,” in Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, ed. Deanna Reder & Linda M. Morra (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010): 5. 29 “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster?” 5.

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1980s and 1990s, Fagan proposes a mode of reading and critique that ­situates Indigenous ­literatures within the specific cultural and political concerns of particular Indigenous nations. She argues that Indigenous literary texts are not wholly individualistic in the way that Western literary critical discourse has characterized Western literature. She suggests that it is necessary for non-Indigenous critics to recognize and acknowledge that Indigenous texts emerge from a communal base. Not to do so is rhetorically to sever these literary texts from the Indigenous cultures and politics that have produced them, that is, to sever them from struggles over land, language, cultural traditions, and Indigenous governance, and the concrete consequences of these struggles for ­Indigenous lives. Culturalist scholarship, in other words, risks reducing and containing Indigeneity as a non-challenging, commodifiable form of difference. To address Fagan’s recommendations here I acknowledge that in my discussion of Every Secret Thing I am limited in my capability to provide an informed exposition of the specific cultural or spiritual traditions or the political history of the Indigenous nation in which Pwomiga and, indeed, the stories themselves, are located. However, in taking up Fagan’s statement that the trickster in Indigenous literatures is often “an ‘embodied’ figure with roots in indigenous lives,”30 I do observe that as a character within the fictional worlding of the stories, Pwomiga is firmly rooted within the historical contingencies of the “bush mob” who are modelled loosely on the Bathurst Island community, and that his character is based in part on one of Munkara’s grandfathers, Pierre.31 Some of the stories featured in Every Secret Thing are stories Pierre told Munkara, and they refer to actual people and historical events.32 Generically, the line between fiction and oral family narrative is blurred in Every Secret Thing as it is in much Indigenous literature. This alerts us to the ethical imperative not simply to aestheticize the textuality of these stories but to position them, as Fagan suggests, as social texts issuing from a communal base. In talking about the provenance of the stories Munkara affirms the ongoing currency of anecdotes and storytelling, and the vital, sustaining role they play within Indigenous familial and community networks. Every Secret Thing might be read as an affirmation of kinship, and a homage and tribute to Pierre, who was an important historical figure in the community and the author’s own life. Moreover, Munkara says that her own sense of humour is similar to her grandfather’s, affirming the continuity of a significant familial cultural 30 31 32

“What’s the Trouble with the Trickster?” 7. As Munkara states in Anne Brewster, “Marie Munkara,” in Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia (Amherst NY: Cambria, 2015): e-book. Marie Munkara, quoted in Anne Brewster, “Marie Munkara,” e-book.

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resource.33 Her affirmation of this oral tradition recalls Gerald Vizenor’s comment that trickster satire is a “dream voice out of time” that forges “magical connections with oral tradition” in the contemporary world.34 Munkara describes the importance and currency of humour in her community and its role in providing a way of dealing with horror.35 She talks admiringly about the ability of her family to adapt historically in the face of circumstances they do not always understand and over which they have little control. In this context trickster humour can be seen as a dynamic response to the threat to culture and lifestyle that colonization represents. Many Indigenous writers have commented on this. In the American context, Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen has said that “humour is the best and sharpest weapon we’ve always had against the ravages of conquest and assimilation” and that “it is the spirit of the trickster that keeps Indians alive and vital in the face of horror.”36 As I have suggested, Kristina Fagan recommends a non-culturalist analysis of trickster aesthetics that examines the social functions and uses of humour.37 She argues that the question as to “how and why the trickster figure is actually used” should be foregrounded in critical discussions.38 My interest in this chapter lies in thinking about the cultural work that the humour and laughter generated by trickster aesthetics undertakes differentially for Indigenous and non-Indigenous (especially settler) constituencies. Pwomiga as a trickster figure operates both within an Indigenous community—as figured within the worlding of the stories (which index the extradiegetic Indigenous community and audiences of Munkara’s work)—and within the intersubjective scene of cross-racial reading. Trickster humour can function for Indigenous communities as protest, critique, cultural consolidation, and celebration. What work does it perform for non-Indigenous audiences? If, as Paul Lewis suggests, intergroup humour can redefine the relationship between groups, then Aboriginal literature can be a powerful apparatus for reconfiguring cross-cultural relations.39 I suggest that it does this by destabilizing colonialist modes of whiteness. 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

“Marie Munkara.” Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988): 46. Brewster, “Marie Munkara,” e-book. Quoted in Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 7; Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston MA: Beacon, 1986): 158. Fagan, “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster?” 6. “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster?” 9. Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 1989): 37.

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Glenda R. Carpio makes the point that traditionally in the usa the humour of blacks has not always been shared with white audiences.40 She argues that black humour was downplayed in the moral and militant culture of the ­civil-rights movement.41 To some extent a similar situation can be seen in the ­Aboriginal literature produced in the early years of the Aboriginal cultural renaissance of the late-1960s and the 1970s, and the life writing and fiction which followed.42 However, the recent proliferation of Aboriginal humour in various artistic forms, and the growth of its non-Indigenous audiences, indicate a marked rise in humour. How has this humour engaged its non-Indigenous audiences? Since Freud’s foundational work The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905) we are well aware of the dynamic psychical work undertaken by jokes and humour, and of the slippery relationship between participants in humour and the act of laughter.43 But what is the nature of this slippery relationship when humour is staged cross-racially by Aboriginal practitioners? I have argued that, by engaging the white reader cross-culturally, Aboriginal humour renders the relationality of teller/reader/butt of joke ambiguous.44 Although I would concede that the effects of Aboriginal humour on non-­Indigenous audiences are to some degree unpredictable and ungovernable, it is possible to speculate about how the trickster aesthetics and the trickster’s comic world view in Every Secret Thing engage and critique colonialist whiteness. I have suggested that much of the humour in Every Secret Thing targets white characters, playing on white fear, fascination, and ignorance (although it encompasses the Aboriginal characters who are often the butt of laughter and jokes, and of the practical jokes). In satirizing white anxieties Munkara exposes the contradictions and limits of the colonial enterprise. The irony of the trickster aesthetics and the bush mob’s narrative point of view inverts the heroic myths of the civilizing mission and the missionary enterprise, to reveal their fault lines. The caricatured portraits of the mission mob bear witness to the failings of the grand colonial project of whiteness and the fact that it 40 41 42 43 44

Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humour in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford UP, 2008): 22. Although Carpio refers to the US context, the same is true, I would argue, in Australia. Laughing Fit to Kill, 20. A notable exception would be many of the plays produced during this period. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Pelican Freud Library vol. 6, tr. James Strachey & Angela Richards (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905; Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6, 1905; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). Anne Brewster, “Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in Nyungar Writer Alf Taylor’s Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading,” in Decolonizing the Landscape. Indigenous Cultures in Australia, ed. Beate Neumeier & Kay Schaffer (Cross/Cultures 173; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014): 233–53.

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delivered, in this region, a lose/lose outcome: white ignominy on the one hand and Indigenous loss on the other. The appropriate mode for this vision of white failure is tragicomedy, and laughter is the white bodily imperative issuing from it. If scholars of black humour have theorized “why black people need to laugh,” I would suggest that it is instructive to speculate further as to why and how white people need to laugh with the very bleak Indigenous humour of which they are often the butt.45 Smith suggests that trickster humour issues both an invitation and a challenge, and I would suggest this is especially true for the white reader.46 If the title of Every Secret Thing foregrounds the book’s project of outing the disavowal of the historical dysfunctionality of the church (its repressed “secrets”) and the civilizing mission of coloniality, its humour invites the settler nation to “own” these historical failures and injustices. How does humour facilitate the white nation “owning” its history? Virginia Richter notes that one of the primary characteristics of laughter is its contagion and uncontrollability, which make it difficult to maintain the distance between the teller and butt, and the audience and butt.47 Munkara herself describes humour as “disarming”: I think the wonderful thing about humour is that it’s so disarming. A humorous situation can arise out of something that you would not expect to be humorous. And when you’re not expecting it, that’s when you are at most of a disadvantage because you don’t have something to come back with.48 Laughter and humour, by drawing raced and white subjects into a readerly proximity, dissolve the disaggregation that the racialized hierarchy of white supremacy endorses. Joseph Boskin quotes a stand-up comic summarizing his goal as an American Indian performer to get “people to laugh with us instead

45 46 47

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Mike Chasar, “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes,” American Literature 80.1 (March 2008): 71. Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 24. Virginia Richter, “Laughter and Aggression: Desire and Derision in a Postcolonial Context,” in Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 65. Marie Munkara, quoted in Anne Brewster, “Marie Munkara,” in Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia (Amherst NY: Cambria, 2015): e-book.

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of at us.”49 In disarming its white audience, Aboriginal humour offers readers access to material that is not funny at all;50 it gives mobility to ideas that might otherwise be taboo in white public space. Humour and laughter command white people’s attention almost in spite of themselves, thereby destabilizing white control of intersubjective space and, concomitantly, of public ­discourse. Further, as I have suggested, Aboriginal literary humour makes white people laugh at themselves. In his study of Native American jokes about white people, Keith H. Basso argues that these jokes prompt white people to “laugh at [them]selves laughing with the natives laughing at [them].”51 Noël Carroll argues that when we “fall” for jokes, part of our appreciation of the joke is precisely our recognition of our “fall.”52 The same is true, I would argue, of white audiences’ response to Aboriginal humour. If we consider Munkara’s comments above—about the ability of humour to disarm—in a cross-racial context, positioning the white audience as “you,” we are reminded that some white people, when confronted with the damning, albeit comic, picture of the failures of the civilizing mission, will not have many options in terms of a riposte that would enable them to retain a modicum of dignity. One such option, which Mukara’s work offers, is laughter. Laughter is, in some measure, governed by an ethic of generosity brokered by Indigenous comic artists, even though this humour is often accompanied, as I have pointed out, by a measure of aggression and Schadenfreude. White people’s laughter at/with Munkara’s schadenfreudig humour, of which they are the butt, allows the white subject a simultaneous bodily recognition of the Indigene’s suffering, and the white subject’s own embeddedness in the culture that has produced that suffering. The white subject is also afforded a measure of dignity that that humour’s ethic of generosity bestows on both the butt and the author of the humour. In this way humour is an alternative to the language of trauma.53 Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the tragicomic vision of Munkara’s work accommodates trauma and ruin without the audience 49 50 51 52 53

Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1997): 175. Linda Hutcheon makes this point about irony in Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994): 26. Quoted in Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford UP, 1993): 101. Noël Carroll, “On Jokes,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16.1 (September 1991): 295. Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill, 13. For a further discussion of the figuring of white trauma in Aboriginal literature, see Anne Brewster, “Negotiations of Violence and Anger in Aboriginal Novelist Melissa Lucashenko’s Hard Yards,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8.3 (November 2014): 339–53.

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being overwhelmed, disabled, or rendered immobile by it. In laughing, a white audience relinquishes control and mastery of intersubjective space—they acknowledge the agency and accomplishment of the Indigenous joker and the joke. As Vizenor puts it, “the active reader salutes tribal tricksters.”54 I do not mean to suggest, in this analysis, that humour creates one big happy family. As Konrad Lorenz points out, if laughter forms a bond, it simultaneously draws a line.55 Although they may sometimes occur in synchrony, I have attempted in this essay to differentiate between the contexts of black laughter and white laughter, and to suggest that there is usually a marking of difference and of protest in the tragicomic mode of Aboriginal literature. Smith observes that, conventionally, the trickster can escape virtually any situation.56 However, within the tragicomic aesthetics of Every Secret Thing, escape is not an option for Pwomiga. If tragicomedy is a mode that figures the failures and depredations of the white colonizing mission, it also figures the limits of the trickster whose powers are “unable to dam the rivers of change” (73) or avert “the age of destruction” (171) that follows in the wake of Indigenous dispossession by the Mission. As Carpio suggests, although tragicomedy can arouse laughter, it is generally dissociated from gaiety; it can in fact be a form of mourning.57 As what Vizenor calls a “warrior clown,” in the last story of Every Secret Thing, “The Movies,” Pwomiga bravely calls the church’s bluff in his efforts to “unravel the mystery of dying and rising from the dead” (177).58 As a sacred trickster shape-changer, he paints himself white to ensure that he looks like the muruntani in order to talk to god about this mystery (178). Then, in a re-enactment of the last supper, he ritually consumes the poisonous tapirtapunga seeds (177). His courageous death sacrificially proves for the bush mob “what they had suspected” (178): namely, the falsehood of the myth of white men rising from the dead promulgated by Hollywood movies and the church’s dogma alike.59 54 55 56 57 58 59

Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988): xi. Konrad Lorenz, quoted in Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1997): 201. Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 7. Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humour in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford UP, 2008). Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty, 34. Another particularly egregious example of the fallacious application of theological logic is when the flu epidemic—which kills many of the bush mob—is attributed by the mission mob to the bush mob’s non-attendance at church (112). Munkara alludes to this event in the story about the movies, employing a sardonic gallows humour which reveals the Mission’s necropolitics, in her description of the bush mob being bribed with movies to

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The disillusionment and “slow downwards spiral of despair” (179) that follow Pwomiga’s death inflect the sardonic humour of Every Secret Thing with a note of pathos. Tragi-comic trickster aesthetics often incorporate an element of protest. The tragic overtones of Pwomiga’s death bitterly reflect Munkara’s anger at and disillusionment with the Catholic church.60 However, as I have suggested, trickster aesthetics are polyvalent, and this bitter event is dignified and uplifted by Pwomiga’s heroism. If Cree writer Tomson Highway has said that Christ is to Western culture what the trickster is to native culture, then, like other trickster figures, Pwomiga shares the sacred power of Christ that Thomson identifies, and his celebratory exploits live on.61 The trickster aesthetics of Every Secret Thing and its biting satire of the muruntani mitigate against Pwomiga being read as a victim, and indeed challenge the victim/victimizer binary in settlerIndigenous relations. If colonialism is “a machine of war, of bureaucracy and administration” that has produced “Aboriginal human tragedy,” Indigenous humour attests to the autonomy of Indigenous agency and the ability of the Indigenous comic imaginary to celebrate Indigenous survival and regeneration.62 In doing this it also has the power to rearrange the historical sensibilities of non-Indigenous audiences and to reconfigure social relations. Comedy and seriousness are not opposites in the tragicomic vision, rather, they co-exist within a dynamic and diacritical logic of inclusion. Works Cited Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston MA: Beacon, 1986). Basso, Keith H. Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache (New York: Cambridge UP, 1979). Boskin, Joseph. Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1997).

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attend church and avoid the wrath of god: “‘If he loves us that much why can’t he let us go to the movies?’ they grumbled. ‘And then he can strike us down with lightning afterwards’” (176). See Anne Brewster, “Marie Munkara.” Kristina Fagan, “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster?” 4. Sue Stanton, “Letter from Darwin,” Borderlands 8.1 (2009): 7, 4, http://www.borderlands .net.au/vol8no1_2009/stanton_letter.pdf (accessed 15 January 2017).

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Brewster, Anne. “Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in Nyungar Writer Alf Taylor’s Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading,” in Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia, ed. Beate Neumeier & Kay Schaffer (Cross/Cultures 173; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014): 233–53. Brewster, Anne. “Marie Munkara,” in Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia (Amherst NY: Cambria, 2015): e-book. Brewster, Anne. “Negotiations of Violence and Anger in Aboriginal Novelist Melissa Lucashenko’s Hard Yards,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8.3 (November 2014): 339–53. Carpio, Glenda R. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humour in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford UP, 2008). Carroll, Noël. “On Jokes,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16.1 (September 1991): 280–301. Chasar, Mike. “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes,” American Literature 80.1 (March 2008): 57–81. Clark, Maureen. “Unmasking Mudrooroo,” Kunapipi 23.2 (2001): 48–62. Cleven, Vivienne. Bitin’ Back (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001). De Heer, Rolf (dir.). The Tracker (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Australian Film Commission, Australian Film Finance Corporation, 2002). Fagan, Kristina. “What’s the Trouble with the Trickster? An Introduction,” in Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, ed. Deanna Reder & Linda M. Morra (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010): 3–20. Freud, Sigmund. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Pelican Freud Library vol. 6, tr. James Strachey & Angela Richards (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905; Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6, 1905; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). Holt, Lillian. “Aboriginal Humour: A Conversational Corroboree,” in Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour, ed. Fran De Groen & Peter Kirkpatrick (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009): 81–94. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994). Kennedy, Gayle. Me, Antman & Fleabag (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007). Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 1989). Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford UP, 1993). McGregor, Russell. Imagined Destinies. Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 1997). Meredith, George. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877; London: Archibald Constable, 1905). Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: U of California P, 1999).

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Munkara, Marie. Every Secret Thing (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009). Nakata, Martin N. Disciplining the Savages. Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). Oboe, Annalisa. “Introduction” to Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Cross/Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): vii–xxi. Reichl, Susanne, & Mark Stein. “Introduction” to Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 1–23. Richter, Virginia. “Laughter and Aggression: Desire and Derision in a Postcolonial Context,” in Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 61–72. Russo, Katherine E. Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance (Sydney: Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2010). Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997). Stanton, Sue. “Letter from Darwin,” Borderlands 8.1 (2009): http://www.borderlands .net.au/vol8no1_2009/stanton_letter.pdf (accessed 15 January 2017). Taylor, Alf. Long Time Now: Stories of the Dreamtime, the Here and Now (Broome, WA: Magabala, 2001). Vizenor, Gerald. The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006).

Chapter 7

Claude McKay and the Pestilential City The Metropolis, the Clinic, the Crisis Anne Collett Born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, in 1890, Festus Claudius McKay grew to adulthood in what by all accounts (including his own) was something of a rural idyll. His “Green Hills of Jamaica” are an Edenic garden to which he will return repeatedly in his poetry. Before leaving for the usa in August 1912, McKay had published two volumes of poetry in Jamaican English: Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912).1 Although these books would come to be considered ground-breaking, at the time of first publication they received a mixed response; consequently, McKay wanted to prove himself “a real poet”.2 His recitations at island literary groups had been greeted with some reservation, which he felt at the time. He writes: I used to think I would show them something. Someday I would write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them because they thought I was not serious, simply because I wrote poems in the dialect which they did not consider profound.3 He later recalled speaking to Frank Harris of his “desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There one was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life.”4 McKay would certainly achieve his aim of finding an appreciative, larger audience, and indeed of amazing and confounding those “back home”. But the man dubbed the “proud child of black Jamaica, diehard bohemian, globetrotting social radical” wrote few poems in celebration of the cosmopolitan

1 Claude McKay, Constab Ballads (London: Watts, 1912); Songs of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Aston W. Gardner, 1912). 2 Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State UP, 1987): 58. 3 Claude McKay, “My Green Hills of Jamaica,” in My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories (London & Kingston: Heinemann Educational, 1979): 86–87. 4 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937; London: Pluto, 1985): 20.

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cities in which he lived the remainder of his life.5 Having left home it would seem that he never found himself truly at home again. The cities in which he led an expatriate life remained, in large part, something external, against which he railed despite occasional declarations of love. The rural idyll of his native Jamaica was kept close to his heart—Jamaica was his lost beloved to which he clung throughout his peripatetic life. But “s/he” would be corrupted by the city whore at his moment of greatest need, a betrayal that proved, against expectation, to be revelatory and regenerative. 1

The City and the Country

In the spring of 1922, McKay’s Harlem Shadows was published to great acclaim.6 This was the first book of poems to be published in the usa since McKay’s arrival there in 1912, the volume that would see him declared “the greatest living poet of Negro blood in America today”; “a real poet and a great poet.”7 Harlem Shadows included most of the poems published in the earlier volume, Spring in New Hampshire, and a selection of other poems written between 1917 and 1922.8 Wayne Cooper divides the collection thematically into three categories: “nostalgic poems concerning Jamaica and nature, love poems, and poems bearing on his radical experience.”9 Of interest to this essay are the “nostalgic poems”—poems that conjure moments of escape to a Jamaican idyll in the midst of the noise and bustle of a “foreign” and cosmopolitan city. “The Tropics in New York” are represented in the eponymous poem by the bananas, gingerroot, cocoa, alligator pears, tangerines, mangoes, and grapefruit in the shop window, which remind the poet-narrator of “fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies,” as well as “old familiar ways” for which he hungers.10 Momentarily, the poet-narrator is overcome by emotion, bows his head, and weeps. The sentiment is repeated in “Home Thoughts” in which, quite suddenly, “Amid the city’s noises” he recalls “mangoes leaning o’er the river’s brink,” and a childhood friend who climbs the tree to pick the

5

William Maxwell, “Introduction” to McKay, Complete Poems, ed. William Maxwell (Urbana & Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2003): xi. 6 Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922). 7 Hubert Harrison and Walter White, both quoted in Cooper, Claude McKay, 165. 8 Claude McKay, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1920). 9 Cooper, Claude McKay, 164. 10 Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York,” Complete Poems, 154.

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“gold fruits ebon-speckled.”11 (There are a multitude of similar examples.) Although McKay would declare in 1920, “I shall return again; I shall return / […] / To ease my mind of long, long years of pain,” he never returned to Jamaica.12 This is the longing for home that sweeps over many an expatriate, but it is also the stuff of Romantic poetry in which unspoiled Nature is the Eden we have “always already” lost to the modern city. The products of rural Jamaica “behind the glass” are symbol of an exoticism for sale in New York that is also suggestive of the poet himself and his wares (sexual, political and literary); yet it might also be that the Jamaica of memory is generative of an indulgent nostalgia that was best kept in its place, behind the glass. I am not convinced that McKay actually wanted to return to the perhaps less-than-rose-tinted reality of these memories; and behind glass they could be conveniently viewed, analysed—like exhibits in formaldehyde—and used at will. These “tropical memories” might be understood to act as Wordsworthian “spots of time”—to be brought to mind like the daffodils, “In vacant or in pensive mood” to “flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”13 They are the stuff of poetry-making. In the poem “North and South” the poet begins with the declaration, “O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!”14 Those “sweet tropic lands” offer a convenient foil to the poet/person McKay is and that which he was or might be. McKay’s claim to a “vagabond soul […] an outlaw soul that cannot reconcile itself to the fact of limitation to any one country, or allegiance to any one nation” is given a necessary anchor (necessary for the modern poet) in a Romantic past out of which his rebellion is born, but to which he also owes allegiance.15 But perhaps I am too literary, and too cynical, for although the numerous expressions of desire for return ‘home’ might also be read as the product of lonely moments of self-pity that are as quickly superseded by the knock at the door that brings an invitation to party—McKay is also named the “playboy of the New Negro Renaissance”16 and one of the 11 12 13

14 15 16

Claude McKay, “Home Thoughts,” Complete Poems, 156. Claude McKay, “I Shall Return,” Complete Poems, 167. William Wordsworth refers to “spots of time” in the 1805 version of The Prelude, Book xi. Here he writes: “There are in our existence spots of time, / Which with distinct preeminence retain / A renovating Virtue” (lines 258–60); “This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks / Among those passages of life in which / We have had deepest feeling […] Such moments worthy of all gratitude / Are scattered every where, taking their date / From our first childhood” (lines 269–76). See Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (Norton Critical Editions; London & New York: W.W. Norton, 2014): 353. William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 418. Claude McKay, “North and South,” Complete Poems, 159. Claude McKay, Letter to Harold Jackman, quoted by Maxwell, “Introduction,” xi. “Introduction,” xi.

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Parisian ‘Lost Generation’ along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald—it should be acknowledged that McKay’s very public and celebrated commitment to Communism resulted in what William Maxwell describes as a “half-­compulsory” exile, particularly in the years from 1923–33. The fbi blocked McKay’s return to America, while the British Foreign Office barred his admission to Jamaica and any other British colonies or protectorates.17 However, the authenticity of emotions and desires espoused in the poems is not at issue here. What is of interest to the literary scholar, rather than say the biographer, is the poetic use McKay makes of ʻhis’ declared nostalgia for the lost Eden of rural Jamaica (lost, that is, to the émigré), and the purpose of the oppositional part played by the city. Again, the expatriate’s city, like the native’s countryside, functions as a kind of poetic fuel: McKay chose to live in the city, the modern cosmopolitan city in which emigrants could make a life of a kind and quality unavailable to them ‘at home’. In 1935 he would write a poem celebrating cities: Oh cities are a fever in my blood, And all their moods find lodgement in my breast, Whether they sweep me onward like a flood Or torture me as an unwanted guest, With wormwood flavouring my scanty foods, I love all cities, I love their changing moods.18 This love that manifests as a “fever in the blood” has a very particular significance associated with the availability of sex in the city and the celebrity status McKay enjoyed during the heady days of the Third International (to which I will return). More commonly, McKay’s poetry expresses antipathy toward the city: the subway air is “sick and heavy,” a “captive wind that moans for fields and sea”—creating a segue into a recollection of the Caribbean Sea where “native schooners drift,” “fields lie idle in the dew drenched night, / And the Trades float above them fresh and free.”19 In the poem “Dawn in New York” the poet’s spirit unexpectedly “thrills” to the spirit of the city—why? Because this is the city—like Wordsworth’s London seen from Westminster Bridge at dawn—when it is least city: “The mighty city is asleep, / No pushing crowd, no tramping, tramping feet.”20 17 18 19 20

“Introduction,” xvii. Claude McKay, “Cities,” Complete Poems, 223. Claude McKay, “Subway Wind,” Complete Poems, 178. “Dear God!” exclaims Wordsworth, “the very houses seem asleep / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”—“This City now doth, like a garment wear / The beauty of the ­morning: silent, bare” (William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,

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McKay’s apparent abhorrence of the city is deep-seated, finding, for example, expression in the much earlier Constab Ballads. In these poems, the decadent, corrupt, and violent slums of Kingston are juxtaposed to “de country woods” where the “midnight girl / Wid her saucy cock-up lips” roamed “Wid a free an’ stainless soul.” The city is associated with sexual promiscuity but more, with the unfree body “for sale”—“Dere’s no better time for her / Dan a policeman pay-day.”21 Through most of McKay’s poems from 1912 to 1922, the city is external to the poet-narrator: he expresses sympathy for those down-trodden and poor, those who are held hostage to the claims the city makes upon them, but he is able to hold the city at bay, free to examine and expose. In the poem “The White City,” the poet-narrator declares, “‘I will not toy with it nor bend an inch’”: I see the mighty city through a mist – The strident trains that speed the goaded mass, The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed, The fortressed port through which the great ships pass, The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate, Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate.22 But he is not only bolstered by his hate of the white power of the city of Manhattan and his contempt for the white “women and men of garish nights” who are rendered “grotesque” by their willingness to engage in the coloured flesh trade; he is fortified by the paradisiacal Clarendon that he keeps locked within himself and from the unblemished natural spring of which he drinks. This “Eden” is both his poetic and personal well-spring, the source of endless rejuvenation. But what is interesting about this poem is the poet’s admission that the city is also the font of poetry. He claims it gives him noble purpose: nurtured “deep in the secret chambers of [his] heart” this “dark Passion” feeds him “vital blood.” The city, as protagonist, the fierce opponent with whom he duals, is necessary to his poetic life, and to the sustenance of his political, social, and sexual life; but it is difficult to maintain control of such a dark passion. Passion might be understood as poetic, political, and sexual. The availability of sex in the city—New York, London, Paris, Moscow—and the degree to which McKay availed himself of it, is given Romantic gloss in his poetry, hinted

21 22

S­ eptember 3, 1802,” in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 402–03); Claude McKay, “Dawn in New York,” Complete Poems, 172–73. Claude McKay, “Pay Day,” Complete Poems, 112. Claude McKay, “The White City,” Complete Poems, 162.

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at in his memoir, and made plain in his letters to friends. Within six months of the celebrated publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay decided to take the big step to visit the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, McKay recalls the evening his wife made a sudden reappearance in his life after seven years’ absence, an appearance that apparently “upset his plans” and from which he wanted to make a quick escape. He writes: There were consequences of the moment that I could not face. I desired to be footloose, and felt impelled to start going again. Where? Russia signalled. A vast upheaval and a grand experiment […] Go and see, was the command. Escape from the pit of sex and poverty, from domestic death, from the cul-de-sac of self-pity, from the hot syncopated fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating ghetto of color consciousness.23 The trip to Russia (and subsequent attendance at the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International) proved a great adventure. After some initial difficulty and discomfort, McKay awoke in Moscow to find himself a cause célèbre—“the black man of the famous poem” (“If We Must Die”).24 He writes: Oh, I remember the magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me sailing on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow […]. In the lonely night I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the morning to find myself the center of pageantry and in the grand Byzantine city. The photograph of my black face was everywhere among the highest Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the city. I was […] installed in one of the most comfortable and best heated motels in Moscow.25 The bed might have been comfortable, and indeed, it offered an escape from “domestic death,” but not from “the pit of sex.” The bed was, according to McKay, responsible for the illness that plagued him in the last days of his stay in Russia, through the early summer in Germany in 1923 and arrival in Paris in late autumn. Apparently, “it was the linen that done it”—being “clean” but 23 24

Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, 150. “If We Must Die” was first published in the Liberator in July 1919 “in the more graphically emphatic original version that jolted the black world” (William Maxwell, Notes to Complete Poems, 332). Maxwell remarks that “A book can and should be written on the history of the reception and appropriation of this sonnet, McKay’s most influential, over a century of world war, revolution, and colonial resistance” (Notes, 332). 25 McKay, A Long Way from Home, 170.

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full of lice carried by “the peasants fresh from the country” who replaced the servants of the privileged classes; “many were neither competent nor clean.”26 This is the story he tells in his memoir, but letters to his friends reveal the knowledge that he had contracted syphilis and recognition of the means by which it might have been contracted—not the bed so much as the bedfellows. He declares that, “Although I went around to all sorts of places I was quite discriminating and had fewer affairs than you imagine! But the best of persons get caught sometimes.”27 It is not surprising that McKay should be wary of publicly admitting to contracting syphilis. Writing in 1920, the medical physician John Stokes names syphilis “the third great plague,” tuberculosis and cancer being the first and second respectively. It is estimated (conservatively) that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, between ten and fifteen percent of the population in the usa suffered from syphilis. But the impact of medicine upon the “plague” was negligible, despite major advances made by August von Wassermann (whose blood-serum test could determine if an individual had syphilis) and Paul ­Ehrlich (who discovered an effective treatment in the drug a­ rsphenamine/ salvarsan), because the disease was still “shrouded in obscurity.”28 Stokes speaks of the disease as being “entrenched behind a barrier of silence,” as having “a thousand times its actual power to destroy” because it is “armed, by our own ignorance and false shame.”29 To name syphilis, and thereby allude to the sexual act or worse, sexual promiscuity, contravened the “boundaries of decency.” Even more damaging was the belief that syphilis only affected immoral persons.30 In addition, syphilis was believed in America to be a “quintessential black disease,” thus African Americans were considered to be “a notoriously syphilis-soaked race”—a belief that derived from myths about black sexual promiscuity and neglect of

26 27 28

29 30

A Long Way from Home, 231. Letter to Alain Locke, 1 May 1924, quoted in Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State UP, 1987): 200. For more extensive discussion, see Nicholas Jabbour, “Syphilis from 1880–1920: A Public Health Nightmare and the First Challenge to Medical Ethics,” Essays in History (2012): http://www.essaysinhistory.com/articles/2012/103 (accessed 10 March 2017); see also Terra Ziporyn, Disease in the American Popular Press: The Case of Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and Syphilis, 1870–1920 (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1988). John H. Stokes, Preface to The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People (Philadelphia PA: W.B. Saunders, 1917): 7. See Jabbour, “Syphilis from 1880 to 1920,” and Ziporyn, Disease in the American Popular Press.

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personal hygiene.31 It is no wonder then that McKay chose to refrain from identifying the disease in the poems he wrote partly while undergoing treatment over the course of six weeks in a Paris clinic, and partly on reflection over a few years thereafter (1923–27). By the 1930s, McKay had begun to refer to these (ten) poems collectively under the title “The Clinic” but they were never published as such: some remained in manuscript form, while others were published sin­ gly in various magazines during the 1920s. The remainder of this ­essay will focus on “The Desolate City,” a poem of eight stanzas, set in the middle of the Clinic group and written in 1926. 2

The Pestilential City

“The Desolate City” was included in full in McKay’s memoir, A Long Way from Home, but nowhere does either the poem or the memoir name syphilis. McKay himself describes the poem as “largely symbolic: a composite evocation of the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.”32 Rather than reading McKay’s claim to symbolism as a deflection that serves to keep the poet’s personal history in the dark, I want to give it credence. So although the poem might be read as McKay’s representation and response (physical and emotional) to syphilis—and by extension the collective poems of “The Clinic”—it can also be read as a reflection on poesis. “The Desolate City” marks a change to McKay’s poetic that is both personal and formal, born of a moment of crisis, and the period of rest and reflection that follows. Although the poem can be read as the classic battle between good and evil—the innocent country boy corrupted by the big bad city (as in Wordsworth’s poem “Michael”)—the reading that follows is one that works both with and against this grain.33 “The Desolate City” begins: My spirit is a pestilential city, With misery triumphant everywhere, Glutted and baffled with hopes and human pity. Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there:34 31

James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (London: Free Press, 1981): 24, 29. 32 McKay, A Long Way from Home, 231. 33 William Wordsworth, “Michael, a Pastoral Poem,” in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 145–56. 34 McKay, “The Desolate City,” in Complete Poems, 203.

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Although much of what follows appears to allude to the body under attack, with reference to fever, decay, and emaciation, it is important to recognize that it is the poet-narrator’s spirit that has become diseased. It is a sickness of soul that threatens the patient (and poet), not a sickness of the body. The body is relatively easily cured—certainly that was the medical prognosis and effect of McKay’s treatment for syphilis in Paris in 1923, given he was in the early stages of the disease. McKay recalls the French specialist telling him that he has “a very wonderful constitution” and that he would “recover all right” if he lived “quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big cities.”35 But in this poem, it is the spirit, and what might also be read as the poetic well-spring, that have taken a deadly blow. The sewers of this pestilential city are bursting to the point where they “ooze up from below” to “spread their loathsome substance through its lanes,” “blocking all the motions of its veins.”36 This might represent not only the poet-narrator’s feelings of self-disgust and despair, but also the blockage of poetic inspiration—as though the fountain of Mt Helicon, or in McKay’s case, the waterfall of the Clarendon hills, had been so carelessly treated as to have been stopped at its source. What is lost to the city/ spirit is the vital life of the tropics: its luxuriance of leaves is “shrivelled silver” and become trodden underfoot “Like wilting creepers trailing underneath / The chalky yellow of a tropic way.” The tropical fountains “no longer spurt,” no longer offer refreshment to the parched spirit/city, with the result that “All is neglected and decayed within.”37 What is particularly interesting about this second stanza is the admission that the spirit/city has fortified itself against the “clean waters” that “beat against its high-walled shore / In furious force,” “but cannot enter in.” Not only has the city become internalized, it has brought into being a kind of siege mentality, bent upon keeping out that which has given it life. Because the rejuvenating poetic and emotional source derived from the tropical, Edenic garden has been polluted (whether from misuse or neglect or misappropriation or disloyalty is unclear—any is possible) and in fact, driven out, the tropical images upon which much of McKay’s poetry has depended are now “deadly”: the “burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted” are poison to the “green-eyed moths of curious design” who feed upon them.38 Here a conflation occurs between the images no longer available for the poet-narrator’s use, and the poet-narrator as an exotic moth (of curious design and a creature of the 35 McKay, A Long Way from Home, 234. 36 McKay, “The Desolate City,” Complete Poems, 203. 37 Allusion to sexual malfunction can also be read here. 38 McKay, “The Desolate City,” Complete Poems, 204.

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night) who is “doomed to drooping stupor, there to die” when on “the fiercelyburning blooms” he reclines. The seventh stanza reflects with some nostalgia on the happy days when happy birds and children’s voices were blown through “scented fields of flowers” to reach the poet in unadulterated form. But this was a time before the Fall: Before the fall of pestilential showers That drove them forth far from the city’s ways: Now never, nevermore their silver words Will mingle with the golden of the birds.39 The last stanza is regretful but not despairing, for although “the familiar forms / To which the city once so dearly clung” are “Gone, gone forever,” “lost away like lovely songs unsung,” “Yet life, still lingers, questioningly strange.” So, too, does poetry: the fragile wings of the modern(ist) moth quiver on the brink of a new world. The poet emerges from the cocoon of Romanticism, but “lingering” and “questioning” suggest the remnants of a former life are not entirely sloughed off, as evidenced in the poetry McKay will write over the post-Clinic years. 3

A Conclusion

In “The Desolate City,” the poet-narrator becomes infected by “the city”— symbolized (or euphemized) as unclean Russian bed linen or actualized in sexual liaisons during his days (and nights) as a celebrity in Moscow; the city, and all “the bad” it stands for in McKay’s oeuvre, have finally taken his spirit prisoner or more, his spirit has become the thing it claims to most abhor. That which was external and kept at bay has broken down his defences and entered him. It has taken his soul prisoner, and threatens to destroy him. The secret joy of Blakean Sunny Ville, Clarendon (figured in his poetry as a paradise of childhood) is threatened by “the worm” of the city—a threat that has hung over McKay since his days with the Police Constabulary in Kingston. “O Rose,” writes Blake in his Songs of Experience, “thou art sick!”40

39 40

“The Desolate City,” 204. William Blake, “The Sick Rose,” in The Selected Poems of William Blake, ed. Bruce Woodcock (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000): 83.

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The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy; And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.41 Although there is no direct link between the poems, McKay was well-versed in Romantic poetry, a literary education received under the tutelage of both his brother, Uriah Theodore [U’Theo], and his patron, Walter Jekyll. McKay’s spirit has become a pestilent city through the sexual act (“his dark secret love”) that now threatens to destroy him with syphilis (the invisible worm). The relationship between (the static Caribbean) rose and (wandering) worm is made apparent in the poem “For Marguerite” that precedes “The Desolate City.” Here, the poet-narrator contemplates “loves lines” as “perfect as a bird’s”—the “brown bosom of a tropic dove / Sitting upon a wild fig-tree flower,” but is drawn to consider What vile malignant worms may be thereunder, Roaming the body’s seas in deadly herds, Seeking to bring sweet love to harsh decay.42 “For Marguerite” might be read as the poet’s recognition that the images of tropical beauty, upon which he has been dependent for so long, might be or might become a source of infection and decay in themselves (the worm is not without; it is within). This reliance on “old forms” might even bring about his own death (the death of a poet). We might then read the final stanza of “The Desolate City” not as a statement of despair, but as one that recognizes the necessity for change. There is grief for what has been lost—“the familiar forms” and “lovely songs unsung”; what remains is “life […] questioningly strange.” And although “Timid and quivering, naked and alone,” it is strong enough to stand “Against the cycle of disruptive change,” as McKay’s recovery from syphilis attests. “Convalescing,” the final poem of “The Clinic,” might be read not only as “notes on how best to ensure full recovery from illness once the patient leaves 41 42

“The Sick Rose,” 83. McKay, “For Marguerite,” Complete Poems, 203.

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hospital,” but as the poet’s reflection on his demoralized poetic state, its rejuvenation, and the fragility of the new poetic spirit. McKay writes: When I go out from here, the doctors say, At intervals I must return again, For purifying treatment till that day When no vile demons in my blood remain.43 While McKay contracted syphilis in the city (most likely Moscow, but as easily Berlin, Paris, or New York), the pestilence that threatens to overwhelm the poet-narrator’s spirit might be surprisingly, but I think justifiably, understood as a clinging to “fond familiar forms” that are ultimately blown away in the destroying storm that also brings new life. It is surely no coincidence that among the poems which follow “The Clinic” are the “city” poems, written mainly during the 1930s. The “Cities” sequence begins with a poem in praise of cities—“Oh cities are a fever in my blood.”44 This is a fever that causes pain, even despair, but one that also cleanses and renews. It is the new font of McKay’s poetic inspiration. Many of the poems collected by Maxwell in the section titled “‘The Years Between,’ 1925–34,” that sits between “The Clinic” and “Cities,” were written before or in the same year as “The Desolate City” (1925 and 1926). The dates of the poems written in the early thirties are uncertain, but the poem of the section’s title (c.1934) begins: I have returned, but you will never find, All the familiar things of me intact, I am like a classic that a modern mind Has cut and altered to improve the act.45 These lines reinforce the claim this essay makes for a shift, and the poem as a whole speaks to this shift: “For storms have swept the currents of my blood / […] / The streams new courses found after the flood.” This changed perspective on the city can be seen in “Note of Harlem,” a poem also written in 1934 and included in the “Cities” sequence. Here the poetnarrator declares that despite a reluctance to return (to the city) due to a fear that the vitality and colour remembered could not be recaptured, 43 44 45

McKay, “Convalescing,” Complete Poems, 207. McKay, “Cities,” Complete Poems, 223. McKay, “The Years Between,” Complete Poems, 218.

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Returning I discovered happiness, Though mingled with the thoughts of farewell pain; Yet any pain was good that brought me this: The joy of finding voice to sing again.46 This is the joy and the poetic voice McKay discovers, not in Clarendon, Jamaica, but in Harlem, New York—the black heart of the “White City.” Works Cited Blake, William. The Selected Poems of William Blake, ed. Bruce Woodcock (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000). Cooper, Wayne. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State UP, 1987). Jabbour, Nicholas. “Syphilis from 1880–1920: A Public Health Nightmare and the First Challenge to Medical Ethics,” Essays in History (2012), http://www.essaysinhistory .com/articles/2012/103 (accessed 10 March 2017). Jones, James H. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (London: Free Press, 1981). Maxwell, William. “Introduction” to Claude McKay, Complete Poems, ed. William Maxwell (Urbana & Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2003): xi–xliv. McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home (1937; London: Pluto, 1985). McKay, Claude. Complete Poems, ed. William Maxwell (Urbana & Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2003). McKay, Claude. Constab Ballads (London: Watts, 1912). McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922). McKay, Claude. My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories (London & Kingston: Heinemann Educational, 1979). McKay, Claude. Songs of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Aston W. Gardner, 1912). McKay, Claude. Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1920). Stokes, John H. The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People (Philadelphia PA: W.B. Saunders, 1917). Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (Norton Critical Editions; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2014). Ziporyn, Terra. Disease in the American Popular Press: The Case of Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and Syphilis, 1870–1920 (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1988). 46

McKay, “Note of Harlem,” Complete Poems, 235–36.

Chapter 8

Bodily Cloth

The Making Process in Artworks by Elsje van Keppel and Jane Whiteley Kay Lawrence One of Paul Sharrad’s interests, exemplified in the 2002 conference “Fabric(ations) of the Postcolonial: Textiles, Texts and Trade” and in the subsequent collection Postcolonialism and Creativity, has been to draw together creative practice and scholarly analysis to investigate the significance of textiles in text, and textuality within textiles.1 In Paul’s own writing he has interrogated the “quality of completion and self-sufficiency” that textile objects can assume in the museum, “even as they also silently express the hands and the times that went into their making.”2 In his essay “Following the Map: A Postcolonial Unpacking of a Kashmir Shawl” he gives voice to this silence by bringing “postcolonial discourse analysis to bear on reading (the) changing and contending meanings” of the Godfrey Shawl.3 The shawl was one of four Srinagar “map shawls,” exquisitely woven and embroidered in the workshop of Sayyid Hussain Shah and Sayyid Muhammad Mir in nineteenth-century Kashmir.4 The essay maps the shifting cultural and political meanings associated with the shawl, from its creation in Srinagar around 1870 for the court of Maharaja Ranbir Singh to its acquisition by the National Gallery of Australia as a gift from the Godfrey family more than a century later.5 It is Paul’s close attention to the materiality and meanings of cloth and its relationship to language, the history embedded in words like “shawl” and “cashmere,” and the ways the meaning of a cloth shifts and changes according to circumstance, that is allied to my own interest in cloth. But I take up his point about the silence of textiles from a different position, that of a textile practitioner. In this essay, I focus on the meanings of the making process itself in the work of two contemporary Australian artists, Elsje van Keppel and Jane 1 Re-Inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004). 2 Paul Sharrad, “Following the Map: A Postcolonial Unpacking of a Kashmir Shawl,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 2.1 (March 2004): 68. 3 “Following the Map,” 65. 4 See Rosemary Crill, quoted in “Following the Map,” 66. 5 “Following the Map,” 66.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_009

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Whiteley. Tim Ingold, in his book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture, characterizes the making process as a collaboration between maker and material, a performative process that unfolds over time, during which makers, as they work with the tensions, forces, and flows of their materials create an eloquent inscriptive trace of their own bodily gestures.6 It is in this sense, of an object inscribed with the actions of the maker, as well as their metaphoric resonance, that van Keppel and Whiteley’s textiles tell stories of the body. Both artists employ the hand processes used to create textiles as action and metaphor to imbue cloth with meaning: the pulse of living bodies, as in the works Breath and Heartbeat by van Keppel, or the yearning for absent bodies in Whiteley’s works still life 2002 and My Mother’s body 2010 and 2011. Of these art works, only van Keppel’s Heartbeat has been acquired by a museum.7 The others remain in that liminal space between public exhibition and the artist’s studio; their cultural significance is yet to settle. Other writers, and in particular, Philippa O’Brien, have eloquently opened up this discussion in exhibition catalogues and monographs on these artists’ work.8 This essay builds on their insights; and as a colleague of both artists, I write in the spirit of friendship, drawing on those bonds of collegiality and affection that sustain the work of artists and scholars.9 As a textile maker myself, I bring my own bodily knowledge and experience to this discussion, to give voice to the meanings inscribed in these textiles through the processes by which they were made. Its rhythms are mine. Its irregularities and imperfections are mine10

6 7 8

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Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013): 101. In 2011, Heartbeat was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Philippa O’Brien, in Elsje van Keppel: Fragile Objects (Perth WA: Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft, 1997); Virginia Rigney, Gail Jones and Holly Story in From Within: Jane Whiteley Works, in Cloth (Perth WA: Art On The Move, 1999): 4–6 (Rigney), 7–8 (Jones), and 18–21 (Shilo); Philippa O’Brien, “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” in Presence: Elsje van Keppel 1947–2001 (Ellenbrook, WA: Ellenbrook Gallery, 2011): insert 1–4; Philippa O’Brien, Ann Schilo and R.S. White, in Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012): 12–17 (O’Brien), 18–21 (Schilo), and 22–24 (White). This insight came from a conversation with artist and writer Linda Marie Walker about her exhibition Room, at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2010. By curating the work of other artists into an installation of her own work, Walker questioned the “singularity” of the artist, focussing instead on the sustaining connections that underpin an art practice, connections formed through friendship and community. Philippa O’Brien, quoting Elsje van Keppel, in Elsje van Keppel: Fragile Objects, 24.

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Elsje van Keppel (1947–2001) set up the influential textiles course at Churchlands Teachers’ College (later part of Edith Cowan University) in Western Australia in the 1980s, while developing her innovative textile practice working with dyed, pieced, and stitched cloth. Although she arrived in Australia in the early 1950s as the child of post-war Dutch migrants, it was to the Asia–Pacific region as much as to her European heritage that she turned, to discover the textile techniques that informed her practice.11 She was influenced by the use of running stitch used to secure layers of cloth in the kantha tradition of Bengal, as well as the clamp-resist process of shibori from Japan and batik waxresist from Indonesia. She adapted these processes to her Australian context and made them her own. Piecing, the process of stitching together fragments of worn or discarded cloth, while common to cultures across the world, is also inflected with regional differences and meanings. Her use of piecing draws on the layered quilts of West Bengal as well as the simple repeated patchwork patterns of triangles, diamonds, and squares from the twentieth-century AngloAmerican quilt tradition. Van Keppel was drawn to these processes—running stitch, clamp-resist, patchwork and quilting—because of their simplicity and responsiveness to the processes of hand-making. Over her thirty-year career, she developed a direct way of working with dye and cloth, often in the bush, over a camp fire, using plant material found on site packed into makeshift dye pots with cloth of different densities and weights: organza, taffeta, silk, and wool, all animal fibres that would readily absorb the dye, as well as picking up traces of leaf and twig. She welcomed the vagaries of the ad-hoc processes she used to dye cloth that she had previously folded and clamped or bundled and tied to resist the dyestuff. She revelled in the chance effects they produced. For van Keppel, these cloths were inscribed with the particularities of her experience in that place at that time: collecting plant material, manipulating the fabric, and subjecting it to pressure before plunging it into the dye pot to meet the resistances, flows, and seepages of plant material simmering in hot liquid. In this way the cloths became a trace of her actions, as well as being inscribed with the forces of the natural world. Ingold, employing a metaphor that links the processes of making to the genetic structure of living organisms, describes such a process as answering to the world: it is to mix the movements of one’s own sentient awareness with the flows and currents of animate life. Such a mixture, where sentience and 11

Elsje van Keppel, 6.

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materials twine round one another on their double thread until […] they become indistinguishable, is of the essence of making.12 It was often many years before a dyed cloth revealed its full potential; cloths were kept folded or pinned to the studio wall in a state that van Keppel called “‘half-cooked’” before being taken up and reworked to bring out a quality latent in the cloth that corresponded with an aspect of her own experience.13 This transformative process could involve overdyeing, or discharge printing (a form of bleaching) or being sent to colleagues at the Brahma Tirta Sari Studio in Yogyakarta to be resist-dyed with a batik tjap, a copper-block stamp constructed with a pattern from one of van Keppel’s drawings.14 She would also tear the cloth into strips or cut it into squares or triangles, before reassembling the pieces and patiently hand stitching them back into the whole from which they came, a restitution of wholeness that recalls the sanctity given to the whole cloth in the textile traditions of India and Pakistan.15 The cloth Heartbeat was made in 1995, at the beginning of a very productive phase in van Keppel’s practice. A year earlier, after an unexpected diagnosis of bone cancer, she immediately left her teaching position to focus solely on her practice. Heartbeat was fabricated from tiny triangles of plant-dyed silk taffeta over-dyed with a batik pattern taken from a photograph taken by her of a decaying wall. Reflecting on the way she created this work, she wrote: this fabric is now much more expressive than the original fabrics ever were. I’m never satisfied with working on a surface and as long as I’ve worked with textiles it’s been about building an image—through the batik, through the shibori. I build into the fabric then I take this a step further by actually cutting the fabric up and piecing it back together again because the stitch itself adds another dimension to it, it adds more weight, it adds, in some cases, almost an armature.16 In Heartbeat, van Keppel cut and stitched cloth to create a pulsating field of energy that seems to correspond to the rhythmic beat of the blood as it courses 12 Ingold, Making, 108. 13 O’Brien, Elsje van Keppel, 24. 14 Elsje van Keppel, 11. 15 Nasreen Askari, “The Continuing Tradition,” in Nasreen Askari & Liz Arthur, Uncut Cloth: Saris, Shawls and Sashes (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999): 21. 16 Philippa O’Brien, quoting Elsje van Keppel, in “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” in Presence: Elsje van Keppel 1947–2001 (Ellenbrook, WA: Ellenbrook Gallery, 2011): insert 2.

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Figure 8.1 Elsje van Keppel, Heartbeat. Place made: Subiaco, Western Australia, Australia. Materials and technique: textiles, silk, cotton: batik-dyed, stitched. Dimensions: 225.0 h × 200.0 w × 2.0 d cm. Purchased 2011; accession no: nga 2011.1288.

through the body to maintain life. Ingold has described this way of working, of creating correspondences between things, as a practice that opens up perception to the world itself. “To practise this method is not to describe the world, [n]or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it.”17 17 Ingold, Making, 7.

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But the pulse of blood might not just maintain life; it might be essential to our sense of self. In an issue of the London Review of Books, doctor and writer Gavin Francis describes a condition known as “pump head,” a “disturbance of mood and cognition” that may occur in patients after undergoing heart surgery.18 During such surgery the heart is stopped, the circulation and oxygenation of blood being taken over by a machine. During recovery from such an operation, the poet Robin Robertson described his experience: Over the pain, a blackness rose and swelled; ‘pump head’ is what some call it – debris from the bypass machine migrating to the brain—but it felt more interesting than that. Halved and unhelmed, I have been away, I said to the ceiling, and now I am not myself. In the article, Francis speculates: by-pass machines have been in use for more than sixty years, but they still can’t closely mimic a natural pulse from the heart. It may be that the heart’s internal rhythm is essential to our well-being: our brain and our sense of self may depend on it.19 If this is the case, then through the rhythmical process of stitching Heartbeat, van Keppel has stitched her self, bodily and metaphorically, into the work. In her essay “Stitching with Metonymy,” the textiles scholar Victoria Mitchell alludes to this transformative process, when she describes stitching as a marking out of signification, embodying metonymic actions which have the power to effect a gestural form of utterance, a manner and matter of speaking through stuff. Through enactment and re-enactment subjects are metaphorically and materially stitched, unstitched and restitched into the world.20

18 19 20

Gavin Francis, “Diary,” London Review of Books (6 March 2014): 39. “Diary,” 39. Victoria Mitchell, “Stitching with Metonymy,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 11.3 (November 2013): 316.

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Van Keppel used the simplest of stitches, usually running stitch, in which the needle runs along the fabric picking up a few threads at a time to create a row of even stitches.21 Like the makers of the kantha quilts from Bengal that she so admired, she often layered cloths, one over another, securing them with row upon row of running stitch to hold the layers together. One of van Keppel’s students, Georgina Cresswell, recalled her saying, “I never unpick.”22 Rather than seeing a misplaced stitch as a mistake, she accepted it as a trace of momentary inattention that, once recognized, would pull her back into being present in the moment of making; the rhythm of her actions traced in the broken lines of thread appearing and disappearing into the fabric, like thoughts that come and go in a meditative reverie. In the following year, 1996, she created the work Breath. At the time, Keppel was focusing all her energies on creating work for the exhibition Fragile Objects that opened at the Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft in Perth in February 1997. Breath is a long, white, and airy cloth, hand-stitched from cut and pieced triangles of silk organza. Measuring 104 by 306 cm, it is a little more than an arm’s length wide and taller than a human body. Suspended free of the wall, it almost seems to float, attuned to the slightest fluctuations in atmosphere and moving gently like “woven air,” the name given to the finest and lightest cotton muslin cloth woven in Bengal. Van Keppel described it as a self-portrait: I wanted to make a long white cloth made of triangles. I just wanted it to record my presence and somehow the repetition does that. It’s about nature. It’s about my precarious presence. It’s a self-portrait. It’s about the fact that we are fragile and that life is transient.23 The repetition of elongated triangular forms could be understood as an analogy for breathing: as one inhales, air is drawn into the narrow aperture of nose or mouth; when exhaling a puff of breath expands and disperses into air. It is this repetitive movement that forms the structure of the cloth, the edge of each triangle hand-sewn to the silk in an action as rhythmic as breathing itself. Pressing the layers together with one hand and stitching each folded edge with the other requires precise concentration and delicate handling, as well as sensitivity to the fragile weave of silk organza with its tendency to fray. In this 21 22 23

Mary Thomas, Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches (1934; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979): 177. Philippa O’Brien, quoting Georgina Creswell, in “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” in Presence: Elsje van Keppel 1947–2001 (Ellenbrook, WA: Ellenbrook Gallery, 2011): insert 2. Quoting Elsje van Keppel, in “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” insert 2.

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careful stitching, van Keppel inscribed into cloth what the body knows instinctively: the innate rhythms of breathing. While silent in the sense of being unvoiced, stitching can be an eloquent way of telling what is known through the interaction of bodily gesture and material. Tim Ingold notes that “the verb to tell has two related senses […] to recount stories of the world [and …] to be able to recognise subtle clues in one’s environment and to respond to them with judgement and precision,” just as makers do when they work with their materials.24 Breath tells of the human experience of being alive, but it also speaks of the processes of making. If the work is a metaphor for the action of breathing, of air drawn into and expelled from the lungs, it also metonymically embodies the living and making presence of the artist herself. In Breath, van Keppel’s presence is palpable, yet her living body and hand that stitched the cloth has gone, just a trace remaining in the hand-stitched seams. Thinking about Breath on a trip to Perth, I wrote in my journal: How extraordinary memory is—bringing phantasms of the past into the present in all their wondrousness; when I see the cloth Breath Elsje lives, along with my memory of the self I was then; when I forget she dies— again and again.25 Perhaps this is the meaning of Breath: that we all live and die myriad times in the memories of others, so that death is not an ending but a transformation, a gradual fading into nothingness, all our atoms transformed into earth and air, consciousness exhaled with the last breath. The body remembers like a rhythm felt but not yet heard26 Jane Whiteley (1958–) arrived in Perth with her Australian partner in 1988. Although she had an Honours degree in literature from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, soon after her arrival she found herself studying textiles with Elsje van Keppel at Churchlands.27 It was van Keppel who, through her teaching and practice, guided Whiteley and others “to experience the extraordinary humanity within the traditions of textiles,” and to understand the power of cloth itself in communicating a human presence.28 Whiteley recalls, as a student, 24 Ingold, Making, 109–110. 25 Kay Lawrence, “Perth: 14 November 2013,” journal (unpublished). 26 Jane Whiteley, Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012): 26. 27 Philippa O’Brien, “The Still Point,” in Jane Whiteley: Body of Work, 14. 28 Jane Whiteley, Acknowledgements, Jane Whiteley: Body of Work, 10.

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Figure 8.2 Elsje van Keppel, Breath.

printing lengths of cloth with a linocut of a human figure. Questioned by Elsje about why I was doing this, I replied that I was “trying to put a human presence into the cloth.” She answered “Why are you trying to do that? It’s already there.”29 29

Philippa O’Brien, quoting Jane Whiteley, in “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” insert 3.

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This insight, that cloth speaks not just of how it was made and by whom, but of all those who have used it, has underpinned the development of Whiteley’s practice for the past twenty years. Whiteley’s family experienced an austerity in post-war Britain that demanded thrift; in her mother’s case it was an attitude that ensured cloth was recycled and reused until it fell apart. Unlike van Keppel, who sought to infuse her cloths with the substances and forces of the natural world, Whiteley’s preference has been to use cloths already imbued with the wear and tear of human use: bed sheets and mattress covers, pillow cases, nappies, tea towels, and worn-out shirts. These used cloths became the stuff of her practice. While the word “stuff” is derived from the French word for cloth, étoffe, the term also describes a kind of indeterminate matter, the stuff that lies around the house. In Whiteley’s hands, cloth is stuff; her cloth works hover indeterminately between the physicality of cloth and body to reveal a kind of yearning (póthos) for what has gone. Whiteley’s earlier cloths were often intensively stitched to heighten their relationship with the body, like the series of indigo dyed cotton and silk cloths reminiscent of quilts in her 1999 exhibition From Within.30 These dark cloths, stitched with a haze of red, suggest a sleeping, dreaming person, their painstaking rows of tiny stitches evidence of the precise attention and loving labour of the maker. In her essay in the catalogue for the exhibition, Gail Jones distinguishes between this kind of methodical and intensive hand-making, and the alienating labour involved in “the tyrannical systematicity” of (industrial) manufacture.31 Whiteley’s stitching, while labour intensive, “inhabits (its) own lavish time” and is also meditative; the repetitive rhythm of piercing the fabric and pulling the thread induce what Jones calls a “dreamy and abstract expansiveness that must enter the composition of a quilt.”32 It is as if, rather than being alienated from her labour, Whiteley has stitched her very being into the cloth. Over the years, Whiteley has worked her cloths less and less, finding a kind of resonance in the cloth itself, in its structure, its associations, and history, that merely needs to be opened out and allowed to breathe. The dense associations of textiles, what Victoria Mitchell has called “The opening-out-from-within of the materiality of textiles,” have the capacity “to reveal hidden trajectories of

30 31 32

Virginia Rigney, “From Within,” in From Within: Jane Whiteley, Works in Cloth (Perth WA: Art on the Move, 1999): 4. Gail Jones, “Softness: Four Meditations on the Poetics of Cloth,” in From Within: Jane Whiteley, Works in Cloth, 7. “Softness,” 7.

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knowledge.”33 This opening-out-from-within also recalls the way that garments can be turned inside-out to be cleaned or repaired. In the work still life 2002, created for the fifteenth Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, Whiteley has turned worn garments inside-out to reveal the pathos of memory and the power of cloth to recall those who have died. still life 2002 is a strange work, Whiteley’s role as artist more an intervention than engaging in making as usually understood. Her mother’s wedding dress is hung tent-like over an invisible ironing board, surmounted by her father’s winter coat turned inside-out, creating a boat-like structure with a sail of unfinished pink knitting still on its needle. Rows of pink blanket-stitch define the prow. In a text originally published in the catalogue for the exhibition, Whiteley aligns the processes of living and making with the movement of sea on sand in that liminal space, the shoreline: The essence and life of making is ebb and flow, empty space, the strained ear listening, waiting watching, letting be, following—the hands know, the materials too, quite apart from your imaginings, less or more than your intentions—following the pattern that emerges, the story as it tells.34 This work was made after the death of Whiteley’s father, when both her parents had gone. The making process evoked in her text moves back and forth between hand and material, intention and imagination, letting the processes of making lead the creation of the work. Her gestures, precisely positioning the fall of the dress and the folds within the coat, bring out her intention: to tell a story of the correspondences between the processes of making and living. As Ingold has noted, “a process of correspondence (is) not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming.”35 Some years later, Whiteley created two even simpler works from discarded and reconfigured cloth. My Mother’s body 2010 is a blue, floral frock rescued from the rag bag and hung on a wire hanger constructed by her daughter Alana for this purpose. Some panels have been torn out, just the seams remaining. When you rip up a garment for cleaning rags, the rip always stops at the seam; 33

Victoria Mitchell, “Drawing Threads from Sight to Site,” in Shaping Space: Textiles and Architecture, ed. Janis Jefferies & Diana Wood Conroy, special issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 4.3 (Fall 2006): 342. 34 Whiteley, Body of Work, 68. 35 Ingold, Making, 31.

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Figure 8.3 Jane Whiteley, still life 2002.

in this instance, they slump and droop like the sagging frame of an aging body. Susan Stewart, in the text “The Sandcastle” that begins her notebook on making, suggests that making can involve a mode of memorization that continues to exist in the mind of the maker, even when the completed object has been destroyed.36 This work could be seen to operate as a kind of transference, an un-making, that for Whiteley intensifies her memory of the mother who made the dress and wore it. It is like and unlike Blue Days, a late work made by Louise Bourgeois in 36

Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2011): 1–2.

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Figure 8.4 Jane Whiteley, My Mother’s body 2010.

1996: seven blue dresses gathered from her past, each carefully sewn to a dressmaker’s dummy, suspended from and circling a central pole.37 The artist’s body 37

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria, 24 November 2012 to March 2013.

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Figure 8.5 Jane Whiteley, My Mother’s body 2011.

as defined by her clothes is compact, almost matronly, a stately presence commanding the space. Whiteley’s evocation of the maternal body, on the other hand, reveals a yearning for the mother that never fades. Jane Whiteley’s other work in this series, My Mother’s body 2011, is simply a pillowcase, torn and pinned so it bells open from the wall. Although I have only seen the work in a photograph, that caught it in a moment of stasis, I know from my haptic knowledge of cloth (and bodies) that the work would

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almost imperceptibly shift and settle into position after being pinned to the wall. Apparently still, it would move slightly in response to people passing, or the changes in atmosphere and temperature that cause cotton cloth to expand and contract. Cloth is not static; it has a living quality and can appear animate, like a human body.38 As such it is the perfect metaphor for the amplitude of the mother’s body, her capacity to swell, contain, and expel. In its suggestion of almost imperceptible movement, My Mother’s body 2011 is animate rather than embodied. For Ingold, “animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure.”39 My Mother’s body 2011 configures the maternal body as an expansive opening out onto the world through the simple act of an artist pinning up a torn cloth. Pinning, piecing, stitching, cutting, and tearing: these performative actions on cloth are, in Victoria Mitchell’s words, “a way of knowing through which we might engage in the aporia of identity.”40 As such, these textiles made by Elsje van Keppel and Jane Whiteley inscribe this bodily knowledge into cloth as a way of signifying the perplexing experience of being a subject in a world always in the process of becoming. Works Cited Askari, Nasreen. “The Continuing Tradition,” in Nasreen Askari & Liz Arthur, Uncut Cloth: Saris, Shawls and Sashes (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999): 20–98. Francis, Gavin. “Diary,” London Review of Books (6 March 2014): 38–39. Gordon, Beverley. Textiles: The Whole Story (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011). Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013). Jones, Gail. “Softness: Four Meditations on the Poetics of Cloth,” in From Within: Jane Whiteley Works, in Cloth (Perth WA: Art on the Move, 1999): 7–8. Lawrence, Kay. Journal 2013 (unpublished). Louise Bourgeois: Late Works, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria, 24 November 2012 to 11 March 2013. Mitchell, Victoria. “Drawing Threads from Sight to Site,” in Shaping Space: Textiles and Architecture, ed. Janis Jefferies & Diana Wood Conroy, special issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 4.3 (Fall 2006): 341–60. 38 Beverley Gordon, Textiles: The Whole Story (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011): 33. 39 Ingold, Making, 94. 40 Victoria Mitchell, “Stitching with Metonymy,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 11.3 (November 2013): 316.

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Mitchell, Victoria. “Stitching with Metonymy,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 11.3 (November 2013): 315–19. O’Brien, Philippa. Elsje van Keppel: Fragile Objects (Perth WA: Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft, 1997). O’Brien, Philippa. “Friends and Colleagues Remember,” in Presence: Elsje van Keppel 1947–2001 (Ellenbrook WA: Ellenbrook Gallery, 2011): insert 1–4. O’Brien, Philippa. “The Still Point,” in Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012): 12–17. Rigney, Virginia. “From Within,” in From Within: Jane Whiteley Works, in Cloth (Perth WA: Art on the Move, 1999): 4–6. Schilo, Ann. Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012): 18–21. Sharrad, Paul. “Following the Map: A Postcolonial Unpacking of a Kashmir Shawl,” in Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 2.1 (March 2004): 64–78. Sharrad, Paul, & Anne Collett, ed. Re-inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3 (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004). Stewart, Susan. The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2011). Story, Holly. From Within: Jane Whiteley Works, in Cloth (Perth WA: Art on the Move, 1999): 25–27. Thomas, Mary. Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches (1934; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979). White, R.S. Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012): 22–24. Whiteley, Jane. Jane Whiteley: Body of Work (Fremantle WA: Jane Whiteley, 2012).

Chapter 9

Overseas and Underground

Travel and Travellers in Janet Frame’s Fiction Dorothy Jones If, as Virginia Woolf said in an essay, one of the hardest tasks of a writer is to get characters moving from one room to another, we might ask why so many New Zealand writers keep moving themselves and their characters from country to country.1

∵ Although Janet Frame dismisses such movement as “a tired, overworked theme in our literature,” she acknowledges how, in many of her books, “I seem to have seized every opportunity to mention this journey to and from New Zealand.”2 Travel, between that country and others—primarily Britain and the usa— plays an important part in her work. She captures New Zealanders’ sense of remoteness (especially before the widespread availability of jet travel), t­ ogether with a mingled fascination and slight dread when contemplating international journeys. Characters arriving from abroad also shed light upon New Zealand itself through their observations and misunderstandings of the country. So, in nearly all Frame’s fiction, whether set at home or overseas, her native land remains a significant reference point as she delights in its natural beauty while regularly exposing its materialism, stultifying conformity, and censorious marginalization of anyone deemed not to fit in. New Zealand’s “very high rate of interaction with the sea” is also important to Frame’s representations of travel, for the ocean is both an enticement leading to new territory and a menace threatening the destruction of all that is familiar and safe.3 Journeys have 1 Janet Frame, “This Desirable Property,” NZ Listener (3 July 1964); repr. in Janet Frame, In Her Own Words, ed. Denis Harold & Pamela Gordon (Auckland: Penguin, 2011): 37. 2 In Her Own Words, 37. 3 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001): 110.

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traditionally provided writers with a rich vein of metaphor and Frame seizes on how readily they symbolize life’s inevitable movement towards death. For her, the land down under offers a fitting image of the underworld as so many of her fictional journeys, within New Zealand and beyond, reveal how deeply life and death are fused. In Frame’s early story “Swans” two little girls, Totty and Fay, set out by train with their mother for a day at the beach.4 Although this brief outing eventually concludes with a return to the familiar territory of home, the narrative movement from morning light to evening darkness indicates the remorseless flow of time that the children sense uneasily but barely comprehend. Frame develops an ironic contrast throughout between their innocent perceptions and readers’ more sombre adult knowledge. Leaving home is preceded by bustle and flurry because Totty discovers Gypsy, the family cat, is apparently dying: “her eyes were bright with a fever or something” (58). Mother, worried about missing the train, urges the animal be given warm milk and covered up: “she’ll be all right till we get home” (55). The children are reassured: “Mother always said things would be all right […] as if she knew, and she did know too, Mother knew always” (55). But this conviction is belied by her confusion over which is the right station to leave the train, and on arriving at the beach the girls are dismayed to find no one else there, fearing they must have come to “the wrong sea”: “Where is the place to put our things, and the merry-go-rounds and the place to undress and that, and the place to get ice-creams?” (60). Doubt is offset, however, by youthful exuberance as they play happily on the sand, proud of Mother’s prohibition against swimming—“Not in this sea”—accepting now that “It was a distinguished sea, oh and a lovely one” (61). Walking alongside the lagoon at day’s end to catch the train home, the children feel content: “the darker the world outside got the safer you felt, for there were Mother and Father always, for ever” (62). Their mother, however, is sad and anxious: “the wrong sea troubled her […] she had been sure she would find things different” (63). Nevertheless, Frame’s description of darkness, and the black swans which seem to embody it, is beautiful, even consoling: They looked across the lagoon then and saw the swans, black and shining, as if the visiting dark tiring of its form had changed to birds, hundreds of them resting and moving softly about on the water. Why, the lagoon was filled with swans, like secret sad ships, secret and quiet. (64) 4 Janet Frame, “Swans,” in Frame, The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951; London: Bloomsbury, 1991): 53–64. Further page references are in the main text.

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Peace and contentment are shattered, however, by Frame’s concluding sentence: “But when they got home Gypsy was dead” (64). Death’s intrusion opens and closes the story, for home is less sheltered than the children assume. We are all nomads journeying irrevocably into the darkness of death; “Swans” was a response to family tragedy. In 1937 Frame’s eldest sister Myrtle had died, aged only sixteen, while swimming. Ten years later another sister, Isabel, collapsed at twenty-one and drowned when swimming in the sea off Picton, where she and her mother were holidaying. Both girls, it seems, suffered from a congenital heart defect. Writing to her friend John Money, Frame describes her “haunting,” and the “imagery” in which Isabel reappeared as a lost child: I saw it vividly and I sat down and wrote, feeling sad because of Isabel’s being lost, and my unconscious very kindly took us for a day at the beach, and sneaked in the sadness with the dead cat and the wrong sea, and the father away at work, not sharing and not knowing. And so on. That is how the story gets written.5 In her autobiography, Frame emphasizes the train trip taking Isabel and her mother to their holiday destination and the sorrowful return journey as the mother now accompanies her daughter’s body: “they were lifting out of the goods van a coffin coloured dull silver, only it was lead.”6 The journey towards death is represented less tenderly in Frame’s novel The  Rainbirds, where it is infused with keen social satire.7 Physical travel, such as migration and tourism, develops into an inner metaphysical journey prompted by terrifying awareness of mortality. The novel’s protagonist, Godfrey Rainbird, emigrates from Britain to New Zealand, where he works as a booking clerk in a Dunedin tourist office. Despite meeting acceptable New Zealand standards for a post-war immigrant—“European of British birth, twenty, single, not a convicted criminal, not suffering from physical or mental illness, politically placid, beardless” (7)—he carries luggage from his World War Two childhood “on his back and in his heart” (13).8 With his mother killed 5 Janet Frame, Letter to John Money, August 1948, quoted in Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Sydney: Penguin, 2000): 99. 6 Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table: An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Women’s Press, 1984): 93. 7 Janet Frame, The Rainbirds (London: W.H. Allen, 1968). Further page references are in the main text. 8 In the first of these comments, Frame is mocking New Zealand government policies concerning post-war immigration. See Jenny Carlyon & Diana Morrow, Changing Times: New Zealand Since 1945 (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2013): 29–30.

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in the Blitz, when the ­underground station where she sheltered with other Londoners received a direct hit, Godfrey is further haunted by his memories as a child evacuee in Scotland’s cold, rainy Trossachs, fearing the mountains might fall on him just as the tube station had collapsed on his mother. In New Zealand he makes a new start, marrying Beatrice Muldrew, a local girl who decides he is the “fascinating young man” (9) required to validate her own existence. They settle into comfortable suburban life, eventually forming a regular family group with their two young children, Teena and Sonny. But however peaceful New Zealand may appear, it is not really a refuge from violence and war since the country has participated in both World Wars while gradually effacing in its collective memory the impact of colonial invasion, relegating the Maori population to “relative invisibility”.9 The novel is “patterned around the metaphor of war in a way that points to the latent violence—or to rankling amputations—inherent in the otherwise peaceful New Zealand setting.”10 The Rainbirds’ uneventful routine is shattered, however, when Godfrey, walking home one night, is knocked down by a car and pronounced dead, only to wake from his death-like coma three days later in the hospital morgue, horrifying those around him who find his miraculous resurrection deeply troubling: “even life may be resented as it disturbs the arrangements made for death and burial” (52). Widespread reporting of this highly newsworthy experience means that Godfrey leaves hospital as both “marvel and monster” (51), discovering he has become a social outcast. When he returns to work at the tourist office, the boss informs him he now projects the wrong image and in consequence he is dismissed. Mr. Galbraith looked sharply at him, thinking, but not saying, Who wants their annual holiday booked by a former corpse? It’s touch and go as it is who does and doesn’t return from the annual holiday. We don’t want it thought that we employ corpses to recruit corpses! (118) The entire experience radically changes Godfrey’s outlook, for he is now firmly set on an inward path where, moving “against all he had been used to in his ten years of living in New Zealand […] He was alone, going to a frightening destination that no other person knew of and that he himself could not name” (79–80). He now fantasizes about offering a different kind of travel advice: “I’ll 9 10

Marc Delrez, “‘Conquest of Surfaces’: Aesthetic and Political Violence in the Work of Janet Frame,” in Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame, ed. Jan Cronin & Simone Drichel (Cross/Cultures 110; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 136. “‘Conquest of Surfaces’,” 136.

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put out my own brochures […] Make your tour of silence and ice. See your own personal ultimate country!” (124). Religious allusion pervades the novel, underlining Godfrey’s inner transformation. His accident occurs in the lead-up to Easter and the three days of his coma appear to parallel Christ’s death and resurrection, though he himself identifies with Lazarus whom, he imagines, would have been similarly reproached and shunned for not having stayed dead (124). Frame’s point is that a miraculous return to life—whether by Lazarus or by Christ himself—would arouse inevitable hostility in a society determined to deny death’s existence, and where the sacred festival of Easter has been largely secularized, even though threats of premature death are still omnipresent: Easter eggs, rabbits for the children; Good Friday turned to Dead Friday; death on the roads, in the mountains, the final drownings before summer came again—how well he had learned the ritual of his adopted country! The Easter Show, the cattle and sheep and pigs. Farm Implements, the Wall of Death, the Fijian Fire Walkers, Shoot and Win a Plaster Ornament, Alternate wails and cheers from the churches: He is dead. He is risen. (98) From his home in Anderson’s Bay, Godfrey keeps gazing across the harbour to the Dunedin city centre, ironically naming it Jerusalem (173), yet at the same time imagining it as “an unobtainable dream city” for which pilgrims may set out on a never-ending journey (178). In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the pilgrim poet is guided into heaven by his beloved Beatrice, but Godfrey’s Beatrice is focused on a materialistic Eden, “where you tripped over buildings, plans, fences, furniture, policies, the goods inside shop windows; everything priced, glittering, displayed” (107).11 Yet the novel repeatedly describes Dunedin in visionary terms—“shining with its secret inaccessible light in the hills” (194)— both evoking and mocking long-standing settler perceptions of New Zealand as “God’s Own Country,” the site of a yearned-for social ideal: “Paradise, Eden, and Heaven on Earth, this beautiful and abundant land has been for many, a place in which to try and create a utopia.”12 Frame, however, emphasizes how unfairly Godfrey is treated by a society proud of giving everyone a fair go whilst justifying ill-treatment and discrimination with the cliché, “fair’s fair.” 11 12

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia, completed c.1320, first published 1472 as La Commedìa). Early translations into English include Henry Boyd (1802) and ­Henry Francis Cary (1805); there are numerous modern versions, in verse and prose. Lucy Sargisson & Lyman Tower Sargent, Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional ­Communities (Aldershot & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004): xii.

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A stretch of sea separates Godfrey from his vision of Dunedin bathed in light. The Rainbirds live only “a stone’s throw from the beach” (84) where, like the two girls in “Swans,” their children delight to play. The death-dealing sea, however, invades Godfrey’s very being: the sea that flowed day and night in his mind now leaving its flotsam and jetsam on the beach of his every thought and feeling; the sea, the thought that overflowed all other thought and sank through it, finding its deep levels where it made dark pools that stayed at high tide, low tide, dead low water: the thought of his death. (121) The novel draws attention to land reclamation carried out along the coast, some of it near the Rainbirds’ house. Godfrey’s accident occurs alongside a recently reclaimed area, which a three-day flood, corresponding to his threeday coma, greedily overflows, suggesting reclamation is merely another vain human attempt to keep death at bay. Social ostracism, along with Godfrey’s inner withdrawal, ultimately engulf and destroy the entire Rainbird family. With her husband unemployed, Beatrice takes a paid job, regularly consoling herself with a glass or two of sherry in the pub on her way home from work. Popular opinion soon deems both parents unfit to care for their children: Sonny is taken away by the Social Welfare Department, Teena is sent to live with her aunt in Auckland; Beatrice commits suicide. We are not told of Godfrey’s ultimate death, learning only that he is buried side-by-side with Beatrice (their graves now a tourist attraction), and that he himself is memorialized by having a children’s ward named after him in the local hospital. Safely buried, he is no longer a threat. “Rainbird” is a colloquial name for various birds whose song is believed to presage rain, which, in this novel, carries largely negative associations; Godfrey and his family become birds of ill-omen, reminders of death. “The Rainbirds” was Frame’s working title, which her English publisher insisted on retaining, considering her preferred title, “Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room,” uncommercial. Her American publisher, however, agreed to the change, so the same novel appears under different titles, “creating a source of confusion for future bibliographers and critics.”13 New Zealand is the antipodean room to which Godfrey’s older sister, Lynley, emigrates, believing it will provide her with space unavailable in England:

13

Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Sydney: Penguin, 2000): 331.

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There, she thought, there will be a special kind of room for me, for I dream now in the spacious sky that I’ve never had room in my life, that perhaps my life may be accounted a failure because I never had room to breathe, move, grow, love. (45) The Rainbirds’ experience, however, reveals New Zealand is as confining as it is spacious. Although “antipodes” usually refers to countries on opposite sides of the globe, its literal meaning, “what lies directly underfoot,” can also suggest the grave. For Frame, antipodean New Zealand serves as an image of the underworld. Yellow flowers planted in the cemetery are an attempt to disguise, or at least soften, the awareness of death, even if, despite their fragility, they also symbolize life’s energy and beauty. For Jan Cronin, “The Rainbirds is one of the few cases of genuine philosophical exploration in Frame’s oeuvre”: the novel consistently maintains an uncertainty regarding the status of its narrative as literal or allegorical. This disjunction between the literal and the metaphoric, which many critics perceive as the central flaw […] is then a deliberate point of contention within the text. Furthermore, the opposition of fabulist and realist contexts […] is ultimately a pretext for what is essentially a phenomenological exploration of the nature of subjectivity and the significance of context in the production of meaning.14 While Frame would have hoped readers would engage with the intricacies and intellectual rigour of her novels’ narrative structure, she also creates an emotive blend of sadness, anger, and humour to facilitate entry into the experience of characters who are often completely at odds with the society they find themselves in. Such an atmosphere pervades The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), a story also underpinned by movement between New Zealand and Britain, with one country balanced against the other.15 Interwoven with this journey is the inevitable progression from life to death, which Patrick Evans considers a common denominator of Frame’s work: “In effect she is using each fresh novel to examine once more, from a new angle, the chasm she perceives at the limits of life.”16 Frame represents the act of writing as yet another kind of journey which 14 15 16

Jan Cronin, “Contexts of Exploration: Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.1 (March 2005): 8. Janet Frame, The Edge of the Alphabet (1962; New York: George Braziller, 1991). Further page references are in the main text. Patrick Evans, “Alienation and the Novels of Janet Frame,” Meanjin 32.3 (September 1973): 300.

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involves entering the realm of the dead to commune with them and gather the treasure they reluctantly yield: “more than in any of [Frame’s] other works the urge to write and the purpose of writing are central; more than anywhere else the discoveries her central characters make are discoveries about the art of fiction.”17 In a newspaper interview, Frame describes The Edge of the Alphabet as “a private exploration of some characters.”18 These are Toby Withers, who believes he must travel to England to write a long-intended book, together with his fellow voyagers, Irishman Pat Keenan, and former school teacher Zoe Bryce, both returning to London from visits to New Zealand. The fourth character, Thora Pattern, is a writer who claims, “I made a journey of discovery through the lives of three people—Toby, Zoe, Pat” (4). A preliminary note to the novel informs us Thora is now dead, implying that what we are about to read is a manuscript submitted to the publisher on her behalf. It is principally through this character and her many direct interpolations in the narrative that Frame explores the writer’s role. “Thora” is a near-anagram of “author” and “pattern” is a concept Frame mentions frequently in talks and interviews. It is not so much a design she imposes, but one she discerns in the world around her, and must recreate in her writing: “The whole of writing is expressing an emerging pattern and shape.”19 Thora’s voice opens the novel, describing the edge of the alphabet as a cross between the town dump and an overgrown cemetery, a piece of ground where discarded waste matter includes people both living and dead and where “words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning” or “show luminous, knitted with force and permanence” (3). This is the region to which a narrowly materialistic society relegates writers, but it is also where Thora herself feels she belongs and chooses to live, even though it is a place of great loneliness. Human detritus offers precious subject matter, while life on the margins makes it easier to escape “the boredom and regulation of the alphabet world,” as she strives to develop her own luminous language.20 The three characters she creates and through whom she conducts her journey of exploration also exist on the margins, lonely, poor, and disregarded. All are single. Pat has been unsuccessful in his search for a wife 17 18 19 20

Patrick Evans, “At the Edge of the Alphabet,” in The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): 86. “Noted NZ Writer is ‘Inspired by People’,” New Zealand Herald (22 October 1963), repr. in Frame, In Her Own Words, 81. Janet Frame, “My Say,” interview with Elizabeth Alley, 30 April 1983, Radio NZ, in Frame, In Her Own Words, 117. Evans, “At the Edge of the Alphabet,” 84.

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in New Zealand: “girls were the same everywhere, too flighty with nothing to think about but sex” (59). Toby, who suffers epileptic seizures, is rejected by the girl he had imagined would marry him, while Zoe, a spinster now approaching middle age, who had fallen in love with a married teacher at the school where she previously taught—“my fantasy love affair was a trick, delivered only to me” (238)—has sought escape through a trip to New Zealand. The novel is divided in three, with its first part, titled “A Home There,” set in New Zealand. But where is “there”? Frame plays with the paradox whereby many New Zealanders of her generation called Britain “home” while never having been there, suggesting some uncertainty as to where they truly belonged. She may also be echoing Allen Curnow’s image of New Zealand as “a land of settlers / With never a soul at home.”21 Toby (who originally appears as a character in Frame’s first novel Owls Do Cry) lives in a mildly combative relationship with his father, whilst experiencing an inner confusion of love and ­resentment inspired by memories of Amy, his recently dead mother.22 In visiting England, home of her forebears, he is possibly searching for home in the Motherland.23 By venturing abroad, however, Toby is, like many New Zealanders, suffering “an affliction of dream called ‘overseas’” (49). His proposed journey prompts conflicting responses ranging from hostility—“why do you want to go to ­England? What’s wrong with your own country?” (12)—to a mild sense of awe: “it is something to have someone who is going overseas” (26). But, according to his aunt Nora, Toby, with his epileptic seizures and coarse, uncouth behaviour, appears unworthy of the honour travel confers: “He’s getting above himself, going overseas” (49). The novel’s middle section, “The Lost Traveller’s Dream of Speech,” describes the voyage from New Zealand, representing it as a movement into the risky territory of language, with solid ground replaced by sea, offering “only in the distance a dark comma of wave perpetuating the sentence—death sentence” (76). Thora’s three characters, Toby, Pat, and Zoe, experience problems of communication in their tentative connections with one another. Although only Toby plans to write a book, each is linked in some way to situations connected with writing. Toby’s assumption he must travel abroad to write has become, as Frame acknowledges, a cliché, prompted perhaps by the experience of many writers and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “The most eminent New Zealanders of their day in the world of art, 21 22 23

Allen Curnow, “House and Land,” in An Anthology of New Zealand Verse, ed. Robert Chapman & Jonathon Bennett (London & Wellington: Oxford UP, 1956): 153–54. Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry (1957; London: Women’s Press, 1985). Gina Mercer, Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994): 60.

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literature, or i­ ntellect, had to leave in order to achieve their maturity. […] New Zealand could rarely find a place for its most able children.”24 Toby’s proposed book is about “the lost tribe,” a topic on which he once wrote a schoolboy essay praised by his teacher. The possibility someone might appropriate what he considers his subject-matter angers and alarms him, while the prospect of sitting down to write inspires still greater anxiety: “there are precautions to be taken, menaces to be foreseen” (30).25 With his schooling disrupted by epilepsy, Toby has only limited capacity for language, and the act of writing defeats him: Blots came, ominously, in strange shapes and clusters; the pen twisted or splayed its nib; the words did not know how to spell themselves but choked their letters together, partnering strangers, refusing conventional and correct marriage; or, solitary, uncertain where to go and what posture to take up. (73–74) Allen Curnow suggests “There is a Toby Withers (that desperately comic antihero of Janet Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet) somewhere under the skin of every New Zealand writer, but he does not care to be reminded of it.”26 Although Toby is incapable of authorship, his struggle to command language is one all writers experience.27 Despite his inarticulacy, he enters, in dreams and epileptic seizures, a visionary world from which so many writers draw inspiration, even if he himself does not understand how to access that world as an author. His desire to write is a kind of torment—“it hurts like an African thorn that has jagged itself in me and festered to bursting point” (89)—and it is significant that, once in London, he develops an infected swelling on his arm, representing both his longing and his inability to write. Yet, through Toby’s stubborn assertion of himself as a New Zealander, his dreams 24 25

26 27

Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (1959. London: Oxford UP, 1961): 180. Delrez suggests “the Lost Tribe becomes emblematic not only of New Zealand’s indigenous populations but also of various further categories of eclipsed humanity”; see “‘­Conquest of Surfaces’: Aesthetic and Political Violence in the Work of Janet Frame,” in Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame, ed. Jan Cronin & Simone Drichel (Cross/Cultures 110; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 137. Allen Curnow, “New Zealand Literature: The Case for a Working Definition,” in Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow (London: Heinemann, 1973): 150. In a 1992 statement read at the launch of Judith Dell Panny’s study of her work, Frame writes: “Patterns are my absorption—and my everlasting love and hate of, and struggle with, the words that compose the pattern.” Janet Frame, “Message for a Book Launch, 1992,” repr. in Janet Frame, In Her Own Words, 198.

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and ­memories form a conduit through which Frame constantly links those sections of narrative set in New Zealand with life outside it. Unlike Toby, Zoe has the benefit of a more extensive education, although she has no ambitions for authorship and has abandoned her teaching career. She also has a level of insight and self-awareness he lacks; descriptions of her inner life often accord with Thora’s more poetic voice in the narrative. For much of the voyage, severe sea-sickness confines her to the ship’s hospital, where a mysterious crew member slips in one evening and steals a kiss. For Zoe the effect of this, the first kiss she has ever received, is cataclysmic, an experience comparable to Godfrey Rainbird discovering he has been pronounced dead: “The kiss was like a divining rod which twists suddenly and trembles in a desert where no one believed in the existence of water—or of wine” (109). Even though the seaman shows no sign of recognition when she later glimpses him on deck, Zoe’s life is transformed. Her imaginative vision is awakened, driving her to feel “an intensity of making” (239), as she re-evaluates her entire existence. Later she attends a gathering organized by the ship’s social committee to draw together those passengers who seem not to have mingled successfully: “For it is the rule; human beings must live in clusters, hanging like grapes from the scaffold, or in flocks like sheep in a bleating panic from the hawk” (80).28 Each is given a label naming them as one half of a couple from literature or popular culture, with the expectation they should search for their corresponding half. This is how Toby and Zoe meet, though they don’t have matching labels; Zoe is Minnie Mouse and Toby is Orpheus, a character he has never heard of and about whom she must enlighten him. Orpheus, famous singer of Greek mythology, enchants the natural world with his music, compelling birds, animals, and even rocks and trees to gather round listening. When his wife Eurydice dies from snakebite, he journeys to the underworld where his song so moves the deities there they agree she can return to life, so long as Orpheus doesn’t look back while Eurydice follows him out of Hades. In his impatience, however, he disobeys, leaving her captive in the underworld. For Frame the myth exemplifies both the power and the limits of art. True artists must confront and grapple with death in their work but, no matter how great their achievement, death always wins, for even if the work of art lives on, the artist still dies. Orpheus fails to rescue Eurydice and is himself eventually torn apart by the Bacchae, followers of the god Dionysus, a fate Zoe prophesies for Toby: “you will be torn to pieces” (85). In linking Toby with Orpheus, Frame respects his struggle and the desperate artistic aspiration he 28

Although the meeting between Zoe and Toby is described before the account of the kiss, the narrative indicates that it occurred later.

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will never fulfil. She also suggests a connection between him and Zoe which the latter eventually acknowledges: “We are brother and sister, in narrow alleyways” (239). Both are travellers, each representing an aspect of the artist’s progress. Pat Keenan, the third character through whom Thora makes her journey of discovery, is Toby’s cabinmate on the voyage and even perhaps his faintly distant echo. Whereas Toby is so intensely engaged with his mother’s memory that she continues to live in his consciousness, Pat directs his filial devotion to a lifeless plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary “enfolding her marble-faced baby” (68). While Toby’s belligerent independence drives him to challenge the merest suspicion of English superiority, Pat’s claim that his native Ireland needs to “break away from the domination of Westminster” (59) is undercut by an overwhelming respect for the “authorities” whom he considers are in charge of society. Although kindly and eager to help others, he promotes conformity with a narrowly puritanical view of appropriate behaviour. Trying to take Toby in hand, he urges him to rent a room in the London boarding house where he himself lives, and on Toby’s refusal, persuades Zoe to live there instead. But even though Pat is largely inimical to all artistic endeavour, representing much an aspiring author should avoid, he too enters a nightly dream world on the edge of the alphabet “among weeds and rusty tin cans and derelict words and people” (70), while his occupation of London bus driver suggests a certain movement in his life, even if only along predetermined routes. Eventually, however, stasis prevails and Pat abandons bus-driving for a job selling stationery—“Just how much blank paper do you need, sir, to match your blank life?” (278). Nevertheless, even this new occupation provides authors with a basic requirement—paper to write on. The final section of the novel, “The Silver Forest,” follows the fortunes of Thora’s three characters in London. Far from offering an artistic Mecca, the city is a dismal place, resonant with echoes of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” in which people in streets at the edge of the alphabet seem to be “sleepwalking in hell” (188) as their “voices grow like bright feverish weeds whose stalks are hollow” (215).29 Yet, despite loneliness and poverty, the urge to create proves powerful, particularly for Zoe, working as an usherette in the Palace, a rundown cinema with scratched, gold-painted pillars “where princes are unknown” (240). But while acknowledging she is no Sleeping Beauty (237), memories of the kiss she received on board ship have awakened Zoe’s creative energies:

29

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922), in Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974): 61–86.

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It is my meaning, my tiny precious berry from the one branch of a huge tree in a forest where the trees are numberless. I need to walk in that forest […] I need to build a house, a tower, under and through the silver leaves into the sky. (239) Through a chance meeting with a failed painter, Peter Heron, Zoe is introduced to a group of seedy Bohemian acquaintances, themselves very marginal figures. Sitting with them beside the Serpentine one summer day she idly twists and folds silver paper from an empty cigarette packet to create a tiny sculpture of “silver trees and people with hats like silver planets, like priests lost in the forest,” people who appear lonely, dead, and snow-covered (271). Created from a piece of discarded rubbish, the silver forest represents art’s power to transform life as experienced at the edge of the alphabet into an image of sombre, fragile beauty. But Zoe, although gratified by her companions’ surprised admiration, recognizes her work as the loneliest shape she has ever seen. Artists must draw on whatever life hands them and Zoe, whose name, ironically, means life, has led an emotionally meagre existence: “The creation of my life—oh my God!— a silver paper shape fashioned from the remains of an empty cigarette packet! Surely now it is time for my death?” (273). Sadness is intensified at this point in the novel through a brief quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, alluding to Zoe’s earlier glimpse of children tossing balls to one another in the park (267): Was anything real at all? Nothing, only the balls, their glorious curving, Though one would ever pass, ah! fleetingly under the falling ball. (273)30 To stand beneath the arc of the thrown ball, however briefly, is to experience a moment of supreme imaginative insight. Zoe recognizes that Peter, who will never create the major painting he dreams of, longs “to stand for one moment of his life beneath the brilliance of the perfect circle” (273). Rilke’s sonnet suggests in its final line that perhaps one of the children at play might 30

The sonnet “Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen” is number eight in part two of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus. The 1962 New York edition of Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet attributes the lines quoted on page 273 to the translation of Rilke’s poem by M.D. Herter Norton in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, 1923; New York: W.W. Norton, 1942), but the lines are actually taken, in a slightly adapted form, from the translation by J.B. Leishman: see Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop, tr. J.B. Leishman (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, 1923, tr. 1936, 1946; London: Hogarth, 1957): 103.

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have experienced such illumination, stepping under the ball as it curves overhead, but this strikes a melancholy note, since either time passing, or indeed death itself, might obliterate both the vision and whoever experiences it. This particular sonnet, “Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen,” is dedicated to the memory of the poet’s cousin, Egon von Rilke, who died aged seven.31 In a letter the poet writes: “so much ‘childhood’—the sad and helpless side of childhood—is embodied for me in his form.”32 The poem’s theme of childhood joy and innocence overshadowed by impending darkness and death has much in common with the theme of Frame’s story “Swans,” and may indeed have influenced her writing of it.33 Rilke’s poetry was so important to Janet Frame that Patrick Evans even claims it “might be seen as the alembic in which her art was formed.”34 Frame herself writes that during eight years spent in a mental hospital, she carried about with her “in a little rose-embroidered bag […] Shakespeare and a translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus […] as physical companions in the fight for survival.”35 Only a few of the sonnets refer directly to the Orpheus story, but Rilke’s first English translator, J.B. Leishman, whose edition of the Sonnets Frame owned, points to the mythic hero’s significance in his Introduction: Orpheus, the mediator, at home in the kingdoms both of the living and of the dead, who, because he has raised his lyre among the shadows in Hades, has earned the right to proffer some surmising report of heaven.36 To affirm life the artist must simultaneously affirm death, as Rilke claims in a letter to his Polish translator: Death is that side of life which is turned away from us, unilluminated by us: we must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our 31 32 33 34 35 36

Rilke, “Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen,” in Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. J.B. Leishman, 102. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995): 589. Frame had already acquired her own copy of Leishman’s translation of the sonnets in 1948 (the year she wrote “Swans”), writing to John Money, “Dostoevsky and Rilke are dear friends.” Quoted in King, Wrestling with the Angel, 98. Patrick Evans, Janet Frame (Boston MA: Twayne, 1977): 33. Janet Frame, “Memory and a Pocketful of Words,” Times Literary Supplement 4 June 1964; repr. in Janet Frame, In Her Own Words, ed. Denis Harold & Pamela Gordon (Auckland: Penguin, 2011): 34. J.B. Leishman, “Introduction” to Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. J.B. Leishman, 13. The information that Frame owned this edition is given in King’s biography, Wrestling with the Angel, 535.

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e­ xistence, which is at home in both of these unlimited provinces, inexhaustibly nourished out of both.37 Frame continually emphasizes how artists must heed this reality, no matter how hazardous it proves. Zoe perceives the tiny silver sculpture as her life’s culmination, revealing its loneliness and emotional impoverishment. Facing such devastating self-knowledge, she deliberately overdoses on sleeping pills, leaving no note or explanation: “Why need one write a note if one can communicate with a left-over wrapping of silver paper from an empty cigarette packet?” (274). Zoe’s death prompts changes in other characters’ lives. As noted, Pat gives up bus-driving to sell stationery. Peter Heron, now aware of the danger inherent in an artist’s calling, abandons his paintings to the edge of the alphabet, dumping them in the dust-cart “with the food scraps, empty tins, the choked insides of vacuum cleaners” (284), and takes a salesman’s job. Toby, after attending Zoe’s funeral, returns to his motherland, New Zealand, and assumes the role of surrogate son to an elderly aunt whose bones are slowly turning to chalk. He still takes comfort, however, in dreams of writing about the Lost Tribe: You and I know he will never write it, that once he finds the real expression of it beyond the childhood story which the teacher read out in front of the class, he will be in as much danger as Zoe in her lonely wandering through the silver forest. And who will help Toby then? (296) Thora concludes her narration by describing herself as a solitary figure living at the edge of the alphabet, a captive of the captive dead whom, we assume, she will soon join. According to the note immediately preceding the novel, “The following manuscript was found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death, and submitted to the publishers by Peter Heron, Hire-Purchase Salesman.” Frame asserts the death of the author well before that concept became a critical commonplace. As Zoe’s companions admire her silver paper sculpture, one of them, a prostitute, asks if she can keep it, placing it in her handbag once Zoe hands it over. Similarly, Thora’s manuscript will be peddled for sale by Peter Heron, named after a predatory bird. Frame implies that, once complete, the artist’s work passes beyond the maker’s control into the hands of those who will both judge and seek to profit from it. 37

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter, November 1925, quoted in “Introduction,” 17.

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Travel between countries, or within them, offers only illusory escape from oppressive or limiting situations and circumstances, since, from Frame’s perspective, it is likely to force travellers to confront loneliness and isolation; she explores the relationship between literal journeys and that darker one from life to death that everyone must undertake. Artists, in particular, even if they never leave home, are compelled to follow a hazardous path leading them to explore the nature of death, for only by doing so can they hope to glimpse a true understanding of life. Works Cited Belich, James. Paradise Reforged: A History of New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001). Carlyon, Jenny, & Diana Morrow. Changing Times: New Zealand Since 1945 (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2013). Cronin, Jan. “Contexts of Exploration: Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds,” Journal of ­Commonwealth Literature 40.1 (March 2005): 5–19. Curnow, Allen. “House and Land,” in An Anthology of New Zealand Verse, ed. Robert Chapman & Jonathon Bennett (Oxford, London & Wellington: Oxford UP, 1956): 153–54. Curnow, Allen. “New Zealand Literature: The Case for a Working Definition,” in Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow (London: Heineman, 1973): 139–54. Delrez, Marc. “‘Conquest of Surfaces’: Aesthetic and Political Violence in the Work of Janet Frame,” in Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame, ed. Jan ­ Cronin & Simone Drichel (Cross/Cultures 110; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 135–53. Evans, Patrick. “Alienation and the Novels of Janet Frame,” Meanjin 32.3 (September 1973): 294–303. Evans, Patrick. “At the Edge of the Alphabet,” in The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): 82–91. Evans, Patrick. Janet Frame (Boston MA: Twayne, 1977). Frame, Janet. An Angel at My Table: An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Women’s Press, 1984). Frame, Janet. The Edge of the Alphabet (1962; New York: George Braziller, 1991). Frame, Janet. In Her Own Words, ed. Denis Harold & Pamela Gordon (Auckland: Penguin, 2011). Frame, Janet. Owls Do Cry (1957; London: Women’s Press, 1985). Frame, Janet. The Rainbirds (London: W.H. Allen, 1968).

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Frame, Janet. “Swans,” in Frame, The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951; London: Bloomsbury, 1991): 53–64. King, Michael. Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Sydney: Penguin, 2000). Leishman, J.B. “Introduction” to Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop, tr. J.B. Leishman (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop 1923, tr. 1936, 1946; L­ ondon: Hogarth, 1957): 9–31. Mercer, Gina. Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994). Mitchell, Stephen, ed. & tr. Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Modern Library, 1995). Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop, tr. J.B. Leishman (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, 1923, tr. 1936, 1946; London: Hogarth, 1957). Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. M.D. Herter Norton (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, 1923; New York: W.W. Norton, 1942). Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen,” in Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop, tr. J.B. Leishman (Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, 1923, tr. 1936; 1946; London: Hogarth, 1957): 102; English translation at 103. Sargisson, Lucy, & Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities (Aldershot & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004). Sinclair, Keith. A History of New Zealand (1959. London: Oxford UP, 1961).

Chapter 10

“Indias of the mind”

Maps, Mothers, and Ethnicized Wonder Woman Outfits in Australian–Indian Fiction Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie memorably speculates on the predicament of diasporic writers It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.1 This essay explores the stories of young Indian Australian writers who negotiate versions of “Indias of the mind” through the presence of parents or grandparents. For second-generation Indian–Australian writers (with or without the ­hyphen), the challenge is to reconstruct in their writing an India vaguely remembered from infrequent visits, or constructed through images made available in their family homes, including their parents’ memories of an India they cherish but have left behind forever. In reading these stories, I am uneasily aware that the writers are negotiating “disjunctures of time, generation, spatializations and dissemination” that refuse to be “neatly aligned.”2 These disjunctures and misalignments are interesting to explore, not least because the texts discussed in this essay were created in an intellectual milieu of intersecting discourses of multiculturalism, diaspora, and marginality circulating both globally and in Australia in the 1990s. These discourses are outlined briefly, 1 Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Viking, 1991): 10. 2 Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question,” in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Barnor Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 227.

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before I turn to examining the “Indias of the mind” embedded in stories of second-generation Indian Australian writers and the ways in which they rehearse in-betweenness. Indian Australian writing mainly began to emerge after the relaxation of the White Australian Policy in the 1970s.3 Along with the “significant demographic shift” that followed this change, there was bipartisan political support for the policy of multiculturalism until the mid-1990s.4 A positive assessment of multiculturalism is that it is “‘a workable model for civic tolerance’.”5 But the policy has many critics. Writers like Graham Huggan and Sneja Gunew argue that multiculturalism can be seen as a mechanism through which ethnicity is turned into a commodity, made subject to the changing rules that govern global cultural exchange.6 More forcefully, Ghassan Hage sees it as “a form of a symbolic violence in which a mode of domination is presented as a form of egalitarianism”; Hage uses a term from Pierre Bourdieu, “‘strategies of condescension’,” to characterize multiculturalism.7 While Hage and others see the adopting of an official policy of multiculturalism by governments as not going far enough to recognize and promote cultural difference, political critics on the right, who saw the policy as ‘going too far,’ emerged strongly in the 1990s. It was in this fraught context that writing by new migrants came to be marketed and received. The narrative templates available for Asian–Australian (or any type of migrant writing), in the early stages, were restricted to two predominant scripts: that of remembering with longing; and trauma.8 However, recent Asian–­Australian narratives unsettle the reader’s expectation.9 Preoccupation with questions of identity, living with difference, a sense of dislocation 3 See Paul Sharrad, “Reconfiguring ‘Asian Australian’ Writing: Australia, India and Inez Baranay,” in India, India, ed. David Brooks, special issue of Southerly 70.3 (2010): 11. 4 Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991): 179. 5 Linda Hutcheon, quoted in Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2007): 112. 6 Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London & New York: Routledge, 2004); Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). 7 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation (Sydney: Pluto, 1998): 87. 8 See Kate Douglas, Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2010). 9 Pamela Graham, “Alice Pung’s Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologised Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood,” in Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth, ed. Kylie Cardwell & Kate Douglas, special issue of Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 35.1 (2013): 67–83.

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and ­alienation are still at the heart of the narratives, but these themes are rehearsed in terms of a different view of Asia and a different kind of migrant life. Thus Wenche Ommundsen has argued that “the major trajectory of Asian Australian writing has been to resist, debate, deconstruct the cultural politics of identity, and to forge new narratives out of the fictions and realities of diasporic experience.”10 This critiquing of identity and forging of new forms of story is part of the project of the texts studied in this essay: a novel, and three short stories of remembered childhoods that move “beyond crude labels such as ‘bananas’ and ‘coconuts’.”11 In the introduction to her anthology Growing up Asian in Australia, from which the three stories are taken, Alice Pung provocatively claims that Asian-Australians have often been written about by outsiders, as outsiders. Here, they tell their own stories. They are not distant observers, plucking the most garish fruit from the lowest-hanging branches of an exotic cultural tree. These writers are the tree, and they write from its roots.12 Shalini Akhil’s “Destiny” is a small-scale, tongue-in-cheek allegory of a young girl’s desire to become Wonder Woman, while in Christopher Cyrill’s excerpt from his novel The Ganges and its Tributaries, the “Indias of the mind” take a literal form.13 Sunil Badami’s “Sticks and Stones and Such Like” humorously reflects on Badami’s childhood experiences, and offers an ironic recounting of his epiphany at finding out what his first name means.14 Suneeta Peres da ­Costa’s first novel, Homework, is a comi-tragic story of a young girl carrying the ‘diasporic burden’.15 All narrate the experiences of second-generation Indian children who grew up in Australia and navigated living between different cultures: those of the home and those of school in the 1980s and 1990s. The struggle to “possess the hyphen,” to understand the problematic of belonging simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there,’ or what Vijay Mishra has called the “­diasporic 10 11 12 13 14 15

Wenche Ommundsen, “‘This story does not begin on a boat’: What is Australian about Asian Australian writing?” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25.4 (2011): 512. Alice Pung, “Introduction” to Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008): 4. “Introduction,” 1. Shalini Akhil, “Destiny,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung, 176–79; Christopher Cyrill, “The Ganges and its Tributaries,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, 39–42. Further page references are in the main text. Sunil Badami, “Sticks and Stones and Such Like,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, 9–15. Further page references are in the main text. Suneeta Peres da Costa, Homework (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Further page references are in the main text.

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b­ inary,” are evident in all four texts, but function slightly differently in each.16 For some hyphenated subjects, Radhakrishnan argues, the hyphen “co-ordinates” the evolving relationship of one’s place of origin with that of one’s “home.”17 The moments of mediating diaspora and reconciling where one comes from with where one is, while they can cause “extreme pain and agonising dislocations,” also enfold an “exhilarating anomie.”18 Mishra argues that the diasporic space is a contradiction, “a racist and contaminated space,” nevertheless one that engenders the “possibilities for exploring hybrid, cross-cultural, and interdiasporic relationships.”19 And for him, “the politics of the hyphen itself is hyphenated because, in the name of empowering people, the classification indeed disempowers them; it makes them, to use a hyphenated term, ‘empoweringly–disempowered’.”20 Graham Huggan rejects all prefixes: the entanglement of prefixes (“multi,” “inter,” “trans”) provides further evidence of an unevenly developed world in which there is not one but ­several possible—possibly incommensurate—modernities, and in which the nation is recognised as only one of several possible—possibly ­irreconcilable—horizons of cultural identity and juridico-political sites.21 For second-generation writers from an Indian background, such as Akhil, Badami, Cyrill and da Costa, the interstitial spaces of the host country and the home country are slightly complicated. The host and home countries are the same, and yet these writers need to make sense of two ‘homes’ in two separate countries: their parents’ home that they half understand; and the ‘host’ country, equally alien, the norms of which they decode through interactions at school. Samir Dayal compellingly argues that diaspora is less of a tug of war between the home and the host country than “the interstitiality of entering or leaving and destabilising the border zones of cultures,” best understood as “fracturings of the subject that resist falsely comforting identifications and reifications.”22 16

Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorising the Diasporic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007): 185. 17 R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996): xiii. 18 Diasporic Mediations, 159. 19 Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, 187. 20 The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, 184. 21 Huggan, Australian Literature, 144. 22 Samir Dayal, “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29.1 (1996): 48.

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The second generation is expected, by both the ‘home’ country and the ‘host’ country, to carry an unchanged identity from the place of their origin. At the same time, there is an expectation that they will gradually morph into ideal citizens who will whole-heartedly embrace the country that their parents have chosen to migrate to. The reality is that they are likely to feel caught between two worlds, at least temporarily. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra observe that First generation migrants tend to emphasise cultural maintenance, while the second generation moves closer towards assimilation, thus creating a major fissure within the group across generations. But the split is in some respects a way of managing the fundamental contradiction, since the children are assigned the task of making links with the new on behalf of the group, while being required to maintain their allegiance to the old. The second generation must live with the double message, to renounce purity while remaining true to the group.23 Given these expectations, the project of constructing a hybrid identity, a much-touted mantra of multiculturalism, presents challenges: the experiences of first-generation and second-generation migrants often are totally different. As second-generation migrant writers watch their parents perform their own versions of “self-division” (Dayal’s phrase), and attempt to create ­hybrid identities, they resist the available positions/fictions in the narratives/everyday practices, rehearsing a public identity in their writing that allows them to straddle two cultures (problematically).24 Doubleness seems to offer ­second-generation migrants the seemingly generous and glorious option of being ‘both/and,’ but in reality holds out the uneasy prospect of negotiating the “neither just this/nor just that” experience.25 The epithets ‘ethnic’ or ‘migrant’ and the terms multiculturalism or transnationalism might not capture the second-generation experience of performing hybridity. This is the case not just in regard to the marketing of ‘migrant writing,’ but even in terms of capturing the realities of the ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by second-generation writers. In response to this situation, the four writers whose work is considered here deploy the powerful, rhetorical devices of intertextuality and irony to double code messages. The concept of doubleness that diaspora engenders is represented using the tropes of intertextuality, irony, and paradox, to afford the possibilities of double vision and to inscribe an ambivalent position in ­relation to 23 24 25

Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 181. Dayal, “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” 52. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” 47.

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both cultures, Indian and Australian. In particular, the “Indias of the mind” that the parents or grandparents recall are juxtaposed with the realities of the Australian contexts. In that respect, the memories of India that exist in the minds of first-generation migrants function like texts: the very presence of other texts, overt or covert, creates interplay between embedded, evoked, or palimpsestic texts. To invoke Bakhtin, any verbal performance can “infect with its own intentions certain aspects of language.”26 Writers choose to create a double message by infiltrating, impinging upon or strategically letting a text from the past hover around a new one. Coupled with irony, intertextuality inherently underlines the instability of texts, becoming a useful device to work out a bi-textual structure in fiction: it recalls the ‘original’ text that has in some way faded away, but has infected the re-formulated or ‘second-generation’ ­story. The evaluative edge of irony, in the right discursive context, combines the said and the unsaid to elicit subversive laughter. While this irony signals the distance of the second-generation writer from the first, it also signals their proximity, because, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, for irony to be perceived shared background is necessary. Irony and interpreters of irony need to converge, albeit on different terrains: rhetorical, linguistic, aesthetic, social, ethical, cultural, and ideological.27 Further, Hutcheon argues that postmodern irony is primarily a strategy for resistance and opposition, suggesting that in its postmodern form, “irony opens up new spaces, literally between opposing meanings, where new things can happen.”28 The unique ability to subvert from within, to speak the language of the dominant order while at the same time suggesting another meaning and another evaluation, is a unique affordance of postmodern irony. Thus, irony creates a two-tiered message, one for the ironist and his or her ‘initiated’ audience, the other a ‘decoy’ message for those who do not share the communal discursive framework.29 In the stories engaged with here, coding devices are used to record the double vision of the diasporic writers, and to educate readers. The stories respond to

26 27 28 29

M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki [Problems of Literature and Esthetics] 1975; Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 290. Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 98–99. Linda Hutcheon, “Appendix 1: ‘Speaking Canadian’: The Ironies of Canadian Art and Literature,” in Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature, ed. Linda Hutcheon (Toronto: ecw, 1992): 31. Margaret A. Rose, Parody/Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979): 51.

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the diasporic experience by offering resistance to pre-determined meanings of ‘Indian’ and ‘Australian.’ Shalini Akhil’s “Destiny” is an ironic retelling of a young girl’s desire to become Wonder Woman. The young narrator is entranced by the television series in which Wonder Woman vanquishes her enemies; in private, the young girl imitates her role model, quite secure in her belief that she knows her calling in life. However her grandmother, who enters her life at that stage, points out that she will have to be an Indian Wonder Woman, since her appearance does not really conform: the colour of her skin and eyes, and the length of her legs (177), mean that the standard-issue Wonder Woman outfit will have to be modified to include a lungi that covers the sparkly underpants. That way, the Indian woman crime fighter can “run and kick and squat and jump and still keep her honour” (177). The strategic advantage of the seven yards of fabric is also strongly promoted by the grandmother, who suggests that the lungi can be used to tie up bad guys. The grandmother also proposes swapping the strapless top for one that has shoulder straps, and that all the insignia Wonder Woman wears should be made from twenty-four carat gold. The trickster grandmother also gets the young swashbuckler making magic rotis and eating them with super-hero eggs. The grandmother peddles a more ethnic and exotic fantasy to the aspiring Wonder Woman, making the narrator conclude: I felt sorry for the old Wonder Woman. I imagined her eating her peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches alone, without a magical grandmother to suggest wearing a lungi over her embarrassing sparkly nappies. That day, I decided to change my destiny. When I grew up, I was going to be Indian Wonder Woman. (178–79) The binary of Western and diasporic Indian is mediated through a playful reconciliation of the hyphenated subject’s ‘here’ and ‘there,’ which are activated through the costume that the grandmother re-designs. The readjustments to Wonder Woman outfit to include a lungi, the slightly more modest top, and the gold accessories that the grandmother recommends are reconstituted in the narrator’s own desires. The invisible hyphen in this story seems like an empowering one, promising “all manner of unprecedented becoming”; it is a picture of what Jacqueline Lo calls “happy hybridity.”30 30 R. Radhakrishnan, “Adjudicating Hybridity, Co-ordinating Betweenness,” Jouvert: A ­Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5.1 (2000), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/con51. htm (accessed 12 May 2015); Jacqueline Lo, “Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-­ Australian Identities,” in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and

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In Christopher Cyrill’s The Ganges and Its Tributaries, the invisible hyphen materializes just below the surface of the narrative. In the extract reprinted in Pung’s anthology, Cyrill remembers with bemusement the map of India that his father created on chipboard that floated on a custom-made pond in the backyard in his childhood home. The father ingeniously models a version of India that contains only the places of significance to him: “his birthplace of Lucknow, Calcutta where [Cyrill’s] mother was born; Bombay, where the great Sunil Gavaskar would bat on the streets with a plank of wood” (41). Verisimilitude was not of great concern. The Himalayas do get pride of place, but the Ganges and its tributaries are represented with thick shoelaces dyed blue, which flow not into the Bay of Bengal, but into “all the oceans of the world” (41). Cyrill, bewildered by his father’s less than accurate image of India, observes “that India had roughly the same outline as Australia. When the model turned in water so that Nagercoil pointed directly east, I could transplant the Great Australian Bight onto the Gulf of Cambay and transplant Arnhem Land onto Calcutta” (41). Cyrill’s comment merges the “Indias of the mind” that his father conjures up with Australia, his home, in a delightful sleight of hand that crafts an invisible hyphen. The story neither offers falsely comforting homilies, nor does it present a migration story of disruption and dislocation. It is made accessible as a yarn or an anecdote, without any apparent attempt at fashioning a literary symbol. However, to a reader of Indian Australian writing, the ‘here’ and ‘there’ are established, as in Akhil’s short story; the cross-cultural, inter-diasporic relationship exerts its ironic presence. In Badami’s “Sticks and Stones and Such Like” the name Sunil is the cause of much consternation. Sunil, the protagonist, hates his name because he has endured every manner of mispronunciation and distortion. Jibes such as “‘Sunil? Like banana peel?’” become part of his daily schoolyard ritual (9). This is accompanied by ritual name-calling, terms such as “Curry-muncher, towel-head, abo, coon, boong, darkie, nig-nog, golliwog” or “‘Black’ followed by any suitable or just thunk-up epithet” (9). His mother sympathetically offers advice by saying, “‘Stones and sticks and such-like can only shake your skeletons. Just rise over it!’” (9). The mother’s garbled recasting of the idiom with an Indian accent, and the injunction to use the situation to build character, do not help Sunil, who suffers taunts such as “‘Why dontcha wash the black off, ya dirty black bastard?’” sometimes accompanied by an “affectionate” chuckle (10). In response, Sunil literally tries to scrub his right arm to wash off the black till the arm bleeds. Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram have argued that ­Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Lisa Law, Sharon Chalmers & Mandy Thomas (Melbourne: Pluto, 2000): 152–68.

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It is the body that grants the subject a sense of personal identity, a sense of belonging to the normative group or of being the Other. Thus one ­carries the notion of home within the body by being at home with it or experiencing it as unfamiliar. The notion of the home and the experiencing of the body are central to the understanding of identity, because so often the term ‘identity’ really suggests bodily identity.31 In “Sticks and Stones and Such Like” the bodily identity, the colour of the skin, is a reality that cannot be changed. The overpowering desire to belong, to be an insider, to be seen as a good sport, to be good at sport (9–10), are stronger than Sunil’s sense of affiliation to the motley crowd of Indian friends who gather to play cards and share pappadums and puris in his family home, the literal representation of the “Indias of the mind.” He declares a hatred of Indians, a sentiment he has in common with his father (10), despite (both) being Indian. Sunil notes that his father, a doctor, has “run off” with one of the Australian nurses in his hospital, in an attempt to fit into Australian society. While the father and the Australian stepmother’s home is described as “too neat to be alive” (10), pathologically clean, smelling of furniture spray and air freshener, Sunil’s mother’s home is “redolent of the trinity that jostles you when you enter an Indian home: not Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva, but asafoetida, cumin and incense” (10). On hot Sunday afternoons, the home becomes a carnivalesque space inhabited by “uncles” and “aunties,” general practitioners trained in Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University or similar-sounding medical colleges from South India (10). The men are described as pipe-smoking, card-playing tellers of bawdy jokes in Kannada (10); meanwhile, the women are puri-frying mothers, constantly switching from one language to another—“English, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani”—who energetically discuss their children’s achievement: “‘Rahul is come first in his class, hunh! He has state rank!’” or “‘Preeti has finished her internship, and now only she’s deciding between ortho or cardio’” (11). These eavesdropped conversations slyly endorse the stereotype of Indian parents goading their children to be high achievers. There is parody as the story sets up oppositional worlds: the ‘Indian’ home Sunil belongs to, and the world that he and his friends long to belong to.

31

Ralph Crane & Radhika Mohanram. “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” in Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000): xi.

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All our Aussie friends would probably be having barbeques—­something unimaginable for us and our strictly vegetarian parents. And they wouldn’t have to translate everything into English in their heads, then back again before answering. (11) The access to the enchanted world of barbeques and facile monolingual exchanges are hampered by having a name like Sunil. Another preoccupation of the Indian women is the analysis of the meanings of their children’s names, a way of lovingly recollecting “Indias of the mind,” but surprisingly, the name Sunil is never discussed. To fit in, Sunil adopts the name Neil, which recalls the astronaut and is ‘cool,’ easy on the tongue, and free of any of the negative connotations of decreased mental ability that Sunil [senile] has. Becoming “Neil” temporarily provides the narrator with a certain credibility, reducing the taunts and the anguish. But when his mother finds out she is furious, chastising him for not being proud of his heritage and for disrespecting what is “‘Best name!’” a “‘first-class name’” (14). She claims that “‘Sunil is breeze that blows at sunset on Shiva’s birthday once every thousand years, blowing snow from his head-top into his ice-cave below, where the snow melts and flows down mountain and becomes what? […] Holy Ganga’” (13). This strategy, of using myth to give gravity to a troublesome name, worked in pre-Google days: Sunil embraces his hitherto rejected name and, despite the mangled pronunciation, takes pride in the exalted identity and the uniqueness that it bestows. The sense of power, pride, and belonging that come along with the new understanding of this name, which he shares with very few (Sunil Gavaskar being the exception), equip him to handle snide comments about immigrants that he hears in trains. He even begins to assume a modicum of superiority that makes him look down upon ordinary, unimaginative names like Mathew. But there is a twist in the tale. In the last paragraph of the story, Sunil finds out that the name that he has so eagerly embraced does not have the heightened associations after all. Sunil, according to a book on Indian names, simply means “dark one” (15). The label ‘black’ that was an integral part of the ­schoolyard torture, and the mythic meaning of Sunil, turn out to be the same. Ironically, the ‘said’ and the ‘unsaid’ messages hint not at opposition, but convergence: Sunil is, indeed, the “dark one.” The irony can also be read as an amused acceptance. The mother’s deception of creating a myth to e­ ncourage the son to retain and take pride in his Indian identity works, while the selfmocking humour at the end alludes to self-knowledge, resilience, and adjustment, as well as distance from a former self. The diasporic consciousness does double duty to uncover and destabilize the Indian and the Australian worlds, reconciling the narrator’s Indian appearance to his Australian feeling,

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“­eventually settling for an a­ wkwardly knotted hyphen to make me Indian–­ Australian or Australian–Indian depending on the day” (14). Just as Badami’s story shows the protagonist shifting between home and school, Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework has been read as a coming-of-age novel in which the young protagonist negotiates a way of belonging and being different in these two environments.32 Bizarre, idiosyncratic characters populate the storyworld, and the tale of a fragmenting family trying to live between cultures is told with endearing audacity. In Homework, the coming-of-age story collides with the quest or mock allegorical tale of a ‘freak’ six-year-old girl with antennae. Homework tells the story of the Pereiras, who have migrated from Goa after the Portuguese colonies were taken over by India in 1961. A key figure in the family is the mother, a palliative care physician who explains her job as “helping people die with dignity” (52). The mother’s nesting instincts gradually decline, a result of being “very unhappy” (176). Paradoxically, she takes to stealing birds’ nests whilst losing interest in her own children, leaving her daughter Mina to mother her siblings. The ranger who returns her to the house after she has raided the neighbourhood for eyries declares that she suffers from “‘Anti-faunal obsessions. Ornithic fantasies’” (246). While the mother constantly seeks to fly away, the father burrows under the house, seeking refuge from a world he has increasingly lost control over. As he becomes gradually unhinged, he sings the praises of WD40, a chemical lubricant with multiple handy uses: “‘whenever things get a bit sluggish, just apply some of this and you’ll be surprised just how much life it supplies’” (229–30; 240; 246). Ironically, the quite toxic WD40, liberally sprayed around the house, might have contributed to cutting his life short and burning down his home. Deepa, the oldest child, is the resident genius who by the age of three has read the complete works of St Thomas Aquinas, and over the next two years makes her way through Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard (82). The youngest, Shanti, is an avid watcher of cartoons who becomes an acrobat (231)— both perfect. Mina, the protagonist and narrator, is the sensitive one, born with two feelers that protrude from her head (albeit that they are covered by a mop of hair). The middle child, Mina yearns for her mother’s love and her approval, of which there are less and less available. She is also the child who literally carries the “diasporic burden” (244). Her body responds to turbulence by gagging, something that one doctor surmises occurs because of the fluid-retaining properties of her antennae (234). This earns her the name Ulti Bachha (233), which can be roughly translated as “the child who vomits,” although in Hindi, 32

Wenche Ommundsen, “Writing as Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung,” in The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting, ed. Anne Collett & Louise D’Arcens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 187–203.

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ulti also means upside down or inside out. The other significant character in the novel is Quentin, the one-eyed boy next door, who on first meeting Mina obligingly lets her hold his artificial eyeball (56). It is with the help of these eccentric characters that Mina tells her mock-picaresque tale. The parents’ “Indias of the mind” are contrasted with the world of Australian schools. In the first chapter Mina steals a can of “California Sunshine” from a classmate, in the hope that she can warm a mother who has grown increasingly cold under Australian skies (15–16). There are no overt links established with the myth of Prometheus, yet there is an echo of that text. The mock epic story of one child’s struggle to mitigate the suffering of a cold mother is heroically set up; what makes the story more interesting is that the little hero is dressed in a heavy box pleated tunic, the uniform of a Catholic school. Dressed this way, and sporting her antennae, she is implicitly presented as a kind of mutant. The Pereiras did not start their lives in a suburb of Sydney as a dysfunctional family. The mother, who becomes increasingly demented, was once a happy parent and general practitioner who, under the warm Indian skies, took Mina shopping and showered her children with her version of maternal love. In the earlier part of the novel, the author describes her family as the stereotypical Indian migrants continuing the traditions of curry, samosas, and amothiks, and the daily bath rituals in which mothers lovingly soften the skins of their protesting children by rubbing in Johnson’s baby oil (1–2). There was the usual pressure of academic performance, present in the story by Sunil Badami, and here described hyperbolically: The pressure on my infant mind to retain, recall, and express myself had been heavy from the moment I blinked. At one, they had moved to placing huge volumes of World Book Encyclopedia directly on my lap, burdening and straining my as yet unformed limbs. No rabbits, no Aesop, Grimm, or Andersen. I did not have in my possession a single pop-up book. (4) Two incongruous frames are created: the Indian family home in which children are encouraged to read books above the level appropriate for their age, and the Australian/Western reading pedagogy that privileges a fun and ­age-appropriate approach to literacy. There are numerous examples of such gentle satire throughout the novel, as precocious Mina tries to reconcile the puzzling worlds of school, with its assortment of characters, with her uneasily lived childhood at home. Alice in Wonderland, the rules of long division, and the laws of physics, which form part of the school discourse, collide with Mina’s continually

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d­ isintegrating home life. Intertextuality is cunningly deployed to comic effect. For example, Mina’s journey to Quentin’s, her neighbour’s home, becomes an Alice-type adventure: “Now I felt I was down the Rabbit Hole, dwarfed by a huge grandfather clock, giant-sized oak dining chairs, a huge scroll of a rug” (55). Once down the rabbit hole, she sees glimpses of a seemingly happy Australian family. Momentarily, Quentin’s home is a refuge, as Mina enjoys the warmth and hospitality of a house wall-papered with maps of the world. Mina yearns for Quentin’s mother as a substitute for her own increasingly cold one. Over a glass of Ribena, Mina tells the new neighbours that her mother is a “palliative physician” (68). When asked if she would want to be one when she grows up, Mina says, “‘I’d rather die’” (68). Rapturous, unstoppable laughter follows during which Mrs Soyer suddenly says, “‘You laugh like that and you’ll end up crying’” (69). The words turn out to be prophetic (252–53). The perfect Australian family ends up being less happy than it initially appears. Mr and Mrs Soyer get divorced and Quentin, in the last chapter, succumbs to Mina’s elder sister’s seduction (250), something that finally causes Mina to break up. She has become aware that the past she has been holding on to has disappeared: the curries once lovingly created by her mother are replaced by “those vile Anglo-American culinary travesties called pies,” and those too from a carton (240). As she runs from her house, she recalls the maps she had seen in Quentin’s house: I had once longed to lie down on those cartographies, but now, wide awake, I believed I was tearing through them, running, ripping, tripping, and falling over the accident of my being in the world, the daughter of my mother the child of my parents. (251) Shanti, whose skin was once fondly anointed with oil by the mother to “filoperfection” (235), now has unattended inflammations and welts, as well as a lice-infested scalp (232). The father, when he surfaces from under the house, is “sad and vanquished, clutching the WD40 can to his chest like an urn that contained the ashen remains of his beloved” (247). Deepa, subversive as always, finds gratification by sleeping with boys that she picks up randomly. As the home disintegrates, Mina helplessly tries to make sense of this unstable world armed with the laws of physics—“Distance over time equals velocity. Velocity divided by time equals acceleration” (238)—in combination with Gandhian principles of renunciation and self-sacrifice, including “Renunciation without aversion is not lasting” (244–45). The two unhelpful sets of ­mantras leave Mina feeling that she is on “a long, long aeroplane journey; but […] strapped to my seat, and there was neither take-off nor landing, no final

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destination to speak of” (235). Mina’s already disintegrating family home literally goes up in flames, and with it the aromas of spices arising from it. The fire takes with it Mina’s deranged parents; what remains are ashes, and a promise of an abstract space, an ambivalent new location: for we begin at a time beyond the womb, a disjunct moment; and we love after having survived the unnameable and unmasterable miseries of the past. And on and on each one of us arrives and advances, flying with her face forever gazing at the nebulous sometimes hideous and occasionally divine shapes of the history from whose thigh she sadly slides. (259) Just before her home burns down, Mina runs through the streets, “yanking from [her] head, the tendrillar, wasted remains of [her] feelers […] crying and tearing those rotted knobs from [her] scalp” (254). The second-generation migrant writer, the diasporic writer, or the transnational writer, resists the false hope that the easy ‘both/and’ conceptions of the diasporic subject often circulated might provide a simple solution to problems created by cultural differences within families, and considers instead the ­uncomfortable, “neither just this/nor just that” position that Dayal proposes. Paradoxically, this more ‘realistic’ version of intergenerational difference is presented through a non-realist frame. The Indian–Australian writers whose work is discussed in this essay reflect on childhood, and perform their engagement with irreconcilable worlds, focusing on the collisions and differences between peers and parents that their protagonists must negotiate. In most instances, the worlds of the parents either collide and disintegrate, or merge with different degrees of ease. The overall sense is, in the case of the four texts, an ironic one that reveals itself through the double coding devices that the texts strategically deploy to speak both to those who have experience of a diasporic existence, and those who do not. The authors reflect on their childhood and wrestle with Badami’s “awkwardly knotted hyphen,” using intertextuality, irony, and paradox. All four writers attempt to reconcile the “Indias of the mind” with the realities of the Australian context, mainly with humorous effect. Writing from the “interstitial spaces of border zones,” the authors have, to use Dayal’s words “resisted falsely comforting identifications and reifications,” as they narrate the disjunctures and collisions of the two worlds.33 Disjunctures and collisions are powerful forces associated with disconnections. However, in three out of the four stories examined in this essay, a sense of affiliation predominates. Akil embraces the destiny of a hybrid identity—that 33

Dayal, “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” 48.

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of an Indian Wonder Woman. Cyrill’s bemused observations on his father’s memory of India and his quirky cartography skills are a tongue-in-cheek reflection of “Indias of the mind,” as is Badami’s resignation to the fact that in both the Indian and the Australian contexts, the name Sunil connotes ‘the dark one’. These signal a positive engagement with “disjunctures and collisions.” In Homework, despite the traumatic end of the family home burning down, there are hints at the “nebulous sometimes hideous and occasionally divine shapes of the history.” To recall Radhakrishnan, an “exhilarating anomie” awaits ­second-generation migrant writers who have the ultimate choice of narrativizing their diasporic existence and designing their own “Indias of the mind.” Works Cited Akhil, Shalini. “Destiny,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008): 176–79. Badami, Sunil. “Sticks and Stones and Such Like,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008): 9–15. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki [Problems of Literature and Esthetics] 1975; Austin: U of Texas P, 1981). Crane, Ralph, & Radhika Mohanram. “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” in Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000): vii–xv. Cyrill, Christopher. “The Ganges and its Tributaries,” in Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008): 39–42. Dayal, Samir. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29.1 (1996): 46–62. Douglas, Kate. Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2010). Graham, Pamela. “Alice Pung’s Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologised Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood,” in Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth, ed. Kylie Cardwell & Kate Douglas, special issue of Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 35.1 (2013): 67–83. Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation (Sydney: Pluto, 1998). Hall, Stuart. “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question,” in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Barnor Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 209–41.

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Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2007). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York & ­London: Routledge, 1988). Hutcheon, Linda. “Appendix 1: ‘Speaking Canadian’: The Ironies of Canadian Art and Literature,” in Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature, ed. Linda Hutcheon (Toronto: ECW, 1992): 29–31. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Lo, Jacqueline. “Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian Identities,” in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Lisa Law, Sharon Chalmers & Mandy Thomas (Melbourne: Pluto, 2000): 152–68. Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorising the Diasporic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007). Ommundsen, Wenche. “‘This story does not begin on a boat’: What is Australian about Asian Australian writing?” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25.4 (­August 2011): 503–13. Ommundsen, Wenche. “Writing as Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung,” in The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting, ed. Anne Collett & Louise D’Arcens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 187–203. Peres da Costa, Suneeta. Homework (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Pung, Alice. “Introduction” to Growing up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008): 1–4. Radhakrishnan, R. “Adjudicating Hybridity, Co-ordinating Betweenness,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5.1 (2000), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/ con51.htm (accessed 12 May 2015). Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). Rose, Margaret A. Parody/Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979). Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Viking, 1991): 9–21. Sharrad, Paul. “Reconfiguring ‘Asian Australian’ Writing: Australia, India and Inez Baranay,” in India, India, ed. David Brooks, special issue of Southerly 70.3 (2010): 11–29.

Chapter 11

Singing the Spiral of Time

Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela Bill Ashcroft Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela, winner of the Best Book in the South East Asia and South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, presents us with a text that could easily be subsumed by the over-used term ‘magic realism.’1 Yet this “novel in verse” offers a strong message that the mythic is constantly imbricated in Samoan reality itself.2 In recounting the purported adventures of Vela, the story moves from mythic time to the present and back as it presents allegorical renditions of the colonial struggle. The stories told by Vela are a record of the adventures of a character who is not exactly immortal but not exactly human, who inhabits both the world of the atua, the Samoan gods, and the present of the writer. “Is Vela of my dreaming? Or am I the object of his?” asks the first line (3), a question that emphasizes the importance of song and story in framing a lifeworld.3 The strategy here is a direct disruption of the linearity of historical time, an attempt to re-assert the significance of a mythic, spiralling time which sees past and future embedded in the present and controlled by narrative. When colonial societies are brought into the discourse of modernity as a function of imperial control—mapped, named, organized, legislated, inscribed—they are at the same time kept at History’s margins, implanting the joint sense of loss and desire.4 Being inscribed into history is to be made modern—as Ashis Nandy puts it “Historical consciousness now owns the globe […] Though 1 Albert Wendt, The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009). Page references are in the main text. For a discussion of the politics of criticism and appellation in relation to postcolonial writing, including the use of the term ‘magic realism,’ see Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003): 141–44. 2 Diane Dekker, “The Adventurous Albert Wendt” [Interview with Albert Wendt], Dominion Post (1 August 2009): 20. 3 Sharrad discusses this question in relation to earlier works by Wendt, and the influence of Carl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges; see Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 185. 4 As Moore says of Africa, “As long as African culture was outside of history, Africans could be brought into history and European modernity through colonial interventions.” Donald Shearer Moore, Contesting Terrain in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands: The Cultural Politics of Place, Identity, and Resource Struggles, vol. 1 (Stanford CA: Stanford U, 1995): 252.

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millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects.”5 The Adventures of Vela shows how the ‘singer,’ the creative artist, can challenge Western historical consciousness by deploying the reality of myth and the power of story. The Adventures of Vela is an extended and exuberant traversal of an invented Samoan mythology, in which Wendt manages to combine comic absurdity, scatological ebullience, and prophetic protest, all of which revolve around the implicit reality of colonial occupation. The genre—an extended poem, or collection of poems—allows the temporal structure of narrative to incorporate the oratorical energy of performance. Vela is the Singer, one who hears “his death song / at the moment of his birth” (9) and whose “first song is of the Va the Space between all things / like the birth fluid holding all in the Unity-thatis-All” (10). “Book One: Beginnings” introduces us to Vela and his rival Alopese, and to the narrator—who at this point is in the same hospital ward as Vela, with the same illness, the first of several parallels of which the most important is poetic ambition. The key chapter in this first section is “The Contest,” in which Alopese challenges the outcast Mulialofa to a song contest, which Mulialofa duly loses (23– 32). As his prize, Alopese demands Mulialofa’s bones: With long bamboo knife they slit open his right leg from groin to toes […] Broke out the thigh bone Tossed it to Alopese who whooped sucked out the marrow noisily and of the hollow bone made a flute He fluted arrogant tunes while they unstitched each bone from the house of Mulialofa’s flesh and tied together with sinnet a Bone-man white as smiling teeth who danced one-legged to Alopese’s fluting song: (26–27) The echoes of Wilson Harris’s ‘bone flute’ place the disruption of linear time in a broader postcolonial literary context.6 5 Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 4.2 (May 1995): 46. 6 Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1960); see also The Adventures of Vela, 134. Sharrad argues that Wendt has a similar view to Harris of the relationship between

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Vela wraps Mulialofa’s boneless body in tapa and carries him to “the dreaming mountains […] like a bride” (27), building a new skeleton from the bones of pigs. Mulialofa recovers but departs, leaving Vela determined to make a “new verse for vengeance he was never to exact” (28). Advised that if he is to defeat Alopese he must create something entirely new, a rhythm Alopese cannot match, Vela studies for a decade. Then he hears “a beat I’d never heard / like the rapid shatter of rain” made by “black youths in exotic hides” (29). Using this ‘new beat’ he defeats a stunned Alopese;7 as his prize, Vela demands his enemy’s voice. I knelt and the Tuimanu’a’s redflowing hand unclasped and covered my in-sucking mouth releasing Alopese’s voice his mana to surge like Tagaloa’s breath that gave us life down down into all that I was am and will be in the Unity that weaves winner and loser (32) As his fame becomes established, the paramount chief Tuimanu’a offers Vela his favourite wife, an offer Vela refuses, although he does accept “the envied post of chronicler” (35). In “Book Two: The Chronicles of Nafanua” Vela has become as “a trophy won by Nafanua’s armies” (47), but manages to rise sufficiently high to become her storyteller. Nafanua is a fearsome figure, sexually voracious, wrathful, and warlike, a depiction one reviewer found offensive: Wendt’s Nafanua is a seductive, scheming power-hungry wretch seething with penis-envy. From what I know, the “Tamaita’i” (our Lady) only raised war to free the enslaved and only went to war when beseeched by past, present, and creative writing: his “repeated insistence on the constructedness of history, the interconnection of fiction and factual record, is [like Harris’s fiction] a tricky wrestling with the slippery power of the past, confessing our need to know it in order fully to be who we are, and our need to break free of it so as to become who we might be” (Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 117). 7 April K. Henderson, “Gifted Flows: Making a Space for a Brand New Beat,” in Flying Fox Excursions: Albert Wendt’s Creative and Critical Legacy in Oceania, ed. Teresia K. Teaiwa & ­Selina Tusitala Marsh, special issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 22.2 (2010): 294.

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paramount chiefs. She never kept any of the titles she won in battle. […] If anything, it’s very unSamoan.8 A less explicit sense of distaste than that expressed by Tupuola Terry Tavita is evident in Helen Watson White’s remarks that she welcomed “the surfacing of Wendt the lyricist” as “a merciful spell from considering bodily concerns” in the book.9 These responses to Vela support Paul Sharrad’s contention that “Wendt has never not been controversial.”10 In a discussion of the reception of Leaves of the Banyan Tree, Sharrad has noted the objections of some (“older Samoans”) to perceived crudity, and (from others) to apparent ‘disloyalty’ to Samoa.11 Wendt’s purposes are more allegorical than worshipful. Towards the later part of the Nafanua chronicle a strange albino creature is found “foetuscurled / in the warm flesh of sand”: “Hairy with a long mane the colour of flames / Pigwhite skin spotted with flyshit” (99). As the creature wakes, it cries: “Va-a-a-aaa! A cry as deep as / all sadness regret and loss” (101). This is an ironic account of the arrival of the white man, who Nafanua protects by introducing him as her son (102–03). It is a stance that leaves her at war with all other atua (gods), and her taulaaitu Auva’a lamenting “But he’s / not one of us: a bad omen washed up / by the tide—his kind will follow / to conquer and destroy us” (107).12 “Book Three: Travel” begins and ends by seeming to return to the historical time of the narrator, opening with the Now of an Aotearoa winter; in between it soars into mythical realms, “tall tales and sci-fi” (224). In one such chapter, “civilization” in the form of individuality is inflicted on peoples obsessed by the 8

9 10 11 12

Tupuola Terry Tavita, “Nafanua Dead in Vela’s Verse,” review of The Adventures of Vela, by Albert Wendt, Pacific Scoop (8 April 2010), http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2010/04/bookreview-nafanua-dead-in-vela’s-verse/ (accessed 6 June 2017). Wendt’s first novel, Sons for the Return Home (1973. Auckland: Penguin, 1987) and its associated film “aroused controversy and resistance”: Sina Mary Theresa Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia: Colonialism and Indigeneity (Le Papa-I-Galagala, Samoa: National University of Samoa, 1999): 57. Helen Watson White, “Free-Running Verse and Stories about Storytelling,” review of Mirabile Dictu by ­Michele Leggott and The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt, Sunday Star Times (26 July 2009): 8. Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003): 18. See also Albert Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979; London: Penguin, 1987); this book won New Zealand’s Wattie Book Award in 1980. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 138. Later, Auva’a is described as a priest (236), and an oracle (245), each a possible translation into English of taulaaitu.

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number ten (144–49), a transformation of society that is enforced by violence (146). Nevertheless, the coercion is sometimes rendered comically: I worked to get them fornicating like us civilised humans in private in moderation during any season and started with my Slaughterers by demonstrating out of season with youths I fancied but they accused me of unnatural practices (147) “Book Four: The Last Adventure” sees Vela and the narrator return to historical time and to Samoa. It is claimed that the narrator shares Wendt’s Samoan name, Alapati (243), and he is said to be the adopted son of Vela; their stories start to entwine and, by the end, they are rivals for the attention and trust of Nafanua. In the penultimate chapter the narrator (Wendt?) prepares to meet Nafanua, in a passage that offers a spectacular condensation of the imagery of smell, birth, blood, and body that has structured the stories told so far (252–53). The Adventures of Vela presents difficulties, not least because it refuses to concede to the demands of narrativity, cycling between various kinds or even realms of mythic chronicles produced by Vela, and the narrator.13 But this refusal of linearity, and the placing of myth and history on the same plane, have an underlying purpose: they confirm the unity of the Va that humans have split and sectioned off in their lust for control (a lust satirized in the accounts of the fantastical worlds described in Book Three, “Travel”). This destructive splitting, then, includes time and ‘reality,’ which Vela works to restore through a poetics of revivification grounded in the notion of the Va.14 Notwithstanding the comedy and the irreverence, Wendt makes clear that song and story are not merely vehicles, but integral to the celebration and maintenance of the Va: His first song is of the Va the Space between all things like the birth fluid holding all in the Unity-that-is-All Va the relationships that must be nursed and nurtured Va the Harmony in which we are one (10)

13 14

At one point the book diverts into telling stories about Vela, ostensibly to address the problem that “chronicles usually omit the lives of their chroniclers” (85). Sina Va‘ai argues that the Va is a foundational element of Wendt’s writing, and is particularly important in the novel Ola (Auckland: Penguin, 1991): see Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 87–90, a discussion that concludes her consideration of “Wendt and Samoan Identity” (55–90). Sharrad’s discussion of the Va in Wendt’s writing likewise focuses on Ola: see Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 193–94.

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Va and va-tapuia describe the relationship between humans and their environment, whether mythological or personal/material.15 Crucially, these spaces have a temporal dimension: past and present entwine rather than separate.16 Sina Va‘ai records an explanation of the terms that she received from Aiono Dr Fanaafi Le Tagaloa: there is the va-tapuia between brother and sister (the feagaiga relationship, the equivalent to a ‘sacred covenant’); the va-tapuia between the parent (especially father/mother) and offspring; there is the va-tapuia between male and female, between male and male—female and female; there is the va-tapuia between host and guest, there is the va-tapuia between matai; there is the va-tapuia between the dead and the living; there is the va-tapuia between man and his environment—sea and sky, flora and fauna; then there is the va-tapuia between the created and the Creator.17 Another perspective on the concept is offered by Epeli Hau‘ofa: The land and sea themselves are […] cultural spaces that maintain a unique relationship—va—within time. Our landscapes and seascapes are thus cultural as well as physical. We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes (and seascapes). When we realize this, we should be able to understand why our languages locate the past as ahead or in front of us. It is right there on our landscapes in front of our very eyes.18 The Va, what we might term relationality itself, has become the utopian space of Pacific writers; the connection makes sense of the relationship between place, story, history, and self that binds rather than separates the writing of the region. The social, material, and mythological connections signify the broader reality of the Va and the role of the artist, “moving back through the past to the visions of an imagined and hoped for future which encircle us in the now.”19 15 16 17

Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 46. Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 46. Aiono Dr Fanaafi Le Tagaloa, former Professor of Samoan Studies at the National University in Apia, quoted in Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 46–47. 18 Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2000): 466. 19 Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 58.

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Vela’s role as a singer/chronicler transforms the space or void, “configured as the Va,” into “an enabling dynamic which asserts local cultural and relationship, and avoids sterile fixations of identity.”20 Or as Sina Va‘ai suggests, “With Wendt’s writing […] there is a reshaping of the English language and the canon from a Pacific perspective.”21 Thus the ideal that The Adventures of Vela celebrates is a way of living in circular or spiralling time, the spiral a central motif in Wendt’s writing.22 And the notion of a recurrent but transformative (and transformable) past is significant in the temporal ordering of narrative in Wendt’s novels, all of which use flashbacks “to give the reader a sense of the past within the circle of life, or within the spiral of the ever-moving present.”23 This folding in of narrative time links to the evocation of an ever-present and changing set of Pacific places; it is what is evoked, in the words of Hau‘ofa, as the poetic sense of an extended homeland: Every so often in the hills of Suva, when moon and red wine play tricks on my aging mind, I scan the horizon beyond Laucala Bay, the Rewa Plain, and the reefs by Nukulau Island, for Vaihi, Havaiki, homeland. It is there, far into the past ahead, leading on to other memories, other realities, other homelands.24 As Hau‘ofa points out, “We can see our traditional nonlinear emphasis in the languages of Austronesian speaking peoples […] which locate the past in front and ahead of us and the future behind, following after us.”25 He quotes Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa: It is interesting to note that in Hawaiian, the past is referred to as Ka wā mamua, “the time in front or before.” Whereas the future, when thought of at all, is Ka wā mahope, or “the time which comes after or behind.” It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future,

20 Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 247. 21 Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 56. 22 Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, viii. 23 Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 69. 24 Hau‘ofa, “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” 470. Wendt’s “Garden 4,” part of the sequence “A  Posonby Garden,” is dedicated to Hau‘ofa’s memory (From Mānoa to a Ponsonby ­Garden, 24), and he is one of the two dedicatees of The Adventures of Vela, the other being Hone Tuwhare. 25 “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” 458.

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and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present day dilemmas.26 This outline of the relationship between past and present emphasizes the power of story and song to create a coherent and continuous world, or in Wendt’s terms, to regain the unity of the world broken up by human ambition. It is a reach that is Oceanic: While it crosses boundaries, Vela maintains a Pacific core; it is rooted or anchored in Samoa, but stretches outward, builds relationships, looks toward other shores […]. Moreover, as Wendt explores the Va […] directing flows of intertexts and other ‘adoptions,’ the Pacific center is ultimately strengthened because Wendt’s living indigenized Pacific novel absorbs, redirects, and refracts the Western literary canon, including the pervasive images that colonial literature has produced about the Pacific.27 Wendt’s novel in verse develops the idea that narrative is the glue that holds together past and present, as Vela asserts that We can’t rewalk the exact footprints we make in the stories of our lives But we’ll hear again our footsteps like the lullabies our parents sang us the moment our stories end Perhaps out of our footprints Our children will nurse wiser lullabies (13) Song and story are the mechanisms through which the past is layered into the present, and culture is sustained, personally and communally. This is perhaps why the beginning of the poem records Vela’s triumph in a song competition; as Vela sings/says, Through my songs I explore all my possibilities to sustain myself (14) 26 27

Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, “Traditional Hawaiian Metaphors,” in her Native Land and Foreign Desires (22–23), quoted by Hau‘ofa, “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” 459. Stephen Gin, “Adventures in Chronicling: The Relational Web of Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela,” Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, ed. Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nalani McDougall & Georganne Nordstrom (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2015): 283–97.

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Sharrad notes that “Alan Roddick makes the interesting observation that many of [Wendt’s] poems […] draw on oratorical tradition.”28 This is perhaps even more relevant for Vela the singer—and one can only guess at how this story might develop greater fluidity if sung. Despite its often-mischievous tone, The Adventures of Vela offers some profound observations on the importance of story in resolving the tension between memory and history: We are the remembered cord that stretches across the abyss of all that we’ve forgotten We don’t inherit the past but a creation of our remembering   sang Vela (23) The role of narrative patterns in structuring history, or in Wendt’s words, “shaping reality” (230), is well-covered ground in the philosophy of history after Michel Foucault and Hayden White. But this mode of creating also means that the storyteller is intimately involved in the story and thus in the reality that song creates and sustains.29 In the melancholy that suffuses this section, Wendt writes: When you were a boy Mele warned you of that recurring death storytellers must live out to ensure their tales’ truths (Baxter Tuwhare and others have spoken of it too) (215) Just as the past is embedded in the present, myth is embedded in reality, so the storyteller is embedded in the story, dying recurring deaths to ensure truth. Sharrad draws a parallel between Wendt’s view of history as a “cycle of decay, stagnation and hopeful reconstruction from enduring structures like the reef” and “Wilson Harris’s fluctuating metaphors (the sun as both tyrant and life-giver, for instance),” as well as “a Pacific reconfiguring of the gyres of 28 Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 98. Roddick’s “Politics in Paradise” appeared in the New Zealand Listener (25 June 1977): 56–57. 29 Foucault is named twice in The Adventures of Vela (204, 206), in the poem/chapter “Nightflight” (189–207).

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Yeats.”30 Such spiralling is indicative of Oceanic time, which as Hau‘ofa explains, is circular, fitting both the cycles of nature and the ritual activities that accompanied them. Yet, the English language [too] incorporates the notion of past as “ahead” and future as “behind,” as in “let us pay tribute to those who have gone before us,” and “the generations that are coming behind us.” […] That the past is ahead, in front of us, is a conception of time that helps us retain our memories and to be aware of its presence. What is behind us cannot be seen and is liable to be forgotten readily. What is ahead of us cannot be forgotten so readily or ignored, for it is in front of our minds’ eyes, always reminding us of its presence. Since the past is alive in us, the dead are alive—we are our history.31 It is an idea proposed in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, when the knowing elder, Toasa, catechizes the young Pepe, who chants, in response to his question: the Dead of [our village] Sapepe are with us, and we, the Living, are with the Dead and the yet unborn, for ever and inseparable. Our duty is to uphold what the Dead bequeathed to us to guard and bequeath to the Unborn when we too join the Dead.32 The Albino washed up from outside the world, described in Book Two of The Adventures of Vela, is a being washed up from and with a different sense of time, washed up from an historical consciousness that will come to swamp Samoa. The only effective resistance is that offered by the singer. It is worth considering this in more detail. Sina Va‘ai sees Wendt’s novels as having tended to depict “breaches of the Va” as causing “strife, loss, and brokenness.”33 In the fantastical chapter on the world of “Nei,” violent and paranoid dictatorship is figured as “perfect Emptiness” (148), the signature emotion of which is “Vanity […] a killing talent” (149). In the tale of Nafanua (Book Two), the immortal being beyond gender able to fight all comers, she adopts an “Albino,” a “creature from way outside the world as we conceived it” (100). The very name of this castaway—Maifea?—is a question mark, a being who proves impervious to education, and beyond the control even of the Lord Tagaloa: 30 Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, 97. 31 Hau‘ofa, “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” 460. 32 Albert Wendt, The Leaves of the Banyan Tree, 72–73. The motif of the banyan and of the flying fox are significant, also, in The Adventures of Vela (see 230–31). 33 Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia, 64.

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Maifea’s? world was out-of-reach way-beyond the Va and Heavens He’d created He made me promise (at the risk of losing my Atuahood) I wouldn’t tell a soul He couldn’t unleash Maifea’s? mind and acquire the secrets of his world (104–105)34 However, the durability of Samoan culture becomes apparent as Vela records some increasingly bizarre adventures, cycling from the place of the mythic gods, the atua, back to Samoa—these stories live, not least as parables about the pressures and catastrophes of colonialism, but it is Vela who enables the narrator to see Samoa past and present: Every thing was still drenched with dew as I drove the landrover along the coast and was surprised (and offended) when Vela named and storied each site for me as if Nafanua’s world was still visible through the transparent mirage of the present a see-through skin he could peel off when he needed to For me the Palagi world was the inescapable reality: the tarsealed road and traffic (229) As this stanza shows, just as Vela is the chronicler of Nafanua (and, more broadly, Samoa), the narrator is the chronicler of Vela—and of himself, of the Palagi, and in the end, of Nafanua. One late story sees the New Zealand Catholic priest, a Palagi, become a devotee of Nafanua (236, 239). It is a fantasy with a distinct political function, emerging from the concept of cyclic time. With the past continually circling in the Samoan present, spiralling through various levels of history and myth, Wendt’s final chapter retells the story of colonization as a film (255–73), concluding with an account of the ‘audience’ reaction. By bringing together the narrator, Vela, and Nafanua—ostensibly from different times— the final chapters model the conjunction of myth, lived historical time, and the working out of the role of the story-teller: “Nafanua leads us out into a world now free of the moon / the cool weaving silence that holds everything in balance” (276). In the end, the stories told in The Adventures of Vela, and the manner of their telling, place the apparently cataclysmic arrival of the white man in the context of the cycles of time.

34

It is notable that the question mark follows the possessives “world” and “mind”, rather than the name “Maifea?” as we might expect.

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It has always been that way: atua come and go depending on their mana to provide what people desire and fulfil their dreams of the ideal afterlife now a new atua has arrived and we can’t match Its cargo and promises of a paradise more paradisiacal than Tagaloaalagi’s He pauses wipes away his tears with his hands and finally relents: To survive It we must join It and conquer It from within. (272) To “join and conquer […] from within” is the key to postcolonial transformation, artistic, historical, and personal. And Wendt suggests, in the strange event of the Christian priest becoming a follower of Nafanua, that the cycle of Oceanic time will triumph. It is an optimism evident in the declaration in Sons for the Return Home that “the circle had not disintegrated; the centre had held and would continue to hold. The best, like his father, still possessed conviction” and, in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, that “We are capable of so much beauty.”35 Works Cited Dekker, Diane. “The Adventurous Albert Wendt” [Interview with Albert Wendt], Dominion Post (1 August 2009): 20. Gin, Stephen. “Adventures in Chronicling: The Relational Web of Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela,” Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, ed. Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nalani McDougall & Georganne Nordstrom (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2015): 283–97. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1960). Hau‘ofa, Epeli. “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2000): 453–71. Henderson, April K. “Gifted Flows: Making a Space for a Brand New Beat,” in Flying Fox Excursions: Albert Wendt’s Creative and Critical Legacy in Oceania, ed. Teresia K. Teaiwa & Selina Tusitala Marsh, special issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 22.2 (2010): 293–315. Moore, Donald Shearer. Contesting Terrain in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands: The Cultural Politics of Place, Identity, and Resource Struggles, vol. 1 (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1995). Nandy, Ashis. “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 4.2 (May 1995): 44–66.

35 Wendt, Sons for the Return Home, 207; Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, 224.

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Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). Tavita, Tupuola Terry. “Nafanua Dead in Vela’s Verse,” Rev. of The Adventures of Vela, by Albert Wendt, Pacific Scoop 8 April 2010: http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2010/04/bookreview-nafanua-dead-in-vela’s-verse/ (accessed 6 June 2017). Va‘ai, Sina Mary Theresa. Literary Representations in Western Polynesia: Colonialism and Indigeneity (Le Papa-I-Galagala, Samoa: National University of Samoa, 1999). Wendt, Albert. The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009). Wendt, Albert. “Garden 4,” in From Mānoa to a Ponsonby Garden (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2012): 24. Wendt, Albert. The Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979. London: Penguin, 1987). Wendt, Albert. Ola (Auckland: Penguin, 1991). Wendt, Albert. Sons for the Return Home (1973; Auckland: Penguin, 1987). White, Helen Watson. “Free-Running Verse and Stories about Storytelling,” review of Mirabile Dictu by Michele Leggott and The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt, Sunday Star Times (26 July 2009): 8.

Chapter 12

Comparative History in Polynesia

Some Challenges of Studying the Past in the Postcolonial Present Teresia Teaiwa and Tekura Moeka‘a 1

Teresia’s Preface

I remember meeting Paul Sharrad for the first time in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, at a Pan-Pacific student party at the East-West Center in about 1989. Paul was a visiting academic with the English department, and I was a student in History at the University of Hawai‘i. In the years to come, I would become better acquainted with Paul’s significance as a scholar of Pacific literature, and in particular his interest in Albert Wendt’s work. As my studies and career progressed, Paul would prove a reliably friendly presence among senior academics at various international conferences. While I was a junior academic, he also passed on an important publishing opportunity to me: editing the south Pacific regional entries in the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English.1 From this valuable experience I learned more about the history of Pacific literature in English than I might ever have done, and Paul also taught me an important lesson about using one’s academic privilege to share opportunities around. There are many more qualities that Paul embodies, but the ones that have inspired me the most in my interdisciplinary Pacific Studies location are evident in his masterful weaving between literary and historical studies, and in his ability to move with ease from focusing on an individual author to national, regional, Commonwealth, and other broad comparative literatures. This essay focuses on the particular challenges of undertaking studies of history in Polynesia that are comparative. I have taken a leaf from Paul’s book and shared a publication opportunity with a younger scholar of Pacific descent, my former BA Honours student and research assistant, Tekura Moeka‘a. We hope that Paul might recognize in our grapplings with both the past and the postcolonial present, some of what fuelled his own exploratory itineraries.

…

1 See Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, “Introduction” to Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, ed. Benson & Conolly (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005): xxxvi. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��19 | doi:10.1163/9789004376540_013

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Pacific Studies is an international interdisciplinary field that takes the ­Pacific Islands region and people as its focus. Called “Pacific Islands Studies” in the usa, it originated in Cold War compulsions “to know one’s enemies and one’s friends.”2 In his pioneering account of the origins of Pacific Studies, Terence Wesley-Smith describes this Cold War intellectual project as being driven by a “pragmatic rationale.”3 In that context, Pacific Studies was very much akin to other “area studies” such as Asian or South East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and African Studies. The objects of such studies were Europe’s and America’s “others”. But unlike an older trajectory of studies—mainly anthropological and historical—that homed in on nation-state formations, WesleySmith observes that the pragmatic rationale tended to take on the region as a whole, looking for economic, political and social patterns across geographic spaces. Interestingly, in the process of decolonizing Pacific Studies, native scholars unwittingly emulated the habits of anthropologists and historians by grounding their academic expertise in their own communities, perhaps unintentionally abdicating the development of “regional” views of the Pacific to non-indigenous scholars. Ever since Kerry Howe published his lament on the myopically nationalist state of Pacific historiography in 1979, the vast majority of researchers who have taken up his challenge have been senior white male academics.4 What prevents more indigenous Pacific people from attempting to assert such expertise over the region as a whole? The Pacific scholars Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa have been the exemplars of traveling between national and regional identities but have eschewed the disciplinary confines of History, although they have certainly been interested in and engaged with its and others’ representations of the past. Wendt was born in Samoa, educated in New Zealand, worked in Fiji twice, travelled to many Pacific islands, and settled in New Zealand;5 Hau‘ofa was born in Papua New Guinea to missionary parents from Tonga, educated in Tonga, Fiji and Australia, and settled and died in Fiji.6 2 Ainslie T. Embree, quoted in Terence Wesley-Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” ­Pacific Studies 18.2 (1995): 117. 3 “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” 117–21. 4 For example, K.R. Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988); Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century, ed. K.R. Howe, Robert C. Kiste & Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1994); Stephen Fischer, A History of the Pacific Islands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Ian Campbell, Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands (Christchurch: U of Canterbury P, 2011); Deryck Scarr, A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages through Tropical Time (Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2001). 5 Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). 6 Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008).

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At Victoria University of Wellington (vuw) in New Zealand, the Pacific Studies programme encourages comparative analysis as a stepping stone to developing an overview of the region.7 For the vast majority of students, born and raised in New Zealand, and having little to no experience of life in the islands their parents and grandparents came from, let alone in other islands of the Pacific, the intellectual and psychological challenges of Pacific Studies can seem daunting. Without the benefit of direct personal experience across and between islands (à la Wendt and Hau‘ofa), and the academic confidence that comes with that, Pacific Studies can set students up to pass academically without experiencing any transformative learning about themselves and/or the Pacific. Indeed, a notably persistent feature of Pacific Studies postgraduate work is the myopia that Howe decried over thirty years ago. A list of theses published annually in the “Pacific History Bibliography” of the Journal of Pacific History illustrates the focus on single national or monocultural contexts.8 But is it sufficient for students to describe what they’re doing as “Pacific” when it might in fact be exclusively “Samoan,” “Tongan,” “Fijian,” “Marshallese,” “Pohnpeian,” “Chamorro,” etc.? What is the cost of one nation or group standing in for the whole of the Pacific’s 1200 (or more) distinct cultures? What is the cost of students focusing their major assignments on the nation or culture they feel most comfortable with, and never engaging in much deep learning about other nations or cultures in the Pacific? What is the cost to the field of Pacific Studies of students and academics developing such discrete specializations that our encounters in seminars and conferences are the equivalent of so many billiard balls bouncing off of each other, rather than having encounters of mutual and informed dialogue and exchange? These are questions that Teresia has been asking in different ways.9 The course pasi 201 Comparative History in Polynesia has been offered annually at vuw since 2000 and it tackles this problem, seeking to staircase students into a position where they can feel more confident about what they know about the Pacific’s diversity, rather than seeking refuge in the small patch of earth 7 Graeme Whimp, “Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 20.2 (Fall 2008): 397–421; Teresia Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-Pacific Studies Agenda,” in Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-Smith & Jon Goss (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2010): 110–24. 8 See, for example, Trish Saunders & Jennifer Terrell, “Theses, Pacific History Bibliography 2001,” Journal of Pacific History 36.3 (December 2001): 335–39; Patricia Luker, “Theses, Pacific History Bibliography 2006,” Journal of Pacific History 41.3 (December 2006): 357–65. 9 Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Lo(o)sing the Edge,” in Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, ed. Vicente M. Diaz & J. Kehaulani Kauanui, special issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13.2 (Fall 2001): 343–57; Teresia Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies.”

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that their ancestors came from. However, the enormity of that o­ bjective—and, indeed, the lack of role models to follow—have meant that the course has required careful revision through trial and error. When pasi 201 was originally proposed as the second-year core course for the Pacific Studies major at vuw, it was given the title “Changing Environments.” The original description and objectives included the following: pasi 201 is essentially a history course that focuses on Polynesian peoples. The title “Changing Environments” refers to both continuities and ruptures in cultural and political developments over time. The pre-colonial, colonial and “post-colonial” experience of eastern and western Polynesian societies will be compared and contrasted. This course combines a thematic and chronological approach. As much as possible, the writings and creative productions of indigenous Pacific writers, artists and commentators will be discussed. Students who pass the paper will: • be familiar with dominant characteristics and trends in Polynesian history; • appreciate the similarities and differences between eastern and western Polynesian societies; • be attentive to the details of Polynesian history as represented in our field trips; • be able to summarize and discuss ideas put forward in the assigned texts for this course; • be able to identify and use archival sources in their scholarly work; • be able to ask critical questions about historical sources in terms of their philosophical and ideological biases; • be able to share their own ideas and perspectives on historical issues through written and oral presentations. In 2004 the course topic/name was changed to “Comparative Histories in Polynesia” in order to represent the content more accurately. Otherwise, the description and objectives remained the same until 2009, when they were first revised and, as will be discussed, further refined through to 2013. As a 200–level course, pasi 201 is delivered in a format consistent with 20-point courses in other programmes within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at vuw. Scheduled sessions are made up of two fifty-minute lecturers and one fifty-minute tutorial per week. Enrolment and registration figures for the course (including gender and ethnic breakdown), and pass rates from 2000 to 2015, are given in Appendix One and Two respectively. Teresia

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Teaiwa has been the course co-ordinator for pasi 201 since it was first offered in 2000, except for 2008 when she took research and study leave and was relieved by April Henderson. For Teresia, the course is a challenge for several reasons: while she has a background and MA in History, her PhD is in the interdisciplinary field of History of Consciousness, and her doctoral work tacked between history and cultural studies, with an emphasis on contemporary history in the post-World-War-Two era and a focus on Fiji. With its broad sweep of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, and its emphasis on Polynesia, pasi 201 has kept Teresia on her toes. As a prerequisite for the Pacific Studies major, some students take the course even though they are not naturally drawn to history. However, not all pasi 201 students are majoring in Pacific Studies, and it is routine for students coming into the course to have not taken any History courses. History is an optional course at secondary school level in New Zealand, and students of Pacific heritage very rarely enrol in university-based History courses—even ones that focus on the Pacific. It does not help that there is little to no scholarship which discusses theories and methods of teaching historical material and/or comparative analysis in the Pacific.10 And what literature exists on comparative historical methods in the mainstream is dense (not appropriate for assigning to 200–level students), although it is useful for informing teaching staff on the challenges and rigours of comparative history.11 Teresia has therefore had to develop her own strategies for helping students appreciate first, why historical research is necessary, and second, why comparative analysis is useful in Pacific Studies. Some of those strategies involve field trips and guest lectures. Being the capital city of New Zealand, Wellington is densely populated with important cultural and historical repositories and archives. Standard field trips for the course include vuw’s J.C. Beaglehole Collection of rare and out-of-print New Zealand and Pacific material, the National Library of New Zealand’s Alexander Turnbull Collection, Archives New Zealand, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Guest lecturers have been drawn from those same institutions, as well as vuw’s History, Art History, and Māori Studies programmes. However, given that most students are not planning to go onto postgraduate study nor into academic careers, it helps to have guest lecturers who pursue historical research outside of academic institutions. We have been particularly 10 11

The Teaching of Pacific History, ed. Paul D’Arcy, special issue of Journal of Pacific History 46.2 (September 2011): 197–256. See, for example, the scholarship discussed by James Mahoney & Dietrich Rueschemeyer in “Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas,” the introduction to Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James Mahoney & Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 3–40.

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fortunate to have a range of independent researchers avail themselves to our students over the years, including the maritime historical novelist Joan Druett and the amateur historian and ethnologist of Polynesia, Rhys Richards. Of course, having some ethnic, socio-economic background and generational points of commonality help students connect to the idea of researching history more easily. In the last couple of years, we have had the rare benefit of having three Māori wāhine—one of whom also has Indo-Fijian heritage— share their research around their whānau or family histories in World War One and World War Two with our students. Georgina Narayan is a retired school teacher of Ngati Porou and Whakatohea descent, Natasha Narayan is her daughter, who also has Indo-Fijian heritage, and Leanne Tamaki is of Tūhoe and Ngāti Maniapoto. Georgina (a retired school teacher) and Natasha and Leanne (public servants) shared their enthusiasm for independent research with the students, demonstrating how family history can sometimes demand the same rigour as academic history. Guest lecturers like Safua Akeli, Kolokesa Māhina–Tuai, and Sean Mallon, sharing their research on leprosy in Samoa and Hawai‘i, Pacific people in the New Zealand Defence Force, and early Pacific settlers in New Zealand, respectively, have also helped bring the topics alive. Pacific staff at Archives New Zealand, such as Junior Maepu and Uili Fecteau, were also able to animate the primary sources they shared with students. Unfortunately, Archives New Zealand no longer has any Pacific staff in positions that involve liaising between holdings and researchers or students. A unique field trip experience is scheduled early on in the term. The first excursion as a class is to Te Tumu Herenga Waka, the wharenui of vuw’s marae. Depending on staff availability at the marae, students may be welcomed on to the marae with a small powhiri—involving being called on to the marae by a kuia or female elder—or with the less formal mihi whakatau. This field trip is often the first time that any student has been on a marae or in a wharenui; even for those who have, it is usually the first time they have been given an opportunity to understand the cultural significance of Māori rituals of welcome, and some of the complex histories embodied in a wharenui. vuw’s wharenui has some features that lend themselves well to the subject matter: in its carved pou, painted heke, and woven tukutuku, it contains visual representations of pre-colonial and colonial events and narratives, while itself being a monument to a Māori postcolonial renaissance. The whare has a kaupapa memorialized in its name: Te Tumu Herenga Waka, which means the hitching post of canoes. The marae and whare therefore offer an open invitation to all Māori, kin and visitors, to “hitch their canoes” there and feel welcome.12 12

A short history of the Marae is at Te Whakatuwheratanga o te Tumu Herenga Wawa: 6 Tihema 1986, Poneke, Te Whare Wanaga o Wikitoria. A Short History of Te Herenga Waka

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There are further features of this wharenui’s architecture of specific interest to us in our exploration of comparative history in Polynesia. The poutokomanawa at the forefront of the whare is a tribute to the Polynesian kin of New Zealand Māori. The figure closest to the ground on the pou is a Hawaiian ki‘i; above him is a Cook Islands Māori tiki, upon which a rare Samoan ­anthropomorphic figure sits; at the apex of the pou is a mysterious figure variously described by marae staff as Rapanui or Marquesan, but which conforms to the visual traditions of neither. The significance of the pou for Pacific Studies, and for pasi 201 in particular, is that it demonstrates Māori connections to Polynesia, and offers a visible—and strikingly so—point of comparison, not just in terms of pre-Christian symbolism and cosmogony, but also in terms of postcolonial literacies, and loss of literacies around that visual vocabulary. The field trip to the marae leaves a deep impression on students, as often evidenced in their tutorial discussions and in the way they refer to it in their Final Exams; unfortunately, it is the only trip we have that truly provides an insight into living indigenous ways of recording and remembering history. Although the trip to Te Papa exposes students to material cultural examples from history, the objects are recontextualized in a museum and disconnected from their lived context. The field trips and guest lectures are the best opportunities to gauge students’ engagement first-hand. Reading has been the trickiest part, not only in terms of deciding what and how much to assign, but trying to measure what students have understood. Up until 2009, the course assessments included a mid-term test, but to align with research that called for reading to be made a more visible and assessable learning activity for Pacific students, the midterm test was abandoned and more regular reading-based assessments introduced (as they were for other courses in the Pacific Studies major).13 This had a noticeably positive effect on tutorial discussions. Prior to this, of course, pass rates in pasi 201 had been respectable if not spectacular, the lowest pass rate being around sixty-three percent in 2001, the highest around ninety-one percent, in 2005. Indeed, when the “Key Concept and Question” (kcq) papers were assigned the first time in 2009, the pass rate dropped from the previous year’s eighty percent to less than sixty-eight percent. Students unused to regular formative assessments and feedback found the pace difficult to maintain, and the pass rate the following year fell again (see Appendix Two). But as more

13

Marae, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-VUWMarae1986-t2-body-d2.html (accessed 11 October 2017). Mary Ruth Toumu’a, “Academic Reading and Pacific Studies: Profiling Texts, Tasks & Readers in the First Year of University in New Zealand” (doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012).

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students gained familiarity with this form of assessment—which had by then been introduced to our 100–level course as well—achievement picked up again. Given that the achievement rates were higher before the kcq was introduced, one might ask “Why fix what’s not broken?” The answer was, quite simply, to improve the quality of learning. From the lecturer’s direct experience of tutorial discussion and assessment of students’ written assignments, she could see that the lower order learning objectives were being met, while the higher order learning objectives were not. In addition to the kcqs, which are worth twenty percent of the grade for this course, other assignments included a Field Trip report worth ten percent, a Seminar worth ten percent, a Primary Source Assignment worth ten percent, and a Comparative History Essay worth fifteen percent. The Final Exam for the course is worth forty percent. In 2009 the course objectives were rewritten and expanded, with further expansions and refinements in 2011 (see Appendix Three). But while these changes helped clarify for the lecturer what she was trying to convey, encourage, and develop, the wordiness rendered these aims oblique and irrelevant to the students, who rarely referred to them in tutorial discussions or assignments. In 2013 the objectives were further revised, and simplified: Students who pass this course are able to: 1. Explain the basic principles and methods of a comparative approach to studying Polynesian history; 2. Define and illustrate an understanding of the key concepts of historical specificity, norms, tapu and noa, agency, mana and sovereignty; 3. Describe and evaluate the possible reasons for similarities or differences in the unfolding of history in eastern and western Polynesian countries; 4. Use the key themes, concepts and methods covered in pasi 201 in your own critical and creative evaluation of the comparative approach to studying Polynesian history. This set of objectives has been much more successful as a guide for students assessing their own learning. The kcqs, in particular, give students the opportunity to reflect on whether the material covered in their lectures, guest lectures, readings, field trips, and tutorial discussions, is helping them achieve their course learning objectives. And having the principles and methods of comparison at the top of the list of objectives means students cannot avoid questions of methodology. This reordering was undertaken after a teaching and learning research project was approved to help sharpen the comparative focus in pasi

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201 in 2012. Tekura Moeka‘a was employed as a research assistant, and helped collate readings and resources. She then reviewed students’ assignments after their grades had been finalized, to assess how the (2009–2012) course learning objectives were being met. 2

Tekura’s Discussion

Although the lecturer had introduced new readings into the course over the years—mainly via the online student system Blackboard—she had not had a chance to revise the Student Notes or syllabus in a substantive way. What she could say anecdotally about the students’ final essays is that while students seemed fairly confident in making comparisons between the cases and topics that they choose to research, they often neglected to engage with the question in the assignment that asks them to reflect on what is lost or gained by taking a comparative approach in Polynesian history. Most of the students glossed over this, simply to assert that the comparative approach is inherently good. Over the twelve years that she has taught this course, only a few students had ever reflected on this part of the question in much depth. With the intervention proposed, it was hoped that all the students’ learning could be scaffolded so that it was not just the very bright or motivated students who would “get” the comparative part of the objective, but that more students would have the opportunity to deepen their learning. The intervention was conducted in two waves. The first wave started mid-February 2012. This required my finding resources and references with the keywords “Comparative Histories in Polynesia,” “Counterfactual Histories,” “Comparative Approach,” “Counterfactual Approach,” “Teaching Methods and Teaching Pedagogy.” I had to collate how many “hits” I got using different search engines such as JSTOR, Anthropology*, and the Victoria University library catalogue, where I took out books and collated resources that I felt could be relevant and useful. The following is a list of sources provided to students in the course outline as a guide for thinking about history in Polynesia in broadly comparative terms: Greg Dening, “History ‘in’ the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 1.1–2 (1989): 133–39. Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell & Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, U of the South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993): 2–16.

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Douglas L. Oliver, “The Polynesians,” in The Pacific Islands (1951; Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1961). Judith Huntsman. “Introduction” to Tonga and Samoa: Images of Gender and Polity, ed. Judith Huntsman (Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 1995): 7–18. Giselle Byrnes, “What if the Treaty of Waitangi Had Not Been Signed on 6 February 1840?” in New Zealand as it Might Have Been, ed. Stephen Levine (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2006): 27–39. Janine Hayward, “What if Māori Had Not Been Made British Subjects in 1840?” in New Zealand as it Might Have Been, ed. Stephen Levine (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2006): 41–57. Robert W. Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia (New York: ams, 1933): 1–45. As part of revising the course outline with the lecturer, we spent hours going over how students can engage better in the “Comparative model/approach,” with the comparative essay assignment as the main focus. The essay, we felt, would give us an indication of whether students engaged relevant readings and methods or not. In 2011, step six of the comparative essay assignment asked students to “Conclude your essay by reflecting on what is gained or lost by taking a comparative approach to Polynesian history.” In the 2012 course outline we were more specific: “Conclude your essay with at least two paragraphs that reflect on what is gained or lost by taking a comparative approach.” The second wave of the project started mid-October 2012 and this was about the time essays were due in. On 16 October I attended a pasi 201 class in which consent forms were handed out. The forms explained that students would give consent for their essays to be used for study for the next five years. Out of thirty-two students enrolled only fourteen consented to participate in the research; only twelve out of the fourteen ended up submitting work for the study. Of the eleven out of thirty-two males in the class, only five were involved in the study. The other seven participants were female. In terms of ethnicity, the twelve participants included one Tongan, one Filipina, one NZ Pakeha, and nine Samoans. As a research assistant I was given four tasks to complete in relation to the assignments submitted by the twelve research participants. My first was to compile a list of the topics covered in each essay, along with the countries

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b­ eing compared, e.g., “European Missionaries and Early Polynesian Conversions” in Tonga and Hawai‘i. I went through students’ essay introductions and tabulated the topics and cases covered. My second task was to compile a list of any comparative histories, or comparative or counterfactual method references that had been cited. Secondly, by a process of elimination, I highlighted and tabulated references that constituted a comparative or counterfactual method. My third task was to highlight the paragraphs in which students ­commented on how they found the comparative approach in their own research, and compile any quotes that struck me as particularly insightful, even if they were critical, and link each quote to the student who authored it, identifying students by Polynesian pseudonyms. My final task was to identify and keep a tally of how many students described the comparative approach positively, negatively, or in neutral terms. This required me to read the students’ essays and identify paragraphs, reflections, quotations, and comments on how they found the comparative approach. This required me to collate and condense, but also keep true to what the student said. Students were given the “agency” to choose their own topics, as long as they stayed within a certain era or time frame, whether it be pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial, and as long as they had one case from eastern Polynesia and one from western Polynesia. Samoa and Hawai‘i were common choices across the board. Most essays looked at Christianity, showing a keenness to understand the impact of Christianity in Polynesia. Other topics included commerce, resistance movements, and oral traditions/mythologies. Not many of the resources provided in the course outline were utilized for the reflections on the costs and benefits of a comparative approach. One out of twelve students cited Giselle Byrnes, which is also a recommended reading in the course. One—not the same student—cited Huntsman, also a recommended reading. Three out of twelve students cited Hawley as a reference on comparative Christian mission histories, unsurprising as Christianity was a popular topic. Of the twelve students who participated in the study, seven made explicit mention of comparative methods. Two out of twelve highlighted how the comparative approach presented both positive and negative points; one had a neutral stance. Two felt that the comparative approach was a good way of analysing histories. Four students mentioned the counterfactual method and how it can co-exist with/be compared to a comparative approach, to add more weight to how we analyse histories. Overall, the reviews were mixed, which suggests that students were engaging thoughtfully about comparative methods but perhaps still weren’t “getting” the full depth of it. In general, students’ marks for the essays were excellent, and those with lower grades tended to have lost marks for late submission.

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207

Tekura’s Comment

I am a twin. The elder by eight minutes. Growing up, my sister and I got grouped or morphed as one person—or one subject. Wherever one went the other followed (side by side). We did everything together: we took the same sports, we were in the same classes, we had the same friends. We were defined as “ma’anga”—twins in Cook Islands Māori. People couldn’t tell us apart. Growing up we always referred to ourselves with collective pronouns. It was always “we” or “us.” At one point our parents decided that at Year 6 (age 11) we would be put in separate classes. This was a shock to us—we had never been ­separated— ever! So, this was testing new waters. Increasingly people were able to differentiate between us through our personalities. (In high school there were three sets of twins in our volleyball team!) When it came to university, my sister and I took separate paths. She went to Auckland University of Technology, and I came to Victoria University of Wellington. Your ontology and epistemology shape who you are both inside and ­outside—whether you understand the relationships or not. The philosophy behind a state of being and examining the default position is important in deciphering and critically thinking about what we believe, why we believe it, and where and when we started to believe it. As a twin, I can appreciate how comparative studies would prove revealing. I went from being a “we” to becoming “me.” Resisting a Eurocentric view of the world is tough, but a lot of my thinking, my education, and the way I have been taught and raised, have had a mixture of Pacific and Eurocentric influences. When I took pasi 201 Comparative History in Polynesia as a student, the comparative part did not leave an impression on me. It felt more like I was learning about the histories of Tonga and Samoa, and I felt pressured to learn this new content. For my major assignment I compared photographic representations of Cook Islands and Rotuman women, but I felt my essay was descriptive—I did not feel like I achieved a sustained or deep comparative analysis. Overall, I was more interested in the histories of not just Polynesia, but Melanesia and Micronesia as well. I guess I thought that comparing across Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia would be more interesting. Is that weird that I wanted to learn more about other Pacific Islanders—“others”—before me? I did not understand why we were being limited to Polynesia. I was a bit annoyed, too, at the emphasis in the course on Samoan and Tongan examples. It was also frustrating that so many of the authors were not from the Pacific, and were men. What about indigenous people writing their own histories? What about women in history? Women historians?

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One thing I can say for sure is that pasi 201 made me more appreciative of history. My favourite assignment involved the primary sources. It is quite something being able to go back in time to gain more of an understanding of what happened and how things have played out, and then from our vantage point in the present, try to imagine how things might have been different. It would be good to have another paper like pasi 201—something that builds on it. There was too much to take in within twelve weeks. 4

Teresia’s Comment and Conclusion

In the first week of the course I get the students to fill out a survey which helps me understand where they are in their thinking about Polynesia, history, and making comparisons, before we get too deep into the course. Interestingly, a question I ask about what they know about Polynesia often comes back with lots of images that are idealized, romanticized, and, in many ways, “touristic”. This is particularly interesting since most of the students are of Polynesian descent. One of the purposes of pasi 201 is to get us beyond the superficiality of such notions. Students often fail to answer the question which asks them if they can recall an occasion when they have wondered why groups of Polynesians are different. The habitual lack of uptake on the question, year after year, speaks to me of a general acceptance of difference amongst us—a tendency to avoid questioning or probing difference; a tendency to suppress our curiosity about difference. pasi 201 asks us not to just accept difference, but gives us permission to be curious about it, ask where it comes from, why it occurs, how others have lived with it in the past, and what it means for us to try to live with it in the present. The anthropologist and historian of Tokelau Judith Huntsman postulates, in one of the texts that is assigned to pasi 201 students, that early Polynesians consciously and deliberately chose to be different from one another, while the Stanford anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson challenge us to think about “difference through connection” (rather than difference through separation).14 They do this in much the same way as Epeli Hau‘ofa asked us to think of the Pacific region not as islands scattered and isolated in a far sea, but as Oceania—a region in which islands are connected by the ocean that 14

Judith Huntsman, “Introduction” to Tonga and Samoa: Images of Gender and Polity, ed. Judith Huntsman (Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 1995): 7–18; Akhil Gupta & James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (February 1992): 6–23.

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surrounds them.15 In a postcolonial society like New Zealand, where minority students are surrounded by pressures to be politically correct while at the same time being pressured to participate in an anaesthetizing consumerism, Pacific Studies tries to give students the intellectual tools to work critically in ­precisely these conditions. As a teacher, I have noticed a significant gap between students’ thinking about the past, and thinking historically. I believe that pasi 201 can help students develop research and analytical skills that are not only transferrable to the job market, but can also help them as audience members for historically-informed art and performance, and with family and personal histories. As a teacher, scholar, and activist, it is part of my mission to empower Pacific students not to claim expertise over the whole Pacific (as more accomplished scholars have), but to nurture an interest in, curiosity about, and empathy and solidarity with Pacific people, beyond their own immediate networks of kin and affinity. Paul Sharrad is a scholar whose expertise across Pacific and Commonwealth literatures has not been achieved at the expense of human connections, and indeed, his own nuanced explorations of questions about history and historical thinking in the literary works of figures like Albert Wendt continue to present me with challenges for future developments in the teaching and learning that takes place in pasi 201. Works Cited Benson, Eugene, & L.W. Conolly, ed. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd edn; London: Routledge, 2005). Campbell, Ian. Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands (Christchurch: U of Canterbury P, 2011). D’Arcy, Paul, ed. The Teaching of Pacific History, special issue of Journal of Pacific History 46.2 (September 2011): 197–256. Fischer, Stephen. A History of the Pacific Islands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Gupta, Akhil, & James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (February 1992): 6–23. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008).

15

Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008).

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Howe, K.R. Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988). Howe, K.R., Robert C. Kiste & Brij V. Lal, ed. Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1994). Huntsman, Judith. “Introduction” to Tonga and Samoa: Images of Gender and Polity, ed. Judith Huntsman (Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 1995): 7–18. Luker, Patricia. “Theses, Pacific History Bibliography 2006,” Journal of Pacific History 41.3 (December 2006): 357–65. Mahoney, James, & Dietrich Rueschemeyer. “Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas,” in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James Mahoney & Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 3–40. Saunders, Trish, & Jennifer Terrell. “Theses, Pacific History Bibliography 2001,” Journal of Pacific History 36.3 (December 2001): 335–39. Scarr, Deryck. A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages through Tropical Time (Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2001). Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). Te Whakatuwheratanga o te Tumu Herenga Wawa: 6 Tihema 1986, Poneke, Te Whare Wanaga o Wikitoria. A Short History of Te Herenga Waka Marae, http://nzetc.vic toria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-VUWMarae1986-t2-body-d2.html (accessed 11 O ­ ctober 2017). Teaiwa, Teresia K. “Lo(o)sing the Edge,” in Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, ed. Vicente M. Diaz & J. Kehaulani Kauanui, special issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13.2 (Fall 2001): 343–57. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 18.1 (Summer 2006): 71–87. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-Pacific Studies Agenda,” in Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning across Asia and the ­Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-Smith & Jon Goss (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2010): 110–24. Toumu’a, Mary Ruth. “Academic Reading and Pacific Studies: Profiling Texts, Tasks & Readers in the First Year of University in New Zealand” (doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012). Wesley-Smith, Terence. “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” Pacific Studies 18.2 (1995): 115–36. Whimp, Graeme. “Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 20.2 (Fall 2008): 397–421.

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Year

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Appendix 1: pasi 201 Enrolment Data Students

Gender

EN

RE

F

M

P

M

S

cim

N

Tg

Tk

F

58 49 39 45 49 38 33 50 23 38 41 45 37 31 33 32

41 33 35 33 41 24 28 43 20 35 39 32 32 25 25 23

38 33 29 34 39 24 19 28 14 27 29 30 25 25 24 26

20 16 10 11 10 14 14 22 9 11 12 15 12 6 9 6

12 8 3 8 8 10 3 9 10 8 4 3 6 4 4 4 4 2 7 5 2 6 1 5 1 0 6 3 4 2 6 2

26 22 6 18 21 21 19 33 9 18 26 22 25 15 16 14

4 1 2 3 3 2 1 0 0 1 1 3 1 2 3 4

1 0 2 2 0 2 0 1 2 0 0 1 2 0 0 0

1 4 1 4 1 3 1 1 0 2 1 6 4 1 3 2

3 5 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 0 3 1 2 1 1

2 1 0 0 1 1 1 2 0 2 2 2 1 1 3 1

opp O 1 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0

Key: P = Pakeha; M = Māori; S = Samoan; cim = Cook Islands Māori; N = Niuean; Tg = Tongan; Tk = Tokelauan; F = Fijian; opp = Other Pacific Peoples; O = Other. In addition: 2002: Indian 1, British–Irish 1; 2003: Other European 1; 2004: Chinese 1, Italian 1. 2007: Japanese 1. 2008: Chinese 1, British–Irish 1, Other Southeast Asian 1; 2009: Dutch 1; 2012: Filipino 1, Latin American 1. 2013: British–Irish 1.

0 0 6 2 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 1 0 0 1 1

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Appendix 2: pasi 201 Student Results Data Resultsa

A+/A/A12/3/4 1/1/10 5/5/0 8/1/3 6/2/3 5/3/5 3/1/2 3/4/2 2/3/3 0/3/0 2/1/2 1/3/0 2/3/0 3/5/4 0/3/5 2/5/1

Pass

B+/B/B-

C+/C/C-

D

E

G

Q

No.

Percent

7/2/3 1/5/2 6/5/2 2/4/2 6/3/5 2/5/2 2/3/4 5/2/7 0/4/1 3/5/4 8/4/0 6/7/3 0/3/7 1/1/0 3/1/3 3/1/4

3/1/0 0/1/0 3/2/0 2/0/0 2/1/0 0/0/0 1/2/0 6/6/0 2/1/0 2/7/0 1/2/0 1/2/0 5/2/0 2/0/0 1/1/0 1/1/1

0 0 1 2 2 1 3 1 0 1 5 2 0 2 0 1

0 0 2 0 1 0 5 7 1 8 14 7 6 6 6 2

1 0 0 1 1 1

5 10 4 8 13 8 K4 0 K3 K2 0 0 0 0 0 0

35/41 21/33 27/35 22/33 28/41 22/24 18/28 35/43 16/20 24/35 20/39 23/32 24/32 17/25 19/25 19/23

85.30 63.63 77.14 66.66 68.29 91.66 64.29 81.40 80 68.57 51.28 71.88 75 68 76 82.6

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 0

a The grades D and E are fails, i.e. lower than fifty percent, while K (formerly Q) is (has been) given for students who have achieved a mark of fifty percent or more but have not satisfied a mandatory requirement of the course. The grade of G is an aegrotat.

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Appendix 3: pasi 201 Course Learning Objectives 2009/2011

o Demonstrate the ability to reflect on and analyse their own prior knowledge of eastern and western Polynesia; o Recall the geographical, cultural and historical distinctions between eastern and western Polynesia and be able to evaluate the possible reasons for similarities or differences in the unfolding of history …; o Demonstrate an understanding of the objectives and benefits of the comparative approach to history and apply this through their own comparative investigation of Polynesian history; o Accurately associate particular authors and personalities with ideas covered in the course and appropriately summarize readings and other course material; o Actively participate in and develop skills in assessing different learning opportunities for the purpose of valuing both introduced and indigenous methods and modes of knowing (in) Polynesia; o Become familiar with methods of accessing primary sources on Polynesia through the Turnbull Library and Archives NZ and other scholarly resources and be able to apply this knowledge in order to select, synthesize, analyse and interpret relevant and appropriate materials to creatively and critically demonstrate their own understanding of comparative issues in Polynesian history through both verbal and written assessments. In 2011 the last learning objective was further refined to read: o Become familiar with methods of accessing primary sources on Polynesia through the Turnbull Library and Archives NZ and other scholarly resources; o Apply this knowledge in order to select, synthesize, analyse and interpret relevant and appropriate materials; o Creatively and critically demonstrate their own understanding of comparative issues in Polynesian history through both verbal and written assessments.

Afterword Lydia Wevers the ocean is really in our blood teresia teaiwa

∵ Walking back to my office after lunch on 21 March 2017, I got a call from Maria Bargh, a colleague in Te Kawa a Māui at Victoria University, to tell me that Teresia Teaiwa had died. Maria and I had always worked closely with Teresia and had been trying to help with the many tasks that need doing when someone is struck by sudden terminal illness. It was heartbreaking to see Tere in hospital, her glorious halo of black curly hair cropped to her head and so exhausted she could hardly speak. Teresia was given a tangi at the university marae later that week. She lay on the marae for most of the day, and hundreds of Pasifika people streamed in to mourn her, sing to her, speak about her. Her absence was palpable. In her too-short life Teresia worked tirelessly to expand and enrich Pacific scholarship. Much of what I know about Pacific Studies and Pasifika scholarship was generated by her passion and activism. I had hardly been a week in my new job as Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies in 2001 when I got a call from Tere. A young, beautiful, feisty and brilliant woman turned up in my office and gave me a good talking to about how Victoria was ignoring its legacy of Pacific scholars and scholarship. She cited J.C. Beaglehole, J.W. Davidson, Derek Freeman and Albert Wendt. She mentioned contemporary scholars Peter Brunt, one of our colleagues, and Damon Salesa. Modestly she did not mention herself. I was abashed, not because I didn’t know of these people but because I did, and in my pālangi way, subsumed them into a broad vague category called ‘The Pacific,’ about which I knew very little. At least it galvanized me. Teresia and I then organized and ran a marvellous seminar series later that year called Thinking Pacific. I will come back to Teresia. This broad collection of essays in honour of Paul Sharrad does not confine itself to ‘the Pacific’. Rather, it showcases the wide range of his sympathies and interests, as well as those of his colleagues: Anne Collett’s lovely essay on Claude McKay for instance, a Jamaican poet born in 1890, about whom I knew ­nothing.

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Collett’s description of his expatriation from Jamaica to Harlem, the city he loves where he is an ‘unwanted guest,’ and his experience of syphilis, narrates a journey familiar to so many people of colour, whose talents have been underrecognized and experience always less than optimal. Anne ­Brewster’s analysis of the trickster figure in Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing extends discussion of that seminal indigenous figure across the colonized world. Brewster draws on Sharrad’s important work on Wendt’s fiction, and suggests more broadly that humour is a key critical tool for Aboriginal literature, as it is indeed for all indigenous writers I am familiar with. The Native Canadian writer Thomas King is perhaps the archetypal example here. The shared ground of the collection is postcolonialism, now perhaps too trafficked a word to fully evoke the colour and many shapes of the world it seeks to encompass, which in a way is demonstrated here. Diana Brydon’s magisterial account of representations of the ‘North’ in the work of Alexis Wright and the Cree writer Tomson Highway draws on three textual categories—­ chronotope, song and ‘ways of knowing’—to show alternative and transformative logics in the work of these writers, offering epistemological resistance to grand narratives. Bill Ashcroft, also true to form, presents a masterly discussion of Wendt’s extended poem The Adventures of Vela, which combines narrative and oratory/performance in an “exuberant traversal of an invented Samoan mythology” (204). He draws on Sharrad’s analysis of the concept of the Va in Wendt’s book, aptly illustrating the centrality of Sharrad’s study (and especially its subtitle, Circling the Void) to critical postcolonial work on Wendt, and on the literature of the Pacific.1 Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay and Tony Simões da Silva offer a more overtly politicised version of literary resistance, discussing respectively the plays of Mukunda Das, which focus on nationalism from below, and the “regime change” fiction of Maaza Mengiste and Fatima Bhutto. Russell McDougall brings the political discussion closer to home with his account of Xavier Herbert’s experience as a dispenser in Tulagi in the British Solomon Islands, at the time of the Malaita Rebellion, armed resistance to an exploitative colonial tax. The violent reprisals and consequent bacterial dysentery experienced by prisoners involved Herbert both as a dispenser and as a colonial administrator, required to demonstrate his loyalty by personally flogging a native employee. Herbert’s reluctance to do this made him a marked man. McDougall links Herbert’s experiences to the brutalities the novelist illustrates in Capricornia, and to that book’s use of soap, a Unilever plantation product from the Solomon Islands. McDougall’s careful delineation of these “webs of empire,” to

1 Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003).

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use Tony ­Ballantyne’s phrase, as they cycle through class and race, ­punishment and disease, capitalism and literature, is compelling.2 And adjunct discussions, by Dorothy Jones on travel and travellers in Janet Frame’s fiction and Meeta Chatterjee–Padmanabhan on four Australian writers from the Indian diaspora, show how powerful intertextual strategies, along with attention to the doubleness and ambivalence of language, open out shifting ontologies in which people must try to fit themselves. The collection opens with Diana Wood Conroy’s description of colonization (and a kind of reverse acculturation) by needlework. She tells the history of the Sacred Heart nuns on Bathurst Island and on Yule Island, teaching local women to embroider, weave and sew. The cultural exchange fostered by missions brings into focus the complex volatility of pattern meaning when one material is exchanged for another—skin tattoos transferred as patterns onto cloth, for example, change their meaning. Many of the nuns arrived at the missions as young girls and spent almost their whole lives living with the indigenous people. Wood Conroy’s text is accompanied by evocative black and white and rather unfocussed photographs, suggestive of the gendered mixing taking place, the ways in which the white women, as expressed by one of them, were “measuring and sifting” the values they had taken for granted (24). Some of the embroidery examples come from the collection of Phyllis Sharrad, Paul’s mother, during the time his family lived in Port Moresby; this essay and ‘Bodily Cloth’ by Kay Lawrence elegantly reflect Sharrad’s own interest in the materiality and meaning of cloth, as Lawrence puts it (144), laid out in the collection co-edited with Anne Collett, Re-inventing Textiles.3 Lawrence’s essay beautifully discusses the work of two textile artists, Elsje van Keppel and Jane Whiteley. She describes the making process as A performative process over time, during which makes, as they work with the tensions, forces and flows of their materials, create an eloquent inscriptive trace of their own bodily gestures. (145) The works Breath and Heartbeat by van Keppel, and still life 2012, My Mother’s body 2010 and 2011 by Whiteley, are gloriously conceived and executed in Lawrence’s account of them—so conceptually imaginative and lovingly created. Her essay made me want to be a textile historian. The final essay in the book, and the one I want to dwell on in more detail as I come back to my starting point, is co-authored by Teresia Teaiwa and her 2 Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). 3 Re-Inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3, ed. Paul Sharrad & Anne Collett (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004).

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graduate student Tekura Moeka‘a. They are the only Pasifika contributors of an essay, which speaks of many things: their generosity, the esteem in which they hold Paul Sharrad, and, more darkly, the still nearly invisible Pasifika academic. Teresia’s preface begins with an account of how she met Paul, and his characteristically generous behaviour to her when she was a junior academic. Her essay, and her deliberate inclusion of a former student as co-author, honour Paul by imitation: he passed on publishing opportunities to her as a younger colleague, his interdisciplinary work, and his broad comparative focus. The essay focusses on the difficult pedagogy of “studying the past in the postcolonial present,” their subtitle phrase. Teresia was a brilliant and nationally acknowledged teacher. In 2014 she won an Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award. These awards are very prestigious. They are given out by the Minister of Education at Parliament, and are reported nationally. In the interview which accompanied receipt of her award Teresia described her practice: “We have observed that Pasifika students are not as comfortable with reading as other students and, indeed, University research has shown that they struggle with academic texts,” says Dr Teaiwa. “By assessing their reading, students have begun to engage more—and what was like mass dentistry in tutorials to extract responses from students about what they’ve read has led to more interactive classes.” “It’s been encouraging to see how the culture of classrooms has changed. Students don’t have to fail—how we design courses and what we assess will enhance learning.”4 One innovative teaching strategy of Teresia’s is ‘Akamai’ for 100–level students. Students can choose to present a creative interpretation of what they have been reading. Several students presented their Akamai at her memorial service—usually accompanied by music they are punchy events, moving and often edgy. Her other initiative was to make reading an assessable activity for all the programme’s undergraduates. Her first-year exam papers focus on concepts, summaries and short essays, training students who come from an oral culture, and often poor families with few books, in how to read and understand ideas. 4 “National Teaching Award for Victoria Pacific Studies Lecturer,” 3 July 2014, Va’aomanū Pasifika, Victoria University of Wellington http://www.victoria.ac.nz/pasifika/about/news/news -archives/2015-news/national-teaching-award-for-victoria-pacific-studies-lecturer (accessed 22 June 2017).

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What was always immediately obvious about Teresia was her exceptionally fine academic mind. Her PhD supervisor was James Clifford, who came to New Zealand several times to visit her; like Clifford, she adopted a big view of her field. Teaching Pacific Studies courses, as she comments in her essay, took her well out of her comfort zone, but she set herself the intellectual project of resisting, and expecting her students to resist, what Kerry Howe lamented as the “myopically nationalist state of Pacific historiography”.5 In a field dominated by, as she says, senior white male academics, she raised her flag for a politically engaged, gendered, diverse and indigenous Pacific scholarship. As her coauthored essay illustrates, she asked the hard questions and found practical solutions to them. Teresia, along with her co-author and former student Tekura, describe the difficulties of studying comparative history, difficulties which apply not only to Pacific students but to any scholar who seriously undertakes comparative work. These are historically more challenging in the Pacific, where so much indigenous knowledge has been recycled back to them through white male mouths. As Tekura points out there are certain foci (Samoa, Tonga, Polynesia), and the sheer size of the Pacific is challenging. One of the first-year exam exercises is to mark Pacific nations on a map. I found this almost impossible, even though those living in New Zealand see a map of the Pacific every night on the weather forecast. Teresia was passionately committed to the welfare of her students. This is a remark heard often enough in academia to have become a cliché about excellent and dedicated teachers, but when the teacher and the class represent a struggling minority who have social, cultural, and economic barriers to academic success, it is a phrase that describes enormous amounts of work and loyalty beyond the classroom door, work that continues after the successful achievement of a degree. I vividly recall Teresia in tears at a Faculty Management meeting when she told of encountering two of her graduates working at kfc because they had not been able to find other jobs. Taking on the responsibility of a society’s racism is an exhausting burden, one Tere shouldered professionally and personally every day. Va’aomanū Pasifika, the academic programme Teresia headed, has only recently stopped being part of a larger school. Once it was under the wing of Te Kawa a Māui, then it lodged in Social and Cultural Studies. Then it got its own

5 K.R. Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988): 161.

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Director (Teresia) and a more separate existence. Of course, that brought with it lots of hard work, applying for more staff, arguing about the budget, being part of faculty management. But at least it was independence of a sort. In a short piece Teresia wrote in 2011, she said: At the rate I’m going, I will just keep slogging away at my academic job until I can retire. This is the fate of the savage in modernity, isn’t it? Work, work, work, so we can eventually have a life that’s close to the one our ancestors once lived? Well, for most Pacific people that’s not the dream. The dream is to work, work, work so that we can have lives that are close to the ones we think white people have.6 Teresia argued that Pacific people are caught in the double bind of late ­capitalism—exhausting their intellectual and physical resources and those of their families, in order to be rewarded in some never to be achieved future. Tere herself tragically illustrated the cost of such unsustainable life and work patterns. At Teresia’s memorial service her best friend, Mele Wendt, daughter of Albert, accused the university of killing her with overwork and not enough support. Tere was posthumously promoted to Associate Professor which Mele, and many others, thought was too little too late. Paul Sharrad has, like, Teresia, worked all his life to enhance and expand Pacific scholarship, and he has done so with imagination and generosity. This book is a fitting tribute to his work by other fine scholars. I wanted to write an afterword to add my own voice in praise of Paul, but Teresia’s death also made me think more specifically about the burdens and difficulties faced by indigenous colleagues. Indigenous scholarship comes at a very high price and has not yet achieved critical mass. I hope the cohort of students taught by Teresia and her colleagues can find the energy, but above all the support, to make it happen. In the long game the future of Pacific scholarship is dependent on its greatest resource—Pasifika people—and indigenous scholars are the key to new ways of understanding the greatest of the world’s oceans. As Teresia once wrote, “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.”7 6 Teresia Teaiwa, “Modern Life, Primitive Thoughts,” Development Special Issue: Produced for the sid World Conference, Houndmills 54.2 (June 2011): 178. 7 The remark is used as the epigraph to Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008): 41.

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Works Cited Ballantyne, Tony. Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). Hau’ofa, Epeli. “The Ocean in Us,” in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2008): 41–59. Howe, K.R. Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1988). “National Teaching Award for Victoria Pacific Studies Lecturer,” 3 July 2014, Va’aomanū Pasifika, Victoria University of Wellington, http://www.victoria.ac.nz/pasifika/about/ news/news-archives/2015-news/national-teaching-award-for-victoria-pacific -­studies-lecturer (accessed 22 June 2017). Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). Sharrad, Paul, & Anne Collett, ed. Re-inventing Textiles: Postcolonialism and Creativity, vol. 3 (Bristol: Telos Art, 2004). Teaiwa, Teresia. “Modern Life, Primitive Thoughts,” Development Special Issue: Produced for the SID World Conference, Houndmills 54.2 (June 2011): 177–79.

Index Aboriginal Australians—See Indigenous Australians Academia 25, 30, 31, 32n6, 41, 196, 200, 207, 219 See also assessment; Australian studies; Australian–Canadian studies; Canadian studies; comparative studies; Decolonial Studies; decolonization; literary studies; Pacific Studies; postcolonial studies Achebe, Chinua 84–85, 86 Activism 50, 53, 55, 57, 215 Aesop 105 Aesthetics 25, 30, 32, 41, 105–106, 109, 110, 13, 114, 117–118 Afaisa, Mary 18 Afghanistan 92, 93, 94 Africa 25, 78n85, 91, 103, 183n4 North Africa 84 Ahmed, Mutu 23 Aihi, Marie Taita 21n39, 22 Akeli, Safua 201 Akhil, Shalini 169, 170 “Destiny” 169, 173 Aklilu Habte-Wold 89 Alexander Turnbull Collection—See National Library of New Zealand Alice in Wonderland 178–179 Allen, Paula Gunn 113 All-India Spinners’ Association 51 American Association of Australian and New Zealand Studies 30n* Americas 54 South America 103, 211 Anastasia, Sister 9 Ancestors 34, 63, 198–199, 220 Anderson, Benedict 54 Anifelo 73 See also Basiana Anstey, Frank 77 Anushilan Samiti 59 Aotearoa—See New Zealand

Apau, Rose 18, 19 Apsley Strait (Australia) 12 Aquinas, St Thomas 177 ‘Arab Spring’ 84 Archives New Zealand (Wellington) 200, 201, 213 Arctic, Canadian 44 Area studies 197 See also comparative studies; Pacific Studies Arnason, Johann P. 50–51 Arnhem Land 104 Arts educators 3–4, 14 Ashcroft, Bill 216 Asia 62, 169 Asia–Pacific 61, 62, 136 Askari, Nasreen 137n15 Assessment, university 202–203, 204, 205–206 Astor, Herbert—See Xavier Herbert Atkinson, Meera 88–89 Auckland 155 Auckland University of Technology 207 Audience 35, 36, 59, 61, 105–107, 113–14, 115–17, 118, 121, 172 ’Auekwa’a of Furi’ilai 64n14 Australia 77, 174, 178 and colonialism 62, 64, 76, 79–80, 106 education 3, 9, 15, 16, 25, 169, 177, 178, 197 family 169, 175, 179 humour 105–106, 114n40, 180 immigration and immigrants 77, 136, 141, 167–168, 169, 172, 176–177, 181 Indigenous sovereignty 32, 37–38, 41, 42, 63n9, 203 literary criticism and publishing 41, 74, 79, 80 missionaries 8, 9, 16, 25, 26 multiculturalism 31–32, 167–168, 170–171 nationalism and stereotype 32n6, 35, 40, 44, 172–173 north 8, 12, 23, 25, 26, 30, 38, 61–62, 75–76

Index Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (ramsi) 78–79 textiles 134–135, 136 White Australia Policy 168 writers, writing and reading 31, 32n6, 38, 42, 61, 74, 79, 167–169, 180, 217 See also Indigenous Australians; National Gallery of Australia Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies 5 Australian–Canadian Studies 31, 33 Australian Council for the Arts 4 Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide) 135n9 Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Canberra) 79 Australian studies 44 Babui, Miriam 18 Babui, Patricia 16n32, 17 Bacchae 160 Badami, Sunil 169, 170, 178, 180, 181 “Sticks and Stones and Such Like” 169, 174–177 Bakhtin, M.M. 33, 172 See also chronotope Ballantyne, Tony 216–217 Bandyopadhyay, Deb Narayan 216 Banerjee, Surendranath 56 Bankim Chandra—See Bankim Chandra Chatterjee Bannon, Charles 19 Barad, Karen 38 Bargh, Maria 215 Barton, Edmund 80 Basiana 63, 64, 67–69, 73, 74 See also Anifelo; Kwaio; Laefi; Malaita Rebellion; Sinerango War Basso, Keith H. 109–110, 116 Basu, Aparna 52 Bathurst Island (Australia) 3, 4, 12, 13–14, 15, 18, 23, 26, 104, 112, 217 See also Nguiu; Sacred Heart Mission; women Batik 136, 137, 138 Baxter, James K. 191 Beagle Bay Church (Beagle Bay) 11

223 Beaglehole Collection—See Victoria University of Wellington Beaglehole, J.C. 215 Beier, Georgina 4, 6, 21–23 Beier, Ulli 6, 21n39, 22, 23 Belich, James 150n3 Bell, William Robert 63, 68–69 Bengal 48, 51, 53, 54n17, 57, 58, 140 West Bengal 136 See also kantha; women Bennett, Judith A. 62–63, 77n80 Benson, Eugene, & L.W. Conolly 196n Berlin 132 Bethune School (Kolkata) 57 Bhadramahila 54, 55–56 Bhutto, Fatima 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 216 The Shadow of the Crescent Moon 85, 86, 88, 91–96, 97–98 Bima Wear (Nguiu) 4, 14, 16 See also Sister Eucharia Black Atlantic 30, 32 Black Pacific 30 Blake, William 130 Body, human 37–38, 78, 109, 125, 129, 141, 145, 147, 148, 174–175 and blood 65–66, 78, 124, 127, 137–139, 220 See also textiles Boismenu, Archbishop Alain de 12, 14 Borges, Jorge Louis 183n3 Bourdieu, Pierre 168 Bourgeois, Louise 145–146 Boskin, Joseph 115–116, 117n55 Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) 62 Boyd, Henry 154n11 Brahma Tirta Sari Studio (Yogyakarta) 137 Brants, Chrisje 85–86, 94n12 Bratachari 59 Bratakatha 48 Brewster, Anne 42, 105n9, 112n31, 113n35, 114n44, 115n48, 116n53, 118n60, 216 Brinkerhoff, Derick W. 94–95 Britain (/United Kingdom) 50, 76, 143, 150, 156, 158, 161 Brunt, Peter 215 Brydon, Diana 31n5, 38n24, 216

224 Buka Island (Papua New Guinea) 62 “Burdened society” 85, 86, 93 Burke, Timothy 78 Burman, Barbara 15–16 Burns Philp 72 Butler, Judith 36 Byrnes, Giselle 205, 206 Call, Charles T. 94n13, 95 Campbell, Ian 197n4 Canada 30, 31, 32n6, 37, 38, 44, 103 Canadian studies 44 Cape York 8 Carey, Hilary M. 4n2 Caribbean 103 Carlyon, Jenny, & Diana Morrow 152n8 Carmelite monastery (Yule Island) 20 Carpio, Glenda R. 114, 116n53, 117 Carroll, Jeffrey, Brandy Nalani McDougall & Georganne Nordstrom 190n27 Carroll, Noël 116 Caruth, Cathy 95 Cary, Henry Francis 154 Catholics and Catholicism 3, 4, 9, 22, 25, 26, 36, 73n69, 118, 178, 193 See also Beagle Bay Church; Carmelite monastery; missions; nuns; Sacred Heart Central Papua 18 Chamorro 198 Channel Island Leprosarium (Darwin) 14 Charka 51, 52, 54, 55, 57 Chasar, Mike 115n45 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 56–58 Chatterjee-Padmanabhan, Meeta 217 Chatterjee, Partha 54–55, 57 Chevalier, Jules 9 Chiria Women’s Club (Chiria, Papua New Guinea) 21 Christianity 5, 8, 11, 21, 36, 64, 206 See also Catholics and Catholicism; grace; missions; Sacred Heart Christ, Jesus 118, 154 Chronotope 33–34, 41, 216 Churchlands Teachers’ College (Perth) 136, 141 Clarendon Parish (Jamaica) 121, 125, 129, 130, 133 Clark, Maureen 103n2

Index Class conflict 51–52, 55–56, 58, 59, 62–63 Clear, Madeleine 4 Cleland, Lady Rachel 6 Clemens, Martin 71n64 Cleven, Vivienne 103 Clifford, James 32–33, 219 Cloth—See textiles Cochrane Archive (University of Wollongong) 8n16, 10, 12n24, 21n36 Cochrane, Percy 8n16 Cochrane, Renata 8–9, 10, 19, 21, 26 Cochrane, Susan 8–9, 18, 26 Cold War 91, 197 Collett, Anne 215–216, 217 Colonialism 26, 38, 49, 62, 114–115 See also violence Colonial Office (British) 63n9, 65n21, 67, 70n53, 71n59, 73n69, 77 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 183 Communism 124, 126 Comparative studies 61, 219 See also Australian–Canadian Studies; Pacific Studies Connell, Raewyn 45 Connor, G.J. 65n22, 70n55 Conroy, Diana Wood 3, 4, 9n19, 14, 17, 21n37, 25, 26, 217 Cook Islands 202, 207, 211 See also women Cooper, Wayne 121n2, 122, 127n27 Corris, Peter 62n6, 63n9, 64n17, 65n23, 66n29, 67n36, 68n38, 69n47, 70n50, 71n60, 72n65, 73n66, 75n76, 76n79 See also Roger M. Keesing Cosmology 31, 42, 43, 111 Cosmopolitanism 8, 31, 31n5, 121–122, 124 Crafts 4, 14–15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 52, 140 Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft (Perth) 140 Crane, Ralph 174–175 Creativity vii, 4, 18, 25, 44, 58, 184, 199, 203, 213, 218 See also decolonization; imagination Cresswell, Georgina 140 Crill, Rosemary 134n3

Index Cronin, Jan 156 Crowley, Walt 34n14 Cruikshank, Julie 31n4 Curnow, Allen 158, 159 Cyrill, Christopher 169, 170, 174, 181 The Ganges and its Tributaries 169, 174 Dante Alighieri 154 D’Arcy, Paul 200n10 Darwin (Australia) 3, 14, 62, 74n70, 75, 78, 104, 118n62 See also Channel Island Leprosarium; Kahlin Compound Das, Charan Kavi Mukunda 49, 51, 52, 56, 58–59 Brahmacharini 49, 58 Karmakshetra 49, 52, 58 Matripuja 49, 59 Palliseva 49, 50, 52, 56, 58 Samaj 49, 58 David Unaipon Award (Australia) 104 Davidson, J.W. 215 Dayal, Samir 170, 171, 180 Decolonial Studies 32 Decolonization 31, 32, 43–44, 45, 197 See also creativity; imagination De Heer, Rolf 104n3 Dekker, Diane 183n2 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 33 Delrez, Marc 153n9, 159n25 Democracy 50, 86–87, 97 Dening, Greg 204 Derrida, Jacques 90–91 hauntology 38 Deshmatrika 51, 56 Desai, A.R. 51 Diaspora 30, 32, 167, 170–172 Dimock, Wai Chee 40 Dionysus 160 Dixon, Robert 76 Dorothy, Sister 12 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 163n33 Douglas, Kate 168n8 Draupadi 53 Druett, Joan 201 Dunedin (New Zealand) 152, 154, 155 Eden 121, 123, 124, 125, 129, 154 Edith Cowan University—See Churchlands

225 Education 4, 6, 8, 25, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57–58, 131, 172, 197, 207 Ehrlich, Paul 127 Eki, Therese 19 Eliot, T.S. 41, 161 Embree, Ainslie T. 197n2 Emotion—See feeling Epistemology 33, 34, 37–38, 38n24, 41, 42, 45, 207 Eritrea 3 Eros and Thanatos 74 Ethiopia 87–88, 90, 91, 94, 97 Eucharia, Sister (Olive May Pearce) 4, 12–15, 26 Europe 25, 56, 57, 71, 103, 136, 211 and colonialism 30–31, 51, 54, 56, 67, 78–79, 152, 183n4, 197 ‘home’ 3, 25 writers and writing 62, 74, 103, 154, 162–163, 178 Eurydice 160 Evans, Patrick 156–157, 163 Fagan, Kristina 111–112, 113, 118n61 “Failed state” 80n88, 85, 94–95 Family 3, 40, 90, 95, 111, 153, 177–178, 201, 209, 217 as allegory for nation 54, 71–74, 88, 175, 178, 179 of the artist 13, 113, 143, 152, 167, 178 stories of 112, 201 violence 88, 90, 92, 98, 155, 180 Fanon, Frantz 90 Fecteau, Uili 201 Feeling—anger/rage 37, 94, 96, 118, 156, 159 fear 26, 36, 58, 63, 90, 92, 96, 110, 114, 132, 153 homesickness 25 love 9, 37, 87, 90, 118n59, 122, 124, 131, 154, 156, 158, 159n27, 177, 178 nostalgia 91, 123, 124, 130 passion 4, 125, 215, 219 Schadenfreude 106, 116 shame 37, 64, 69, 106, 127, 175 yearning 135, 143, 147 See also generosity; humour; imagination; memory; trauma Ferguson, James 208 Fiaria 69

226 Fiji 8, 63n10, 76, 79, 197, 198, 200, 201, 211 First Nations/Native American 216 Anishinaabe 105 Cree 30, 36, 38, 118, 216 Laguna Pueblo 113 NunatuKavut 111 Squamish 34 Western Apache 109–110 Fischer, Stephen 197n3 Fischer-Tiné, Harald, & Michael Mann 48n1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 124 Florida (Solomon Islands) 65n25, 72 See also Nggela Sule Fonaringa 69 Foucault, Michel 191 Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Petrograd; Moscow)  124, 126 Frame, Isabel 152 Frame, Janet 150–152, 154, 156–157, 158, 159n27, 160–161, 163–165, 217 An Angel at My Table 152n6 The Edge of the Alphabet 156–164 In Her Own Words 150n1, 157n18, 159n27, 163n35 Letter to John Money 152n5, 163n33 “Memory and a Pocketfull of Words” 163n45 “Message for a Book Launch, 1992” 159n27 “My Say” 157n19 “Noted nz Writer is ‘Inspired by People’” 157n18 Owls Do Cry 158 The Rainbirds 152–156 “Swans” 151, 163 “This Desirable Property” 150n1 Frame, Myrtle 152 Francis, Gavin 139 Freeman, Derek 215 Freud, Sigmund 114 Fufuae 69 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 50, 51–53, 55, 56, 58, 179 Ganguly, Sumit 50 Gavaskar, Sunil 174, 176 Gender roles 12, 14, 18–21, 22, 52–53 See also women

Index Generosity 116, 218, 220 Genevieve, Mother 10, 14 Gin, Stewart 190 Godfrey Shawl (National Gallery of Australia) 134 Golf (as colonial game) 70 Gordimer, Nadine 84–85 Gordon, Beverley 148n38 Grace, saving 5, 26–27 Grace, Sherrill E. 44n42 Graham, Pamela 168n9 Grimshaw, Beatrice 62 Gsell, Francis Xavier 12 Guha, Ranajit 63n9 Gulpilil, David 104n3 Gunew, Sneja 31, 168 Gupta, Akhil 208 Gwee-abe (Solomon Islands) 63–64 Hage, Ghassan 168 Haile Selassie 88, 88–90, 91 Hall, Stuart 79n86, 167n2 Halmi, Nicholas 123n13 Hara Hara Prints (Port Moresby) 22, 23 Harlem (New York) 115n45, 126, 133, 216 See also Claude McKay Harris, Frank 121 Harrison, Hubert 122n6 Harris, Wilson 184, 191 Hau‘ofa, Epeli 23–25, 188, 189, 192n31, 197, 198, 204, 208–209, 220n7 Hawai‘i 31, 189–190, 196, 201, 202, 206 Hayward, Janine 205 Hegel, G.W.F. 177 Hemingway, Ernest 124 Henderson, April 185n7, 200 Herbert, Xavier 61–62, 65–75, 78–79, 216 “The Ape-Men of Mobongu” 61 Biographical Statement 73n70S Capricornia 61, 72, 74, 75, 78–80, 216 Letter to Harry Heseltine 70n57 Letter to Drs Karl and Paula Schubert 71n59 Letter to Secretary 65n26, 66n27, 67n30 manuscript of “Capricornia” 79 as medical officer 65–67, 70–71 “The Man behind the Story” 74n70 “The Other McLean” 61, 73–74

227

Index “Return of a Wanderer” 74n70 See also Peter Corris; Kathleen Jackson; “Maianbar”; Malaita Rebellion; Camden Morrisby; Andrew Martin; Peter Simon Heseltine, Harry 70n57 Hetherington, Harry (smo) 65n21, 67, 68n42, 69, 72–73 Higginson, R.C. 68 Highway, Tomson 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 40, 44, 45, 118, 216 Kiss of the Fur Queen 33, 34, 36, 38–39, 43, 44 Hindus and Hinduism 52, 54, 58, 177–178 History 32–33, 51, 105, 112, 183–184, 200 and literature 80, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 98, 128, 180, 181, 187, 188, 191–192, 193, 196 study of 197, 198–199, 200–202, 203, 204–205, 207–209 and textiles 134, 143 Hitchcock, Peter 33–34 Ho Chi Minh 94 Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra 168n4, 171 Holt, Lillian 105–106 Horne, C. Sylvester 7, 8n14 Howe, Kerry/K.R. 197, 198, 219 Howe, K.R., Robert C. Kiste & Brij V. Lal 197n4 Hoy, Helen 111n28 Huggan, Graham 168, 170 Humanism 4, 25, 26, 38 See also posthumanism Humour 112–113, 114–117 in literature 39, 94, 104–109, 113, 118, 156, 176, 216 See also audience; laughter; satire Hunter Commission (Indian Education Commission) 48 Huntington, Samuel P. 91–92 Huntsman, Judith 205, 206, 208 Hutcheon, Linda 116n50, 168n5, 172 Hutson, Sir Eyre 73n69 Hybridity 5, 21, 41, 170–171, 173 Imagination 25, 39, 43, 51, 88, 96, 107, 144, 220 See also creativity Indentured labour 77

India 49–56, 58–59, 63n9, 77, 167–168, 171–172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180–181, 211, 217 nationalism 51, 53–55, 57–59 South India 175 textiles 134, 137 writers and writing 167–168 See also Bengal; Bhadramahila; Deshmatrika; Kulalakshmi; Matrishakti; Memsaheb; women Indian National Congress 49, 50 Indigenous arts 4–7, 16–23, 32, 34, 42 Indigenous Australians 31, 35, 42, 104, 106 Rembarranga 104 Tiwi 4, 12, 16–17, 21, 26, 104, 217 Torres Strait Islanders 110–111 Waanyi 30, 41 Yolngu 3 Indigenous sovereignty—See Australia Indonesia—See batik; Brahma Tirta Sari Studio Ingold, Tim 135, 136, 137n12, 138, 141, 144, 148 Iraq 93, 94 Ireland 25 Irony 114, 116n50, 171, 172, 176, 180 Jabbour, Nicholas 127n28 Jackman, Harold 123n15 Jackson, Kathleen 62, 72 See also Xavier Herbert Jamaica 121–122, 123, 124, 133, 215–216 See also Clarendon Parish; Kingston JanMohamed, Abdul 49 Japan 62, 136 Jatra 48–49, 51, 58–59 Java 76, 77 Jayapalan, N. 48n2 Jekyll, Walter 131 Jenkins, Rob 50 Johnson, Colin (Mudrooroo) 103n2 Jones, Dorothy 217 Jones, Gail 135n8, 143 Jones, James H. 138n31 Jose, Nicholas 31n4 Joseph Mary, Sister 18, 19, 20, 22 Journal of Pacific History 198 Jowitt, Glenn 21n34 Jung, Carl 183n3 Kahlin Compound (Darwin) 75, 78

228 Kali 59 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikalā 189–190 Kannada 175 Kantha 136, 140 Kashmir 134 Kasturba Medical College (Manipal) 175 Keeble, Frank 71n64, 72 Keeble, Myrtle 71, 72 Keesing, Roger M. 63n9, 64n13, 67n34 & Peter Corris 64n11, 65n20, 67n37,  68n39, 73n69, 77n81 Keneally, Thomas 3 Kennedy, Gayle 103 Kierkegaard, Søren 177 King, Michael 152n5, 155n13, 163n36 Kingston (Jamaica) 125, 130 King, Thomas 216 Kipling, Rudyard 78–79 Kubuna (Yule Island) 12 See also Sacred Heart Küchler, Suzanne, & Graeme Wear 21n34 Kulalakshmi 52, 53–54, 55 Kwaio 63–64, 67–69 See also Basiana; Malaita Rebellion Laefi 73n69 See also Basiana Lamming, George 84–85, 86 Langton, Marcia 5, 26 Laracy, Hugh Michael 73n69 Laughter 36, 105, 106, 108, 109, 113, 114–117, 172, 179 Lawrence, Kay 141, 217 Laxmi 48, 54 Laxmi Panchali 48, 54, 55 Lazarus 154 Leishman, J.B. 162n, 163 Le Tagaloa, Aiono Fanaafi 188 Lever Brothers 76–77 Levers Pacific Plantations 77, 216 See also Unilever Leverhulme, Lord 75, 76, 77, 78 See also Port Sunlight Lewis, Paul 113 Liberalism 48, 50 Liberation 50 Libya 93 Lincoln, Kenneth 104n7, 109, 113n36, 116n51 Literary studies vii 30, 103, 111, 112, 196

Index Locke, Alain 127n27 Lo, Jacqueline 173 Lomas, Julia 5, 6 London 67, 77, 124, 152–153, 157, 159, 161 London Missionary Society 6–7, 9 Lorenz, Konrad 117 Luita 69 Luker, Patricia 198n8 McDougall, Russell 61n2, 71n63, 73n70, 216–217 McGregor, Russell 105n15 McGuiness, Patrick 84, 85, 87, 88, 89 McKay, Claude (Festus Claudius) 115n45, 121, 215 A Long Way from Home 123n4, 126n23, 127n26, 128, 129n35 “Cities” 124, 132 “The Clinic” 128, 132 Constab Ballads 121, 125 “Convalescing” 131–132 “Dawn in New York” 124–125 “The Desolate City” 128–131 “For Marguerite” 131 Harlem Shadows 122–123, 126 “Home Thoughts” 122 “If We Must Die” 126n24 “I Shall Return” 123n12 Letter to Alain Locke 127n27 Letter to Harold Jackman 123n15 “My Green Hills of Jamaica” 121n3 My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories 121n3 “North and South” 123n14 “Note of Harlem” 132–133 “Pay Day” 125 Songs of Jamaica 121 Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems 122 “Subway Wind” 124 “The Tropics in New York” 122 “The White City” 125 “The Years Between” 132 See also Romanticism McKay, Uriah Theodore 131 Maepu, Junior 201 Magic realism 40, 41 Mahabharata 53, 56 Māhina-Tuai, Kolokesa 201

229

Index Mahoney, James, & Dietrich Rueschemeyer 200n11 “Maianbar” (ship) 73 See also Xavier Herbert Malaita (Papua New Guinea) 62, 63 Malaita Rebellion 63–65, 74–75; 216 See also Basiana; Kwaio; Sinerango War Malaria 64, 70–71 See also quinine Mallon, Sean 201 Maneba, Elizabeth 18 Manichean allegory 49 Manipal University 175 Māori (New Zealand) 31, 43, 153, 201, 202, 211 Ngāi Tūhoe 201 Ngāti Maniapoto 201 Ngāti Porou 201 Whakatohea 201 See also Cook Islands Māori Studies 200 Margarine Unie 76n78 Mariana Islands—See Chamorro Marie Louise, Mother 12 Marjorie Mary, Sister 20 Marquesas (French Polynesia) 202 Marshall Islands, Republic of 198 Martin, Andrew 62n7 Martin, Richard J., Philip Mead & David Trigger 31n4 Marx, Karl 184 Mary Mercia, Sister 12 Matthiessen, Peter 84, 97 Matrishakti 56 Maxwell, William 122n5, 123n15, 124, 126n24, 132 Mazumdar, Vina 52–53 Melanesia 8, 23, 25, 61, 207 Melbourne 13, 73, 104 Mel, Michael A. 18n Melville, Herman 103 Melville Island (Australia) 12, 13, 26 See also Sacred Heart; Tiwi Islands Memory 39, 86, 97, 123, 141, 144, 145, 153, 160, 167, 172, 189, 191, 192 Memsaheb 54, 56 Mengiste, Maaza 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 97, 216 Beneath the Lion’s Gaze 85, 87–88, 89–90, 91, 94, 96–98 Mengistu Haile Mariam 89

Menon, Visalakshi 52n11 Mercer, Gina 158n23 Meredith, George 108 Micronesia 207 Middle East—See ‘Arab Spring’ Milan Gan 49 Miller, Tyrus 105n9 Milne Bay (Papua New Guinea) 24 Mimicry 48 Mir Ali (Pakistan) 93–96 Mir, Sayyid Muhammad 134 Mishra, Vijay 168n3, 169–170, 171 Missionaries 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 21, 78, 114, 197, 206 Missions 3, 7, 8, 18, 73n69, 206, 217 development of crafts 4, 14–15, 18, 20, 22, 25 suppression of Indigenous culture 4, 16 teaching by 15, 17, 18 See also Sacred Heart Mitchell, Stephen 163n32 Mitchell, Victoria 139, 143–144, 148 Mitra, Dinabandhu 57 Modernity 4, 25, 26, 54, 76, 78–79, 170, 183, 220 Moeka‘a, Tekura 204, 207–208, 218, 219 Mohanram, Radhika 174–175 Money, John 152, 163n33 Moore, Donald Shearer 183n4 Moorhouse, Commissioner H.C. 63n9, 67n34 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 37–38 Morphy, Howard 4 Morrisby, Camden 74n70 Moscow 125, 126, 130, 132 Moss, John 44n42 Multiculturalism 31–32, 167–168, 171 Munkara, Marie 104, 105n9, 110, 112–113, 114, 115, 116, 117n59, 118, 216 Every Secret Thing 104–105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115, 117–118, 216 Munkara, Pierre 112 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington) 200, 202 Muslims and Islam 52, 58, 92, 93 See also women Nairokopi, Bernard 25 Nakata, Martin 110, 111

230 Nandy, Ashis 183–184 Narayan, Georgina 201 Narayan, Natasha 201 National Gallery of Australia (Canberra) 134, 135n7 See also Godfrey Shawl; Elsje van Keppel; Heartbeat National Library of New Zealand–Alexander Turnbull Collection (Wellington)  200, 213 Nation and identity 54–55 Australian and Canadian 44 Bengali 48, 49 masculinist 53 orientalist 48, 49 See also Australia; India; Pacific Studies Nation-state 32, 35–36, 45, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 96, 97, 197 Native Americans 116 See also First Nations Navarre, Father Andre 9, 11n21, 12 See also Sacred Heart Nazrul (Kazi Nazrul Islam) 58 Nehru, Jawaharlal 57 New Britain (Papua New Guinea) 12 New York 123, 124–125, 132, 133 New Zealand/Aotearoa 150, 151, 152, 197, 198, 201, 209, 219 in literature 153, 154, 155, 156, 157–159, 160, 164, 186 writers and writing 159 Nggela Sule (Papua New Guinea) 65n25, 72 Map of 66 See also Florida; Malaita Rebellion; ­Solomon Islands Nguiu (now Wurrumiyanga; Australia) 3, 17 See also Bathurst Island; Tiwi Designs; Tiwi Designs Archive Nietzsche, Friedrich 39 Nigeria 22 Niue 211 North Africa—See ‘Arab Spring’ North Coast Steam Navigation Company (Australia) 73n67 Northern Territory (Australia) 3, 14, 77, 104 Norton, M.D. Herter 162n30 Nuns 4n2, 9, 12, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 25 See also Anastasia; Dorothy; Eucharia;

Index Genevieve; Joseph Mary; Marie Louise; Marjorie Mary; Mary Mercia Oboe, Annalisa 103n2 O’Brien, Philippa 135, 136n, 137n13, 140n22, 141n27, 142n ocean, the 24, 215, 220 in literature 150, 174, 190 transoceanic imaginary 24–25, 32, 190, 208–209 See also Black Atlantic; Black Pacific; Pacific Oceania vii, 8, 25, 32, 180, 208–209, 215, 220 in literature 150, 174, 192, 194 See also Black Pacific; Pacific; sea Oliver, Douglas L. 205 Ommundsen, Wenche 169, 177n Opu, Margaret 18, 19 Orality 33, 112–113, 206, 218 Orpheus 160 See also Eurydice; Rainer Maria Rilke Orsto, Antoinette 18 Pacific 7–8, 24, 30–31, 61, 74, 80, 188, 189 writers and writing vii, 5, 196, 216 See also Black Pacific; Oceania; ocean; sea; trade Pacific History Bibliography 198n8 Pacific Islands Regiment 5, 6 Pacific Studies 5, 32, 61, 196–197, 215, 219 aims 198–199, 200, 203, 208–209, 213 assessment 218, 202–203, 204–206, 212 comparative methodologies 198, 200, 202, 203, 204–05, 206, 207, 213, 219 nationalism 197, 208, 219 scholars of 197, 198, 201, 207, 208 students 198–199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 211, 218, 219, 220 teaching strategies 199–201, 202, 203, 205, 208, 218 See also Pacific History Bibliography; Va’aomanū Pasifika Pakistan 88, 91–95, 97 textiles of 137 Palagan 48 Palipuamini, Benedicta 16, 18 Pandanus (palm) 16–17

231

Index Panny, Judith Dell 159n27 Papua New Guinea 3, 5, 8–9, 18, 20–21, 22, 23, 26, 76, 79, 197 Kwaio 63–64, 67–69 Mekeo 20 Motu 20 Rigo 20 Roro 22, 23 Veiru 6 See also missions; Port Moresby; Sacred Heart; University of Papua New Guinea; women; Yule Island Papua Pocket Poets 6 Parau, Mary T. 21 Paris 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 132 Parry, Suzanne 12–13 Pattern, significance of 5–6, 20, 21, 26, 159n27, 217 Pearce, Bertha 14 Pearce, Olive May—See Sister Eucharia Pearson, Noel 26 Peres da Costa, Suneeta 169, 177 Homework 169, 177–180, 181 Perth (Australia) 140, 141 See also Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft Philippines/Filipina/o 205 Picton (New Zealand) 152 Pilakui, Annunciata 18 Planetarity 31, 44 Plantation agriculture and exploitation 62– 63, 76–78, 216 Poe, Edgar Allan 103 Pohnpei (Federated States of Micronesia) 198 Pol Pot 94 Polynesia 24, 202, 203, 204–205, 207, 208, 213, 219 Pomare (King of Tahiti) 8 Pope, Alexander 12n27 Port Moresby 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 22, 23, 27, 217 Port Moresby High School 5 Port Moresby Mission 8 See also Hara Hara Prints Port Sunlight (Merseyside) 77 Postcolonial studies 31, 32–33, 34, 84, 103, 111, 134, 183n1, 196, 216

Posthumanism 31, 37 Prarthana Samaj Ramakrishna Mission 48 Prometheus 178 Puantalura, Christina 16–17 Pung, Alice 168n9, 169 Pye, John 12n28 Queensland 63n9, 77, 111 Quilts and quilting 136, 140, 143 See also textiles Quinine 71n59 Racism 42, 75, 76, 77, 79, 174, 175, 176, 219 Radhakrishnan, R. 170, 173n, 181 Ramayana 53, 56 Rapa Nui/Rapanui 202 Ravenscroft, Alison 41 Rawls, John 86–87 See also “burdened societies” Ray, Bharati, & Aparna Basu 52n11 Reading and readers 42, 44 “Regime change fiction” 84, 86 Reichl, Susanne, & Mark Stein 104n5 Religion—See Catholics and Catholicism; Christianity; Hindus and Hinduism; Muslims and Islam Renes, Maartin 103n2 Residential school 34, 37, 43 Richardson, Michael 88–89 Richards, Rhys 201 Richter, Virginia 115 Rigney, Virginia 135n8, 143n30 Rilke, Egon von 163 Rilke, Rainer Maria 162–164 Robertson, Robin 139 Roddick, Alan 191 Romanticism 123, 125–126, 130–131 Rose, Margaret A. 172 Roy, Parama 53 Roy, Rammohan 54 Rushdie, Salman 167 Russia 126, 130 Russo, Katherine E. 110n26 Sacred Heart 9, 18 Mission, Bathurst Island (Australia) 12, 18, 23

232 Sacred Heart (cont.) Mission, Yule Island (Papua New ­Guinea) 8–11, 18–21, 23 Sacred Heart, Congregation of the Daughters of our Lady of the 9–10, 13, 217 Said, Edward W. 30 Salesa, Damon 215 Samaj, Arya 48 Samaj, Brahma 48 Samoa 8, 184, 185–186, 187n14, 182–193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 211, 219 Sargisson, Lucy, & Lyman Tower Sargent 154n12 Satire 113, 114, 118, 152, 178, 187 See also humour Satyagraha 50, 53, 57, 58 Saunders, Trish, & Jennifer Terrell 198n8 Saw, Ron 18–20 Scarr, Deryck 197n4 Scheherazade 108 Schilo, Ann 135n8 Schopenhauer, Arthur 177 Schubert, Karl 71n58 Schubert, Paula 71n58 Scott, Kim 103 Sea, the 23–25, 37, 62, 150, 152, 155 See also ocean; Pacific; Epeli Hau‘ofa Seattle, Chief 34, 36 Secularism 4, 26 Sen, Samita 53 Sewing—See textiles Shah, Sayyid Hussain 134 Shakespeare, William 103, 163 Sharma, Ram Nath, & Rajendra K. Sharma 48n2 Sharrad, Paul 3n, 31, 196, 209, 215, 218, 220 early life 5, 27 influence of 30, 33, 61 on postcolonial literatures and cultures 5n5, 6, 26, 31, 168n3, 217 on textiles 134, 217 on Albert Wendt vii, 33n9, 183n3, 184n6, 186, 187n14, 189n20, 190–192, 197n5, 216 on Alexis Wright 32, 37 Sharrad, Paul, & Anne Collett 134n1, 217n3 Sharrad, Phyllis 5, 6, 24, 217 See also Julia Lomas Sharrad, Rex 5 Shibori 136, 137

Index Shoemaker, Adam 32 Simões da Silva, Tony 216 Simon, Peter 70n50, 71n61 Sinalaggu 63, 64n15 See also Malaita Rebellion; Sinerango; Sinerango War Sinclair, Keith 159n24 Sinerango 64n15 See also Sinalaggu Sinerango War 64–65 prisoners of 66, 67 See also Malaita Rebellion Singh, Jyotsna G. 48n1 Singh, Maharaja Ranbir 134 Sita 53 Slavery and indenture 76, 77 Smith, Henry A. 34n14 Smith, Jeanne Rosier 103, 104n6, 109, 115, 117 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 43 Smyth, Heather 30 Snyder, Louis L. 51–52 Soap—See whiteness “Solomite” (pseudonym) 74–75, 79 Solomon Islands 61, 62, 63n9, 72, 73, 74–78, 79, 216 Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (ramsi) 78–79 See also Xavier Herbert; Lever Brothers; Malaita Rebellion; Nggela; Tulagi; Unilever Song 35–37, 43, 48 Sovereignty, Indigenous—See Australia Soviet Union 126 See also Russia Spengler, Oswald 74n71 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 31, 35, 44 Stanton, Sue 118n62 Stephensen, P.R. 79 Stewart, Susan 145 Stokes, John H. 127 Story, Holly 135n8 Strutynski, Kim 71 Suva 189 Swadeshi 49, 58 Swadeshi Jatra 51 Swaraj 51, 52, 53 Sydney 12, 18, 19, 76–77, 178 Syncretism 21 Syphilis 127–129, 131–132, 216 Syria 93, 94

Index Tagailamo (Noru) 67–68 See also Kwaio Tagore, Rabindranath 58 Tahiti 7–8 See also Pomare Tamaki, Leanne 201 Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial (Tamworth, Australia) 144 Tattooing 7, 20–21, 22, 23, 217 Tavita, Tupuola Terry 186 Taylor, Alf 103 Teaiwa, Teresia 198n7, 199–200, 208–209, 215, 217–220 Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award 218 See also Victoria University of Wellington Temporality 40–41, 136, 143, 183–84 and decolonization 31, 33–34, 188, 192, 194 in literature 35, 39, 94, 151, 162–163, 167, 183, 187–189, 191, 193 See also chronotope Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington) 200, 202 Textile(s) 3, 5–7, 20–21, 30, 54, 58, 134, 217 artists 21–23, 134, 136, 141 and the body 7, 21, 135, 136, 137–139, 140–143, 217 as community development 5, 6, 14 in formation of gender roles 12, 14–16, 52 making and sewing 4, 12, 16–17, 137, 136–141, 217 See also All India Spinners’ Association; batik; Brahma Tirta Sari Studio; Godfrey Shawl; India; kantha; Pakistan; shibori; Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial; quilts and quilting Theatre 36, 49, 59 See also Charan Kavi Mukunda Das; Jatra Thomas, Mary 140n21 Thomas, Nicholas 8, 24n47, 25n54 Tipiloura, Leonie 16n32, 17 Tipungwuti, Giovanni 4, 18 Tiwi 4, 16, 21, 26, 104, 217 See also Bathurst Island; Bima Wear; Melville Island; Sacred Heart; women Tiwi Designs (Nguiu) 4, 14–16, 17 Tiwi Designs Archive (Nguiu) 15, 16, 17 Tokelau 208, 211 Tolia 69

233 Tonga 8, 23, 197, 198, 205, 206, 207, 211, 219 Toronto 30n*, 44 Toumu’a, Mary Ruth 202n13 Trade 24–25, 31, 62, 72, 76–78, 206 Transitional justice 85–87, 89, 90–91, 94, 96, 97–98 Transnationalism 30, 34, 61, 76, 171, 180 Transpacific connection and comparison 24–25, 30–33 See also ocean; Pacific Studies Trauma 38, 85, 88–89, 95–97, 116, 168 Tricksters 36–37, 103–107, 108, 109–110, 111–113, 114–115, 117–118, 173, 216 Tulagi (Solomon Islands) 62, 64, 65, 71n64, 72–73, 75, 79, 216 hospital 65–66 See also Xavier Herbert; Malaita; Nggela; Solomon Islands Tungutalum, Bede 4, 17, 18 Turner, Catherine 97 Tuwhare, Hone 189n24, 191 Twain, Mark 103 Ulysses 62, 103 Underworld 151, 156, 160 Unilever 76n78, 78, 216 United Kingdom—See Britain United States 114, 122, 127, 155, 179, 197 neo-colonial power of 88, 91, 93, 94 travel to 93, 121, 124, 150 writers and writing 103, 109–110, 113, 122 University of Hawai‘i 196 University of Papua New Guinea 6, 22 University of Vigo 30n* University of Wollongong 5 See also Cochrane Archive Va 187–189, 216 Va‘ai, Sina 186n8, 187n14, 188, 189, 192 Vancouver 30 Van Herk, Aritha 44n42 Van Keppel, Elsje 134, 135–138, 139, 140–142, 143, 148, 217 Breath 135, 140–141, 217 Heartbeat 135, 137–139, 217 Veiru (Papua New Guinea) 6 Venard, Marie 9n20, 12n23 Verius, Father Henry 8 Vestey, Lord/Vestey brothers 62, 75, 77

234 Victoria University of Wellington 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 207, 215, 219–220 J.C. Beaglehole Collection 200 marae 201–202, 215 Stout Research Centre 215 Te Kawa a Māui 215, 219 Te Tumu Herenga Waka 201–202 Va’aomanū Pasifika 218–219 See also Pacific Studies; Teresia Teaiwa Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra 54 Violence, colonial 39, 41, 43, 63–65, 69, 73, 85–86, 107, 125, 153, 186–187, 216 national 85–86, 90–91, 94–96, 98, 153, 192 sexual 39, 64, 93 symbolic 168 See also family Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta) 58 Vizenor, Gerald 105, 106, 113, 117 Waiko, John Dademo 25 Wainright, Elsina 80n88 Walker, Linda Marie 135n9 ‘War on terror’ 91, 92 Wassermann, August von 127 Watt-Cloutier, Sheila 44n42 Wattie Book Award (New Zealand) 186n10 Weaving (pandanus) 16–17 Wellington 200 See also Archives New Zealand; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; National Library of New Zealand; Victoria University of Wellington Wendt, Albert vii–viii 184, 184n6, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 198, 209, 215, 216 The Adventures of Vela 183, 184–187, 189, 190–191, 192–194, 216 “Garden 4” 189n24 influence of Borges and Jung on 183n3 The Leaves of the Banyan Tree 186, 192, 194 Ola 187n14 Sons for the Return Home 186n8, 194 See also Diane Dekker; Wattie Book Award Wendt, Mele 220 Were, Graeme 21 Wesley-Smith, Terence 197

Index Whimp, Graeme 198n7 White, Charles Havelock Gordon 71n61 White, Geoffrey 23n47, 24n50, 25n51 White, Hayden 191 White, Helen Watson 186 Whiteley, Jane 134–135, 141–148, 217 Jane Whiteley: Body of Work 141n26 still life 2002 135, 144, 217 My Mother’s body 2010 135, 144–147, 217 My Mother’s body 2011 135, 147–148, 217 Whiteness 42, 69, 73, 105–106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114–115, 125 and cleanliness 16, 78–79 White, Patrick 76 White, R.S. 135n8 White, Walter 122n6 Williams, John 8 Williamson, Robert W. 205 Women—Bathurst Island 18–21 Bengali 52, 54 and class 54–55, 57 Cook Islands 207 and education 6, 13, 15, 18, 22, 25, 53, 54, 56 Indian 52–56, 175–176 Muslim 52 Papua New Guinean 6, 14–16, 18–21, 22 Rotuman 207 Tiwi 12, 16, 17, 18 See also gender roles; missionaries Woolf, Virginia 150 Wordsworth, William 123n13, 124, 128 Wright, Alexis 30, 31, 35, 39, 41, 43, 44 “A Question of Fear” 44n43 Carpentaria 30n*, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38–41, 43, 44, 45, 103 “On Writing Carpentaria” 41n29, 43 The Swan Book 39 “Where to Point the Spears” 39, 43 Wright, Miriam 12 Wurrumiyanga (Bathurst Island)—See Nguiu Yeats, W.B. 191–192 Yule Island (Papua New Guinea) 8, 12, 18–21 See also Kubuna; Sacred Heart Ziporyn, Terra 127n28