Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics 9789042036482, 9789401209168

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Speaking the Earth’s Languages

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

159 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Speaking the Earth’s Languages A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics

Stuart Cooke

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Cover Image: Lionel Fogarty, Dulgu (‘Heart Fighters’, top left; 2008) and Barang Dumburra (‘Now Full’, top right; 2008) (pen, felt-tip pen, pencil, and oils on laminated polystyrene board) Layout by Gordon Collier Courtesy of the artist Cover design: Inge Baeten The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3648-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0916-8 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on the Translations Foreword

vii ix xi xv

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Where to Begin? Judith Wright and the Limits of Her Tradition Pablo Neruda and Complex Topography Reading Complexity Leonel Lienlaf and the Potential of Song Paddy Roe’s Nomad Poetic The Non-Limited Locality: Paulo Huirimilla with Lionel Fogarty Imagining Syntheses Coda

1 39 73 115 155 189 223 265 295

Appendix A: An Introduction to Mapuche Poetry Appendix B: “Ríos de cisnes,” by Paulo Huirimilla

297 303

Works Cited Index

311 321

Acknowledgements

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would never have progressed beyond the realm of ideas without the support of many special and generous people. First and foremost, I am forever indebted to Deborah Bird Rose for her provocative, wise comments about all stages of my research, and for her tireless advocacy of my work. Tremendous thanks also to Stephen Muecke for believing in my work, and for inspiring me to take Deleuze and Guattari to such far-flung places. I am extremely appreciative of Peter Minter’s advice on many matters regarding this book’s development, and for his encouragement, without which I would have shied away from much of my material. This book was lucky to be subject to the eagle eyes of Gordon Collier, my editor at Rodopi. I thank him profusely for his attention, care, and responsiveness, and for his diplomacy. My sincere thanks extend to Pierre Joris, for his advice and encouragement. Berndt Sellheim has been a good friend and a valuable critic, and he blazed a doctoral trail across languages and continents. Gracias a Hugo Carrasco y Paulo Huirimilla, por su ayuda y apoyo durante del tiempo de mi estancia en Chile. Thank you to Joseph Roe, Margaret Cox, and Franz Hoogland, for their generous hospitality during my time on Gularabulu country. I would also like to thank Peter Boyle, Ian Campbell, Michael Farrell, Juan Garrido Salgado, Peter Read, Russell Smith, Jonathan Skinner, and Jessica Wilkinson, for their valuable assistance. Finally, a warm thank you to Martin Harrison, for showing me why Australian poetry matters, and why we should write about it. HIS BOOK

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4:

Meli Witran Mapu The kultrun Paddy Roe, O A M “territories of sensual connection” in Minyung Woolah Binnung

30 168 191 247

Notes on the Translations

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from the Spanish have been made by me, unless otherwise specified. For reasons of economy of space, I have not included the original Spanish quotations of most sources. Regarding the poems of Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, I have chosen to use Donald Walsh’s superlative English translations. Regarding Neruda’s Canto general, I reference the Spanish original as well as Jack Schmitt’s 1991 translation. Most of my quotations are translated directly from the Spanish version, but at times I quote small portions from Schmitt’s. I reference Schmitt in order to acknowledge the guiding influence his translation has had on my own reading of the Canto, and to employ his renderings of the section titles to provide the reader with Neruda’s thematic pointers. Regarding poems by the Mapuche poets, in each case I have included the original Spanish alongside my English translation. I have provided Spanish versions here because the books from which these poems come are littleknown outside of Chile (on the other hand, an enormous corpus of Neruda’s work is available globally, in English translation and in the original Spanish). Regarding Leonel Lienlaf, who writes and publishes his work in both Mapuzugun and Spanish, I have chosen not to include the Mapuzugun versions here. While I regret not being able to present them, as he intended, alongside their Spanish counterparts, restrictions of space have necessitated their exclusion. I am assuming that the readers of this book will not be readers of Mapuzugun. Finally, regarding certain spellings in Gularabulu: these have changed since the book’s publication (‘Gularabulu’ is now written as ‘Goolarabooloo’, and ‘Bugaregara’ as ‘bugarregarra’, for example). For simplicity, I use the original spellings throughout this book. LL TRANSLATIONS

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N.B. A word from a language other than English will be italicized the first, and occasionally the second, time that it appears. Thereafter, the word’s italicization will cease (excluding book titles). I want non-English terms and concepts to be incorporated into the larger discussion, rather than to be typographically exoticized. NOTES OF

ON THE DESIGN AND OPEN TRANSLATION D Y U N G G A Y A N ’ S B U L U ( P P . 132 –40 )

1) The reader should be aware that these are translations of the event of each

song-poem, meaning that they seek to translate the dynamic, communal, and open-ended nature of nurlu song-poetry and poetics. Many translations of Aboriginal song-poetry treat song-poems as if they were written texts with one author and one ‘meaning’. Unfortunately, this is a grossly reductive practice because it ignores a fundamental feature of Aboriginal poetics: there is neither a single authority nor a ‘correct’ poem waiting to be translated, but, rather, a matrix of country, text, and rhythm that can manifest itself in a variety of forms, depending on the context. For these reasons, the song-poems have been presented here as compositions of numerous formats, voices, and textual styles. 2) Each translation contains:

— Ray Keogh’s transcription of George Dyunggayan’s performance of the song-poem; — a brief gloss of the key terms in the verse; — a series of interpretations by Keogh, Paddy Roe, Butcher Joe or Dyunggayan, often in the form of conversations between two or more of them; and — my ‘translation’ of the song-poem, which incorporates the various interpretations of Keogh et al. 3) In the glosses, ‘ø’ refers to a word without meaning (common in song language), or a word which Keogh did not understand. These ‘silences’ are reproduced in my own translations as blank spaces, or ‘( )’. 4) There are a number of typographical features in the passages of dialogue that need to be pointed out:

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Notes on the Translations — line divisions have been determined by a falling intonation pattern; — in order to emphasize the oral nature of the language, many orthographic features (such as commas, italics for non-English words, full stops, and capitalizations) have been removed; — larger-than-normal spaces between words indicate a pause; — long phrases are indented after the first line.

5) In each of my translations /interpretations (‘Cooke’), the staggered lines are

meant to reflect the cyclical repetitions of pitch descent; the final line of each poem shows how the rhythmic text repeats until the melody is complete.

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Foreword

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H E G E N E R A T I V E I M P E T U S for this enquiry begins with the question: ‘How can local, indigenous formations also be global or transnational formations?’ Indigenous cultures are defined by their inextricable attachments to places, but how can we talk about such intimate, specific relationships in any general or collective sense? Broadly speaking, my concern as a scholar has been with a ‘multi-site poetic’: finding ways of discussing developments in indigenous poetics on an international level, without subsuming the discrepancies and peculiarities of each situation beneath a bland, one-size-fits-all discourse. Yet these questions, while useful, present some outcomes which are perhaps too predictable. For example, initially I began to calibrate the focus of my research towards North American indigenous populations, whose shared experiences of colonization under the British Empire allowed me to exchange the national confines of Indigenous Australian poetics for only a slightly less cosy discussion about indigenous peoples brought together within the constitution of the English language. Australian literary scholars enjoy only a relatively small exposure to Latin America, however, and an even smaller awareness of its indigenous populations. The question had to be asked, therefore: ‘Can Aboriginal and Indigenous Latin-American poetics be brought closer together?’ The rather circuitous route that would lead me to the Mapuche of southern Chile brought me into contact with a set of cultural, political, and literary practices which, on the face of things, have little in common with Aboriginal traditions in Australia. Nevertheless, it was my experience – and it will be one of the arguments of this book – that shared histories of colonization, dispossession, and exploitation by European powers bring Aboriginal and Mapuche people into inextricable proximity. It is this proximity that creates an emergent, transPacific indigenous poetics.

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Where to Begin?

Everything that allows men to become rooted, through values or sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, is the principle of alienation which constitutes man as privileged in so far as what he is [. . . ] imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as a conquering assertion.1 I’m saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral and written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation and would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.2

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indigenous peoples and the lands to which they belong become fodder for the imaginations of the colonizers. A set of new expectations is placed over their world like a thin cotton sheet. Lumps and gradations protrude through the sheet, but everything is covered by its white topography. Soon, the gritty realities of the colonial frontier are wrapped up in smoother narratives about civilization and progress, as if the land and its occupants were the dormant forms of something not yet realized. Here, in this as if, we find a disjuncture so profound that it leads one society to collide blindly with another; the peaks and chasms of misprision that result prevent dialogue or consultation. As the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose writes, ‘as if’ “is a fundamental epistemological error.”3 It presumes the existence of another world, and lays its imaginary form upon the 1

ROM THE FIRST MOMENTS OF COLONIZATION,

Maurice Blanchot, in Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics: Essays (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2003): 138–39. 2 Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1981): 11. 3 Deborah Bird Rose, “What if the Angel of History Were a Dog?,” Cultural Studies Review 12.1 (March 2006): 74.

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one already present. The colonist, in turn, acts as if he were the creator of this world, as if the land and its indigenous custodians were nothing other than parts of a material field awaiting sanitization and re-sculpting. The colonist’s identity is determined by his own imagination; the new world needs to exist so that the colonist can colonize. The colonial project is consolidated implicitly by a conviction that colonization of the new world will improve it; for the Caribbean poet and critic Édouard Glissant, this conviction becomes a value: an individual’s very worth will now be determined by his or her relation to this new colony. So it is that those conquered or visited peoples are forced into what Glissant calls “a long and painful quest” for a way of defining their own identities in the wake of conquest. For centuries, “whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders.”4 Christopher Columbus did not voyage in the name of a country, Glissant argues, but in the name of an idea.5 It was this idea – of the New World as Other, of Europe as the source of knowledge – that would provide the impetus for the creation of so many ‘epistemological errors’. As the Spaniards spread north and south throughout the enormous continent of the Americas, it was as if virgin territory were being revealed to the light for the first time. This conviction followed them like a shadow all the way to the site of what is now Santiago de Chile, and remained embedded in the non-indigenous Chilean consciousness. Before their arrival, writes Pablo Neruda, all was “silence of water and wind” across the vast southern lands.6 As the conquistadors continued south into the territories of the Mapuche, “the light came despite the daggers.”7 However, rather than “silence,” the Spaniards actually encountered fierce resistance: their colonial expansion was halted by the Mapuche; the majority of colonists retreated to Santiago, where they turned their focus to developing a new centre of commerce and European civilization. Thus, by the nineteenth century, with firm boundaries established between it and the ‘wild’

4

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation,

1990; tr. 1997; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997): 17. 5 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 17. 6

Pablo Neruda, Canto General, “I. A Lamp on Earth: vi: Man,” tr. Jack Schmitt, intro. Roberto González Echevarría (Canto general, 1950; Latin American Literature and Culture 7, tr. 1991; Berkeley: U of California P , 2000): 26. 7 Neruda, Canto General, 69; tr. Schmitt: “I I I . The Conquistadors: xxv: Despite the Fury,” 69.

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lands to the south, Chilean society could imagine itself as primarily European. A national imagination absorbed beneath its white skin those indigenous pueblos of the central zones, but it expelled the idea of the indigenous Other to the southern frontier, beyond which lay the lands of Araucanía.8 Because of its self-styled distinction and separation from surrounding indigenous peoples, the nascent Chilean state began to assume what we will soon recognize as a high-modernist optic or point of view, in which it raised itself, from its capital in Santiago, up above the surrounding territories. From this height, it proceeded to subsume cultural and territorial differences beneath the lines of centralized economic and social policies. As a consequence, from the later nineteenth century onwards, all indigenous peoples – of the north, of Easter Island, of the southern territories – were treated in identical fashion, with scant regard for local particularities, by policy designed from the central perspective of Santiago.9 Internationally, too, high modernism was fuelling similar processes of homogenization, as capitalism sought to expand its reach across the world’s lands, resources, and cultures. The majority of colonial observers thought that indigenous populations were going to succumb to the pressures of capitalism and European civilization.10 Darwinian notions about the inevitable decline of weaker, indigenous races helped to provide further rational justification for colonial expansion. In Australia, support for evolutionary theory entailed a concomitant contempt for Aboriginal culture and a justifying of Aboriginal people’s economic exploitation. It also legitimized the brutal violence of the frontier.11 At the turn of the twentieth century, Australia was federated, but its ‘Founding Fathers’ explicitly excluded Aboriginal people from its constitution, which imagined a wholly white, northern-European nation. In making white Australia, the settlers had to invent a fresh space of inhabitation.12 8

José Bengoa, La memoria olvidada: historia de los pueblos indígenas de Chile (Santiago de Chile: Cuadernos Bicentenario, 2004): 20–21. The Mapuche were known by the earliest colonists as Araucos, hence, the name of their territory became known as Araucanía. ‘Los Araucos’ is considered highly offensive today; ‘Mapuche’ is the preferred term of identity. 9 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 14. 10 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 22. 11 Richard Glover, “Scientific Racism and the Australian Aboriginal (1865–1915),” in Maps, Dreams and History: Race and Representation in Australia, ed. Jan Kociumbas (Sydney: Department of History, University of Sydney, 1998): 78. 12 Jennifer Rutherford, “Undwelling; Or Reading Bachelard in Australia,” in Half-

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On the streets of Santiago, so far from the frontier, it was easy for stereotypes about the Mapuche to mutate. These stereotypes were inspired initially by Romantic theories of the noble savage, and were typified by stories of the Mapuche’s heroism and valour in battle against the Spaniards, such as Alonso de Ercilla’s famous La Araucana.13 However, stereotypes were to be indelibly tinted by the global tide of early evolutionary theory. The Mapuche came to be described as a race in decline, like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia or the Mori of New Zealand, irreversibly degraded by alcohol consumption and listlessness; they were hopeless and pathetic beings, a far cry from those heroes in La Araucana. From the 1870s onwards, numerous articles appeared in the Chilean press circulating not only the notion that the Mapuche culture had collapsed but also that its population was diminishing at a steady rate. Santiago began to assure itself that, in fact, very few Mapuches remained in the south, and that the lands were essentially unoccupied. With time, the state decided that the territories of Araucanía were empty; they were lands belonging to no one.14 This was a South American imagining of the same terra nullius that had been used to justify British possession of apparently ‘empty’ Australian land. Similar to colonial expansion across Australia, where the preconception of an image of terra nullius led to such tragedy was in its complete incompatibility with the reality of the situation. That the south was in fact populated by close to one million indigenous people was of little use to a nascent republic that wanted to justify its push to take charge of new (and extremely fertile) territories. The Chilean historian José Bengoa aptly summarizes the entire situation, skilfully highlighting the emergence of the high-modernist gaze: The ideology of the epoch had changed from the period of Independence, in which the prominent discourse was of the ‘patriotic and indomitable Mapuche’. [Then, following independence from Spain,] a discourse of the ‘Mapuche question’ was most prominent. One didn’t make references to the

way House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces, ed. Jennifer Rutherford & Barbara Holloway (Crawley, W A : U W A Publishing, 2010): 119. For a nuanced account of the scientific and literary methodology of colonial exploration in Australia, see Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1996). 13 De Ercilla’s epic poem, published in three parts between 1569 and 1589, is an excellent example of the romanticization of the Mapuche. 14 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 23, 327.

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Mapuche in their fight against Spain, only to the aboriginals who were occupying an important part of the territory, and whose incorporation into the nation was deemed necessary. The view of the problem had changed, and the Araucanian hero departed to make way for the barbaric and bloodthirsty Indian of the south. This stereotype gave Chilean society a calm conscience about waging a war of the frontier, and a new perspective: the new heroes were those soldiers who were killing off the ‘ancient heroes’.15

In both Australia and Chile, imposed images of aboriginality were, to borrow the words of Louise Taylor, “a blatant attempt to manipulate and disempower, a way to divide and confine, a chance to restrict and deny.”16 While they are clearly distinguished by the different periods in which they were colonized and the different geographies of their regions, Aboriginal and Mapuche people come together beneath colonization’s sheet. In the coming chapters we will see that Indigenous Australian and Chilean poets deconstruct such restrictions to reveal once more the swarming, dynamic landscapes beneath.

The Nomad The central argument of this book is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation. Before we can begin to examine nomadic poetics in any detail, however, we need to consider how being both ‘nomadic’ and ‘poetic’ is crucial for a sensitive understanding of colonial nations such as Australia and Chile. To think about Australian and Chilean spaces without starting from assumptions about their inhabitants or their characteristics, one needs to develop a form of thought that engages with the landscape in an ongoing, dialogic process. In other words, to decolonize colonial thought, one must attempt to disregard a-priori images and to engage instead with the world as it unfolds to us as series of vectors. The land needs to become a moving, evolving process, not a continent abstracted into a nation-state by the lines on a map. This means that those who are of such lands must be engaged with on similar terms. 15

In Elicura Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos (Santiago: L O M , 1999):

74. (My tr. and emphasis.) 16

In Sarah Maddison, Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009): 106.

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I will turn to the work of the late-twentieth-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze in order to find ways to begin thinking without recourse to the potential tyranny of certain fixed images. When Western philosophers start thinking, objects Deleuze, they do so with the presumption that everyone knows already what it means to think.17 We might suppose this to be an unnecessarily vague and abstract objection, and argue that each individual is well aware of what it means to be, and what it means, therefore, to think. Yet this objection relies on an image of being (to be), itself a highly problematical and unproductive term. The poet and theorist Pierre Joris reminds us about the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Nachgebur (‘neighbour’). My Nachgebur may dwell nearby, but she will always be too far away to coincide with my own, discrete ‘being’. She will, therefore, always serve to guarantee my own ‘being’ by her difference, being “the other, the non-genuine, the enemy to be killed.” “Be done with being,” Joris urges, “become!”18 Joris is urging that we embrace the connective possibilities of Deleuzian becoming, in which the fixed and the preconceived are swept up in a flux of fusion and re-creation. The very image of ‘human’ is placed in direct relation to the ‘in-human’ (‘savage’ or ‘animal’, for example), blurring its discrete form within a larger socio-ecological context. This is of crucial importance in colonialistic situations, in which we are trying to overcome the a-priori division between Self and Other. The new or unfamiliar, rather than being consigned to the frontiers or subsumed under homogeneous forms, must impregnate, invigorate or attack colonial thinking in order for it to become properly post-colonial. The ‘post-colonial condition’, clearly, emerges as a society moves out of the colonial phase. For the cultural theorist Ross Gibson, this happens when some of the new, settler narratives of sacred or enchanted places are fused with some of the native ones that remain: “in this jittery reanimation, a nervous system of meaning manages to prevail.”19 Gibson cites as an example a book we will return to often in the present study – Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Kim Benterrak’s Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. While it is very useful, a problem with such a definition is that it might occlude the ways in which indigenous narratives continue to resist such 17

Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (Différence et répétition,

1968; New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 131. 18 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 136. 19

Ross Gibson, “Enchanted Country,” World Literature Today 67.3 (Summer

1993): 474.

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‘fusion’. Muecke’s transcription and publication of Roe’s stories in books like Reading the Country and Gularabulu (which I will discuss in Chapter 6) could indeed be examples of a postcolonial authorization, containment, and categorization of indigeneity, but Roe is also involved in this authorization, which has for him a particular ethical or pedagogical function. In particular, Roe is trying to authorize and impart certain kinds of knowledge to those members of his people who do not yet possess it.20 To enclose Roe’s work within a set of settler narratives is to ignore his significant capacity for negotiation, leadership, and resistance. When I talk about a ‘postcolonial poetic’ in this book, I will be referring to a situation which recognizes indigenous resistance to ‘fusion’. To think with open-ended freedom about colonized spaces, I will be employing what Deleuze, along with Félix Guattari, terms ‘nomadology’. The aim of nomadology is to free thought from a fixed point of view or position of judgement. Such fixed positions are maintained by centres of political power, which in colonial contexts are channelled through the organ of the nationstate. The colonial state uses its transcendent authority to striate space with abstracted grids of legal divisions. The Deleuzian theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi shows how such spaces reflect the heights of the modernist impulse to order and categorize: the world is organized into discrete components, with the ultimate aim being to reduce its infinite varieties to a simplified distinction between the One who observes and controls, and the Other who is not part of the One.21 Nomadology allows thought to wander away from simple binary reductions, to move beyond a single frontier of resistance and create new habitations or fronts for struggle.22 Free of fixed dwellings, nomads move continually across the open-ended nomos of their country.23 At

20

Ken Gelder, “The Politics of the Sacred,” World Literature Today 67.3 (Summer

1993): 500. 21

Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992; Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1996): 6. 22 Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002): xxvii. 23 “Nomad space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended [. . . ]. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space [. . . ], as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space.” Brian Massumi, “Introduction” to Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Massumi (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; tr. 1987; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2004): xiii.

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the same time, however, the nomad is he or she “who does not move.”24 This apparent contradiction – a nomadism that is not defined by movement – is resolved with the passing of time: over the course of their journeys, nomads return continuously to important places, thereby remaining with them over time. They are of their country, and the country is of them. ‘Nomadology’ is not just a francophone idea; it can emerge anywhere. It can come to bear on the way one walks the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, which runs along the north-western coast of Australia through Gularabulu and Djabirr-Djabirr country. The Lurujarri Trail travels through country that we will return to frequently in this book; following the path of a song cycle, the Trail spans the 72 kilometres from Minarriny (Coulomb Point) to Minyirr (just to the south of Broome). Each year, the trail’s custodians, the Gularabulu people, invite interested members of the public to take part in the walk with them. As a public event, walking the trail demonstrates not only the movement of the nomad but also some of the communicative strategies nomads might use in order to show that they do not want to move from their country. By returning to walk the path of the cycle, the Gularabulu people are reaffirming their connection to country and, by performing the song cycle, they are ensuring that the country remains healthy. Furthermore, by sharing some of these moments with others (who are mainly university students and academics), they are reaffirming publicly their responsibility for their land. Walking the Lurujarri Trail was part of my corporeal introduction to the Aboriginal poetics we will first encounter in Chapter 4. The knowledge required to sing the Lurujarri song-cycle is like an ambulant, itinerant science: those with knowledge of the cycle follow “a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered.”25 Like the nomos of the nomad, the Lurujarri Trail has oases in the form of permanent water holes or jila, which are fixed points along the songline.26 Yet the trail also has “rhizomatic vegetation” that is temporary and shifts according to the amount of rain.27 After a big wet, bilara (temporary lakes) appear, allowing people to diverge outwards from the direct paths between one jila and the next, and to create further alternatives for travel. No particular site is more important than 24

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420. Phrasing from Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 411. 26 A ‘songline’ is the path travelled by the Dreaming ancestors when they sing the songs. 27 Phrasing from Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421. 25

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others; the focus is on walking the trail through them. Even if it is dry and only jila are available to determine the route of travel, these points “must remain subordinate in importance to the voyage itself.”28 Yet the path between waterholes is not a free-flowing, unmediated river of movement; to walk the Trail is to experience a confluence of multiple rhythms. Important parts of country demand more time, care, and attention, but we come across them sporadically; the irregular frequency of their occurrence punctuates the measured beats of our footsteps. The features of the terrain always determine the variations in our velocity. As such, the Lurujarri Trail is an example of a nomadic formation: Nomadic formations are those which value motion over fixation, variation over order; which affirm the spaces between stops rather than belonging to a promised land; which reach a resting point only to use it as a relay to a further move; which have no finality, only process; which skim the surface rather than implanting a symbolic edifice or superimposing a code or statistical grid. 29

After a couple of days on the Trail, I realized that the arrival at each campsite was of crucial importance; the walking wasn’t the half of it. But here we need to refine our notion of ‘arrival’: on the Lurujarri Trail, one doesn’t arrive to remain, as in the colonialist sense of the term; we arrive at a site in order to rest, to wait while the custodians perform ceremony, to eat, sleep, and piss before packing up and moving on. Things can happen during the journey from one site to another, and they will often provide some welcome entertainment or diversion, but, really, no one wants to walk all day in the heat of the Kimberley sun. The highlight is always getting to the next camp, laying out the tarpaulin in the shade, getting a drink, then sitting down to chat. So destinations are important, and they are often points on a map. At the same time, however, these are all points which are to be moved on from (just as creation spirits will emerge from a particular place, such as the cliffs at Coconut Wells, but will then move on inland). This is a flow with various stoppages, or a nomadology in which the nomad is always on the move, but where there are still clear gradations of speed. Destinations are real (not metaphysical or amorphous) and important (they determine the direction of travel; they must be cared for). The country in between isn’t insignificant, but it needs to be crossed if you’re going to reach the next jila. This mode of habitation is not 28

Kim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984): 223. 29 Massumi, in Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 40.

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arriving at a place, deciding you love it, then buying it and building a fence around it; nor is it a constant, ceaseless movement across countless locales without ever stopping to learn about any of them. Perhaps the best way to think about your experience on the Trail is with a theory of the ‘post-tourist’. The cultural theorist and writer Stephen Muecke developed the notion of post-tourism after spending years working and researching with Gularabulu people. Instead of imagining herself permanently ‘at one’ with the place she is in, or indulging in what Muecke calls a “plodding spirituality,” the post-tourist just imagines that she is “already gone.” In this “lightness,” then, when she relieves her mind of the desire for permanent immersion, the post-tourist might “lift ever so slightly off the ground so that objects are only faintly touched.” Here, the “real seeing is in the glimpse,” and “sounds reduce to a whisper.”30 Writing in glimpses exhibits a number of distinctive characteristics, many of which we will find in the poetry in latter parts of this book. For example, the writer’s descriptions might be evocative and detailed – intense – but they are also relatively skeletal. Descriptions are not great, verbal accumulations, piling up on a certain object or place, but are drawn out thinly over the lie of the land. Then, in order to accumulate detail, to add historical or cultural weight, the writing returns to those places that hold most significance. Some places are returned to more often, depending on the levels of exposure they are able to bear. Constantly in flight from associations with the singular, original, and uniform, the writing casts up thoughts in series of glimpses, stopping and starting according to the prevalent conditions on the road.31 Across white space, our eyes zoom and we might experience the sensation of speed across an open plain, before we come to a waterhole – another piece of text – and sit down beside it, drink from it, then move onwards once more. A book of glimpses is never ‘the whole picture’; rather, it needs to be returned to, reconsidered, and put down again. In this book, I will be focusing on readings of poetry before other kinds of writing. Like the literary critic and scholar Philip Mead in his landmark work on Australian poetics, Networked Language, I am working on the assumption that poems are articulations of complexity, designed specifically to defy closure and striation much more so than most prose. The source of pleasure in such poetry is, for many readers, “precisely in its opaqueness – its resistance 30

Stephen Muecke, No Road (bitumen all the way) (1997; Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999): 135. 31 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 15.

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to easily communicable ‘meanings’.”32 A poem “is not an argument or an idea. It is a free movement, a freed-up place [. .. ] a poem does not seek to express truth but rather [. . . ] to realise psychologically the true conditions for some possible, future moment of truthfulness.”33 In this light, it is interesting to note Julia Kristeva’s comparison of Martin Heidegger with the poet Paul Celan, showing how the philosopher wants to dwell in and root himself to the truth, while the poet – forever the “radical stranger” – can only hold on to the world via a tense “fragmentation of languages.”34 For Joris, therefore, a philosophy like Heidegger’s is the enemy of the nomad because it is “only a sort of homesickness, a need to feel everywhere at home.” Poetry is the opposite: “a desire to feel everywhere estranged, out of touch /in reach with the other.” The poet is out of both house and home. It is because of its very strangeness, Joris concludes, that “the basic push of poetry is nomadic.”35 However, some kinds of poetry work very differently from others. As this book will show, the high-modernist poetics of non-indigenous poets like Pablo Neruda and Judith Wright can indeed be driven by a philosophical project “to express truth” or “to feel everywhere at home.” When this desire to create a home (often by constructing nationalist, environmentalist ideologies) is imposed upon a people whose home is under threat, the poetics becomes highly problematical. Talking about indigenous poetic expression in this context is particularly important for a project that wants to think nomadically about relationships between colonizers and colonized, or to imagine “some possible, future moment of truthfulness” about the colonial situation. Indeed, Muecke suggests that the practice of thinking poetically can be of benefit for the non-indigenous thinker wanting to learn about indigenous thought: Visitors to indigenous Australian communities, typically, anthropologists, have time and time again learnt things through defamiliarisation, a concept and practice favoured by the poets who burst open words as if they were seed pods and all our certainties suddenly lie scattered on the ground.36

32

Philip Mead, Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008): 6. 33 Martin Harrison, “Face to Face: Place and Poetry,” Cultural Studies Review 12.1 (March 2006): 87. 34 In Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 139–40. 35 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 140. 36 Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004): 61.

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Simply, indigenous poetry can be a highly effective tool for learning about indigenous philosophies and politics. For those of us who are unable to visit indigenous communities, with his or her poem the indigenous poet can invite us to sit down at a ‘mobile meeting ground’. This ground will always be located in the only places indigenous people have been given permission to inhabit: “the nomadic margins of the polis.”37 I will be using the term ‘nomadic poetics’ after Joris, who introduced it in his seminal A Nomad Poetics. A nomadic poetics might be a literary manifestation of what the political scientist James C. Scott calls mƝtis. An ancient Greek term referring to ‘cunningness’ or ‘craft’, mƝtis is the wide array of first-hand knowledge one develops in response to a dynamic environment; mƝtis is almost always local.38 The accumulation of local knowledge – from close and intense observation of one’s environment – is necessarily morethan-individual, too, requiring community input and elaboration, and development over generations. Like a nomad poetics, mƝtis, far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic, local, and divergent. It is in fact the idiosyncrasies of mƝtis, its contextualness, and its fragmentation that make it so permeable, so open to new ideas. MƝtis has no doctrine or centralized training; each practitioner has his or her own angle.39

In linguistic terms, formal grammar parallels the abstracted rules of state agencies, whereas mƝtis is more like day-to-day speech: mƝtis “is no more derivative of general rules than speech is derivative of grammar.”40 A nomad poem relies on mƝtis because, like the language it uses, it is the product of local observations that have been refined in complex, ground-level systems of dialogue and participation. “In language as in mƝtis,” Scott points out, “seldom is the name of an innovator remembered, and this, too, helps to make the result a joint, mutual product.”41 So, too, does the nomad poem often incorporate a variety of authors, translators or voices. This evolving, ever-permeable approach to the local is what allows the nomadic thinker to incorporate such a wide variety of knowledges. Such flexibility leads Joris to conclude that nomadic poets are so important “in these arid, or at best semi-arid times” 37

Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 12. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1998): 317. 39 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 332. 40 Seeing Like a State, 319. 41 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 333. 38

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because they are the least specialized, the least beholden to a particular way of seeing things, “with the free-est hands to think through the episteme of this moment.”42 In their use of mƝtis we will see how nomad poets from Chile and Australia walk similar, if parallel, paths. Nevertheless, it is not my intention here to propose for Aboriginal or Mapuche people a definition of their ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ behaviour. It is crucial that the concept of nomadism be separated from any essentialist concepts of race or ethnicity: there are no races of nomads, only people who practise nomadism in certain places.43 Both Aboriginal and Mapuche tribes have become more or less nomadic, depending on the season and the availability of resources, or depending on the need to escape from, fight against, or work with colonizing powers. Michael Dodson, of the Yawuru people of Broome, argues that Aboriginality involves this very resistance to definition and representation: the insistence on speaking back and retaining control are highly political acts. They are assertions of our right to be different and to practise our difference. They refuse the reduction of Aboriginality to an object, they resist translation into the languages and categories of the dominant culture. They are at times ancient, at times subversive, at times oppositional, at times secret, at times essentialist, at times shifting. It is for this very reason that I cannot stand here, even as an Aboriginal person, and say what Aboriginality is.44

In Australia and Chile, Aboriginal and Mapuche people have consistently evaded the impositions of settlers in order to resist their incursions and definitions. Developing a sophisticated and diverse set of cultural and socio-economic practices, the Mapuche people resisted hundreds of years of Incan, Spanish, then Chilean attempts at colonization. They remained independent from the Spanish Empire for more than 260 years, the most successful resistance to European colonization in history.45 The key to their effectiveness as warriors and their endurance and development as a culture was their ability to adapt rapidly to new and surprising conditions. For example, escaping from Spanish expansion, many Mapuche began to take refuge in the Andes. With time they 42

Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 12. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 223. 44 Michael Dodson, “The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michèle Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2003): 40. 45 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 281. 43

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began to move out into the pampas on the other side of the sierra, where their territories expanded to encompass vast hunting grounds and grazing lands (see Chapter 7). So effective were the Mapuche at resisting Spanish domination, on the one hand, and at utilizing the pampas, on the other, that during the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century they occupied what was perhaps the largest territory ever controlled by an indigenous group in all of America.46 By the same token, Aboriginal cultures in Australia have been so successful at rapid adaptations that most have not only survived the Ice Age (possibly the only contemporary cultures in the world to have done so), but they have also withstood 220 years of European invasion and colonization. Life for Aboriginal people has been particularly unsettled during those latter 220 years: they have been dispersed, concentrated, relocated, and detached from their land and from one another, and have continually kept moving. “Their territories of nomadism have had to enlarge,” notes historian Tom Griffiths, “they have survived by continuing to travel lightly in patterned ways.”47 The mythological and philosophical basis of their resilience, The Dreaming, is expressed in symbols which are multivocal and open-ended, leaving them open to different interpretations and adjustments. Even though The Dreaming is regarded as having been laid down once and for all by supernatural beings, this in no way precludes its ability to effectively incorporate new realities. Indeed, Robert Bos argues that The Dreaming may in fact facilitate and enable social change because its symbols are sufficiently open-ended to allow constant re-interpretation. Of the Yolngu people of Northern Australia, he writes: they may well have discovered what [non-Indigenous Australians] have yet to discover; how to maintain social cohesion and prevent disintegration in a world which is rapidly changing.48

While I am going to be focusing on how late-twentieth-century indigenous poets show evidence of such adaptive sophistication, I will also suggest that

46

La memoria olvidada, 308. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 226. 48 Robert Bos, “The Dreaming and Social Change in Arnhem Land,” Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions: Ethnographic and Historical Studies, ed. Tony Swain & Deborah Bird Rose (Bedford Park, S A : Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1988): 435. 47

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contemporary non-indigenous poets might learn from the resilience of Aboriginal and Mapuche cultures.

Open Systems As Deborah Bird Rose has done before me, I turn to current Western discourses about connectivity and complex systems in order to engage with Aboriginal peoples’ understandings of place and spirituality.49 I will also use these discourses in my discussion of Mapuche philosophy. Indeed, developments in systems biology provide excellent evidence – albeit on the molecular level – for the strength of nomadic systems. Living systems themselves could be said to be fundamentally nomadic: open systems that are able to maintain their life processes under conditions of non-equilibrium, living organisms are characterized by continual flow and change in their metabolisms. Equilibrium or stasis only actually exists when these processes come to a halt: an organism in equilibrium is a dead organism. A state far from equilibrium, by contrast, is the state of life.50 “The days of anything static are over,” writes Joris, “The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies.”51 The strength of such dissipative or open structures is not only that they can maintain themselves far from equilibrium but also that they can evolve. When the flow of energy through these structures increases, they may go through points of instability and transform themselves into new structures of yet higher complexity.52 Their evolution is driven by the horizontal exchange of energy from one organism to the next, negating the slow, vertical accumulation of genealogies. Humans evolve and die more from polymorphous and rhizomatic infections, for example, than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent.53 In the wake of such science, the study of single organisms (such as poets) becomes highly problematical:

49

See, for example, Deborah Bird Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” in Experiences of Place, ed. Mary N. Macdonald (Religions of the World; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2003). 50 Fritjof Capra, “The Web of Life,” 3rd Schrödinger Lecture, Trinity College, Dublin, 1997. 51 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 25. 52 Capra, “The Web of Life.” 53 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.

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It seems that there is a continuity of energy flux, communication, informational transfer from the genome up through the cells, community, virosphere, and environment. If the interactions are strong, and collective effects dominant, then an organism cannot even be considered in isolation. Indeed, we would go so far as to suggest that a defining characteristic of life is the strong dependency on flux from the environment. 54

Indeed, unlike the significantly more stratified forms of animals and plants, those parts of the ecosystem in which rate of flow is much higher, such as in microorganisms, have consistently escaped man’s best attempts at controlling them, even after the development of antibiotics.55 On a much larger scale, indigenous communities in Australia and Chile have had to maintain a very high rate of cultural flow in order to survive and develop in highly unstable conditions, and to resist colonial attempts at control. Throughout the epoch of colonization, Aboriginal and Mapuche cultures existed in an open state of resistance, adaptation, reaffirmation, and creativity. The ‘world’ or ‘environment’ that I talk about in this book is one composed of high-energy, non-linear processes. It is a confluence of flows, in which content is processual rather than consolidated into fixed categories, or: a ‘melt’ of material that is continually in flux [. . . ] in which numerical calculations are being done and redone continuously, so that static representation becomes subordinated to flow. 56

Such a fluctuating, dynamic world necessarily denies the possibility that a subject might assume a position discrete enough in order to become detached from it. It is therefore impossible that a member of the world might rise ‘above’ the world and, from this detached viewpoint, produce a static representation of the world. Transcendence, or a continuous existence outside the created world that is free from the limitations inherent in matter, is inimical to a world of dissipative structures. Transcendence is inimical to indigenous thought, too. The region of the sky (Wenu mapu) is defined by its connection to the earth in Mapuche thought. Wenu mapu translates literally as ‘Sky earth’. Aboriginal Dreamings are about life in this world; they are “localised, 54

Nigel Goldenfeld & Carl Woese, “Biology’s Next Revolution,” Nature 445 (2007): 369. 55 Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997; New York: Zone, 2003): 262. 56 Nigel Thrift, in Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2009): 267.

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detailed, intimate, and connective.” There is no other world; Dreamings are immanent to this one.57 Here, a failure to know or see the world completely is due to the complexity and vitality of immanent forces rather than to an absence within them or a transcendence beyond them.58 I am describing an ‘open field’, or a continually evolving collection of matter and energy. An open-field poetics would not engage in empirical surveys of the landscape, separating the speaker from a world of clearly observable objects. Rather, it would consist of collaged, interconnected elements moving through space and time, interrupting and questioning the possibilities of the micronarrative that develop from time to time, creating momentary pools or meditative or contemplative loci. . . before dissolving as quickly as they disappear.59

Inherent in my argument, therefore, is a conflation of the literary with the non-literary, or a premise that the way one writes is reflective of, or inextricably connected to, the wider world. Never a mere representation of some other, more authentic reality, the book “is not an image of the world.”60 Instead, the book is simply of the world, evolving in parallel fashion with the environment in which it is written or read. As the book grows, it interacts with a similarly interactive, generative open field. The result is an assemblage, absent from which is a tripartite division between reality (the world), representation (the book), and subjectivity (the author). Rather, the assemblage creates connections between certain parts of each of these ‘orders’. Nomadology as a cultural or political practice can be translated into a nomadic writing practice, and vice versa. The syntax of a nomadic poetics does not articulate discrete states of being, or define how one state is separate or distinct from another, but it seeks to draw connections between accumulations of matter or energy. As in systems biology, the emphasis is on how the components of an environment work together, rather than on how one component (human or otherwise) might be distinguished from the next. In order to under57

Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” 175. Paraphrasing Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 364. 59 Pierre Joris, Justifying the Margins (Cambridge: Salt, 2009): 20. An ‘open-field’ poetics was coined originally by Charles Olson, and explored extensively by other poets such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. Here I am referring to Joris’s contemporary use of the term. 60 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12. 58

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stand the important relationships between poems and their environments, we need to understand their positions in these open fields. This emphasis on a poem’s inherent connection to the wider world relies on a number of premisses regarding the nature of linguistic expression. I am influenced by Aboriginal and Mapuche philosophies of language here, both of which posit the origin of language in the earth itself, be they the many different languages that emerged from various parts of Australia, or Mapuzugun, which translates literally as ‘language of the earth’. In Northern Australia, where various Aboriginal languages are still widely spoken, language is country, and comes into being in tandem with it.61 In Aboriginal poetics, words and their meanings are not pure, transcendent particles to be taken from the air. People have their knowledge in country; knowledge emerges as one moves through it.62 Here, what makes language function is its quality of being part of the world. In Deleuzian terms, pure information or signification becomes potent only when it is taken up by the force of a context. After all, it is only because signification is exceeded by affect that we can make the same words the basis for different speech acts. The Deleuzian critic Alan Bourassa gives the example of the phrase, ‘I shall return’, which might be a promise, a threat, or a citation, “but it is only in abstracting it from a context – that is, a set of affects – that we can consider it ‘purely’ as signification.”63 In this formulation, expression is abroad in the world. It is not locked up in a book or in the purely ‘cultural’ domain of human communication, but is brimming in the soils, “non-local, scattered across a myriad struggles over what manner of life-defining nets.”64 a

61

Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 90. 62 Stephen Muecke, “A Chance to Hear a Nyigina Song,” in Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, ed. Judith Ryan & Chris Wallace– Crabbe (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2004): 222. 63 Alan Bourassa, “Literature, Language, and the Non-Human,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 64. 64 Brian Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): xxi.

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Growing a Structure For Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘method’ “is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis, or the organized production of a ‘universal reason’.”65 In keeping with the emergent qualities of self-organizing systems, however, this book has developed in the absence of over-arching criteria or methodology. The goal was not to develop a general idea or model that would stand out from, and transcend, the poetry beneath it. Instead, I wanted the poetry to create a new body of discussion at ‘ground level’. Amidst the open, smooth spaces of my research material, I couldn’t begin by marking clear lines of approach from one point to the next without seriously delimiting the potential for the poetry to do other, unpredictable things. Accordingly, I avoided top-down forms of analysis, which would have screened and sorted the poets in order to achieve a kind of homogeneous equilibrium, and would have prevented the lateral flows of ideas that can take place in a heterogeneous mixture. I approached the poets as one person would approach another: while I made certain assumptions regarding their ethnicity, gender, and geographical and historical locations, these were all soon dissolved as a more sophisticated dialogue emerged. Certainly, some of those initial assumptions were confirmed, but the important point is that the links between each of these poets only became clear as I continued my research; they had not been assumed beforehand. Consequently, and fortunately, a structure grew in tandem with the book. The reader will note that the book begins with an examination of high-modernist writing about indigenous people in Australia and Chile, before tracing the emergence of an after-modern, indigenous response to such writing, as Aboriginal and Mapuche people start to assume control of the writing and publication of their literatures. Yet this trajectory was not hypothesized from the outset, and even as it became more apparent, I did not wish to use it like a forceful ordering mechanism. As a result, other pathways emerge between the chapters – some continue for long distances; others end in dark cul-de-sacs. The principle at work was perhaps akin to Deleuze’s own style of writing in ‘series’ or ‘plateaus’. He discourages any unified plan of organization or development in favour of an unlimited plane, on which one is always passing from one singular point to another, making connections along the way.66 At

65

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 416. John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge M A & London: M I T Press, 2000): 4. 66

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each stage of my research, I was interested not only in comparing styles of poetics, but also in placing these styles in a web of relations, gently uprooting them from their specific contexts, urging them to find points of contact with one another.67 In tracing the emergence of an after-modern response to non-indigenous, high-modernist writing, I will be making explicit and important links between oral poetry traditions and contemporary, avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics. In essence, what I aim to do here is ‘compress’ the evolution of two indigenous poetic traditions into a ‘rhizomatic’ analysis of Aboriginal and Mapuche oral and written poems from the latter half of the twentieth century. In other words, I do not trace, via a linear time-line, the evolution from Aboriginal song-poetry at the moment of colonization to Lionel Fogarty’s poetry at the century’s close, before tracing the parallel progression from Mapuche song-poetry to Paulo Huirimilla’s work. Instead, I begin with examples of Aboriginal song-poems that have been performed throughout the twentieth century, before moving on to see how these song-poems share compositional and structural links with contemporary forms of Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry. I have been influenced here not only by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome but also by the distinction made by the literary scholars Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ forms of Aboriginal literature. As a result, I am placing both oral and written texts on something of a “transformational continuum”: between what seem more and less traditional positions [. . . ] each text is always positioned along a stretch of this continuum, never at a single point. Texts that seem more ‘modern’ encode a transformational relationship to the tradition, while more traditional seeming texts produced today still attempt to incorporate meanings and problems from the present.68

This ‘horizontal analysis’ deliberately disregards national boundaries and historical distinctions, a strategy that I hope will be justified when some key themes begin to materialize that will provide us with the basis for thinking about Indigenous Australian and Chilean poetics. Inevitably, this horizontal, 67

See: “At each stage of the problem, what needs to be done is not to compare two organs but to place elements or materials in a relation that uproots the organ from its specificity, making it become ‘with’ the other organ” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 285). 68 Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1990): 91.

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trans-national approach relates to a growing body of scholarship about the ‘Transnation’. Like Bill Ashcroft, in this book I distinguish the characteristics of the nation from those of the State. Defined by a desire for a heightened level of order, the State delimits flux. The nation, however, is a mobile, open category, a horizontal reality – distinct from the vertical, hierarchical authority of the [S]tate. In this horizontal reality culture still escapes the bounded nation state society, exceeding the boundaries of the nation state and operating beyond its political strictures through the medium of the local. This excess is the transnation.69

Importantly for our purposes here, Ashcroft argues that “Aboriginal literature [.. . ] is critical to the idea of the transnation because it so manifestly disidentifies with the nation.”70 In Chapter 7 we will explore some of the most intense manifestations of an Aboriginal/Mapuche transnation. Nevertheless, the discourse on nationalism (minus ‘trans-’) remains important to many areas of Indigenous studies both in Australia and internationally “because it remains the domestic and international language in which Native struggle is waged” and also because it “remains a primary vehicle for fuelling Indigenous imaginations.”71 As long as indigenous peoples continue to have political status as nations, the relationship of people and nation /State will remain of upmost importance to a postcolonial poetics. For now, we can preview the convergences between Indigenous Australian and Chilean poetics with a summary of the ideas of the poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg regarding intersections between ‘primitive’ (or oral) and ‘modern’ (or written) poetries:72 First, all the poetry in this book is notable for being “carried by the voice,” referencing to varying extents situations in which poetry is composed to be spoken, chanted or sung. However, while the voice carrying the poems of contemporary indigenous poets is invariably of, and heading back into, the world, two of my chosen poets, Judith 69

Bill Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation,” Southerly 71.1 (2011): 18–19. Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation,” 26. 71 Robert Warrior, “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn,” Cultural Studies Review 15.2 (2009): 126. 72 See “Primitive & Modern: intersections & analogies” in Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 73–75. 70

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Wright and Pablo Neruda, are distinguished by their insistence that their voices rise above, or are detached from, the world (Chapters 2– 3). We will find that many of these poems have what Rothenberg calls “a highly developed process of image-thinking,” where logical connections are superseded by concrete or “post-logical” streams of images (Chapters 4–7). Here, too, much of what is problematical in both Wright’s and Neruda’s poetry is a tension between the uncertainty inherent in the world and a desire to transcend such ‘chaos’ for a clearer, more logical or axiomatic organization (Chapters 2–3). One of the most marked divergences from the elaborate, Romanticmodernist constructions of Wright and Neruda is the “ ‘ minimal’ art of maximal involvement” practised by the Aboriginal and Mapuche poets (Chapters 4–6). Rather than landscapes blanketed heavily by bold description and verse rhythms, the poems are characterized by series of “compound elements,” each carefully articulated, with large amounts of space between each element. In these poems, a complete scene is not revealed to the reader in full detail; rather, the reader is a participant in a performance or ritual, and must make connections between a myriad of glimpses. In the work of poets from Broome, along with Leonel Lienlaf, Paulo Huirimilla, and Lionel Fogarty, we will encounter a clear “ ‘ intermedia situation’,” which actively denies Western categories of literary genres (Chapters 4–7). The poets’ techniques aren’t limited to written functions but operate also with reference to song, non-verbal sounds, visual signs (such as drawings), and the activities involved in the event of the poem (dancing, or walking through country, for example). The Aboriginal and Mapuche poets acknowledge that the poem has a real, physical basis in the human body, which itself is an integral part of the surrounding environment; the “animal-body-rootedness” of such poetry means that the poem is an event of body and mind together (Chapters 4–7). Wright is unable to accept this conjunction of breath and spirit (Chapter 2), and Neruda’s body – as he imagines it, at least – is anything but a concrete, physical form attached to a particular part of the world (Chapter 3).

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Finally, emerging from the dialectic of the oral and the written will be a drift towards a theory of multilingualism and translation. Never satisfied with productions solely in the imperial tongue (whether English or Spanish), the nomadic poetries of these indigenous poets decentre, fragment, and reorganize colonizing languages into multilingual ecologies. Following on from Mead, my aim here is “to put into question the presumptive, state-indemnified version of a singular Australian [or Chilean] language as a ‘naturalised’ substratum,” against which other forms of expression are “divergent and even aberrant instances” of disjuncture.73 There is no central or root language in this formulation, only rhizomatic proliferations of many. There are significant stylistic differences between the poets in this book, but the reader might be more familiar with Aboriginal poetics, and with Wright and Neruda, than with the Mapuche poets. In anticipation of this, I refer the interested reader to Appendix A, where I give an overview of Mapuche poetics, and make some broad generalizations about the work of Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla. Here, it is important to emphasize that my discussion of ‘Mapuche poetics’ involves an entity that is no more self-contained than ‘Aboriginal poetics’. ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Mapuche’ culture can only be understood as a complex product of colonial processes acting on earlier forms of life and culture. Aboriginal and Mapuche literatures are “composite and federalist,” to use a term of Hodge and Mishra’s, with specific components belonging to different groups, who themselves speak a variety of different languages or dialects, and live in a vast array of environments.74 If we needed to make any general claims about contemporary Indigenous Australian or Chilean literatures at all, we could say that they are characterized by their dialogic qualities, by multilingual and multimedia forms that produce diversity in a polyphony of genres. As something of a corollary to the above discussion, I should point out that my desire to critically review Neruda and Wright is somewhat different from my desire to engage with Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics. As two of the most widely read and influential poets of their generation, and as two figureheads of non-indigenous, humanist/neo-Romantic postcolonial poetics, Neruda and Wright are enlisted as examples in order to critique the broader traditions of which they are part. My attempt to develop a more nuanced critical dialogue with indigenous poetics, on the other hand, is reflective of its 73 74

Mead, Networked Language, 405. Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 107–108.

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relative obscurity in discussions about Australian and Chilean poetics. Simply, this book critiques dominant examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics before turning to ask, ‘What would constitute an indigenous postcolonial poetics?’ The aim is to give primacy to the poetics of the nation’s first peoples in the formulation of a contemporary literary ethic.

High Modernism Before we begin to critique it, it is necessary to flesh out certain aspects of ‘high modernism’. For the purposes of this book, high modernism refers not so much to literary notions of modernism as to those most powerful and compelling artifices of global modernity – be they poems, nationalist political policies, or industrial proliferations of products. As a corollary of industrial uniformity and standardization, concepts of ‘place’ and /or ‘the local’ are “thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.”75 In their commitment to the integrity of country, many indigenous poets are thoroughly ‘after-modern’.76 To clarify the distinction between the high-modernist poetries of Wright and Neruda and later, indigenous poetic responses to high-modernist thought, I want to return to explore in more detail Scott’s notion of the ‘high-modernist optic’. The clarity of this optic comes from its “resolute singularity”: “Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on.”77 Scott suggests that a map of a city drawn via the high-modernist optic might constitute a neat, geometrical representation of various streets and buildings. In this book, the boldest form of the high-modernist poem is realized when, in Chapter 3, Neruda stands atop Macchu Picchu and subsumes the entire past and present landscapes of the Americas under a single, thin, topographical line. Apparently, to a young Australian journalist he said of the ruined city, “It dwarfs all else, and it dis-

75

Anthony Giddens, in Ursula K. Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 128. 76 I am reluctant to refer to contemporary indigenous poetry as ‘postmodern’ in this book in order to avoid simplistic associations with (Western) traditions of postmodern poetics. Many such associations may indeed be important, but it is not within the domain of this book to discuss them. 77 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 347.

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plays the greatness of my ancestors, your ancestors.”78 For Neruda, we – a global consolidation of ‘comrades’ – own the past; the locality of indigenous Andean history withers beneath the light of mass-solidarity. However, Scott describes a second map which would consist of tracings – or, as Muecke might say, of glimpses. The map would outline a host of unplanned and haphazard movements with wavy lines of varying thickness.79 This will be a far more useful way of thinking about the landscapes of poems by Lionel Fogarty or Paulo Huirimilla. In A Thousand Plateaus, the modernist optic is traced back to the ocular centre: the eye (which in poetry often becomes the ‘I’). In flexible regimes, or those societies unbounded by the modern nation-state, centres of knowledge or authority can act as various knots or eyes of power but “they do not all resonate together, they do not fall on the same point.” Rather, there exists “a multiplicity of animist eyes” – different Dreamings and law in different parts of country, for example – each of which is positioned in a particular, local way with respect to local ecologies. Thus, even the power of someone as important as a shaman “is entirely localised,” strictly dependent on a part of country, or on particular resources from that country. The same cannot be said of modernist states, however. In state-based societies, centres of power and knowledge become definitively categorized. What was once supple becomes rigid, “to the extent that all centres resonate in [. . . ] a single point of accumulation that is like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes.” The permeable, divergent collections of mƝtis – what Deleuze and Guattari call those “supple microheads with animal facializations” – “are replaced by a macroface whose centre is everywhere.” There are no longer various eyes with various perspectives, but “a central computing eye scanning all of the radii.”80 In the quest for universal notions like Truth or Justice, the poet, once a localized individual like the shaman, now becomes a universal individual, or one whose eye (or ‘I’) is everywhere.

78

In Kevin Bannon, “Conversations with Pablo Neruda,” Southerly 67.3 (2007):

34. 79

Scott, Seeing Like a State, 347. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 232–33. Importantly, it is not that the various centres of power no longer exist in state-based societies; rather, these different resonances are delimited beneath the state’s optic, which prevents them from selfgeneration and -organization. 80

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Eco-Logic Australia is criss-crossed with Aboriginal Dreaming tracks. From Minyirr Park (south of Broome), they shoot out east and link up with others, which in turn shoot out in other directions; in such a way, each region of Australia is linked together. Yet these often-hidden tracks have been “violently assaulted” by the sedentary, slowly fattening habitations of cities and the immovable lines of states and property boundaries.81 The state must protect the sanctity of the cities at all costs; the boundaries of properties in turn need patrolling. Recent plans by the Western Australian State Government to compulsorily acquire a large section of land on Walmadany (James Price Point, to the north of Broome) provide a living, breathing example of such a situation. A point on the route of the Lurujarri Song Cycle, Walmadany is a campsite and a place of enormous historical significance for the Gularabulu and DjabirrDjabirr people. The government’s determination to take over this land in order to construct a natural-gas refinement plant upon it will destroy not only the site itself but also the integrity of the entire trail. The status of the Trail as a nomadic formation, which values “motion over fixation, variation over order,” is threatened by plans to striate the country within “a symbolic edifice” of capitalism. After all, the Western Australian economy thrives by regulating transcendent flows of mineral and gas resources from the smooth spaces of unpopulated regions to the striated grids of cities around the world. Gularabulu country is not unpopulated, however; its people have resisted the plans, and a large body of community support has grown behind them. Like nomads living and travelling beyond the bounds of the cities, the Gularabulu people occupy those zones outside of Broome through which the city’s resources /capital must flow. They are determined to protect the country (in this case, ocean, coastal and inland country) upon which the state relies, and which it necessarily depletes. There is an important pathway from nomadological to ecological theory, then. As a corollary to this book’s main argument about nomadic poetics and colonization, I will also be suggesting that a nomadic ontology has much to offer contemporary ways of thinking about the human’s relationship to the surrounding environment. For example, an Australian ecological poetics would learn from the country’s first nomads. Ecologically sensitive, never blundering or wilfully destructive, the poet would not burrow into a site and

81

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 219.

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refuse to leave it, but would, like the post-tourist, “lift ever so slightly off the ground so that objects are only faintly touched,” drifting through place(s), never staying in one for too long, and always remaining conscious of the best time to leave. The writing would address the question, therefore, of how we are going to leave the land once it becomes time to move on. Even if we reach apparent oases, those waterholes large and small dotted throughout the landscape, they are not to be over-exploited. To head north in pursuit of the abundance of natural gas and then make the mistake of settling there, developing large-scale factories and industries, would neglect the question of where we might go from there. Once the gas is used up and we have destroyed the fragile ecology of the country by contaminating its water supplies and removing the habitats of countless creatures and plants, do we leave it and move on? If so, to where? Or could we avoid these questions by making sure we don’t over-stay our welcome in the first place? The nomad arrives in a place and enjoys its hospitality, but also cares for it and leaves it healthy enough so that she can come back and enjoy it again. It’s better than wandering yet further, under the increasingly hot sun, to look for somewhere else. When Deleuze starts thinking about experience, he does not start with human experience. For him, the error of Western thought is that it always begins from some already existing thing, some transcendence or given point of reality. In Deleuzian ontology, ‘experience’ includes the perceptions of all kinds of materials: plants, bacteria, animals, machines, and humans. In this book, too, discussions of ‘experience’ in realms such as ‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ will necessarily involve the more-than-human world. Like Jane Bennett’s ‘thing-power materialist’, I am using the term ‘ecology’ to describe “a dynamic flow of matter-energy that tends to settle into various bodies, bodies that often join forces, make connections, form alliances.” This “swarm of productive activity”82 is the Deleuzian plane of nature. Also known as the plane of immanence, the “swarm” is composed of “various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations.”83 In Aboriginal thought, for example, there are times when dingoes and stone tools are seen simply as objects; at other times, however, when they assume a super-vital

82 83

Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” 365. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 280.

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assemblage, both dingoes and tools are seen as relatives or kin.84 To call something ‘ecological’, therefore, is to draw attention to its necessary implication in a network of relations, marking its persistent tendency to enter into a working system with other things.85 Such a stance refuses to separate ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, arguing instead that, in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems (be they populated primarily by humans or by other things), we must think nomadically. To this end, Guattari outlines a kind of “transversal” relationship between various kinds of ecologies: Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City.86

Guattari’s examples are useful manifestations of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “a philosophy of life,” a tradition whose beginnings he identifies in Benedict Spinoza and which continues, through Friedrich Nietzsche and a detour via Heidegger, to Gilles Deleuze. In the philosophy of life, all occurs on the plane of immanence, so that there is “little sense in distinguishing between organic life and animal life, or even between biological life and contemplative life and between bare life and the life of the mind.”87 Reflecting my interest in the principles of such vitalist philosophy, I will be concerned with a poetics of immanence in this book. Guattari proposes a different kind of method – an ‘eco-logic’ – to that modernist logic which seeks to completely contain and delimit the environment. Logical systems and structures strive “to capture existence in the very act of its constitution.” Eco-logic, on the other hand, is explicitly concerned with resisting this process of ‘fixing-into-being’, concentrating instead on the

84

John Bradley (with Yanyuwa families), Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010): 134. 85 Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” 365. 86 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, tr. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton (Les Trois écologies, 1989; tr. 2000; London & New York: Continuum, 2008): 29. 87 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., tr. & intro. Daniel Heller–Roazen (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1999): 238–39.

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movement and intensity of evolving processes.88 In other words, to think ecologically is to think about the development and formation of things as they are becoming, rather than the arbitrary assignment of categories and the divisions between them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Guattari mentions poetry as a way of facilitating such logic. The ambiguity of the poetic text allows it to transmit a message or denote a specific referent, while simultaneously functioning through redundant content or expressions. The poem can slow to the point of signification while immediately moving on, generating a “processual assemblage,” in which “the expressive a-signifying rupture summons forth a creative repetition” that initiates all kinds of various affects.89 Such poetry is typical of Guattari’s ‘eco-art’, a “praxic opening-out” that always resists confinement and closure.90 This book will outline certain poetics that engage very much in this ‘opening out’ (Chapters 4–7), and some that, while indeed willing to open, suffer from a much stricter set of limitations (Chapters 2–3). If the ‘poetic domain’ is to include the possibilities of all experience, then it needs to become more, rather than less, flexible. Poets engaged in articulating the great rush of disparate ideas and images that an ecological conception of experience presents turn to every means afforded by their own tools, including: all levels & styles of language, borrowings from other languages, new words or word distortions (punnings), visual signs, experiments with animal and mediumistic language, even clichés and old poeticisms where the content demands it. Metrics give way to measure [. . . to] a variable succession of sounds and silences [. . . to] the freedom of a poetry without fixed limits, which may change at any point into something else.91

Such an open poetic region is like Angus Fletcher’s ‘environment poem’, one that “discovers a manifold in nature that has no perfect isolationist wall around it.” It is a communally created text, developed by virtue of an interaction with human and non-human things “living on this side of some horizon,” without any kind of transcendent or abstracted system of images.92 88

Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 30. The Three Ecologies, 31. 90 The Three Ecologies, 35. 91 Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 106. 92 Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2004): 237. 89

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Getting to Country I often use the word ‘country’ when referring to various locales or environments. A term common in Aboriginal English, in this book ‘country’ will refer to the dimensional complexity of indigenous landscapes, both in Australia and in Chile. ‘Country’ is not synonymous with ‘place’; indeed, there can be many important places within one country. Deborah Rose has published the most sophisticated definitions of Aboriginal country, on which I will draw: Country is multidimensional: it consists of people, animals, plants, Dreamings, underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water, and air. There is sea country and land country; in some areas people talk about sky country. Country has origins and a future. 93

We can draw tentative parallels between Aboriginal notions of country and Mapuche landscapes. In Mapuche thought, there is also sea, land, and sky country, as well as an underground region. The diagram below (Figure 1) describes a three-dimensional compass, each horizontal axis corresponding to one of the four cardinal directions.

F I G U R E 1: Meli Witran Mapu.

Meli Witran Mapu, or ‘the four sides of the earth’, consists of Wenu Mapu (‘the land of the sky’), Miñche Mapu (‘the land below’), and Nag Mapu (‘the land on which we walk’). Like Aboriginal identity, Mapuche identity is determined by one’s region of origin. For example, Huilliche people come from Huilli Mapu [‘the land of the south’], whereas Lafkenche come from Lafken 93

Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004): 153.

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Mapu (‘the land of the coast’).94 In both Aboriginal and Mapuche contexts, one’s country does not refer to an abstract entity such as a nation-state but, rather, to the particular ancestral region of earth in which one and one’s family originate. When I talk about ‘country’, I will be referring to Aboriginal and Mapuche conceptions of locales as generative, self-sustaining entities that are autonomous with respect to other locales while at the same time interdependent with them. Crucially, ‘country’ does not simply refer to the physical presence of the land and to the people who populate it, nor does it equate to the tranquillity of a tamed, domesticated pastoral scene (full of malevolent spirits, country can be extremely dangerous and harmful). Rather, country is the generative space for the culture, language, and identity of everything in that space, human or non-human: In contemporary ecological terms, we would say that country is a self-organising system: people are part of the system, and their work contributes to country’s organising, but humans are not the only organisers. Not only is organisation shared, but humans get organised by others, as well as doing their own organisational work.95

‘Country’ fragments the abstracted notion of an impossibly large ‘Earth’ into myriad, interconnected cells. However, an attachment to country is also a highly fragile kind of social or environmental politics. Breaking indigenous peoples’ links with country has had enormously destructive effects on indigenous societies and cultures world-wide. Colonial processes in Australia and Chile prevented indigenous peoples from moving across their country and caring for it, instead confining them to an area but a fraction of that to which they belonged. Sedentarization and settlement of indigenous peoples into missions and reserves in both countries threatened the very foundations of their religious cosmologies, impaired their economic self-sufficiency, and diminished the opportunities for landbased ceremonies, songs, and dances. To this day, the decrease in opportunities to engage in landed rituals has eroded the transmission of cultural knowledge. Rupturing this connection with country removed cultural meaning from peoples’ lives and made them more susceptible to the influence of the colonial powers.

94 95

Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 36–37. Rose, “What if the Angel of History Were a Dog?” 71.

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The later sections of this book will examine how Aboriginal and Mapuche poets negotiate this complicated and often frustrating set of conditions. For indigenous people who live on or in proximity to their country, such as Paddy Roe (Chapter 6) or Leonel Lienlaf (Chapter 5), simply caring for country is not enough: one must inform others about the need to keep protecting it. For other poets who grew up at a remove from their traditional lands, like Lionel Fogarty or Paulo Huirimilla (Chapter 7), the task becomes that of finding ways to articulate meaningful connections to country from somewhere else. In all cases, however, these poets are engaged with the necessary question of how to articulate relationships with that which must remain – for its own safety – opaque. The nomad must elude the state’s optical “macroface,” even confuse it, taunt it. In contemporary Australian and Chilean contexts, the tenuous political status of indigenous connections to country demands an equally delicate poetics. I am writing about country, and the places within them, as porous entities, each with multiple entries and exits. I have also emphasized that the connections to such places must be maintained, and that the severance of such connections can have, and has had, drastic effects. In this book, we will see how poetry creates and maintains these connections in a variety of ways, whether for colonialist purposes or as forms of indigenous resistance to colonialism. “Poetry,” writes Harrison, “seems to have a deep connection with the discovery, or opening, of places: imaginatively a poem always takes place somewhere, not just because it is descriptive, but because the thought or image of a poem is staged or positioned ‘somewhere’.”96 A nomadic poetry is that which acknowledges the flow of matter and energy between places; not content with “opening” one place, the nomad poem shows how the existence of one place depends necessarily on those of others. It is crucial that the nomad poet never sit still; he must always be restless, shifting between voices, tenses, languages. After all, without the maintenance of an appropriate distance from equilibrium, the opportunity to engage with a problem on multiple fronts dissipates. Once equilibrium is reached, the detailed balance of a complex system is restricted to a single solution. Nonequilibrium, on the other hand, reveals the potentialities hidden in all the nooks and crannies of the system, potentialities that remain dormant at or near

96

Harrison, “Face to Face: Place and Poetry,” 80.

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equilibrium.97 In terms of poetics, if the poem resists easy revelation with a particular kind of reading, then it, like the language with which it is written, will never rest. The best way for the nomad poet to maintain and protect country is for his poems to continue to display the potential of country’s various parts, without ever actually settling on and revealing any one of them. The reader is made aware of this potential, but remains unable to capture or define it in any empirical manner. This way, the nomad can keep his country free of occupation, while still expressing its vital charge. At all times, the question is not ‘Is the poem true?’ but, rather: What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?98

The nomad’s poem promotes proliferation of diversity, and of life.

The Oral A nomadology of any kind requires dynamic, adaptive movements, but the nomadic drifts of a language are perhaps the best model for adaptive processes: ever open to the improvisations of its speakers, a language is a structure of meaning and continuity that never reaches equilibrium.99 However, it is important here to distinguish between various kinds of language: namely, written and oral ones. While I do not agree wholeheartedly with the ecophenomenologist David Abram, for whom written texts are necessarily removed from the flux of the world, while oral languages remain ‘connected’ to it,100 there are nevertheless important differences to highlight between the two forms. According to the philosopher Manuel de Landa, written forms of imperial languages such as English or Latin have been far more sterile than their spoken counterparts; the very imposition of a system of grammatical rules and procedures can exert a homogenizing influence on a language.101 Meshworks of a-grammatical or ‘vulgar’ Latin, for example, contained sounds, words, and 97

Ilya Prigogine & Gregoire Nicolis, in Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002; London & New York: Continuum, 2004): 75. 98 Paraphrasing Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 8. 99 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 357. 100 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (1996; New York: Vintage, 1997): 254–57. 101 De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 208.

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constructions that could replicate with a variety that eluded the written systems, and were therefore capable of generating new linguistic structures more frequently.102 Yet the influence of the printing press in the Western literary tradition has been such that a language like English has become recognizable primarily as the written word. In much of English literature, the raw powers of its oral heritage have gradually given way to the elegant refinement of silent, literary grammars, as the literary theorist and anthropologist Dennis Tedlock explains: It was not until the Renaissance that there began to develop the kind of prose narrative we know today the kind that is read silently and has lost many of its oral features. Today’s prose is no longer in the care of professional performers who know how to turn it back into the oral nor is it accompanied by performance notations. 103

Tedlock’s concerns stem from Charles Olson’s arguments about a ‘projective verse’, or a written poetry that recovers the energy, the intention, and the location of the voice: What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination.104

Yet Muecke points out that the concrete fixity of written words may actually work against their supposed permanence. Not only can books and hard disks be destroyed, but they can also discourage the use of memory, and consequently an engagement with their contents. “The spoken word, on the other hand, may have the capacity to endure precisely through its flexibility to arising situations, renewing its relevance on each occasion.”105 The domain of poetry covered in this book includes both oral and written forms; I will argue that it is precisely because of their very close proximity to oral literary traditions that indigenous poets are able to produce such surprising and innovative written texts. 102

De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 187. Dennis Tedlock, “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” boundary 2 3.3 (Spring 1975): 712–13. 104 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950), Charles Olson: selected writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1967): 22. 105 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 163. 103

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These poetries that enjoy such proximity to oral traditions could be located after modernity’s fascination with the printing press. If we think of modernity in poetry on its most basic level, it is that feature which, according to Harrison, “constantly undermines the truth of fervent, expressive language with the reminder that the words are representations and empty signs.” Here, each expressive moment, each image, each sensation arising from an experience, “each framing of the moment or the experience,” is only ever empty language. The voice, therefore, not only addresses the void, but itself composes it.106 Yet this silence, this preoccupation with a burrowing ‘underneath’ the written signs of language to escape its tinny clamour, is precisely what Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, by virtue of their close relationships to oral traditions, are not. Words are not representations, but are expressions of country. I want to go still further than this, however, and argue that for colonized, subjugated peoples, their ‘ground zero’, as it were, is this condition of silence. They would be abandoned in the void, were it not for their ability to access the power brimming in their oral traditions. The indigenous nomad poet fractures the silence with his or her speaking;107 the orality of the written sign is a culmination of tremendous cultural energies, and a direct reaction to the modern imposition of silence under which Mapuche and Aboriginal people have suffered. The poem, rather than a shell of the past, is a fissure in the present moment, through which the living past is configured anew.

A Final Note about the Approach The operating principle of a nomadic poetics, and the generative ‘code’ of this book, is to write without an already established idea of home. It is not a question, write Deleuze and Guattari, “of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought.” Instead, this book pursues a model “that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting again.”108 To ward off from the outset a set of goals, or a desire to reach a

106

Martin Harrison, Who Wants to Create Australia? Essays on Poetry and Ideas in Contemporary Australia (Sydney: Halstead, 2004): 69. 107 Mabel García, Hugo Carrasco & Verónica Contreras, Crítica situada: el estado actual del arte y la poesía Mapuche (Temuco: Universidad de la Frontera, 2005): 39. 108 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22.

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conclusion or to formulate a theory to answer all questions, we need to keep in mind one of the rhizome’s most fundamental characteristics: A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo […]. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and”… Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation – all imply a false conception of voyage and movement…109

Writing in such a way – in a way that thrives on the mutations generated by making new, unpredictable connections – means that an attempt to find a ‘tree’ or ‘root’ for all of these differences is an invention after the fact of their emergence. Rather, each of the following chapters is a zone of distinct intensity; lines of communication race between them before dissipating in other zones. If the following discussion cannot wholly escape a simplistic notion of an alternation between ‘Chilean’ and ‘Australian’ contexts, I should reiterate that I am not interested in ‘folding’ a map of the world in two so that both countries are compared as mirror images of one another. Rather, I want to go between Australia and Chile. Deleuze and Guattari point out that to go between things is not to swing back and forth between two discrete objects as in the manner of a pendulum. To go between is actually to go between two nonlocalizable relations, in the manner of a stream speeding between its banks, picking up more speed so that it “sweeps one and the other away.”110 To go between is to go down the middle, then, but this middle region is not an average; “it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement.” What they are referring to here is the intermezzo status of the rhizome-structure, its quality of always-becoming-something-else. This is the productive capacity of the middle, the place for fresh becomings to occur: a becoming is “neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two;” it is the region of the in-between. This is the non-localizable region of the stream, “sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other.”111 Consequently, I do not wish to talk about Australia as a molar entity, then Chile as some kind of ‘polar opposite’ or ‘other’ to this entity. Rather, this 109

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27. A Thousand Plateaus, 28. 111 A Thousand Plateaus, 323–24. 110

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book will proceed along the lines of ‘Australia and Chile and Australia. …’ I will be speeding between these two incredibly non-specific locations, taking ideas from both and letting them get mixed up. To paraphrase Jahan Ramazani, the virtue of such “poetic transnationalism” is that it can help us to both understand and imagine a world in which cultural boundaries are fluid, transient, and permeable, and thus read ourselves as imaginative citizens not of one or another hermetically sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intercultural worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge.112

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Jahan Ramazani, “A Transnational Poetics,” American Literary History 18.2 (Summer 2006): 355.

2

Judith Wright and the Limits of Her Tradition

W

E EXPECT MUCH OF

J U D I T H W R I G H T ; she is an icon of twentiethcentury Australian literature and poetics. The popularity of her earlier work is unrivalled in Australian poetry; some of those poems are among the most widely anthologized works in Australian literature.1 Wright pioneered criticism of Australian poetry, and revolutionized the possibilities for Australian feminist poetics. A decade after her passing, she remains an inspiration for many environmental and Aboriginal-rights activists. Importantly for our purposes here, her work provides a space for these two discourses to meet in ways rarely experienced elsewhere in the mid-twentieth century. Wright was too aware that environmentalism does not necessarily exist harmoniously with Aboriginal affairs. It frustrated her that many environmentalists were unable to accept the validity of “any kind of vision” other than their own.2 She understood that for any landscape poet in Australia “questions of ownership, the usage to which the land is put and the results of that usage must be of utmost importance.”3 One’s relationship to ‘nature’ could not be separated from one’s relationship to Australia’s brutal colonial history, so Wright would scoff at claims that settler connections to country approached something resembling those experienced by Indigenous Australians. “After so short an occupation,” she wrote, “with 40,000 years of the previous occupation at least, the land we took as, to quote an early colonial dispatch, ‘intended by Providence as a sheep-run’ is scarcely a credit to our feeling for it.”4 In Aus1

Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow: a study of Judith Wright's poetry (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1991): 4–5. 2 In Jennifer Jones, “Why Weren’t We Listening: Oodgeroo and Judith Wright,” Overland 171 (2003): 44. 3 Gig Ryan, “Uncertain Possession: the politics and poetry of Judith Wright,” Overland 154 (1999): 27. 4 Les Murray & Judith Wright, “Correspondence,” Southerly 63.1 (2003): 171.

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tralian poetry, argues Martin Harrison, no one has paralleled Wright’s ability to create a “dialogic space with Indigenous poetries.”5 What her work points to, then, and the reason it provides the aforementioned political movements so much inspiration, is what Philip Mead calls “the possibility of an ‘environmentally-grounded poetics’.” In Australia, such a poetics incorporates not only the issues of environmental sustainability and long-term land use but also the “unsettling and unresolved question of land rights.”6 However, I will argue here that, despite her best attempts, much of Wright’s poetry has perpetuated an Australian colonialist poetics. Her failure to adequately critique in her poetry what she sees as such pressing issues in her critical prose suggests a disturbing disjuncture between poetry and politics in Australian culture.7 Wright’s poetic response to the crisis of Western modernity (manifested as over-consumption and environmental destruction) is very similar to the response of earlier Romantics. Like them, Mead writes, she chooses to “infinitise,” moving images of experience and landscape out of the immanent realm “and onto the ground of the infinite, figured as myth.” Often Wright’s poems are driven by the well understood imperative within the Romantic aesthetic to sublate the contradictions of the material and historical world into a dream of human essence and subjective transcendence.8

These “contradictions” that lead Wright to seek “subjective transcendence” point to a profoundly important rupture between the poet’s body and the country in which it moves. The rupture enables Wright to observe country poetically, but it also ends up preventing the act of observation from having much impact on the structure of her poetic expression. This situation is perhaps best highlighted in a poem like “At Cooloola” (from The Two Fires, 1955): The blue crane fishing in Cooloola’s twilight has fished there longer than our centuries. 5

In Bonny Cassidy, “The Sounds of Sight: Jennifer Rankin’s poetics,” J A S A L 6 (2007): 102. 6 Philip Mead, Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008): 328. (Quoting Paul Carter.) 7 Mead (Networked Language) provides a definitive account of the complex network of associations between Wright’s poetry and the culture in which she wrote. Here, however, I will be focusing primarily on issues raised by her poems. 8 Mead, Networked Language, 297–98.

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He is the certain heir of lake and evening, and he will wear their colour till he dies, but I'm a stranger, come of a conquering people. I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake, being unloved by all my eyes delight in, and made uneasy, for an old murder's sake.9

A key feature of “At Cooloola” is the limitation of the speaker’s vision. The subject is prevented from an easy embrace of the world by the world itself: she is “unloved by all [her] eyes delight in.” Yet she is not, as a consequence, isolated: while her limited awareness of the environment’s dark history limits the extent of her vision, it also implies that she is nevertheless interconnected with the rest of the field. She knows that there is more than what she can see herself; her limits have been imposed by her connection with a larger system of which she is keenly aware. For the place seems to remind her of her limits as soon as she attempts to surpass them: she is “challenged by a driftwood spear / thrust from the water.” A distinctly ecological relationship is being proposed in the poem, therefore, in which the role of each organism is determined by others in its vicinity. For all of its ecological sensitivity, however, the poem is nevertheless ordered neatly by a stern, semi-regular iambic foot, end-rhyme and four-line stanzas. This contradiction – between the ecological flexibility of an Australian environment and the archaic structures of a traditional, English lyric form – leads us to the source of the lapse between Wright’s political and poetic practice. It also reflects something of the discrepancies between the myths of a conquering people and the lands they purport to mythologize. Here, in the space opened by such disconnections, we can begin to explore some of the key issues of non-indigenous poetics in Australia.

Finding the Universal in the Individual For Pablo Neruda, who becomes so embroiled in the ideological significance of the Spanish Civil War, to be ‘politically responsible’ entails a certain international ‘spirit’.10 Wright’s politics are more provincial. Her concern is first 9

Judith Wright, Selected Poems: Five Senses (1976; A & R Modern Poets; North Ryde, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1989): 108. 10 Gordon Brotherston, Latin American Poetry: Origins and Presence (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1975): 169.

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with ‘Australia’ as a burgeoning, colonial idea, and then with its relationship to the rest of the globe. Nevertheless, her connection with the local is just as ambivalent as Neruda’s, despite her far smaller predilection for global politics and travel. Mead shows that even a poem such as the early “South of My Days,” about an intensely felt experience of a local habitation, is ultimately dislocated by a sense of estrangement between the poetic self and its social and historical locales. It begins: “South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country, / rises that tableland,” a sign, says Mead, that the poem “is articulated from somewhere else.” The imprecision of its geographical “feeling” provides what he calls a “poetics of displaced location.”11 We will see how this paradoxical sense of presence-and-absence-in-place also exists in poems like “Bora Ring,” “The Garden,” and “Nigger’s Leap: New England.” “Bora Ring”12 (from The Moving Image, 1946) is an especially important example, because we confront both the speaker’s problematical position with regard to Indigenous and European traditions and, as Shirley Walker points out, the paradoxical presence and absence of Aboriginal tribes.13 The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale.

Typically from eastern and southern Aboriginal nations, a Bora is the name given both to a male initiation ceremony and to the site on which the initiation is performed. A bora ring is a circle of foot-hardened earth surrounded by raised embankments. The process leading to the ceremony involves the learning of sacred songs, stories and dances, which is to say that the ring is part of a much larger, productive web of culture. Indeed, in Sam Watson’s novel The Kadaitcha Sung, the Rings of Bora are the only doorways for Biamee, the great creator-spirit, to enter into the world of humans.14 In Wright’s poem, however, the bora ring is bereft of all the vitality it might otherwise have had during ceremony. Repressed elements of Aboriginal culture do emerge, but they are restricted by flat rhythms that never gain 11

Mead, Networked Language, 279. Wright, Selected Poems, 3–4. 13 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 28. 14 Sam Watson, “From The Kadaitcha Sung,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 132. 12

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momentum. The “song is gone” and the dancer’s ritual is “useless,” the painted bodies of the dancers are nothing more than “a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.” This “tribal story” of disappearance is absorbed entirely into the earth; to recover the story, the poet must look for its traces in the landscape: Only the grass stands up to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums posture and mime a past corroboree, murmur a broken chant.

Importantly, Wright knows enough about the landscape to deduce that the hunters have vanished; she can perform a geographical survey accurate enough to determine that “the nomad feet are still.” She even knows what lies underground, where she points out a “splintered” spear. All that remains are ghostly traces in the apple-gums: allegorical correlatives for a past which is no longer. In its imagining of a vanquished landscape haunted by tragedy, “Bora Ring’ seems to join a tradition outlined by the scholar Jennifer Rutherford, of imbuing the Australian landscape “with melancholy properties.”15 Amidst this sadness, a curious shift occurs. A rider appears, “halts at a sightless shadow” and is gripped with a “fear as old as Cain.” The poem then concludes by fusing Australian natural and Aboriginal history with the history of the European Biblical imagination.16 Noel Rowe’s suggestion that Wright “turns absence into presence” by recalling such “sightless shadows”17 is complicated by the fact that all such temporary presences are swept up in a much more powerful Judaeo-Christian narrative. The implicit suggestion is that God’s “ancient curse” on Cain survives until the present day; that fratricide, therefore, is inevitable. To be sure, the relationship being proposed here is an extremely daring one for this time in Australia’s history: that Aboriginal people are our brothers; that colonial conquest was and is fratricide. Yet the inevitability of the deaths is what allows Wright to indulge in sadness, and to finish 15

Jennifer Rutherford, “Undwelling; Or Reading Bachelard in Australia,” in Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces, ed. Jennifer Rutherford & Barbara Holloway (Crawley, W A : U W A Publishing, 2010): 120–22. 16 Susan McKernan, A Question of Commitment: Australian literature in the Twenty Years after the War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989): 144. 17 Noel Rowe, Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2008): 180.

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the poem: “Bora Ring” ends with the haunting sense of this inevitability, which is to say it ignores those who did not die, and sidesteps the notion that tragedy was not necessary. The past of a bora ring is welded to prophecies of a Judaeo-Christian future. In other words, Wright’s vision is effectively everywhere, born of a modernist consciousness that in the act of a poem can link the local history of a bora ring with religious mythology from a completely different time and place. Negativity could be the enabling structure of Wright’s poetry, in that it provides her with her most prominent, recurring themes of loss and destruction. Invariably for Wright, the impulse, form or substance of poetry derives from the force of its capacity to negate rather than produce.18 Certainly, “Bora Ring” is one of the earliest instances of Wright’s insistence on the unproductive capacity of silence. The poem is so alarming because it is as if Wright needs loss; the world of The Kadaitcha Sung must be entirely negated for the poem to function, and in order for the impending doom prophesied by the last, Biblical stanza to be realized. In stark contrast, some years later the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) affirms that the bora ring and its associated corroboree have disappeared, but “we,” she emphasizes in the last line of her astonishing poem, “are going” (not gone). Aboriginal people have hardly vanished, and “We Are Going” is a bold testament to the fact.19 Even if the bora ring is half-covered by trash in Noonuccal’s poem, it lives on in the remaining members of the tribe: We are the corroboree and the bora ground, We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders. We are the wonder tales of the Dream Time, the tribal legends told. We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games. . .

Unlike “Bora Ring,” “We Are Going” imagines a productive region: those stories, songs, and dances linked to the site are reproduced in threads of positivity. It is as if, to borrow the words of the critic Ivor Indyk, Oodgeroo’s relationship to the Ring is “not fixed and unchanging, but mobile, something remade and renewed in the face of negation.”20 Indeed, Oodgeroo’s “We Are 18

Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 158, 161 19 Oodgeroo Noonuccal, “We Are Going,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 43–44. 20 Ivor Indyk, “Pastoral and Priority: The Aboriginal in Australian Pastoral,” New Literary History 24.4 (Autumn 1993): 852.

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Going” inspired a number of subsequent Aboriginal poetic productions, not least of which is “Kath Walker” by Lionel Fogarty: We are coming, even going I was born in 1957 the year after I became a realist I am a full blooded black Aussie. . . 21

By denying the continued presence and importance of the bora ring to Aboriginal people, Wright is engaging here in the kind of presuppositional thinking we noted in the introduction, imagining the world ‘as if’ it were something else. The poem’s silent stillness reflects “a moment in which history is about to begin, an unchanging moment, in effect, when ‘nothing’ is happening.”22 To be fair, “Bora Ring” is hardly a celebration of the silence, but the poem nevertheless depends upon it; the silence clears the space in which the lyrical voice can begin to sing. The song itself – a series of elevated, priestly intonations – neutralizes the relationship of the poem and, therefore, of the reader, to the locale. Consequently, the poetic voice is both everywhere and nowhere; the culture Wright mourns is both an ethereal shadow looming in our present, and dislocated from the world in a past returning to wilderness. “The Garden,” published in Woman to Man in 1949,23 is another particularly interesting poem because it takes the Australian landscape, into which the Aboriginal people were submerged in “Bora Ring,” and makes it absent, too. The garden on which the poem is based belonged to Wright’s grandmother, Mary Wright. It also has Edenic connotations, as a place brimming with “flowers of red silk and purple velvet,” “a humming may-tree” and a solitary black snake “whispering” through the grass. Along with much of the other work in the volume, it is one of Wright’s most uplifting poems, where beauty and evil are equally valuable – where Eve is walking, in the final line, “with her snake and butterfly” (my emphasis). The dynamic euphoria, however, is a highly effective disguise for the fact that the black snake is the only presence in the entire poem that bears any resemblance to an Australian

21

Lionel Fogarty, “Kath Walker,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 93. 22 Adapting Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004): 64. 23 Wright, Selected Poems, 33.

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native. Otherwise, the life, be it human or otherwise, is gathered by a high Romantic rhetoric with a strong, anthemic rhyme-scheme. That the only trace of the Australian environment is the black, Satanic reptile strikes at the heart of the Australian neo-Romantic project. Traditionally, at least, Romantic art has had a function analogous to that of religion: The traditional scheme of Eden, Fall and Redemption merges with the new triad of Nature, Self-Consciousness, and Imagination – the last term in both involving a kind of return to the first.24

Romantic efforts to transcend subject–object dualism took place through this healing imaginative act, which brought the Self back into nature, just as the Redeemed Soul could return to Eden. In Australia, however, attempts to transcend this dualism were frustrated by the fact that the natural object was so alien.25 If nature was alien or, like the snake in the poem, if nature was evil, then it must be ignored in order for transcendence to be achieved. In “The Garden,” therefore, this merging of Eden and Nature can only take place problematically. Wright withdraws from almost all of the botanical particularities of the original garden’s locale and replaces it with a non-specific, universalist Edenic ecology. Once more, a transcendent plane of Biblical mythology overlays a local natural history. The poet’s means of fending off nature’s ‘evils’ is to order the world within the careful rhymes of a European poetics, and with the vocabulary of European ritual. Those remnants of the ground which remain uncovered are left to sneak, snake-like, through cracks, or to loom up as a “black hand” on the throat of an old lady (Mary Wright, presumably), who consequently needs “her Joseph’s coat” for protection. These black remnants of the Australian landscape reflect the fact that, even when it is “firmly pushed away,” the local persists like a faint residue in Wright’s poems. These are the beginnings of Wright’s extraordinarily contradictory politics, part of which is an ostensible withdrawal from urban society in order to focus on the local environment, while still insisting on maintaining a global or universal vision. As Mead notes, Wright’s self-imposed isolation and independence began at an early age. Moving to Sydney as a young woman meant escape from the pressures of marriage within the New England squattocracy, in which she had spent most of her childhood. Sydney also promised the ex24

Geoffrey H. Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1970): 307. 25 Wright, in Kane, Australian Poetry, 12.

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perience of an urban, intellectual life, as opposed to time in a rural women’s college. Even at university, however, Wright disregarded the conventions of accreditation, enrolling in 1934 as a non-matriculant student.26 Her withdrawal continues after university, when she and her philosopher–husband, Jack McKinney, move to a retreat in the Queensland mountains. “Deliberately removed to the edge of society, and on the relatively undisciplined and uninstitutionalised margins of knowledge,” they are able nevertheless “to think and imagine themselves at the centre of human experience.”27 After McKinney’s death in the 1970s, Wright moved to a new home in the bush of the south, tellingly named ‘Edge’, about an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital. Once housed at ‘Edge’ she did not retreat from political life but, rather, increased her level of participation in national and, occasionally, international affairs. Like Cain, it seems Wright separated herself from life in the midst of life, doomed “to live a middle or purgatorial existence.”28 Mead shows how Wright’s notion of the ‘political’ is repeatedly defined in terms of often contradictory conjunctions of humanist-subjective philosophy, familial and regional ties, and an idea of ‘the national’. Her personal history, and the colonial history of her family, forms a generative matrix for a national, ethical commitment. Unlike Neruda’s Marxism (see Chapter 3 below), Wright’s ideological commitments don’t stem from social theory or a particular experience of abstract social structures.29 The ambivalence of her politics expresses itself in those repeated moves to withdraw, “to stand to the side, to live at the edge of social conurbation and national history,” while still engaging in political action and working hard for socio-political change. At all times, she takes personal shelter “in the language of poetry,” in which she seeks ultimately a kind of transcendence from the world into a realm of silence.30 This local–universal tension would not ease, either. Grasping for universal meaning, her poetry begins by grappling with the particular; the particular, then, becomes Wright’s launch-pad into transcendence. Indeed, after Woman to Man, and for much of her career, there is an increasing tendency towards abstraction in her work, or a retreat into a cold solipsism in which the poem provides her with a shelter against the evils of the wider 26

Mead, Networked Language, 274. Networked Language, 277. 28 Paraphrasing Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 303. 29 Mead, Networked Language, 278–79. 30 Networked Language, 279. 27

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world. This tendency is typified by a movement towards a symbolism abstracted from local ecologies and by the frequent presence of a speaker who occupies a decidedly priestly distance from the world. The shift invariably has a negative impact on the work itself: statements are simplified and lose their textural complexities, and the verse, as it becomes increasingly dogmatic and liturgical, slackens.31 “Nigger’s Leap: New England”32 is a striking example of the uncertainty of Wright’s intellectual position, as a descendant of pioneer colonists, and also as a committed humanist. As such, the poem provides us with a microcosmic example of this very movement: from the ground of local history, it moves upwards into transcendence and then, finally, into silence. Written after a return to her family’s rural property, “Nigger’s Leap” delicately negotiates the line between abstraction and the violent, tragic history of Darkie Point.33 The poem is a kind of “contorted elegy,” writes Mead, in which neoShakespearean rhetoric is used to subsume frontier violence under “a grander economy” of the inevitability of time and death.34 The first two stanzas of the poem reflect precisely this immanent–transcendent tension. The first is a deeply evocative response to the “sheer and limelit granite head” of the Point, which ends with the image of a dead, silent body “waiting for the flies” at the Point’s base. The second stanza, however, is a sermon about the Point as a “symbol” for the inevitability of death. The tension is captured most succinctly in the poem’s final lines: Night lips the harsh scarp of the tableland and cools its granite. Night floods us suddenly as history, that has sunk many islands in its good time.

Here, the first sentence is a very clear, sensual image of the landscape, richly textured with harshness and coolness. However, the next phrase lifts us suddenly into abstracted regions of history and time, in which the complexity of an event at Darkie Point (now one of “many islands”) is fused with a faith in the inevitability of what is yet to come (a “flood” as sure as “Night”). In other 31

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 128 Wright, Selected Poems, 11. 33 Darkie Point is an enormous escarpment over which Aboriginal people were driven, to fall to their deaths in the valley below, as retaliation for the alleged spearing of settlers’ cattle. 34 Mead, Networked Language, 280. 32

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words, “Nigger’s Leap” is about subsuming the gross violence of New England’s history under a pontification about ‘inevitable’ universal processes. The poem’s optic enacts a series of simplifying reductions – from massacre to tragedy; from tragedy to the eternal refrain of death – which ends at a single point of accumulation: “O all men are one man at last,” she writes in the third stanza. Although it deeply frustrated Wright, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that “Nigger’s Leap,” having embedded the local in the abstract, was itself enlisted into the nationalist educational policy of the 1950s and 1960s, which included a “disremembering” of Aboriginal presence in Australia.35 As we saw in “Bora Ring,” the image of deathly silence is itself an extremely powerful negation. Proceeding from this image, however, means that the poem bases itself upon a negative presence, or an emptiness. So the omission of Aboriginal presence and the quest for neo-Shakespearean abstraction indicate that the poem refers to an unformulated background – a background, that is, which we are unable to experience. Unfortunately, by producing this sense of absence, Wright also generates a gap between the recognition of the continued suffering of Aboriginal people and a will to engage in ameliorative action (they are ‘gone’, so nothing more can be done). One powerful source of energy required to leap over this gap is joy, where joy is “an animated energy generated in part by affection for a material world experienced as vital and alive” (my emphasis). Jane Bennett here argues that such joy must be the basis of activist policy, for it derives from the notion that things can evolve for the better. A negative dialectic, on the other hand, “does not court the joyful affects, but is designed to enhance feelings of guilt, suffering, and a haunting sense of loss.”36 Indeed, an inevitable sense of loss can even dull the force of guilt, for it removes the possibility of, and responsibility for, positive production or aid. This is precisely what we find in “Nigger’s Leap,” where Wright, confronted with the seemingly irrevocable silence of the local, escapes into grim ‘Truths’ about the universal. We have seen how the local–global tension in Wright can manifest itself as a kind of negation of the local for the universal. In other instances, however, such as in “Wildflower Plain,”37 the negation is not so rapid, nor is it so obvious. The poem is from The Two Fires (1955), a book written amidst fears that humankind’s quest for intellectual exploration and analysis would end in 35

Mead, Networked Language, 281. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” 363. 37 Wright, Selected Poems, 121–22. 36

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nuclear annihilation. Still, the poem’s short, eroded lines and their rocky sounds, and the crisp images of the wildflowers on the plain, might suggest that Wright has sought calm in her surrounding country. Here, as the sun’s energy transforms soil into plants, the word transforms nature into the ‘higher’ realm of art. This organicism references one of Romanticism’s most basic tenets, in which the living plant is a paradigm for the product of the creative process.38 That second transformation – from nature into art – becomes problematical for us when we look in further detail at the way the poem effects this transformation, and at the result. It raises a number of questions, some of which Mead has flagged already. Principally, it begs consideration of the relationship between poetry “generated in language but out of a concern for environmental integrity” and Wright’s assumptions about such “integrity,” given that, in generating her poems, the poet embraces “a traditional, formalist poetics.”39 Next to “Wildflower Plain,” other poems from the same volume – “The Harp and the King,” for example, with its fuller lines laden with sharper rhymes, and its subject-matter of kings, thrones, and harps – are more pointedly from a European tradition. Yet, despite appearances to the contrary, “Wildflower Plain” also retreats from the challenge of trying to articulate the peculiarities of an Australian locale. The first clue is found in the rhyme, which takes the form of couplets of an iambic metre, slightly eroded and split over two lines: The angry granite, the hungry range, must crumble away, must melt and change. . .

Such rhyme re-gathers those disparate elements, which might otherwise be released by the shorter lines, into a kind of over-arching order. “Underneath the bipolar structure of the couplet,” writes Fletcher, “there always lurks a desire to define, to enclose, to delimit.” It is the symmetry between the two lines, he says, that provides an “essential component of enclosure.”40 But the

38 39

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 93–94. Philip Mead, “Two Fires: Poetry and Local Government,” Overland 182 (2006):

34. 40

Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2004): 35.

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final stanza of “Wildflower Plain” is so interesting because at first it appears to resist this order entirely: Blue orchid gentle as skies seen early; blown purple iris so quick to wither; tea-tree falling on water-lily; heath, boronia, many another, can but spring where rock makes way. Let rock be humble. Let it decay. Let time’s old anger become new earth, to sign to the heart the truth of death.

In the first nine lines of the stanza above, it appears that Wright has decided to continue her poem without the earlier rhyme-scheme. It is telling, too, that this occurs in one of the most detailed passages from that period of her work. It is as if the sheer brilliance of the description – of the blue orchid, tea-tree, water-lily and company – resists containment by a metrical scheme: the words’ sounds are so distinctive, and their syllabic weight ensures that they cannot be encased easily in sentences replete with vowel-rich rhyming words. Rhymes do still occur, of course, but beyond the bounds of the iambic couplet. Like the actual plants on the plain, the words are not bounded by grid-lines but demand individual attention and response. For Wright to return to end-rhyme, then, as she does in the final seven lines, she must retreat from the scene and move, as she did in “Nigger’s Leap,” from scenic particularities towards a more ordered, abstracted space. Correspondingly, the colours and textures of the plants are replaced by another sermon about time, decay, and “the truth of death.” In “Wildflower Plain,” the word cannot consistently transform nature into art, because the speaker of the word removes herself from nature. Thus removed, the self can no longer be a point of entry into the world; hence, instead of the world, only the transcendent self remains as that region to be explored.

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In “Bora Ring,” “The Garden,” and “Nigger’s Leap: New England,” we have seen Wright fashion something of a ‘universal individual’ – a speaker who is both everywhere and nowhere, absent and present, and always eager to transcend the local in favour of the universal. The erasure of local regions by vast, cavernous ideas about ‘death’ and ‘history’ occludes their particularities; the world becomes one great lyrical repetition from which difference and differentiation have been leached. This is a curious turn of events because, according to the philosophy of her husband, Jack McKinney, reality is a vital and evolving organism, subject to continual modification and reinterpretation by an individual’s consciousness as it interacts with the world around it. For McKinney, the exciting moment comes when the perceiver, stimulated by her senses, breaks down the concepts she has inherited and weaves a newer, more stirring synthesis of thought and experience.41 Rather than despairing about his inability to fit experience to orders of language, McKinney – like Charles Olson, perhaps – insisted that language “be returned to its place in experience.”42 McKinney’s thought had a tremendous impact on Wright, too. Presumably, it would have translated into a poetics of enriched, stimulating metaphors, in which the elements of physical matter and their manifestation as speech produce, via the imagination, startling works of art. We might see the emergence of radical new articulations of Australian locales, replete with new sounds and grammars, and new linkages made between previously discrete parts, including a process of integrating the speaker’s own biology into a hitherto strange or illusive environment and history. Yet this is far from the case. Instead, the savage violence of conquest is refigured as the tragedy and injustice of Australian Aboriginal history, and this history is negated by its stony relegation to the past, subsumed under narratives of death and decay. And the language itself, while occasionally numinous with particularities, loses weight as it floats into abstraction. Unfortunately, the abstraction would become yet more prevalent in much of Wright’s work from the 1950s onwards. a

41

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 116. Robert Creeley, “Introduction” to Charles Olson: Selected Writings., ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1967): 5. 42

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Inwards then Upwards As soon as Western poetry was separated from imposed religious or traditional, communal ends, writes Geoffrey Hartman, it became as problematical as the notion of the individual him- or herself. If the poet’s art is linked to her autonomy and individuality, then that same art, in the absence of an authoritative myth that tells her to do so, must bear the entire weight of having to transcend tendencies to indulge solely in individuality. It is a paradox with roots in all the seminal works of the Romantic period.43 The problem persists in Wright’s own oeuvre. “Like the rest of the ‘divine influences’ which once swayed man,” she herself wrote, “inspiration has retired into our own inner recesses.”44 The situation manifests most clearly in her numerous poems about childhood and children, including “The Child” (from Woman to Man). In these poems, the child is a symbol of innocence and individuality. “Subjectivity – even solipsism – becomes the subject of poems which qua poetry seek to transmute it.”45 Accordingly, these poems focus on the child’s original, unmediated responses to the world and, importantly, on an attempt to ‘recapture’ this primal sense of experience. In this condensation of human experience into its most innocent and unsullied, then, Wright must transcend the complexities of her own, subjective position in order to distil its essential form within the child. “The Child”46 is a stunning poem about the sense of wonder of a sensitive child who withdraws from a crowd in search of “the Dream.” It is luscious, slowly burning poetry, counterpointed by the casual repetition of certain words and phrases, including “To be alone in a strange place in spring / shakes the heart.” Immediately, however, we are aware that we are once again in no place: it is “strange,” unknowable, even frightening, and the child needs to withdraw from it. In doing so, “to go away, to be quiet and go away,” the child might be able to enjoy a more intense connection to the world: To hide in a thrust of green leaves with the blood’s leap and retreat warm in you; 43

Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 306. Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1965): 129. 45 To adapt Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 306. 46 Judith Wright, Collected Poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994): 34. 44

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burning, going and returning like a thrust of green leaves out of your eyes. . .

It is here, in the solitude of the lone being, that the mythic pattern of life is revealed, and that its symbols reveal their meanings: Spring is always the red tower of the may-tree, alive, shaken with bees, smelling of wild honey, and the blood a moving tree of may; like a symbol for meaning; like time’s recurrent morning that breaks and beckons, changes and eludes, that is gone away; that is never gone away.

Life forms are eternally recurrent, but are nevertheless delimited by the flux of cycles of growth and decay; the beauty of this poem is that it echoes the recurrence structurally. Still, as we are swept up by it, we need to keep in mind that the poem charts an arc that is central to Wright’s problematical position as a post-colonial poet. For example, the use of the words “always” and “never” in the stanza above signals the presence of fundamental axioms: they arise from observation of a particular ecosystem, but they could be said anywhere, or in any place. These axioms are the things that are “never gone away,” rather than the places they have subsumed. Wright has produced for herself, in the image of the child, an ideal form which cannot exist in any real location. Rather, the poem is about the withdrawal from location in order to rejoice in the simplicity of the singular, the eternal, and the serene. Paralleling contemporary, popular interpretations of quantum physics, McKinney argued that the rich, conceptual world of language could not be traced finally to any provably independent or objective world outside our perceptions. Language was an emergent, complex system, in which it was impossible to explain the world by referring only to one’s individual sensations. The ‘emptiness’ of modern language, which had no apparent roots in the world, had led to scepticism regarding the reality of a shared meaning or world-view. For the modern subject, then, the individual’s experience was the sole truth. Wright and McKinney both argued that this despairing sense of meaningless was leading people so frequently into violent conflict.47 Too often, however, 47

Meredith McKinney, “Memoir of Jack and Judith,” in The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, ed. Patricia Clarke & Meredith McKinney (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2004): 7.

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Wright’s desire is to retreat into this very individual experience. A poem like “The Child” actually romanticizes the value of an individual response to the world, only compounding McKinney’s dilemma yet further. Furthermore, Wright’s children tend to have a symbolic, rather than a personal, status; they are not only individuals, therefore, but abstracted or universal individuals, removed entirely from the flesh. This relates to a common criticism of what is otherwise Wright’s most sensual and positive collection of poems, Woman to Man – that it is not sensual enough. The title poem, wrote Elizabeth Lawson, evades too much of the sexuality of its subject, opting instead for a safer, more abstract realm of signification. Consequently, the woman becomes romanticized and mysticized, compromising the poem’s ability to embrace another living, fleshly being.48 Wright’s desire for an originary innocence, for a return to unity with the world, is the ontological ground of creation and inspiration for the Romantic poet.49 The desire reveals itself in many of her letters throughout her career. Writing about the illuminating nature of a child’s perception, Wright says that it makes you see “how sophisticated your own way of looking really is”: what seems the obvious way of seeing something is often really a most complex and difficult and artificial one. I suppose that is what teaching really is: imposing an artificial way of seeing on a primitive one. I can remember myself a time when the world was completely animistic to me – every object had a kind of emotional connotation; trees had personalities and water was alive and even furniture lived a life of its own. All that projection has to be gradually referred into the child’s own self – it’s a deadening process in many ways.50

Clearly, Wright is mourning the loss of those various, animalistic ‘microfaces’ that abound in the world, watching them subsumed by the modernist self. Yet she is also implying that the loss takes place inevitably, rather than as part of a modern process of homogenization and erasure. The Romantic poet believes that words “originate out of nothing” because they cannot have anything to do with the ‘primitive’ animism of a natural world.51 If language is not engaged, along with the rest of the world, in continual production, but is 48

In Walker, Flame and Shadow, 41. Kane, Australian Poetry, 25. 50 With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke & Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006): 114. (My emphasis.) 51 In Kane, Australian Poetry, 26. 49

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instead the result of a “deadening process” which distances the human from the world, then the poet must exist in this same state of disenchantment. Here, no amount of singing will reconstruct the bridge she believes she once enjoyed to other things. Trapped in language, Wright is forever removed from the pure moment of beginning, child-like in its innocence, unhindered by the weight of her speech. “The Child” is a withdrawal into an abstracted solitude.52 If she continues to feel encased in a cold, objective language, and if a return to the child is simply the creation of an ideal image or form, then where might the poet go from here? The answer lies in complete transcendence. As Wright becomes increasingly concerned with what she thinks is the impersonality and cruelty of nature, many of her poems go beyond a desire for immersion in nature, the driving force behind so much of her earlier poetry, to search for an ideal dimension which transcends the natural world. Again, this is a retreat we see taking place: from the material world to a safer and more stable world of ideal forms. Early poems like “The Child” anticipate a later group of poems which deal with the progression towards complete individuation, where the goal is now psychic or spiritual unity, rather than unity with the environment. This accompanies a movement towards a wholly symbolist mode, the landscape of which is either thoroughly transcendent or located entirely within the speaker’s psyche.53 Despite the glorious organicism proposed in Woman to Man, the human mind and the world of nature are to become separate, closed systems and, no matter the intensity of love with which an individual observes the non-human world, this world will remain essentially removed from her advances. Described by Shirley Walker as an “increasing resentment of natural processes,” the movement from the immanent to the ideal culminates in an open confrontation with the cruelty and impersonality of nature. This defining thread in Wright’s work (spread across a number of poems in collections from the 1950s and 1960s) is like an intense meta-state, which eventually bifurcates into two distinct modes, each of which is weaker, and sapped of the energy and vigour of the earlier poetry. There are the poems of a return to a momentary association with nature, such as many of those in 52

Furthermore, romanticization of the innocence of childhood dovetails disturbingly comfortably with early-modern theories of evolution, which conceive of indigenous people as children. Children are not real people engaging with the world, but need to be cherished, protected, or cared for. 53 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 145.

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Birds (1962). Then we see poems such as “The Lake” and “Interplay,” which continue to reveal Wright’s suspicion of negative spaces, and a certain diffidence about her ability to be truly part of the world in which she finds them. The high hopes Wright has for her poetry in her earlier years – that it would help reconcile the gap between human society and the wider world – is short-lived. When it is clear to her that her poems were achieving no such thing on any large scale, she becomes disillusioned with her project – not because of the poetry itself, but because of its poor public reception. She was famous in literary circles but, like most Australian poets, Wright suffered from near-anonymity in broader social contexts. She writes often of this problem, too, as in this letter from 1989: I’m not writing poetry now, since what I have to do is push my barrows, hoping that one at least will get unloaded in the right place, and very few people read poetry and even less know what it’s about now. . . poetry has to show a way down, into, back and beyond or it’s no poetry. But at a time when none of us want to look at the reality of ourselves, such poetry is not welcome to anyone.54

While Wright would turn frequently to writing prose (such as memoir and essay) in order to reach wider audiences, it is as if her poetry enters everfurther into a self-enclosed system. Prose, instrumental, analytical, and what Octavio Paz argues is “offspring of thought’s distrust of the natural tendencies of language,”55 is favoured over the poem’s song. The poet’s increasing suspicion of the world’s processes leads her to become increasingly focused on her interior. Meanwhile, diminishing public support for her poetry leads her to move the focus of her lyric yet further inwards. As her perception goes inwards it also rises upwards, towards a transcendent region where relationships with the concrete and the ecological are ignored in favour of a Platonic region beyond the stars. Indeed, as she descends into deafness in late age, the public’s silence becomes the world’s silence in her lyric. Conversely, Neruda, whose poetry enjoys sustained critical, popular, and political attention for almost his entire career, can decide to become, at what was perhaps the height of his fame, “the invisible man’ (another kind of uni-

54

In With Love and Fury, ed. Clarke & McKinney, 443. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem; Poetic Revelation; Poetry and History, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms (El arco y la lira: la revelación poética, poesía e historia, 1956, rev. 1967; tr. 1973; Austin: U of Texas P , 1987): 57. 55

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versal individual), to whom everyone spoke and through whom everyone would live: For my life, give me all lives, give me all the pain of all the world, I will transform it into hope.

For Neruda, unlike Wright, language could be a tremendously productive force, a kind of catalyst for transferring potential into reality: my song reunites them: the song of the invisible man who sings with all men.56

On the other hand, as Wright feels ever more keenly the waning support of an audience, she seems to lose faith in her ability to speak for, or through, the public. This, writes Mead, “is the real pathos of Wright’s career,” that she suffered the increasing marginalization and institutionalization of an art-form which had been, until the mid-century, “an idealist art with an aura of social power.”57 Neruda, as we will see in the following chapter, was to suffer no such thing. Nevertheless, a kind of demiurgic power continues to reside in Wright’s Word. Because her reality is itself a linguistic creation, her language marks the emergence of a world of verbal forms from an undifferentiated flux of becoming.58 Apart from some moments in Woman to Man, however, there never seems to be a suggestion that language could be part of this flux. In “The Pool and the Star” (from The Gateway, 1953), it is telling that the speaker imagines herself as a pool (still) rather than as a river (moving): Let me be the most clear and most tender; let no wind break my perfection. Let the stream of my life run muted, and a pure sleep unbar my every depth and secret.59 56

From “El Hombre Invisible,” in Pablo Neruda, Odas elementales (2005; Santiago: Pehuén, 2008): 17. 57 Mead, Networked Language, 330. 58 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 125. 59 Wright, Selected Poems, 73.

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A watertight connection with the transcendent sign of the star can only be achieved if the poet ceases to move. When she stills and opens herself completely and transparently, her transcendence will occur; if the star is the sign of pure meaning, then as a word it must represent a static, unalterable Truth. Otherwise, Wright sees no further relationship between the sign and the world. Rather than acknowledging its capacity to adjust organically to situations over time, as her contemporary, the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, argued that it could,60 for Wright language has become crystallized, fixed.61 There is an insurmountable division placed between language and world, therefore, neglecting the fact that words respond to, and quite often come from, the places in which they are used. Language, for Wright, is the empty, abstract labelling system of the modern, devoid of non-discursive or pre-linguistic ancestry. However, a poem like “Gum-Trees Stripping” (from The Two Fires) is a plea for a re-entry of sorts, back into a fresh, pre-verbal cognition, ignoring the abstraction of the word for the uniqueness of the object.62 Yet the poem relies, nevertheless, on a division between the word and its object. “GumTrees” is entirely musical, replete with rhyme and alliteration, and short, energetic lines, but it is also entirely abstract. The poem is not about any tree in particular, but about some gum trees, somewhere. So the poem sings an abstraction into being, and then mourns the fact that this abstraction exists. The relationship between seeing and speaking is broken; the Deleuzo-Guattarian “central computing eye” achieves complete primacy: [ . . . ] wisdom lies outside the word in the earlier answer of the eyes.63

In effect, Wright is proposing here that the poem, as an act of speaking, is already separate from any real truth about the word from the moment of its beginning; it is as if the poet has defeated herself. Yet, as the poet and critic Gig Ryan points out, a “desire for the ‘wisdom’ of silence is a conservative and passive stance, condemning one surely to thoughtlessness.”64 What this 60

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: the revolution in modern science (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 119. 61 See, for example, Judith Wright, Because I Was Invited (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1975): 169. 62 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 156. 63 Wright, Selected Poems, 100. 64 Ryan, “Uncertain Possession: The Politics and Poetry of Judith Wright,” 31.

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implies about postcolonial Australian poetics is even more unsettling, if we consider what lies at the basis of the ontology. Wright is proposing a disconnection between word and world, and a concomitant failure of all things written, regardless of their potential. If she knows that language is failing, then by implication she is privy to something that language is not. She must be somewhere between ‘the world’ and ‘language’, then, in a position of quite tremendous privilege, where she can mediate between the Truth and those who are otherwise ‘lost’ in the generalities of language. But where could she be, in such an enormous country patterned with hundreds of different indigenous and non-indigenous languages, and countless human and non-human ways of being in the world? Wright is a traditional poet, both stylistically and in the sense that she believes that poetry is the preserver and renewing source of humane values. The nineteenth-century idea of the poet as priest and prophet lingers in her role as spokesman for the emotional lives of her people; it is a kind of bardic role.65

For Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin was the archetype of the poet as priest or prophet. Hölderlin cast himself into the ‘Between’, between the gods and his fellow mortals, naming the “holy,” or giving worldly weight to what he was shown by the gods.66 He spoke to mortals on behalf of the gods, granting them a sense of the divine.67 Wright’s own ‘Between’ is brought into sharp relief in a poem like “The Encounter,” from The Other Half of 1966. The speaker’s position, common to numerous poems, is that of a kind of Orphic seer between the “Lord” and everything else: Lord, how the creatures bully me! Stroke me, the cat says. My vibrant velvet lit with eyes asks you to stroke it. Look at me, says the horse – my arches of suave muscle,

65

McKernan, A Question of Commitment, 155. Werner Brock, “An Account of ‘The Four Essays’,” in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949): 170–71. 67 Brock, “An Account of ‘The Four Essays’,” 196. 66

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my round, kind eye, my stride and speed ask you to fill their need.68

Once again, the question of locality has been evaded in this poem. In addition, we should note that, were the poem addressing a particular cat, one might see more clearly a process of language interacting with things in the world. General concepts like ‘the horse’ and ‘the cat’, however, say little about particular objects themselves. This is congruent with the poem’s content, too, in which creatures cannot “know [their] beauty” until the speaker has interpreted them “in god-made words.” It is their rising into language, that is, which grants them Being, rather than any non-discursive looking and sensing that is going on already between the speaker and the creatures alike. The final line almost gasps with exasperation: Lord, how the earth and the creatures look at me.

Clearly, her power to name things does not imply that she is herself a demiurge. Rather, the poet needs help from God, who in turn does not seem to respond very frequently to her calls. So she is distanced from Him. She is speaking to us, too, and we might speak back to her (along with the cat and the horse). The poem gathers us together – “men, plants and birds” – yet she is the one who steps out from the group to speak to the Lord. By addressing this “Lord’, Wright, like Heidegger’s Hölderlin, has assumed a position between the divine and other mortals. This site of mediation certainly echoes bardic and shamanic roles, but the power Wright grants herself is markedly different from the localized powers of an indigenous shaman. For example, T.G.H. Strehlow observes that, among the Aranda people, medicine men utter spells only on the exact sites where they first proved their power.69 Like the shaman, Wright is necessarily of “a particular segment” of land herself, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, yet from the local she abstracts pure, static ideals in a quest for universality. As in the poem of the same name, Wright’s “Vision”70 is not about the reception of light-waves on the retina. It is a rejection of such sense, singing instead of “He who once saw that world beyond the world.” In other words, “Vision” is about being visionary: the poem’s central computing eye has a clear, uninterrupted sight 68 69

Wright, Collected Poems, 220. T.G.H. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971):

336. 70

Wright, Selected Poems, 154.

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of the Truth that “the human eye was meant to see.” This is the resolute clarity of the high-modernist optic; the innumerable ‘microheads’ and ‘animal facializations’ of complex, Aboriginal landscapes are flattened beneath lines of liturgical stanzas. Wright’s vision is an escape from matter, which constitutes part of what Shirley Walker terms Wright’s “movement away from commitment to and unity with the natural world.”71

Two Dreamtimes? In postcolonial contexts, one’s vision of the Truth can only extend so far before the non-indigenous poet begins to participate in further acts of colonization. Keeping this in mind, it is appropriate that we turn to “Two Dreamtimes,” a poem which Wright dedicated to Oodgeroo and published in her 1973 collection, Alive.72 It is surely one of the most important attempts to acknowledge Aboriginal history, and settler guilt, in non-Aboriginal Australian poetry. Yet the very title of the poem is enormously problematical, conflating two remarkably different historical traditions in a genetically similar nomenclature, ‘Dreamtime’ (which itself is by no means an uncontested translation this vital component of Aboriginal thought). I don’t wish to dismiss the poem on this basis, however. It is exemplary as a gift from a settler to an Aboriginal Australian, born of a friendship between Wright and Oodgeroo which, according to Jennifer Jones, “modelled a foundation for successful cross-cultural collaborations.” Indeed, Oodgeroo reportedly was so moved by the poem that she was unable to read it aloud for months.73 But it is right here, beside this figure of a silent Oodgeroo, that we need to begin our criticism. “Two Dreamtimes” begins as follows: Kathy my sister with the torn heart, I don’t know how to thank you for your dreamtime stories of joy and grief written on paperbark.

Immediately, Wright constructs a rigid subject-position which acts very much like a single point of accumulation into which all other information, such as

71

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 149. Wright, Collected Poems, 315–18. Wright refers to Oodgeroo as ‘Kathy’ (as in Kath Walker) throughout the poem. 73 Jones, “Why Weren't We Listening: Oodgeroo and Judith Wright,” 47. 72

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Oodgeroo’s stories, flows. For Oodgeroo has written and published countless stories and poems, but we don’t see or hear of them here; instead, they are subsumed under a single sentence, with the aid of the half-rhyme of “heart” and “paperbark.” It is telling, too, that the stories are written on paperbark. Oodgeroo’s collections of poetry and prose were pioneer events in modern Aboriginal publishing, but here her writing practice gets associated with a traditional, ‘nature’-themed archetype. Of more significance is what the halfrhyme does to the stanza as a whole: it collates these difficult and provocative associations and ties them together with the inevitability of rhythm. “You,” Wright says to Oodgeroo in the second stanza, “were one of the dark children,” an unknown community with which the poet was not allowed to play as a child (suddenly, the ‘innocence’ of childhood loses something of its allure). This opening sequence develops a dense, magnetic position for the speaker, while also hinting at a process in which Oodgeroo’s own position will be dissolved into a larger notion of a generalized Aboriginality. The third stanza of the poem further compounds the problem: So it was late I met you, late I began to know they hadn’t told me the land I loved was taken out of your hands.

Wright, as we know, grew up in New England, New South Wales. Oodgeroo, however, was of the Noonuccal tribe on North Stradbroke Island (close to Brisbane), Queensland. Clearly, then, “the land” Wright loved was not Oodgeroo’s country, and it wasn’t taken out of Oodgeroo’s hands. So “the land” could refer to the entire continent, in which case Oodgeroo has become representative of a generalized concept of dispossessed Indigenous Australians. On the other hand, “the land” could indeed refer to New England, which would mean that Wright has displaced Oodgeroo from her traditional country so that she can accept Wright’s apology for the robbery of another one. In both cases, Oodgeroo assumes a role as representative of Aboriginal cultures, in whose presence Wright can vent her guilt and shame: you brought me to you some of the way and came the rest to meet me, over the desert of red sand came from your lost country to where I stand with all my fathers, their guilt and righteousness.

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The final two lines of this passage reveal how Wright has homogenized settlers as well as Aboriginal people, setting up an easily mediated binary. To Oodgeroo she then says, “We too have lost our dreaming.” Again, radically different approaches to land and history are conflated within a single phrase, as if settler notions of past and future could indeed be equated with The Dreaming. What the phrase also does, however, is recall the much earlier attitude of a poem like “Bora Ring.” While Wright might reasonably feel that her own people have lost something very important as a result of their colonization of the continent, here she also talks of what Oodgeroo’s people have lost, with “their dreaming buried” (be they Aboriginal people, or of the Noonuccal tribe). As in “Bora Ring,” through Wright’s voice the past is assigned forever to the past. With pasts effectively “buried,” then, Wright may now perform a most remarkable manoeuvre. The manoeuvre is, as we will see in the next chapter, strikingly similar to one Neruda employs in “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”: a complete compression of histories, places, and contested identities: If we are sisters, it’s in this – our grief for a lost country, the place we dreamed long ago, poisoned now and crumbling.

This is the boldest moment of Wright’s reconciliatory gesture, granting herself and Oodgeroo a genealogical relation based on the assumption of a stable, non-variable notion of “a lost country” and a mutual sense of grief for it. Histories are assimilated, too, into a vague, culturally non-specific idea of “long ago.” For Wright, as we already know, the word is abstracted from local conditions, allowing it to scan multiple locations: I mourn it as you mourn the ripped length of the island beaches, the drained paperbark swamps.

Wright’s childhood in an “easy Eden-dreamtime” makes her Oodgeroo’s “shadow-sister.” Yet this hybrid of Aboriginal and Judaeo-Christian mythologies subtly negates the historicity of the land in which she grew up: the word “Eden’ suggests she was there at the very beginning, as was Oodgeroo (neither of which is the case). Having come supposedly from the same point, it is as if Oodgeroo and Wright simply branched off on different trajectories: . . . we are grown to a changed world: over the drinks at night

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we can exchange our separate griefs, but yours and mine are different.

Now, after expressing her profound guilt and sorrow for the dispossession of Oodgeroo and her people, Wright then seems to want to become one of them, and to bear the burden of their problems. This, however, also needs to take place within a particular hierarchical framework, which reflects Wright’s presence in the poem as the privileged, colonial subject: Raped by rum and an alien law, progress and economics, are you and I and a once-loved land peopled by tribes and trees. . .

It is the three of them, all suffering equally, each as abstracted as the other – the ‘I’, the ‘you’ and the ‘land’ – which occupy one plane. Below this plane are all the other things, the “tribes and trees,” which would otherwise complicate Wright’s compression and simplification of settler and Indigenous relationships with land and history. The simplification relies on profound abstractions which allow the poem to proceed at such a measured, organized pace: there are indeed multiple categories (more than one), but the multiple is not continually multiplied; instead, it is reduced to two (as in “Two Dreamtimes”) or, perhaps, three (however, “a once-loved land” is only connected to “I” and “you” by virtue of the pause at the end of the line; grammatically, it remains part of the ‘lower’ line of “land”; “people”; “trees”). Notions of genealogy and gender, however, allow Wright to cement the primary relationship – of her and Oodgeroo – prior to all else. In Oodgeroo’s vision of an “integrated” society, collectives may interact and associate with one another on equal terms, but they do not necessarily all dissolve into one, uniform mass. The choice of who might and might not integrate remains with Aboriginal people, rather than being determined by topdown reform.74 Wright seems to be aware of this, too. “The knife’s between us,” she tells her friend towards the end of the poem, as if to sever that relationship she earlier proclaimed had united them:

74

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, “From ‘Speech Launching the Petition of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement’ ” (1962), in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 40–41.

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The knife’s between us. I turn it round, the handle to your side, the weapon made from your country’s bones. I have no right to take it.

Yet we might also assume that in a properly integrated society all ethnicities have equal measures of power. Here, however, it is Wright who decides who has the right to use the knife: she is the one who turns the handle around so that Oodgeroo might take it. The power to affect justice and to determine Truth, in other words, remains with her. While she knows that she has “no right” to take the knife, certainly she is still able to do so. Then, however, it is as if Oodgeroo’s capacity to take action is no longer relevant, and the blade was never used, for all is subsumed under Wright’s larger narrative about the decaying of the flesh: But both of us die as our dreamtime dies. I don’t know what to give you for your gay stories, your sad eyes, but that, and a poem, sister.

Oodgeroo has become her sister again; furthermore, the two dreamtimes have been reduced to “our dreamtime” (my emphasis). Wright is unable to imagine any kind of future; instead, she withdraws from time so that she can mourn the absence of hope. As the simplifying fiction of the modernist optic transformed the horror of massacre into the inevitability of death in “Nigger’s Leap,” Oodgeroo’s agency and difference are here dissolved by death’s unstoppable tide. The failure of reconciliation and, with it, the destruction of the possibility for a coherent diversity, seems to be inevitable; the poem ends with the same, haunting sense of sadness as “Bora Ring.” The gift of a poem is something of a poisoned chalice, too: for Wright, after all, language is a negation of real difference and, therefore, a negation of the world itself. Like the knife, Wright’s poem is a deadly instrument; neither knife nor poem will elicit something of the joy required to initiate reconciliatory dialogue. On the other hand, “affection for a material world experienced as vital and alive”75 might have inspired Wright to engage with Oodgeroo poetically, to recognize her friend’s own undeniable vitality. Thus, by framing Oodgeroo as an empty sign, as opposed to a person with potential, Wright neglects the productive capacity of the middle, where a becoming 75

Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” 363.

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might have taken place between Oodgeroo and herself. The enormous value of this poem is that is encourages us, in our search for alternatives, to turn to this productive region of the in-between.

Lyrical Authority A major problem in “Two Dreamtimes’ is its simplistic lyrical structure, which institutes an arbitrary, tripartite division between the poem’s component parts: the poet’s ‘I’ looks at the Aboriginal Woman, and then at the Land around the Aboriginal Woman, and mourns their apparent fragmentation. Consequently, any discussion of this poem and, indeed, of Wright’s work in general must lead us to a discussion of her poetic practice, and of what sorts of other poetic practices might better engage with some of the most pressing issues of a postcolonial poetics. As I have intimated on a number of occasions, Wright’s poetry is problematical both because it overlooks the continuation of Aboriginal Australia into the present moment and because, in reaching for the universal, it ignores the specificities and complexities of Australian ecologies. This is linked to a fundamental problem with the lyric form as she inherited it: its reliance on a single, discrete voice or authority. Even in Wright’s most ambitious moments, her poems return to abstracted notions of a subject separate from things, of someone who is neither anonymous enough to be multiple nor particular enough to be individual. It is true that in certain, later poems, like “Habitat,”76 or in many poems from Woman to Man, the self is traced laterally into connections with larger cycles of growth and decay, but otherwise the general trend in Wright’s poetry is of the self’s gradual retreat from the material world. The retreat is not an uninterrupted process by any means, full as it is with various halts and blockages. Indeed, Mead praises “Habitat” for attempting to deconstruct the “magisterial gaze” of an empowered, European observer in order to “establish a myth of the ‘shared house’ of Australia.” However, as he points out, the original inhabitants of the habitat are nowhere mentioned.77 Just like Neruda’s turn to the particular in Odas elementales, in poems like “Habitat” Wright does sing of the lives of materials – of their diversification into various forms and their eventual decay – and embrace their mutual symbiosis. Nevertheless, “Habitat,” like all of Wright’s poetry, re-

76 77

Wright, Collected Poems, 297. Mead, Networked Language, 328.

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mains mediated by an ‘I’ who sees, speaks for, and ignores others. The lyrical voice remains the mediator of a higher knowledge. At the core of the problem is Wright’s understanding of language as “the final achievement of men as builders of a picture of their world.”78 The modernist undertones here, of construction, framing, and progress, are obvious. For Heidegger, too, language is a not a “tool” at man’s disposal, “rather it is that event which disposes of the supreme possibility of human existence.” It is only language “that affords the very possibility of standing in the openness of the existent. Only where there is language, is there world. . .. ” Yet, where Heidegger’s linguistic open provides us with a highly complex, fluctuating world reminiscent of Heisenberg’s quantum universe – a “perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility, but also of commotion and arbitrariness, of decay and confusion”79 – Wright’s overlooks such vibrations and uncertainties. For her, the “foggy” language world is defined precisely by its capacity not to evolve, of always resting, therefore, on the periphery of a deeper, more essential truth.80 The crucial purpose of Wright’s poetry was to resist the threat of change, to maintain “a primordial home for the self, for partnerships and for community in language.”81 In this home the poet was to attend, as Wright herself put it, to “the responsibilities of our solitary selfhood.”82 Yet Wright’s quiet house of poetry becomes a haven for ‘over-consciousness’, where access to the outside world is denied by a series of axioms about the differences between language and reality. Sitting at the intersection of Romanticism and modernism, Wright’s poetry leads to “a Hamlet-like incapacity for action.”83 A Romantic also in her desire to explore the intersections between philosophical and poetic discourses, Wright encounters difficulties negotiating the distinct requirements of these forms of thought. In recent decades, Australian poets such as Martin Harrison and Robert Gray have used more relaxed and conversational rhythms in order to enable a voice both lyrical and philosophical. For Wright, however, her adherence to the shorter feet of the English

78

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 125. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, tr. Douglas Scott, R.F.C. Hull & Alan Crick (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949): 276. 80 For example, see “For Precision,” in Wright, Selected Poems, 97. 81 Mead, Networked Language, 311. 82 Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 128. 83 To adapt Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 302. 79

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tradition means that a heavy philosophical freight sometimes overwhelms the music of her lyric. It is also difficult for her to find objective correlates for powerful, sensuous experiences, which must be subject simultaneously to her intellectual analyses.84 This can result in a particularly complicated version of Hartman’s ‘over-consciousness’: in poems like “Gum-Trees Stripping,” the poet attempts to watch herself looking at the world at the same time as registering her immediate response to the world and her interpretation of the response. How this overloading leads to excessive strain on the lyrical structure is best shown by Mead’s reading of “The Moving Image.” Mead reveals tensions in Wright’s early poem that will never be properly resolved in her poetics, despite her constant efforts. The poem enacts, he says, “a series of simultaneous contradictions:” an attempted reterritorialisation of an elaborate (English) formal pattern within an Australian context; between a modernist ‘content’ of the wasteland of contemporary life and an ecstatic, lyric celebration of her love; between its voicing of the (present) lyric self and a dramatisation of a figure from a (historical) social dislocation; between its material fragmentariness and a thematic of a totality of human history.85

These poetics and thematic contradictions strain under her “explosively energetic expression,” even causing the third part of the poem to be blown “off into outer space” (it was never republished in selected or collected editions of her poetry).86 While the allegory of the poem – a myth about national origins – will be discarded, Wright will never find a satisfactory solution to the disturbing politics of form that it inaugurates; the Romantic ‘I’ will continue to emerge nostalgically as an attempt to recover an essential simplicity of a self. In a lyric poem, writes Hartman, “it is clearly not the first-person form that moves us (the poem need not be in the first person) but rather the I toward which that I reaches.”87 This ‘reaching’ defines her entire oeuvre. If, for a poet like Wright, language “poses a threat to the quality, the ‘thisness’ of nature, for it is forever subsuming the particular and the unique under

84

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 15. Mead, Networked Language, 306. 86 Networked Language, 307. 87 Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 304. 85

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the universal and the abstract,”88 then the task for the postcolonial poet would be to destabilize language. Destabilization would liberate from within language those unused, dormant energies that would rupture its structures, allowing it to adapt more rapidly to local conditions. Using certain practices of expression – including a-grammatical phrasing, linguistic gestures like halfformed words or punctuation marks, and non-verbal expressions – that are capable of actualizing the moment in which language emerges from the world, one might catch “expression in the forming”: to catch expression in the forming requires allying with forces of systematic deformation. It takes stretching and twisting: pain. The agrammatical experiment is a cry of expression.89

On the other hand, we have seen that lyrical structures can drastically limit the energetic and haphazard nature of organic/linguistic creation. As a poetics, then, Wright’s oeuvre is a paradoxical circumstance which bedevils much Australian poetry to this day: a distinctly ‘conservative progressivism’, or the articulation of progressive politics within conservative, traditional structures. This implies a dislocation of expression from content, allowing the latter to continue changing without greatly influencing the former. It translates, as it does in Wright’s poetry, to a speaking about Australia without ever trying to speak from or of it, the separation inherent in which produces the various frustrations and negations that we have seen in the poems of this chapter. Finally, although it may appear that I have done so, I don’t wish to dismiss Wright’s tremendous achievements. The course I have mapped out here is only one of many; it serves the purposes of my argument but does not paint a complete portrait of the poet. Wright remains one of the most widely read Australian poets, and an inspiration for national conservation movements. It is largely because of her own, life-long involvement with questions about the poetics of colonization and environment that we are able to follow the trail she left behind. Nevertheless, it is precisely because of her importance and influence that we must direct our strongest critical attention towards her. Doing so will allow us to realize that there exist other possibilities for the future of

88

Walker, Flame and Shadow, 127. Brian Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): xxiii. 89

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postcolonial poetics that are less beholden to the neo-Romantic tradition of which she was a part. We may keep moving, then, now that Wright has provided us with such an outstanding demonstration of what we need write no longer.

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3 P

Pablo Neruda and Complex Topography

ABLO

NERUDA’S CANTO

GENERAL

was first published in Mexico in

1950. It is the song of a continent, written to bring a new kind of Amer-

ica into being. Arguably the epitome of the Nerudian oeuvre, the book attempts to produce an exuberant, extraordinary fertility. In Neruda’s own words, it is a poem that emerges from a “secret womb” and flows, fertilizing and singing. It kindles with its swelling waters, it works at milling flour, tanning hides, cutting wood, giving light to cities. It is useful, and awakens to find banners along its banks: festivals are celebrated beside the singing water.1

Neruda’s inexhaustible belief in the power of his poetry, in its ability to propose and develop new modes of being, contrasts starkly with Wright’s own. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, understanding the difference between the two poets’ public receptions is essential to understanding some of the differences between the trajectories of their poetries. In Neruda, we have a poet who feels cherished by his reading public. “My contact with the masses makes me think,” he was to say in an interview in 1965, “that some of the people most receptive to my poetry are the Chilean people [. .. ]. In few countries in the world is a poet listened to with so much attention and dignity as in our small country.”2 Indeed, by the 1960s Neruda was a national and international icon. Although he had been famous in Chile from his late teens, now his poems were translated into dozens of languages and received by millions of readers. To this day, he remains one of the most widely translated poets in history. Next to Neruda’s, then, Wright’s public presence is distinctively 1

Neruda, in “Introduction” to The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, ed. Ilan Stavans (2003; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005): xxxvi. 2 In Sara Vial, “Neruda viaja a Inglaterra (o entrevista con terremoto),” Atenea 489 (2004): 133.

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paler. A growing scepticism about the power of poetry to affect change in those areas of the world she thought most important led Wright to channel her energy into other projects. Neruda, by contrast, was never forced to confront questions about the necessity of poetry, or about its relevance in particular social contexts. Consequently, his singing could continue unhindered. In this chapter I will discuss what, precisely, is so problematical about Neruda’s lack of restraint. For this very bounty of optimistic energy is what pushes the Nerudian voice to roll blindly into places where it otherwise might have travelled with greater caution (or might not have travelled at all). As his career progresses, Neruda will come to believe that he, via his language, can touch everything. As a result, where a feature of Wright’s poetics is the problematical relationship between language and the wider world, for Neruda this question is absorbed into a broader one having to do with his body’s problematical relationship to Chile, particularly in his constant re-imagining of his location. For Neruda, language is not an abstract visual cipher, but emerges in the corporeality of his being. The nature of Nerudian language precludes the distance that art, as considered in Western terms, assumes between speaker and audience, signified and signifier, and even man and nature.3 The poetic word is, above all, the spoken word, which is “born in the blood” and takes “flight through the lips and mouth,” as he writes in “La palabra” (the word).4 Yet this fleshy, earthy aspect of Neruda is complicated by his disregard for the physical limits imposed by such corporeality. For there are many, many Nerudas: the natural, the erotic, the nationalist, the political, the solitary, and the personal; of his poetic personae he would confess, in his 1958 volume Estravagario: “We are many.”5 He seemed to encourage this multiplicity internationally, too, allowing various translators to work on the same poem, at times even simultaneously.6 By so readily assuming an organic relationship with the wider world, therefore, we will see that Neruda’s poetic language actually becomes a kind of invasive species. Writing from so many places at once, Nerudian colonization is often overwhelming. a 3

James Nolan, Poet-Chief: The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P , 1994): 71. 4 In Nolan, Poet-Chief, 67–68. 5 In Nolan, Poet-Chief, 32. 6 “Introduction” to The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, ed. Stavans, xxxviii.

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A Residence in the Earth Before looking at the problems of Neruda’s boundless organicism in Canto general, it is necessary to begin by isolating its emergent properties in some of the poems from Residencia en la tierra (‘residence on earth’), Neruda’s most highly regarded collection. Residencia en la tierra is composed of three separately published books, Residencia I (1933), Residencia I I (1935) and Tercera residencia (1947). Slightly preceding the publication of Wright’s first book, most of the first Residencias (I and I I ) was written during Neruda’s time of ‘exile’ in South-East Asia, where he was sent as a Chilean diplomat. Often working alone in the office, and with little official work to attend to, removed entirely from his language and the Chilean landscape, Neruda was left to plunge into fecund, tropical, and decidedly alien environments. During this time he was profoundly influenced by such English-language writers as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, whose post-utopian visions seemed to complement the life around him.7 In Canto general, he would write that his poems of this period were full of . . . dreams dissolved by implacable acids, permanences in exiled waters, in silences from which bitter roots rose forth like tree trunks burned in the forest.8

From a young age, Neruda yearned for contact with other people and things; in this period of ‘exile’, however, where this is not possible, his ‘social energy’ builds up tremendous pressure and finds only momentary release in profoundly “bitter roots”: the most dense, most powerful poems of Neruda’s oeuvre. While critics have often pointed to the closing stages of Tercera residencia, or the subsequent Canto general, as the initial indication of Neruda’s rejection of ‘elitist’ or ‘difficult’ modes of poetry, there is also a certain democracy inherent in his poetry prior to this ‘change’ as well. Indeed, in some ways the earlier Residencia poems offer a more inclusive, more democratic poetics than the public poetry that was to follow. From Veinte poemas (1924) onwards, writes the Latin American literary scholar Jean Franco, Neruda 7

Vial, “Neruda viaja a Inglaterra (o entrevista con terremoto),” 131. Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “X I I . The Rivers of Song, ii: To Rafael Alberti (Puerto Santa María, Spain),” 307. 8

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develops a structure of poetic associations that spread outwards like “ripples of imagery”: Of distances accomplished, of faithless resentments, of hereditary hopes mixed with shadow, of slashingly sweet attendances and days of transparent vein and floral statue, what subsists in my scanty end, in my feeble product?9

It is up to the reader to form associations between the phrases, allowing their effects to accumulate; we have the task of filling in what are, in essence, ‘the blanks’.10 Neruda spoke of Residencia en la tierra as “a pile of verses of great monotony, almost ritualistic, with mystery and suffering like the old poets used to compose.”11 The reference to ritual here is extremely important. As Franco foregrounded, the Residencia poems require a measure of commitment on behalf of an audience in order to ‘complete’ the poems. This is a spreading out or dispersal of the discrete moment of the poem into the wider environment in which it might be read.12 The strength of such work, then, resides partly in the fact that it exploits the potential for language to cross from subject to subject, like the “old [oral] poets,” and to re-energize and reconfigure itself at each new juncture. As a poetics, it takes full advantage of the capacity of language to change, and to transfer from body to body, rather than to petrify; it “implicitly presupposes a continuum of variation between and across thresholds of meaning.”13 A source for the incredible power of many of the Residencia poems is their pulsing intonations – what Angus Fletcher would term their wave-like qualities. The poems, like the seething, tropical worlds in which many were written, undulate with a complexity akin to chaos. The only way, Neruda believed, for such vertiginous flux to be categorized would be by creating the 9

From “Diurno doliente”/“Daily Mourner,” in Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth, tr. Donald D. Walsh (Residencia en la tierra, 1933–47; tr. 1973; New York: New Directions, 2004): 41. 10 Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1969): 280. 11 Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 281. 12 The concept of a ‘dispersal’ of the poem will re-emerge in following chapters. In nurlu song-poetry, for example, the emphasis on any one participant is dispersed across a wider ensemble of singers and of country (see Chapter 4 below). 13 Paraphrasing Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 42.

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poetic analogue of flux, with a suspended grammatical order that allows restless images to flow into one another.14 Here, things relate to one another because of their mutual propensity to decay or disintegrate. Waves of rotting grammar ferment and germinate yet more waves. Consider the following section of “Sistema sombrío”: Así, pues, como un vigía tornado insensible y ciego, incrédulo y condenado a un doloroso acecho, frente a la pared en que cada día del tiempo se une, mis rostros diferentes se arriman y encadenan como grandes flores pálidas y pesadas tenazmente substituidas y difuntas. Thus, then, like a lookout turned insensible and blind, incredulous and condemned to a pitiful spying, facing the wall at which each day of time unites, my different faces gather and make chains like great flowers pale and weighty tenaciously replaced and dead.15

Grammatically, “Sistema sombrío” is quite ambiguous. A verb like estoy (I am) or me siento (I feel) might have been placed before “como un vigía. . .. ” However, Franco notes that the omission of such a verb is significant, for, had it been used, it would have suggested a state or a being, “something that halted or appeared to halt the implacable flow of time.”16 In the Residencias, the body’s very expression is overwhelmed by periodic waves of energy: I am securely and eternally surrounded by this great respiratory and entangled forest with huge flowers like mouths and teeth and black roots shaped like fingernails and shoes.17

The body is nothing, in other words, if it is not part of the world’s flux. The porosity of the poet’s body ensures that the reader might take part not only in the stringing-together of images but, in doing so, might give something of his own body to this dynamic environment. The poem permeates the reader, overwhelming him with sensory information as the poet himself is overwhelmed. 14

Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 282. “Sistema sombrío”/“Somber System,” in Neruda, Residence on Earth, 48/49. 16 Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 283. 17 From “Caballero solo”/”Single Gentleman,” in Neruda, Residence on Earth, 71. 15

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“Perhaps,” writes Jim Harrison, “Residence on Earth is one of those very rare poems you must drown in.”18 The “oneiric succession of images” of the first Residencia poems do indeed have an order, but one that is perhaps “more like the order of waves beating on a shore than the order of a construction.”19 Neruda is writing less about these waves of life than he is actually writing in them. Systematic orders of looking and analysing are subversively dismembered, as much as possible, until finally they become phrasal processions of thoughts. Intriguingly, the waves of the Residencia poems, and much of the Canto, too, are dependent on a ceremonial mode of speech also prominent in Walt Whitman’s verse – anaphora. Anaphora is an organizational device that produces an atmosphere of ritual or procession, or “when let loose produces an opposed sense of onrushing elemental force”: Anaphora reinforces belief in a ritualized spell binding poetic rhythm, whose force attains sometimes to religious ecstasy [. . . ] . The technique requires waves of segmented phrases whose repetition builds into pulsations rather than points and predications.20

The power of the anaphoric procession suggests that the poet’s voice has a powerful, orphic quality: words, phrases and even language itself can be moulded by the rhythm of the poem; thus, the poet can bring otherwise disparate elements into the same field. Language is transformed into an openended series that flexibly incorporates new additions, all the while allowing each part to contribute in small ways to the gradually shifting constitution of the larger structure. The following extract from “Caballero solo” provides an excellent example of the Residencia aesthetic: The twilights of the seducer and the nights of the spouses unite like two sheets burying me, and the hours after lunch when the young men students and the young women students and the priests masturbate, and the animals fornicate directly, and the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz angrily, and boy cousins play strangely with their girl cousins,

18

Jim Harrison, “Introduction” to Neruda, Residence on Earth, xiv. Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 283. 20 Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 154–55. 19

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and the doctors look furiously at the husband of the young patient, and the morning hours when the teacher absentmindedly fulfils his conjugal duty and has breakfast. 21

Here, an extended accumulation of phrases of widely varying colours and tones is linked by the thread of ‘and’. What anaphora does in poems like “Caballero solo” is to propose chaos momentarily – by piercing grammar’s skin and allowing the phrases to gush out – before binding chaos with the order of waves. Within waves, energies disperse through space while nevertheless remaining part of a larger rhythmic system or order. Equally important, however, is the way in which such waves blur or smudge together what would otherwise be discrete syntactic units and correspondingly clear images: the rhythm – or the sound – of these poems takes precedence over their visual clarity; the ear comes before the eye. Unlike the problematical positioning of the speaker in many of Wright’s poems, the poet in Residence on Earth does not yet believe that he could ever leave this earth – this is to follow in Canto general. Even so, the most telling of all the relationships between the Residencia poems and Neruda’s later work is found in one of the “Tres cantos materiales” (“Three Material Songs”), from Residencia I I . In these poems, the indefinite waves of the earlier work begin to surge into clearer forms, defining themselves.22 In particular, “Entrada a la madera”23 quite markedly resembles the structure of Canto general’s most famous poetic moment, “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu” (‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’) – the moment to which we in this chapter are inevitably headed. As we will see, “Macchu Picchu” describes a simultaneous rising and falling – the climbing of a mountain and the falling into historical depths – that we can also identify in “Entrada a la madera.” Near the start of “Macchu Picchu” we read: I plunged my sweet and turbulent hand into the genital matrix of the earth.24

21

“Caballero solo”/”Single Gentleman,” in Neruda, Residence on Earth, 71. Eulogio Suárez, Neruda Total (Santiago de Chile: Editorial América Morena, 1994): 64. 23 “Entrada a la madera”/“Entrance to Wood,” in Neruda, Residence on Earth, 154– 57. 24 Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 31; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, ii: If the lofty germ is carried from flower to flower,” 30. 22

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Likewise, at the beginning of “Entrada” we come across: Scarcely with my reason, with my fingers, with slow waters slow inundated, I fall into the realm of the forget-me-nots, [...] I fall into the shadow. . . (155)

Yet, just as the fall in “Macchu Picchu” is succeeded by transcendence on a mountain top, in the earlier poem we find, after the fall: Gentle matter, oh rose of dry wings, in my collapse I climb up your petals [. . . ] in your harsh cathedral I kneel beating my lips with an angel. (155)

These initial similarities between the two poems are, in a way, the most superficial. What is of most crucial importance to us is the way in which these moments of transcendence afford each speaker the most privileged position with which to perceive his surroundings. The over-seeing vision of “Macchu Picchu” is echoed in the following part of “Entrada”: I am the one facing your worldly colour, facing your pale dead swords, facing your united hearts, facing your silent multitude. I am the one facing your wave of dying fragrances, wrapped in autumn and resistance: I am the one undertaking funereal voyage among your yellow scars:. . . (155 / 157)

It is the same ritualistic anaphora, the same rushing, impending force, that here strengthens and emboldens the vision of the ‘I’: the song’s rhythm strengthens the process of individuation; indeed, the repetitions soon come to demand it. While slightly less prominent in “Macchu Picchu,” the very same depth of sound, the intoning, magical incantations, produce similar effects. In each poem, with an ‘I’ acting as an anchor for such powerful rhythms, the similarities are as abundant as they are startling. The references in the extract above to the silent multitudes and to the funereal are echoed clearly in the deathly abyss Neruda comes to in “Macchu Picchu” (“You are no more [. . .] /

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all that you were has fallen”25). To the depths of this abyss he calls, “Rise up with me, American love.”26 He asks the dead to “Come to my heart, to my dawn.”27 Having done so, he tells them, “I’ve come to speak through your dead mouths.”28 Back in “Entrada,” we find that the speaker says, to “the beings asleep in your thick mouth,” “come to me [. . . ] and bind me to your life and to your death” (157). With the same, quasi-orphic energies that the song grants him in “Macchu Picchu,” in “Entrada” Neruda is to sing, “let us make fire, and silence, and sound” (157). Rather than enveloping the poet in a swirling, rhythmic world, as in earlier poems, the anaphoric structure is beginning to isolate him by drawing around him a rapidly thickening border. The similar movements in both of these poems – the movements downwards and upwards – have much to do with Neruda’s complex notion of topography, a notion crucial to a rigorous understanding of Canto general, and foregrounded not only by “Entrada” but also by other Residencia poems from the same period, such as “Estatuto del vino”/“Ordinance of Wine.”29 Constitutive of this structure is an experience of the surface, the depths beneath it, and an aerial view of the entire landscape. The poet will experience intimate contact with the ground: Its feet touch the walls and the tiles with the dampness of drowned tongues. . .

and will have a clear understanding of the historical context of that moment: I know that wine does not flee shouting at the coming of winter. . .

and will then proceed to look skyward: rather it flies above the season, above the winter that has now arrived. . .

25

Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, vii: O remains of a single abyss, shadows of one gorge,” 35. 26 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, viii: Rise up with me, American love,” 36. 27 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, viii: Rise up with me, American love,” 37. 28 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, viii: Rise up to be born with me, my brother,” 41. 29 Neruda, Residence on Earth, 162–69.

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This vision of the sky inevitably translates into an experience of looking from the sky, while still purporting to maintain that original contact with the ground: I see vague dreams, I recognize far away, and I see in front of me. . . (163)

A scene of astonishing compression and perception, Neruda’s complex topography is perhaps the boldest-possible poetic realization of the high-modernist optic. Importantly, the energy required for such incredible geographical gymnastics is always generated by the momentum of the Nerudian song. The song grants Neruda a stage, and allows him to clearly individuate his position with anaphoric repetitions of the ‘I’. The performative, oral features of these poems remind the reader that Neruda was desperate to speak to others and to be heard: Residencia en la tierra is a great plea for company. In the early Residencias, the poet’s high-modernist gymnastics are moderated by an overwhelming sense that the environment is so much larger and more powerful than he is; he is hardly able to define his self apart from anything else, and to speak is actually to express the awesome complexity of a system from which he is inextricable. However, the turn occurs towards the end of Residencia I I : Neruda arrives in Spain, and flourishes in an abundance of political and social energy; the earlier limitations vanish.30 Now the song will impel the poet to continue, and to say more; indeed, as we will see later on, the potential infinity of rhythmic series will propel Neruda to say too much.

General Songs According to Octavio Paz, many of his bardic contemporaries, in an attempt to bridge “the barrier of emptiness that the modern world puts before them,” have tried to seek out what he calls “the lost audience,” or “the people”:

30

Neruda revelled in Spanish literary and political life, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian César Vallejo. As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicized for the first time. The leftist politics of his literary friends influenced his own support for the Republican army.

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But now there are no people: there are organized masses. And so, ‘to go to the people’ means to occupy a place among the ‘organizers’ of the masses. The poet becomes a functionary [. . . ] . The poet has a ‘place’ in society [. . . ] But does poetry?31

Some ten years before Paz published this essay, Neruda returned to Chile after the Spanish Civil War. This freshly inducted Marxist poet came to yearn for an allegiance of collective action with the Latin American earth – an ecocommunism, perhaps – which would engender both topographical beauty and social justice. The result would be Canto general (‘general song/chant’). In the most literal sense, the Canto is a monumental poem: it is a song for the masses, an event. But while Canto general instates the poet as an all-American bard, the one chosen to celebrate the length and breadth of the American continent, it also places tremendous pressures on the poetic imagination. For, just as it proclaims a new, American being, it also questions the roles of ambiguity and difference – of poetry – in this new society. When we think of songs, we think not only of their musicality but also of the ways in which they are performed. After all, songs hardly become songs until they are embodied by a singer and sung; there is a stronger suggestion of verb in the noun ‘song’ than there is in the noun ‘poetry’. The Neruda scholar James Nolan writes that in the Canto, unlike in the traditional European lyric, “the voice is not merely one of several elements subordinated into the functioning of the poem, but alone determines the length and shape of the poem as well as of its lines.” This act of saying is the poetry; the poem is thus a typographical description of the voice. Hence, The actions implied in such [. . . ] Nerudian illocutions as ‘I name,’ ‘I speak,’ ‘I sing,’ ‘I give,’ ‘I celebrate,’ ‘I pronounce,’ and ‘I bequeath’ assume a power of language and authority that are rare outside of religious or legal ceremonies, and are certainly foreign to modern literature. Yet their use is consistent with the empowering sense of language present in oral cultures such as the American Indian.32

For speech to be ceremonial, it requires a ceremonial gathering. Neruda’s most intimate relationship with such a large audience – larger, perhaps, than that of any other poet’s in history – allowed him to think in such bold terms about poetic performance. The Canto is the consequence of a very public and 31 32

Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, 30. Nolan, Poet-Chief, 64.

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very bold conception of the oral. Unlike the poets of those oral cultures to which Nolan alludes, however, we will see that Neruda’s attempts to separate his voice from the immanent world of his environment encourage him to speak with transcendent, more-than-local powers. Like Wright, Neruda is well aware of the horrors of colonization; unlike Wright, however, for Neruda they are part of the genetic code of a new land: The murderous blade plunged into my country’s entrails, wounding the sacred lands. The burning blood fell from silence in silence, below, to where the seed is waiting for the spring. This blood went yet deeper. Towards the roots it ran. Towards the dead it ran. Towards those who will be born.33

Despite the ceremonial mode, from the outset of the Canto’s first book, “La lámpara en la tierra,” it seems that Neruda is more comfortable with matter than with people; his interest more geographical than ethnographic. Inspiration comes from elements of the natural world; when man – Amerindian man – appears, we have something of an anti-climax. For the poet and critic Nathaniel Tarn, it is not until the conquistadors arrive later on that Neruda’s ire is aroused.34 In the meantime, what quickly becomes apparent is a tension between a poetic desire to elucidate the particular and an urge to sing of an entire continent. The opening verses are stretched across a multitude of landscapes, none of which we actually enter. Soaring above the land, within just a few stanzas Neruda has called to jacarandas, araucarias, mahogany, cypress trees, thorn trees, ceibos, rubber trees, jaguas, pumas, savannas, islands, jungles, guanacos, llamas, butterflies, anacondas, toucans, humming birds, parrots, and caimans. Soon we are in the Amazon, then we are thousands of miles south, looking over the Bío-Bío (a river in southern Chile), then we are 33

Neruda, Canto general, 94; tr. Schmitt: “I V . The Liberators, vii: Impaled,” 94. Nathaniel Tarn, The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2007): 63. 34

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in Mexico, now in Columbia. This ‘soaring’ is less a god-like transcendence than, to borrow Massumi’s words, “a manically accelerating alternation of bodily states striving to blur, like the spokes of a wheel, into an optical illusion of unity overcoming dismemberment.”35 These are the beginnings of a collective drive for the synthesis of disparate elements into a unified whole that will, as we will see, be the vision of a single man. So it is that after taking us in one, rushing sweep across a prehuman America, through a dizzying array of colours, sounds, and materials, we return to the ocean: Sweet race, daughter of mountains, stock of tower and turquoise, close my eyes now before we enter the ocean from whence the pain comes. . . 36

Then, suddenly and fantastically, we soar upwards to the heights of Macchu Picchu (approximately 2400m). Where the inland of the Australian continent rises gently to the plateaus of the Great Dividing Range, the western coast of South America rises far more steeply into the Andes. This is no incremental climb, then, but, rather, a dramatic launch into the skies. Up here, at these great heights, “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu” is the book’s proper beginning, when Neruda enters into the full, concentrated force of his song. That Neruda could travel from sea level to Macchu Picchu almost instantly shows us that we are dealing with an incredible distortion of space and time, and of their relationship to the capacity of the human body. Such an impossibly rapid ascent prefigures the re-emergence of a ‘complex topography’, which is traversed at often blistering speeds. Time and space are squeezed together into the almost one-dimensional point of Neruda’s mouth: first, American history becomes American territory; second, American territory becomes one man’s song. Like Wright at instances in the previous chapter, Neruda has become a Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘macroface’, that single point of accumulation into which everything is sucked. Indeed, the obsession with topography can be traced back further than poems Residencia en la tierra. The Neruda scholar Manuel Jofré has identified its beginnings in Neruda’s earliest known poem, a small text he com-

35 36

In Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 30. Pablo Neruda, Canto general, tr. Schmitt: “I . A Lamp on Earth, vi: Man,” 27.

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posed at ten years of age for his stepmother’s birthday. The young poet’s focus on ‘topos’, or on the physical manifestation of the landscape, is emphasized by a concertedly chromatic atmosphere. Most colours have been washed away, leaving only a golden skin.37 This rutilant ‘sheen’, writes Jofré, is a poignant sign of what will later blossom into a fully developed over-seeing: Gold is something rich, full, yellow and solar. [. . . ] The fertilisation implicated in the placement of the sun over the earth (the luminous over the dark) is the primary location of cosmic interrelation, and from it would derive a Nerudian mythology pertaining to the natural cycles of matter and its renovation.38

Golden luminosity is significant in Neruda’s poetry for a variety of reasons. Primarily, light provides him with the clarity necessary for his high-modernist optic. The beginnings of the preoccupation – a ‘topical’ preoccupation, in Jofré’s (translated) words – inform Neruda’s first books and much of the Residencia series as well. Indeed, in so many of his poems the earth (below) is constructed as a feminine and dark figure, which is to be illuminated by the masculinity of a luminous gaze (above). In turn, this close relationship with the luminous influences the totalizing vision of Canto general. The book’s most telling moment comes, perhaps, at the start of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” when the poet finds “a world like an entombed tower” (note again the merging of height – the tower – with depth – its burial) deep down “in the gold of geology.” It is because of its golden light that he can see the geology below; he can, therefore, plunge his “turbulent and tender hand / into the genital matrix of the earth.”39 Canto general might be an example of what Paz terms a general attempt in Latin American poetry to erase all dates, to search for “a non-historical antiquity.” This willingness to delve into deepest time relates to a preoccupation of the Latin American modernists, for whom there is no such thing “as an original substance or past to recover: there is only emptiness, orphanhood […]

37

Manuel Jofré, “El primer texto de Neftalí Reyes y el último poema de Pablo Neruda,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 65 (November 2004): 53–76, http://www.scielo .cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22952004000200004&lng=es&nrm =iso (accessed 15 April 2008). 38 Jofré, “El primer texto de Neftalí Reyes y el último poema de Pablo Neruda.” 39 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, i: From air to air, like an empty net,” 30.

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the search for the origin, the word as foundation.”40 No doubt the word is foundational in Canto general. Yet we need to discuss how Neruda’s search is influenced by the set of axioms through which he insists on perceiving the world. For the Canto’s environment is carefully ordered to fulfil a communist vision of cultural and economic progress.41 This point can be made clearer by looking at the poems. “Canto general de Chile” (“General Song of Chile”) (book V I I ), for example, begins in Araucanía and describes Neruda’s desire to return there. Neruda wrote the first passages of the poem on the night of his father’s passing in May 1938, in their family home in Temuco, the capital of the Araucanian region. Half-way through the poem, however, we find that suddenly we are no longer reading about Araucanía, but about the arid, mineral-rich mining country some two thousand kilometres to the north. This country has a particular importance for Neruda, illustrated most clearly by yet another poem, “Oda a la tierra,”42 from his subsequent book, Odas elementales (1954): I do not sing the prodigal earth, the profligate mother of the roots, the squanderer, full of fruits and parrots, mud and springs, home of the caiman, fat sultanas with spiky tiaras, nor the origin of the mountain lion nor the gravid, tilled earth with its seeds like minuscule nests

40

Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, tr. Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987): 208–209. 41 Neruda joined the Chilean communist party in 1945, after he had been elected as a senator in the Chilean parliament for the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. His problematical relationship with Stalinism was cemented in 1953, when he received the Stalin Prize for the Consolidation of Peace. 42 “Oda a la tierra” (‘Ode to the Earth’), in Pablo Neruda, Odas elementales (2005; Santiago de Chile: Pehuén, 2008): 245–49.

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that will sing in the morning, no, I praise the mineral earth, the Andean stone, the severe scar of the lunar desert, the spacious sands of saltpetre, I sing iron, the flaming head of copper and its clusters as it emerges covered in dust and gunpowder freshly unearthed from the geography. Oh earth, stern mother, there you hid the deep metals [...]

Two important features emerge in “Oda a la tierra.” First, in a poem addressed quite broadly to ‘the earth’, the poet is focusing his attentions on a very particular part of it. The need to search for precious metals comes at the expense of other places, which are criticized or downgraded next to “the lunar desert” of the Chilean north. Neruda’s original soil, “the gravid, tilled earth” of Araucanía, barely rates a mention. Returning to “Canto general de Chile,” then, now we can see how larger, economic and political imperatives lead Neruda to drag the poem from an intimate association of poet, family, and country (Araucanía) towards a grander concept of nation (Chile). The second key feature is the feminization of this territory, which goes right back to Neruda’s earliest preoccupation with golden topographies. The Chilean desert is luminous, sandy, and coppery; hints of yellow and gold abound. It may not be soft or immediately enticing, but the desert’s “stern” femininity becomes overwhelmingly inviting in a later section of the ode: to you I sing because man will make you yield, will fill you with fruits, will search for your ovaries, will spill special rays into your secret cup, land of deserts, pure line,

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to you the words of my song because you appear to be dead but are woken with dynamite’s sudden sting, and a plume of bloody smoke signals birth and metals leap toward the sky.

Neruda has so little interest in his home territory because it is already pregnant: it is not “pure” like the “secret cup” of the desert. For here we have, in its most violent, aggressive form, a refrain of the complex topographical vision of the Canto. What is beneath is to be found, and impregnated, and brought to the surface, regardless of its (her) own desires. This will not occur carefully or gently, but with a blast of dynamite; the “bloody smoke” of a painful childbirth will be forgotten amidst the transcendental glory of subterranean material heading for the sky. Importantly, Neruda’s project legitimizes such violence; an ethic of place is forgotten in the drive towards a more global, placeless modernity. By returning to his time-worn binary of man as the hardened pursuer and woman as the generous, giving landscape, Neruda commemorates poetically the forced impregnation and destruction of the American continent. Here, domination of the non-human world is a re-enactment of man’s domination of women.43 In the Canto, too, Neruda talks of the acts of violence, rape, and destruction committed by the conquistadors, but also credits them with advancing American cultures through an introduction to European rationalism.44 He writes, for example, that “a light was cast over the earth: / number, name, line and structure [. .. ] The light came despite the daggers.”45 The integrity of the human body and /or the local fades next to the quest for a celestial, utopian vision; the conquest of virginity is part of the movement towards modernity. Simply, what is taking place here is a chauvinistic mutation of the Romantic imperative that Mead noted in Wright’s poems: material and historical difference

43

For a brilliant exposition of the relationship between environmental destruction and male power, see Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1994). 44 Brotherston, Latin American Poetry, 43. 45 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I I . The Conquistadors, xv: The red line,” 68–69.

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and contradiction are sublated “into a dream of human essence and subjective transcendence.”46 In Neruda, the uneasy conflation of progressive impulses to modernize and cultivate the earth with Romantic eulogies about this earth is much starker than in Wright. In the Canto, poetry is an instrument of social utility, entirely political. Unlike the human in many of Wright’s poems, the Nerudian human of the post-Residencia period is a political subject, a member of a collective, not alienated by or subsumed under anguish and solitude.47 Yet Neruda’s move away from the inward-looking poems of the Residencias is not entirely altruistic or self-effacing. Faith in communism, namely, also provides the poet with immortality in the face of chaos, which previously had so frightened and worried him: You have made me see the world’s clarity and the possibility of happiness. You have made me indestructible because within you I do not end in myself.48

‘Place’ is not a geographical location for the communist poet; communism is a global ideology aimed at uniting collective action in all places. It is his joining this global system, then, that grants Neruda “the world’s clarity”; he overcomes the decaying, organic world of the Residencias and becomes placeless, no longer vulnerable to unpredictable, dynamic ecologies. To the Chilean Communist Party he would write: “You made me build over reality as if over a rock.”49 Certainly, many communist writers have been notoriously blind to the nonhuman world as part of their rejection of Romanticism. As a Latin American writer of the early-twentieth century, however, Neruda was emerging from a background of Rubén Darío-inspired Modernismo, which, not to be confused with European Modernism, had much in common with the European Romantic movement. While not identical, both movements sought evidence of an essential harmony or unity within the world, as well as a Christ-like identification of the poet with ‘the people’. Neruda’s commitment to a kind of ‘ecocommunism’ – a combination of a bureaucratic desire for equally distributed

46

Mead, Networked Language, 297–98. Federico Schopf, “El problema de la conversión poética en la obra de Pablo Neruda,” Atenea 488 (2003): 54. 48 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “X V . I Am, xxvii: To My Party,” 399. 49 Neruda, Canto general, 399; tr. Schmitt: “X V . I Am, xvii: The Steel Gathers (1945),” 390. 47

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order and an awareness of the complexity of ecological systems – is a function of his position as a communist amidst the vestiges of Modernismo.

Song of My Father Some years after completing the Canto, Neruda was decorating his home, La Sebastiana, in the port city of Valparaíso. He wanted to hang a large portrait of Walt Whitman on the wall next to his desk. Local folklore has it that, while he was framing and hanging the picture, a carpenter asked Neruda if it was of his father. “It is,” Neruda replied. So, to talk of Walt Whitman as Neruda’s father-figure is in no sense misleading. Indeed, Neruda’s own father, José del Carmen Reyes, was an ever-moving, ever-absent foundation for the young poet. In the early poetry he is cold, distant, and rarely at home – all in stark contrast to the softness of the mother’s presence, and the tenderness of the stepmother’s.50 Indeed, in the Canto itself, Neruda repeatedly uses his father’s surname as the name of a conquistador.51 On the other hand, Neruda would claim that Whitman taught him how to be American.52 In fact, the growth of the Canto general parallels that of Leaves of Grass, for just as everything followed on from “Song of Myself,” so, too, are the seeds of the Canto found in “Canto general de Chile” (a Nerudian “Song of Myself”). Unlike Whitman, however, who used an impressionistic syntax of ostensibly unconnected ingredients, of touches of colour, of nouns freed from finite verbs – all to function, says Fletcher, as “a general suppression of superordinate control”53 – Neruda’s syntax is often frustrated by a desire for control, a desire to “build over reality.” The chaos of Residencias was always distressing for the poet because it eluded capture; each phrase was born of a frustrated need to define, to delimit. The boldness of the Canto, conversely, comes from a pride born of communist solidarity; the world has been defined by Marxist principles and now Neruda must go about organizing the future in accordance with these. Whitman exhibits a “mindless favouring of the present tense” in order to “dissolve the sense of history, the sense of hierarchical con50

Víctor Raviola, Cuatro estudios sobre Pablo Neruda (Temuco: Universidad de la Frontera, 2003): 10. 51 Nolan, Poet-Chief, 40. Nolan also notes that Neruda associates his mother, who died shortly after his birth, with the Indian. 52 Brotherston, Latin American Poetry, 44. 53 Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 106.

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catenation or indeed any logically enlinked furthering of probable steps in a development [. .. ] while complex enumerations in parallel quasi-biblical rhythms are allowed to verge on chaos.”54 In Neruda, this is the stuff of the Residencias. The biblical rhythms of Canto general, however, are contained largely within the past tense, and dates and place-names often accompany the poems. For it is history that Neruda wants to re-order; it is the chaos of Chilean liberalism that he wants to decry. We are coming closer to identifying the fundamental tension that threatens the integrity of the Canto general. Undoubtedly, the speaker is “free within beings,”55 walking over vast territories and addressing an array of historical figures, as well as landforms and plants and animals. However, Neruda’s interactions occur purely on his own terms, according to criteria he developed elsewhere (while learning about communist politics in Spain). Consequently, places are devoured by the mouth of the all-speaking, all-seeing autocrat. To illustrate the point, consider the following passage: Antarctica, austral crown, cluster of cold lamps, cinerarium of ice removed from the earthly skin, church shattered by purity, nave soaring over the cathedral of whiteness, immolator of smashed glass, hurricane dashed on the walls of nocturnal snow, give me your double breast. . . 56

This is illustrative of a recurring syntactic pattern in Canto general, of which similar examples could be taken from almost any part of the book. The passage starts with a place-name, which is followed by various adjective–noun combinations (or, more commonly in the Spanish, noun–adjective combinations). The adjectives allow the nouns to become, or to shift beyond the category of their discrete being as nouns; such becomings accumulate, and the poem-place begins to vibrate with the jostling of its materials. But the key moment here is the last line, “give me your double breast. . .. ” By describing a 54

Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 107. Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “X V . I Am, xxviii: I End Here (1949),” 399. 56 Neruda, Canto general, 422; tr. Schmitt: “X I V . The Great Ocean, ix: Antarctica,” 348. 55

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shifting, contorting topography and then addressing it in the second person, Neruda is sewing these changes to a subjecthood and granting primacy to the ability of a single voice to harness a myriad of becomings. This cascading sequence of phrases with its capacity for infinite bifurcation is compressed and funnelled into the articulation of a single speaker. This is why the Canto general is an uneasy mixture of Neruda’s desire to sing about Latin America and his desire to sing of himself: the omniscient Nerudian gaze is unwilling to release control for long enough to enable the poet to return to the concerns of his body’s locale. A further, important difference between Whitman and Neruda is to be found in Whitman’s celebration of Jacksonian democracy, as opposed to Neruda’s condemnation of the oppressive, conservative regime of Gabriel González Videla. Whitman seeks and supports contemporary social and governmental democracy. Conversely, Neruda wants the abolition of the current political regime. Unlike Neruda, Whitman is open to the potential of the current set of circumstances. As a result, in Leaves of Grass no phrase is ever grammatically superior to any other phrase, which means that there is never a ‘logical’ development of arguments, which “would require controlled predications along with their extension into further sequences of predication, leading in logical fashion to clear conclusions.”57 The result, the Whitmanian phrase, is what Fletcher calls a form of “linguistic particle.”58 It creates expression and meaning in waves, leading the poet “away from argument toward a visionary simultaneity without progress towards an end.” Any conclusions the poems might make, therefore, are “suspended in liminal space before any arrival at a permanently defining closure.”59 Turning back to Neruda, what is striking is that, when we traverse from the a-grammaticality of Residencia en la tierra (with phrases that swirl and cascade in this same liminal space) to Canto general, the particle-like phrases from the Resdiencias are still present. The difference, however, is in the way the phrases are organized to form controlled predications. Consider another extract from the poem “Entrada a la madera”: Pores, veins, circles of sweetness, weight, silent temperature, arrows piercing your fallen soul, 57

Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 111. A New Theory for American Poetry, 144. 59 A New Theory for American Poetry, 111. 58

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beings asleep in your thick mouth, powder of sweet consumed pulp, ashes filled with extinguished souls, come to me, to my measureless dream. . . 60

Now look at the following portion of “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu”: I see the vestments and the hands, the vestige of water in the sonorous cavity, the wall softened by the touch of a face that saw with my eyes the earthen lamps, that oiled with my hands the vanished woods: because everything – clothing, skin, vessels, words, wine, bread – is gone, fallen to the earth.61

The speaker is central in both extracts, but in the passage from “Entrada” no particular phrase achieves dominance over any other, and all coalesce and fragment simultaneously to produce a wavy, viscous texture. Nothing is being predicated here; there is no obvious outcome. Instead, we have “a visionary simultaneity.” The most obvious difference in the second extract is that it oscillates between the past and the present tense. Immediately, then, we know that this extract from “Macchu Picchu” implies a form of predication, for the speaker has decided that something in the past has had a direct influence on the present moment. More importantly, consider the word ‘because’ in the third-last line of the “Macchu Picchu” extract: the images that come before it are controlled by this predication. What the speaker sees (b) is because everything has “fallen” (a); b is because of a, the predicate. Yet this is not just a structural difference: in the first extract the speaker is calling for things to join him as if he were a part of their environment; in the second, the things perceive through the speaker (“. .. saw with my eyes. .. / saw with my hands. . . ,” etc.). The power of the predicate is exerted not only on the grammatical arrangement of phrases but also on the manner in which the speaker’s perception organizes and monitors the flow of information in the environment. Since everything has fallen (a), the speaker must now create the environment (b). Again, b is because of

60

Neruda, Residence on Earth, 157. Neruda, Canto general, 36; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, vi: And so I scaled the ladder of the earth,” 35. 61

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a. This is not pluralistic and democratic; someone is steadily rising up to take control. Thus, we must take care to define the extent of Whitman’s influence on Neruda. Whitman refuses to take command, preferring what Fletcher shows us is the middle voice.62 Much as with the reflexive verb, the middle voice makes it hard to categorize the subject as either an agent or a patient. Whatever is spoken of in the middle voice, then, becomes part of the subject in some way. The presence of the reflexive verb in Canto general, however, is particularly prominent only in one of the last poems, “A mi partido” (‘To My Party’), which is to suggest that it is to the Communist Party that Neruda belongs, or that the Party is the only system in which he is subsumed. Otherwise, the verbs tend to express direct actions by the speaker upon other things: “I broke a glassy woodland leaf. .. ,” etc. What Neruda is taking part in with relation to the world is something distinctly more Platonic than in Whitman’s poetics. His is a question of making a difference, of distinguishing the thing itself – the real Latin America – from those who depict it dishonestly. Genuine mixtures and democracies are not of such interest here. What is important is the task of division – to select genuine lineages, then isolate and separate those who would pretend to be part of this lineage. The poet divides in order to “screen the claims and to distinguish the true pretender from the false one.”63 The Canto is a song of the authentic in battle against the inauthentic. Here, the essence of division does not appear in the determination of varieties of species or genera but in vision’s depth, in its ability to select the most desirable of all trajectories. Little is more striking in the Canto than the piercing depth of the speaker’s vision.

The Plane of Transcendence What is the nature of this tension in the Canto, then? How do we describe the dynamic world by which Neruda was surrounded, and the thin, golden sheet he subsequently laid over it? To conceive of these two distinct regions we need to be thinking about them as two systems, each of which might be 62

Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 165–74. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale (Logique du sens, 1969; New York: Columbia U P , 1990): 254; “the Platonic dialectic is neither a dialectic of contradiction nor of contrariety, but a dialectic of rivalry [. . . ] a dialectic of rivals and suitors” (my emphasis). 63

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thought of as occupying a different plane. On the one hand, there is what Deleuze and Guattari call “the plane of Nature,” the ecological plane that I outlined in the Introduction. All the various assemblages of matter and energy group together on this plane “like an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less-connected relations.” Thus, there is a coherence to the natural plane, which involves all matter, be it natural or artificial, animate or inanimate. Importantly, the unity has nothing to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions.

In the Canto, this open plane is the ecology of the Americas, the land’s proliferating nature. The earth of the poem is a profusion of life, in which everything is in a state of flux, in the process of becoming different or becoming something else. And the poet is always there, in this plane, sensing, showing things to us, looking about: A newly propagated aroma suffused, through the interstices of the earth, the breaths transformed into mist and fragrance: wild tobacco raised its rosebush of imaginary air.64

Complex natural processes are cyclical and emergent (that is, they do not proceed in linear fashion). As opposed to linear processes of differentiation, on this plane “things are distinguished from one another only by speed and slowness”65 – by ground-based, relative measurements, in other words. There is no analogy, where one ‘thing’ is or is not like another ‘thing’; there are only collections of becomings. If Neruda is to take command of Latin America’s uncertain destiny, he also needs to harness, in a poetic sense, its enormous diversity. The recurrent image in later sections of “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu” is that of the coral reef, a durable rock made from countless smaller organisms. The deaths of these organisms, the sheer number of them, haunt the poet:

64

Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I . A Lamp on Earth, i: Amor America (1400) – Vegetation,” 15. 65 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 280–81.

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But a permanence of stone and word: the city was raised like a glass in the hands of all, living, dead, silent, sustained by so much death, a wall, from so much life a blow of stone petals: the permanent rose, the dwelling: this Andean reef of glacial colonies.66

There is a problem with the image of the reef, noted perceptively by Franco. “The stones, the air that surrounds then, the past time to which they bear witness,” she writes, “seem to negate humanity.”67 Amidst the moonscape of the deserted city, it would appear that Neruda constitutes the sole consciousness in a barren environment. Here we see that, in order to satisfy his desire to define and delimit, Neruda must negate the world before him and occupy a higher plane. This plane “is as much a plan(e) of organisation as of development.” The image of the reef, therefore, is a transcendent one that allows Neruda to incorporate a hidden structure into the work: Neruda’s transcendent ideology does not admit itself – he always pretends to be ‘brother’ to, or one of, his people – but instead “exists only in a supplementary dimension,” at n+1 dimensions (where n = the world). This design or mental principle is, for Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘plane of transcendence’. The transcendent plane cannot be given as such, but can only be inferred from the forms it develops, since it exists prior to and for these forms, rather than as a component of them: “It may be in the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language: it is always concluded from its own effects.”68 Indeed, we would do well to consider just how much more god-like Neruda could possibly become. Although the poet is avowedly an atheist and writes damningly about the legacy of the Catholic Church, Michael Predmore argues that there is a theme of Biblical apocalypse in Neruda’s work that one can trace to the earliest moments of Residencias. In the Canto, too, the world is still under threat of being taken over by malicious forces: Residencia is inspired allegorically by the biblical history of the Apocalypse, which describes a land attacked by horsemen and galloping horses, assaulted by the devil and the beast, satanic characters unleashed from the ocean. In Canto general, clearly inspired by Chilean and Latin American history, ‘the 66

Neruda, Canto general, 37; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, vii: O remains of a single abyss, shadows of one gorge,” 35. 67 Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 288. 68 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292–93.

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devil’ effectively comes from the ocean in the form of invading foreigners who plunder the countries, taking their treasures and mineral wealth.69

For Neruda, these invaders have satanic motives, yet the benevolent, opposing power in the poem is not the Christian God but the poet himself. By rising to the heights of Macchu Picchu to lead the battle for a continent, Neruda elevates himself to the position of deity. His omniscience is benevolent but, spread far across a transcendent plane, it is also barely visible, stretched thin like John Donne’s famous “gold to airy thinness beat.” “The plane of transcendence is best understood not in terms of the content of any particular image, or even in terms of a medium,” writes Massumi, “but as the process presiding over the creation of a certain kind of image.”70 In the context of Neruda’s work, these controlling processes produce Biblical inflections. We are talking about two different planes, therefore, both of which Neruda occupies in various capacities throughout the course of Canto general. On the one hand, there is the plane of immanence or of Nature.71 In the Canto we see this plane emerge in the countless, swarming adjective–noun combinations mentioned earlier. It is a vision that shares and participates in the inchoate creativity of the natural world. Inherited from the Residencias, its mythic language is freed from any abstracted temporal or historical dimension. Time is a function of this creativity. “In fertility,” says the poet at the beginning of the poem, “time grew.”72 However many different dimensions this plane may have, however many subjective perspectives, it never has a higher, or supplementary, dimension than that which transpires upon it. There is no such thing as a contradiction on this plane, for one of its characteristics is its diversity. On the other side, there is the plane of consistent, transcendent principles. This plane establishes structures and proportions before they are put in place,

69

Michael P. Predmore, “Imágenes y visiones apocalípticas en Residencia en la tierra y Canto general: de revelación a revolución en la poesía de Pablo Neruda,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 65 (November 2004): 77–89, http://www.scielo.cl/scielo .php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22952004000200005&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 8 September 2008). 70 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 111. 71 Although we should remember that “nature has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between the natural and the artificial”; Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 294. 72 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I . A Lamp on Earth, i: Amor America (1400) – Vegetation,” 14.

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but it is not itself given in these structures. It manifests as prosaic, rational, political history, cast in time. This is the Marxist vision of the Canto, which determines a beginning (the first poem in the book is dated with the year 1400): Before the wig and the dress coat there were the rivers, arterial rivers: there were cordilleras, jagged waves where the condor and the snow seemed immutable: there was dampness and dense growth, the thunder as yet unnamed, the planetary pampas. 73

And then a utopian end: Common book of man, broken bread is this geography of my song, and a community of labourers will one day harvest its fire and will sow its flames and its leaves again in the ship of the earth.74

If the Canto is the song for a continent, then it must be the song of an environment. The task of environmental poetry is “to find a way of concentrating and focusing diversity, as with the glass one uses to light a fire.” Importantly, “such poetry allows itself always to contradict itself, in order to subvert that absolute power.”75 This “glass” is a kind of ordering mechanism that emerges from the work itself, but it is hampered in Canto general by the prior existence of a transcendent, disciplinary mechanism that resists subversion and contradiction. The result is a highly reactive collision of radically different poetics. Normally, where an assemblage meshes differences without cancelling them through homogenization, an open and evolving set of possibilities will remain.76 In the case of Canto general, however, where a higher plane is in place to cancel differences in intensity or to eliminate differences through uniformization, the virtual becomings and processes of a porous and coherent America are often hidden under that plane’s shadow.

73

Neruda, Canto general, 11; tr. Schmitt: “I . A Lamp on Earth, i: Amor America (1400) – Vegetation,” 13 (italics in original). 74 Canto general, 485; tr. Schmitt: “X V . I Am, xxviii: I End Here (1949),” 399. 75 Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 244–45. 76 de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 74.

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A las alturas de Macchu Picchu Neruda uses a distinctly Castilian Spanish throughout the Canto. Although he constantly denies and denigrates his Spanish heritage, it is in the vocabulary and the images of that heritage that he interprets America. Some of the most common words in his vocabulary, such as ‘rose’, ‘blood’, ‘cathedral’, ‘stone’, and ‘chalice’, are legacies of the general Catholic footprint upon South America. Far from challenging Roman cultural origins and semantic identity (as does César Vallejo, for instance), such words effectively suppress the potential for new expressions to grow from his mosaic.77 The poet was also one of the first of the modern era to stabilize in print many of the vernacular names assigned to Latin American natural phenomena and, therefore, to consecrate a Spanish interpretation of reality.78 I argued in the Introduction that the very existence of a writing system exerts a homogenizing influence on language and acts as a brake on linguistic change. Many Residencia poems resist this deceleration because of their inability to catalogue and order phenomena, but the Canto relies upon it. Where Neruda assumes the vantage point of high modernism is in his embrace of the unifying, rather than the disruptive, capacities of language, and in his decision to explore these capacities in grand modes of performance (such as a ‘General Song’) rather than in the more intimate, dialogic experiences engendered by earlier work (an inward-looking ‘residence in /on’ something). Here we come to understand the purpose of this ‘General Song’: it is to call out or, rather, call down to those who are unable to attain Neruda’s startling heights of perception. After all, among the first lines of the book he tells us: “I am here to tell the story”79 – he will tell us the story, not a story. In other words, the Canto begins with a determination to select and differentiate; the world will be calmed and ordered with the power of a voice which “seems to rock and sway in sleep-inducing rhythms.”80 In this context, consider the closing lines of “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu”:

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Brotherston, Latin American Poetry, 52. Nolan, Poet-Chief, 74. 79 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I . A Lamp on Earth, i: Amor America (1400) – Vegetation,” 14. 80 José Santos Chocano in Nolan, Poet-Chief, 69. 78

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Dadme el silencio, el agua, la esperanza. Dadme la lucha, el hierro, los volcanes. Apegadme los cuerpos como imanes. Acudid a mis venas y a mi boca. Hablad por mis palabras y mi sangre. [Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes. Bodies, cling to me like magnets. Hurry to my veins and my mouth. Speak with my words and my blood.81]

First, one is struck by the Castilian verb forms – dadme, apegadme, acudid, etc. Neruda is using the vosotros form, the second-person plural, a peninsularSpanish conjugation not uncommon in Latin American literature, but never used in spoken conversation. Yet this work is meant to be spoken. While poets like César Vallejo and Pablo de Rokha deliberately break down the rhetoric of Spanish, here we see Neruda strengthening it through repetition, through bold intonation. His rhythms, writes Franco, “are those of the Church, those of prayer, litany and chant.” His reading voice, known by almost all Chileans, gives an impression of languor and monotony, infused as it is with a kind of liturgical emotion. The “sonorous epithet, the rolling feminine wordending, the use of alliteration” make this poetry distinctly auditory.82 Here we return to the importance of a quasi-biblical performance, during which Neruda is raised on a platform in the centre of an enormous gathering of listeners (not speakers). Scholars such as Nolan have argued that Neruda’s proximity to oral poetics grants his work an alliance with Native American poetic traditions and thus with the localities of which they sing. Such a reading of Neruda fails to understand rigorously the wider cultural-political implications of work like Canto general. Similar in some ways to what takes place in poems like “Two Dreamtimes” (as indicated in Chapter 2 above), the Canto is actually exem-

81

Neruda, Canto general, 45; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, xii: Rise up to be born with me, my brother,” 42. 82 Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, 288.

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plary of Chilean modernity’s denial of its relationship to local (i.e. not generic, ‘Latin American’) indigeneity. The solo performance of a papal figure, who uses anaphoric rhythms to intone an imperial dialect removed from Latin American idioms, leads the Canto to inhibit, rather than foster, the development of regional differences. Nolan also argues that the magical, oral nature of Neruda’s language allows it to minimize the distance between speaker and world, granting the language itself a worldly, ‘natural’ quality.83 Yet this very capacity to speak for and within the world allows Neruda to take what was ‘general’ – the incredible variety of which the Canto purportedly sings – and make it General: a single word, a rigid signifier. Throughout the twentieth century, as ships, trains, and the telegraph began to ‘shorten’ geographical distances, as the speed of communications intensified, differences would tend to converge rather than diverge. The issue with the Canto is a similar kind of homogenization. Distances between Latin American locales are decreased; past and present are compressed; divergences in language are ignored. Nevertheless, “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu” remains a breathtakingly dramatic journey from a Residencia-like solitude and alienation to the attainment of a powerful sense of solidarity with humanity, with the past, and with the American earth. The densely interior imagery of the first half of the poem recalls the earlier Residencias, but the latter half develops into a more directly public mode of incantation, which will then continue throughout the book. Accordingly, the tensions I have discussed in relation to the Canto in general are intensified in “Macchu Picchu.” Consider the poem’s first lines, for example: From air to air, like an empty net, I went between the streets and atmosphere, arriving and departing. 84

Such lines are typical of the entire book. Present is the preoccupation with the thin, topographical line, that intersection between “the streets and atmosphere.” In addition, we should note the reference to a decidedly vacuous or transparent self, a transcendent plane or “empty net” racing across territories in a vain effort to grasp hold of things. Soon afterwards, in a glancing reference, the poet tells us that during the writing of Residencia en la tierra he

83

Nolan, Poet-Chief, 71. Neruda, Canto general, 31; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, i: From air to air, like an empty net,” 29. 84

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“could grasp nothing but a clump of faces or precipitous / masks.”85 The remark is important because, placed as it is at the beginning of “Macchu Picchu,” it implies that the poem’s arc will take us to a moment in which the speaker can grasp things. Yet the personal nature of Neruda’s quest does not lead him to explore in closer detail the relationship between his body and its locale. Instead, Neruda has already become vastly plural, indulging in rapid increases in speed so that he can traverse yet more space over time: then I went from street to street and river to river, city to city and bed to bed, and my brackish mask traversed the desert [. . . ] I rolled on dying of my own death.86

That the speaker is “dying of [his] own death” – that he is sick, in other words, because of the death of his earthly body – reminds us that Neruda is talking of a time before he found in communism a way of transcending his own mortality through the collective energies of the masses. When he ascends “the ladder of the earth” to find before him the remains of the ancient Andean city, everything he sees there, every event, every person, and every creature that he imagines might have once inhabited the place, “is gone, fallen to the earth.”87 These deaths, of Neruda’s corporeal body and of others, are necessary so that the poet can rise up, free of attachments, reborn, above the future of Latin America. In “Macchu Picchu,” death, and the past to which it is consigned, is located in the earth, which links the poem to David Abram’s argument about the very real, physical location of the past in the decaying, composting matter of the soil beneath our feet. For Abram, it is the earthy nature of the past that supports, and resists, the present.88 Likewise, for Neruda, the past, and the earth in which it resides, can propel him to greater heights. We get a more refined sense of the extent to which Neruda regards that which is above the ground – 85

Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, ii: If the lofty germ is carried from flower to flower,” 31. 86 Neruda, Canto general, 34–35; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, iv: Mighty death invited me many times,” 33. 87 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, vi: And so I scaled the ladder of the earth,” 34. 88 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 214.

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the air – as quite separate from the ground itself, when, in the following section, the poet writes that “the empty air no longer weeps, / no longer knows [.. . /... ] has now forgotten” the ground.89 All of Macchu Picchu is lost in the Earth, which, for Neruda, means that it has lost contact with the “empty air,” and the realm of the transcendent. Abram argues, however, that it is the air that surrounds and thus connects all things; it is the element which every thing is “most intimately in.”90 The voice, by extension, can remind us of this fact, for it begins as an internal series of bodily vibrations before fanning out in waves into the air around the speaker. The voice is a liminal tracing between inside and out, between vegetable matter and gaseous atmosphere. But Neruda needs to deny the interlinking of ground and air so that his voice can be disconnected from the ground and rise above it. It is the final stage of a transcendent process that began with the death of his earthly body. So he cries in the following section, “Rise up with me, American love.”91 We are on our way. Abram argues that the past is always, necessarily, invisible. If we look for it we will never find it, for it is withheld from us underneath the ground and within the bodies of things.92 This isn’t the case with Nerudian complex topography. That the speaker wants to “ascend the rungs of the air up to the void” and, at the same time, “scrape the innards” of the earth until he “touch[es] mankind”93 emphasizes two vital points. First, Nerudian air eventually becomes a “void,” without connection to a material realm. Secondly, when he speaks within this void, his voice far above the physical realities and permutations of the earth, the depths of this earth can still (or best) be plundered: topography is compressed into a dense line beneath his transcendent plane. The most compressed topography in the Canto – and the book’s most intense exhibition of high modernity – then comes when the poet, from his transcendent heights, seeks to gather up all depth, all past, into the one line of his sensory field: Through the confused splendour, through the stone night, let me plunge my hand,

89

Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, vii: O remains of a single abyss, shadows of one gorge,” 35. 90 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 260. 91 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, viii: Rise up with me, American love,” 36. 92 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 214. 93 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, x: Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?,” 39.

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and let it beat in me, like a bird captive for a thousand years, the old heart of the forgotten!94

All is to be contained within the Nerudian body. His gaze will now pierce “the confused splendour” and frame everything in its cage. As Neruda himself wrote: I understood that if we tread on the same ancestral earth we had to somehow consider the efforts of the American peoples, that we could not ignore them, that our ignorance or silence was not only a crime, but the continuation of a defeat [. . . ] . I thought about the ancient American man. I saw their fights enlaced with our current fights. There began to germinate my idea of a general American song [. . . ] . That view changed my perspective. Now I saw the whole of America from the heights of Macchu Picchu, with my new understanding.95

The progression here is quite clear: it was with his new understanding – a “view” that conflates history into a single struggle for economic and social justice – of “American” history that Neruda saw the continent below. In one motion, the poem takes us down into the past, across vast territories populated by diverse cultures, and up into the future. The main hitch with a desire for transcendence is that its functioning is always immanent to the parts it tries to overcome.96 As in “Macchu Picchu,” it is indeed a movement to abstraction, but it can never detach itself completely from the ground-level sources of its energy. Thus, it moves in two contradictory directions simultaneously: toward the beyond, and back to our world.97 Thus, having assumed it, Neruda then wants to “forget [.. . ] the powerful proportion, / the transcendent measure.” Tired of the abstract geometry of “the square,” he now wants to run his hand “over the hypotenuse of rough blood and sackcloth.”98 The strange collusion of the hypotenuse with “rough blood” is a deliberate mixing of Euclidean abstraction and earthly material, and it represents a split in the poem between incompatible motivations. On the one hand, there is Neruda’s desire for an ‘impure poetry’, which 94

Neruda, Canto general, 43; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, xi: Through the hazy splendor,” 40. 95 In Schopf, “El problema de la conversión poética en la obra de Pablo Neruda,” 71. 96 Massumi, in Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 30. 97 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 111. 98 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, xi: Through the hazy splendor,” 40.

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he wrote about often: a poetry composed of words stained with the sweat of everyday life, born of and spoken by ‘the common man’. On the other hand, we see a desire, motivated by his social ideals and political affiliations, to schematize this experience of rediscovery as an ideological revision of a dark past. This split manifests itself as what Federico Schopf calls “the undeniable impenetrability” of various fragments disseminated throughout the book. Each fragment is an anomalous nugget of immanence in the larger transcendent system.99 Like stones in a flowing stream, these fragments perturb the book’s continuity, and lead to the taught burls of local and transcendental images at the book’s less-than-euphoric conclusion: my burning and starry heart will flame again in the heights. And so this book ends, here I leave my Canto general written on the run, singing beneath the clandestine wings of my country. Today, 5 February, in this year of 1949, in Chile, in “Godemar de Chena,” a few months before I turned forty-five.100

In the second half of the eleventh and in the first three-quarters of the twelfth sections of “Macchu Picchu,” however, this Residencia-like poetics of immanence and uncertainty disappears to make way completely for the rolling, intoning rhythm of the transcendent ‘I’/eye. The change begins with a litany of assertions concerning what the poet is able to see: “I do not see. .. / I do not see. . . / I see. .. / I see. .. ”101 Again, the rhythm grants the speaker energy and assurance; as in “Entrada a la Madera,” the repetition of the ‘I’ works to highlight its importance and singularity. By section twelve, the speaker has seen the past in its entirety. He calls for it all to rise up so that it may be “born” with him, once again drawing tremendous depths into a single, higher line. The compression is effective to the extent that the past will no longer “return from the bottom of the rocks”; rather, into this tiny, compressed moment, “the cup of this new life,” the dead will pour all of their “time99

Schopf, “El problema de la conversión poética en la obra de Pablo Neruda,” 73–74. Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “X V . I Am, xxviii: I End Here (1949),” 400. 101 Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, xi: Through the hazy splendor,” 40. 100

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less buried sorrows.” The rhythm grants Neruda the power to issue orders fearlessly and exultantly: “Rise up.. . / Give me. . . / Behold me. . . / Show me. . . / tell me. .. / show me. . . ” We can almost hear the crowds chanting, a large drum beating. The moment is upon us: Yo vengo a hablar por vuestra boca muerta. I come to speak for your dead mouths.102

It is all here: the Castilian verb-form vosotros, to refer to the vast millions of Indigenous American deaths in the wake of European colonization; the funnelling of these millions of mouths into the single mouth of the Yo; the way the speaker’s arrival – after a journey in which his individuality has died and he has assumed transcendent heights – grants an afterlife to those who are dead. It is his voice that comes to rescue these dead from their earthly coffins, giving them life in the air once more, but the voice rises directly from their enforced silence. As Tarn writes, Neruda’s speaking is predicated entirely upon the assumption that indigenous Americans will not speak: “Indians have been oppressed, enslaved and killed in order that he can speak.”103 In turn, the ‘gift’ of his vocalization allows Neruda a primal connection with the continent. He can be everywhere at once because he is no longer a corporeal being but a voice, invoking all of the New World. If this is a shamanic imitation, then it is a flawed one: the shaman is beholden to his locale; this, however, is a manic projection over vast territories and histories. If Whitman’s politics were particularly Jacksonian in their democratic, nation-building aspiration, we must not overlook the way in which this moment in “Alturas” is also driven by a particularly Chilean conception of nation and of progress. The constitutions of the 1800s, on which the modern Republic of Chile was based, made no mention of indigenous peoples; on the contrary, everyone – except those Mapuche under the age of twenty-five – was presumed to be Chilean and subsumed under the rubric of the nationstate. According to José Bengoa, early-modern theories of evolution conceived of indigenous groups as children, like beings who had passed through a primordial, primitive stage, and now their father – the West – had to guide them along the path towards development, progress and civilization.104 102

Neruda, Canto general, 45; tr. Schmitt: “I I . The Heights of Macchu Picchu, xii: Rise up to be born with me, my brother,” 42. 103 Tarn, The Embattled Lyric, 65. 104 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 318–19.

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Like the Nerudian voice, the Chilean state needed to speak for their indigenous children. Regardless of their different political persuasions, both Neruda and the architects of the early Chilean constitutions pursue the same objective: the Indian is to be appropriated for a higher cause, of which only the nonIndian is presently aware. Tarn notes that “Indianity” is used largely as an adjectival element in Neruda, rather than as a substantive one.105 The Indian forms part of Neruda’s mosaic, rather than being the creator of his or her own: In [. . . ] section one of Canto general, the Indian, if he emerges at all, tends to do so generically as “el hombre” (man); “el pobre” (the poor); “el pueblo” (the people). Later, in ‘Alturas de Macchu Picchu’, he comes as “el antiguo ser” (the ancient being); “el servidor” (the servant / slave); “el dormido” (the sleeper); and, of course, “hermano” (brother).106

Before going any further, we should remember that in the mid-twentieth century, at the time “Macchu Picchu” was written, over a million Americans indigenous to the area around Macchu Picchu were very much alive in the Andean region.107 Their mouths were hardly ‘dead’. If Neruda has indeed sacrificed his solitude and alienation for a social solidarity, if he has given up dwelling on his own frustrations and desires for a song for the greater good, then by assuming the voices of Indigenous America he is subsuming these [living] voices under a larger system. “For Neruda,” writes Tarn, “‘Indio’ is ‘Pueblo’ before being ‘Indio’.” Indeed, for many Latin American Marxists, Vallejo among them, indigenous people should be subsumed under the broader category of the ‘proletariat’.108 While atop Macchu Picchu, we don’t notice the full effect of this subsumption, for here Neruda’s golden topography only concerns this “Andean reef”; at the very least, the reef’s protrusion so far above the earth affords the city and its ancestors a privileged place below Neruda’s transcendent plane. Yet the ethics of the event are complicated drastically when we consider the poem in the wider context of the Canto: Neruda assumes the indigenous mouth atop Macchu Picchu, then takes it down with him when he descends the cordillera 105

Tarn, The Embattled Lyric, 63. The Embattled Lyric, 6. Neruda’s conflation of the Indian with the poor could correlate with Les Murray’s own desire to categorize the Australian population on the basis of economic status, rather than indigeneity (see Chapter 2 above). 107 Brotherston, Latin American Poetry, 51. 108 Tarn, The Embattled Lyric, 64. 106

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in the next section. What he is doing, in other words, is delimiting the potential for these voices to proliferate and develop freely by dragging them into a larger, two-dimensional mosaic of America. Accordingly, the names he lists in section eleven of “Macchu Picchu’ – Juan Stonecutter, Juan Coldeater, Juan Barefoot – are almost identical. We are to believe that they were among those who once lived in the ancient city, but they share the same first name and, most importantly, the poem does not identify them with any particular ethnicity – Incan or otherwise.109 The lack of particularity is not an oversight, either; it is the necessary first premise of any large-scale plan for transformation.110 The plane of transcendence “lifts bodies out of the uniqueness of the spatiotemporal coordinates through which they move. It abstracts them, extracts them from a system of identity.”111 The bodies become part of the gigantic, undifferentiated mass of Neruda’s poor and downtrodden. Despite the fact that he wrote the first poems of the Canto in his home city of Temuco, on the frontier of Mapuche territory, it is of further concern that Neruda then needed to travel to Incan Peru in order to discover America’s indigenous roots. This raises a further, inescapable problem, to which Tarn’s anthropological knowledge alerts us. The Mapuche were “mortal enemies” of the Inca; indeed, prior to Spanish invasion, the Inca’s feudal structure had absorbed many Indigenous Chilean tribes to the north of what is now Santiago. Neruda ignores this by concentrating instead on a facile binary of ‘nonIndian’–‘Indian’ conflict.112 This conflation is further complicated by the fact that Neruda seems to grant himself the powers of an Incan emperor in part twelve of “Las alturas.”113 It is of yet more concern, therefore, to read the prominent Mapuche poet and critic Elicura Chihuailaf’s prologue to a selection of Neruda’s poems, which he translated into Mapuzugun. For Chihuailaf, Neruda was the first real ambassador for the Mapuche people, publicly critical of the way Mapuche were treated by the Chilean state. Chihuailaf asserts that Neruda understood

109

Cedomil Goic, “Cartas poéticas de Pablo Neruda en Canto general,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 65 (November 2004): 31–52, http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php ?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22952004000200003&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 8 September 2008). 110 Paraphrasing Scott, Seeing like a State, 346. 111 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 112. 112 Tarn, The Embattled Lyric, 64. 113 Nolan, Poet-Chief, 214.

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the way in which the world must enrich and rescue all cultures in order to enrich or save anyone; he was a poet with a keen sense of the vast diversity of details to be found in the natural world.114 To be fair to Chihuailaf here, it is essential to realize that he uses Neruda’s poems in a politically strategic manner: based in Araucanía, where territorial battles take place that still plague government–Mapuche relations, Chihuailaf chooses to translate and publish those poems of Neruda’s which are most clearly identifiable with the fight for his homeland.115 Still, in his prologue, Chihuailaf affirms that Neruda “glimpsed our Azul, the Azul of our life, the colour that we inhabit, the colour of the world from where we came and to where we are going.”116 Chihuailaf then references a line from Book I V of the Canto, “Elástico y azul fue nuestro padre” (“Our father was elastic and blue”). The father to whom Neruda is referring here is Lautaro, a famous Mapuche leader of the resistance against the Spanish invasion. Chihauilaf notes the pride in Neruda’s language for this man, nuestro padre. Yet, by calling him ‘our father’, Neruda overlooks countless fractures between Mapuche and non-indigenous people – to this day, many of Lautaro’s descendants are still in conflict with the Chilean state. Furthermore, in the light of what I have just discussed, of Neruda’s assumption of the right to speak for those mouths that are dead, we need to keep in mind another highly problematical move the poet makes here: Lautaro was our father, he writes. He is thus speaking on behalf of the Mapuche people as well, which must mean, by extension, that they are also dead (after all, he has come to speak for the “dead mouths” of all Indigenous Americans). If we read the section in its entirety, we find that Neruda has acquired a complete, intimate familiarity with many aspects of Lautaro’s life, including how he was born and why he was worthy to lead his people. Images follow in quick succession; rapid repe114

Prologue to Pablo Neruda, Todos los cantos / Ti kom vl, tr. Elicura Chihuailaf (Santiago de Chile: Pehuén, 1996): 10. Chihuailaf’s could be a more accurate description of Neruda if we concentrated on his later years, when the poet sheds some of his utopian ideas of history and progress, and is no longer so interested in the notion of communist solidarity as he is in exploring the various divergent signs and languages in the world around him. 115 James J. Park, “Poetics and Translation in Todos los cantos – Ti kom vl: Neruda in Mapuzugun,” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 23.2 (Fall 2007): 104. 116 Neruda, Todos los cantos / Ti kom vl, 10. El Azul [‘the blue/azure region’] is the single most sacred concept in Mapuche culture. It might correlate with Aboriginal notions of ‘The Dreaming’: an ancestral region of all past and future times.

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tition of the third-person singular seems to revive Lautaro and heighten our sense of familiarity with him: He prepared himself like a long spear. He accustomed his feet to the cascades. He trained his head in the thorns. [...] He burned himself in the infernal gorges. He was hunter among the cruel birds. His hands were tinged with victories. He read the aggressions of the night.117

Extracted from his cultural context (in which he was fighting against Neruda’s own European ancestors), Lautaro can be examined against a blank background. And Neruda, having assumed the voices of millions of Mapuche, can become his only son.

Finding a Balance without False Discipline From what Sergio Holas argues is the cerebral poetry of the Residencias, Neruda would look to create other agencies that could question the centrality of his own mind, thereby “opening himself” to the wider world.118 Rather than “opening himself” to the world, however, the Neruda of Canto general seeks instead to control it. Any cerebral primacy in the Residencias is threatened and often overwhelmed by the power of the poet’s environment. This is no longer the case in the Canto: “Now I saw the whole of America from the heights of Macchu Picchu, with my new understanding,” Neruda wrote. He is not in America, amidst its incredible dimensions; he is above it, and he has collected these dimensions into a thin, dense topography. And that, we must conclude, is the central problem with Canto general – that Neruda was unable to sing a world of flux and dynamism because his poetics, while it called for change, was tied to a transcendent structure that was reliant, ultimately, on simplicity and stability. 117

Neruda, Canto general, 94–95; tr. Schmitt: “I V . The Liberators, ix: The Chief’s Training,” 82. 118 Sergio Holas, “La impureza: sus implicaciones en la poesía y las colecciones de Pablo Neruda,” Revista Signos (Valparaíso) 38/57 (2005): 91–100, http://www.scielo .cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-09342005000100007&lng=es&nrm =iso (accessed 8 September 2008).

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Here we should note that it was not only the contemporary culture and geography of Indigenous Americans that Neruda overlooked in Canto general, but also the ghettos of Warsaw, the horrors of Stalinism, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the Russian–German pact of 1939.119 To talk of his being detached from the ground is indeed to talk about a very real condition of blindness, and of the problems of high-modernist fictions of simplicity. In a manner of speaking, Neruda doesn’t actually manage to break free of the subject-centred realm he enclosed himself in during much of the Residencias. For, as he sings of Mao Tse-tung directing poetry “toward our victory,” of “humming Prague / building the sweet hive,” of a “green Hungary” dancing beside a river, and the secure “firmness / of Stalin and his children,”120 he is allowing his vision to overcome the plainly visible. The subject, in other words, still dominates; any hope that others might be ‘allowed’ to speak through his voice is in vain. Of course, if there were no compensating spring or balance in the poem, the flux seeping through the fissures of the Canto would go on forever, completely unchartable. We know that Neruda was quite guilty of writing without springs or balances in place: his collected works, as yet available only in Spanish, spans some 2,000 pages. Some device must guide or control the flux, but the device can’t be an axiomatic diagram – what Fletcher calls a “false discipline” – because, as we have seen, it can exert upon the poem a dogmatic structure that is insensitive to the particularities of the emerging poetic environment. These axioms produce the weaker moments of the Canto, when Neruda’s rhetorical mode spills over into his ordering of histories and ecologies. “Perhaps,” writes Schopf, “the Canto’s imperative for totalisation means that it must exclude all the experiences that might endanger it, or exceed it.”121 Neruda’s insistence on integrating a false discipline into the poem produces those troubling political assertions that were absent from “Entrada a la madera.” As such, the Canto is a defining literary example of authoritarian, highmodernist violence and hegemony. According to Scott, what such authoritarian schemes ignore, and often suppress, are the innumerable processes that

119

Goic, “Cartas poéticas de Pablo Neruda en Canto general.” Neruda, Canto General, tr. Schmitt: “X I I . The Rivers of Song, v: To Miguel Hernández, Murdered in the Prisons of Spain,” 317. 121 Schopf, “El problema de la conversión poética en la obra de Pablo Neruda,” 73. 120

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contribute to any complex activity.122 It is important, therefore, not to speak as if assuming a clear line of sight to the horizon (and beyond). No set of axioms, however large, can account for the drastically divergent compositions of Latin American ecologies; Neruda’s axioms often discard such complicating processes, leaving them for waste. If the poet is imagining a natural system, however – one complex and adaptive on a plane of immanence – then the device of control must emerge and remain within this flux, rather than transcend it. Neruda’s most successful and stunning moments – if we think, for example, of the Residencias – exhibit an incredible economy that emerges from their luscious landscapes of colour and sound. What produces the crystallization of form, therefore, comes from a texture or weaving, or the poem’s gradual discovery of the nature of its own flowing.123 Anaphora produces in the Canto less a rhythmic sense of order, as in Residencia en la tierra, than a transcendent voice that can continue to pronounce its presence into being almost indefinitely (what here spring to mind, in addition to the hundreds of pages of the Canto, is the seemingly endless series of Odas elementales). Titles like Canto general alert us to the importance of the event of speech in the work, where the event of poetry is the voice of the poet: “I pronounce... ,” “I sing. .. ,” “America, I don’t invoke your name in vain. .. ,” etc.124 Were these events tied more closely to the body, however, were they more beholden to the biophysical limits experienced by corporeal beings, they would have a finite quantity of breath, which would necessitate a more careful use of poetic resources. Reading Neruda helps us realize that the voice speaks, but cannot listen. Thus, the simple fact of its speech is not sufficient; what also needs to be considered is what it says, and for how long. Accordingly, the rest of this book will argue that a postcolonial poetic voice must emerge on the plane of immanence. When the poet and the poem are a part of his or her territory, order will emerge in this territory as a function of the resources available in that place. Order will not be imposed from without and, although outside influences may certainly enter the system (and other elements will leave it), they will do so on the same plane. The issues with the plane of transcendence are, as we have seen, that it is frustrated by diversity and that it is less sustainable. Not beholden to the resources or the needs of the local ecosystem (of which it is always, nevertheless, a part), it is 122

Scott, Seeing like a State, 311. Paraphrasing Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 213. 124 Nolan, Poet-Chief, 63. 123

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content to cover vast tracts of territory in an effort to fulfil abstracted goals. We will see, however, that a nomad poetics is about defending and protecting land; it is, therefore, crucial that the nomad remain on this land in order to fight for it.

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T ’ S T I M E T O G E T B A C K T O C O U N T R Y . Descending from the transcendent heights of Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu, we now need to consider the principles of a poetics of immanence, in which everything – language, spirit, and law – is to be found in the ground beneath our feet. We need to embrace the challenge and learn how to read, rather than reduce, complexity. Aboriginal people have been doing this for millennia. Uniformity is unheard of in the West Kimberley, for example. Each spring has its song-poems, rituals, and set of stories. Patterned groupings limit any one person’s authority in relation to their country; there is no singular, overseeing God.1 Powerful spirits are moving and multiple, stronger in some places than in others. Every activity is contingent upon the place in which it occurs.2 Language means nothing until its connection to country is understood; if the poet isn’t prepared to go to the place of the poem, then the poem can only be seen in an abbreviated form. But the phenomenal diversity and complexity of the West Kimberley doesn’t result in chaos; in this chapter we will see how complexity can be both an enabling structure and a limit for poetry. In West Kimberley poetics, there is no sole [or soul] source of a poem: people and country gather to produce texts in what Muecke calls a “contrapuntal polyphonic style.”3 As people and country work in partnerships, so are partnerships important across descent groups: the members of a local descent group are responsible for but a part of a song-cycle; almost every song-cycle is shared by members of several local groups. This means that knowledge is segmented; what any one person knows is but a glimpse of a larger mythic terrain. Knowledge can rarely be performed ritually in toto, either, if only be-

1

Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe, “Words from the Other Side,” Social Alternatives

9.4 (January 1991): 27. 2 3

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 72. Reading the Country, 72.

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cause of the practical difficulty of getting all the people concerned to meet together at the one time.4 If the song-cycle travels through country, and country is home to multiple groups, then a travelling song necessarily requires more than one performer if it is to be realized in its entirety. Boundaries between groups differentiate parts of country and necessitate various procedures that need to be followed if one is to travel in a place to which one does not belong. But borders are also porous and permeable.5 In the Kimberley, an environment composed of permeable boundaries requires a communal mode of singing and talking about it. The way most of us get to the West Kimberley, however, is through its urban gateway, Broome. The striated spaces of this rapidly growing town can lead us to something of “an enlightenment encounter” with the surrounding country. In this encounter, the country surrounding Broome is of little relevance other than as a place to build more roads and houses, or to look for more gas. We “praise / the mineral earth,” as in Neruda’s “Oda a la tierra,” for its capacity to bring more capital into town. The loss of attunement to the particularities of the West Kimberley contributes to “a loss of contextually, ethically derived behavioural responses.”6 If we leave Broome and enter country yet to be chopped up by urban-zoning lines, however, the encounter becomes entirely localized, because all orientations and linkages from one place to the next are in constant re-calibration: One never sees from a distance in a space of this kind [. . . ] . Orientations are constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers. 7

4

R.M. Berndt, “Traditional Aboriginal Life in Western Australia: as it was and is,” in Aborigines of the West: their past and their present, ed. R.M. Berndt & C.H. Berndt (Perth: U of Western Australia P , 1980): 21–22. 5 This relates to the crucial Kimberley concept of the wunan. The wunan is the idea that social groups are fixed about the landscape in a particular constellation of positions, while also being interrelated by virtue of various social and economic practices of exchange. See Valda Blundell & Robert Layton, “Marriage, Myth and Models of Exchange in the West Kimberleys,” Mankind 11 (1978): 231–45. 6 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 75. 7 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 544. (My emphasis.)

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Necessarily, therefore, the importance of vision relative to other senses recedes: close-range vision is more likely to be complemented by auditory and tactile information, such as the sounds of waves crashing at a nearby beach or the texture of moisture in a clay pan. In this modality, effective seeing is more about glancing at various things than about attempting to acquire a static overview; maps of country are personal and can readily change to become part of a communal mƝtis. This is not the world as viewed by “an immobile outside observer” through a high-modernist optic. Rather, this is perception in accordance with Muecke’s “aesthetic of the glimpse.”8 A couple of years’ back, while camping in Minyirr Park, just to the south of Broome’s town centre, I kept a journal. The following is part of an entry dated 6 September: Last night the entire park became enshrouded in a mist so thick that the tree above my tent started dripping as if it were beneath rain. Each drop onto the tent’s mesh split into a fine spray that landed on my face, my pillow, my neck. I had to get up at some stage after midnight to take a piss. As I was walking away from my tent I was a little haunted by the eerie gloom of the place: visibility only a few meters; the dark shapes of trees twisting through the fog in black, wrangled lines. It was gloomy in a way I don’t remember ever seeing the Australian bush. Spirit beings could have been walking about; there was ample room for this possibility.

Plenty of things could be going on around Broome that I have no idea about. Crucially, what Muecke’s glimpse allows for is the gathering of enough information for the observer to make his or her way through the environment as well as for those half-seen things to be left to themselves, “imagined as something other, beyond and magical”: Perceptions come in flashes, in disruptions of the steady gaze. Since the country is peopled variously by spirits, ghosts and natural things transformed, there is always the danger that this mystical world will break through into perception. [ . . . ] Gaps can appear in the veil of ordinary looking.9

In the realm of writing, an aesthetic of glimpsing might translate to “acts that try to conjure up what is missing without destroying it by reducing it to the [.. . ] writing of classificatory reason.” This is what the spatial theorist Paul Carter calls “dark writing,” a writing that “must remain on the edge of sight.”10 8

Muecke, No Road, 214. No Road, 214. 10 Carter, Dark Writing, 13. 9

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Taking an aesthetic of the glimpse to its limits allows the world itself to emerge unshackled by the frames of high-modernist encounter. The idea that there can be a set of axioms which give us rigid, ever-lasting facts about the environment – an idea that supposes a closed and finished world – gives way to what Manuel de Landa calls an “open world.” This is a world full of divergent processes which yield novel and unexpected entities; it is “the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth.”11 Of course, a world full of divergent, dynamic processes is still a world in which particular processes condense into forms. The country around Broome tells stories of smooth, open spaces striated by settlement patterns: out on the Roebuck Plains, fences cut across Aboriginal tracks, so that you need to take a detour and drive to the owner’s house to get permission to keep on going.12 Smooth space “provides room for vagabondage, for wandering and drifting between regions instead of moving straight ahead between fixed points.” Certainly, the ocean to the west is one such space. It is an entire region “that, despite its enormity, is not a strictly measurable space with definite borders.”13 Yet on the land surrounding Broome it becomes clear that one is always moving through mixtures of smooth and striated spaces, watching as one space disappears to make way for another. While walking the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, for example, we might be tempted to categorize the experience as one of walking through a smooth space – an experience directly opposed to the experience of walking with a tourist map along the streets of Broome. However, as the cultural theorist Chris Healy points out, while the Trail is not determined by the straight lines of an urban map, it is not walking as a “resistance to the spatial program of the city” either. For the trail is goal-driven – we are always concerned about getting to the next campsite – and regimented – a particular pace and direction is predetermined by the guides, and it is to be adhered to.14 While at times in the day our experiences might inflate into a multi-sensual array of complex possibilities, these possibilities will contract to rhythms that are determined by

11

de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 7. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 66. 13 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 1998): 304. 14 Chris Healy, “White Feet and Black Trails: Travelling Cultures at the Lurujarri Trail,” Postcolonial Studies 2.1 (1999): 71. 12

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daily costs and pre-planned itineraries. These rhythms of contraction and expansion, of striation and smoothness, are useful segues to a discussion about West Kimberley song-poetry.

Song-Poetry and the Nomadic Line There are three categories of song-poetry in the West Kimberley: that which is composed, such as country and western songs; that which comes from the Dreaming (known in the West Kimberley as Bugaregara) and forms part of what are generally sacred rituals (such as The Two Men, which I will discuss further on); and that which is known as nurlu and comes from balangan (ancestral spirits), such as the Bulu series (which I will also discuss later on).15 Bugaregara and nurlu song-poems often occur as cycles, or extended series of poetic texts; structurally, they have much in common with the more widely researched body of Central Australian song-poetry, which allows us to talk about West Kimberley and Central Australian song-poetry together.16 Despite important exceptions, Western scholars have usually described song-poetry in purely musical terms. Such musicological analyses can neglect the poetics and philosophical implications of the poems, and have drastic impacts on the style of translation. Accordingly, I will be reading song-poems with an emphasis on their poetics. In West Kimberley and Central Australian songs, the poetic text is grouped into rhythmic units, and this ‘rhythmic text’ is then laid against a melody. The rhythmic text is repeated until the melody is complete, which means that the precise points at which the text begins and ends are often concealed.17 The poetic text, therefore, is integrated into a dynamic, cyclical system. Each song item can be clearly identified in isolation as an autonomous body, but the form it assumes is always contingent on its place within a larger performative matrix. Despite such musicality, however, we are dealing with song-poetry in

15

Ray Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys” (doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney, 1990): 51. 16 Ray Keogh, “Nurlu Songs from the West Kimberley: An Introduction,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (1989): 6. 17 Myfany Turpin, “The Poetics of Central Australian Song,” Australian Aboriginal Studies. 2 (2007): 100.

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which “music is still the servant of the words.”18 Contrary to what Western poets might assume, the adjustment of the words to fit a song text does not reduce the text’s poetic value.19 Rather, the syntactic contortion is a consequence of the fact that verse rhythm is not produced by speech rhythm (which is the case in Western song). The text’s conjunction with rhythmic patterns to produce a rhythmic text means that Central Australian poetic language is quite distinct from the language of everyday speech. That the word exhibits new connective characteristics in the rhythmic text is a sign of its distinct, poetic nature. Song-poetry, in Strehlow’s words, “is a mould in which the untidy scrap material of everyday speech is melted and reshaped.”20 Music and speech combine to form poetic speech; thus, the poetic space is the ‘attractor’ that initiates the transformation of speech into poetry. For Deleuze and Guattari, a rectilinear or concrete line around something is negatively motivated. Amidst “all that passes, flows, or varies,” the concrete line erects an idea of “constancy and eternity” in order to “ward off anxiety.” Their ‘nomad line’, by contrast, is motivated positively by the smooth space it describes, rather than striates. The nomad line has multiple orientations, pass18

Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 32. In most Western songs, the ‘tune’ is a combination of melody and rhythm, and the lyric or the text is a structure independent of the tune. Different texts can be laid upon the same tune, yet the song is still regarded as the one song. In Central Australian song-poetry, by contrast, rhythm and melody are independent. Instead of melody and rhythm combining to form a tune, as in Western music, here the text and the rhythm are combined to form a ‘rhythmic text’. In the Western case, text is usually superlative to the song’s structure; in the Central Australian case, it is melody that is superlative. Consequently, the substitution of a different text while maintaining the same melody and rhythm would be regarded as the performance of a different song, or simply as incorrect. 19 Often, a clear rhythmic measure will reshape the words of each poem into new forms. This leads to situations in which the verse rhythm may require the breaking-up of words linking adjacent syllables to other words, or the addition of syllables to ‘fill in’ rhythmic gaps between or within words. Additionally, while the words are initially moulded to fit the rhythmic structure, they are further modified by the pairing of the rhythmic text with the melody. 20 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 19. We should note that there are also many instances in which this “scrap material” must be skilfully manipulated to do things other than make song-poems, such as negotiating restrictions on mother-in-law languages, initiation languages, and various other languages or terms that refer to the presence of sacred sites. Language use, in all its forms, involves a high degree of virtuosity in Aboriginal cultures.

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ing between points and figures without attempting to enclose smooth space within a striated plan.21 Linguistically, the nomad line equates to a privileging of the present tenses, which – as we saw in Chapter 3 – avoid predications and conclusions, and favour open-ended sentences. The imagery of many of the poems in Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia, for example, vividly depicts open-ended situations rather than a sequence of actions with a clear conclusion. Strehlow himself emphasizes that the poetry tends to contain verbs of ongoing states, which he demonstrates by frequently using the progressive present in his translations.22 For the anthropologist and linguist John Bradley, that such song-poetry can never be described in the past tense tells us that the poems are in constant movement through country, “flowing like a living conduit of meaning, ever present.”23 Consider the following curse song, from a women’s ceremony carried out by a wronged wife who wishes to punish her rival: The tjƱmbarkƾa plaits are lying there: She is continually wasting away without hope. With bleaching teeth she is lying there, With [shrivelling] brain she is lying there. Her eyeballs are projecting from their sockets; Her head has grown too large for her. The plait woman keeps on crying and crying; In her loneliness she keeps on crying and crying. The tjƱmbarkƾa plaits are breaking her life; The avenging woman is breaking her life.24

Clearly, this is powerful, potent poetry, intended to sing into another person the state being evoked in the song. The digging sticks are like constant 21

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 548. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 420. 23 Bradley, Singing Saltwater Country, 106. 24 In Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 394. Here, two women make two long digging sticks before cutting off their locks and pubic hair, which they work into plaits. The plaits are tied to two neckbands, and these are attached to the two digging sticks, which now represent the mythical plait women (tjƱmbarkƾa). A women’s dance is executed around these ‘image-sticks’; the outlines of a snake are drawn to the intonation of the verse. 22

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shadows beneath the activity, yet the poem-space is porous enough to allow for the present moment to move and change. For all we know, the moment might endlessly perpetuate, or it might fragment and decompose into other moments; neither of these possibilities is of concern, however. What is relevant is movement. This is a crucial aspect of the nomadic line: for all of its porosity, it nevertheless has a direction. The song-poem, in turn, and even the songline of which it might form a part, is powerful and pointed: its power does not radiate indiscriminately, but has a very particular velocity. In other words, the poem’s smooth open-endedness focuses into particular, albeit fleeting, striations. There are yet other linguistic consequences of a nomadic line. The poem above is an example of how, in much Aboriginal song poetics, there is a tendency to reduce the parts of speech to mainly verbal or substantival elements: the poetic vocabulary consists largely of nouns and verbs. Of course, an absence of adjectives suggests that descriptive texture is derived from other performative elements such as dance, yet it is also indicative of a poetics resistant to delimiting its environment by confining it within the language of a descriptive survey. The poetry doesn’t seek to encompass the country with rectilinear lines – it needs to form an open relationship with it. Objects remain free to enter into partnership with, or break away from, language; without adjectival anchors, a phrase cannot become ‘inaccurate’ because the object to which it refers has changed in some way. Rather than stopping to layer a place with description, the nomad line keeps flowing. Instead, objects or places can be emphasized by repetition, or by returning to them periodically, as we can see here in this poem from Arnhem Land: Tree-trunk, wood of the Tree, Spirit Women belonging to Sugar Bag hang up their honey-baskets. . . the bees are hurrying back, hurrying back. . . Wood of the Tree, Tree-trunk, wood of the Tree, Sugar Bag, exuding viscous drops, hot dark Sugar Bag, dry Tree with Sugar Bag inside, dry wood, fat, fermented Sugar Bag at the Tree’s mouth, beeswax and cells filled with honey.25

25

From “Wama-Dupun (Sugar Bag and Hollow Log),” in Margaret Clunies Ross, “The Structure of Arnhem Land Song-Poetry,” Oceania 49.2 (December 1978): 148–

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Furthermore, many Aboriginal languages employ a poetic verb in which person and number, as well as tense, appear to have been eliminated. Here we come across a feature that will be common in much of the indigenous poetic practice we encounter in this book: places are rarely indexed via the first or second person. More akin to Walt Whitman’s impressionistic syntax of unconnected elements than to Neruda’s overcoding of landscapes, the poetics of Central Australian /West Kimberley songs is indefinite, tied to the “collective assemblage” of the locale rather than to “a subject of the enunciation.”26 In most nurlu songs, for example, actors are largely occluded: texts are in the third person, and the subject is only sometimes identified; where a prefix might refer to the first person, that person’s identity is never stipulated.27 This suggests indifference both to the distinction between the singular and plural subjects, and to a clear distinction between the singer of the song-poem and the subject-matter about which he or she sings.

Topological Connectivity The parts of an object put together on a factory assembly line typically have fixed metric sizes, shapes, and positions. This limits the kinds of procedures that may be followed for their assembly. Transport-system channels and motion sequences are rigidly controlled in order to correctly position parts relative to one another. By contrast, the component parts in a biological assembly are defined less by rigid metric properties than by what de Landa terms their topological connectivity. Just as the specific shape of a cell’s membrane is less important than its continuity and closure, so is the specific length of a muscle less important than its attachment points. This allows component parts to be adaptive instead of inert, so that tissue can grow and fold in response to a vast range of events. It also means that transport processes need not be so carefully controlled: components can float around and randomly collide, using code-matching mechanisms without the need for exact positioning.28 Produced by biological organisms, language also exhibits biological qualities. Phrasal units are essentially adaptive because their significance is realized – 49. These repetitive, emphatic structures will re-emerge in Paddy Roe’s narratives (in Chapter 6 below). 26 Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292. 27 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 77–78. 28 de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 66.

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which is to say, they become phrases – within larger tracts of linguistic code. What is important in a letter or a word (or a sentence) is also its topological connectivity, the way that it connects with the syntactic membrane(s) around it. We need to think of Aboriginal song-poetry in these same terms. For, while all language exhibits this adaptive topology to some degree, it is often difficult in the dense sedimentation of a printed text to see how language in turn attaches to, and forms integral relationships with, surrounding materials. It is in Aboriginal song-poetry that we see most clearly how the ‘tissue’ of a poem can change according to a host of fluctuations in the environment. The aforementioned adjectival paucity of Central Australian song-poetry does not necessarily limit a song-poem’s evocative capabilities. Like a biological unit, it exhibits such paucity in order to develop a better continuity with its surrounding environment. In Arrernte culture in particular, writes the musicologist Andrée Rosenfeld, “the language of song is deprived of much of its denotative power so that its evocative potential can be enhanced in rhythmic and sound patterns”; in Central Australian [and West Kimberley] songpoetry, language and music aren’t experienced as separable components of song performance.29 Indeed, Allan Marett goes so far as to argue that thematic articulation – whether overt in the song or deeply embedded in it – is not the focus of attention during performance. Rather, the focus is most squarely on the performance itself, in ensuring that the performers construct it in a conventionally and aesthetically pleasing way.30 This is the wider, extra-linguistic assemblage of which the song-poem is a part. The song-poem, then, is not only a poem, or even a song text, but a multimedia assemblage, which itself is not simply a mode of entertainment but a moment in a chain of dialogue between a great network of speakers – human, spirit, animal, and otherwise. Within such assemblages, even the non-musical intervals can acquire important functions as “contrapuntal engagement[s]” with the music itself.31 Often, for example, the performance of a nurlu series

29

Andrée Rosenfeld, “Structural Convergence in Arrernte Art and Song,” in Many Exchanges: Archaeology, History, Community and the Work of Isabel McBryde, ed. Ingereth Macfarlane, Mary–Jane Mountain & Robert Paton (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 2005): 180, 178. 30 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2005): 81. 31 Deborah Bird Rose, “Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between,” Religion & Literature 40.1 (Spring 2008): 116.

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involves the progression, song by song, along a particular track. If there is a chorus, or a group of ‘back-up’ singers, it will follow the main singer and repeat his verses, rising in song after his voice has faded, and fading as his voice rises again. This song-dialogue has been known around Broome as tracking.32 In this way, the focus on an individual’s voice (something so prominent in Romantic poetic practice) is dispersed across the ensemble. The emphasis on any particular subjective response is in turn dispersed across multiple subjectivities (balangan – song-writer – singers – country). Most important is the exchange between bodies, the tracking, rather than what any individual body does. A good performance of a song-poem depends, therefore, on the creation of a good assemblage. In other words, the song-poem is a framework for an event; it is potential energy, genesis in waiting. Almost all of the major genres of song accompany rites at some time or other. However, the specific nature of the rite, the stage of the ritual during which the song-poem is sung, and other variables inherent in any particular performance can have a profound influence on the way the singer chooses to recite the structures within the song’s strophes. Meanings become dependent on their position in the overall songline; it is the context in which the song is performed, therefore, that determines the meaning of each verse.33 Topological connectivity and adaptability are further enhanced by the flexibility of the song structures themselves. In the nurlu, for example, multiple interpretations of a song’s meaning are common, as are confusions and omissions. Word groups have a fixed relationship to rhythmic units, but float freely alongside the melodic contours, so that the singer will contort the shapes of specific words to conform to the underlying rhythm. Such divergent, nonrepeatable performances have recurrent properties. An important property of all open, dynamic systems, Aboriginal poetic structures are recurrent because each component of the song-sequence is potentially unlimited with regard to the ways in which it can be modified and can diverge from previous renditions.34 Over time, however, or on a statistical basis, the song-cycle conforms to a set of rhythmic rules. This is a poetics that shows how the potentially un-

32

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 55. C.J. Ellis & L.M. Barwick, “Musical Syntax and the Problem of Meaning in a Central Australian Songline,” Musicology Australia 10 (1987): 48. 34 See Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (1996; New York: Free Press, 1997): 96–101. 33

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predictable trajectories of individual particles can be gathered within larger, cyclical forms. However, the song-poem connects not only with a performative topology but also with a larger network of knowledge-systems and environmental markers. The most powerful song-poems are able to maintain the functional integrity of country, confirming relationships between things living and nonliving, as well as affecting events from the past through to the present.35 The poems’ integral bonds with country are not plainly visible, however: most song-poems are inaccessible to people unfamiliar with their contexts, only becoming transparent as one learns about the song’s country; we can’t remove ourselves from country’s immanent plane in order to see the poem’s entirety ‘from above’. The poem is also strengthened by performance in certain places, where linkages can be glimpsed between the song text and certain significant sites. Furthermore, one’s ability to know the song-poem is dependent not only on one’s knowledge of country but also on one’s sex and one’s degree of initiation into the culture; the poem will ‘fit’ with any one body, depending on that body’s relationship to other forms of knowledge and expression.36 The lack of syntactic markers serves either to obscure or to promote the songpoem’s topological connectivity with broader contexts.37 Thus, as in many other forms of Aboriginal art, the song-poem reveals itself only in strict relation to the proximity to country of the poem–audience assemblage. The measuring unit of West Kimberley and Central Australian verse is not the classical European metric foot, but the smallest musical phrase into which the rhythmic measure of the line can be divided. Carter proposes that such measuring reflects “the flexibly incorporative” nature of Central Australian 35

Bradley, Singing Saltwater Country, 106. Again, all texts exhibit this same quality to various degrees, but it is in Aboriginal song-poetry that the degree of variability is greatest. 37 Still, if we are to argue that song-poetry is a component of a larger, performative moment, we must keep in mind the dubious ways in which such an argument can be appropriated. Paul Carter observes that various musicologists prior to Strehlow had obscured the social structures and the religious and philosophical life of the Aranda culture. By focusing on the physical, visual, and musical dimensions of the songpoems, they evaded the need to grapple with their complex intellectual content, and “confirmed the impression that Aranda society was ‘primitive’ ” ; Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber & Faber, 1996): 77. It is as much for this reason as for any other, then, that we should remember Strehlow’s axiom: in Aboriginal song-poetry, the music is always “the servant of the words.” 36

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song. C.J. Ellis terms such phrases ‘isorhythmic units’ and, writing of their “capacity for expansion and contraction of formal units within established boundaries,” contrasts them with the rigid bar-divisions of Western music: This difference between the rigid divisive thinking shown in the structures of Western music and the flexible additive thinking shown in the structures of [Central Australian] music [. . . ] suggests a greater capacity for exclusion on the part of Western thinkers and for incorporation on the part of Aboriginal thinkers.38

The flexibility of the textual and melodic relationship permits a continuous decision-making process to take place: the performer can choose at what point to enter the poem, and then how to modify the words to conform to certain rhythmic rules (for example, syllables must begin with consonants, and rhythmic units with fewer notes must not precede those with more). Strehlow’s anguish about the imminent disappearance of certain Central Australian song traditions was based largely on what he saw as performers’ failures to reproduce a song metrically, “with all the reliability of a tape recorder.”39 Because he could find no room within the tradition for individual creativity, he saw the poems as rectilinear lines, or as concrete definitions of knowledge in need of constant maintenance. Structural neglect meant that chaos would start to eat at this line and soon, like the Roman Empire, the tradition “was doomed to collapse.”40 However, it is the very flexibility of the way in which a rhythmic text and a melody can be placed together that has promoted the conservation of otherwise inflexible rhythmic and melodic structures.41 Instead of the mere repetition of standardized formulas, song-poetry is what we might call, after Abram, a “genuine expressive speech.” It is inherently creative; there is always a slight shift in words’ meanings. The language is always subject to a “coherent deformation.”42

38

Catherine J. Ellis, Aboriginal Music: Education for Living (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1985): 85. 39 Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land, 103. 40 Carter, The Lie of the Land, 104. 41 Linda Barwick, “Creative (Ir)regularities: The Intermeshing of Text and Melody in Performance of Central Australian Song,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (1989): 27. 42 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 83.

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Orpheus in the Kimberley? For the anthropologist R.M. Berndt, the clue to Western Desert philosophy lies in the criss-crossing of its Dreaming tracks, along which spirit beings travel(led). What they do (did) during their journeys provides the content for every ritual and the basis for all philosophy and expressive practice. One mythological constellation that has a very wide distribution across the Western Desert features characters known as the Two Men. Known around Broome as the gundurr line (a ‘line’ is a cycle of song-poems), the poems tell of the journey of two shape-changing creation beings who, at particular stages of their journey, visit areas that are now within the town’s limits.43 The gundurr line is but a series of glimpses. The Two Men that I discuss here are not necessarily the same as the Two Men in other ritual contexts: the paths they follow, and the rituals that are to take place along these paths, are different across different areas. The following version was related by the late songman Butcher Joe Nangan and, while the content of the cycle is restricted (so that I can’t provide examples), what will be become apparent nevertheless is the startlingly different nature of its poetics. A discussion of The Two Men prompts us to reconsider the relationship between language and the wider world. The relationship between poiesis, or the creative, generative moment, and the act of poetry crosses cultures and territories. For Aboriginal as for Western poetic traditions, poetry is linked to the process of world-making. For the Greek and Roman poets, when Orpheus sings the trees and mountain tops bow to him as if he were a god, the singer’s music is so expressive that all creation cannot help but respond to it.44 For the Orphic poet it is as Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “song is reality.”45 The world is poetry, for it is only upon the ground of the poetic word that the world can become real or meaningful.46 Orphic poetry is therefore not simply a form of signification but, by providing 43

Ray Keogh, “The Two Men: an Aboriginal song cycle from the Kimberleys” (Honours thesis, University of Sydney, 1981): 48. 44 Elisabeth Henry, Orpheus with his Lute: Poetry and the Renewal of Life (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992): 1. 45 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sonnets to Orpheus I, 3” (1923), in Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & tr. Stephen Mitchell, intro. Robert Hass (New York: Random House, 1982): 231. (“Gesang ist Dasein,” 230.) 46 Gerald L. Bruns, “Poetry as Reality: The Orpheus Myth and its Modern Counterparts,” E L H : English Literary History 37.2 (June 1970): 264.

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us with a world, makes signification possible. The Two Men are also the first to sing of the world around them. Everything, from geographical features and the names for flora and fauna, to religious objects and rituals and the songcycles themselves, is sung into being during their journey.47 And while Orpheus carries his lyre, the Two Men carry sacred boards and wear headdresses. An early researcher in the area went so far as to propose that before these two brothers there was nothing at all – no trees, water, people, or animals – so that the Two Men, in the manner, we might think, of Orpheus, granted each of these things its being, its ‘reality’.48 Immediately, however, the reader with access to a transcription sees that most of the world was extant before the Two Men journeyed through it. Before they embark on their travels, they spend a great deal of time examining the animals and plants already present in their country. We see that the Two Men are ascribing qualities and traits to various things – they are differentiating the world – but they aren’t bringing into being, as if from nothing, entirely new forms. Furthermore, most versions of the Orpheus myth describe the forming of a pacific order in the natural world: animals join together in groups; species habitually hostile to one another become tame and friendly; trees and rocks also form various patterns. In Ovid’s version, trees come together to provide Orpheus with shade; in Latin, the trees are called nemus, which is a grove of planted trees, as opposed to a wild forest.49 In The Two Men, however, life occurs quite chaotically – replete as it is with humour, hunting, killing, sex, fighting, and cheating – and of its own accord. The Two Men follow not one but a great variety of trajectories that spill out across the south-west edge of the Kimberley. The notion of de Landa’s ‘open world’, of a world full of divergent processes which yield novel and unexpected entities, a world which is too fluid to sit frozen in frames, is crucial to our understanding of what takes place here. For many Aboriginal groups, song enables performers to draw on powers left in the soil by Dreaming ancestors. If the “very ephemerality of sound draws attention to the evanescence of existence itself,”50 then song-poetry is the conceptualization of a world far from rest. To examine The Two Men is not to witness a divine power sculpting creation but to examine the breathing, dyna47

Keogh, “The Two Men,” 41. Piddington, in Keogh, “The Two Men,” 42. 49 Henry, Orpheus with his Lute, 2. 50 Linda Barwick & Allan Marett, “Introduction,” Oceania Monograph 46 (1995): 4. 48

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mic nature of the Roebuck Plains, for The Two Men are participants in, rather than creators of, the world. Indeed, they are themselves so much a part of these dynamic processes that after each song they both undergo a physical transformation: the stouter man becomes lean, while the leaner man becomes stout.51 There are no higher orders of organization in this world; the Two Men, as powerful components of a larger system, are certainly able to exert considerable influence on the wider environment, but the environment, in turn, is able to influence them. The Two Men are part of a flourishing assemblage of forms, among which they can distribute their catalytic energies. At this point it is also necessary to distinguish between the notion of an ‘unworld’, or a pure, chaotic ‘no-thing’ – which, thanks to a poet’s Orphic creative powers, becomes ‘some-thing’ – and the world we see in The Two Men. A world brought into being by (poetic) language rests, always precariously, on the silent emptiness which preceded language. So, because language does not come from the world but only houses it, language must rest on this same emptiness. Muecke argues, however, that the crucial relationship in much Aboriginal ritual is between body and world, and that Western research has interposed the concept of ‘the word’ between body and country much more recently.52 Similarly, in The Two Men the world and the bodies in it are already there; language emerges from this world, so words do not create the world. Rather, as a part of a pre-existing ecology, the function of language is to differentiate (just as trees grow, bodies breathe, fires burn, and so on); it is but one of a variety of processes acting upon the environment. Thus, the Two Men are certainly ascribing forms and qualities with their songs – they give particular birds particular abilities; they name trees; they give deadly venom to one snake and remove it from another – but they are differentiating these forms from a pre-existing diversity. Rather than bringing to life new beings, the Two Men are drawing things into becomings. The Orphic poet–magus derives his power from a solitary unity of word and being; by contrast, in The Two Men word is not being, but a function of being. Like everything else in the Western Kimberley, language was always ‘there’, and there are correct times and places for its use. Those rituals, songs, place-names, and features of which the Two Men sing are the results of very direct encounters between themselves and other people and animals. Unlike Orpheus, who wanders alone and brings fresh, new objects to life, the Two 51 52

Keogh, “The Two Men,” 58. Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 167.

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Men are with company (for, even at the very beginning, there are two of them); the names and characteristics they assign each part of the landscape are results of conversational exchanges with already present things. Indeed, often the course of their journey is altered because of a desire to follow a particular animal or another ancestral being. Never concentrated in a single unity of lyre and body, the creative power of the Two Men is inseparable from the larger fabric of the country in which they sing. This concept of creative power and agency ‘dispersed’ through country is dramatically different from Orphic models of poiesis. In the former, all action takes place on an immanent plane; in the latter, the power has a transcendent source. Orpheus received his lyre from Apollo and his poetic instruction from his divine mother, a Muse. His magic, in other words, came in a clear, uninterrupted channel from a deity ‘above’ (or detached from) the earth. His body, then, is the single, earthly origin of the poem. Later, Romantic interpretations of this circumstance claimed that poetry originated ‘within’ the self, for the human imagination had replaced God’s. When the poem originates as a function of an interaction with country, however, and in its speaking is to be given back to country, what we have, rather than an instance of self-reflexivity (where the subject initiates, then orients, moments of perception), is a country-reflexivity. The weight on Judith Wright’s shoulders in a poem like “The Encounter” starts to lift; we start to approach the position posited by the theoretical chemist Ilya Prigogine, where the poet no longer plays some extravagant role in the evolution of nature [. . . ] we are far from being the demiurge, as postulated by quantum physics, who would be responsible for the transition from nature’s potentiality to actuality.53

This deferral or removal of subjective influence is a characteristic not only of The Two Men but also of Butcher Joe’s nurlu song-poems, which he attributed to the spirit of his mother’s sister. Her spirit is country; it resides in the Roebuck Plains, south-east of Broome. She appeared in Butcher Joe’s dreams as a balangan to give him the songs.54 Rather than a solitary artist, then, he was, more properly, a vehicle; when he woke in the night with poetry in his head, he had become a conduit in a circular system whereby expression was channelling into him in order to be channelled back out again. This is countryreflexive. Country – rather than the poet – has initiated a series of reactions; 53 54

Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 151. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 55.

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the discrete body of Butcher Joe only functions with relation to larger environmental processes. The poet’s body, like each poem in a performance, like each phrase in a poem, like each word in a phrase, like each letter in a rhythmic text, is integrated in a circuit in which it may both receive and produce affect.

The Bulu A contemporary of Butcher Joe’s and a half-brother of Paddy Roe, George Dyunggayan (c.1900–c.1995) was the owner of a series of seventeen songs and three dances known as Bulu Nurlu. Like Butcher Joe, Dyunggayan received the songs from a balangan while he was dreaming. In the dream, Dyunggayan accompanies his late father, Bulu, and a group of ray (child-like spirits) through traditional Nyigina and Warrwa country in the West Kimberley.55 For the musicologist Ray Keogh, who worked closely with both Dyunggayan and Butcher Joe, “insofar as Bulu exhibits characteristics found in most, if not all Central Australian music, it can be said that the Bulu songs fall broadly within the Central Australian tradition.”56 Bulu is distinguished by minor differences, including the arrangement of text lines at melodic points of fit, but the form of the structural components themselves and the ways in which the rhythmic text relates to the melody are similar to many desert series.57 Dyunggayan’s Bulu will be the focus of the rest of the discussion, because the scale and public nature of the series allow us to explore its most interesting features in detail. Amidst fleeting moments of perception, we will see how our progression through Bulu starts to produce a divergent, complex environment. The experience of reading is that of a pulse: moments of comprehension are dispersed by those of confusion; the waves of comprehension are almost rhythmic, but the confusion is decidedly productive. Deleuze and Guattari identify three key properties of song. The first two concern the establishment of a circle of “sonic bricks” around a fragile in55

Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 40. Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 208. According to Keogh, West Kimberley and Central Australian songs exhibit significant degrees of variation, so that it is inappropriate to speak of a Central Australian musical ‘style’. Thus, while there are certain differences between Bulu and other West Kimberley / Central Australian songs, because of the already present diversity it is not possible to set up a stylistic boundary between them. 57 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 208–11. 56

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terior, which needs protection from the undifferentiated chaos beyond if it is to maintain its integrity. An Orphic poem, for example, could be “a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing [.. . ] centre.” The third property, however, only becomes apparent when “one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth.” One doesn’t open the circle so far as to let in complete chaos, but just enough to allow for the available possibilities of a future, “as a function of the working forces [the song] shelters.” Thus, the song “launches forth, hazards an improvisation”; it becomes an open system, country-reflexive, because “to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it.”58 This connects with some of the musicologist Linda Barwick’s recent work on Northern Australian song-poems, which “point outside the performance itself, to a meaningladen totemic landscape from which springs a host of beings, forces and sounds.”59 Barwick is interested in the liminal qualities of such songs, where she defines liminality as “a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process.”60 Crucially, this ‘joining’ is a mutually beneficial relationship: the song-poem grows as a function of the available possibilities with which the world cares to present it. In the case of Bulu, it was the balangan, a resident of country, who revealed to Dyunggayan the ‘possibilities’ for a nurlu cycle. Dyunggayan’s subsequent waking, then the refining and eventual performance of the songpoems, was the result of a complex “gestation process” – his act of singing involves simultaneous deferral ‘back’ to the balangan-source in country, and articulation of, or movement towards, these same forces. The most impressive moment of this process comes towards the end of the series, in Verse 16: barril yarramanydyina raydyinurri yimanayana dyilabumirri

Keogh’s basic gloss: (open eyes) (we made for him) (the ray spirits) (he went)

58

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 343–44 Linda Barwick, “Marri Ngarr Lirrga Songs: a musicological analysis of song pairs in performance,” Musicology Australia 28 (2007): 9. 60 Barwick, “Marri Ngarr Lirrga Songs,” 9. (My emphasis.) 59

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(rain-making / waterhole)61

My provisional translation: the waterhole’s eye opens wide for ( ) the spirits coming out the spirits bringing ( ) making rain opening it up making it for (

)

secret waterhole opening up for ( ) we can see the spirits emerge everything opening open eyes. . .

Here, according to Paddy Roe, Bulu’s ray gave sanction for all the songpoems, dances, and paraphernalia associated with Bulu to be made public. For Dyunggayan and Butcher Joe, however, the song-poem tells of how Bulu’s spirit now dwells in a dyila (waterhole), associating him with rainmaking activity. This, they say, reflects the close relationship of the song with Bugaregara and with country.62 These two different, although not inconsistent, interpretations of Verse 16 reveal how the direction of Bulu ‘explodes’, via a series of improvisations, into the wider realms of the public, all the while maintaining a reflexive connection with the “fructile” processes in which it was generated. That there are two interpretations of a song-poem among three such knowledgeable commentators is no accident, either. Multiple interpretations of the Bulu are extremely common. Of the eleven song-poems discussed by more than one of the men with Keogh, five were interpreted differently.63 Generally, the obfuscation of meaning in Central Australian song-poetry arises for two main reasons: the difficulties of translation and the difficulties of identi61

In Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 114. Muecke suggests that the first line of the poem means ‘we gave him a big surprise’ or ‘make him lil-bit open eye’ to see the ray (personal communication). 62 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 114. 63 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 85–86.

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fying words in a song.64 Yet this difficulty of identification can be attributed not only to the differing levels of understanding of researchers, but, as we see in the case of Bulu, also to various levels of meaning within the song text itself. Meaning variability arises “not so much from an inability to discover a fixed interpretation as from an intrinsically fluid relationship, which predicates against the discovery of any such fixed relationship.”65 Not only is the poetic language more opaque than in regular Nyigina practice, with different levels of access to those with greater or lesser levels of knowledge, but the placement of the song in different contexts may considerably alter the performers’ perception of its meaning. Verse 9 is a particularly interesting example in this respect: larn dyimirri yinyanydyina murda buyurr yarrabanydyina

Keogh’s basic gloss: (star) (comet / morning star) (he was there) (?) (make a haze) (we saw him)66

My provisional translation: in the hazy light of dawn in the (

)

we see the first star burning a track across the sky in the ( the comet burns a track

) in dawn’s light

we saw it in the sky above. . .

For Paddy Roe, this verse isn’t included in the primary journey described by the previous eight verses of Bulu. Instead, it commemorates the appearance of a comet passing over their sheep camp, known as Dyarrmangguyan, on Roebuck Plains Station. Dyunggayan, on the other hand, would sing Verse 9 (and 10) before Verse 6 as a part of the primary Bulu journey. Doing so arranges 64

Turpin, “The Poetics of Central Australian Song,” 100. Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 79. (My emphasis.) 66 In Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 105. 65

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the poems in a chronological order, where the “star” in Verse 9 is a morning star, and the sign for the ensuing sunrise, which is the subject of Verse 6.67 Importantly, Dyunggayan had only received Verses 1 through to 8 before Roe left their sheep camp in 1929. Roe refers to those songs that Dyunggayan received after his departure as “another line.” Unlike the previous eight songpoems, the latter additions don’t describe a single journey but a series of isolated events and natural phenomena.68 Thus, by incorporating Verse 9 into the previous series of eight song-poems, Dyunggayan has ‘de-contextualized’ Verse 9 in order to insert it into the larger fabric of the original Bulu journey. According to Keogh, Roe remembered songs more consistently than either Butcher Joe or Dyunggayan himself. To say that Dyunggayan was simply ‘wrong’, however, would be to overlook an important aspect of the poetics. Song-poems remain the property of the man to whom they were revealed until he decides to hand them on. With this transfer, certain travels also begin. Mutations in time and space transfer the origins of the poetry from a particular balangan to the creative period of Bugaregara.69 As an oral literature, without textual reference-points for marking deviations, the Bulu is able to drift. Having no fixed ‘yardstick’ to measure the extent of this drift, ‘tradition’ is a region replete with potential for change. We saw with Verse 16 that Dyunggayan associates the presence of the dyila with Bugaregara; earlier on, in Verse 9, semantic positions are slowly changing as part of this same drift towards Bugaregara. Similarly, while following six Kutjungka women along the Nakarra Nakarra Dreaming track near Balgo, Christine Watson encountered differences in the women’s interpretations of the cycle, particularly to do with the ‘correct’ place of verses within the cycle. For Watson, this was an example of how knowledge in the Kutjungka world “is not fixed and immutable but flexible, and is used to make cultural statements appropriate to contemporary events and situations.” It further emphasized “the fluid, continually reforming nature of space and place” in Kutjunka society.70 As in the interpretation of the Bulu series, no one subject is invested with an ultimate or unquestionable authority; meanings bounce against and interact with one another. In

67

Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 105, 279. “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 42. 69 “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 88. 70 Christine Watson, Piercing the Ground: Balgo Women’s Image Making and Relationship to Country (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003): 203–205. 68

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Deleuzian ontology, trying to fix meanings in place would be “akin to pinning down a live butterfly.”71 Rose argues that Western thought leaves us ill-equipped to find the value in a fluid ontology. Our long history of equating ‘sacred’ truth or knowledge with the eternal and immutable means that it can be extremely difficult to imagine “another world in which life is valued for its qualities of birth, change, motion, death.”72 Here, forms and qualities need to be explained as series of emergent processes, rather than as reflections of predetermined axioms or ‘blue-prints’. Again, such ontology is Deleuzian, characterizing a universe of becoming without static accumulations of being. More precisely, this is a universe where individual beings do exist but are only the outcomes of becomings, or irreversible processes of individuation.73 This has implications for poetic practice as much as for metaphysics. As narratives of passage and change, song-poems are local, itinerant propositions, which are valid for their particular localities insofar as they are part of these localities. There is thus no clear line to the horizon in an Aboriginal song poetics, for such a line would amount to reduction to an essential truth. Certainly, much of the journey during Bulu is marked by interruptions and uncertainty, and by constant changes in direction. In Verse 6, the group sees a mountain or a ridge in the distance:74 malarra dyid yiyalmanayana marrarri/barrarri yinyanydyina

Keogh’s basic gloss: (Mt. Clarkson / Garrawin) (stop) (he went) (can’t see properly / sunrise) (he was there)

My provisional translation: faint far away Mt Clarkson standing up coming from the east we look into the distance Mt Clarkson there 71

de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 8. Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal religion of place,” 181. 73 de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 106. 74 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 100–101. 72

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standing up to greet us the sun’s rising over us we stop to watch it rise at Garrawin where the day begins we see the sun coming up to dance over Garrawin faint / sun we’re far away / the day at Mt. Clarkson / Garrawin we stop to watch we’re watching standing up / sun rising Mt Clarkson / the sun’s coming out at Garrawin / in the distance a new day / standing up. . .

Roe reads this verse as the journey north-west from Balgandyirr towards Malarra (Mt. Clarkson), which is in traditional Warrwa country. Unlike many instances in poems by Wright and Neruda, where the poet is able to see everything, the group of characters in the Bulu can’t see the mountain very clearly because they are still a long way away: marrarri, says Roe, means ‘can’t see properly’. This lack of visual clarity, however, implies the absence of any immediately obvious landmark or physical referent, so it seems to require a different reading. Dyunggayan, then, says that the verse actually refers to Garrawin, a ridge to the west of Mt. Clarkson. Malarra, he says, is not Mt. Clarkson. Furthermore, instead of ‘marrarri’, Dyunggayan sang the verse with the formulation barrarri, which refers to ‘sun’ or ‘sunrise’. This was the verse he would always perform after Verses 9 and 10 (discussed above) in order to further develop the motif of the new day. Here we can see that as the line acquires a particular narrative form for Dyunggayan, it can also continue to shoot off on other trajectories, such as Roe’s. Like events, which by themselves do not seem to be meaningful units in Aboriginal thought,75 the song-poem itself acquires emotive and ceremonial 75

Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1992): 227.

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power once its place has been revealed within a series. We have to move through a series in order to bear witness to this power. It is no coincidence, then, that Verse 8, the final verse of the original Bulu line, is called wirdu nurlu (‘big nurlu’). Verse 8 is an accumulation of movement, causing the poem to split into new forms: the song bursts out into a dance which, according to Roe, Bulu imbued with such tremendous power that it could cause sickness; the sight of a storm-cloud on the horizon assumes the form of the wanjgararra (‘headgear’) worn by the dancer.76 On the other hand, as we saw with Verse 6, in the course of time the place of each song-poem can change, and along with it the accumulative result. A song-series like Bulu is a writhing snake composed of integrated parts, which are themselves interchangeable, or topologically connected. In the Bulu series, fluidity is nurtured, but discrete forms can still evolve because the cycle moves in a circular, recursive structure. “To change is to move,” writes Rose, but “to bring change into nurturance is to return.”77 This nurturance occurs in two ways: ‘vertically’ within each song-poem; and ‘laterally’ across the Bulu as a whole. Within each song-poem, while the relationship between the rhythmic text and the melody is extremely flexible, and no one text-line appears to be more significant than any other, the repetition of the text is nevertheless bounded by the ‘life-span’ of the melody. The Bulu melody is composed of several cyclical repetitions of a descent over the range of a ninth or tenth interval, and each descent has a structure typical of many Central Australian melodies. Keogh divides the melody into the introduction, which defines the upper pitch area, the central descent, in which particular characteristics of the melody emerge, and the concluding section, which is a repetition of the lower tonic.78 The singing of the rhythmic text must begin and end within the extent of the melody. Thus, the permutations taking place in the text are nurtured by a larger melodic structure, just as individual trajectories within a dynamic system are bound by larger, statistical trends.79 The second form of nurturance relates to the songline as a whole. Bulu begins and ends at Wanydyal, a waterhole from which all of its songs and dances emanate. In Verse 1 of the series, Bulu and his ray have emerged from Wanydyal, and are contemplating the direction they’re going to travel around 76

Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 103. Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” 179. 78 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 211. 79 See Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 87. 77

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the country, when Dyunggayan joins them in his dream-state.80 In Verse 8, dragging their feet with exhaustion, the group arrive back at Wanydyal, where they see a rainbow.81 The journey is now complete. “Birth is a key moment [.. . ] because it defines the source,” writes Rose, “and thus the site of return – to be born from a place is to be located so that one knows to where one shall return.”82 The form of Bulu is nurtured by its return to Wanydyal, allowing the journey to expand as an imperfect circle over country without breaking its connection to any place along the way. That final image from Verse 8, of the group walking with heavy feet back to the poems’ birth-place, should alert us to one of the most essential tenets of an Aboriginal poetics: much of the history of Aboriginal life has ignored walking as a basic activity. Walking [. . . ] is as easy to learn and as interesting as language, in fact the acquisition of language comes hot on the heels of learning to walk – and there is the isomorphism of the rhythm and their linear telos [. . . ] it is an activity which fundamentally relates the machinery of the body to a country with distances to be crossed.83

Like the Lurujarri song-cycle (mentioned in Chapter 1 above), the Bulu is a journey made on foot. Places are glimpsed while on the move; rarely do they grow heavy with layers of detail. Via the body, walking relates the voice to the country and to the performance of the poem; walking both organizes and nurtures the Bulu, and determines its appropriate length (for, as we saw in Verse 8, the group can’t keep walking forever!). The experience of reading Bulu texts, too, involves a kind of ‘walking’ through the dense scrub of confusion, and stumbling across clearings from time to time. The reader finds a path through arrays of glimpses, traces, sounds. For Carter, Western poetics are also composed of traces of movement, but our representations conceal this movement: our abstracted, generalized concepts of forms and populations are static.84 In Heidegger’s beginning, Logos signified a ‘gathering’ of the flux of the world into “unity and permanence.” It is by virtue of such permanence that the world first emerged into the light of

80

Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 92–93. “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 103. 82 Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” 179. 83 Muecke, No Road, 195. 84 Carter, Dark Writing, 5. 81

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being.85 Light provides us with vision; clear vision of a stable scene enables us to describe and define. When human language is less incisive and categorical, however, when it is on the move and more fragile relative to other sounds, to other performative modes, and to the various layers of a place, many of which require initiation in order to gain entry, this stability cannot exist. Now, instead of the shining stream of Logos, a slim packet of light rests on the retina in the instant of a glimpse. To recover an understanding of the mutable, therefore, is to recover an interest in the connections between static points of reference: this is the country encountered by walking, and the sounds encountered in language when syntax is split open, played with, jostled about in a rhythmic phrase. In turn, our interest in Bulu needs to be as much about the song-poems themselves as about the spaces between these poems. As Paul Carter argues, When this happens, the intervals will turn out not to be empty but embodying instead a rhythm. The passage from one position to the next – and the passes themselves – will acquire interest and meaning.86

Within a narrative of travel and return, non-musical intervals in performance are times for passage from one site to the next. They are not ‘breaks’ or ‘gaps’ in the performance, but constitute “a contrapuntal engagement” with the poetry.87 The poems themselves, then, are what Joris would call poases – poem-oases, or stops in the nomad’s journey.88 This is the rhythm of the performance, of walking the Bulu line.

Translating the Voice A primary task in a critical discussion of Aboriginal song-poems is not to read their transcriptions and translations as static representations of ideal performances in distant times and places, but as performances in themselves. Each transcription of a song-poem is a nexus of Aboriginal and settler knowledges, and the critical lens can be widened or narrowed in order to read a poem with greater or lesser complexity. Indeed, once we discard the European notion of

85

In Bruns, “Poetry as Reality: The Orpheus Myth and its Modern Counterparts,”

274. 86

Paraphrasing Carter, Dark Writing, 10. Rose, “Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between,” 116. 88 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 47. 87

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‘poem’, we can far better acknowledge the impressive complexity of the song-poem assemblage. Rothenberg writes of ‘tribal poetry’: [it] was almost always part of a larger situation (i.e. was truly intermedia), [so] there was no more reason to present the words alone as independent structures than the ritual-events, say, or the pictographs arising from the same source. Where possible, in fact, one might present or translate all elements connected with the total ‘poem’. 89

Like Rothenberg, we need to be thinking about dealing with these multiple elements in the context of print-dominated fields of scholarship, where the ‘literary’ and the ‘poetic’ primarily constitute written texts. We also need to move beyond Rothenberg, however, in order to acknowledge the multiauthorial, communal, and political contexts in which this work is translated. In other words, readings of song-poetry need to engage with the texts as instances of colonialism, in which both settler and indigenous peoples have played crucial roles. The aim of the translation process, then, is not to rediscover or re-create remnants of authentic Aboriginality but, rather, to “explode the processes, energies and investments that have gone into the construction of such spurious entities.”90 As a colonizing preliminary, however, these fragments of movement and sense have often been turned into ‘frozen’ verse-forms by Western scholars, which are then incapable of generating the creative current so present in their live performances.91 The result is a text which no longer moves, a ‘live butterfly’ which has been pinned down ready for analysis. This accords with what Glissant argues is at the basis of Western thought, the requirement of transparency: In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce.

With those who might suffer reduction at the hands of Western thinking, Glissant urges them to displace this reduction, to agree not only to the right to difference but also to the right to opacity. Opacity, as opposed to difference, is not defined by, or separated from, “an impenetrable autarchy” but can “coexist and converge” with innumerable fabrics, always eluding capture and 89

Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 96. Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 115. 91 Paraphrasing Carter, The Lie of the Land, 51. 90

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control. In the case of the Western thinker, Glissant argues that understanding must come from focusing on the texture of this convergence rather than on the nature of its components. To produce a poetics of relation we need to “give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.”92 This is to ask, ‘What are the affects of the components?’ rather than (or as well as) ‘What do these components mean?’ For our translation and reception of song-poetry, then, we need to recognize that the poetry must continue to elude us in its opacity. In general, the fixity of knowledge in printed texts is distinct from the continuous flux of process. “Once recorded,” writes Muecke, “knowledges are open to be traded, manipulated and reinterpreted.”93 Here, opacity involves a resistance to translation into printed text (stasis). Keogh’s transcription of The Two Men from an old tape-recording, for example, is full of empty spaces and uncertain translations: Butcher Joe’s patchy explanations often ignored numerous words or entire phrases in almost every song in the cycle. Thus, even a privileged reader like me cannot, despite long hours of study, see the entire text. This in turn imposes necessary limits on my gaze: I can at best catch a glimpse of fragments of The Two Men – not because the knowledge is transcendent, but because someone else has withheld it. It is as though, to paraphrase Glissant, the song-poems were “striving for disguise” beneath the symbols of written language, “working to say without saying.”94 Those long silences in Keogh’s translation have a positive function, therefore: the absence of words draws our attention to the lack of common ground between Aboriginal and settler discourses; the open spaces force us to glimpse rather than gaze. Translation must embrace the recurrence of opacity as productive, which is to say that the opacity should be recognized as a particularly effective strategy not only of articulating a breathing, moving world, but also of resisting colonial appropriation and encapsulation. Nevertheless, if major technical aspects of a song poetics are ignored during translation and transcription, we veer towards the other end of the spectrum where, rather than a surrender to colonial power, no productive encounter at all can take place. For one, the proper translation of a song-cycle can be an enormously effective tool for proving one’s right to country in the face of whitefella law, and for ensuring the cycle’s continued survival. In Borroloola 92

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 105. 94 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 68. 93

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in the Northern Territory, for example, an elder named Dinny told Bradley about the political importance of his own song-cycle, known as kujika by his people (the Yanyuwa). Bradley had finished translating the cycle and transcribing it onto the page: [Dinny] said that now “the kujika was like a whitefella paper. If government want to know why I got country, why I owns it, I gotta show him this paper – just like whitefella got him, you know, got a paper to show how you own that country.”

Bradley then adds that Dinny “caressed the sheet of paper bearing the kujika, handling it reverently: for him, it held power and authority.”95 This is an example of the real power of an Aboriginal oral poetics when it has been sensitively translated into printed form. I like to imagine that perhaps Dinny can see this power in the paper itself, its white field still bristling with all the potential of the song-poetry. Returning to the nurlu, then, and to the task of its translation, we will see that basic, line-by-line translations are dreadfully insufficient: To provide versions of translations, in the free-verse forms that Western readers would understand, is only to hint at their possibilities. If there are two lines, and neither comes first – they just turn around each other, a small cycle within a larger one – where does the meaning begin?96

In Reading the Country, Muecke cites the Rarrdjali song as an example. Rarrdjali has three separate text-lines but they can be performed in any order: At Rarrdjali the sun rises and a bird sings Sings a bird at Rarrdjali in the morning At Rarrdjali the bird sings the sunrise

95 96

Bradley, Singing Saltwater Country, 40. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 56.

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At Rarrdjali the sunrise is the bird singing97

In the Bulu as well, the text can wriggle and change shape in the moment of performance: no one text-line appears to be more significant than any of the others; the rhythmic text and the melody can intermesh at central points of structural coincidence, of which there are as many as the text-lines themselves.98 It is not so much the description of a scene that is important as the scene’s comfortable place within wider performative structures. The scene isn’t detached or frozen, in other words, but is wrapped up inside the performance space, within the wider environment. Without acknowledging the song-poem’s capacity to be reproduced in a variety of ways, the translator is reproducing nothing of the complexity of the poetics in question. This leads to a second issue, however, to do with what aspect of a word one chooses to translate. A poem’s sonic qualities – such as rhyme and alliteration – are more inextricable from the language in which the poem is written than are the meanings of the words themselves. Relatively simple examples can be found in common translations of Federico García Lorca’s poems, many of which were inspired by Andalusian folk songs. In “Memento” we read: Cuando yo me muera, enterradme con mi guitarra bajo la arena. Cuando yo me muera, entre los naranjos y la hierbabuena. Cuando yo me muera, enterradme, si queréis, en una veleta. ¡Cuando yo me muera!

A number of basic aural features are apparent here. There is the end-rhyme (of the ra/a sound), which is repeated almost constantly. We can also hear the repetition of a strong rhythmic unit, which repeats in each stanza and recalls 97 98

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 56. Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 211–12

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the brevity and intensity of the cante jondo (flamenco), on which the poem was based. The English translation, however, reads as follows: Whenever I die bury me with my guitar beneath the sand. Whenever I die among orange trees and mint. Whenever I die, bury me if you wish in a weather vane. Whenever I die!99

While the images remain more or less the same, the poem’s affects – or the ways in which it says what it says – have been severely altered. This is not unusual, either; invariably, a translator will work on capturing the semantic content or the ‘meaning’ of a poem instead of the rhyme and other affects. In all such cases, the discrete idea or image – the descriptive, delimiting, and ornamental capacities of language – is given priority over the sound. For Gordana Crnkoviü, the supremacy of knowledge over opacity, or of concepts over sounds, in matters of translation can be seen as a part of a much older and broader struggle between philosophy and art, or “conceptual cognition and sensual apprehension”: Art apprehends the world and we apprehend the art through our humanized senses – our ears, eyes, touch. This sensual apprehension profoundly affects us and changes our minds, but in ways different from those caused by clear concepts. From Plato on down, however, European and Western philosophy has commonly deemed such aesthetic appreciation to be inferior to conceptual cognition that deals with immaterial and disembodied ideas and that employs words that are, above all, comprehensible, working with their meanings rather than with their incomprehensible vocal bodies.100 99

Federico García Lorca, “Poem of the Deep Song” (“Poema del cante jondo,”

1931), tr. Cola Franzen, in García Lorca, Selected Poems, intro. Christopher Maurer (1995; London: Penguin, 2001): 44–45. 100

Gordana P . Crnkoviü, “The Poetry of Prose, the Unyielding of Sound,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009): 94.

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Where this issue becomes particularly problematical is when we are translating and writing down song-poetry: as it loses its sound for the survival of meaning, it also loses its flight or movement, which is to say that it slows down. According to the musicologist Myfany Turpin, the sound-patterning of song-poetry carries with it an “intangible aesthetic quality,” but this comes at the expense of semantic meaning.101 Indeed, in those poems most carefully guarded and revered, the poetic language is often entirely unintelligible to the performers: the potency resides in the actual sounds rather than in their meaningfulness.102 After all, the audience is more than purely human, so we can presume that the generators of such language (spirits in country) might garner at least as much as those who are performing it. A tremendous amount of information precedes an ‘understanding’ of the semantic content of an oral poetry. “The act of sounding the poem,” writes Rothenberg, “like that of making it, may (as in a ritual or a prayer or incantation) overshadow the urge to understand it.”103 It is not that the poem might not mean anything, but that this ‘meaning’ might not be present in this or that place or time. The problem is complicated further when we remember that in the Central Australian poem the words are necessarily altered to fit the rhythm. Implicit in the rhythmic text, therefore, is a deviation from regular speech towards sound, which imbues it with a “poetic function.” Thus, translating with an emphasis on semantic content alone is a sure way of denuding such poetics. For the non-Nyigina speaker, a Bulu song-poem is in a virtual (non-actual) state awaiting translation into any number of forms. So we need to follow the poem’s line of actualization back across the threshold of language to those non-linguistic forces that are contained in it, and that generated it.104 For Muecke, translating song-poems with men like Butcher Joe and Paddy Roe was “a process of building a story around the song” – a story being the next best thing to the complex poetry of the song, a narrative pleasure supplanting the musical and poetic pleasure, closing its arms around it while still the song struggles to break free.105

101

Turpin, “The Poetics of Central Australian Song,” 112. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 331. 103 Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 35. 104 See Bourassa, “Literature, Language, and the Non-Human,” 75. 105 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 56. 102

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Here, a non-linguistic notion of pleasure, as much as the linguistic content itself, is being translated. A translation practice with an emphasis on the poem’s phonetic flight has “a repositional rather than negative effect upon meaning; it situates the semantic order elsewhere – meaning becomes potential in its marginality.”106 The postcolonial translator must acknowledge, therefore, that the virtual nature of the song-poem does not have to be realized as such – not ‘copied’ – but actualized. The difference is that the rules of actualization “are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference and divergence and of creation.”107 The song-poem becomes a story, and keeps moving. So we return to the point raised at the beginning of this section: the transcription needs to be configured as a dynamic performance in its own right, in which it does not cancel or erase the old songline but, to paraphrase Carter, “divides and doubles it.” The translation that recovers the dynamism of performance “opens up a space where wandering tracks can find room. The authority of the line yields to the pattern created by those participating in its realization.”108 ‘Opening the space’ of the translation involves expanding our concept of ‘poem’ to include not only its multimedial nature but also a wider network of actors and their pathways through the text. Consider the following transcription of Verse 3 of Bulu:109 mawulanyana galydyi / galdyiriyana / nyana guwarrawarra dirrin yinmamayana

Of course, to anyone but a reader of Nyigina this does very little; its small form eliminates, rather than catalyses, affect. Almost all traces of oral form have been effaced, including the poetic strategies, the poet(s) involved, and the situation in which it was performed. To paraphrase Hodge and Mishra, this is a text “ruthlessly extracted from its original conditions of existence, de-

106

Steve McCaffery, “Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: The Fate of the Dada Sound Poem,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009): 125. 107 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (Le Bergsonisme, 1966; New York: Zone, 1988): 97. 108 Carter, Dark Writing, 97. 109 Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 96.

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prived of life, energy and the possibility of beauty.”110 So a better version might look like the following: mawulanyana galydyi/galdyiriyana/nyana [clay plan near Geegully Creek] [white ochre/snake] guwarrawarra [unknown] dirrin yinmamayana [right through] [he made]111

While the partial gloss in English certainly goes some way to destabilizing the concrete form of the first text, this second version still ignores the communal context of the song, as well as the sense of bodily movement and music. Missing, too, is an idea of the permutations the poem might undergo during performance. What we need to be thinking about instead is the entire complex of the song-poem. Now translation results in a prose-poem assemblage, as in the third example:112 Verse 3 mawulanyana galydyi/galdyiriyana/nyana guwarrawarra dirrin yinmamayana mawulanyana galydyi/galdyiriyana/nyana [clay plan near Geegully Creek] [white ochre / snake] guwarrawarra [ø] dirrin yinmamayana [right through] [he made]

Butcher Joe: snake dyurru yimana mawula galdyiri dyurru113 in Mawula that one in Dyirrgali side

110

Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 79. Keogh, “Nurlu Songs of the West Kimberleys,” 96. 112 Pieced together from Keogh, “Nurlu Songs,” 84, 85, 96, 278. 113 ‘The snake went to Mawula, galdyiri snake’. 111

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Mandigarrgabu Mawula and galdyiri bilong to marduwarra114 snake name galdyiri he’s there bilong yunjurrugu115 yunjurrugu all that (Dyunggayan: bilong yunjurrugu)

Keogh: Butcher Joe’s interpretation centres on the understanding of galdyiri as a tree snake found in Pandanus palms. He says the snake belongs in the river, and associates it with watersnake mythology. Dyunggayan confirms this association.

Roe: galydyi dat one Garrmurlgabu country name Garrmurlgabu galydyi they bin see im but they pass they pass ray with that old man too all travelling116

Keogh: For Paddy Roe, galydyi is white ochre. Galydyi is abundant at Garrmurl. Indeed, Galydyi is also known as garrmurl. Galydyi / garrmurl is used for bandirr (body painting) in ceremonies and ramu (etchings) on wooden artefacts.

Keogh & Roe: K – so what’s that one? R – that’s the galydyi galydyi dat one Garrmurlgabu galydyi dat one galydyi then bin see im but he not he not snake galdyiri he not snake that’s the galydyi K – what’s galydyi then? R – galydyi is white paint. . . not galdyiri snake he got im wrong in this tape117

114

‘river’ ‘water snake’ 116 ‘that old man’ is Bulu. 117 ‘he’ refers to Butcher Joe. 115

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Keogh: For Butcher Joe, the text is about a snake associated with the watersnake myth. Paddy Roe, on the other hand, described how Bulu’s group were travelling near a place called Garrmurlgabu where white ochre can be found.

George Dyunggayan & Keogh: D – and this one we look im, we look im for im for white white thing longa ground white [sings Verse 3] K – galydyi D – that galydyi that one wipe out you know we paint im galydyi

Keogh: Dyunggayan’s interpretation suggests that he and the group were travelling in an area of white ochre. While he confirms Roe’s interpretation, he also confirms Butcher Joe’s statement about the song’s relationship to watersnake mythology.

Cooke:118 they’re travelling to Mawula looking for white ochre ( ) passing through they didn’t stop making galdyiri travelling to Mawula ( ) didn’t stop didn’t stop making travelling to Mawula for white ochre galdyiri ( ) going right through making them 118

I have used ‘galdyiri’ to reflect the uncertainty about whether they are going for white ochre (‘galydyi’) or whether the song is in fact about the water snake (‘galdyiri’).

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making them they’re travelling to Mawula looking for white ochre.

This new translation is an extended and visually complex piece with multiple modes and a number of voices. Featured first and foremost is the indigenous language in which the poem is sung and a partial translation of its phrasal units, then we see a number of mediations of this poem through the voices of Butcher Joe, Roe, and Dyunggayan. The whitefella response, while positioned in Keogh’s original book as the (modestly) mediating voice of reason, through which these other voices are understood, is now inserted into the textual system. Any conclusion or final statement Keogh might like to make about the ‘correct’ version is rendered impossible: even after speaking to all the commentators, Dyunggayan’s apparently paradoxical agreement with the interpretations of both Butcher Joe and Roe means that Keogh is no closer to a ‘true’ reading than the others. In this respect, the above version is an example of the limited authority granted any particular agent in a complex system. In West Kimberley societies, knowledge is invariably deferred: to the old if you’re young, or to the people in the next community in the story or songline. Roe would often say to Muecke, “That’s all I can give you about that story, if you want the rest you had better go see so-and-so.”119 In this translation, limited authority is evident not only in the ways in which each speaker contributes small readings, but also in the way the reader’s position is not allowed to rest comfortably with any one of the speaker’s. “The single course of the linear argument yields to the discourse of the crowd at large.”120 The truth is in the way the text performs, not in what it discovers. As Dennis Tedlock has noted, an oral poetics that deals with contemporary oral traditions “is by its nature participatory.”121 In turn, the final addendum that has been made to this translation – entitled ‘Cooke’ – is one that acknowledges the affects of the poem upon the reader. Once those ‘intervals’ in the fissures of the text had been revealed as replete with various meanings and encounters, once the passage between readings had acquired as much interest 119

Muecke & Roe, “Words from the Other Side,” 27. Paraphrasing Carter, Dark Writing, 97. 121 Dennis Tedlock, “Toward an Oral Poetics,” New Literary History 8.3 (Spring 1977): 515. 120

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as the reading itself, then it became my ethical task to continue the passage, to prevent its conclusion. In translating the Bulu, I became a tracker – I let the shadow of my intentions “fall across the track.”122 As a tracker, however, I must tread as lightly and as quickly as those I pursue. My translation must be as nomadic as the nomad poem: glimpsing, moving, evading. Thus, the blank lines in my response remind us that a complex translation practice has to be as literal as possible, that is to say, it has to adhere to the same absence / presence structure the poem uses. [ . . . ] A translation should not, cannot make clearer what the original poem has purposefully hidden.123

There is no longer an individual poet, or only one reader of the poem, not even a particular ‘moment’ of reading. Such activities have been subsumed under a larger framework, in which the poem permeates and provides the basis for an elaborate discussion not so much about the poem itself as about the nature of responses generated by participation in its poetics. From this, we might have something resembling a poetic dialogue, in which the poem is still present but we are watching its written shape morph quite drastically, becoming quotations, being stitched on to reminiscences, floating around in the air about us. This is intended to be a rather dramatic shift in the direction of our critical gaze. We are no longer looking back, into the poem, for a source or a moment of genesis, or a static reality to which the poem is connected. Instead, all reality is wrapped up in the direction of time’s arrow, which means that we are moving forward, with the poem, and looking for connections or communities that the poem may inspire, or places to which it may return. Things start to make sense as one event bleeds into another. Again, we are not looking at what the text means, but at what it does (and, even, at what it might do).

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Paraphrasing Carter, Dark Writing, 7. Joris, Justifying the Margins, 23.

5

Leonel Lienlaf and the Potential of Song

W

E B E G I N T H I S C H A P T E R with a poem that takes us from the red soils and turquoise beaches of the West Kimberley to the lakes and snowcapped volcanoes of Araucanía:

Al recordar a Neruda recuerdo también a mi pueblo, mi patria, me recuerdo de mi tierra, del camino, de los valles, los montañas, la majestuosa Cordillera de los Andes, las araucarias, el Volcán de Villarica, allá en Cautín, en el corazón de la araucanía, donde viven los Mapuches. [...] Neruda fue el lucero del amanecer que alumbró el camino del acontecer. Su poema es como la luz de la luna menguante, suave, fresco y estimulante. To remember Neruda is also to remember my people, my country, I remember my land, the road, the valleys, the mountains, the majestic Cordillera of the Andes, the araucarias, Villarica Volcano, there in Cautín, in the heart of Araucanía, where the Mapuches live. [...] Neruda was the bright star of sunrise that lit up the path of events. His poetry is like the light of the waning moon, soft, fresh and stimulating.

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From “Yo recuerdo a Pablo Neruda”(‘I remember Pablo Neruda’)1 by the Mapuche poet Rosendo Huenumán, the above extract highlights something of the lingering influence of the Nerudian vision in contemporary Chilean poetics. Neruda acts as a catalyst here. Evoking memories of Araucanía, he must be passed through in order to attain a richer connection to country. It is his light that illuminates the topography; while not overbearing, while “soft,” it is nevertheless the “bright star of sunrise.” The following, later section of the poem is also of importance: Cada libro, cada poema de Neruda es un fusil, una ametralladora para el combate. Cada palabra, cada letra, es un proyectil de largo alcance, solo que este proyectil no mata, no derrama sangre, este proyectil es la razón de la razón, la verdad de la verdad, es potente, infinito, universal. Por eso es imposible dejar de recordar a Neruda. Each book, each poem of Neruda’s is a rifle, a machine gun for combat. Each word, each letter, is a long distance projectile, yet this projectile does not kill, does not spill blood, this projectile is the reason of the reason, the truth of the truth, it is powerful, infinite, universal. As such it is impossible to stop remembering Neruda.

Again, most apparent here is Neruda’s omnipresence, his transcendent “reason of the reason,” which is “impossible” to avoid. Neruda’s vision is so pervasive that it provides light even to those who never needed it. Of greater relevance to this chapter, however, is Huenumán’s association of poetry with combat, resistance or war. For at all stages of our discussion of Mapuche poetics, it is essential to remember the ways in which the voice and the poem are being used as modes of resistance. Like the Aboriginal poet, the Mapuche who speaks of her country is speaking with a-priori rights to this country. The voice thus has the function of a re-assertion, or a re-emphasis, of subjective presence, inextricably connected to which is the land of which he or she sings. Indeed, the voice can have the same aggressive, assertive quali1

In Virginia Vidal, “Sobre lucha y poesía del pueblo Mapuche,” Araucaría de Chile

12/37 (1987): 177–79.

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ties as a bullet from a gun. Further consideration must also be made of the type of speaking that is taking place here – most obviously, that Huenumán’s poem was written in Spanish, as opposed to the dominant Mapuche language, Mapuzugun. It was because of their inability to speak Spanish that many Mapuche people were unable to argue for their rights to their country;2 it was, in turn, with Castilian Spanish that Neruda assumed the ‘dead’ mouths of the Native Americans. Writing in Spanish, therefore, situates contemporary Mapuche poetics in a much wider field of politics and activism. Yet, despite the work of scholars such as Henry Reynolds, some Australian readers might be accustomed to thinking about indigenous people in ahistorical contexts, as ‘noble’, peaceful people, living in quiet ‘harmony’ with a precolonial landscape. Such readers may therefore baulk at a strong association of indigenous creative practice with combat. In discussing contemporary Mapuche poetics, however, understanding the relationship between war and word is crucial if we are to understand a history of five hundred years of successive waves of European colonization. “It is necessary,” writes Virginia Vidal, “to remember that the Mapuche people have always cultivated a mastery of the word”: [The Mapuche were] the only [indigenous people] on the American continent who never had princes or nobles, who only elected a leader – a toqui – when they were in danger. The election was a competition between candidates, each of whom had to display indispensable qualities: to be able to speak eloquently, profoundly, and beautifully, interpreting the mood of the populace; to be strong, daring, and valiant, to be masters of the art of war. 3

These links I am making in this discussion, then – between poetry, speaking, and fighting for territory – have a real, historical efficacy which goes to the very heart of Mapuche tradition. Vidal’s comment also highlights another important aspect of traditional Mapuche society: its fluid, adaptive nature. Traditional Mapuche social structures could change radically depending on external influences; an event as significant as armed conflict could cause dramatic phase changes to take place. The Spanish noted that, in times of peace, these groups would live in relative autonomy and independence, while during war they would unite

2 3

Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 25. Vidal, “Sobre lucha y poesía del pueblo Mapuche,” 161.

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under the authority of a single chief.4 The toqui were elected in times of conflict to resolve disputes and determine punishments or, in the case of war, forms of retaliation. Importantly, however, once the conflict was resolved the toqui was relieved of his position, and resumed a life in the society similar to that of any other Mapuche.5 This fluidity proved one of the Mapuche’s greatest assets during the protracted wars with the conquistadors: the Mapuche’s non-centralized political structure, which, for this reason, did not obligate its members to conform [to a single decree], constituted the chief obstacle for the invaders.6

Unlike the Inca, who had a centralized system of government and administration, the Mapuche social structure was far less hierarchical. There was no central body or figurehead. The ‘society’ as a whole was composed of distinct clans that, on occasion, needed to unite temporarily. The salient point here is that fluidity and adaptability have proven useful for the Mapuche people across many generations.

The Language of the Earth Before we begin to talk about Leonel Lienlaf’s poetics, it is necessary to explore at some length this very special importance of the word, and of its being spoken, in Mapuche culture. If there is a particular cultural trait that distinguishes the Mapuche people, it is the fundamental role of language in their social fabric. For the Mapuches, speaking is not only a medium of communication and expression, but an art form.7 As such, one’s ability to use language, even in contemporary contexts, is highly valued and contributes greatly to one’s social prestige. Oratorical skills – in Spanish, the ability to hablar bien (‘to speak well’) – is so highly valued that whoever possesses it is known as a weupin (‘one who conserves the language of the earth’). Furthermore, the earth’s language determines an understanding of the universe, and of the relationships between all things.8 For Elicura Chihuailaf, the words of Mapuzu4

Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 283. La memoria olvidada, 278. 6 La memoria olvidada, 282. 7 Jaqueline Caniguan, “Poesía mapuche registrada: un primer rescate” (doctoral dissertation, Universidad de La Frontera, 1997): 15. 8 Sonia Montecino, “Literatura Mapuche: oralidad y escritura,” Simpson Siete 7 (1992): 156. 5

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gun (literally: ‘the language of the earth’) express the conception of the world as it was created by his ancestors – words are, he says, the world’s “gestures” (gestualidad): people, human beings, travel through life in a world invested with gestures. These gestures express themselves before the initial murmur between the spirit and the heart is completely understood. Little by little, with the growth of experience, encountering the words of the others, the colours, the aromas, the textures, the impression we are given by these things and by the mysteries of our Dreams, this murmur becomes transformed into a language. It is this language that translates the presence of the ancestors, of each one in his or her actuality, and the creation – and all of its potential – of his or her ‘future’. With Silence, and resulting contemplation, understanding of the language of nature will be more profound. Consequently, there will be a greater capacity to synthesize thoughts and their forms with those that we use to construct the architecture of poetry, the song that is necessary in order to live with ourselves and with others.9

For Chihuailaf, as for Deleuze and Guattari, language is a product of human engagement with that myriad of other-than-linguistic forces. Not only does Mapuzugun integrate and reinforce social and worldly relationships, but it necessarily reinforces the speaker’s relationship with his or her origins and ancestors, and values and beliefs, as well.10 Language thus functions on a variety of levels, and ultimately, when constituted as poetry, is necessary for the synthesis of human and world. What this amounts to is a conception of the speech act as a composition of earthly, material forces, implicit in which are speakers of the past and present – all the actors involved in the development of language. As in Aboriginal thought, in no sense are the categories of body, world, and language separate or meaningfully discrete. The act of speaking draws a thread from the past to the world of which it speaks, and from the body from which it emerges to the community into which it is directed. This correlates usefully with a Deleuzian understanding of language as emerging from a virtual world of indirect discourse. Here, every production of meaning is a becoming, rather than an assertion of a fixed being, because it is a confluence of a potentially infinite, dynamic array of historical forces. The context in which one speaks is an 9

Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 69. Caniguan, “Poesía mapuche registrada: un primer rescate,” 15.

10

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accumulated density of such forces, all of which propel the act of speech into the future. Subjective context, therefore, can only be conceived of as movement: “an infinitely complex concertation of forces” driving the moment of speaking.11 The I is not a discrete, expressive subject but, rather, a “linguistic marker” indicating precisely which body is implicated in the complex. What becomes ‘direct discourse’, or a subject’s speech, is actually “a detached fragment of a mass,” which Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage”: the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice.12

The linguistic forces of this assemblage are immanent to the I, in that they are always about to take place within it; by corollary, the I cannot begin in a single body or place.13 As the weupin speaks the language of the earth, within this language there are as many individuals – as many ‘I’s – as in the earth it moves through. The first person only speaks an accumulation of what the earth has already said elsewhere, further back in the compost of the past. “Free indirect discourse,” writes Brian Massumi, or speech that we cannot attribute to a particular speaker, “is the fundamental mode of language.”14 To write, propose Deleuze and Guattari, is to bring free indirect discourse “to the light of day,” to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self. [ . . . ] My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets.15

The virtual world, then, is both the future and the past of the world: a monism, or the world’s destiny as well as its conditions of existence. A thing becomes actual when it emerges from the virtual. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between what is ‘actual’ and what ‘exists’. A thing that ‘exists’ does so outside of the dynamism of time: it is ‘being’. Though it still comes from the virtual, ‘being’ sets up concrete boundaries in the moment of the actual and attempts to resist further change. A process of ‘becoming’, however, refers to 11

Paraphrasing Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 30. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 93. 13 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 33. 14 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 33. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 93. 12

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a thing’s actuality as it emerges from the virtual: the actual is a thing’s “duration as a process – of genesis and annihilation.” In a language of the virtual, the virtual is certainly real, and always in “reciprocal presupposition” with the actual, but it does not exist, as much as we might allow that the actual exists. Rather, the virtual always “subsists in the actual or is immanent to it.”16 The virtual equates to the Mapuche notion of El Azul (‘the azure region’), a liminal, ancestral world of dreams from which we all come, and to which we return (similar in scale and importance to ‘The Dreaming’). A poetics of becoming-actual exhibits a constant preparedness to dissipate or change, always sensitive to the whims of the virtual. That the virtual subsists in the actual implies a constant reciprocity between the two, with the virtual feeding into the actual, and the actual dissolving once again into the virtual. Daily life in Mapuche country must be understood not only in terms of human activities, but as the confluence of an enormous assemblage of virtual energies from El Azul: a variety of perceptual, porous materials, accumulating as the passage of the wind, the smallest insect, the vision of the condor, of the caterpillar. An object like the hazel tree survives, writes Chihuailaf, by its becoming part of a wider network of evolving processes (such as a forest).17 Thus, to be ‘Mapuche’, to be ‘of the earth’, is to be a process of becoming, or the manifestation of a host of cultural and geographical vectors. This process is typified by the energy of the Great Cinnamon Tree: a Tree sustained by the memory of our ancestors [. . . ] that the parents of our parents planted, they tell me. Our Spirits are the waters that continue singing beneath its leaves. 18

Indeed, it is interesting to think about the importance of the Great Cinnamon Tree in relation to a powerful moment from the Aboriginal writer Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers: T O M M L O : [. . . ] I’ve looked at life, the world, the whiteman’s way. I’ve

looked through a whiteman’s eyes and I was lost. (Pause) I ain’t lost anymore. I am a nothing. The trees, the grass, the river, the earth is life, is everything. I am nothing, a nothing. Now that tree is me. It is all of me. I am that tree. I am nothing, yet I am somethin’ because the earth is me. These rocks are me and I am the movin’ soul of them all. See, I looked at the tree and said that it is a

16

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 37. Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 47. 18 Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 46. 17

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tree. I kept it all separate and alien, but now, like the old days, I am a nothing but that tree is me and I am a something and when I die I will flow into the creative essence that made me, the tree and all created life, for we are all inseparable.19

In both Gilbert’s play and Chihuailaf’s essay, the tree’s function as an anchor of, and entry into, ancestral memory is but the beginning of a process of conscious self-disintegration, during which the ‘I’ is absorbed into flowing waters and creative energies. Importantly, this is in no way a denial of subjectivity or voice but, rather, a strengthening of a collective presence, a local differentiation: the tree becoming part of a locale, a forest, not growing above it or apart from it. Previously, Tommlo “looked at the tree and said that it is a tree,” which was to assert its being as separate from his own. With his new understanding, however, the tree is actualized in his own continual process of becoming. His ‘I’, like Chihuailaf’s spirit, is an accumulation of ancestral and environmental forces. In each case, the tree’s energy is immanent to subjectivity, but the resulting ‘I’ is not tied to a single body. Instead, it is a “movin’ soul” distributed across the earth, de-particularized and interlinked as water. Upon the speaker’s death, expression will continue to be immanent in “the creative essence that made [. . . ] all created life.” The fight will go on; voices will “continue singing” a free indirect discourse beneath the tree’s leaves. At its most potent, we would expect a language born of the virtual to provide the speaker with some sort of conversation space in which to engage with the virtual. Mapuzugun provides such an immanence to the Machi, a Mapuche shaman. A shaman from the Western Kimberley is a maban, and is able to see into the world of the spirit beings and draw on some of their energies.20 Similarly, the Machi is an intermediary between the visible world and those virtual forces which, though invisible, create the world. Küymin denotes the ‘trance’ the Machi enters, permitting a negotiation to take place with El Azul.21 This trance is perhaps the most extreme realization of a becoming: not only does the Machi chant in a language that has been granted her by the ancestors (the Machi is, after all, a ‘chosen one’), but in her heightened sensitivity to the words’ origins and destinations a complete self-dissolution can 19

Kevin Gilbert, “From The Cherry Pickers,” Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 82 20 Paddy Roe & Stephen Muecke, Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983; Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1985): vii. 21 Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 77.

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take place. The completely analogical relationship between the Machi’s subjectivity and the energies of the virtual world allows her to form an autocatalytic loop, or a self-perpetuating matrix of breath–voice–earth. During the küymin, the Machi encounters the virtual forces of the ancestors and, by channelling them through the more concrete form of her actuality, feeds these forces back into themselves: from the dynamic earth comes Mapuzugun, which, in the moment of the küymin, the Machi then uses to effect change on this same, dynamic earth. This is the basis of the Mapuche poetics: a profound respect for the virtual, the most intense manifestation of which is the Machi’s dialogue with it.

Becoming Actual One of the tasks for a philosopher attempting to create a theory of becoming is to locate those areas of the world where the virtual is expressed, and to “use the unactualized tendencies and capacities one discovers there” as sources of insight into the process in which the virtual is becoming actual.22 It follows that a theory of a poetics of becoming searches for the virtual as it is expressed in poetry, then asks how this poetry negotiates between these virtual regions and the actual. We have already seen that Aboriginal and Mapuche song-poetry often is this becoming-actual, transferring parts of a thriving virtual realm into an open, ecological matrix. A characteristic feature of a nomad poetry is its ‘crossing’ of the “material flux of language matter,” where this ‘matter’ is “pre-language, proto-semantic.”23 Always in such close proximity to the flexible, oral structures of the song-poem (known as the ül; see Appendix A) and to the voices of his ancestors, Leonel Lienlaf’s poetry allows us to read across this process of virtual matter becoming linguistic /poetic matter. He has said on more than one occasion that he is not a poet in the sense that a winka (a non-Indigenous Chilean) would define the term. “More than a representative of my culture,” he says, “I come from it. I am an expression of it.”24 Lienlaf is not, in other words, a lone voice but, rather, a becoming of ancestral expression. This willingness to describe himself as a function, rather than as a source, of Mapuche 22

de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 76. Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 5 24 Guillermo Chávez, “No soy representante de mi raza, pertenezco a ella,” El Diario Austral (23 August 1990): A12. 23

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culture is related to his complex conception of the word. In Mapuche ‘cosmovision’, each element of the universe has a particular correspondence to a variety of other elements; within this enormous fabric the human being is nothing more than a point of intensity – “a point of great dialogue” – of energies which travel “from the trees to the clouds, to the rain and to the fire of the volcanoes.”25A truly nomadic poetics is one in which everything can speak, in which language – or the collection of intensities that engenders it – does not stop with the human subject. For Lienlaf, the word “is not a human privilege.” In his poetry we are able to hear “the heartbeat of things, their soul.”26 What we are arriving at here is a notion of the word as an expressive energy, which, like other energies, travels through, and often without, matter. Like Neruda, Lienlaf burst onto the Chilean literary scene at a very young age. His first book, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón (‘The Bird of My Heart Has Awoken’), was published in 1989 when he was just twenty years old, and won a variety of prestigious awards. His work is central to this discussion because of his proximity to traditional Mapuche culture. Lienlaf grew up in a rural Mapuche community, and only moved to Temuco to study in his late teens. His poetry consists largely of the transcription onto the page of ül structures, while at the same time attempting to place these structures in a wider context of Mapuche colonization and subjugation.27 His position is thus complex, oscillating as it does between at least two (literary) worlds, and it is reflected in his mode of publication: his books are bilingual, written by the poet in both Mapuzugun and Spanish, in order to appeal to readers of the two languages, and to establish clear links between written Spanish and the oral poetics of the ül, to which all the poems refer. Perhaps Lienlaf’s interest in traditional song-poetry is demonstrated most profoundly by the fact that, in the fourteen years between the publications of his two books of poems, he also produced a compact disc entitled Canto y poesía mapuche (‘Mapuche Song and Poetry’) in 1998. This was a result of more than a decade of research into Mapuche oral poetics.

25

Raúl Zurita, “El Ave de tu Corazón” [‘The Bird of Your Heart’], in Leonel Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1989): 13. 26 Zurita, “El Ave de tu Corazón,” 13. 27 Iván Carrasco, “Poetas mapuches en la literatura chilena,” Estudios Filológicos (Valdivia) 35 (2000): 139–49, http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid =S0071-17132000003500009&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 30 August 2007).

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We might loosely organize the principal thematic concerns of Lienlaf’s work into three areas. The first includes the exploration of traditional beliefs and symbols of Mapuche society, while the second has to do with an interaction between these ideas and Chilean society at large. Lienlaf’s early, memorable symbol for this strained interaction is the city of Temuco, the historical frontier between Mapuche and winka: El cerro Ñielol sentado mira grandes casas Casas que no son de Mapuches, piensa. Temuco – ciudad debajo de ti están durmiendo mis antepasados. Soñando en su sueño están ellos y corre en el río su sangre.28 Seated Ñielol mountain looks out at great homes Homes that don’t belong to Mapuches, mind you. Temuco – city underneath you they are sleeping my ancestors. Dreaming in their dream there they are and their blood runs in the river.

28

From “Temuco – ciudad,” in Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón,

38–39.

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The final stanza of this poem might make us think immediately of Wright’s nightmare in “Nigger’s Leap: New England” (“Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers [.. . ]?”). Where Wright can leave the horrors of such places behind for abstract notions of history, however, Lienlaf, like any nomad, cannot leave his country. What is most striking about this excerpt is the manner in which it deals with notions of depth and topography in an altogether different way from poems such as “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu.” The first stanza of the extract is written from the heights of the mountain overlooking Temuco, and it ends just as our vision is about to be plunged various levels beneath it. No attempt is made to compress these levels into a single line or form; they are in no sense reconciled. Rather, the blood continues to run through the gaps. Yet it is also clear that there is a tension on the city’s surface, too, for while his ancestors are sleeping, the bird of this speaker’s heart has awoken, and is able to sing a line of resistance against the swarming masses of mansions in Temuco’s wealthier barrios. Here we arrive at the third of Lienlaf’s core concerns: the expression of a Mapuche poet who has “awakened” to hear the music of his ancestors. Lienlaf’s early poetry records the discovery of his capacity to sing in order to make manifest both his dreams and those of the earth.29 He is what Chihuailaf terms an exponent of ‘oraliture’, or oral literature, in which the word is sustained by Memory, moved by it, from the speech of the source that flows through the [Mapuche] communities. The written word is not a mere linguistic artifice [. . . ] but a commitment of Dream and Memory to the present.30

Like the ül, Lienlaf’s poems have an axial quality designed to gather and re-invigorate Mapuche communities. In this way, he pursues a project similar to that of Chihuailaf, for whom writing, like song-poetry, can revitalize, reconstruct or even give birth to a mode of being that is genuinely Mapuche. “We were born Mapuche,” writes Chihuailaf, “we will die Mapuche, and writing [. . . ] is one of the greatest ways to dignify, to guard, and to recuperate [.. . ] the soul of our people.”31 For Chihuailaf as for Lienlaf, poetry not only

29

Carrasco, “Poetas mapuches en la literatura chilena.” Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 62. 31 Quoted in Iván Carrasco, “Metalengua de la poesía etnocultural de Chile (I),” Estudios Filológicos (Valdivia) 28 (1993): 71. 30

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guards the elements of his people’s culture, but it also generates them.32 Writing is, therefore, a glorious ‘bringing-forth’ of the past so that the past’s infinite potential might be dispersed across the landscape to regenerate it. Again, the cycle is an autocatalytic one: by providing the poet with a language, the earth might then enjoy the benefits of renewal and reaffirmation provided by the poem. In “Camino” (‘Path’),33 Lienlaf affirms that his literary project is to recover the lost expressions of his ancestors – a recovery that will, at the same time, provide life for the poet and the world: He corrido a recoger el sueño de mi pueblo para que sea el aire respirable de este mundo. I have rushed to recover the dream of my people so that it might be the air we can breathe in this world.

In particular, “Camino” suggests that Lienlaf’s project of recovery has the explicit aim of rescuing the “silence” of his people “so that the spirit might be a wind / between the emptiness of words.” As for any nomad poet, it is the passage between words, as much as what the words themselves denote, that is important. Indeed, the silence of his people is a function of the negation of the Spanish tongue, written or spoken.34 By writing in Mapuzugun before Spanish, then, Lienlaf is rescuing his people’s silence with their own language, before encouraging their spirits to pass, like a wind, into Spanish. Each poem in Mapuzugun ‘reinforces’ Mapuche culture, while its Spanish translation transforms it into an indigenous protest against colonization. As he writes in “El espíritu de Lautaro” (‘The Spirit of Lautaro’), Lautaro, the great Mapuche resistance fighter, has come to find Lienlaf “in order to fight with the spirit / and the song.”35

32

Carrasco, “Metalengua de la poesía etnocultural de Chile (I),” 71. Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 100–101. 34 Iván Carrasco, “Tensiones entre la intra y la interculturalidad en la poesía de E. Chihuailaf y L. Lienlaf,” Actas de Lengua y Literatura Mapuche 7 (Temuco: Universidad de La Frontera, 1996): 33. 35 Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 41. 33

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I need to make yet more explicit a number of important links between Lienlaf’s poetry and Mapuche oral song-poetry. In all of his work, we find short lines and small stanzas, which seem almost overwhelmed by the oceans of white page surrounding them. There is the prominent sense, then, that the stanzas could be repeated, like the stanzas of a song, in order for the white space to be more properly filled. In many poems like “Temuco – ciudad,” phrasal units within stanzas are often fragmented and free to be read either on their own or connected to those phrases above or below. Indeed, as with Muecke’s translation of Rarrdjali (see Chapter 4), I could, when translating, easily rearrange the orders of the lines in each of Lienlaf’s stanzas without disturbing their relaxed syntax. The poem’s short forms also allow a heightened reading speed, which in turn can contribute to a rhythmic page-turning.

F I G U R E 2: The kultrun. The skin of the drum corresponds to Nag Mapu (‘the

land on which we walk’). The spherical, wooden underside of the drum is Miñche Mapu (‘the earth below’). The air through which the hand passes to beat the drum represents Wenu Mapu (‘the land of above’). Before covering the drum with animal skin, the Machi breathes her Neyen (breath) into it in order to link the character of the drum to her own.

Furthermore, both of his books are organized into four separate sections, which correspond to the four elements (earth, water, wind, and fire), as symbolized by the axis of the kultrun (see Figure 2 above). A crucial instrument in song performance, the kultrun effectively brings Mapu (‘earth’) together with the singing of its che (‘people’). For Lienlaf, therefore, song is a way of making explicit the presence of the earth in his speech: La pampa me pidió que cantara la poesía de infinito36

36

From “Creación,” in Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 82–83.

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The plains asked me to sing the poetry of infinity.

The poems’ clear structural and thematic links to the ül become yet more apparent in Lienlaf’s second book, Pewma dungu (Palabras soñadas) [‘Dreamt Words’]. Just as the ül tends to recount daily events, or to recall certain memories, we find in Pewma dungu poems like the following, which is tellingly titled “Ülkantun”:37 Trafuya pewman papay Kachill trayen ñi miaufel Trafuya anay rumen kachill Kiñe rayülechi kura.38 Anoche soñé, hermana que cerca de un estero mi voz andaba Pasé anoche no más por una piedra que florecía. Last night I dreamed, sister that my voice walked close by a stream I passed just last night by a rock that was flowering.

Traditional ül share a number of important qualities: certain words are continually repeated; the verses are irregular; and the themes stem from situations in daily life.39 Although the poem is incredibly succinct, a number of these features are visible in “Ülkantun.” The situation the poem describes is, of course, hardly extraordinary; rather, its importance, like the ül, stems from the fact that it is being spoken. It is common to find in the ül a confluence of 37

Leonel Lienlaf, Pewma dungu (Palabras soñadas) (Santiago de Chile: L O M ,

2003): 20–21. Ülkantun translates broadly as ‘the singing or performance of the ül’. 38

I have included the Mapuzugun here to highlight some of the differences between it and the Spanish version. The shape of the Mapuzugun version is quite distinct from the Spanish translation, not only withholding something of its structure and rhythm from Spanish readers, but also enforcing for us the fact that Lienlaf has deliberately (re-)structured the translation. 39 Caniguan, “Poesía mapuche registrada: un primer rescate,” 41.

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poetic or ornamental rhetoric with a more personal or familiar way of speaking; this is the case in “Ülkantun,” too: while the rhythm is certainly measured carefully (“Last night I dreamed, / sister”), the address to the sister is also a distinctly familial message, and the colloquial “no más" confirms it. We can see the repetition of ‘anoche’, as well as only two metrically equivalent lines of “Anoche soñé” and “anoche no más” (five syllables each, with stresses on the second and fifth). Furthermore, the title signals that this is the moment of the singing of the ül, which suggests that the text on the page is this very singing. At the same time, however, the repetition also catalyses the song’s bifurcation into a series of forms: a trace from a dream is sung, is transcribed into Mapuzugun, is translated into Spanish, is read, and so on. The irregularity of the verse is overwhelming: in terms of metre, lines one and two are almost diametrically opposite to four and five, while lines three and six are almost syllabically equal. In turn, we encounter end-rhymes in lines two, three, and six with “hermana,” “andaba” and “florecía.” Clearly, the line with the greatest weight is line three, and, like the effects of a tree drawing too much water from its surroundings, the lines before and after it are sparsely populated. It is not until we reach the final line of the poem that there is enough water for more syllables to flower, like the rock in the line itself. When spoken, therefore, the poem rises and falls like a wave – a wave that is not symmetrical or Euclidean, but like the waves we see coming towards us from the ocean: irregular, sucking the water into a thin film across the sandbar, rising up; the low, fat lull after the crash. Indeed, this arrangement is common throughout Pewma dungu: rarely do long lines follow in immediate succession; rather, in accordance with a carefully proportioned breath, they are sparsely distributed like trees in open woodland: Sobre los campos talados angustiado da vueltas el viento; sobre el polvo y las cenizas arrastrando los nidos donde soñaron las aves El viento se enloqueció entre las rocas porque a sus oídos

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ya no llega el canto suave de los árboles.40 Over the cleared country anguished the wind whirls about; over the dust and the ashes the nests blown from where the birds dreamed The wind went crazy between the rocks because to its ears the soft song of the trees came no longer.

It is in relation to the physiological limits imposed by a speaker’s voice during the moment of singing – the ülkantun – that these poems are crafted. Their proximity to song consequently determines their ephemeral, fleeting nature: they do not – indeed, they cannot – impose themselves like monuments, but must flare and quietly subside, returning their energies to the silent potential of the virtual. As I mentioned earlier, both of Lienlaf’s books are arranged in four parts, each of which corresponds to a cardinal point on the kultrun’s skin. At all moments the poet’s voice is related to, and measured by, the beat of the kultrun. Consequently, the primeval elements of fire, air, water, and earth, and the animals and plants which they form, are also part of the books’ very fabric.41 In Se ha despertado, it is in the third section, entitled “Mi corazón está despierto con la tierra” (‘My heart is awake with the land’), that the spirit of the songs flourishes in the poet, granting him the confidence to assume a role as an integral part of the earth and thus as a Mapuche (remembering that mapu = earth and che = people).42 It is as if the beats of the ritual not only purify his voice but illuminate it; in its illumination, his voice, like the Machi’s, grants life: Acaricié entonces mi corazón y encendí con fuego mi camino

40

“Kürüf,” in Lienlaf, Pewma dungu, 44–45. García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 104. 42 Crítica situada, 102. 41

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para vigilar el sueño del sol y el baile de las estrellas. Mi risa es el sol del mediodía, mis lágrimas las vertientes, mi dormir es el descanso del amor y mi despertar la vida de los peces. Es así mi existir, es así mi palabra y las aguas me continúan cantando.43 So I caressed my heart and with fire I lit my path to keep watch over the sun’s dream and the dance of the stars. My smile is the sun of midday, my tears the streams, my sleep is love resting and my awakening the life of fish. My existence is like this, my word is like this and the waters keep singing to me.

Sound, of course, is extremely ephemeral, being composed of rapidly dissipating perturbations. Because his voice is not the only one (“the waters keep singing”), and because his own song is limited by the capacity of his lungs, Lienlaf’s presence is only a momentary collection of intensities, rather than the ever-present, and almost never-ending, Nerudian voice. The poet can’t see everything from a heightened vantage point, but is going only by the small circle of firelight over his path. This is how the poem proceeds: not by piercing flashes of complete knowing, but through the accumulation of sediments left by departing waves of sound. If the book is structured according to the map of the kultrun, then the reading of the poems is the beating of the kultrun’s skin. In Lienlaf’s work, then, earth becomes sound (via Mapuzugun), which becomes text. It is because of this transfer of energies that Lienlaf’s poetics involves not only a kind of intertextuality but also an intermateriality – Joris’s 43

From “El Sueño de Mañekean” [‘Mañkean’s Dream’], in Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 74–77.

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“material flux of language matter.” Lienlaf’s is what the poetry critic and scholar Hugo Carrasco identifies as a distinctly experimental writing that moves oral forms towards the canonized, written tradition of Chilean society.44 Seeking to strengthen and recover a tradition for those who wish to participate in it, the poet is forever mindful of certain core structures and communal festivities. Nevertheless, by choosing to write his poems rather than sing them, he engages with another discourse with quite distinct priorities. Western written literary traditions, namely, tend to value a more liberal mixture of resemblance to certain key forms, and certain departures from these forms; what tends to make the most impact is work that breaks most dramatically with tradition, and the relation of the individual writer to his or her ‘original’ creation.45 Thus, Lienlaf’s position is a particularly complex one. Based on a contemporary experience of the interaction of indigenous, creole, and foreign cultures, it has a discernibly synergetic quality, where an assemblage of Western and indigenous poetics produces ambiguous responses to notions of authorial control and individual creativity.46 When we talk of the various and important relationships between Lienlaf’s poems and traditional oral songs, then, we must also take into account the extent to which, as written texts, they attempt to individuate themselves, and to remain individuated, within the tradition of written literature.47 While Lienlaf’s poetry does indeed extend the trajectory of oral poetry, and in no sense attempts to break completely with this tradition, the harder, impermeable textures of the writing into which these songs have been transformed cannot be ignored. Between the ephemeral song and the printed text we find ever-present a tense, occasionally frustrated voice trying desperately – for the sake of his ability to speak in the contemporary moment – to negotiate between the two realms.

44

Hugo Carrasco, “Poesía mapuche actual: de la apropriación hacia la innovación cultural,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 43 (1992): 75. 45 Carrasco, “Poesía mapuche actual,” 75 Along the same lines, Muecke writes that in the West, “[broadly speaking,] beliefs in self-expression and ‘originality’ have killed off the formulaic in literature and conversation (verse shall henceforth be ‘free’, conversations ‘unstructured’ in order to be sincere)” (No Road, 52). 46 Carrasco, “Metalengua de la poesía etnocultural de Chile (I),” 67. 47 Carrasco, “Poesía mapuche actual: de la apropriación hacia la innovación cultural,” 78.

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The Array before the Word Looking briefly at the following extracts from the remarkable early poem “Le sacaron la piel” (‘They took off the skin’)48 will give us further insight into the complexity of Lienlaf’s poetics: Tres veces vino el malón tres veces lo rechazamos pero ahora viene otra vez y no podemos luchar. El winka está disparando. [. . . ] Le sacaron la piel de la espalda y cortaron su cabeza. ¡A nuestro valiente Cacique! y la piel de su espalda la usaron de bandera y su cabeza me la amarraron a la cintura. Vamos llorando y nuestra sangre riega la tierra de rato en rato bajo la mirada a la cabeza que llevo en la cintura y me parece que ya va a hablar pero continúa en silencio. The surprise attack came three times we repelled it three times but now it comes again and we can’t resist. The winka is firing. [. . . ] They took the skin from his back and cut off his head. Our valiant Chief! and the skin of his back 48

Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 30–37. For a complete translation, see Stuart Cooke, “Two Mapuche Poets: Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla (introduction and translations),” in H E A T 22: The Persistent Rabbit, ed. Ivor Indyk (Atarmon, N S W : Giramondo, 2010): 51–53.

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they used as a flag and his head they tied to my waist. We keep crying and our blood flows through the land from time to time I lower my gaze to the face I carry on my waist and it seems that now it’s going to speak but it continues in silence.

The striking repetition of loosely linked phrases, coupled with a recurrence of images of heads and skin – these are clear reminders of the repetitive structures of the ül. That an historical event which took place over a large territory is not only condensed into the moment of the poem but is channelled into a relationship between the speaker and the silent head of the chief (for whom the speaker must speak) is an indication that Lienlaf intends the poem to concentrate the event’s energy and transfer it via poetic conduit. What we might term its ‘testimonial mode’ is a feature the poem shares with much Mapuche public discourse as well. Here, both poem and public expression exploit a textual mechanism of ‘discursive heterogeneity’, in which an explicitly intercultural text is configured to achieve the maximum possible impact on its intended audiences, indigenous and non-indigenous: This consists of inserting within the lyric expression a ‘narration’ which tells us about their history, a testimony conveyed by the construction of a ‘dramatis personae’ in the organism of the speaker.49

In “Le sacaron la piel,” Lienlaf is precisely this “dramatis persona,” revealing the remarkably close relationship between Mapuche poetic and political discourses. In the disequilibrium produced by colonial domination, the speaker’s voice is but a small sliver of light piercing the darkness. What is initially proposed as a symmetrical situation – three winka attacks are repelled successfully three times by Mapuche forces – is promptly destroyed by the flaying and decapitation of the Chief, and the chaos that ensues. The poet cannot wholly reverse or deconstruct such pain, nor can he bring back to life the mute head of his Chief. Yet by speaking from this position of silence Lienlaf manages to grant the Chief a potent expressive power. Lienlaf’s poems are more-than-individual performances in other ways, as well. The help of Raúl Zurita, a prominent winka poet, with the Spanish trans49

García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 33.

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lations in Se ha despertado, for example, blurs Lienlaf’s role as the sole ‘owner’ or ‘speaker’ of his poems. As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, similar kinds of communities are present in books by Paddy Roe, Lionel Fogarty, and Paulo Huirimilla. Important in the instance of Lienlaf, however, is that he is blurring the authorship of his book across the colonial frontier. This move need not be seen as a concession to the colonizer, either: as with Paddy Roe’s stories, what is not for the settler’s ears is kept hidden safely beyond the range of the settler’s tongue. This is what the Mapuche scholar Iván Carrasco terms an “intercultural codification and decodification,”50 or a simultaneous translation and protection of knowledge. The poems have a number of destinations, therefore, the first of which is, of course, the Mapuche people, with the re-gathering of lost geographical and cultural spaces. On the other hand, the work is for non-Indigenous Chileans, from whom it demands recognition of the right of the Mapuche community to speak as it wishes to speak, and to live as it wishes to live.51 Social representations of the Mapuche are to be modified while, at the same time, the figure of the winka and/or of the invader is demystified. Thus, cultural hegemony is eroded to make way for an imagined diversity and a proudly spoken Mapuche collective.52 Just as the ül is designed to gather and strengthen the community in which it is sung, Lienlaf’s poems are intended to re-establish a wider sense of cultural collectivity; by their undeniable presence on the page, these poems seek to validate the strength of Mapuche subjectivity. In his poetry we see a message emitted across two (now: three) different linguistic codes simultaneously for a number of local and global destinations.53 If we were to paraphrase him, we would read Chihuailaf as saying that Lienlaf’s discursive heterogeneity, or his nomadic appropriation of a variety of cultural materials, reflects the social and political reality of Mapuche communities.54 To use Massumi’s words: translating Lienlaf’s work into Spanish (then English. .. ) catapults “the inexhaustible complexity” of the relationship between Mapuzugun and the virtual into “an indefinite circuit of reproduction

50

Carrasco, “Metalengua de la poesía etnocultural de Chile (I),” 67. Caniguan, “Poesía mapuche registrada: un primer rescate,” 37. 52 García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 50. 53 Carrasco, “Tensiones entre la intra y la interculturalidad en la poesía de E. Chihuailaf y L. Lienlaf,” 35. 54 Elicura Chihuailaf, “Mongeley mapu ñi püllü chew ñi llewmuyiñ,” Simpson Siete 2 (1992): 123. 51

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and systematic variation.” Translation, then, is crucial because of its capacity to add another level of meaning to the dynamism of Lienlaf’s poetry, by imbuing it with new potential, by multiplying it and making it repeatable. Here, however, is the catch, for the multiplication of the [poem] is also its domestication. Its dynamic potential is simultaneously carried to a higher power and dulled, diffracted, captured in a regularizing network of forces.55

Many volumes of poems by Mapuche poets that are published as bilingual editions grapple with this problem. Certainly, the power of Lienlaf’s poetry is a result of its ripples across several languages. Still, the poetry’s entry into Spanish is also its entry into a system replete with dominant modes of reading and understanding Mapuche literature, many of which threaten to dull or ‘domesticate’ Lienlaf’s expression. In fact, the problem often frustrates the poet, when he feels literally compelled to write in a language that he would rather not speak. The challenge for a reader of Lienlaf’s work is to conceptualize what Massumi calls the real conditions of production of statements, or to understand how his poetics operates in an open ecology, emerging from pre-linguistic contexts, then continuing to move from one language to the next.56 Rather than assuming that meaning in language is static, and that it is moved ‘reluctantly’ from one language (or form) to another, with Mapuche poets like Lienlaf we need to be thinking about stasis as relative to the conditions in which it emerges, or as a ‘slowing-down’ of certain processes. This involves disregarding the notion that a statement is the container at the pinnacle of a linear generative process; the supposedly ‘vertical’ relationship between a signifier and the signified is far more complex: it envelopes many lines and levels of causality so that the statement stands less as a “content” than as a culmination, an evaporative end effect, a landmark pointing to a geologic past.57

55

Borrowing from Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 19. ‘Pre-linguistic’ contexts involve those forces that lead up to linguistic expression in any given moment. Thus, expression can be both pre-linguistic (causing a word to be spoken) and linguistic (the affect of the word itself). Importantly, by using the term ‘pre-linguistic’ I am not referring to hypothetical situations before the existence of language itself. 57 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 43. 56

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For a statement to appear in all its simplicity and clarity, its complex genesis must recede into the virtuality from which it came. The virtual, after all, is the unsaid of the statement. [ . . . ] It is real and subsists in [it], but must be forgotten at least momentarily for a statement to be produced as evaporative surface effect.58

In this sense, a proper reading of Lienlaf’s work explores what Massumi calls the “inevitable forgetting,” asking how to re-attach statements to the conditions from which they emerged. Traces from a vast array of stimuli – songpoetry, social and historical injustices, linguistic colonization, resistance and adaptation, the entire virtual realm of El Azul – should flare up as the reader’s eyes cross the path from the poem in Mapuzugun to the Spanish translation. As we might expect, this condition is illustrated more clearly by reference to a number of the poems. For example, in “El Sueño de Mañekean,” nütram, which in Mapuzugun refers both to ‘the word’ and to ‘conversation’, is translated simply as ‘palabra’ (‘word’).59 In turn, in the poem “Extranjero” (‘Foreigner’), the word for ‘language’ in Mapuzugun (dungu) is translated again as ‘palabra’.60 This is also the case with the title of his second book, where Pewma dungu becomes ‘Dreamt Words’. The point here is that the ‘larger’ or more open regions of both ‘conversation’ and ‘language’ in Mapuzugun are in each case condensed into the Spanish equivalent of ‘word’. However, in “Extranjero” he writes that the word “is transparent,” which suggests that he can still see its real conditions of production in the larger concept of dungu (‘language’). Furthermore, while the written statement is normally the culmination of Lienlaf’s ceaseless nomadism, in “Kay Kay y Treng Treng” (‘Kay Kay and Treng Treng’),61 the process of culmination keeps spilling over into other forms: printed texts, copies of the poems in Lienlaf’s own handwriting and a picture drawn by Lienlaf that depicts the event in the poem (see overleaf). It is not fortuitous that a poem about two creation serpents, whose battles produce the landscape of southern Chile and the Mapuche people themselves, should result in a similarly exciting variety of forms on the page. Through the word’s apparently brittle shell, then, we can catch glimpses of a dynamic interplay taking place between an oral language (‘nütram’ or

58

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 46. Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 74–77. 60 Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 102–103. 61 Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 104–105. 59

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‘dungu’), the songs in which the language appears, and the social realities that have necessitated the extension of Mapuzugun into written mediums.

Coming directly after “El Sueño de Mañekean” is a poem often quoted by Chilean critics and scholars, “Rebelión” (‘Rebellion’):62 Mis manos no quisieron escribir las palabras de un profesor viejo. Mi mano se negó a escribir aquello que no me pertenecía Me dijo: “debes ser el silencio que nace.” Mi mano me dijo que el mundo no se podía escribir. My hands didn’t want to write the words of an old professor.

62

Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 78–9.

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My hand refused to write what didn’t belong to me It said to me: “you must be the emerging silence.” My hand told me that the world couldn’t write itself.

Of all Lienlaf’s poems, perhaps “Rebelión” most explicitly outlines the nature of his complicated, nomadic negotiation between the structures of written literature and oral poetry. The first and second stanzas describe his frustration with having to use what is in effect a forced inheritance (written expression). His hand, ‘speaking’ from a purely traditional perspective, refuses to write with the signs made available by winka invasion. Given that the poem is eventually written, however, it seems that his other hand won the argument: the world needs him to write, regardless of any reservations Lienlaf might have. This is the frustrating, almost schizophrenic compulsion to write in Spanish that I mentioned earlier: the writing of the poem compels the poet to neglect or to deny the part of him that refuses to write. Yet the part that refuses nevertheless retains a powerful presence, forcing the poem to end suddenly, leaving the reader with a large space of white page beneath. Though not without complication, Lienlaf still becomes “the emerging silence” that his other hand demands. If we turn a page back to “El Sueño de Mañekean,” we see that Lienlaf has already told us “my word is like this”: an expression of the earth’s desires, their vast numbers boiling within him and increasing his cerebral pressure. That the subsequent poem is called ‘Rebellion’ should signal for us something of the furious, bursting release of these conflicting energies.

Lienlaf’s Territorial Principle It is useful to return now to that a-priori condition of Mapuche poetics, which is the inalienable connection, and right, to the territory of Southern Chile. For, in our discussion of a nomadic poetics, we must take care to define the limits of its movement. Certainly, Lienlaf does not confine himself to any particular discursive or cultural axiom, instead moving among a wide variety in order to escape confinement. Like the nomad, he “distributes himself in a smooth space” free of walls and barriers but, as I discussed in Chapter 1, “he occupies, inhabits, holds that space”:

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that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. [ . . . ] Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is the one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.63

Lienlaf’s movement is always made in relation to his “territorial principle,” which both initiates and defines his nomadism. First of all, the country of his ancestors was invaded and usurped. With the presence of the new settlers came the ‘stripping’ (despojamiento), first of his people’s habitat, then of their customs and their traditional forms of political and social organization. Finally, many had to move to the confines of the city as part of the adaptations that were necessary in order to assure the continuity of their society and culture.64 In all of Chile, Lienlaf’s region of Araucanía has suffered the highest level of deforestation. It is also in Araucanía that there have been the most violent clashes between indigenous and invading forces. This relationship between ecological destruction and political resistance stems from the fact that what we refer to as ‘land’ (Mapu) and ‘people’ (che) forms part of the same ontological set for the Mapuche. All movement is initiated and contained by the centrifugal forces of country. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, nomadism is a response to the challenge presented by the “receding forest.” At this intersection of colonization, ecological destruction, and dispossession, then, let us now consider the following poem, “Atardecer” (‘Dusk’):65 Hay gritos de pájaros y en los caminos salen las sombras a mirar el paso lento de los colores sobre el horizonte El lejano zumbido de las motosierras estremece la noche que cae sobre los canelos marchitos. There are cries of parrots and on the paths the shadows come out to look 63

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420. García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 100. 65 Lienlaf, Pewma dungu, 50–51. 64

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at the slow passage of the colours over the horizon The distant whirring of the chainsaws shakes the night as it falls over the faded cinnamon trees.

In “Atardecer” we find ourselves in an interstitial zone, on the edge of that receding forest. It is important that we do not actually see the forest, but only hear the chainsaws as they eat into it: like the speaker, we are on ground level and unable to see the entirety of the landscape. The shadows, too, are liminal: they are signs of objects – they signal the presence of things – but they are as distinct from the things themselves as they are inseparable from them. Consider, too, the structure of the poem: the heavier, more bulbous first stanza is anchored by the second, a structure which is reflected in its content. What in the first stanza is the world of the in-between, of the border, of colours and shadows passing over smooth lines of stripped territory, is in turn anchored to the denser lines in the second – lines which speak of the territory, of the land from which the speaker has been removed. Not transcending the concrete for the abstract, in “Atardecer” Lienlaf moves from the liminal and ethereal back to the specific features of the locale. We return to this very after-modern notion of the poem, then, in which the emptying of words to produce a hazy, abstract system of expression – here, the destruction of country – demands the moment of the poet’s speech, and his reunifying of world and language. Again, the poet’s voice does not compose the void, but the void compels the poet to speak. Where the forest has been cleared to produce farmland and eucalyptus plantations we find the nomad hovering on its borders, fighting against further territorial encroachment. Historically, the frontiers between Mapuche clans were never rigid; rather, different clans often shared commercial routes, hunting areas, and spaces for cultural exchange.66 Like those between Aboriginal clans, borders were porous and mobile; even along the colonial frontier, Mapuche invaded Spanish and Chilean outposts and stole horses and equipment in order to develop forms of counter-attack. Indeed, the Mapuche have demonstrated a remarkable openness to intercultural borrowing; readily incorporating elements from the invading cultures (such as weapons and horses) into their own cultural systems to produce a hybrid or ‘in-between’ culture that has often proved effective in

66

Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 72.

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mediating between Mapuche and winka worlds.67 The nomad poet also inhabits such regions, in the middle of indigenous and non-indigenous poetics. For Iván Carrasco, this porosity has allowed another kind of ‘frontier’ to develop between traditional and contemporary poetic forms. Traditional Mapuche oral literature has remained behind this frontier but, at the same time, the border region has fostered the development of a vibrant intercultural literature, or “with many mixed or hybrid categories that refer simultaneously to the two cultures in contact.”68 There are, of course, distinct strategic advantages to inhabiting the border regions: as we saw in Chapter 1, to go between them is to sweep them up into a motion of becoming. The poet who is between the gods and the mortals in the realm of Heidegger’s Between cannot move towards the gods, nor can he move towards his fellow mortals; he is stuck, and he is alone. In movement across the borders of territories, however, things are always being swept up into becomings with one another; one is always en route to somewhere /-one else. We might say that Lienlaf is like a population of locally correlated molecules, or a ‘supple individual’. He is not a molar form; his various positions have not yet been suppressed and forced to fuse into a single, discrete entity. Suppleness can be a powerful mode of attaining freedom from colonizing constriction, a freedom that enables the poet to move within and away from enemy lines, and to keep singing of the earth he is trying to protect. While his poems often concern the problem of the Other and the construction of a viable contemporary identity, they do not seek these concepts as final end-points. Rather, they serve as trajectories, following which allows the poet to evolve from the position of a purely independent Mapuche subject, who has been repressed and isolated from the society of the winka, towards acquiring an interculturality that is more integrative and flexible, which forms part of a wider, more complex universe.69 The first lines of Se ha despertado are: El sueño de la tierra grita en mi corazón. . . 70

67

Carrasco, “Tensiones entre la intra y la interculturalidad en la poesía de E. Chihuailaf y L. Lienlaf,” 28. 68 “Tensiones entre la intra y la interculturalidad,” 28. 69 Carrasco, “Tensiones entre la intra y la interculturalidad,” 36. 70 Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, 29.

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The country’s dream screams in my heart. . .

This is the first encounter of the supple individual with outside disturbance and, because the poet tries to contain this noise in his own body, the result is a high-intensity, frustrated system. Over a decade later, however, the subject no longer contains, like a compressed, dense point, the dreams of the land; instead, his dreams have extended beyond the confines of his body. An individual ‘he’ is less discernible in the fabric of the landscape in the final poem of Pewma dungu:71 Wenteko Extiende su manta la madrugada sobre el lago y un viento suave me despierta Weyeltue Gritan los pájaros del amanecer Weyeltue y mis sueños se pierden detrás de las montañas. Wenteko Extends his blanket the early morning over the lake and a soft wind awakens me Weyeltue Cry the parrots of the dawn Weyeltue and my dreams lose themselves behind the mountains.

Sustainable Poetics Earlier I mentioned that their proximity to song determined the minimal, ephemeral nature of many of Lienlaf’s poems; now I want to examine more closely how this strong relationship to song-poetry can produce a nomadic poetics. Simply, the temporary presence of the song-poem or ül, its close rela-

71

“Aguas” [‘Waters’], in Lienlaf, Pewma dungu, 54–55.

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tionship with the limits of voice and breath, necessitates that it is gone almost as soon as it has arrived: if it is beginning, it is always ending. It cannot dwell, therefore, or remain long past its welcome; it disperses into the air in an instant. Printing a song, however, imbues it with a weight, permanence. It becomes a discrete object bordered-off from the world by a white page. But this is not to say that it loses its affective potential, which can be activated and dispersed in a moment of reading. Furthermore, we see in Lienlaf’s lines that their short, supple length imbues them with something of a song’s transience. They can be read relatively quickly; their distinctive qualities soon blend into a coherent collection. Its proximity to traditional song-poetry, in other words, decreases each poem’s proximity to stasis and to molar singularity. In Lienlaf’s poetics, we could say that song-poetry is an ‘attractor’ which leads his poems to maintain a high degree of energy, movement, and biological sensitivity. Usually, the conclusion of a Lienlaf poem is visible even before the reader has read the first line: the poem rarely strays further than a single page; surrounded by white space, the last lines often teeter on a white precipice. A Lienlaf poem need not be a stage in a series of ascending stages, or a point passed en route to a more important one. His books, structured like the kultrun, are circular, but lines cross them at various angles. So we do not – cannot – read his poems as an endless stream, as one page following another, as lines and lines of text blocked up together on page after page after page. Rather, the poems are smaller and humbler. They are more accommodating of the world: they do not take all the space available to them by pushing up to each page’s edge; instead, their lines breathe in and out, expanding and contracting, and leaving plenty of space unspoken. Their ephemeral, sonic qualities reflect the fact that the poet speaks but leaves yet more time to listen. Despite his reservations about the written word, Abram argues that we should not be turning away from all writing but taking it up, with all of its suggestive potency, so that we can carefully write our language “back into the land.”72 For poets like Lienlaf, ‘the land’ is a palimpsest of diverse discourses (country is a complex system). With a language from country, which is to be returned to country, Lienlaf is indeed performing Abram’s task. He assigns a regenerative quality, as opposed to a reductive one, to written language. His Spanish translations extend from the poetics of the ül, exploiting the complexity of winka signs in order to resonate with a greater array of cultural systems. 72

Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 273.

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His is the nomad’s stance, foraging on the border regions between materials and forms: Más allá de los árboles muertos un tímido chilco aparece escondido tras el barranco.73 Beyond the dead trees a timid fuchsia appears hidden within the ravine.

Yet, when we assert that Lienlaf’s intimacy with traditional oral poetry grants his work a particular, nomadic sensitivity, this does not imply that the poems are somehow closer to the world. For the world is the totality of all forms – oral, written and otherwise. Rather, because of their modesty, of their small, fleeting presences, we might say the poems are more sustainable. They are organized and catalysed by the earth’s systems, but they do not plant themselves in a place and drain it of resources. Since they are defined by a fragility of the voice (its lack of range, its limited breath, its ignorance), they speak, then subside; soon the poet is moving on. Canto general sought to supersede the limits of the voice by gathering vast spaces and times into a single, compressed topography underneath an abstracted, regulating plane. Lienlaf’s proximity to traditional song structures, conversely, ensures that he engages in a poetics, and a politics, that is nowhere near as bold or imposing, but which aims to change and evolve in order to avoid capture (or death). But he does not seek to surpass death altogether. Rather, Lienlaf, as in the case of Butcher Joe and Dyunggayan, includes the dead and their country in his poems. In times of such rapid, climactic change, the increasing numbers of these dead are an almost overwhelming source of grief for the poet who listens to them. Like the earth of which it is a part, sadness is indissoluble and its extent is indeterminable because it is not only individual but pervades all matter. In the words of Chihuailaf: To my spirit have arrived the pained voices of my people, while in the wind the clouds dance the sacred dance, making, all of a sudden, my heart sing excitedly.

73

Lienlaf, Pewma dungu, 48–49.

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[. . . ] Are they all dead? – I asked myself, rising up. [. . . ] I am alive, I said. And the spirits cried. They cried.74

Lienlaf’s poetry is the result of collaboration with these “pained voices,” their potential “rising up” to him from the ground beneath. If his poetry is miserable, then, it is because country is suffering. The written ‘I’ of his poems is a distribution across country; the poet consoles himself with the presence of the surrounding words:75 there, in the threshold of misery, he who sings is able to say that he is alive, and that he will be alive while things keep speaking in him and don’t terminally interrupt his dialogue with the earth. . . 76

These virtual forces contribute to and increase the intensity of Lienlaf’s poetic system. Indeed, as the reader is moved by Lienlaf’s own capacity to listen to the virtual, she might in turn consider how this same act of listening could re-invigorate her own postcolonial poetics. Listening can open the doors to the possibility of dialogue, in which those who have arrived and those who were already here can “share a time and space of attentiveness.”77 By listening, the settler is drawn into the possibilities of a connection; her subsequent response is the actualization of that connection.78 Zurita writes that a great horde of anthropologists and linguists have already gazed across the lands of Araucanía, but none of the research will have useful outcomes for the Mapuche if “we keep confusing what we want to give with what they actually need.”79 To recover those spaces lost or stolen during the process of colonization, the virtuality of such spaces – their ever-present relationships to the present – must be re-thought as potential actualities; it is to this virtuality, then, that the postcolonial poet must listen. Listening entails an understanding that implicit in the landscape of Araucanía are Mapuche voices; if we listen to Mapu, then we must also listen to its che, and vice versa. a 74

Chihuailaf, “Mongeley mapu ñi püllü chew ñi llewmuyiñ,” 134. Zurita, “El Ave de tu Corazón,” in Lienlaf, Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón,” 20–21. 76 Zurita, “El Ave de tu Corazón,” 21. 77 Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 30. 78 Reports from a Wild Country, 31. 79 Zurita, “El Ave de tu Corazón,” 22. 75

6

Paddy Roe’s Nomad Poetics

Every place has a story; stories are located but not static. They pull people, other species, and other places into connection.1 conversational narratives T H E M S E L V E S traditionally classified as P R O S E turn out, when listened to C L O S E L Y to have poetical qualities of their O W N .2

T

on a reading of Gularabulu, a ground-breaking collection of stories narrated orally by Paddy Roe and transcribed by Stephen Muecke. In a book about poetics, however, a collection of short fiction might seem out of place; here I am following Dennis Tedlock, who has argued at length that oral narratives are better understood as dramatic poetry.3 After all, Gularabulu is a remarkably poetic negotiation of a landscape composed of settlers’ striated spaces and the interwoven lines of Aboriginal country; many of the stories tell of liminal figures that exist between these worlds. The title itself refers to a vast, liminal region of land and sea. Gularabulu is ‘the coast where the sun goes down’, a large area of coastal country stretching from La Grange in the south, right through Broome, and north to Dampier Land in the West Kimberley. Consequently, Gularabulu is not one place but many; it encompasses multiple tribal groupings (Garadjeri, Nyigina, Yaour, 1

HIS CHAPTER WILL FOCUS

Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” 180. Tedlock, “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” 708. 3 Dennis Tedlock, “On Translation of Style in Oral Narrative," Journal of American Folklore 84/331 (January–March 1971): 129–32. In particular, Tedlock points out that many Native American oral narratives incorporate frequent, distorted depictions of reality, a tendency to evoke, rather than describe, emotional states, and various forms of repetition – all of which are qualities we accept in the most highly canonized poems of Western literature. 2

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Nyul-Nyul, and Djabirr-Djabirr tribes),4 and urban and non-urban lands. In the same spirit of community, then, “Roe stresses that these stories belong not just to him, but to all these people.” Gularabulu includes Broome, too, which is the home of plenty of whitefellas; to tell stories that are “for everybody” consequently involves a difficult negotiation of cultures and contexts. Rather than shy from it, Roe embraces the challenge. He talks to whitefellas so that “they might be able to see us better than before.”5 What people get to see during Roe’s narration is a central concern of his poetics and politics. A nomad poetics, says Joris, “will cross languages, not just translate, but write in all or any of them.”6 Like his characters, Paddy Roe is himself a skilled nomad, crossing languages, genres, and cultures as adeptly as he crosses country. Until the time of his death in 2001, Roe (Figure 3 below) was the head of a large family, and maintained a position of power as a negotiator between government departments in Broome and the surrounding Aboriginal communities. Prior to assuming such responsibilities, however, Roe had always been negotiating the many differences between indigenous and nonindigenous societies. His mother nearly killed him at birth because his skin colour revealed white paternity, which would have made him a prime target for removal by missionaries at the nearby Beagle Bay mission. Luckily, he says, he was rescued by a young Butcher Joe, who took special care of him. But in order to stay with his family he would spend many of his formative years avoiding the white authorities. With time, Roe was to be fully initiated and become a Nyigina law man. He also learnt the skills of working sheep and cattle stations, and for many years he travelled across the Kimberley as a drover, before being contracted to work as a repairer of windmills.7 He met Stephen Muecke in the 1970s, when Muecke was visiting Broome for the first time as a young PhD student. Roe’s skills as an ombudsman and a nomad poet were developed over the course of a complicated history involving avoidance of and, later, employment by non-indigenous centres of power.

4

Tensions have flared up between some of these groups over the proposal to construct a gas plant at Walmadany (James Price Point). Some Djaber-Djaber people are disputing the native title of Joseph Roe, Paddy’s grandson, showing that ‘Gularabulu’ is an open category with a fluctuating constitution. 5 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, i. 6 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 5. 7 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, ii.

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F I G U R E 3: Paddy Roe, O A M (from The Broome News, c.1990; courtesy of Deborah Vincent)

The ever-present opportunities for transformation and expansion in Gularabulu are signs of its expansive ecology. The fractured objectivity and the absence of any controlling, authorial point of view gesture toward a plenitude of evolving explanations for how the stories came to be. The book’s origins can be traced rhizomatically across a diverse range of communities, not only on the southern coast of the Kimberley, but across those with which Muecke is also involved; that is, the book does not dwell in a single location, but moves nomadically between places in an effort to connect them. Of equal significance is the fact that Gularabulu works because Paddy Roe told these stories, and Muecke heard them, at specific times, in specific places. The places become interlinked by Roe’s narrative gifts, then: as the story unfolds

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and moves, so the place becomes linked to another one, somewhere else. Roe doesn’t waste time concerning himself with what belongs only in one place or in another. Rather, he is interested in flows of information and matter between places, in how the energy of one place permeates the membrane of another, and how this permeation is part of a larger current that gathers places into particular relationships across country. For Roe, a poetics of sharp lines and borders between habitats holds little currency. Place has a power to embrace and support as well as to locate, bind, or demarcate. It is a bounded-but-open region within which a set of interconnected properties can be located.8 These boundaries, however, are relative to the action-system of the thing that is bounded. Since a subject can move beyond boundaries (through a doorway, over a fence), notions of ‘within’ and ‘outside’ a place aren’t objective spatial relations but instead have entirely to do with the subject’s capacity or desire to move.9 In Aboriginal Australia, one country connects to another by virtue of this very directionality. Countries and the places in them are connected through Dreaming tracks, and the tracks of humans and other animals who come and go.10 As a corollary, these places is also rhythmic, or within rhythm: it is experienced in the pace of a walk, organized by the thud of one’s footsteps; if you stop and stand still, they are the thud of your beating heart. This beating, stop–start, on–off pattern goes to the very centre of Aboriginal thinking. Just as Dreaming ancestors travelled and linked up places, they also stopped, and now many remain fixed in various places. They have changed into permanent sites and other living things. Equally, however, they have kept going. Dreamings, writes Rose, “are masters of an art that includes both motion and stasis; they are both here and there. They are also both then and now, both origins and contemporary presence.”11 This is the basis of Roe’s nomad poetics: presence always eroding into departure; movement governed by the rhythm of walking. A beat is sound paused by silence; silence paused by sound. A beat is a repetition and a progression, a consolidation of being and a becoming something else, neither one nor the other. Rhythm is the blood of experience.

8

J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 170. 9 Malpas, Place and Experience, 169. 10 Rose, “Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between,” 110. 11 “Dreaming Ecology,” 111.

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In turn, the places in Roe’s stories are also rhythmic, articulated with repetitive, distinctive speech-patterns that produce more-than-simple representations of static environments. In Gularabulu country, no place is still or unchanging. The ground is alive with meat ants; the horizon is thrashing acacias or ragged swells. And if everything else calms down, there’s always the beat of your heart to move things onwards. Roe’s stories, like the places in which they are told, are both stationary and moving: ‘stationary’ because they are clearly located in a particular space; ‘moving’ because their energy and anaphora grant them lives of their own, thoroughly captivating Muecke, who takes them from local yarns into the global realm of literature, from oral narrative into written poetry. The book engages, therefore, with what Rose would call “a particular nomadic problematic: that of being here and not-here at the same time, of being both local and mobile.”12 Gularabulu is an example of being “always here, and always on the move.”13 To illustrate the importance of movement in Gularabulu, a brief elucidation of a passage from the book’s first story, “Mirdinan,”14 will be useful. The following scene tells of a maban (a West Kimberley medicine man or shaman) who sees his wife with another man, then goes back to his camp to wait for her and confront her: . . . “Hello” he seen this man and woman in the mangroves, sitting down -oh he come right alongside -he seen everything what they doin’ (Laughs) you know -they sitting down -so, he seen everything -so he wen’ back -he wen’ back home firs’ -he still waitin’ for his missus his missus come up oooh -prob’ly half an hour’s time -the woman must have give him time you know “oh mus’ be nearly time for my oldfella to comeback” -

12

Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal religion of place,” 165. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 3. 14 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 3–17. Muecke starts a new line after each of Roe’s pauses, marked by one or more hyphens (what Muecke calls ‘dashes’, x). 13

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but he was about half an hour late might be, his man was there15 already with the fish he was the oldfella was cooking -fish, aaah they had a talk there -that was about, dinner time --

Here, the narrative arc is not a smooth, uninterrupted line but is punctuated with a variety of complex rhythms accentuated by repetitions. Certain phrasal elements carry over a number of lines, such as “he seen. . . he seen” and “sitting down.. . sitting down,” before the pause after line 4. Then, the steady accumulation of anaphoric rhythm in the next five lines (“so, he seen. .. so he wen’... he wen’.. . ” etc.) increases the momentum. Roe’s short, sharp phrases, however, mean that he acquires a surplus of breath as well as momentum, and the energy begins to spill; when it does spill, we reach the climax of the arc: the oldfella was already waiting for her in the camp! After the long line depletes his breath, however, Roe retreats to the smaller phrases. Such deft use of rhythm is not only an aesthetic affect; it has an explicit relation to movement and time. The problem discussed in the story relates to the different speed at which each character moves – the wife too slowly, the maban too quickly. As the rhythm increases, so does the maban’s speed, which allows him to get back to camp before his wife. So there is an important connection between the world of the story and Roe’s own physiology (his lungs). This connection is translated by Muecke into a material relationship between the typography on the page and the story-world, which remains mediated by the qualities of Roe’s voice. It is futile to say that these stories are settled in locales when, like the Dreaming ancestors of whom some tell, they keep these locales alive with movement – of spoken performance (mediated by breath rhythms); of distribution across spaces (mediated typographically by breath rhythms). Rhythm signals motion, the passing from one country into another. On the Roebuck Plains, says Muecke in Reading the Country, there is no sustained level of pleasure or boredom. Rather, experiences come in flashes, and specific meanings arise for different places or things. Thus, for Aboriginal people the Plains are a “moving text”: you’re walking along and then you’re struck by an eruption of life as a lizard scuttles away. For you, the lizard is 15

From Muecke’s introduction: “Kimberley Aboriginal English often does not distinguish between gender in pronouns (females are referred to as ‘he’ or ‘him’)” (xi). Thus, this line refers to the maban’s wife.

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both here and not-here, always a moving-away-from-here.16 This requires a different language from much European poetics. The features of the landscape aren’t obvious: hills are only slight, and ground-cover is sparse. You can’t go around trying to attach words to what you (can’t) see. To get anywhere, you have to see the Plains in terms of a series of tracks linking places together, underneath some of which are large rivers of underground water.17 Things are hidden most of the time, only emerging momentarily – not that we would have it any other way. In the green, wet season the nomad has to stop moving, because everything is choked with life: mosquitoes fill the moist air; roads and tracks become flooded and can take months to dry out. The wet is a pause, like the space between beats. It is the interval between dryer seasons, when people can start to move again and things can actually get done.18 If nothing changes, however, if the wet goes on and on you’re stuck in the same green place for too long, boredom can set in. Texts, like landscapes, can become dull and flat if they are repeatedly read in the same way. Everything changes with the “sudden cyclonic disturbance” of a new reading, in which the words come alive again.19 Work that keeps the wor(l)d alive is a fundamental component of daily and ceremonial Aboriginal life. Life is not already given but is, rather, “a flourishing dynamic that needs to be charged up, and that loves and seeks more life.”20 As vital components of this life, stories need to be re-spoken, and re-read, in order to add to the flourishing. We navigate the stories just as we navigate the Plains, then we need time to rest and recuperate before setting off again.

A Poetics of the In-Between Roe and Muecke use a number of strategies in order to allow Gularabulu to ‘speak’ not only in the West Kimberley but across locales. Roe’s Aboriginal English, as Muecke notes in his introduction, is a crucial mode of communication between Aboriginal people of various language groups. Furthermore, it is also a way in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can communicate. For Muecke, then, Roe’s Aboriginal English could be “the lan16

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 90. Reading the Country, 91. 18 Reading the Country, 91. 19 Reading the Country, 91. 20 Rose, “Dance of the Ephemeral,” 164. 17

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guage of ‘bridging’ between the vastly different European and Aboriginal cultures.”21 Consequently, one could say that Roe’s language is an articulation of the poetic–political mode that we found in Lienlaf: the mode of the inbetween. Here, it matters as much that Roe’s stories articulate his country as it does that non-indigenous readers enjoy these stories. The narratives depend on Muecke’s response (and subsequent transcription); it is important for Roe that Muecke understands him and that he performs as a listener.22 One touching moment comes to mind from “Worawora Woman,” where the story is paused to find out if Muecke is uncomfortable about Butcher Joe lighting up a cigarette. Roe continues the narration only once Muecke has said, “Oh that’s all right.”23 This is not to say that Gularabulu is all about talking to a white audience, however. Often Roe threads his stories with words and phrases that are left unexplained, hence mysterious to those unfamiliar with Nyigina language or culture. In a veiled aside during “Djaringgalong,” for example, Roe laughs and says to one of his countrymen, “binabinaba,” the meaning of which is never explained.24 A large chunk of one of Roe’s djabi djabi nurlu is included in “Mirdinan” with only a very basic gloss.25 By repeating these old fragments of stories or songs, old patterns of tradition are imprinted on contemporary texts. Roe’s voice is thus an example of what Hodge and Mishra call an “Aboriginal polyphony” – rather than constituting a text that represents a ‘pure’ Aboriginality, Roe’s is a “composite and federalist” literature,26 which crosses a number of genres and can operate in different places. Like George Dyunggayan’s Bulu series, Gularabulu employs polyphony to articulate and maintain diversity. To get a sense of how Roe’s language isn’t simply a container for content but is also doing things, we need to expand on the notion of linguistic expression discussed in the previous chapters. That Roe is not as explicit as Lienlaf about the relationship of his language to country should not prevent us from recognizing that it nevertheless constitutes a culmination of many prelinguistic forces. Each of Roe’s statements conveys, in addition to any mean-

21

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, iv. Gularabulu, v. 23 Gularabulu, 33. 24 Gularabulu, 80. 25 Gularabulu, 13. 26 Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 107. 22

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ing it may have in the narrow sense of semantic content, a commanding ‘force’. ‘Force’ comes from the fact that language is generated by a context. A context is an infinitely complex gathering of vectors, which come together in the direction in which the speech-driven body is being propelled.27 This force accumulates in the moment of speaking as a statement; language, by extension, includes extraverbal as well as verbal factors: language doesn’t take place in a vacuum, but within a wider ecology. This ecology must be immanent, not internal, to language, because the force required to speak accumulates from the ecology. In other words, the language comes from context; context is not in the language. Here, then, we come to the crux of the matter: if context is immanent to language, then language as a whole is not primarily about meaning-making. Meaning is only secondarily what the words are saying literally; at heart, meaning is what the context has already said.28 Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, any linguistic expression implicitly presupposes a continuum of variation between various thresholds of meaning and social functioning. Any given language is, therefore, a dialect among others, rather than an ideal form, and languages together form a vast network of power-relations. In this network, grammatical formations stand as signposts for sites of everyday conflict.29 Engaged in such a network, at times Roe diverges from certain of its (grammatical) rules, while at other times he carefully obeys them. The important point here is that Roe, as a multilingual ombudsman, uses English as an articulation of change and conflict. The transcriptions of his stories, therefore, are not codifications of meanings but tracks into the dynamic realm of Gularabulu. Each phrase of Roe’s is sent hurtling forth by the force of the country behind it. But just as each word acquires a solid form, so that form might explode into something else, a little further down the track; the forces in any context are continually contorting and remaking themselves. A similar process emerges in Geoffrey Bardon’s discussion of Papunya paintings from Central Australia. Bardon knew that the particular quality or ‘finished product’ that he sought in Papunya art was foreign to the manner of its inspiration. The paintings were always, he wrote, stories “to be continued.” Hence, an artist such as Old Walter Tjampitjinpa would say upon completing a painting that it was ‘finished’, just as he would say a deceased relative was ‘fin27

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 30. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 31. 29 A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 42. 28

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ished’.30 Yet, as Carter points out, in this context the word ‘finish’ did not indicate the end of an aesthetic process. Instead, it was “the precondition of migrating from one cultural system of representation to another.”31 The phrase is a kind of punctuation, an in-breathing, a preparation for a phase-change. Likewise, when Roe says at the end of a story like “Djaringgalong,” “that’s the finish,”32 he is referring to the death of the large bird at the story’s conclusion. The phrase does not indicate the end of the story’s life, however, but Roe’s readiness for his speech to be taken by Muecke into another kind of existence (text). The phrase says, ‘We will stop here and rest, so we can move on later’. The word ‘finish’ or the phrase ‘that’s the finish’ are eruptions of contexts; they are what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘order words’, which signal an incorporeal transformation from one state into another. The moment of ‘finish’ is the accumulation of which each word in the story before it was a bristling sign. We won’t understand the motivation for having his stories transformed into Gularabulu unless we can think of Roe’s language as part of an ongoing process of non-discursive change. We discussed the dynamic qualities of oral poetics in Chapter 4. With the order word ‘finish’, however, Roe, through Muecke, is sending his stories into the discursive regimes of literate culture. What is the nature of the new cultural system into which Roe sends his stories? While written discourses are often valued more highly than oral ones in this system, a genealogical link with oral modes is nevertheless a marker of exceptionally high status in Western literary culture.33 Roe’s stories exploit this link. Indeed, like his stories, the most famous members of the Western canon show traces of their oral origins: retarded narratives, prolepsis, bricolage. Western drama and poetry are still realized in the oral mode, though they circulate in written forms. Even the novel relies heavily on dialogue.34 Muecke’s typography does not eliminate or disregard the features of Roe’s speech, either, but uses them to help usher the stories into Western discourses of avant-garde literary form. But Roe’s stories were always more than spoken language, anyway; an oral culture like Roe’s is a complex semiotic system. Consequently, as in the nurlu, various forms of drawing and performance also play crucial roles: Roe 30

In Carter, Dark Writing, 125. Carter, Dark Writing, 126. 32 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 82. 33 Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 75. 34 Dark Side of the Dream, 75–6. 31

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growls, sings, rasps a boomerang, draws pictures in the dirt, or members of his audience will interject and contribute to the story. It is more accurate to say that Roe’s poetics consists “of a set of genres which will not all correspond exactly to any equivalent in English.”35 Like Glissant’s Creole storyteller, who “is surprising in his talent for relentlessly bringing together the most heterogeneous elements of reality,” Roe’s poetics is “an uninterrupted process of revelation: of putting into relation.”36 Glissant’s concept of ‘Relation’ has to do with understanding how the storyteller or poet might make sense of the world by moving between its various elements and allowing them to produce dialogic forms. The storyteller does not know the totality of things; it is enough, if need be, to imagine it though a poetics: “this imaginary realm provides the full-sense of all these always decisive differentiations.”37 Like bricolage, then, a poetics of relation is about roaming through the aftermath of colonization and picking up useful bits and pieces to keep things going, or to make them function better. For the authors of Reading the Country, bricolage is a practice and a way of living as much as it is a poetics. Since European invasion, Aboriginal people have been forced into this poetics of relation: to become fluid and fringe-dwelling; to not assimilate foreign materials totally or totally ignore them. The bricolage poet moves nomadically, passing through cultures like a rhizome through soils. Bricolage is flexible and adaptive, even subversive: it will never completely switch one set of meanings for another, often leaving things half-complete.38 In this way, by leaving anomalous details in the mix (an untranslated word or phrase, perhaps) bricolage is always disruptive of ‘the normal’ linguistic rules. Roe is our bricolage-poet extraordinaire: he juxtaposes English forms with Aboriginal rhythms and syntax, and this elicits a gentle pleasure “in seeing the edifice of language tremble a little as it becomes a kind of poetry.”39 Of course, in various ways Muecke is crucial to Roe’s bricolage, granting it yet further complexity by opening it to the systems of written language. Muecke helps the stories survive, but remains peripheral to their cultural and linguistic contexts. He is not a mediator between Roe and settler culture in the same sense as Ray Keogh was for Butcher Joe and Dyunggayan, because here 35

Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 76. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 200. (My emphasis.) 37 Poetics of Relation, 154. 38 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 148–50. 39 Reading the Country, 151. 36

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Roe controls much of the mediation. Rather, Muecke is part of Roe’s bricolage – yet another foreign material to be used where necessary. When Roe is telling the story “Djaringgalong,” for example, he requires assistance from his companion, Donald, with a “whatname” – gurdjarda – from the Nyigina. By incorporating the word into his story without translating it into English, Roe draws a line between Nyigina and whitefella worlds without any need to explain the situation to Muecke (or the reader!): these two man dress up with they they dress up they get their two spears an’ that whatname we call-im (Question to Donald in Nyigina) garbarda eh? (Donald: Mm) gurdjarda we call-im he got that.40

Roe has deftly incorporated both Muecke and Donald into his bricolage structure, also showing how Donald, Muecke, and he all have limited amounts of knowledge, requiring a communal effort to keep the story moving. Nevertheless, Muecke’s role as editor means that he must make some difficult decisions about just how opaque his transcriptions of the stories should be. His introduction, summaries, and footnotes, while extremely helpful, are far from comprehensive or extensive; Roe’s story-poems constitute without doubt the largest presence in the book. Yet Muecke’s typographical decisions in his transcriptions of Roe’s stories reflect his interest in modernist poetics, with lines of uneven length and a very sparse use of punctuation such as commas or capital letters. So ‘The Translator’ is a blurred confluence of two people, both of whom must determine the precise entry-conditions and semiotic routes through each written text. The task of trying to ‘locate’ a single author of this nomad poetics is highly problematical, because – as we see with “Djaringgalong” – it moves freely not only between languages but also between subjects. We know that we will never arrive at an original location, a small clearing in which Paddy is chatting with Stephen. The text is somewhere between the two of them, or shooting off in another direction.

40

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 79. The meaning of ‘gurdjarda’ is never revealed.

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Moving Language Movement constitutes the flexibility of all nomadic poetics. Yet, we might ask, ‘How can a story move at all?’ In two ways, according to Muecke. Stories can be distributed through space in book-form, but they are also moved around when they are interpreted. “When you make a story mean different things,” says Muecke, “you move it by attaching different values to it.”41 For stories like Roe’s, we need to think of movement as the norm, while stasis can only ever be momentary. A nomadic poetics, according to Joris, is “always on the move, always changing, morphing, moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping.”42 But an ecological poetics is beholden to the limits of biological organisms. The poetry must therefore stop at some stage so that rest and recuperation can take place. When it does stop, however, it does not do so for too long; this would risk placing too much pressure on the place of rest. As we saw in Chapter 4, such “poases,” only “last [. . . ] the time of a poem, & then move on.”43 We have already touched on the importance of movement, and of relative speeds, in a couple of moments in Roe’s narratives. The following reading of “Djaringgalong’ will examine some of the relationships between speed and stasis in further detail. Djaringgalong is an enormous ancestral bird that lived in a large nest. Roe’s story begins with two men who went to have a look at this nest. Upon climbing up the tree they are greeted with a horrific sight: they look “Oh” two eggs -an’ bone head everything all kids -you know, bone “Oh this fella eating this fella eating people this bird --” [. . . ] “Oh” baby one baby half eatened up you know only bone -in the whatname, in that nest --.44

41

Stephen Muecke, “Listening to Paddy Roe: Form and Movement in Narrative Structure” (lecture, University of New South Wales, 16 August 2009). 42 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 26. 43 A Nomad Poetics, 26. 44 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 78.

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Djaringgalong has been stealing people’s babies and taking them back home to his nest to eat them. The men decide to go and find two strong maban who can hunt down and assassinate Djaringgalong: oh plenty man was there but they get the bes’ one -two bes’ man --.45

The two maban assemble their spears and woomeras (spear-throwers), and decide to wait all night for the bird to return to its nest. They don’t see it until the early morning. When Djaringgalong arrives, one of the men attracts the bird’s attention by dancing in front of it; Djaringgalong swoops down from its nest to attack him. While his companion is being chased, the other maban emerges from his hiding-spot: ’nother one come out -that’s two of them now -while he was playin’ around he want to grab this man ‘nother one come out -went down an’ he jus’ want to climb up this fella throw spear for im right through (Laugh) finish knock im down then other fella come up ’nother spear again finish they finish im off they killed im finish no more Djaringgalong that time -.46

Following its death, the giant bird then turns into stars. Unlike many other stories in Gularabulu, “Djaringgalong’ is a story from Bugaregara (the West Kimberley term for ‘The Dreaming’). Such stories are about supernatural beings like Djaringgalong who created various landmarks, landforms, and stars, and gave mankind language and laws for social conduct.47 What we can garner from a story like “Djaringgalong,” therefore, are not only Roe’s own poetic idiosyncrasies but also what this story suggests about Nyigina philosophy and poetics in general. Physically, “Djaringgalong” 45

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 78. Gularabulu, 81. 47 Gularabulu, vii. 46

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involves two different sets of movements, and it is the conflict between them that drives the story to its conclusion. First, there are the wide-ranging velocities that dominate the dynamic world of Bugaregara. These take the form of the various human characters who come and go from Djaringgalong’s tree, and who dance and talk with others. In stark contrast to them, however, is the static form of Djaringgalong’s tree-home, which seems to exert a kind of magnetic power over Djaringgalong, who must always return to it with his stolen prey. In the world of Bugaregara, such stasis is highly dangerous. The human characters are not as big or as powerful as Djaringgalong, but they are far more mobile and numerous. On the other hand, Djaringgalong’s fatal weaknesses are that he is alone and that he stays for long enough in the same place to be hunted down, then tricked and killed, by a group of men. Like a black hole, he has thrived on sucking the life from people’s babies, but the men’s victory is celebrated when Djaringgalong’s energy is exploded and dispersed into a host of stars across the night sky. Not only does the story explain the absence of such a terrible monster in contemporary ecology, but it can also be a justification for the need to keep moving as a community, so as to avoid the consequences of staying put for too long. The flexibility enjoyed by the victors is reflected in Roe’s narrative expression, which, because of Muecke’s limited punctuation, sprawls freely across each page. Pauses occur in order to catch breath, rather than because of the imposition of a grammatical rule to do with metrics or sentence structure. Structurally, too, the story develops in a very particular way. Were Roe interested in decorative or ornamental flourishes, he would slow his scenes down with heavy, animated images; each elaborate image, weighed down with such detail, would become static. But Roe’s lines are sparsely detailed, perhaps to minimize the strain on his voice. When speed needs to be reduced in order to emphasize something, Roe, rather than layering imagistic detail upon the line, will use what Muecke calls a “cross parallelism." With cross-parallel phrasing Roe takes information from one line and repeats it in the following line, but this time as a mirror image. Consider the moment when Djaringgalong finally returns to his nest: just about towards morning just about towards morning tjipeee they hear-im he’s coming they can hear-im somewhere here - (Laugh) they hear-im he’s comin’ back -

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so they get ready these two bloke (Soft) these two bloke get ready -.48

The extract above is composed of a number of rhythms, which are partly hidden by the metronomic thud of the first two lines. The third line, however, is part of a phrase (“. . . they hear-im. . . somewhere here”) that has been spliced with the first cross-parallelism, “he’s coming they can hear-im. . . they hearim he’s coming back.” Cross parallelism occurs because, if we assign “he’s coming” the letter ‘A’ and “they can hear-im” the letter ‘B’, these two parts are switched in the next line. That is, the first line consists of A[he’s coming] + B[they can hear-im], which becomes B[they hear-im] + A[he’s coming back] two lines later. This pattern recurs in the final two lines, where A[so they get ready] + B[these two bloke] becomes B[these two bloke] + A[get ready]. By utilizing this sort of ‘spliced anaphora’, the story never stops moving, but Roe is still able to return to places. The change of pace exerts a potent gathering power: overlapping and repeating phrases like this slows the story considerably, and draws the listener /reader closer with a seductive rhythm.49 Interestingly, this circular, repetitive structure also echoes some of the defining characteristics of longer song-poems, as I outlined in Chapter 4. The nomad needn’t commemorate a place by erecting a structure on top of it; returning to it periodically is what’s needed to keep it alive and well. We looked at de Landa’s notion of topological connectivity with relation to song-poetry in Chapter 4. A linguistic unit, like a biological cell, exhibits an adaptive topology which allows it to form a variety of assemblages with other units in response to a vast range of events. In the densely compacted phrasing of a printed text, it is often difficult to ascertain this inherent flexibility of language. In Gularabulu, however, Muecke’s method of transcription reveals to us the ways in which Roe is able to splice and manipulate phrasal units at will, without recourse to larger notions of grammatical concision or narrative drive. Such flexibility is a direct outcome of Roe’s openness to the world around him – his environmental sensitivity. As we saw in “Djaringgalong,” Roe’s narrations are communal efforts, assisted by audience members and companions. But each narration is also dependent on its relationship to where Roe is at the time of its telling. Each story is told at a specific place, and each place contains specific vagaries – gusts of wind, glaring sun, an inquisitive child – which will cause him to repeat particular phrases for emphasis, or in 48 49

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 79. Muecke, “Listening to Paddy Roe: Form and Movement in Narrative Structure.”

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case they weren’t heard the first time. If we take a cell with a specific history, and a certain signal which can change its fate, the outcome of the cell-and-signal interaction will depend on how many other attractors exist in the cell’s proximity.50 Likewise, if we take a newly completed phrase, which of course has an historical relation to what has been said before it, the outcome of that phrase – whether it grows yet larger, whether it is repeated, whether it becomes incidental, etc. – will depend on how many attractive pathways there are in the place in which the phrase is spoken. We don’t need to know all the intricate details of such a place (or places); it is enough to know that Roe is speaking, that he is bound by the limits of his own voice, for us to realize that the place must influence his performance. As in “Djaringgalong,” many other stories in Gularabulu employ a phrasal flexibility that allows them to function at various velocities. In Roe’s poetics, on the level of phrases, scenes or whole narratives, stasis is always superseded by agile movements. In “Mirdinan,” Mirdinan uses his powers as a maban not to stand and staunchly fight against or resist the police, but to escape them by going “quietly” after he has been arrested. He will make himself invisible or turn into another creature in order to slip away unnoticed. At the moment of his hanging he turns into an eaglehawk, “converting his hanging (the supreme expression of the other’s material power over him) into flight (the supreme expression of his freedom and identity – a spiritual triumph).”51 It is only when Mirdinan is attacked spiritually, as Ross Chambers puts it, by being given liquor to drink, that he slows down sufficiently for the authorities to trap him in a coffin and drown him at the bottom of the ocean. Yet things don’t end here, for Mirdinan’s power has already been transferred to Roe, who seems to be his descendant (and then to the listeners, and then to the readers. .. ).52 Like Gularabulu itself, Mirdinan is a set of traces, moving from one body to another. There is no single authority determining the overall outcome, just local movements that respond strategically to the particularities of their environments. Part of the driving force behind Rothenberg’s open translation project is a desire to “desanctify & demystify the written word.” For him, the dangers of “frozen” or “authoritarian” thought have been too closely tied up with written 50

de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 65. Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1991): 21. 52 Chambers, Room for Maneuver, 22. 51

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language.53 This also relates to one of the concerns of Carter, for whom the Western world is composed of the traces of movement, but our representations conceal this. Our thinking is a movement of the mind, but our forms of thought are static. Whether it is the outside world or the inner world, we write about it and draw it as if it were motionless.54

To ‘melt’ the frozen thought represented by the written word, then, Rothenberg’s translator must produce in some way the ethereal qualities of the speaking voice. Roe’s own writing already does this. As he tells his stories he will sit and draw accompanying patterns of various kinds in the dirt, which he will then erase with his hand once the story is completed. His drawing is an abstract system of lines, dots, and circles, but Muecke argues that because we as non-Indigenous readers do not understand such a system, and because it is always being erased and redrawn, we fail to acknowledge such a practice as writing. It is because of our obsession with the enduring nature of the written word, he says, that we say Roe is illiterate.55 Yet, if we are to walk the same track as Rothenberg, then surely Roe will be a crucial guide: his writing, like spoken language, “traces an arc in the medium of sound waves before disappearing in minute echoes.”56 To melt the frozen, to interrogate the authoritarian, to think of moving forms, then we need to conceive of both appearance and disappearance. As one moves through country, meanings (like rituals, for example) emerge, then disappear.57 Traces of the movement become material objects; we read their tracks across the land.58

Productive Opacities We are leaving Broome’s grid lines, its careful street plans and dense fortifications of concrete and iron. Heading north on the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, we begin to encounter nomad spaces: the ocean’s smooth film stretches across the west; a gloomy storm gathers over the thick green bush of the interior.

53

Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 10. Carter, Dark Writing, 5. 55 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 63. 56 Reading the Country, 64. 57 Muecke, “A Chance to Hear a Nyigina Song,” 123. 58 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 22. 54

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Rusty pindan cliffs bleed out into fat sand dunes, then re-emerge further down the beach. All the while, tracks could be heading off in a multiplicity of directions, but we’d be none the wiser. We can’t occupy this space by counting it up or measuring it beforehand; we can only explore it by travelling across it.59 Everything passes by quite swiftly and we only catch glimpses of things: oystercatcher, shrub, termite mound. As an Aboriginal philosopher, Roe urges us to follow him, to learn what he knows by following literally in his footsteps, because knowing him is equivalent to a capacity to mimic his gait.60 Muecke writes that modernity has tried to eliminate “this notorious or dangerous mimeticism,” which is so close to the object it mimics that “it runs the risk of losing itself in it.” In response, scholars have attempted to maintain their distance from things by using representational tools: alphabetical signs, once pictographic, have over the centuries acquired “a mysterious arbitrariness.”61 Roe’s oral-based poetics, by contrast, fuse the arbitrary nature of written signs with a mimetic and performative practice akin to the cinema. Indeed, if there is one clear relationship between Gularabulu and the screen, it is that the skeletal structures of the stories could resemble screenplays for short films – both are guides for performance. The letters on the pages of Gularabulu are not simply transcriptions of ideas; the typographical presentation is almost ‘spatial’, in that it re-presents a theatrical moment in visual form, but communicates permanently its ephemeral nature. In a moving, performative system of expression, however, we have to acknowledge the very likely possibility that some things will be irreducible to the rigours of Western logocentric alphabetization. So it is no good our using our words as static representations of things (everything keeps moving!); doing so would fail to recognize the productive, extra-verbal processes behind each phrase. Words are markers on a trail; they flare up momentarily before we have moved on. We need to “displace all reduction” and opacity – that indissoluble otherness lurking in the shadows of difference – must flourish. We cannot describe opacity, or lock it up in a fortress of representation; opacities subsist as their own productive singularities, and they “can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”62 As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, these ‘fabrics’ are often pregnant with potential: Muecke’s failure to understand entirely what 59

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 222. Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 36. 61 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 36. 62 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. 60

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Roe is saying, for example, means that he remains attentive (understanding something entirely would be the end to a nomadic poetics: once the entirety is revealed, relationships of listening, learning, and responding are rendered redundant). With a fabric woven of the opaque, we might have some of the conditions for a contemporary Aboriginal aesthetic: conditions for living with the possibility of exchange, expansion and transformation, always moving slightly beyond recognition, allowing critics [. . . ] the occasional glimpse of a secret which is both profound and as candidly open as the country in which we walk.63

I don’t want to make a theology out of such opacity, so that it becomes a metaphysical Unsayable or Invisible. What matters is not the ontological status of empty spaces in a work, but how such spaces can produce forms and affects.64 In Chapter 4 we encountered song-poems which have no clear meaning, “or no meaning that you can get at by translation into-other-words,” as Rothenberg would say. Yet such sounds still function; the ‘meaning’ is contained in how the chant is made to function.65 The chant’s purpose is transformative and efficacious, in other words, rather than signifying. What Glissant and Muecke are both proposing, following in the footsteps of Deleuze, is that vision and language are parts of a transformative stutter, like a series of glimpses: ‘. . . and, and, and... ’ (where each provides stimulus for the next), instead of a declaration from an imperial vista: ‘this is’. What is is constantly moving “slightly beyond recognition” as it joins the line of a productive series. This condition of being both within and beyond recognition, of an opacity that can still be interwoven with other things, provides a functional stimulus to the system of which it is a part. The series ‘. . . and, and, and’ is propelled by the stimulus, by the continual revelation of that which is becoming recognizable as it emerges from the virtual realm of the pre-recognizable. Roe’s own poetics works through these series and variations of series, and we can follow him as he walks along the track.

63

Muecke, No Road, 217. Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 125. 65 Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 144. Furthermore, John Bradley notes that the sound units of songlines for Yanyuwa people combine to make up words and phrases, but the meaning of such phrases is secondary. Rather, the sounds of the songpoems “are seen as the substance embedded in Yanyuwa country” (Singing Saltwater Country, 166). Once again, language has a pre-linguistic significance. 64

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A poem that elicits, and incorporates, series of responses from the wider environment will have roots in a diverse range of human and non-human communities. A good place to be, according to Rose, is one in which every element contributes. “They all nourish each other because there is no site, no position, from which the interest of one can be disengaged from the interests of others in the long term.”66 Their roots in such diverse communities allow the stories in Gularabulu to move so freely: the agency can shift across a range of actors, frequently producing disjunctions and ambiguities. A delightfully microcosmic example of this occurs during “Donkey Devil,” a story about the sighting of a demon who looked like a cross between a donkey and a dog. A young member of Roe’s audience interjects during his narration: in that road --they look -oh donkey layin’ down (Laugh) you know donkey ah not donkey but (Young Girl: Dog) er dog dog -67

The young girl is Roe’s great-granddaughter, and her presence here is important not only for the fact that she reminds readers that Roe’s stories are being told to other (Aboriginal) people, but that these people also have a particular purchase on the stories themselves. For, in this apparently innocuous instant, during which Roe is searching for the correct word, someone else in the group is able to find it: Roe’s authority is submerged in the group and, by virtue of her investment in the story, a group member is able to provide him with the impetus to continue: ‘. . . and, and, dog, dog. .. ’ Roe’s uncertainty, with his granddaughter’s assistance, reflects and enacts the uncertainty regarding the donkey-devil’s form. ‘Dog’ is an order word; it initiates a series of dogs, pushing Roe onwards with a momentum that leads him to say it twice himself (“er dog dog”). We are reminded of what he tells us in the book’s introduction, that these stories belong not just to him but to all the people of the Gularabulu region.

66 67

In Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 51. Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu,” 52–53.

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Land, Voice, Line The relationship between voice and line, and line and text, is watertight in Gularabulu. The achievement requires a particularly innovative typographical approach. Bearing some striking similarities to Tedlock’s transcriptions of Native American oral histories, all of Muecke’s typographical marks stand in an analogous relation to Roe’s vocal delivery.68 A translation into writing of an oral performance must keep in mind that the meaning of speech is not only carried by the sheer words as transcribed by alphabetic writing but by the placement of S I L E N C E S by T O N E S of V O I C E by whispers and S H O U T S .69

In Gularabulu, Muecke sets the words on the page in lines of uneven length, each marking the natural rhythm of the spoken phrase: The texts are divided into lines whenever the narrator pauses. The length of these pauses is indicated by one dash per second of pause. Hesitations in midline, at which points the breath is held at the glottis, are indicated by commas. Extended vowels, ‘growls’ or breathy expressions are indicated by adding more letters to the extent of one per second. The texts are also broken up into episodes. The change from one episode to the next is indicated largely in changes of content: a change of character, place or time.70

Most striking about this note is the idea that at all times a written mark is appearing to keep up with Roe’s narration. Not only speech translates into writing, however; hesitations and pauses also acquire material signification. Furthermore, the changing episodes within the stories affect changes on the page: as one episode ends and another begins, a line-break appears (where the gap itself is a liminal space, a vector from one location to the next); Muecke also tells us that, in Aboriginal storytelling, extended or lengthened vowels indicate movement through space or time.71 Thus, movement is constantly producing incorporeal transformations: from actual bodies journeying through space, to bodies travelling through story-worlds, to words spilling out across a

68

See, for example, Tedlock, “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry.” Tedlock, “Learning to Listen,” 712. 70 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, x. 71 Gularabulu, xii. 69

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page. The formation of printed /spoken words in bodies is emphasized by Muecke’s decision to present the stories as poems. For him, it “is a way of justifying a writing which tries to imitate the spoken word.” If we read the language as poetic, he says, we pay attention not only to its “underlying content” but also to its form.72 Muecke is very much aware of the poem as the design of various, more-than-purely-linguistic elements. Implicated in this voice–text fabric is a much larger web of connection. Present everywhere are traces of the dialogic situation in which the narrative was recorded, with Roe tactfully in control of the narrative process and consciously mediating Aboriginal thinking through Muecke to a wider, largely non-indigenous, audience.73 Gularabulu is the cumulative result of a process in which “the spoken voice is transformed into writing and the country then becomes the book, [and] the traveller in turn becomes a reader.”74 Roe wandered through his country and told stories about it; if Roe’s voice has become writing, and his path the book, as readers we are indeed travelling, but we are doing so under Roe’s very careful guidance. Yet Roe’s authority could remain only if his presence in the stories wasn’t erased. Rather than effacing the traces of Roe’s oral form, rather than ruthlessly extracting ‘content’ from its conditions of emergence, Muecke has transcribed a kind of ‘dark writing’. The text does not try to minimize the manner in which the story was told, by reducing it to line after line of prose, but instead is designed with the aim of emphasizing its oral poetics. In “mechanically and electronically mediated script communication,” Carter sees a linguistic field of “dark strokes and dots” evaporate “into the light of reason.” In Gularabulu, however, many such dots and strokes are imbued with real functions. Roe’s expressions are inscribed in our writing system and survive not by acquiring a solidity, but by becoming movement forms,75 dynamic collections of intensities sustained by the relation between Roe and Muecke, and by the way he is read as he strolls through story. The movement witnessed in the first performance will be translated into a new one on the page. But if Roe is taking us through his country as he tells stories about it, what’s to stop him telling us endless stories (allowing us to see too much), or telling us too many stories about a particular place (allowing us to stay for too 72

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, v. Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 84. 74 Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 14. 75 Paraphrasing Carter, Dark Writing, 253. 73

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long)? Structurally, his stories are bound by the limits of spoken language, and are integrated into the rhythms of the voice. In Gularabulu, things are moved along by the expansion and contraction of the lungs. When we listen to a recording of Roe telling a story like “Mirdinan,” we find that his speech is slow, with many pauses. There is a lot of silence between the phrases, too. It all alerts us to the way Roe’s delivery is so closely bound up with his breathing, but his narratives are also determined by the characteristics of breathing. “Mirdinan,” for example, ends when the maban loses his breath while drowning at the bottom of the ocean (but just as the air was sucked from him it was given to Roe, who uses this breath to tell Mirdinan’s story). Breath ensures both the undeniable presence of a voice and its very mortality; it is ephemeral and limited, but it still is. The breath determines the movement forms of Roe’s expression; without the mediating rhythm of breathing, his speech could become ceaseless flow, lacking any counterpoints that would make it “discernible and susceptible to manipulation.” A movement form, however, “makes sense of both movement and stasis”;76 it occurs when movement is momentarily contracted into syntax. In the act of breathing, the “ceaseless flow” of moving particles in the air is sucked into the mouth, contracts through the throat, and is compressed in the lungs. Some of it is absorbed into the bloodstream; some of it will be released as “discernible” molecules of speech, which will soon dissipate into the air. By alternating between compression and expansion, Roe mediates poetically the perpetual oscillation between concrete form and unrestricted flow. I want to explore how the breath produces limitations of movement and stasis in the final story in Gularabulu, “Langgur.” Like “Djaringgalong,” “Langgur” is about a supernatural being – a possum – from Bugaregara. Langurr used to be a man; now, however, he is a big possum, and a misanthrope: so one day he -he was thinkin’ about --there’s too many people you know walkin’ round everywhere --.77

Langgur decides to try and get rid of the people. He invites them back to his place for a corroboree, but when they arrive he disappears into his home, a hollow tree:

76 77

Paraphrasing Carter, Dark Writing, 14–15. Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 85.

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he got inside and they can hear this – fella you know he’s – he’s drinkin’ water – inside –.78

The people get very thirsty after a while and, because Langurr will give them no water, they all die. When he wants to do the same thing with another group of people, however, he is second-guessed by a pair of maban. They have dreamt of his activities, and decide that they will comply with his wishes until the moment he refuses their people water: all right now these two maban say these two maban man say now you fella get ready (Soft) all right straight away they ask-im you know they can hear-im inside you know clean his water out - glok glok glok glok inside the holler tree you know (Laugh) everywhere (Calls out) “All right djambardu” he say “You give us drink water,” nobody dead yet -79 “You give us drink water” -80

When Langgur refuses, the two maban pull him down from the tree by his legs and decapitate him. Then they chop off a knot from the tree’s trunk: they come up they cut that tree dud dud that lump come out you know water run everywhere -81

The flowing water manages to bring all of the dead people back to life. To begin, we could certainly say that, as a story from Bugaregara, “Langurr” is another account of the tensions between movement and stasis in Nyigina philosophy. Langurr, like Djaringgalong, is a solitary, slow-moving being, who always returns to a single home-place. Also like Djaringgalong, he insists that his stasis and solitude must come at the price of the deaths of others in his vicinity. Once he has killed off the people who use one waterhole, “next day he off to ’nother water hole” until the people who use it are also killed.82 So Langurr moves doggedly from point to point, exhausting the 78

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 87–88. Langurr is also known as djambardu. 80 Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 91. 81 Gularabulu, 92. 82 Gularabulu, 89. 79

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resources at each one, and always returns to his own. Things that flow freely, like water, or the groups of people in the surrounding country, are gathered in by him, and either hoarded or eliminated. Langurr could thus be a kind of sign or representation that seeks to erase the traces of movement and change of which he was once, as a human, a part. When he is killed, when the hierarchy of representation is removed, water rushes back into the landscape and, with it, the life of those who had passed away: water was running everywhere so when that water run everywhere an’ these dead people now they aall come up life again they move about now (Laugh) finish -.83

Here, movement not only keeps things going but it also helps life to flourish. Now water is “running everywhere,” and people are being brought back from the dead and are moving across their country once more. In tandem with the sudden breakout of movement and life, Roe’s narration has also increased in pace and intensity: the narrative becomes infused with laughter, with long, fast lines and with moments of emphasis like “dud dud ” and “aall.” Yet such frenzied pace cannot continue forever, exhausting as it would be for anyone who lives by trying to maintain that tempo. Thus, the final laugh after “they move about now” is followed by what is almost an admission of exhaustion: “finish.” After this, the last lines are comparatively lackadaisical, operating at greatly reduced pace: I dunno how but he’s Bugaregara anyway they all come live again (Stephen: Mm) that’s that Langgur now, possum 84

Two important points need to be made here. First, the fact that Roe says “dunno” – that is, that he doesn’t know – is our first clue as to where and how a limit is placed on the growth and scope of the story. Simply, while the people’s movement “everywhere” is the sign of complex, frenetic activity in the world of the story, the extent to which such complexity is translated into the narrative is limited by Roe’s inability to know “everywhere,” or to speak about it. Aboriginal knowledges, we know, are segmented and local; they deal

83 84

Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, 92. Gularabulu, 92.

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not with generalizations but with the specific qualities of the country in which they emerged. Furthermore, even if Roe were privy to a vast range of local knowledges and could attempt to make generalizations, the oral nature of his stories – the fact that they are inextricable from the capacities of his voice and lungs – means that he would only ever be able to travel a limited distance before needing to take a rest. Meanwhile, the world around him would keep racing on ahead. The second point has to do with the word “finish,” which occurs in a couple of places in the story. As I discussed earlier, the word does not refer to an ultimate end, but to the liminal space of passage from one place to the next. What is interesting about its use in the final lines of “Langgur,” however, is that it denotes the passing from death into life (the people are revived by the water) while still signalling the closing of the story. After so many people have come back to life, after so much activity and movement have returned and continued until the present, for Roe only to mutter “finish” and then those last, somewhat casual lines suggests that he feels no need to keep going. Were he concerned with the present moment and how it was teetering on the precipice of the future, he might have wanted to pave out this future with details and narrative threads. Instead, his orientation seems to be “towards origins,” as it is for Victoria River people in the Northern Territory. In this ontology, explains Rose, we in the present are the “behind mob,” or those who come after the people of earlier times, who made our lives possible. Those who come after us in the future, on the other hand, are known as the ‘new mob’ or as those behind us. We are facing Dreaming, therefore. Dreaming time is the enduring, alwayspresent past which, as it approaches the near-past, becomes measurable, historical time. Just as Dreaming encroaches on one end of historical time, “we live our lives moving closer to Dreaming” by encroaching on historical time from the other end. That is, as we move further into the past we near Dreaming, and eventually enter it (usually by the time we are deceased great-grand parents).85 Perhaps for Roe, too, the past is not some infinite descent into darkness, from which he veers towards the light of the future. Far from teetering on the edge of an abyss, his language gives form to the flow of material as it enters Bugaregara. The always-present past of Dreaming is sustained by stories and songs, the words of which acquire the same immutable presence as Dreaming beings themselves. Here we come to perhaps the most important 85

Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 55.

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distinction to be made in Roe’s poetics: the poet is not driven by a desire to speak endlessly, to prepare frantically for the unknown possibilities of a future-in-waiting; instead, he need add only small pieces to a fabric that is already in place, and of which he was always a part.

Regional and Itinerant Philosophies The task now will be to emphasize how the existence of these stories is inextricable from a history of colonization and dispossession. Essentially, what makes Gularabulu a necessarily political act is that it says, ‘There is a language’. Without language, there would be neither transmission nor signification of meaning. Importantly, this cannot be communicated in language itself: actual utterances are possible only where speech has already begun.86 While Roe’s stories render explicit what has been implied by the fact of their utterance (that his language exists), they also force us to acknowledge that he can speak, and that he has already begun to do so. Roe knows that “as long as his people can speak out clearly, their culture will live on.”87 Included in this event of speaking, of course, is Muecke. Roe is an authoritative narrator, and has knowledge that Muecke desires. Muecke, on the other hand, defines what of Roe’s knowledge is desirable by extending or withholding his interest. If Roe signifies the presence of his people here, so too does Muecke, says Chambers, “by virtue of his whiteness and Western education.” He is, therefore, “the symbolic representative of a historically dominant, not to say oppressive, society.”88 In this context, Muecke’s lasting interest in Roe’s stories is an enduring victory for a man who devoted much of his life to reconciling his language with non-indigenous Australia. However, it is also true that, in addition to their signification of Roe’s presence, the stories of Gularabulu make particular Aboriginal issues endure in the public arena. A great theorist of storytelling, Hannah Arendt, reminds us that words, and the deeds to which they relate, depend on their being made material and publicly visible by artists. By making the story visible to a broader audience and initiating a process in which its meanings can be con-

86

Agamben, Potentialities, 2. Roe & Muecke, Gularabulu, ix. 88 Chambers, Room for Maneuver, 19. 87

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tested and disrupted, the storytellers turn the narrative into a public event.89 In the case of Gularabulu there are two levels of ‘public’ – the first is when Roe presents his stories to Muecke; the second when I, as a reader, witness this exchange. I coincide fully neither with Roe nor Muecke, but find myself in a triangular relationship with the two of them.90 This places me in a somewhat unusual, and even awkward, position, in that I am unable to neatly separate myself from the Aboriginal ‘object’ of my attention: Muecke is in the frame, too, and my status as an ignorant but interested whitefella is reflected by his. Yet I am more knowledgeable than the Muecke who appears in the stories: because I am reading while he is listening, and because I have access to his endnotes, often I understand why something has happened before he, in the story, asks a question about it. In this way, I can also feel as though I am looking from Roe’s side (of knowledge) towards Muecke. What Gularabulu makes public, therefore, is an event of dialogic interaction between Aboriginal and settler Australia, which refuses a reader’s easy alliance with one category or the other. This situation is compounded yet further in a story like “Mirdinan.” That Mirdinan’s deeds are made public by Roe and given material form by Muecke is another way of saying that the maban power in Mirdinan’s belly is transformed into a seductive narrative power in Roe’s voice, then into an attractive typography by Muecke (and Fremantle Arts Centre Press). Accordingly seduced, I gain a sense of what it is to belong to a culture like Mirdinan’s. I see my own, repressive culture – present in this story as the police, the judge, the telephones, the hanging – from the other side. In this way, the narrative of Mirdinan’s defeat is a major component of the story’s affective success, since I am led to empathize with the defeated character that my own culture is destroying.91 Mirdinan’s defeat is not final, however; rather, he has shifted form once more and moved on. At any rate, it is no longer possible for me to think in abstract terms about life in Roe’s country, or about Aboriginal and nonAboriginal relations. I have been seduced into a complex, triangular relationship, where I have glimpsed the point of view of the oppressed, as well as the power wielded by white perception.92 No relief comes for me, either, for the 89

Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1994): 85. 90 Chambers, Room for Maneuver, 24. 91 Room for Maneuver, 23–24. 92 Room for Maneuver, 24.

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story provides no satisfying closure. After a number of apparent conclusions – each as Mirdinan seems, at last, to escape for good – and Roe’s signal to keep listening (“that’s not the finish yet”), all of which draws much ‘mming’ and ‘ohing’ from Muecke, the final act is almost inconsequential to what has already taken place. That is, by the time Mirdinan is drunk and drowning in a box on the bottom of the ocean, Muecke and Roe have already woven a thick web of poetry between each another. Mirdinan’s expulsion from life is actually his last great transformation: through Roe’s voice, he finds new life in Muecke, then again in the reader. The act of making public, of making material, is thus repeated twice already at the moment of reading. Aboriginal texts can play an important role in the construction of policies that are sensitive to indigenous people’s needs and values, but they are primarily “regional and itinerant philosophies of the bush” rather than material that can be reworked into acceptable forms for colonialist administrations.93 They can’t be mined for a set of overarching, immutable truths regarding Aboriginal existence; they are valid for their territories, constructed from ancient knowledges of survival, ecology, and social relations. If they don’t provide discrete, static parcels of information, then taking such parcels from the stories would reflect, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “an imaginary degradation of experience.”94 Roe’s poetics constitutes “an environment in the process of being reinvented”: inherently non-reductive, communal and worldly, but always subjective and, consequently, entirely intimate.95 A land known by its stories cannot be prised from the storyteller, nor can the knowledge in the stories be removed from the process in which it came to be (or in which it perishes). So there is a careful political move going on with Roe’s decision to allow Muecke to translate his stories into printed material. Each piece of Aboriginal information has, as Muecke says, a specific context of disclosure “situated within larger processes of responsibility.” As was the case with the nurlu in Chapter 4, non-indigenous readers of Roe’s texts cannot effectively mine the stories for transcendent laws or axioms, because the stories are slender, ambulant, even subterranean at times: they are narratives in which we see some things but miss many others along the way. For Hodge and Mishra, European invasion of Aboriginal society was to reduce a whole continent into but a part of a European one, or what was a com93

Muecke & Roe, “Words from the Other Side,” 27. In Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 44. 95 Borrowing from Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 45. 94

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plex variety of cultural groupings and forms into “components of a single fragment” called ‘Aboriginal Australia’. Survival in this new situation required a capacity to adapt and transform, without allowing such transformations to negate an enduring cultural base.96 Roe’s is an ethic of ‘re-fragmenting’ the fragment. The issue at stake in many of Roe’s stories is not to define an authentic or indisputable Aboriginality but, on the contrary, to complicate and dissolve such spurious unities with characters who are always on the move in an ambiguous space between traditional Aboriginal life and white society. The experience of reading Muecke’s transcription forces us to recognize continuities and differences between Roe and ourselves, but we must also defer for ever a move to unity, “whether the unity of Aboriginality or the unity of Australia which might subsume both Black and White.”97 It is in unity that substances cease to change, stop moving, and solidify. Deferring a move to unity might involve something akin to Guattari’s ethic of experimentation, constantly opening out to the new and unknown to free ourselves from the “fogs and miasmas” which obscure the creative potential of the future.98 It would underscore an ever-evolving understanding of different Aboriginalities, both as oppositional to settler cultures and in relation to them. For Roe’s narrative art is, as we already know, as much about talking to his country’s people as it is about speaking to others. Gularabulu itself is a between-world, a marshy, coastal environment prone to flooding – never entirely land or sea. Like his country, Roe is often liquid in his consistency, moving fluidly across cultural and linguistic divisions, but often drying out and hardening somewhere for a season or two. You can’t be sure. The point is that Roe is something of a ‘conscious pariah’, to use Arendt’s term. He finds a way out of the dichotomy between the inside and its outside by inhabiting the fringes, by speaking the line that divides them. He is not a lone outsider, abstracted from his country and people. Nor, however, is he so isolated from non-indigenous society that he becomes unseen or unheard there, yet he is careful to maintain a certain distance from it, too. Importantly, the conscious pariah needs other people for his audience – be they indigenous or non-indi-

96

Hodge & Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream, 91–92. Dark Side of the Dream, 115. 98 Stephen Zagala, “Aesthetics: a place I’ve never seen,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 20. 97

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genous.99 Gularabulu is an integrated, ecological matrix; Roe would never have told Muecke his stories had not Muecke been so drawn to them. There is certainly a distinction between traditional and modern societies, write Deleuze and Guattari, “but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled.”100 Roe’s stories are negotiations of the hazy line proposed by the separation /overlap of settler and Aboriginal West Kimberley culture. For Paul Carter, this line would suggest not only a binary logic of either /or, but “a counterlogic of meeting, joining, or sealing”: In this understanding of the organization of matter (and of relations generally), differentiation is not oppositional. It is the precondition of discovering likeness. The line within the line marks the distance from which potentially opposed entities run to meet each other. It is the sign of sociality or attraction. [ . . . ] it is the gap necessary if meeting is to occur.101

It is most likely that Roe’s approach to the line-as-meeting-place has its basis in Aboriginal approaches to geography. Talking of the lines Aboriginal people use to cross country (tracks), Rose writes: Unlike European maps on which boundaries are lines that divide, tracks connect points on the landscape, showing relationships between points. These are the ‘boundaries’ that unite. The fact that a Dreaming demarcates differences along this line is important to creating variation, but ultimately a track, by its very existence, demarcates a coming together.102

Thus, the spoken line is the coming together of different linguistic regions, the potential for ‘bridging’, rather than for transcending a void, or erecting a wall around a culture. Reflecting the dynamic, porous nature of the places he traverses, Roe can suspend the dialectic between inside and out, giving value to that realm of the passage, or the interval, or “the may be.”103 These are the potentials (and risks) liberated by a creative, open-ended aesthetic practice: the telling of stories to a whitefella; knowing, therefore, that the words you give him could go anywhere. In turn, the value for a progressive political practice is immanent to the aesthetics: lines drawn between indigenous and non-indigenous lands, knowledges or customs need not scare people off; they are there so that we might encounter them, and consider their implications. 99

See Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 191. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 234. 101 Carter, Dark Writing, 98. (My emphasis.) 102 Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human, 52. 103 Carter, Dark Writing, 98. 100

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A poetics that facilitates this meeting place – a poetics of the interstitial – must resist generic definition, because it is composed entirely of the shifting, varied terrain it is trying to negotiate. Similarly, Geoffrey Bardon’s classifications of the Papunya artworks have only “limited ethnographic authority” because many of the paintings could quite easily be reclassified. Kangaroo Dreaming sequences, for example, could also be grouped with certain Water or Rain Dreaming sequences. The stories attached to a number of paintings were not themselves necessarily stable, either. When asked on different occasions about his Goanna Dreaming work, for example, Shorty Lungkata “provided markedly different accounts.” Importantly, “the classifications were talking points, another encouragement to illustration, explication and innovation.”104 Here, the lines between categories enable – rather than prevent – artistic discussion and evolution. Roe is interested in the same kind of facilitation; like Lienlaf, he places his thought “in an immediate relation with the outside”105 – an ‘outside’ that is personified in Gularabulu by Muecke. The pair developed a kind of writing; once published, the writing threatened to become a kind of literature. Like the nomad himself, however, a nomadic literature can’t stay put as a genre; it must always appear between categories, its language shaking the edifice of “Correct Standard English words and sentences.”106 In Gularabulu country, you are always somewhere between the land and the sea; similarly, in Roe’s Gularabulu the reader can’t be quite sure if she’s reading oral history, short fiction, or poetry (a feature common to many Aboriginal creative forms). And, to top it off, Roe’s laughter throughout the book can easily obscure the gravitas of all this subject-matter. Like those paintings produced at Papunya, Roe’s stories are “masterpieces of ambiguity, equivocation, and disguise.”107

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Carter, Dark Writing, 129. Quoted from Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 415. 106 Muecke & Roe, “Words from the Other Side,” 28. 107 Borrowing from Carter, Dark Writing, 130. 105

7

The Non-Limited Locality — Paulo Huirimilla with Lionel Fogarty

We now have to say: “I is many others.” A nomadic poetics will thus explore ways in which to make – & think about – a poetry that takes into account not only the manifold of languages & locations but also of selves each one of us is constantly becoming. The nomadic poem as ongoing & open-ended chart of the turbulent fluxes the dispersive nature of our realities make inevitable.1

T

is not a bounded, strictly measurable area, but something porous and open to visitors. It consists of territory that might be fought for, but it does not correspond neatly to the lines on a map. Depending on the needs at hand, the nomad may require different kinds of country for sustainable habitation; indeed, at different times and places, nomadism has spread out across almost the entire planet. The absolute space available to the nomad is therefore a borderless region, or what Deleuze and Guattari call a “nonlimited locality.” But to think in terms of the absolute does not require that the nomad gain access to the entire planet (as if he were a conquistador looking at his planet from space); rather, the nomad’s absolute is achieved “in an infinite succession of local operations” at ground level.2 Over the course of hours, years or millennia, his tracks extend gradually like the roots of a rhizome across the earth, each new path changing the composition of his mƝtis and slightly shifting the bounds of what constitutes his locality. In this chapter, I will be arguing that understanding ‘local operations’ in an absolute sense can form the basis of a relationship between Mapuche and Aboriginal poetics. Rather than neglecting their specificities beneath an abstracted notion of a ‘global indigenous poetics’, poets such as Paulo Huirimilla and

1 2

HE HOME OF THE NOMAD

Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 44. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.

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Lionel Fogarty can communicate with one another precisely because of their commitment to the open systems of their locations. First we return to southern Chile in order to explore some of the ways in which this communication has started to take place. It is relatively easy to identify some of Huirimilla’s North American and European influences, but one of his more recent poems, “Ríos de Cisnes” (‘Rivers of Swans’),3 suggests the beginnings of an entirely different literary relationship. A dramatic poem in ten parts, “Ríos de Cisnes” is notable both as the ars poetica of a contemporary Mapuche poet and as an attempt to expand Mapuche consciousness far beyond the South American cone. That the poem centres on the plight of “black swans with red crests” might be of immediate interest to many Australian readers (given our own varieties of black swan); of more importance, however, is the way in which the poem actively seeks out this transPacific connection. From the outset of “Ríos de Cisnes,” the black swans are swans-becomingtext: The river of swans sprays foam On the ocean of the white page, Searching for the red crest and black neck In the signs of the lamilla.

Physical and textual worlds are merged here; indeed, text can be found in the world itself, in the signs of la lamilla, a coffee-coloured seaweed eaten by the swans. As text, then, the swans leave the confines of their physical bodies to travel as the signs on the page. However, the birds are suffering: they “can sell their vegetables no longer” because the waters they use to irrigate their crops have become contaminated with heavy metals. The conflation of human agricultural activity with the swans’ ecology signals an important point about their home-place: it is no longer sustainable; for the poem to continue, therefore, the swans must expand their localities and search for other lands. By the same token, if poetic language is to continue to survive as an expression of the physical world, this world must be vibrant and healthy. For the Mapuche, the notion of ‘biodiversity’ or, in Mapuzugun, Icrofil Mogen (roughly: ‘the complete world’) is not limited purely to conceptions of the natural or non-human order. Instead, like Guattari’s concept of ‘the three ecologies’, Icrofil Mogen also involves social and cultural dimensions, since the human is of the earth in

3

See Appendix B for the complete poem.

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Mapuche thought.4 When culture is deemed part of nature, in other words, the focus is not on ‘Nature’, but on how ‘(the language of) Culture’ is a sign of the health of the biosphere. This point is emphasized later on in the poem, when we come across the ghostly figure of Gabriela Mistral. We see that the Nobel laureate is singing to the remaining birds, so few of which remain, because the rest have “been displaced by law and rifle” as pressures on the ecosystem have increased. That the poet directs her song towards these few remnants of a once-flourishing colony is telling: Mistral is singing in “the language of [... ] the world”; all that she sings of, then, must be in this world; depleted or not, this world provides the poet with the language for her song. If we attempt to retreat to an abstracted realm of signification, the sign of the swan will still appear, “but without meaning.” For meaning must come from the way in which language is an expression of world. Here we return to the conception of language as Mapuzugun, or the language of the earth. However, where an older poet such as Chihuailaf tends to romanticize poetic language as “the song that is necessary in order to live with ourselves and with others,”5 Huirimilla – while not disagreeing with the notion – is arguing that if these “others” are not healthy and flourishing, there can be no language to begin with. In the quest to diversify and grow more resilient, Huirimilla has decided that all language and meaning-making – not just the Mapuche tongue – is of the earth. In doing so, he is not asking that language deny the local but, on the contrary, that we never forget its attachment to the local. Thus, we read in the seventh part of the poem, when he is carrying a swan on his shoulder, that the swan is [. . . ] a Pingangu Colour albino Mutro we say

First, the swan is identified in Mapuzugun (‘Pingangu’), then we read of its golden-albino colour, which in Mapuzugun is ‘mutro’. The phrase “we say” references a connection between the speaker and a community of the Mapuche people. The general movement, then, is one of translation – from Mapuzugun (“Pingangu”) to Spanish (and English) and back to Mapuzugun (“mutro”). Although no place of rest exists in any one language, and the poet

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Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 52. Recado confidencial a los chilenos, 69.

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needs to keep shifting between many, he doesn’t discard the significance of the swans’ home, or its importance to his poetry. To protect his locale, the nomad poet has sought to expand it. Accordingly, in the eighth part of the poem we arrive at a dramatic climax, in which the speaker has arrived in a new land: I turn around in the island’s desert like the black swan with red crest. I fly around looking for the inland sea. I have seen it in these other black swans with red crests.

These “other black swans” are at once the black swans native to parts of Australia and “the Koori swans,” the Indigenous Australians of whom Huirimilla became aware when he visited the “island desert” in 2008. He sings for their “rainbow snakes” and hopes that these snakes will “breathe eternally against oblivion.”6 In this remarkable passage, Huirimilla seemingly stumbles upon a virtual realm replete with connective possibilities, in which dance, music, and art converge to produce a powerful synergy of Australian–Chilean histories: I see one dance and sing the way her grandmother did and the grandmother of her grandmothers and she paints a white fabric with many spots of colour which become the parallel dreams of my kidnapped grandparents who speak through my sweat. [. . . ] May you swim now, Koori swans with all your rainbow snakes. 7

The poem then crosses to the banks of the Thames in London in yet another international leap before we find, in the subsequent and final part, that the swans have formed pairs. In a show of solidarity, the pairs of “the black necks walk on the ocean” between Chile and Australia. Importantly, these swans appear to the speaker “on another island / On a page.” The page is the source of potential for trans-Pacific partnership; its smooth, white space is the event horizon between the virtual realm of the future and the present. For Huirimilla, the page “is more luminous than rebellion,” suggesting that its trans6

There are intriguing similarities between the rainbow serpents of many Aboriginal Dreaming stories and those two Mapuche creation serpents, Kai-Kai and Tren-Tren. Primarily, both Mapuche and Aboriginal serpents gave the land its current form by moving through it. 7 ‘Koori’ is the term used by Aboriginal people from parts of New South Wales and Victoria to refer to themselves.

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lations of potential – from places, animals, and people into moments of poetic language – are some of the most important sources of cultural strength. Yet this bi-national vision of Huirimilla’s does not involve his ascent to an outlook above both territories. Rather, he remains in Southern Chile, where he calls to the swans “from the beach of the petrified cypress [. . . ] through the air choked with fumes and ash.” In this semi-apocalyptic landscape he still finds hope, but in order for this hope to be actualized he would need help from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

“sparkling thoughts struck minds” Some of Huirimilla’s poems appeared relatively recently in the first bilingual Aboriginal and Mapuche anthology of art and poetry.8 In years to come, this anthology might produce further potential for cross-cultural relationships; for now, however, it is in the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty’s work that we see the strongest example in Aboriginal literature of commitment to an international fight for indigenous peoples’ justice.9 For many years, Fogarty has been urging his people to “fight / like the red man has done,”10 drawing particular strength and inspiration from North American developments in indigenous rights and poetics. In the nationalist climate of ‘Australian poetry’, dominated by the English language and by variations of Romantic, lyrical poetry, Fogarty’s poems are often extremely confronting. For Mead, they present “difficult and unresolved questions about the relation between language, nation and identity [. .. ] in the face of powerful interests that want to settle the question of identity and language, literally, once and for all, to act as though it was settled from the beginning.”11 Much of Fogarty’s poetry has an undeniably international flavour, particularly Minyung Woolah Binnung (What Saying Says) (2004), some of which is even influenced by contact with Latin America. The first poem in the book,

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Espejo de tierra (Earth Mirror), ed. Gonzalo Rojas & Peter Minter (Canberra: Chilean Embassy, 2008). 9 ‘Murri’ is the term used by Aboriginal people from Queensland to refer to themselves. 10 From Lionel Fogarty, “For I Come – Death in Custody,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 92. 11 Mead, Networked Language, 403.

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“Balance Earth 20057 Corroborate Love,” a call for a global gathering of lovers, is soon followed by a poem called “Embassy.”12 “Embassy” is about the shocks to thought that can take place during a period of international travel, leading to the development of new intellectual pathways and social networks: Travelling in another lands people sparkling thoughts struck minds

Later in the book, a peculiar moment occurs in “I Sus I,”13 in which Fogarty appears to write the opening words in Spanish, before continuing the poem without any further reference to them. The first two words of the line “Dos messes Intrinsic” are too close to a phonetic transcription of the Spanish ‘dos meses’ (‘two months’) to go unnoticed, but there is no other use of the language anywhere else in the book. Closer still, “Bina Open Hearts Precendents” is for the refugees of the civil war in El Salvador, while “Ningla-a-na” is, as we will soon see, a bold attempt to link Latin American and Australian histories of colonization. Mirroring Huirimilla’s own trans-nationalism, Fogarty’s response to the plight of Chile’s indigenous peoples proposes a relationship between language and identity that is not mediated by ideas of nation, or even of ethnicity. Rather, in the eyes of these two poets, what unites indigenous peoples from Latin America and Australia is shared histories of resistance to territorial dispossession, where ‘territory’ is a central and pervasive agency. Their peoples’ similarities, in other words, have to do with their responsibilities for their localities; parallel histories bring these localities into proximity, interweaving them and producing new fabrics. By virtue of such expansion, for Huirimilla and Fogarty the local is non-limited. Land, in this sense, becomes a proper noun: “we must unite on Land we relate to better than rich.”14 It is fundamental to their poetry that both of these poets speak from their land, rather than from a transcendent plane above it. For this reason, Fogarty writes of “our indigenous brother and sisters over there” in “Ningla-a-na”: they are

12

Lionel Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung (What Saying Says): Poems and Drawings (Southport, Queensland: Keeaira, 2004): 12–14. 13 Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung, 22. 14 From “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’,” in Lionel Fogarty, Yvette Walker & Kargun Fogarty, Yerrabilela Jimbelung: Poems about Friends and Family (Southport, Queensland: Keeaira, 2008): 53.

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“over there” because the poet is ‘here’, fighting for his country, for Land that gives him and his people “all / laws and security to pass on.”15 Then, in a more recent poem, “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’,”16 Fogarty is quite explicit about the brother- and sisterhood he feels with the Mapuche. “I’m glad you are to reclaim land,” he writes, and then: Live on, we are the earth the land Indigenous Chilean you shall shine in our heart’s spirits

Mapuche might baulk at being called “Indigenous Chileans” (“No somos Chilenos,” many will tell you, “somos Mapuche!”), but the more pertinent point is that Fogarty doesn’t seem to be aware of this. He is speaking a local discourse rather than a global one, in which his language is firmly attached to the realities of Murri life. Grounded in his local context, he calls on Native Americans: it’s now we must build an indigenous international communists united force to have liberation here we natives have to collect our culture

The mention of communism here may lead us to make vague associations with Pablo Neruda’s poetics. Where Neruda rose up to assume the voice of Indigenous America, however, Fogarty insists on speaking within a much larger population: Maybe we been see over the Americas so aborigines bring back our guerrilla fighter Che Guevara well armed in action inter out well-known Pan Aboriginalism struggles Argentina “gumboo” we shall “attack” naturally lead by our old spearheading

Clearly, the Americas are always “over there” for Fogarty, as opposed to ‘down there’ or ‘right there’. The first person is absent from much of his work, too; as one of many, he is speaking from an immanent place rather than a transcendent one. Indeed, the final line of “Ningla-a-na’ might serve as a corrective for Neruda’s song for ‘dead mouths’. “We are hungry for our lands,” he writes. That is, “we are hungry for our lands,” where hunger signifies a desire to eat, and eating is done by open, and living, mouths. No less 15 16

Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung, 58–59. Fogarty, Walker & Fogarty, Yerrabilela Jimbelung, 53.

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important, either, is the fact that ‘we’ are speaking, and shedding the imposed silence of settlement. Here we come to see why Bridie McCarthy concluded, in her pioneering thesis on Latin American and Australian poetry, that an engagement with Latin American poetry might show how Australian poetry is already amenable to transnational networks of communication. Shared colonial policies of genocide and dispossession across the Pacific can contribute to a synergetic power in the poetics, which are not weakened necessarily by divergent histories, or by differing forms of colonization.17 This responds to Mead’s call that we imagine ‘Australian literature’ not as a national canon, but as a network of discourses in which we can read a series of relational practices “exceeding and resisting all culturally nationalist definitions and priorities.”18 In an interview with Mead some years ago, Fogarty himself noted that I’d really like to get all my poetry overseas and I’d like to get it to places in Europe, in Asia, in America, and the Pacific. I mean I’d like to get it to communities of indigenous people as well as into bourgeois society. 19

It is thus no doubt the case that Fogarty has long been predisposed to figure his work in a variety of national and international contexts. He wants his poems to create “a collective thought within people so that they can go back and read other Aboriginal literature or whiteman’s literature [which] will help them to meditate, so that they can create an energy, good energy.”20 This good, creative energy is the imagination of a cohesive, postcolonial environment, at once democratic and inclusive in its scope, and stridently expansive in its willingness to relate to other, like-minded environments. Fogarty wants the reading of his poetry to produce, in a very real and literal sense, a Deleuzian ‘deterritorialization’ of previously foreign territories. Read together, then, such poems as “Ríos de Cisnes” and “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’ ” constitute a kind of becoming. They perform, to paraphrase Massumi, “an operation on [.. . ] group-policed categories of thought and action.” Such a reading experience “opens a space in the grid of identities those categories delineate, 17

Bridie McCarthy, “At the Limits: Postcolonial and Hyperreal Translations of Australian Poetry” (doctoral dissertation, Deakin University, 2006): 208, 210. 18 Mead, Networked Language, 401. 19 Lionel Fogarty & Philip Mead, “Lionel Fogarty in Conversation with Philip Mead,” Jacket (1997), http://jacketmagazine.com/01/fogartyiv.html (accessed 16 November 2009). 20 Fogarty & Mead, “Lionel Fogarty in Conversation with Philip Mead.”

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inventing new trajectories, [. . . ] unheard-of futures and possible bodies such as have never been seen before.”21

A Tradition of Discursive Resistance While it would be futile to attempt to compare the two and make generalizations about their work as a whole, poems like “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’ ” and “Ríos de Cisnes” suggest that certain trajectories in the work of Huirimilla and Fogarty should, eventually, lead them to intersect. To this end, I will highlight some of the primary forces behind Huirimilla’s work before exploring how similar forces are also immanent in Fogarty’s. Huirimilla’s Palimpsesto (‘Palimpsest’) (2005), was declared by Hugo Carrasco to be one of the most significant books in recent years by a Mapuche writer.22 Here we find an abundance of references to the ül and to ülkantufe (singers), as well as to relationships between oral and written poetics. In this interweaving of divergent traditions we will find something of what predisposes Huirimilla to a trans-Pacific postcolonial poetics. For, despite his post-symbolist, cosmopolitan irony, Huirimilla is bent on maintaining connections between contemporary poetry and Mapuche song-poetry traditions. Like Lienlaf, with whom he shares a strong friendship, he recorded an album of ül, entitled Püramtunül: el canto que aparece entre nosotros (‘Threading-ustogether-ül: the song that appears between us’) (2003). Indeed, Palimpsesto begins with a series of short songs very much reminiscent of Lienlaf’s Pewma dungu. Unlike Lienlaf, however, Huirimilla’s work isn’t based solely on the traditional notion of poem-as-ül (although the ül is still central to his poetics). In a technologically complex urban environment, the sacred spaces of ritual and song are problematized in his work by a recognition that Mapuche culture can never return to what it once was.23 As his book’s title suggests, he has deliberately expanded his poetic region to incorporate a palimpsest of discourses; Palimpsesto is the result of Huirimilla’s search for extra resources to reinforce Mapuche poetics. He deliberately uses many elements of Western 21

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 101. García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 79. 23 Claudia Rodríguez, “Weupüfes y Machis: canon, género y escritura en la poesía mapuche actual,” Estudios Filológicos (Valdivia) 40 (September 2005): 151–63, http ://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0071-17132005000100011&lng =es&nrm=iso (accessed 16 March 2009). 22

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poetics in order to slide the Western canon and, with it, Western aesthetics beneath a Mapuche world-view, so that they end up actually contributing to it. Born on the island of Calbuco (south of Puerto Montt) in 1974, Huirimilla identifies as Huilliche-Mapuche.24 His paternal grandparents came from the nearby islands of Chaulinec and Puluqui, and his maternal grandparents from Quigua Island, which are all located in the Archipelago of the Chonos (south of the large island of Chiloé). In the mid-1990s he moved to the southern town of Osorno (in between Valdivia and Puerto Montt), where he undertook studies in Spanish and Latin American literature. Since 2006 he has been living in Puerto Montt with his wife and son, where he works as a high-school teacher and as a teacher of Mapuzugun. Like many Mapuche poets, an important function of his work is the maintenance and restoration of Mapuche cultures.25 Unlike many other poets, however, his commitment is to a reconciliation of the traditions of his origins with the demands of contemporary urban society. Huirimilla’s identification as Huilliche is particularly significant because it provides an historical context for the multiple layers of discourse in Palimpsesto. Where the Huilliche distinguished themselves most particularly from other Mapuche was in their response to the Spanish-Chilean invasions of their lands. While those to the north took up arms, an alliance of Huilliche chiefs sought a more diplomatic path. The chiefs formed a ‘parliament’ with Spanish administrators, which resulted in a celebrated peace treaty in 1793.26 From then on, Huilliche leaders began to elaborate a distinct range of discursive strategies of resistance. Letters, requests, and reports were presented to the parliament not only to tabulate demands for justice and autonomy, but also to re-emphasize their authors’ positions as figures of authority within the Huilliche community. The Huilliche-Spanish parliament provides an historical context for the political importance of speech for Mapuche people, particularly for the Huilliche: the caciques (‘chiefs’) were able to lead and, ideally, 24

The term ‘Huilliche’ does not refer to an ethnic domination but, rather, to a geographical one. Their territory, known as Huichan Mapu (‘great land of the south’), is understood principally as the 10th region of Chile, which ranges from Valdivia to Chiloé. Within this region lies a further distribution of smaller groups. 25 García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 30 26 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 532. The alliance culminated in La Junta de Caciques del Butahuillimapu in the early 1980s. In 1989, Huilliche organizations joined with other Mapuche groups in order to form a single representative body, El Consejo Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas.

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protect their people precisely because of the eloquence of their language (hablar bien). Yet diplomacy was, to be sure, no less a mechanism of resistance than guerrilla warfare: the chiefs’ decision to engage ostensibly in ‘negotiations’ on behalf of their people initiated a stable, hierarchical structure of authority necessary, like all Mapuche structures of leadership, in a time of crisis.27 Understandably, the process was not without its problems. Discursive resistance created enormous tensions for writers and orators; primarily, the act of translation – from their language to that of the invaders – forced the Huilliche to forgo their own modes and methods of communication in order to negotiate on the invaders’ linguistic and cultural terms. We find this frustrated sense of identity – born of a need to speak of one’s identity in a mode inherently resistant to it – in much Mapuche poetry, but Huirimilla, in particular, wants to exploit it by re-invoking the parliamentary context in which it was born. Palimpsesto is actually the accumulation of many years of writing and publishing, the combination of two previously published books (El ojo de vidrio and Árbol de agua) as well as other poems. The book is divided into five major parts, but it is not until later sections that we get a sense of just how original Huirimilla’s approach to cultural reconciliation is. As I said earlier, the first part of the book is a collection of ül; it begins with the following epigraph, entitled “Cántico” (‘Chant’):28 Una medusa flota en el agua: mi padre escribe mi nombre en la arena con una cruz quemada de quila A jellyfish floats in the water: my father writes my name in the sand with a burnt cross of quila.

The ‘quila’ is a species of South American bamboo; for the Mapuche, it is one of four trees used by the Machi in ceremonies. Immediately, then, we find that the poet is invoking the supernatural powers of his ancestors: we watch them flow through his father and into the written form of his name. Another brief, epigraphic statement on the following page reinforces this ancestral relationship, which we see extends to human and non-human forms: 27

Pilar Álvarez–Santullano & Eduardo Barraza, “Escrituras de ‘encanto’ y parlamento en la poesía huilliche,” Alpha 29 (2009): 18–19. 28 Juan Paulo Huirimilla, Palimpsesto (Santiago de Chile: L O M 2005): 5.

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En la machicura mi espíritu fue la pisada De un avestruz en el cielo.29 On the machicura my spirit was the step Of an ostrich in the sky.

With the machi’s ceremony placed firmly at the beginning of the poetic arc, a song-cycle is ready to begin. The first song is of Kai Kai and Tren Tren, those two Mapuche creation serpents: trenzan sus bocas Haciendo aires en esteros que se agrandan. KAI KAI TREN TREN

espejean sus espíritus Hasta hacer crecer el amor. KAI KAI TREN TREN

marina Tren Tren tierra: Islas que se acercan Cuando llueve en sus ojos.30 KAI KAI

braid their mouths Making winds in the growing swamps. KAI KAI TREN TREN

shine their spirits Until they make love grow. KAI KAI TREN TREN

marine Tren Tren earth: Islands that approach one another When it rains in their eyes. KAI KAI

Here, the prominent performative elements – the short, disjointed lines, the ambiguous meanings, the limited punctuation and capitalization – all place these opening poems within the broader context of Mapuche song-poetry. “Ul: Canto” [‘Ul: Chant’] further consolidates the speaker’s connection with his ancestors and with the surrounding world:31 Tus ojos son de luna Mareas que se acortan Semillas que vibran En el trompe.

29

Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 6. A machicura is a powerful stone used by the machi. Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 7. 31 Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 10. Huirimilla’s spelling of ‘Ül’ excludes the umlaut. 30

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De tus ojos que se ven En mis ojos Suben espíritus Humo de agua arriba Del cielo: padre madre Azul. Your eyes are of moon They shrivel up and sicken you Seeds that vibrate In the trompe.32 From your eyes which see themselves In my eyes Arise spirits Smoke from water above From the sky: father mother Azul.

Replete with rhymes and half rhymes (in the Spanish) and short, fragmented phrases, “Ul: Canto” demands that attention be paid to one’s breathing by deliberately terminating the momentum that would threaten to build with a regular rhyme scheme. What is fascinating, too, is the rhizomatic way in which the poem, inside this quite well-defined structure, proceeds via a series of images, moving from realm to realm – material, musical, celestial, ancestral – and from the sky to the ground and back again, transferring from one realm to the other with the transfer of breath. As in Aboriginal poetics, the sacred is entirely immanent in the Mapuche landscape; by transforming the individual speaker into a channel between ancestral and contemporary worlds, the discourse of ritual in these poems opens Palimpsesto to the possibilities of the ever-present sacred (El Azul).33 Consequently, the book’s opening poems create what is a typically dynamic situation in Huirimilla’s work, much of which layers written grammars over references to the malleable, improvised

32

A traditional instrument of the Mapuche people, the trompe is a variety of mouth harp. 33 Mabel García Barrera, “Entre-textos: la dimensión dialógica e intercultural del discurso poético Mapuche,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 72 (April 2008): 29–70, www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22952008000100002&lng =es&nrm=iso (accessed 3 October 2008).

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structures of song-poetry, dialogue, or even pop music. ‘Fixed texts’ are partly dissolved in a moving, spontaneous musicality. As stereotypes about Mapuche culture have developed, so, too, have cultural and critical expectations. Specifically, these include a range of themes deemed appropriate for an indigenous literature by winka criticism, such as the re-use of ‘authentic’ genres and poetic structures that come from rituals and oral traditions.34 Of those Mapuche poets who grapple with ‘the authentic’, Elicura Chihuailaf has attracted by far the most critical and popular attention (and material reward). Chihuailaf talks of his poetry as a journey to El Azul, in which with each poem he gets closer to his original, traditional roots. The only poet to approach his popular stature is Lienlaf, who, as we have seen, talks of his poetry as ‘oral text’, insisting on its proximity to traditional song-poetry and performance. Other poets, such as Jaime Huenún and Bernardo Colipán, see their poetry as a discourse of ‘buried voices’. In each case, poetry is the ancestral voice of Mapuche society translated for the contemporary, winka-dominated world.35 Huirimilla, however, is a thoroughly different beast because, unlike so many other Mapuche poets, his poems function by virtue of a fragmented and often confused identity that doesn’t sit easily with notions of ‘authentic Mapuche culture’. For him, ‘Mapuche identity’ cannot be found in one place or another, because it has been forever disrupted and displaced – but this disruption is inherently productive: I don’t think I write pure poetry [poesía pura]. My poetry is born of identity, memory and a mixture of cultures. I think the poetic text is a generative element of identity, and it’s not only oral discourse that does this. Each Mapuche discourse is at once polyphonic, and attempts to represent certain zones of reality; in my case, certain zones of Mapuche-Huilliche reality in this time and place. This is what can make our poetry interesting: the construction of texts with symbolism that is not strictly traditional. [ . . . ] The use of symbols that at first we might consider foreign has allowed me, and has allowed my readers, to understand better the notion of territorial identity.36

34

Claudia Rodríguez, “Enunciaciones heterogéneas en la poesía indígena actual de Chile y Perú,” Estudios Filológicos (Valdivia) 44 (September 2009): 183. 35 García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 77–78. 36 In Carlos Trujillo, “Poesía para todos: Paulo Huirimilla” (2006), http://www .chiloeweb.com/Datos/Noticias/Noticias.asp?No_Id=200636001 (accessed 21 April 2010).

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For Huirimilla, then, poetic intertextuality is not only a consequence of a cultural mestizaje (mixture) but “generative” of hybrid identities within this mestizaje. Multiple forms of expression abound in this contemporary, postcolonial landscape; in Huirimilla’s work they mingle and mix with those everpresent ancestral forces in order to produce a radically different Mapuche poetics.

What Saying Says Born in 1958 at Barambah Mission in south-eastern Queensland (now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve),37 Fogarty is of the Yoogum and Kudjela tribes. Prior to their relocation to Cherbourg, Fogarty’s people came from the Beaudesert area (Yoogum) and Charters Towers (Kudjela).38 Although he didn’t grow up in his own, connection to one’s country is fundamental to Fogarty’s work; indeed, many of his poems demonstrate a belief in land rights as the basis for an Aboriginal future without oppression. Important to this chapter, however, is how he places the land-rights struggle in an international context. Since his activist role in the liberation movements of the 1970s (highlighted, perhaps, by his address to the American Indian Movement of the Second International Indian Treaty Council in the U S A in 1976), Fogarty has always seen the struggle for land rights in relation to the struggles of indigenous peoples globally.39 To begin this next part of the discussion, it is useful to consider how Fogarty’s problematical relationship to the colonizing tongue reflects his predisposition to an internationalist stance. Fogarty received very little formal education, and learned almost nothing about Western poetry as a child. His earliest relationship to poetry involved going down to the township of Mergon and in the park areas there or in the outskirts of Mergon, or even in Cherbourg, just sitting down with young folks as well as old folks and just listening to their gossip, rumours, yarns, storytelling. . . 40 37

Throughout the twentieth century, Aboriginal people from many disparate tribal groups were forcibly removed to Cherbourg, which became the largest settlement of its kind in Queensland. 38 Mead, Networked Language, 423. 39 Networked Language, 425. 40 Fogarty & Mead, “Lionel Fogarty in Conversation with Philip Mead.”

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In its focus on orality and storytelling by “old folks,” Fogarty’s introduction to poetry seems to have been in the oral Aboriginal tradition of which Paddy Roe was a part. Indeed, despite the fact that Western literature provided him with the technology or the “medium” to write, Fogarty maintains that his greatest influences have come from oral Aboriginal sources: In some of my writings, when I read them myself I get a thing that ancestors give me this, and at the same time I get a thing that some whites have given me this. [ . . . ] I believe I read some stuff after I started learning to read, some white man’s writings, I’m not saying they influenced me, influence is the wrong word for me to use, but I believe I got a medium of some sort from some of the white writers. [ . . . ] I think that the most influence on my life, in literary terms, was from people who are the down and outs, the ones who didn’t really care about employment, that were in the parks. These were the people, street talks, these kind of things, lane walks, that’s what influenced my life in terms of writing. [ . . . ] An old man by the name of Bob Landis was the greatest poet in Cherbourg, poetry used to just flow out of his mouth, out of his heart and out of his mind, was a great influence to me.41

Fogarty’s Aboriginality is expressed as an accumulation of hybrid virtualities, the actualization of indigenous tradition in “white man’s” form. What is also significant in the above passage is his mention of “the down and outs.” Fogarty’s poetic education came primarily from societal margins: members of the periphery without jobs, or without published bodies of work, or, if their work was published, writers like Oodgeroo and Kevin Gilbert, who were not yet considered part of an Australian literary canon. Fogarty was profoundly influenced by those on the margins of the Australian imagination. According to Mead, Fogarty’s poetry “exemplifies the poetics of resistance, in its forms, in its multiple rhetorical gestures, in its grammar and vocabulary, in every capillary of its language.”42 It might seem, as Adam Aitken has noted, that Fogarty “is trying to have it both ways,” in that, by using such an open, many-sided language, he wishes both to represent and to protect Aboriginality, while doing so in a way that non-indigenous people can understand. Yet, this is precisely the point: Fogarty is “occupying a position of strength and manoeuvrability, patrolling that vague margin between black and white – and forcefully occupying and controlling the discourse of diffe41 42

Fogarty & Mead, “Lionel Fogarty in Conversation with Philip Mead.” Mead, Networked Language, 422.

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rence.”43 These are the tactics of the nomad, or of the guerrilla poet. If his poetry is to communicate to people other than his own, it is to do so only insofar as it will allow his people to reclaim the political and geographical space they had occupied and should still occupy.44 Indeed, Fogarty has likened himself to heroic Aboriginal guerrillas of the frontier, including Jantamarra, Mulbaggarra, Dundalee, and Pemulwuy. He wants to use the language of the colonizers against the colonizers, denying the regulations and rules they have imposed. English must be ungrammatical because it is already bastardized, uprooted, and “because it doesn’t have any meanings in [. .. ] spirit.”45 Fogarty’s a-grammaticality – the structure on which his language is formed – is a rebellious, spiritual force providing the impetus for all expression. Mead sees this conjoining of grammar and spirit as “the great ambition of his work, to reconfigure English, one of the primary weapons of settlement used against Aboriginal people, into a language of Aboriginal culture and spirituality.”46 We have seen in “Ríos de Cisnes” how Huirimilla wilfully ignores divisions between the human and non-human: in keeping with the adaptive nature of the world he envisions, humans can become swans and swans humans, and each of these animals can become signs on a page. Likewise, in poems of Fogarty’s such as “Ecology,” the ‘I’ becomes all manner of things, from the frill-necked lizard and the king brown taipan, to digging sticks, seeds, and a woomera. The process taking place in these poems is a kind of signal for avant-garde evolutionary theory, in which Homo sapiens is “reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plant and animals, blurring the boundaries between species”:47

43

Adam Aitken, “The Poetry of Lionel Fogarty and Lois–Ann Yamanaka,” in Soundings: Poetry and Poetics, ed. Lyn Jacobs & Jeri Kroll (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1997): 89. 44 John Kinsella, “The Hybridising of a Poetry: notes on modernism & hybridity – the colonising prospect of modernism and hybridity as a means to closure,” boundary 2 26.1 (Spring 1999): 157. 45 Fogarty in Mead, Networked Language, 427. 46 Fogarty in Mead, Networked Language, 427–28. 47 Freeman Dyson, “Our Biotech Future,” New York Review of Books 54.12 (19 July 2007): 4–8, www.nybooks.com/articles/20370 (accessed 25 February 2008).

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I. Am we pelicans of woodland brolga traditional yamming yes roots, nuts differ to geese, hawks, quails that number plentiful. Still I am dugong, kangaroo, cockatoo and grasshopper too. Yes I am termite, better still butterflies are my beetles, wasps friends. 48

As in “Ríos de Cisnes,” the strengths of these multi-modal transfers are determined by the health of the country that produces them (if the woodland disappears, so will the pelicans and the brolga). Yet the strikingly inclusive grammar of the poem is not blind to the political imperative of its becomings. “I. / Am we” is not you; in other words, the poem differentiates between the creatures of the ecosystem and those ‘other’ beings who would seek to destroy this system: You are natures crocodile even pythons are not inadequate, nor geckos. We are goannas after salt water got grounded. I am death harmless. You are tropic cycles swamps got bad affinity says who. [. . . ] I am club, woomera, an agile well-balanced bandicoot flying fox and an A B O R I G I N A L our systems woven from an eco-system so don’t send us to pollution. . .

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Lionel Fogarty, “Ecology,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 91.

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By becoming each of these animals, Fogarty is alerting the ‘you’ to a community of sentient, meaningful creatures, what we might consider ‘ecology’; he is populating the poem-space with a variety of characters whose lives are invested in the health of country. Again, just as in “Ríos de Cisnes,” the production of difference is a response to a challenge for survival, but the diverse becomings can only continue so long as the system’s health is maintained. These becomings will form part of a larger system, too, in which various languages are spliced together in an effort to speak across localities. In both Fogarty’s and Huirimilla’s poetical scaffolds, the willingness to consider the possibilities of becoming-something-else, coupled with a desire to experiment freely with the colonizing tongue, is what allows for innumerable indigenous communities to form part of a global imaginary. Understanding that Fogarty is speaking from within a broader ecology is central to an understanding of his poetics. His ‘I’ is highly flexible; it can be of his local community, of his ecosystem, or even of Aboriginal people across the whole continent: we are a clan we are clean are we to inflame our truth: My people over Australia. 49

Here we see taking place what the poet and critic John Kinsella calls “a communalizing of the lyrical I.”50 Yerrabilela Jimbelung (2008) is perhaps the best example of what Kinsella is talking about. The book’s subtitle, Poems about Friends and Family, is the first clue to a piece of literature that deliberately evades the traditional association of the poetry book with a single author or origin. Here, three poets have contributed, as listed on the cover: by Lionel Fogarty with Yvette Walker and Kargun Fogarty

Walker and Kargun, Lionel’s son, are emerging poets. The book is still clearly anchored by the presence of Lionel, who writes the first, and the longest, introduction, and whose poems close the volume. Nevertheless, the lack of

49

From Lionel Fogarty, “Dulpai – Ila Ngari Kim Mo-Man,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 96. 50 Kinsella, “The Hybridising of a Poetry,” 156.

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authorial demarcation on the contents page is striking, and we find that Fogarty’s poems actually occupy about a third of the book – no more than either segment of the new poets’. So it is an extremely generous and democratic gesture, to allow two other voices to share the privileged position of Fogarty’s own, but there is also a very important, and no less striking, tactical manoeuvre going on here, too. “We wish to withdraw all poems from the buildings and put them in open spaces,” writes Fogarty in his introduction, a significant statement that suggests two things.51 First, it would seem that Fogarty wants to return poems to the contexts in which they were generated – namely, in country, where, like the nurlu, communities gather and bring them into being. Secondly, it also seems that he wants to initiate a kind of ‘ransacking’ of those institutions and places of power that have to date insisted on particular readings of poems, or of particular, canonical selections of poems. This is the stuff of a nomad poetics. Featuring a group of poets, the book could constitute a rhizome, “as opposed to the arborescent type that centres around organs of power” (such as an editor, or a single author).52 “We belong to different styles,” writes Kargun, “yet like the corroboree – one story – many voices – same song.”53 The mention here of a corroboree signals that other other key facet of Fogarty’s poetry – the continued translation of a line we began tracing with the nurlu in Broome. The inheritance of Aboriginal oral, collaborative, and performative traditions has a “spectral presence” in what Mead calls Fogarty’s “guerrilla surrealism.”54 “The reason why I’m a poet is so I can perform,” he says, “Whatever I write, I have to perform it, and so that others can also perform my writings!”55 His rhythms are accordingly densely performative and often anaphoric, ignited by internal and enjambed rhymes that don’t produce smooth, prolonged intonations, but explode in a flurry of Aboriginal English and Australian idiom: Heart of European capsule my luxuriant love’s poems Heart of Australia capsule all animus native’s binding vessel universal 51

Fogarty, Walker & Fogarty, Yerrabilela Jimbelung, 6. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 395. 53 Fogarty, Walker & Fogarty, Yerrabilela Jimbelung, 8. 54 Mead, Networked Language, 428. 55 Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung, 4. 52

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Heart of earth clank beat landscaped bloods slashed by depopulated Heart perfect dream time rhyme Moral lead self ambition and loyalty runs breasts of many disguises Hearts never beaten interest inextricably rest tensions by reached high-minded.56

In poems like “Heart of a european.. . ” it is the sonic similarities of words – their capacities for rhyme and half-rhyme – that drive the poem as much as any desire to accurately elucidate the semantic content. This is largely because the poetry is the result of a difficult process of translation, from a moving, sound-based tradition to one based primarily on the recognition of printed signs. What makes Fogarty’s poetry so distinctive, however, is the fact that he has refused to surrender his cultural context to the standards prevailing in Western poetics: [Fogarty] writes in a manner which is the response of an Aboriginal songman against the genocide inflicted on his language and the tyranny imposed on him by a foreign language.57

As a poet wielding the language of the invader, then, Fogarty has succeeded in denying many of its countless impositions and in injecting into the language those elements that might befit the freely moving, ambiguous, and many-sided song languages of his ancestors. As with the nomad poetics of Dyunggayan, Lienlaf, and Roe, for Fogarty the act of translation is of crucial importance. For each of these poets, the environment or the context of language is immanent to language; the linguistic act, therefore, is a translation of an environment’s pre-linguistic expression. In Dyunggayan and Lienlaf this is perhaps most obvious, in that their poems often arrive first in dreams from country or El Azul before the poets translate them into Nyigina or Mapuzugun. Along with Roe and Fogarty, Lienlaf also negotiates complicated translations into colonial languages. From Lienlaf’s “Rebelión” (Chapter 5), we may recall the following: My hands didn’t want to write the words of an old professor. 56 57

From “Heart of a european. . . ,” in Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung, 17. Mudrooroo, in Mead, Networked Language, 426.

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My hand refused to write what didn’t belong to me.

In a poem with eerily similar sentiment, “Tired of Writing,”58 Fogarty says: to write I have to use a medium that is not mine. If I don’t succeed, bear with me.

Clearly, in both cases the poet is enormously uncomfortable with writing in the colonizers’ language, but he is compelled nevertheless to use it. Mead describes Fogarty’s dilemma brilliantly: With a profound sense of the loss of an original and radically other linguistic world of his ancestral languages, whose remnants might nevertheless be revived and even maintained, Fogarty is also tragically aware that English, and the Aboriginal ethnolects of English at Cherbourg, are also his ‘first’ language, even as his experience of the institutions of that language have been of institutions whose purpose is to wipe out his and other ancient languages and culture.59

Yet something else is taking place in these two poems, which suggests that perhaps what was ‘erased’ by the colonial tongue might still subsist in a virtual form beneath its structures. Simply, the poet’s desire to say something overrides his distaste for the language in which he might say it, meaning that the force of his expression overwhelms, and surpasses, the moment of speech. Expression isn’t inherent to a particular language; for Fogarty as for the other indigenous poets we’ve looked at, expression weaves snake-like between and within languages, a thrashing tongue of charge streaming out of country and always on the way back. If expression compels these poets to write in languages that would appear to erase their subjectivities, then expression must be more-than-subjective; therefore, a communal, more-than-human agency is driving the actualization of these poems. With Fogarty and, as we will see, with Huirimilla, we need to be mindful of the ‘atypical expression’, or that performative dimension of expression which could manifest itself in any number of ways. An atypical expression of Fogarty’s such as “Heart of earth clank beat landscaped” addresses, in Mas-

58 59

Lionel Fogarty, New and Selected Poems (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995): 109. Mead, Networked Language, 424–25.

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sumi’s words, “the hinge between non-verbal and verbal expression.” It experiments not only with the limits of the expression as container of a semantic message but also with the very nature of this content–expression relationship: “how bodies and words couple and struggle; whether or in what circumstances they might pass into each other.”60 Specifically, Fogarty’s work often explores how a noun can become dynamic enough to acquire the status of a verb (“landscaped”), or how a description of elements ‘out there’ in the world can interact with the materiality and musicality of language as a primal mode of bodily expression and performance (“clank”; “beat”). Such a-grammaticality stretches language beyond its equilibrium, and pulls it closer to the possibilities of what it might become, forcibly twisting it “into glints of forms, hints of contents, as-yet functionless functions which, however ‘unmotivated’ or ‘arbitrary’, could be.”61 Herein lies the ongoing importance of Fogarty’s agrammaticality: by producing such atypical expressions, he causes language to tend toward what Deleuze and Guattari call “a near side or beyond of language.”62 The result is a poetics that is never at rest, because the actuality of language – its ‘thisness’ – is entirely wrapped up with the possibilities of what may come, and of what it might become. On the other hand, if Fogarty’s poems were nothing more than lyrical descriptions by/of a single, discrete self, they would leave themselves too vulnerable to confinement, less open to communal re-interpretation and performative elaboration. By superseding both the moment of enunciation and the subject who enunciates them, however, his poems are necessarily more-thanindividual creations. His page thus becomes “a field of myth-thought, of song-dream continuity, a place that refuses closure.”63 In order to keep refusing closure, the poems need to keep moving. Whereas in Yerrabilela Jimbelung the inclusion of other poets’ work produces a sense of community, through which the idea of the poem or the poetics passes in order to produce startling differentiations, in Minyung Woolah Binnung (What Saying Says) the realm of the ‘poetic’ involves a bricolage of text and visual artwork (see Figure 4 below). Unlike the relationships between family and friends in Yerrabilela Jimbelung, then, of primary importance to Minyung Woolah Binnung

60

Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” xxiii. “Introduction: like a thought,” xxxii–xxiii. 62 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 99 63 Kinsella, “The Hybridising of a Poetry,” 158. 61

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are the relationships between word and image, recalling the pictographic writing of Paddy Roe: Fogarty poses a fundamentally organic relationship between self, culture, politics and art practice. This is echoed throughout the book by stimulating drawings that synthesise a type of post-representational avant-gardism with distinctive symbolic content. [. . . ] Anthropomorphic figures multiply across pages into any number of organic utterances, their lines, circles and patterns worked and reworked as territories of sensual connection.64

This process of organic multiplication and reproduction between visual and textual artwork is analogous to the process of relation at work in the poems themselves. Consider the final segment of “Heart of a european.. . ” (which opens with an unlimited series of ‘and, and... ’): Australia land of the and and? free and figures federally natives buy versed new things Until flower wait for bees diverse Until flounder waits for good dirt So heart of girls from Europeans Those masculine reminiscences debts all heart landed even sky hearts here Australia skate smoothed

In this extract, as in many of Fogarty’s poems, an act of smearing is taking place: the integrity of signifying words is deliberately questioned. There are portions of grammatically correct English here, but no sooner do they appear than they have dissolved into a kind of word-music. Consequently, those intelligible phrases have the effect of punctuating the swirl of rhythm and assonance with moments of clarity, which the reader ‘clings’ to, as if stopping at the occasional waterhole to rest before moving on through the scrub. These phrases /waterholes jostle and commingle into a smaller, poetic bricolage, similar to the more macroscopic bricolage of poem and artwork in the book at large. Movement, rather than transparent, intelligible language, produces the poetry; there is nowhere for the eye to rest:

64

Peter Minter, “A Radical Tonic,” review of Minyung Woolah Binnung: What Saying Says by Lionel Fogarty, and Smoke Encrypted Whispers by Samuel Wagan Watson, Australian Book Review 268 (February 2005): 53.

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Australia land of the. . . free. . . natives buy. . . . . . flower wait for bees. . . . . . girls from Europeans. . . Those masculine reminiscences. . .

This is “What Saying Says”: (my/your) presence, ecology, reproduction, song.

F I G U R E 4: “territories of sensual connection” in Minyung Woolah Binnung (25)

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“We came to negotiate with you in Spanish and creole...” In the third section of Huirimilla’s Palimpsesto, entitled “Árbol de agua” (‘Water Tree’), the world begins to suffer a great transformation, in which indigenous spaces of ritual and rural habitation are displaced by references to semi-urban development and allusions to Christian culture. In the fourth section, “Rahue,” the urban world expands yet further and becomes the setting for much of Mapuche life. However, Rahue’s urban world isn’t analogous to the cities of Santiago or Temuco; it is further south, in Huilliche territory. Here exist a myriad of intercultural and inter-linguistic relationships, all clustered around a harbour or port – presumably that of Puerto Montt.65 In “Rahuina,” categories merge into one another: the supernatural joins with the natural, as does the present and the past, and the traditional with the modern: Hacia los bares de la waria Vuelven marinos con sombrero al ojo / manta y jeans con banjos en la boca /y en la espalda un ojo solo así hablamos castilla: vine aquí a parlamentar con la realidad por eso espero que usted diga su romance: – Disque Wentriao subió la neblina al avión ahí anda él en el ver de los maestros casas de la otra gente se llenaron de agua Subimos a los botes /y al cerro desde entonces. . . vuelvo a las cantinas del naufragio– To the bars of the city The sailors return with sombreros over the eye /blanket and jeans with banjos in the mouth /and an eye on the back we only speak Castile this way: I came here to negotiate with reality so I hope that you might explain your romance, Sir:

65

García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 82–83.

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– They reckon Wentriao climbed the cloud to the aeroplane66 there he walks in view of the masters houses of the other people they filled with water We boarded the boats /and climbed the mountain since then. . . I came back to the bars of the shipwreck–67

“Rahuina” is a mixture of Chilean creole, Mapuzugun, and literary Spanish, with various references to non-indigenous cultural icons. The sombreros, for example, are but one of many references to John Wayne, westerns, and the colonization of the ‘Wild West’. The poem confronts the mestizo condition of the poet himself while also attempting to rescue the remains of ancestral memory from the streets of Puerto Montt. That the poet comes “to negotiate with reality” recalls the nomad’s flexibility: those who refuse transcendence, who remain on the ground, must work with the materials they have at hand; like Roe, Huirimilla must negotiate with what reality presents him. Huirimilla’s is a diverse and complicated world, different from the rural, traditional landscape of Lienlaf but still replete with strong community and ancestral links. As already indicated, his poems are regions of mestizaje, in which Huilliches join with other ethnicities, creating new necessities and possibilities. In Deleuzian terms, poems like “Rahuina” show us that Palimpsesto as a whole is: an attempt to find release from the suffocating sense of given possibility, ready-made ideas [. . . ] a fight against immobility and catatonia [. . . ] to extract possibility from probability, multiplicity from unity, singularity from generality. 68

Here, mestizos arrive from the ocean to laugh and cry with help from the alcohol in the bars, to sample the prostitutes, and to escape reality by listening to copious amounts of Mexican ranchera music. These songs, scorned by many Chileans as crass and clichéd but very popular in rural indigenous villages, provoke in Huirimilla’s characters strong feelings of anguish and abandonment. Ranchera, for Huirimilla, is a kind of mediating presence that al66

Also known as Wenteyao, Wentriao is an ancestral spirit who lives on the coast near Osorno. 67 Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 63. ‘Rahuina’ is the name of a bar in Puerto Montt. 68 Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 127.

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lows him to draw together the multiplicities he has extracted from rural and city life.69 Thus, “Rahue” constitutes something of the book’s central nucleus, forming the porous region between the world of traditional Mapuche culture and the world of modernity, producing mobile, exciting becomings in the process. In even broader terms, “Rahue” is a reflexive mediation between the human and the vast possibilities of an expanding universe.70 In Wright and Neruda’s poetry, we saw how the world often becomes rigid beneath the gaze of the modernist optic, “to the extent that all centres resonate in, and all black holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes.” Various segments and localities still exist, but they are organized by a transcendent framework, which inhibits their becomings to various degrees.71 In Huirimilla’s work, conversely, each of these “supple microheads” – each voice, character, and image – retains its distinctive resonance, creating a steadily vibrating, and often disconcerting, reading experience. The effect of so many instances of disjuncture means that “the poem composes, recomposes, decomposes before your eyes, de- & re-territorialising at will or chance.”72 Thus, Huirimilla’s work often fragments into multiple discourses, which speak of a tense and unresolved multiculturalism. In such poems as “Carnicería ‘La Realidad’ ” (‘‘Reality” Butcher’),73 the combined effect of these resonances is to generate a consuming and, indeed, inescapable environment, through which there are no clear pathways or raised vantage points: Si entras a “La Realidad” encontrarás a Susi y “Sofía” /del Pino Huacho con olor a sífilis acompasada una loca pintando marcos para espejos un poco de lenguaje para envolver la carne /y no podrás salir.

69

Trujillo, “Poesía para todos: Paulo Huirimilla.” García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 84. 71 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 233. 72 To apply Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 31. 73 Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 64. 70

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If you go into ‘Reality Butchers’ you’ll find Susi and ‘Sofía’ /of the Pino Huacho74 with a thick smell of syphilis an idiot painting frames for mirrors a little language to wrap up the meat /and you won’t be able to leave.

According to the Mapuche poet and critic Jaime Huenún, Huirimilla’s poems are sound tracks composed of the rhythms of speech, popular music, and ceremony; their bastardization and hybridity are the poems’ most visible characteristics.75 This is central to the performative, nomadic poetics of both Huirimilla and Fogarty: their foundations in such disparate materials (songs, dialogue, and other written texts) and traditions (European and Mapuche or Murri) means that the poems must be read “as a material flux of language matter, moving in & out of semantic and non-semantic spaces.”76 Huirimilla’s world is wrapped up in a “transcultural flux that alters and subverts the poetic landscape [. . . ] of southern Chile”;77 poetry becomes mercurial: La poesía es la cabeza de un gallo Cortado bajo tierra por un árbol Que un muchacho de la esquina Confunde con el sol que brilla En una poza de agua.78 Poetry is the face of a rooster Hidden underground by a tree That a man on the corner Confuses with the sun that shines In a pool of water.

Huirimilla’s is a decentralized, heterogeneous poetic system with constantly shifting sites of meaning; it speaks of broken, dispersed, and unstable experiences. Never reconstructions of either purely ancestral or modern landscapes, the poems use these disparate referents in order to thread multiple lines from a

74

The Pino Huacho is a brothel in Puerto Montt. In Hugo Carrasco & Selva Mora, “Lectura palimpséstica de Palimpsesto de Juan Paulo Huirimilla,” Estudios Filológicos (Valdivia) 41 (September 2006): 47–48. 76 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 38. 77 Huenún, in Carrasco & Mora, “Lectura palimpséstica de Palimpsesto,” 48. 78 Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 64. 75

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utopian past to the dystopian present, then further onwards to the uncertainties of a virtual future. Nevertheless, we have seen how, in spite of the radical poetics it might engender, a nomadic subjectivity is also extremely difficult for the poet to negotiate. If Huirimilla, like Lienlaf, is to be a ‘supple individual’ made up of a multitude of sub-individuals of countless different sediments and accretions, then he is only as stable as these constituent parts. Being meta-stable, therefore, he can be precipitated into a state of crisis.79 In such a state, the poet can multiply chaotically and lose altogether his identity and agency; his ‘I’ will completely disappear.80 This is the (often manic) generative force behind Huirimilla’s nomadism: an exploration of writing not only between a “manifold of languages & locations” but also between these languages and the selves he is constantly becoming. To this end, his poetry becomes an “ongoing & open-ended chart of the turbulent fluxes” made inevitable by the suppleness of his individuality.81 Such a poetics may indeed appear neurotic, but it is the plight of the Mapuche poet – always a migrant, even in his own land, beset by an onslaught of urban development, industry, digital information, governmental oppression, and poverty.82 Unable to find a home, the poet starts to drift, transgressing forms, assuming something of the chameleon. His movement is thus not only a problem for state power but the problem caused by this power: Canto de guerrero [extract] Yo cazador recolector urbano de chaqueta e cuero Peinado a la gomina nacido de la chingada De Pedro Eriazo Con una armónica música entre dientes Hablo tartamudo por los muertos de mis antepasados Con el ceño partido Parco de palabra

79

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 81. Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 43–44. 81 Paraphrasing Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 44. 82 Rodríguez, “Enunciaciones heterogéneas en la poesía indígena actual,” 187. 80

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se me ha perdido El carnet de identidad. . . 83 Warrior Song I hunter-gatherer urbanite of jacket and leather Combed with hair gel born in shit From Pedro Eriazo With a harmonica between my teeth I stammer for the deaths of my ancestors With a split scowl Few words I have lost My identity card. . .

The nomad poet, Joris tells us, “learns & then writes in foreign languages [.. . ] in order to come to the realization that all languages are foreign.”84 This realization certainly has exciting political and aesthetic implications, but for Huirimilla, Fogarty, and other poets like them, it can also be profoundly distressing. While the use of Spanish has always been problematical for the Huilliche people, in that it has involved a form of subservience to a colonial custom, earlier generations of Huilliches were still able to return to the ‘home’ of their own language once parliamentary negotiations had drawn to a close. This is no longer the case, because the vast majority of city-dwelling Huilliches like Huirimilla no longer enjoy fluency in Mapuzugun, just as many urban Aboriginal people are no longer fluent in their ancestral languages. The Mapuzugun of daily city life has become a collection of vestiges, often trapped in hardly recognizable, fossilized formulas and in words that have been morphed to fit Spanish pronunciations.85 Thus, what was once recognized as an elocutionary force that would unite a people has become an example of fragmentation and social oppression, closely related to state policies which, for centuries, denied the very existence of Huilliche people in large tracts of 83

Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 101. For a complete translation, see Cooke, “Two Mapuche Poets,” 56–57. 84 Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 45. 85 Álvarez–Santullano & Barraza, “Escrituras de ‘encanto’ y parlamento,” 14.

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their territory. The herida colonial (colonial wound) – the feelings of inferiority experienced by those who do not conform to the language and culture of the conquistadors – is actualized in the remnants, or hilachas, of a language once commonly shared: the separation of human and language brings with it the termination of the human’s communion with the language of the earth.86 Poets like Huenún who, in books like Ceremonias (1999), have attempted to return to a notion of a community bounded by Mapuzugun, have come face to face with this problem: in contemporary Chile, there is no longer a home to return to once negotiations in the language of the colonialist Other have ceased. This leads us to one of the final poems in Palimpsesto, “Escribo con el otro que me desdibuja” (‘I am blurred by the other with whom I write’).87 An extract follows: Mi memoria se mira en aspavientos del otro Aquel que se desmiente en narradores del Quijote –no entiendo vuestros codices esa lengua tan testaruda– Yo, sin embargo, veo arañas acercar Y condores caer al mar Hasta ser transparentes. Escucho el río de arriba Por eso quemo harina y converso con el Filew. My memory sees itself in furious gesticulations of the other That which denies itself in narrators of Quixote – I don’t understand your codexes that tongue so stubborn – However, I see spiders come closer And condors fall to the ocean Until they are transparent. I listen to the river above That’s why I burn flour and talk with the spirit of the Machi.

Here, the poet’s very identity is a function of the Other’s “furious gesticulations.” He is without a home in the “stubborn” Spanish tongue, although he himself uses it to speak (“vuestros codices” utilizes that peculiarly peninsular vosotros form with its silent freight of deep colonial history). Despite the fact 86 87

Álvarez–Santullano & Barraza, “Escrituras de ‘encanto’ y parlamento,” 14–15. Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 112.

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that he might commune with the Machi’s spirit, Huirimilla cannot actually speak of this communion in a way that might codify and integrate it within a poetics. “Oom!” he proclaims in the final lines of the poem, “The impossibility of speaking with this meagre tongue / Castilian or Chilean like muteness.” There is no home to which he can return; he remains stranded in the terse music of another world. In instances such as these, a fabric woven only of opacities can become genuinely overwhelming. We should also note Huirimilla’s distinctive use of lineation in poems like “Escribo con el otro que me desdibuja” and “Ríos de Cisnes.” Each line is often a complete phrase, with few punctuation marks such as commas or full stops, which would attach /separate the line to /from phrases before or after. In some cases, the poems can be enjoyed if read backwards as much as if read conventionally. In this light, we can think of each of Huirimilla’s lines as phrasal units that are part of a flexible, adaptive structure similar to a songpoem. In Huirimilla’s poems and in Fogarty’s, too, each phrasal unit is subject to a number of not necessarily similar ‘inductive signals’, or potential phrasal ‘partners’ before and after the phrase in question. Most Huirimilla poems are collections of partly autonomous units that are always ready to dissociate and shoot off in various directions. The constant destabilization of syntax and perspective prevents the reader from finding that ideal, causal line that passes smoothly throughout the phrasal chain like an illuminated topos. That centre ‘outside’ of the image that organizes and orders the poem – so prominent in Judith Wright’s poetry – is swept up here in a flux of movement and instability, and each trajectory (be it of a narrative or of a phrase) has multiple origins and solutions. What holds Huirimilla’s poems together, then, is their close relationship to the voice. The organization of the poetry, its links to the ül and to canto, signals its procession as a passage of speech and the fact that, despite its heterogeneity, it is to be read as a series of structurally coherent texts. Frequent justification to the left margin ensures that each line emerges from the same place, albeit at different points in time, like ribbons of water tumbling from a waterfall. Importantly, the image of the cascada (waterfall) is prominent throughout Palimpsesto. Waterfalls are sacred spaces for the Mapuche. In fact, “Canto a la cascada” (‘Song to the waterfall’) is the only poem in the book that is accompanied by a translation into Mapuzugun, “Txayengko ül,”88 placing further emphasis on the relationship between the voice of the singer, 88

Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 103–104.

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the form of the poem, and a waterfall’s cascade. When standing before Huirimilla’s waterfall, we hear a ‘sonic mesh’, as a boiling multiplicity of sounds collide with and overrun one another. Likewise, a complex mesh of phrasal units is what lends this book a troubling tension, in that it threatens at any moment to pull apart at the seams. Even as it rests precariously on the edges of a form of neurosis, this state, so far from equilibrium, is what contributes to the openness and adaptability of Huirimilla’s poetics. Each of his poems is composed of different ‘organs’, but without that overbearing “organisation of the organs” known as “the organism.”89 This lends his work an ability to fuse with other ‘organs’: all the various layers of the palimpsest are lodged on the vertical stratum of the lefthand margin, where they produce various conjunctions of flows, but they remain constantly ready to proceed elsewhere; the ‘organism’ of the poem itself – an over-arching blueprint of form – does not determine the end-points of these phrases. The lines are not to be read as permanent notations on a lyrical subject, but as malleable utterances that compose a larger palimpsest, similar to the text of a song sung in ceremony. Huirimilla’s poems are like various parliamentary sittings, perhaps, in which an idea of the public re-emerges in a cacophony of voices. The communal gatherings of earlier times, now fragmented and displaced, here come to life in contemporary colours. In Chile, parlamento signifies, especially in intercultural contexts, a public ceremony in which agreements are made for the mutual convenience of all parties. Originally this took place between Mapuches and the Spanish, and then, after the establishment of the Chilean Republic, between Mapuches and Chileans. However, these agreements were always written down into a formal, Spanish legalese, immediately denying the communal nature of their composition, and thus becoming another of the ways in which the voice of the conquistador dominated that of the Mapuche.90 Huirimilla’s resistive and recuperative task is to retain the cultural and linguistic plurality of these discussions. Various speakers, with various kinds of knowledge and modes of expression, create a distinctly heterogeneous set of enunciations. While invariably grounded in the local, the trajectories of these voices will mean that each poem explores a number of localities. These different speakers and localities do not achieve some kind of synthesis, however; rather, they create a polyphony, or a multitude of voices that correspond to 89 90

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 175. Álvarez–Santullano & Barraza, “Escrituras de ‘encanto’ y parlamento,” 10.

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multiple subjects,91 all of which are nevertheless interrelated within the ecology of the poem. After all, this is the nature of the palimpsest: the text echoes other texts, in such a way that the writing becomes the echo of other voices.92 Huirimilla draws not only from the speech and songs of contemporary urban society, but from the wisdom of Mapuche spirits, from Koori mythology, and from poets like Mallarmé, Mistral, and Darío. Such a poetic ideology involves the composition of the poems as well as the manner in which we read them. Palimpsesto demands that the reader work to uncover the traces of others, allowing the texts to balloon into the tensile constructions we have seen.93 Entering the region of the poem’s ‘community’, the reader needs to become a translator as well; the task of interpreting such hybrid symbolism is dispersed from the poet to his audience: the multiple possibilities of the text can be reformulated constantly by the reader’s enquiring gaze. In this way, each new reading grants new life to the unpredictability of the poetic system; the ‘agglutinated’ phrasing of the poems recovers its flexibility and uncertainty; reading, the most private of acts, helps to regenerate a communal song. This is precisely what occurs in “Ngillatukar,”94 in which this most personal of expressions becomes a prayer of the many (rather than of the one): El lenguaje debería estar debajo de la línea del mundo me dicen Pero nosotros siempre arriba de cuevas Galopando con el lucero al hablar con el Weichafe Con aquel cardo encendido para que el perro Negro se entierre su pelaje: Ay! Guerrero que hablas desde tu casa de piedra Venimos a parlamentar contigo en Castilla y Paisano Ha tronado mi corazón con tu caballo blanco Rodeado hemos el cerro para encontrar el veneno Y sangre de serpiente en el michay. They tell me that language should remain beneath the line of the world But we’re always above caves Galloping with the morning star to talk with the Chief

91

Rodríguez, “Enunciaciones heterogéneas en la poesía indígena actual,” 186. Carrasco & Mora, “Lectura palimpséstica de Palimpsesto,” 48. 93 “Lectura palimpséstica de Palimpsesto,” 49. 94 Huirimilla, Palimpsesto, 106–107. ‘Ngillatukar’ is a word from Mapuzugun (lit. ‘to pray’). 92

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With that burning thistle so that the black dog Might find in its coat: Ah! Warrior the things you say from your house of stone We came to negotiate with you in Spanish and creole My heart has thundered with your white horse We have rounded the mountain to find the venom And the blood of the serpent in the scrub.

In this extract we can see first-hand how the poem is a kind of aural polyphony. There are the obvious references to Spanish and to the Chilean creole Spanish of the countryside (Paisano), as well as words from Mapuzugun like Weichafe and michay. We can also find the presence of an ‘I’ (“My heart has thundered”), a ‘you’ (“the things you say”), a general, inclusive ‘us’ (“we’re always above caves”), an ‘us’ that seems to be more ethnically specific (“We have rounded the mountain”), and a ‘them’ which is differentiated from the ‘I’ and the ‘us’ (“They tell me that language. . . ”). The worlds of the ritual and the urban, and the mythological and the colonial, thus converge, but their relationships to one another are largely ambiguous; typographically, the poem even appears at rest. Crucially, the reader must trek through the palimpsest in order to recover, and enact, something of its polyphony. A nomad poet like Huirimilla is never looking for some ‘average’ or ‘common ground’, a place of dwelling where flows can slow and coalesce before solidifying into permanent forms. For Huirimilla, the subject’s relationship to diverse times and places, the adoption of a variety of identities and voices, does not signify a desire to declare or demarcate a particular ‘ethnic conscience’ or a new idea of Chilean nationalism. Rather, the aim here is to produce an open or non-limited conscience, where what is of predominant concern isn’t so much the quest for self-definition in various spaces and times as the possibility for de-centering the self, of opening it to the various centrifugal forces born of the aggregations of energies in various localities.95 By fragmenting and becoming many, the poet widens the field of vision – of the poem and, therefore, of the reader. In this fashion, Palimpsesto constructs what we can experience as an emergent system or an environment, in which numerous characters – from the present and past, from the worlds of the living and of the spirits, from Araucanía and elsewhere – approach us and interact with us. These various discourses create moving, dynamic texts that change their locations with each reading /translation. In this sense, the performance of 95

Carrasco & Mora, “Lectura palimpséstica de Palimpsesto,” 52.

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the poem (whether this ‘performance’ be literally performative or whether it performs a function) is a transformation, highlighting how the poet’s statements convey, in addition to any semantic meaning, a further non-discursive or illocutionary force that is responsible for their pragmatic success.96

To Keep Becoming In order to keep becoming, to continue to resist capture and containment, the nomad poem avoids becoming rooted in any one particular place or identity, releasing itself from such borders to become “light or deterritorialized.”97 Again, however, we must remember that the nomad poem does not become so light as to float away; rather, like the nomad, the nomad poem is always in touch with the ground. For nomad poets, the goal is a constant redefinition of the conditions of existence laid down by the dominant cultural order. They want to convert these accepted conditions into conditions of becoming: “the end is for there to be no end.”98 To paraphrase the poet and theorist Charles Bernstein, nomad poets like Fogarty and Huirimilla might be bringing together distinct cultural groups, and making problematical their national affiliations in the process, in order “to forge new collective identities that will enable a more resourceful resistance to rigidly territorializing clannishness and paralysing depoliticizing codicity.”99 This is why, in poems like “Ríos de Cisnes,” “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’,” and “Ningla-a-na,” the conclusion of each poem is written in the present tense: the lines depict actions in progress, which will continue long after the poem itself has ended: myself I call them from the beach of the petrified cypress we are hungry for our lands Chile Mapuche we are with you to liberation

That remarkable eighth part of “Ríos de Cisnes,” in which Huirimilla sees in the paintings of the Koori people “the parallel dreams of my kidnapped grandparents,” is the envisioning of a kind of virtual realm, the possibility of a reality which has not yet attained a physical actuality but resides only in the 96

To adapt Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 29–30. Paraphrasing Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 95. 98 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 104. 99 Charles Bernstein, “Poetics of the Americas,” Modernism / Modernity 3.3 (September 1996): 19. 97

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realm of the imagination. Fogarty, in both “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’ ” and “Ningla-a-na,” explores precisely this kind of virtuality. In the former of these poems, it emerges as the poem’s startling conclusion: We had civilization before they came so us know the way to a future Chile Mapuche we are with you to liberation

In the latter, the vision is yet hazier and more ill-defined: 500 years ahead we will be survive in

off our lands overseas

Here, as much as the concept of liberation itself still subsists in the virtual, Fogarty’s disregard for traditional structures of English grammar allows the articulation of his visions to echo something of their blurry content. Writing in a “conventional literary language” would reflect a willingness to abide by the linguistic and epistemological norms of a culture and to negotiate with these norms. For Bernstein, writing in Standard English instead of a more overtly hybrid mode riddled with fissures and ruptures would “obliterate or overcome such marks of difference.”100 As we have seen, both Fogarty and Huirimilla write in languages that are quite distinct from their ‘Standard’ English or Spanish counterparts. Such exploratory writing does not escape from its socio-historical location but, rather, according to Bernstein, “contributes to an interrogation and reformulation of the description of that sociohistorical situation.” Bernstein is writing here about a ‘poetics of the Americas’ – a writing necessarily multilingual and multinational, aspects of which we would need to apply to a theory of Australian–Chilean poetics as well. A poetics of the Americas is more about “foregrounding heterogeneous and anomalous elements [. .. ] than homogenizing ones.” This Bernstein contrasts with nationalist “attempts to represent an already constituted idea of identity [that] may preclude the possibility of encountering newly emerging identity formations.”101 As a progressive politics, however, this poses a distinct problem, because “no Party, no group of intellectuals, can ever fully represent or direct such ‘movements’, such ‘becomings’.” Such was the problem with Neruda’s Canto general. The relation of the intellectual, artist or poet to such a movement, therefore, must change “from a ‘representational’ to an ‘experimental’ role” in order to free the social imagination from preconceived images or representations. Thus, the poet be100 101

Bernstein, “Poetics of the Americas,” 11. “Poetics of the Americas,” 1. (My emphasis.)

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comes “part of the ‘fabulation of a people to come’,” which, because it is “no longer tied to the ‘imagined communities of a time or place’,” would contrast markedly with myths about original or past peoples.102 As for a poetics of the Americas, an innovative imagination is crucial for any postcolonial poetics, too. In poems like “Ecology” and “Ríos de Cisnes,” an experimental approach to reality allows for lateral transfers of matter and energy to take place across organisms. Such lateral transference is a kind of neo-evolutionism, where movement occurs not primarily by hierarchical selection (as in traditional, Darwinian conceptions of evolution), but also “by transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.”103 This is a crucial characteristic of becoming: it occurs like a rhizome across categories, not along genealogical or classificatory trees. Indeed, after three billion years, writes the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, lateral, cultural evolution has become the main driving force of change: Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalisation.104

The task for nomad poets like Fogarty and Huirimilla is to ensure that this horizontal transfer of culture never ceases to take place – that the world never solidifies into a new, albeit ‘globalized’, state. Horizontal transfer is much faster than rigid, hierarchical, and predominantly vertical and ‘rooted’ patterns of change, allowing huge amounts of information to be transferred freely across strains and even species. In a political and an ecological sense, a hierarchical approach to change weakens systems, leaving them more vulnerable to consumption by fast-moving, horizontal evolutions. Allowing information to interact freely and laterally promotes a flow of energy and heterogeneity demanded by the intensities of the situations at hand. Such high-speed reactions can produce tremendous resilience over relatively short spans of time.105 In this sense, the rapid transference of cul102

Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 101 (includes quotations from Deleuze). Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 263. 104 Dyson, “Our Biotech Future.” 105 de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 175. For example, this explains why, since its introduction in 1941, a majority of penicillin’s targets (staphylococci) have become resistant to it. Today, nearly every disease known to medicine has become resistant to at least one antibiotic, producing what de Landa terms an “arms 103

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tural replicators across national borders, what Dyson calls globalization, can develop a potent resistance to the ponderous, though powerful, discourses of nationalist institutions. In terms of poetics, what we can see in these poems by Fogarty and Huirimilla is an attempt to extend ‘horizontally’ their own kind of resilience to state-sponsored forms of hierarchical control and exploitation. Such is the value of a more-than-local indigenous poetics. However, this raises important questions to do with the variety of attractors that drive one towards the moment of poetic expression. When Fogarty begins a poem, “Chile our liberation fight is the same / Indigenous courage we must unite on Land we relate to better than rich” (“Mapuche ‘Campesinos’ ” ), he is articulating in a local fashion a problem that is necessarily more than local. Similarly, Huirimilla was drawn to make a global statement about events in Araucanía in “Ríos de Cisnes.” These articulations arrive from contexts far larger than the original localities of the poets, suggesting that they come from a more than personal expressive agency that is abroad throughout the world – not fundamentally subjective, nor restricted to a particular place or language, but flowing freely across subjects. This is, of course, the Deleuzian conception of expression we have already covered: “abroad in the world [... ] nonlocal, scattered across myriad struggles.”106 Similar to organisms, which are, in a simplified manner of talking, “resilient patterns” in a turbulent flow of energy,107 bodies are resilient complexes that expression uses like conduits, adopting each one for its temporary articulation. This is expression’s own “turbulent flow”: it is “always on the move, always engrossed in its own course, over-spilling individual experience, nomadically evading responsibility.”108 Expression moves laterally across ecologies. To understand the relation of the local to the global in this sense obviously requires a particular openness. A resultant poetics must remain conjectural and presuppose no stability of ideology or form, for this would result in a failed attempt to trap expression within a closed structure. Syntax cannot make bold suppositions or conclusions, therefore, and statements about the world must be sensitive to the world’s own resistance to definition. Conse-

race” between hierarchical medical institutions and a “rapidly evolving meshwork of microbes.” 106 Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” xxi. 107 Carl R. Woese, “A New Biology for a New Century,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 68.2 (June 2004): 176. 108 Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” xxi.

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quently, a contemporary Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics must be less replete with realistic details than a more descriptive or analogical poetics that clings to the local so tightly that it neglects the local’s capacity for change. The poetics needs to inhabit a region between the celestial discourses of the abstract and the myopia of ultra-localism. And because free indirect discourse runs beneath all languages, a trans-Pacific postcolonial poetics cannot insist on the primacy of one language, or on rules for using a language. As a poetics of relation, it will be “latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.”109 In other words, rather than clinging to resemblances between different things, such expression will celebrate differences for their capacity to produce something else. Finally, an Australian– Chilean postcolonial poetics bears primarily on what may or may not come to pass, rather than on what a general consensus deems already is. The goal here, as with any kind of thought-in-becoming, is not to develop a general idea or model that stands apart from, or transcends, the world from which it comes. Instead, the goal is to create something new at ground level.110 To step towards a tentative poetics operating principle, while avoiding a general model or idea, I will propose that different localities can certainly exchange information but, if at any stage the local engages with the transcendent, the local will always be subsumed under the transcendent. Generalities might abolish difference for an experience of homogeneity and equilibrium, but becomings free differences from prior determinations of what is true or acceptable.

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Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 32. Paraphrasing Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 98.

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A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things. 1 . . . for those of us who think of poetry as linked to, as that very process of unfolding & changing, let me venture a guess that what we’re recovering is the oral tradition [. . . ] , but what we’re creating is an oral tradition – & that we’ll get to the first only by shooting for the second.2

L

I K E T H E N O M A D H E R S E L F , a nomadic poetics doesn’t stop moving. This final chapter is no conclusion, then, no place where the book can be laid to rest. Certainly, I will synthesize some of the key ideas that have emerged during the discussion in order to consolidate a theory of an Australian– Chilean postcolonial poetics. These syntheses are the first of many, however, rather than the end-points. Any nomadic poetics must be as permeable as the poems themselves. Thus, this chapter will emulate a waterhole, providing a place of rest and reflection from which we may continue on our own. Aboriginal and Mapuche poems have provided us with ‘mobile meeting grounds’, in which we have been able to sit down and engage with indigenous poetics and philosophies. While seated, we have seen that these meeting grounds are far from silent, empty places; rather, they are full of people, and their often noisy clamour is part of an attempt to throw off modernity’s stifling cloak. We haven’t been able to stay seated for long, however, because each meeting has been only temporary; before long, everyone has packed up and moved on. Such fleeting glimpses into indigenous cultures haven’t frustrated our analysis. By reading poems nomadically, we didn’t need to insist that someone stick around long enough to explain things carefully and com-

1 2

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27. Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 16.

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prehensively. Instead, just like everyone else, we’ve got our gear together and have set off once more. Before we could come to terms with the context and importance of an indigenous nomad poetic, we first needed to look at the Western lyric form, and at how canonical, non-indigenous writers have used the form so problematically. The ‘universal individual’ emerged in the poems of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda, whereby ‘the world’, or everything that was other to the poet him- or herself, was generalized by the gaze of a transcendental ‘I’ (or eye). A disturbing consequence of detaching the poetic voice from the limits of the human body was that it no longer enjoyed any compensating balance; as a flow of expression, therefore, it could keep on going forever, flooding the lands beneath it. One of the most primal motivations behind indigenous poems was a need to reclaim the voices that settler poets like Neruda and Wright had assumed. The next stage of the discussion traced recent developments of poetic traditions with histories far longer than that of the printing press. A crucial component of song-poetry was a ‘country-reflexivity’, in which the source of poetic inspiration lay not in the individual poet but in the poet’s country. Country-reflexivity means that the song-poem is part of a larger ecosystem. We can’t see this entire environment, because we, too, are embedded in particular areas of it; opacity is thus a necessary part of the poetics. The structures of song-poetry constantly re-emerged in later parts of the book, too. In particular, Gularabulu provided a stepping-stone between contemporary, avantgarde Aboriginal poetry and its musical, oral heritage. Common to much of the indigenous poetry has been an emphasis on the progressive nature of the present moment, revealing dynamic, moving environments. Contemporary indigenous poets have remained in close contact with the virtual energies of their ancestors, so that their poems not only recall the memories of their heritage but also seek – like the song-poem – to emphatically relativize the primacy of the present moment. Furthermore, Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry continues to be characterized by a strongly performative dimension. The spoken word is irrepressibly potent, and enjoys a strong presence in the written text. Indeed, we saw that proximity to the spoken word could actually produce a more sustainable poetry, beholden to more checks and balances than Nerudian floods of expression. Nevertheless, their theorization as nomads allowed us to see how the contemporary Aboriginal or Mapuche poet is constantly on the move between settler and indigenous cultures, using elements from both in his poetry. Abori-

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ginal and Mapuche oral cultures have always been complex semiotic systems, but in this book we have seen the performative, multimedia semiotics of songpoetry translate into a bricolage of various media, languages, and cultures in Lienlaf, Roe, Fogarty, and Huirimilla. This bricolage points once more to a communal poetic process, in which an assemblage of actors and materials has an important role to play in the production of the poetic ‘text’. Expression is “abroad in the world,” never confined to one language or place or subject; the ‘I’ of the nomad poet is a communal construct. As fluidly as it negotiates a variety of indigenous and non-indigenous genres and art-forms, Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry articulates and maintains a host of connections between human and non-human worlds. As a poetics of this interstitial region, it must resist confinement; its strength relies on its always being able to move between various regions. In the same way, the nomad poet’s locale can’t be limited by impermeable boundaries; lines and borders are points of convergence, of porous liminality, places where disparate elements might approach one another and meet. Like nomadic poets ourselves, we have moved ‘horizontally’ or rhizomatically though languages and landscapes in order to produce some unpredictable results. Indeed, their open-ended, rhizomatic movements eventually allow Fogarty and Huirimilla to imagine tentative connections across thousands of kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. Aboriginal and Mapuche poetries involve a determined struggle for the autonomy of the local in the face of an onslaught of overbearing, colonialist forms of control. At the close of Chapter 7, I made the point that when different localities exchange information internationally with one another, the quality of exchange is crucial. If such localities resort to a generalized, abstracted discourse in order to communicate, then their local particularities will be smothered by this abstract plane. Generalized discourse seeks to simply eliminate difference. At stake here is mƝtis. What mƝtis does is to resist a delimiting logic of control and appropriation, because it is dispersed across communities and is relatively autonomous from hierarchical power-structures. Yet these same qualities, in the face of centralized governments, become its idiosyncrasies and sensitivities: mƝtis is contextual and therefore fragmented;3 centralization can stamp out local knowledges over time. Destruction of mƝtis has been “virtually inscribed in the activities of the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism.” Scott argues that the eradica3

Scott, Seeing like a State, 332.

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tion of mƝtis is a precondition, “in the case of the state, of administrative order and fiscal appropriation and, in the case of the large capitalist firm, of worker discipline and profit.”4 The mechanical efficiency of such institutions has precluded many of Bernstein’s “newly emergent identity formations.” In Australia and Chile, much local knowledge production has been lost as the result of colonization and industrialization; for Scott, it is the imperialism of rationalism that is troubling: As Pascal wrote, the great failure of rationalism is “not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize any other.” By contrast, mƝtis does not put all of its eggs in one basket; it makes no claim to universality and in this sense is pluralistic.5

Unfortunately, Judith Wright’s commitment to indigenous affairs often relied upon similarly bureaucratic processes of rationalization and simplification. During the 1980s, the poet was heavily involved in the development of a petition, composed of signatures from various artists and intellectuals, calling for a single, national Treaty with all Aboriginal peoples. In a response to her request that he sign the petition, however, Les Murray objected: “To me, I’m afraid, the Treaty smacks of the radical dream of the One Big Generalisation, leading to the One Big Act which resolves everything.”6 By arguing for an overarching reform, summarized in one capitalized word, Wright wanted to make precisely this “One Big Generalisation.” On the other hand, Murray’s position is more uncertain and, in subsequent letters, it shifts and twists, searching for differences and complications. The problems with Murray’s own politics are manifold and I don’t wish to pursue them here,7 but it must be acknowledged that, for Wright, the diversity of Aboriginal postcolonial experiences needed to be illuminated by the light of a single, simplified Idea.

4

Scott, Seeing like a State, 335–36. Seeing like a State, 340. 6 Murray & Wright, “Correspondence,” 165. 7 Although not willing to agree that all Aboriginal people needed the same, generalized ‘Treaty’, Murray was much more willing to group them into a larger socioeconomic underclass: “The Aborigines may well not have entirely the same view of things as the white poor, but they are willy nilly in the same boat as us, and I think that the ultimate morality of the thing requires repairs and maintenance to the whole boat, not just to certain cabins” (“Correspondence,” 173). Like that of Neruda atop Macchu Picchu, Murray’s optic also conflates indigenous history into a vision of mass solidarity among the working poor. 5

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Running counter to this, a nomadic poetics indulges in differences because it works by travelling between them. It frees processes of differentiation from determinations of tradition, habit, and routine, opening up multiple, vital possibilities.8 Joris calls for “an absence of rest, always a becoming, a line-offlight (as against Being, which is always a being-toward-death, stillness).”9 By contrast, Neruda’s Canto general ends in a defining moment of being with the proclamation “Yo Soy” (‘I Am’). In keeping with such “an absence of rest,” in the rest of this chapter I will make some summative remarks regarding the compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetries encountered in this book, before developing some ideas about the nature of a Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. Importantly, these links I am about to propose are not necessarily specific to any particular group of poetry, or to Australian and Chilean poetry in isolation. Rather, what I am about to highlight has emerged because of these poets having come into contact; such qualities might also emerge in the meetings of other poets elsewhere as well. As a poetics that is about “walking [its] readers into the interstitial spaces of [a] culture,” it cannot be, to paraphrase Carter, “a general poetics, [but] only a poetics of situations, occasions or unfinished tracks rather than complete outlines.”10 We have found that poetries in Chapters 4 to 7 exhibit nomadic properties that often frustrate, or are neglected by, Neruda and Wright. These properties consist of the following: First, and perhaps most importantly, the body is the organic limit of the voice. By incorporating “the respiratory measure of the breath,” Aboriginal and Mapuche poems carry with them “the sound of the body.”11 Close proximity to the body protects the poem from a pretence to the transcendental, and ensures that the speed at which the poem moves and the size to which it grows are

8

Paraphrasing Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 86. Joris, A Nomad Poetics, 29. 10 In Jennifer Rutherford, “Kairos for a Wounded Country,” in Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces, ed. Jennifer Rutherford & Barbara Holloway (Crawley, W A : U W A Publishing, 2010): 9. 11 Paraphrasing Pierre Guyotat in Craig Dworkin, “The Stutter of Form,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009): 177. 9

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entirely dependent on the location of the body and the resources available to it. Secondly (as a component of the first point), Aboriginal and Mapuche poems are complex and participatory systems. They are compositions of hybrid arrays of materials. Such diversity increases the poetry’s resilience by reducing its reliance on any single source. The poem is always connected to – and relies on – multiple components in the wider environment, including the active participation of the audience /reader. This type of organization is inherently nomadic, involving the intersections between bricolage structures, with connections and seams following the model of the rhizome.12 Thirdly (as a component of the second point), Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry is poetry that moves and is polysemic, allowing the work to change swiftly over time. The relationship between phrasal units can be many-sided, allowing them to jostle and intermingle in ever-different ways, depending on the route(s) taken by the audience /reader.

The Body, the Voice “The envelope of sound tells us where we really are,” writes Fletcher, “because, unlike most sight, sound in poetry has greater power to enter us bodily.”13 For the Yanyuwa people of Northern Australia, breath-becomingvoice “connects singer, song, being, homeland.”14 The voice is the translation of breath into sound waves, of body into world, of an organism into the gases in which it subsists. The voice is the body’s expression of what is available to it, an accumulation of ecological forces that prompt the poet to speak in that place. The nomad poet, ever keen to limit her impact on the ground, will never use more language than what she needs. This does not mean that her poems will become a bland journalese leeched of all colour and rhythm: as we saw in Chapter 4, verse is not speech; an oral poetics is not simply spoken language, but spoken poetry. A spoken poetry, like those most appealing of 12

Joris, Justifying the Margins, 32. Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 174. 14 Bradley, Singing Saltwater Country, 245. 13

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sounds, draws us into the world, absorbing “our powers of discriminating part from part, edge from edge, as sight alone permits us to do with complete accuracy.”15 A poetry that draws on the properties of the poet’s voice resists the clarity of optical survey in favour of waves and waves of sound. Neruda’s desire to sing of his whole continent was enabled by the god-like ascendancy of his voice above the earth, from which he had almost omniscient vision of space and time. Consequently, the Canto general proposes an extremely awkward relationship between the location of the poet’s voice and his body. Paul Celan (via Joris), however, suggests that a modern prophet or visionary poet would need to speak in a very different fashion. To speak about the contemporary world, the poet could only stammer repeatedly, “always / agagain”: an articulation of an open-ended series of recurrent possibilities. Having examined the problems with Neruda’s poetry, we can confirm Joris’ own conclusion: “We no longer can afford the certainty of the singular, the unique, any once-and-for all truth – to speak true now is to stammer, to fragment.”16 Many nomad poets write with this very propensity to stammer. Roe is always stammering, laughing, asking – ever interrupting the narrative with extra-narrative punctuation. Fogarty’s language seems to tumble from the lefthand margin, often tripping over itself before gathering a momentum which is then chopped into repeated staccato fragments. Lienlaf’s brief translations of songs and dreams – all ephemeral things, written with hesitation – are never complete. We see this ephemera translated into those minimalist, breathing lines on the page; the language creates smaller clearings that share existence with a jostling group of ancestral and contemporary voices. His music is communal, forming part of a larger palimpsest of human and non-human languages. Moving on to Huirimilla, however, we find in “Escribo con el otro” that he writes in a language which signifies “muteness.” Indeed, Fogarty, too, feels uncomfortable with the English tongue because it is so bastardized and uprooted, and without what he calls “spiritual meaning.” Yet the two poets still write in these languages; they are compelled to do so by a network of ancestral and colonial forces. Thus, their speech is always an expression of complexity. This is why Lienlaf’s, Fogarty’s, and Huirimilla’s poems begin in, and ultimately defer to, the locales in which they were composed: poetic language, these poets show us, is never a stable home of meaning building 15 16

Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 174. Joris, Justifying the Margins, 106.

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smoothly to a transcendent altar; it is but an inflection of a larger, unpredictable system, which grows, decays, stops, and starts again. The poem is a product of environment, in other words; the poet’s enunciation is but one of the many transformations taking place in an ecosystem. This is not to say that the poem is a purely individual creation – far from it. Rather, the poem is never more than, or detached from, those innumerable other-than-linguistic forces: “The subject does not express the system. It is an expression of the system.”17 It is no coincidence that the nomad poets in this book retain so many oral elements in their writing: an oral poetics, as opposed to a written one, more easily avoids the rigidity of state-imposed orthodoxies (such as grammars or classifications). Because an oral culture has “no textual reference point for marking deviations,” its knowledge-set is more likely to morph or “drift.”18 Paddy Roe, for example, can deter imposed orders by reintroducing the vagaries of time and space into his discursive practices. A poetics based on principles of sound and speaking is thus a potent anticolonial politics. Sound, writes the scholar Ming-Qian Ma, has long suffered “the ruthless invasion and colonization” of sight: Worse yet, it has been traditionally derogated as noise, both metaphorically and literally, aesthetically as well as scientifically. In the schemes of things lorded over by the eye, sound as noise [was] conceived, [in] Homeric Greece, as destructive to telos [. . . ]. It is subsequently perceived, especially in light of the analogy of Plato’s Cave and its shadows, as antithetical to the enlightenment of the universal signified. 19

The momentary is inimical to sight because we cannot see it; vision requires relative stasis. Ma writes: to see, in this sense, is to frame the fluctuating multitude into a timeless pattern of fixity and stability, to transcend the whirling chaos of noises into an ideally eternal form of silent clarity and transparency [. . . ] to see is thus to predetermine the ordered shape of the world and to construct it in its corresponding image.

17

Massumi, “Introduction: like a thought,” xvi. Scott, Seeing like a State, 332. 19 Ming-Qian Ma, “The Sound Shape of the Visual: toward a phenomenology of an interface," in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009): 255. 18

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By contrast, sounds disappear as they arise, and thus they are the opposite of stability. To privilege sound is therefore to seek a kind of resistance to universal order: Different from vision, sound [. . . ] articulates a trajectory at once temporal and quotidian. To sound, in this view, is to announce the concomitant exit of sound, to render acoustically the fleeting moment of its own physicality. Transient and unstable, sound thus makes manifest audible traces of its varying tracks.20

The sounds of spoken language, because they move faster, because they can vanish and re-appear as fast as a breath, form the basis of Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics. To deny a poem’s proximity to the voice, then, to read it as a single, permanent line of text (as opposed to multiple possible lines) is to subject it to a form of colonialist reading that decides that what is said (the informational content) is of more importance than its manner of expression (the embodied performance of the saying). At any rate, the rocky permanence of text is illusory: the act of reading can unleash written knowledge into a further variety of affects; writing may yet become speech once more: Yesterday we distinguished between the oral and the written, with the latter being transcendent. Maybe tomorrow we shall be living through a synthesis that would be summed up as the written revolution, or transcription onto the page.21

A written language aligned so closely to a spoken one displays the bristling potential of the synthesis of two distinct linguistic modes. Of course, writing a poem is not speaking it, but its written form has, in the case of Aboriginal and Mapuche cultures, emerged relatively recently from oral forms. The resulting emergent structure adds to the mixture of those structures already extant, interacting with them, but never leaving them behind as prior stages of development (while other literatures might, over the course of centuries, create the conditions for their disappearance). By displaying openly its origins in the evanescence of the oral, Aboriginal and Mapuche writing reveals its potential for further bifurcation. Ultimately, if writing is no longer any guarantee of stability, accumulation of knowledge or, finally, transcendence, then those other components of ‘civilization’ to which it relates – a mastery of nature, or

20 21

Ming-Qian Ma, “The Sound Shape of the Visual,” 266–67. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 83–84.

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a control of economic factors, for example22 – might also be broken down into local varieties of the fleeting, the momentary, and the glimpsed. Writing becomes as rhythmic as country.

Diversity, Flexibility, Resilience: Movement The second characteristic of these poetries is their complexity. In speaking of a poem’s complexity, we are describing the real conditions of production of poetic language – a term that we encountered in Chapter 5. In Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry, the real conditions relate very much to the performative nature of the poetics: as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, Aboriginal and Mapuche song-poetry traditions incorporate a variety of poetic, musical, and theatrical elements, and are generated by both human and non-human sources. Those written poetries that lie in close proximity to the song-poem or the ül also incorporate some of these elements. The notion of poems as hybrids of various inter- and intra-cultural forms can also articulate quite delicately the experience of a fractured or irreconcilable identity, which is so prominent in work by Lienlaf, Fogarty, and Huirimilla. Such identities are composed of what Glissant would call a series of ‘Relations’, as opposed to an identity founded on the idea of a root. A root identity is one founded in the distant past, in a vision or a myth of the creation of the world. Clearly, Neruda’s creationist poetics comes to mind here,23 but so, too, does Wright’s myth-fashioning about the creation of language and meaning. As the name implies, a root identity depends on the rooting of self and of territory in a particular location. Yet this does not imply a heightened sensitivity to the earth in which the self is rooted: the self is so clearly defined that it is severed from engagement with anything outside of it; indeed, Glissant argues that the self’s very existence implies the subjugation of other things, from which it needs to become transcendent. Glissant’s ‘relation identity’, conversely, is the nomad’s identity. Relation identity isn’t linked to the colonization of a world but “to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures.” Relation is produced in chaotic, dynamic networks, as opposed to smooth, violent streams of filiation (a heavy, 22

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 162. I don’t wish to confuse Neruda’s ‘creationist poetic’ – by which I mean his desire to sing up a continent – with the creacionismo of his fellow Chilean, the poet Vicente Huidobro, although they do exhibit a number of similarities. 23

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anaphoric beat linking elements throughout the environment, for example). Most importantly, a relation identity “does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one giveson-and-with rather than grasps.” In sum, an identity of relation “exults [in] the thought of errantry and of totality.”24 An ‘errant’, nomadic poetics is not so much concerned with a ‘recognition of the true’ as with articulating complications. It is not a logic that moves carefully from one point of truth – or one root – to another, or from indeterminacy to a dialectical whole, to arrive at essential, a-priori categories. Similarly, its model of communication is not a binary formation of author /reader, where the expressive author is wholly active, and the silent reader is wholly passive. Rather, the poetics involves an explicitly Deleuzian, ‘complicating’ logic, in that it is intended to move between common distinctions, producing surprise, incalculable chance relations and irreducible disparities.25 In this, it exhibits something of the complex behaviour of emergent systems. Indeed, nomad poems certainly rely on emergent properties: their employment of bricolage, fragmented phrasal units, and song-styles produces poems with multiple points of entry and exit. Their systems are made still more complex, however, by their incorporation of multiple authorial voices and by participation from the audience (which might take the form of a vocal interjection, a chanted refrain, or choosing one of many routes through a text). Each new agent introduced into the system produces further possibilities for surprise. Because adaptive relational structures are so readily able to incorporate other things, they provide more sensitive instances of non-linear evolution than poetry more firmly based in textualized (and canonized) poetic traditions. As the literary critic and scholar Claudia Rodríguez notes, the age of a written literary system can be a major factor in deciding the variety of strategies it uses for its elaboration. When a system is ‘young’, its repertoire is usually less well-defined, which makes it more open to using other available

24

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 143–44. Betsy Wing’s translation of Glissant’s ubiquitous concept of ‘errance’ as “errantry” may mislead readers who associate it with knight-errantry and Quixotic wanderings – but the translator herself explains cogently (xv–xvi) that Glissant not only deflects from ‘errer’ (wander) and ‘erreur’ (error) to valorize the intent, circular movement of ‘Relation’ but is also revalorizing an old, ‘high-culture’ word for the use of marginalized peoples. ‘Errantry’ fits the various geocultural and aesthetic vectors of indigenous poetry perfectly. 25 Paraphrasing Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 51.

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systems (such as other languages, cultures, or art-forms). In the case of Mapuche poets, as well as other Indigenous American poets – most of whom are writing in contexts where indigenous poetry publishing has a very brief history of fifty to seventy years – their poetics are clearly very permeable, open to the incorporation of many resources from other arts and traditions.26 At the same time, however, this particular ‘openness’ is a quality that can be traced back to the precolonial characteristics of song-poetics (as assemblages of poetry, music, dance, etc.). Consequently, we see so much avant-garde indigenous poetry that is “genre diasporic,” to use Joris’ term,27 nomadically located between genres with exciting hybrids of oral and written literatures, languages, and materials. Here we need only think of Fogarty’s poems and drawings in Minyung Woolah Binnung, or Lienlaf’s in Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón, or Lienlaf and Huirimilla releasing individual studio albums of Mapuche song-poetry in addition to their printed work. For similar reasons, we also see surprising attempts like “Ríos de Cisnes” at fresh, incalculable connections between hitherto separated peoples. The nomad poet is at war with fixed and impermeable forms. In Chapter 7, we saw that Fogarty wants to remove his poetry from the built environment. Similarly, Rodríguez argues that the new waves of Indigenous American poets are interrupting the fragile equilibrium of la ciudad letrada (‘the city of writing’), bringing with them a radical plurality that questions centralized notions of culture and literature. The ‘oral city’, she writes, advances upon the written nation, appealing for the recognition of its existence while simultaneously interrogating the hegemony of the centre.28 Having begun their siege, the poets attempt to impregnate the academies and publishing houses with other codes or registers. They utilize a variety of genres and media; in response to the challenges at hand, fronts of resistance or ‘war machines’ emerge spontaneously and in different forms: “they bring [novel] connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture and domination.”29 Behind a nomad poetic we find that its mercurial adaptability has as much to do with political resistance as with poetry. They are precautions against the slower but more powerful movement of the state. These are tactics for a world that cannot be predicted on the basis of a model that progresses in 26

Rodríguez, “Enunciaciones heterogéneas en la poesía indígena actual,” 183. Joris, Justifying the Margins, 16. 28 Rodríguez, “Enunciaciones heterogéneas en la poesía indígena actual,” 185. 29 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 467. 27

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linear fashion along a highway of development, or continues to attain everhigher states of perfection. Nomadic experimentation also has the advantage of allowing the production of complexity in a non-arbitrary fashion. In human and non-human systems, the advantages of complexity are manifold: Complex, diverse, animated environments contribute [. . . ] to producing a resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in confronting novel challenges [. . . ]. Narrow, planned environments, by contrast, foster a less skilled, less innovative, less resourceful population.30

While old-growth forests, for example, may not be as productive in the short term as single-species forests, they are demonstrably more stable, more selfsufficient, and less vulnerable to epidemics and environmental stress. Scott writes, quoting Herman E. Daly: Every time we replace “natural capital” (such as wild fish stocks or old growth forests) with what might be called “cultivated natural capital” (such as fish farms or tree plantations), we gain in ease of appropriation and in immediate productivity, but at the cost of more maintenance expenses and less “redundancy, resiliency, and stability.”31

It is precisely this “ease of appropriation” that indigenous poets such as Huirimilla and Fogarty are desperate to avoid. In their poetry as in other systems, the less diverse the cultivated material, the more vulnerable it becomes. In human institutions specifically, Scott compares “the fragility of rigid, singlepurpose, centralized institutions to the adaptability of more flexible, multipurpose, decentralized social forms.” As long as an environment remains stable, repetitive, and predictable, it is easy for it to be bounded by set routines. In most contexts, of course, environments are seldom stable, “and such routines are likely to be counterproductive once the environment changes appreciably.”32 Ecological diversity increases resilience and adaptability, and necessarily escapes appropriation by ponderous, top-down routines. Closely related to a poem’s diversity is its capacity to move. A system may indeed be diverse and composed of heterogeneous elements, but it will not be effectively resilient unless it can distribute energy efficiently and quickly among these parts. And those systems in which the rate of energy-flow is

30

Scott, Seeing like a State, 349. Seeing like a State, 353. 32 Seeing like a State, 353–54. 31

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highest can evolve at the fastest pace.33 The third characteristic of this postcolonial poetics, therefore, is that movement – not stasis – is the key to survival. An Aboriginal or Mapuche poet must constantly interrogate and reformulate himself. It is dangerous to confine the origins of his language to a single place or subject; doing so will only result in “drying up a spring or stopping a flow.”34 Furthermore, not only does a settler poet who fails to move risk depleting the resources of that location – if his gaze dwells on scenes, as opposed to glimpsing them, then he prolongs the event of colonization and indigenous dispossession. In either case, the poem needs to be an articulation of Bennett’s “dynamic flow of matter-energy,” which “tends to settle into various bodies, bodies that often join forces, make connections, form alliances.”35 We saw that Glissant’s poetics of Relation is based on concepts of contradiction and errantry. Errantry keeps going; by definition, it cannot be disciplined. Although errantry “emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities,” the errant poem does not resolutely reject its origin, or succumb to an impulse to abandon it.36 Instead, the poem spills into other languages and territories while remaining fluid within its own. Its contradiction – and, perhaps, its vulnerability – lies in the fact that it must nevertheless maintain a connection to the locale in which it was generated. This third characteristic of Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics, then – the ability of both the poem and the poet to move – does not refer to an unlimited exploration (and colonization), but is determined by the resources in the geography of the poem’s emergence. Unpredictable like any complex system, the path of the poem’s movement becomes available as one of a variety of paths, each of which is a possible consequence of the history of the poem’s development. Reading Aboriginal and Mapuche poems as parts of complex systems is only half of the assignment, however, the other half being that we need to acknowledge that those poems that attempt to simplify or escape the diversity of ‘The Plane of Life’ are frustrated by the impossibility of the task. For even the transcendent laws of the state rely on the ground-level knowledge of mƝtis for their elaboration, and grammatical laws themselves are derivative of the prac-

33

de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 262. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 304. 35 Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter,” 365. 36 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 34

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tice of speaking.37 Transcendence itself “is always a product of immanence” because it is constituted solely on the Plane of Life.38 Consequently, the lifecycle of a transcendent plane will involve the production and application of a transcendent image, then a repeated cycle of becoming-transcendent, becoming-immanent (as it returns to the plane of immanence in order to ‘feed’), and re-becoming-transcendent.39 A useful example here would be that other formalized system of coordination, the capitalist market. Despite the apparent freedoms it provides to its participants, the free-market economy is nevertheless dependent on wider, ever-immanent ecologies ‘below’, which constitute a larger system of social relations which its own calculus does not acknowledge and which it can neither create nor control [. . . ] most important, the economy is “a subsystem of a finite and nongrowing ecosystem,” whose carrying capacity and interactions it must respect as a condition of its persistence.40

In our readings of the apparently transcendent, we must take care to understand its nature as a formal structure within a larger system, upon which it is dependent: transcendence relies on a variety of processes which alone it cannot create or maintain. In Chapter 2, we saw that some of Wright’s early poems needed to establish the ground from which she could subsequently transcend. In “The Child,” for example, the locale produces transcendent axioms about growth and decay. Then, in Chapter 3, we encountered Neruda’s attempts to “forget [. . . ] the transcendent measure” in order to return to the earth’s “rough blood.”

What Now? The selection of poetries in this book reflects the course of my own journey across contemporary literary landscapes. As I outlined in the Introduction, the dialogues between poets emerged during the course of my research; while my initial questions led me in certain directions, the actual encounter with each poet became the basis for the unfolding of the discussion. Since the poets I selected are not representative of any closed set of criteria, the characteristics 37

Scott, Seeing like a State, 319, 325. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, tr. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001): 31. 39 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 114. 40 Scott, Seeing like a State, 351. (Quoting Daly.) 38

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of the poetics I have been outlining can apply to other work, allowing us to understand the context and the function of such work to a more sophisticated degree. To illustrate the point, I want to look briefly at poems by two emerging indigenous poets who have attracted significant attention in recent years. Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Nunga poet from the Northern Territory. Her poem “Intervention Pay Back” was the defining moment of The Best Australian Poems 2009, and is featured in her first book, little bit long time (2009). From Osorno, Roxana Carolina Miranda Rupailaf is a rising star of Mapuche poetry. She was one of five contemporary Mapuche poets selected for the Aboriginal–Mapuche poetry anthology Espejo de tierra, from which I am taking her poem “Rituales de la serpiente azul” (‘Rituals of the Blue Serpent’). From the outset, it is clear that both “Intervention Pay Back”41 and “Rituales de la serpiente azul”42 have been tempered in a furnace that conflates the difficulties of the poets’ own personal experiences with the lives of their peoples since colonization: From “Intervention Pay Back”: and from there night time when we all asleep all together on the grass patch dog and cat and kids my wife and me them kids they ask really good questions about the olden days about today them real ninti them kids they gunna be right and from there come intervention John Howard he make new rules he never even come to see us how good we was doing already Mal Brough he come with the army we got real frightened true thought he was gonna take the kids away just like tjamu and nana bin tell us I run my kids in the sand hills took my rifle up there and sat but they was all just lying changing their words all the time wanting meeting today and meeting tomorrow we was getting sick of looking at them. . .

41

In The Best Australian Poems 2009, ed. Robert Adamson (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009): 37–41. ‘ninti’ – clever; ‘tjamu’ – grandfather; John Howard – former Prime Minister of Australia (1996–2007); Mal Brough – former Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the Howard Government (2006–2007). 42 In Espejo de tierra (Earth Mirror), ed. Rojas & Minter, 98–101. (My tr.)

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From “Rituales de la serpiente azul”: Agua hacerte y agrietarte por las pieles. Devorarme tus latidos y montañas. Persiguiendo los gritos de la muerte que se resiste al atorarse de los peces de la sangre. Cuerpo arrastro en oleajes de sal y de locura. Muerdo tierra en los rinconces de lo azul. Los llantos y las rabias fragmento en los ojos de la vida. To make you water and to crack you across the skins. To devour your heartbeats and your mountains. Chasing the screams of a death which resists choking on the fish of blood. I drag my body through the waves of salt and madness. I bite earth in the corners of the azul. The cries and the rage fragments in the eyes of life.

I want to highlight how these two poems exhibit various features of a contemporary Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics and – most importantly – how reading them in such a way is highly effective and instructive. Of the two, “Intervention Pay Back” displays the most obvious proximity to oral poetry. The lines are organized into parcels of breath units, which are separated by exaggerated spacing, producing an unmistakably vocal rhythm (“all together on the grass patch dog and cat and kids my wife and me”). From the outset, then, we are aware, despite the fact that we are reading text printed on a page, that we are reading someone’s speech. Yet this is made clear not only by the organization of the lines into units mediated by breathing; we can see, too, that the language is often a-grammatical and is always without capitalization, suggesting its closer relationship to the flexible grammars of contemporary Aboriginal English than to any standardized set of lexical rules. The flexibility lends the poem a fluid quality, as if each stanza

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were part of a series (often linked by the repetition of the phrase “and from there. . . ”). Here, too, the mode of speaking, of mixing Aboriginal English with traditional languages, inevitably locates the poem: the fragments of Aboriginal languages such as Pitjantjatjara and Luritja tell us that the speaker is somewhere in or to the south of Alice Springs, yet the predominant reliance on English also confirms that the speaker is in an environment heavily impacted upon by the colonizing tongue. Indeed, the relationship between the space of the poem and the speaker’s voice is so inextricable that we see nothing in the poem that the speaker does not see; all events take place only because they are sensed by the speaker’s body: and from there I drive round to see tjamu he says his money in the store too poor bloke he can’t even walk that far and I don’t smile I look at the old man he lost his smile too but nana she cook the damper and roo tail she trying to smile she always like that.

The linguistic mixtures also alert us to the open, adaptive nature of the poem’s environment. As we move through “Intervention Pay Back,” we come to realize that it is being written (spoken) in response to something – namely, the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (also known as ‘The Intervention’), introduced by the Howard Government in 2007.43 Cobby Eckermann’s poem is thus a grounded, embodied response to a governmental, bureaucratic invasion of country. Indeed, the poem draws energy from The Intervention; the extra energy added to the speaker’s environment results in the need for something to be said. Thus, in the first fragment, we see the speaker shifting and adjusting to the new conditions: taking his children into the sand hills, assuming a defensive position with his rifle, assuming the shape of a war machine in response to the threat of war. Here, mƝtis is crucial: his grandparents’ first-hand experience of the Stolen Generations translates

43

The Intervention was staged nominally to address claims of rampant child sexual abuse and neglect in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. Operation Outreach was The Intervention’s main logistical operation, conducted by a force of six hundred soldiers. While the package was supposed to be the Howard Government's response to the publication of the Little Children are Sacred report by the Northern Territory Government, Prime Minister Howard implemented only two of the ninety-seven recommendations in the report.

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into a local knowledge about the capacity of the government to remove Aboriginal children from their families.44 While the speaker’s flexibility defines his response to the initial moments of the Intervention, however, we see that it is his inability to keep moving that will have such a tragic outcome. Having retreated to the sand hills for fear of the removal of his children, the speaker soon realizes that a removal is not going to take place. Tired of waiting, of the bureaucratic processes of meetings and discussions, he returns to the life he enjoyed prior to The Intervention: and from there I didn’t care too much just kept working fixing the housing being happy working hard kids go to school wife working hard too didn’t care too much. . .

That the speaker wants to return home belies a dark, underlying point concerning the reality of The Intervention. The speaker must return home and stay there, rather than break out into a nomadic pattern of evasion and resistance, because the only way government forces will ignore him is if he is peacefully settled: he and his family must be housed in one place, and they must be “happy working hard” – whether by earning capital, or by learning how to earn capital at school. Unfortunately, the problems that emerge towards the end of the poem do so precisely because the speaker is moving no longer. While the speaker wanted to return to the routine of his working life, his wife is not as comfortable about the situation. She becomes increasingly itinerant – going out often on trips to the casino with her friends – while the speaker keeps working in order to continue caring for the home and his family. His wife’s gambling of the capital needed to keep the home-place stable and intact, however, exposes the fragility of the domicile, and causes our protagonist enormous frustration; the poem begins to overheat. Before long, we are left with the haunting possibility of some kind of ill-directed, violent explosion: I already told you I love my kids I only got five two pass away already and I not complaining bout looking after my kids no way but when my wife gets home if she spent all 44

‘The Stolen Generations’ is a term used to describe the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under Acts of their respective parliaments. Most of the removals occurred in the period between 1869 and 1969 (approximately), although in some places children were still being taken in the 1970s.

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not gonna share with me and the kids first time

Next to such a strikingly conversational poem, Rupailaf’s “Rituales de la serpiente azul” might appear out of place. Certainly, “Rituales” is not as obviously linked to the oral as “Intervention Pay Back,” but there are nevertheless some very clear links between Rupailaf’s work and oral traditions. One need only hear her read her work in order to understand the strong relationship between her poetry and her performance: she reads with an impassioned, almost liturgical rhythm, chanting out the lines with a steadily increasing momentum. In “Rituales” we can see the traces of this in the recurring presence of anaphora, giving the poem various, performative rhythms similar to the very kind of ritualistic incantation after which it has been named: Anda sangre cortándome la lengua. En danza de golpear me baila el acento hacia el afuera. Sangre corre por los dientes. . . Blood runs, cutting my tongue. In a violent ballet my accent dances for me towards the outside. Blood runs across my teeth. . . Yo que no estoy viva entre las vivas y que padezco una sola de las muertes No vislumbro el sol cuando rebana mis ojos en el agua. No vislumbro Niebla45 cuando escucho el mar en las almohadas. Ciega es como me palpo contra el tiempo la herida. . . I who am not alive among the living and who suffers only one of the deaths I can’t make out the sun when it slices my eyes in the water. I can’t make out Niebla when I hear the sea in the pillows. Blindly is how I feel my wound in the face of time. . . .

The latter of the two extracts above is particularly interesting in the context of this book, in which we have already seen Neruda’s anaphoric use of the ‘I’ grant him complete ascendancy over the cultural and geographical landscapes of South America. But whereas Neruda’s ‘I’ rose into transcendence and as45

Niebla is a small town on the coast of southern Chile, close to the city of Valdivia.

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sumed the voice of everything beneath it, Rupailaf’s is consistently negated here. The ‘I’ can’t, rather than can. It “suffers only one of the deaths” rather than all of them; it can see very little with its sliced eyes. This is in stark contrast to high-modernist vision: as in “Intervention Pay Back,” the optic does not survey the world from a point above it, but is inextricably within the world. Furthermore, rather than drawing the past into it, Rupailaf sinks her subjectivity into the past. Unfortunately, she needs to perform the Ritual of the Blue Serpent in order to escape a situation in which her body is being violently assaulted: Ciega es como me quiebro los espejos y los vasos, y así es como me quieren, y me odian en las camas y me gritan y me pronuncian los sudores enfermos de las sábanas. Blindly is how I break the mirrors and the vases, and that is how they want me, and they hate me in their beds and they yell at me and talk of the sick sweat of the sheets.

Her voice, therefore, is a pronouncement against those who would angrily plunder her interior. For Rupailaf as for Cobby Eckermann, the poem is a moment of desperately vocal articulation against appropriation. The ritual of it, however, allows Rupailaf recourse to a liminal region, in which she can converse with Kai-Kai (whose mountains are being devoured in the first stanza of the poem). As that first extract shows us, happiness is not to be found on the fringes of El Azul, either, for Kai-Kai is in no way immune to the “madness” and the “rage” of the contemporary moment. So it is that the poet is pursued across both worlds, preventing her rest in either. She is ever compelled to reenter the generative process of what has become a cruel and frightening reality for many Mapuche. Clearly, both Cobby Eckermann’s and Rupailaf’s speakers draw from their ancestral heritage for strength, allowing them a certain degree of mƝtis, or an ability to shift between regions thanks to an intimate knowledge of the history of the places they are in. In both cases, however, it is not enough: the nomad is forced to retreat yet deeper, from a place where she can see the horizon and respond accordingly to a kind of crazed blindness, from where she cannot see a way out. It is as if the impact of modernity has filled their environments to bursting-point, to a point at

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which all poems – be they by Fogarty, Huirimilla, Cobby Eckermann, or Rupailaf – must end with some form of anger, destruction or madness. Of course, this is not to say that the only option for the Aboriginal or Mapuche poet is to retreat into blindness or depression. Indeed, to say such a thing would negate what we have seen over the course of much of this book, that such trauma can translate into explosions of powerful, persuasive poetry. Thankfully, these poets continue to gather enough energy from their respective ecologies to write within them.

An Imagination of Diversity An Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics signifies an unavoidable and uncontainable indigenous presence, and produces irreconcilable differentiations from nationalist and colonialist literatures. In effect, its cultural marginalization is entirely necessary; for a nationalist canon to embrace wholeheartedly such a poetics would mean that the poetry is no longer successfully differentiating itself from the impositions of the state. Here, we can take some of Mead’s conclusions about the work of Fogarty and stretch them across the entire corpus of work examined in later sections of this book. From the transcriptions of Bulu to Palimpsesto, these poems imagine through, and in, language as an alternative polis, a poetic space where the diversities of politics and identity, including [the poets’] own, are able to be articulated and represented. It is hardly surprising that these poetic projects should be marginalised; they are difficult to listen to. They represent an intolerable challenge to a mainstream Australian [and Chilean] identity, with all its political and social investments.46

The confluence of such a great diffraction of cultures into a poetics is not only testament to its complexity but also means that the divergence of the poetics from imposed norms is what Glissant calls a “generative distancing.”47 In other words, the marginalization of indigenous poetry is entirely productive: it achieves the aim of the poem itself, to become something else. Indeed, we should remember here that becoming is always marginal, “a simultaneous coming and going in a borderland zone.” Less-than-marginal zones are too densely striated to release matter into swirls of becoming; the place of inven46

Mead, Networked Language, 454. Here, Mead is actually talking about the poetry of Fogarty and the Macedonian-born Australian poet ʌ.o. 47 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 153.

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tion is in the dynamic border region. “To get there,” writes Massumi, “one must move sideways, through cracks in accepted spatial and temporal divisions.”48 Of course, charging straight ahead into the ‘mainstream’ may be necessary and effective at times, as we see with Cobby Eckermann’s presence in a canonical almanac of Australian poetry. As a general political principle, however, the goal of the nomad is to remain at a distance from the equilibrium of the centre but still close enough to learn from it, using unique rhythms in order to differentiate her movement from “the reflex speed of the existing apparatuses of molar capture.”49 Now, if we were to attempt, as Glissant would urge, to summarize the unique becomings of Aboriginal and Mapuche nomad poets – “all the singularities, all the trajectories, all the histories, all the forms of denaturation, all the syntheses that are at work or that have resulted from our confluences” – obviously we would be incapable of doing so with anything like complete accuracy. Not enjoying an accurate understanding of the totality is hardly a weakness. However, “not wanting to know it certainly is” (my emphasis). A complete understanding is impossible, and any pretence to the contrary is highly dangerous, but this is not to imply that our ability to listen to and learn about the world should be curtailed by a preconception of its impossible enormity. We can imagine these many divergences through a poetics: an imaginary realm that provides a glimpse “of all these always decisive differentiations.”50 A nomad poetics can provide hints of signification while immediately generating an assemblage of further processes; any image of the whole summons up series of productive, a-signifying ruptures.51 Here we can recall Fogarty’s “good energy” from Chapter 7: the poet wanted his work to engender in his readers “a collective thought” that might, through the imaginative synthesis of rupture, bring together indigenous and settler literatures. As such, a proper postcolonial poetics in Australia or Chile needs to be an imagination of diversity. We do not negate the diversity, or relegate it to a transcendent absence from our knowledge; rather, we seek it even as it eludes us, and we propose it poetically. The change in Neruda’s poetics between the Residencias and Canto general is an excellent example of a negation of diversity. In the Residencias, 48

Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 106. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 104. 50 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 153–54. 51 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 31. 49

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the suspended grammatical order cultivated series of freely flowing, restless images, which developed wave-like phrasal forms. The poet could observe and speak of the system, but he was unable to organize it. Neruda’s ‘linguistic particle’ enjoyed something of the topological connectivity of song-poetry, where phrases were free to connect up with any number of others, depending on the context of reading or performance. Logically ordered successions of thoughts developing into arguments would start to emerge in the Canto, however, when the Nerudian revolutionary voice sought to take control and impose an order from above. As Prigogine reminds us, the problem of such apparently chaotic and unpredictable becomings cannot be solved by any individual line of sight or trajectory. It can be solved, however, on the level of ensembles: “instability at the level of trajectories leads to stability at the level of statistical descriptions,” where trends can be perceived in more general, ephemeral terms.52 Such statistical descriptions often appear as different kinds of curves on graphs – as waves, in other words, restless signs of the movement of energy from one place to another. Indeed, statistics are themselves extremely poetic, full of spaces and ambiguities, along with metaphoric potential and narrative arcs. Certainly, they can be manipulated by bureaucracies in order to control and organize populations, but such measures are always generalizations typical of the modernist optic: they seek only the smooth lines of averages drawn across graphs, and neglect the standard deviations and uncertainties inherent in the data. If a nomad poetry can behave in a statistical fashion, it is by virtue of its ability to accumulate a myriad of divergences over time – its ability to consistently imagine and plot points of diversity. From Butcher Joe’s rendition of The Two Men to “Ríos de Cisnes,” the accumulative articulations of these poems invoke ancestral territories, which develop into irrepressible demands for justice for the places from which they come. As country-reflexive systems, the poems cluster around particular regions but, like statistical data, they cannot be understood by looking at a single actor, or at a single point of origin (a mythical time = 0). Nomad poems are descriptions of unpredictable, ever-moving systems, ceaseless as sound. The graphic (Lienlaf, Rupailaf), sprawling (Roe, Cobby Eckermann), and fragmented (Huirimilla, Fogarty) accounts of depression, frustration, and violence in the indigenous writing we have seen here conflicts with a central impulse of the lyrical tradition, which is to insist on the quest for harmonious 52

Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 87.

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beauty in the poem, regardless of what is going on in the poem’s environment. After all, the lyric comes from an accompaniment with the lyre and with music: we will recall that he or she who holds the lyre occupies a privileged position between divine and mortal worlds; accordingly, lyrical language can locate its musicality in such a way that it has nothing in common with the sounds of dispossession and violence.53 Joris argues that “beautiful” surrealistic images and lush melodies need to be discarded in order to widen the lyric’s historical perspective. Celan, for example, grappling with the nightmare of modern German history, needed his language to become “more sober, more factual [. . . ] ‘greyer’.”54 The direct effect of giving up melodious sounds and serene imagery is to increase linguistic accuracy and melodic instability, or to move from the smooth structures of graphs to the pockmarked landscape of the data itself. Such language, wrote Celan, “does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”55 The “possible” signals how a rejection of abstracted structures can entail an imagination of diversity, or what Joris calls “an insistence on and quarrying of the word itself,” an imaginative “telescoping” of the word into “numerous new semantic formations.” This leads poetry to acquire some of the features that we have seen exhibited in the contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry we have looked at here: Joris notes that the poems “become richly – at times dizzyingly – polysemic and in the process shed all facile representational and symbolizing functions.”56 Indeed, like a collection of Wright’s, Celan’s earlier, lyrical poems “had been well-defined, self-contained units with individual titles declaring this coherence, mirroring a near-classical modernist faith in the achieved or achievable single masterpiece.” Interestingly, then, in order to read the “greyer” language of Celan’s later work, we need to re-train our reading habits. “One needs to try to read the single poem as a phrase or sentence in a longer composition, while thinking of a given cycle as a completed yet openended sentence”57 – as if we were reading a palimpsest, perhaps, or a poem in a larger, malleable cycle of songs. Where Neruda and Wright were troubled by complexity, and used various devices in order to reduce it to a size contain53

Celan, in Joris, Justifying the Margins, 104. Celan, in Joris, Justifying the Margins, 104. 55 Celan, in Joris, Justifying the Margins, 104. (My emphasis.) 56 Celan, in Joris, Justifying the Margins, 104. 57 Celan, in Joris, Justifying the Margins, 104. 54

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able within a lyric structure,58 indigenous responses to colonialism have sought to rediscover this complexity through its imagination. For these poets, language does not represent country in a separate realm, but the linguistic system is an open and “polysemic” one, resulting in poems which display a startling topological connectivity with other parts of their environment. Beneath the smooth lines of the lyric, on the other hand, those dead, voiceless people in poems like “Macchu Picchu” or “Bora Ring” could not be allowed to speak. For the success of the poems, indigenous people needed to be reduced to symbolic shells (a circle of hard earth, a coral reef); allowing more complexity would have burst the container, or fractured its golden allure.

Echoherence If a nomad poet like Paddy Roe were to formulate an ecopoetics, it would not have become what Muecke calls an “ecofascism.” An ecofascist defines the landscape in terms of conflict and contradiction between various sharp, impermeable borders. For the fascist, the question of belonging becomes paramount: does my neighbour (Nachgebur) belong as much as I do? Thus, liminal figures that go between borders, such as feral animals or weeds, need to be exterminated “on the basis of a general principle of not belonging or of competition with good pure life forms.” Roe, conversely, sees feral animals not so much as an impure or ambiguous category as each one in its singular trajectory – each has a right to live and move between places, just like anything else. Things are valued for their capacity to give life, not restrict it or take it away. At Minarinj, on the Lurujarri Trail, Roe would point to a stand of three or four acacias on the sand dunes. Muecke recalls: What is extraordinary about these trees is that they don’t belong here; they are montaged into the landscape: this gives them a kind of sacred power. A positive one, like you wouldn’t go and cut them down because they are being ecologically anomalous or useless, rather, you would be charmed by this anomaly or singularity. And the next thing you know there is a story about them.59

58

Neruda, it could be argued, took this reductive process to its extreme by writing his Elemental Odes: here, reality was divided into a collection of discrete molecules, each of which was simplified to the extent that it could be translated into a highly transparent and syllabically facile diction. 59 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 50.

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In other words, Roe’s ecopoetics would be decidedly integrative. Here, the acacias’ abnormality and charm still initiate their “generative distancing” from the surrounding flora. However, their anomalous status does not render them solitary; rather, it produces the need for their integration into one of Roe’s stories. In Roe’s ecopoetics, therefore, differentiation and coherence are not at odds with one another; rather, a new environment needs to be imagined through a poetics so that a measure of coherence can be achieved between its different parts. Of course, this does not necessarily imply some facile form of laissez-faire ecological management (in which we let people do whatever they like to the environment – including introduce feral species – on the basis that we need to value all lives equally, regardless of their characteristics). Again, the crucial concept here is diversity. Diversity is valued for its capacity to keep things moving, to create and sustain life. Without careful attention to the needs of every part of an ecosystem, however, we could allow one species to completely overrun everything else. Three or four acacias can be charming, but an enormous, corporate acacia plantation would depress and overwhelm Roe’s country. This is why a nomadic ecopoetics needs to be based on the capacity of the poet’s voice to cohere with what surrounds her. A vibrant materialism of things-in-general necessitates a communal approach to poetry, in which poetic expression cannot originate solely in the body of a single poet. The danger for the poet is that she might neglect the limits of her own capacity to comprehend and articulate such a system, and might attempt to proclaim a clear understanding of the entire system. Such a poet will then flood the system like a contaminant, destroying its complex ecology. But if the poetic voice is beholden to the poet’s own physiological limits, then even a great diversity of similarly limited voices might commingle without any one voice losing connection to (and responsibility for) the materials through which it speaks. If one is to speak of all life, as Neruda surely intends in his Canto general, then the elements in the surrounding world must somehow fit together, despite their different types, so as to form a life-process. As with Roe’s stories, there may indeed be heroes in such systems, but the system must necessarily override the role of the particular hero, or, rather, the hero must be made heroic precisely by being but a single participant.60 The self, therefore, must be a function of its world. I am saying that country must be able to speak.

60

Paraphrasing Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 119.

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Of course, the purpose of this book has not been to provide an exhaustive catalogue of all kinds of nomad poetics in all kinds of literatures. Nevertheless, it is important to reiterate the point that nomadism is not specific to any particular group of people; rather, it can reveal itself at various times and in different places. By way of a closing statement, I want to show how a nomadic poetics might structure a dialogue with which indigenous and settler poets can begin to re-imagine the terms of use for Australian and Chilean ecologies. A brief discussion of a poem from the Australian poet Peter Minter’s latest book, blue grass, will reveal some of the features of this structure. I refer in particular to the following extract from “is it is,” a long poem in five parts:61 The earth prolongs mutation, rumbles for our listening to plants as if it is just animal, humus, bone whistle that we speak with, or just love & die then usurped for dwelling here. I will listen to you & the world’s prolific nose, refuse indifference as the winds’ press & topic proliferates indifferently, costs parables of fallen trunks. Cumuli hoist and the sky leans fast, traces over countries Loded deep with marrow, crescent spines & ruins made fecund. I’ll follow too, as we free and offer blue cosmos caught on winter’s stakes walk way along the sky’s arc, echo & cohere.

What one notes immediately in much of Minter’s work, and certainly here in “is it is,” is the dramatic confluence of a wide variety of “language matter”: forms of perception, evocations of sounds, smells and sights – all mingle. Important, too, is the manner in which none of these perceptive modes or ‘matters’ is given primacy: there is no coercion of sense into a single optic. The speaker isn’t a central point of accumulation, but instead engenders various

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Peter Minter, blue grass (Cambridge: Salt, 2006): 35–39.

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open-ended questions: “What will grow from me? What will I become?”62 Crucial here is the sampling or recycling of other texts: in the manner of a rhizome spreading out through the soil, blue grass draws on numerous other poetic ecologies for energy. In so doing, the book creates a layering of referencing and quotation that works in much the same way as composting, rotting down to create new matter. “is it is” relies on the historical genealogies of places, but it never entrenches itself in just one. Fragments collide and coalesce in order to speak as palimpsest; the land speaks as polysemous, historical layers. The heavy textures of the language, its mineral-like density, firmly anchor the poem to the earth: here, no amount of abstraction will allow the poet to drift off into space. Yet there remains a question of where, exactly, we are upon this earth. The poem is ‘here’, but it can move, quite mercurially, over to ‘there’. The reciprocity of listening (“our listening to plants. .. I will listen to you”), following (“I’ll follow too”), and echoing (“echo & cohere”) form part of what is most certainly a nomadic poetics: we move together with the poem; there is no final destination. Each image in “is it is” is but glimpsed as part of a larger process of communal song (as the book’s title suggests, Minter’s poem is most certainly musical). As in any song, the voices are important in blue grass; language isn’t abstracted from the context of its being spoken. Rather, voices interact closely with a host of materials, all of which are widely dispersed; we walk “along the sky’s arc” imagining a deceptively simple phrase that has the potential to provoke infinite bifurcations (“echo & cohere”), in which 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The voice hurtles towards the rock face and collides; some of it remains; the rest travels back as “echo”; some of the “echo” fans out and dissolves on the return journey; the rest of it keeps going; finally, this remnant “co” returns to “here,” the locality of the voice which sent it forth.

In other words, ‘co’ is part of a dialogic process in which ‘co’ + ‘here’ form a coherence. Locality (or ‘here’) is non-limited, defined only by the velocities of energies that travel between it and the other localities to which it connects.

62

Peter Minter, “ ‘ Such sweet things out of such corruptions’: On Pollution and Ecopoetics” (doctoral dissertation, University of Technology, Sydney, 2010): 211.

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Minter’s poem is echological: a moving poetics that immediately disperses into the surrounding field like waves of sound. We are not rooted in a location, relentlessly sucking up groundwater; we are, rather, speakers of matter, always communicating the transformation of energies across multiple subjectivities. For Deleuze and Guattari, meaning is only the product of ongoing expression; meaning, therefore, is attunement to this process of translation and transformation.63 An echological poetics is not “an attempt to transform into language an experience of dwelling upon the earth”;64 rather, it is an expression of country in language. In the present study, we have walked through a fecund assortment of materials, languages, and sounds, seeing that any ecological, postcolonial situation is necessarily dependent on waves of echological coherence.

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Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 15. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000; London: Picador, 2001): 201.

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to grapple with the complex, vastly diverse, and often frustrating landscapes of the New Worlds of Australia and Chile (and elsewhere), we could try to engage more often in forms of nomadism. This wouldn’t require us to transform ourselves somehow into populations of wandering hunters and gatherers; we might think about nomadism in less than purely literal terms. By making our ‘carbon footprints’ lighter, for example, we are attempting to mimic the soft steps of those who wore no shoes prior to Australia’s colonization. By dealing with problems that extend across a variety of locales – whether in rural or urban or ‘wilderness’ areas, or in Australia or Chile or elsewhere – we are encouraging the wide-ranging distribution of our attention, and of our capital. We might also remind ourselves of the mineral and vegetable composition of our cities, of the bodies which build and inhabit them, and of the bodies which lie beneath them. In doing so, we might recover our places within intricate ecological networks and follow pathways that extend from the cities into the lands that sustain them. The first time I was in Broome, Richard Hunter, Paddy Roe’s grandson, told me: N OUR QUEST

It’s a choice you make, to stay in the city or to know the country. And if you wanna know the country all you gotta do is walk, cause you’ll get there eventually.

It’s time to place a limit on the first-person voice, to stop pretending that the best way to experience the world is by wandering through it alone. Paddy Roe’s story of Langgur the possum is a reminder that to desire solitude in country is to wilfully imagine its death.

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Appendix A An Introduction to Mapuche Poetry

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with European colonization of the New World, invading European powers did not recognize Mapuche land-use. On the one hand, they did not acknowledge the physical presence of Mapuche people in much of their territory; on the other, they ignored the particular characteristics and patterns of Mapuche life and land-use. Particularly during a time of renewed acquisition of territories during the mid-1800s, the winka did not distinguish between the concepts of ‘dwelling’ and ‘possession’. Vast tracts of territory, although not inhabited permanently, were useful for, and used by, the Mapuche for economic purposes. For the nascent Chilean state, however, those lands that did not contain permanent dwellings were considered vacant and uncultivated, and were thus available for acquisition. Such criteria failed to take into account the fact that the pattern of even the most sedentary Mapuche settlements (like those of the Huilliche) generally favoured lake and river edges, whereas forests were rarely populated, and were essentially areas for the collection of plant species, hunting, and the grazing of livestock.1 The ül, or song-poem, is considered the primary antecedent of the contemporary Mapuche poem.2 Prior to European colonization, composition and recital of ül, along with the sacred tayel, constituted the entirety of Mapuche poetic practice. Coupled with the oral rendition of short stories, or epeu, Mapuche verbal traditions were purely oral. The ül are almost exclusively improvisations, created at specific moments to celebrate or recognize particular events.3 Usually referring to a certain emotion, or to a feeling about a certain

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S IS OFTEN THE CASE

Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 515. García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 26. 3 Carrasco, “Poesía mapuche actual: de la apropriación hacia la innovación cultural,” 75. 2

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person or thing, they are sung in order to make these emotions manifest.4 While the content of the songs themselves is improvised, the ül do exhibit structural similarities, or particular forms that are re-actualized on each occasion. Generally, a classical grammar is merged with more personal metaphors. For this reason, Hugo Carrasco writes, each ül constitutes something of a communal inheritance, and although the best ülkantufe (‘song-poet’) might boast about his expressive abilities, he would hardly think that his songs are his own exclusive property. On the contrary, the ülkantufe sees the performance of an ül as the re-actualization of a tradition, the integrity of which is to be guarded with the utmost loyalty (like many Aboriginal song-poems). The task of the ülkantufe, then, is to grant the song-poem the best qualities of his voice. The ülkantun (‘singing of the ül’) powerfully reconfirms the social cohesion of the community: the song becomes an axis around which the party, meeting, or manifestation achieves solidarity and meaning.5 Generally termed oralidad absoluta (‘absolute orality’), this oral poetic practice still has much contemporary significance as a form of intra-cultural discourse that maintains the strength and vitality of Mapuche communities.6 After the re-invasion of southern Chile and the forced integration of many Mapuche people into towns or reservations in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a second phase of Mapuche literature began. Known as oralidad escrita (‘written orality’), it refers to the written translations of ül into Spanish by non-indigenous researchers: Mapuche poetry moved from a purely intracultural context into intercultural ones.7 At the same time as they were being removed from their traditional lands, however, the Mapuche needed to find ways to continue to maintain their culture as well as to acquire those most necessary of tools, such as the Spanish language, that would allow them to argue for their rights and carve out their presence in the colonial landscape.8 By the middle of the twentieth century, then, a third phase of literature

4

Montecino, “Literatura Mapuche: oralidad y escritura,” 158–59. Carrasco, “Poesía mapuche actual: de la apropriación hacia la innovación cultural,” 78. 6 García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 26. 7 This phase might be aligned with the process which has made famous the songs in T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia and, of course, with the process in which Ray Keogh was engaged when transcribing Butcher Joe’s nurlu. 8 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 31. 5

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emerged. Escritura propia (‘actual writing’), refers to work by Mapuche authors who have conceived and generated their own written texts. Some escritura propia is bilingual – or has a ‘double register’ – and therefore has a highly explicit intercultural character. Whether bilingual or not, a defining characteristic of escritura propia is that it traverses various cultural spaces.9 We could place the stories of Paddy Roe between the second and third phase of Mapuche poetic evolution because Roe’s stories, like oralidad escrita, were spoken rather than written by Roe. However, in the manner in which they were spoken – that is, to Stephen Muecke, who recorded them, then wrote them down, with the explicit intention of publishing the work in book-form – they also exhibit something of the intercultural characteristics of the third phase. Of the two Mapuche poets whose work I focused on in this book, Paulo Huirimilla is much more vagrant in his movement away from the traditional structures of Mapuche song. Leonel Lienlaf, by contrast, achieves more of a syncretism between the song structures of the ül and contemporary written forms. Like many Mapuche poets, Lienlaf and Huirimilla are involved in projects that involve a rediscovery and re-actualization of their ancestral roots in the contemporary world, as well as in a return to the source of their cultural identity as a way of recuperating culture. Here, the poem is an attempt to maintain and protect Mapuche tradition. Also apparent in many Mapuche poems is a form of questioning intended to edify social and cultural structures by demanding the recognition of Mapuche history and the validation of their values and traditional knowledges.10 Consequently, poets like Lienlaf and Huirimilla are writing from a space of multiple potentialities: they are reclaiming cultural heritage while at the same time attempting to contest their marginal social positions, thereby overcoming a sense of fragmentation and disorientation felt by many Mapuche in the present.11 Quite similar to the more public discourse of Mapuche political activists, poetry is at the forefront of cultural resistance.12 We can divide the present corpus of Mapuche poets along generational lines. 1977–80 marked the emergence of the first major group of Mapuche poets in escritura propia, who published for the first time with Chilean and 9

García, Carrasco & Contreras, Crítica situada, 27. Crítica situada, 30. 11 Crítica situada, 30–31. 12 Crítica situada, 31. 10

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Spanish publishing houses. The most prominent member of this group is Elicura Chihuailaf (1952–), who to this day remains the most widely known and honoured Mapuche poet. Following his success came poets such as Lienlaf (1969–), Jaime Huenún (1967–), and Graciela Huinao (1956–). In more recent years, poets such as Bernardo Colipán (1966–) and Huirimilla (1973–) have moved into the very vanguard of Chilean avant-garde poetics and culture. With the publication of the Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü (‘Twenty Mapuche Poets’) anthology in 2003,13 Mapuche territory was established as an essential part, albeit not necessarily a complacent member, of Chilean literature. The contrast in Mapuche poetry between poets who are carefully oriented towards tradition and those who wish to mix elements of this tradition with foreign elements reflects something of a rift in Mapuche society at large. The last fifty years have been a time of “frustrated integration” of the Mapuche people into the Chilean state, and have involved two distinct periods. The more important period was not initiated by the state itself, but saw the rise to prominence of multiple indigenous movements and organizations, which, in the face of integrationist policies, began to forcefully demand the recognition of their presence and their specific cultural affiliations. Lienlaf emerged as part of this cultural renaissance, and as such his work very effectively demarcates lines of difference between the Mapuche and the winka, and between traditional country and the spaces of modernity. The second, more recent phase sees increasing globalization contributing to a dramatic shift in the way these categories are understood. While a confluence of international discourses added yet further fervour to the fight for indigenous rights, the main effect of globalization, according to Bengoa, was an “indigenous emergence” not only in Chile but in all of Latin America. In place of older indigenous voices, therefore, a younger generation would emerge with a concern not only for lo Mapuche but also for indigenous people across the continent.14 Indeed, as we see with Huirimilla, some of these voices would begin to look even further. Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that there is in no sense a homogeneous collection of written styles in, or attitudes to, Mapuche poetic practices. This is hardly surprising: in the Mapuche community as a whole (if we can speak of it as a whole) there exists enormous cultural diversity stemming from 13

Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü (Veinte poetas mapuches): edición bilingüe, ed. Jaime L. Huenún (Santiago de Chile: L O M , 2003). 14 Bengoa, La memoria olvidada, 34.

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major differences of geography and history. Land-use, territory, and the grade of acculturation to Western norms have been major factors in identifying and differentiating cultural associations and levels of westernization. However, James Park argues that this is of less interest to a discussion of a contemporary Mapuche poetics than the possibility that, across such divisions, what is taking place today in the south of Chile is the development of a new identity, or an “ethno-genesis.”15

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James Park, “Discursos y poética mapuche-huilliche actual: cambio generacional y diferencia territorial,” Alpha (Osorno) 24 (July 2007), http://www.scielo.cl/scielo .php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22012007000100009&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 3 October 2008).

Appendix B “Ríos de cisnes,” by Paulo Huirimilla

I. El río de cisnes que baja su espuma Al mar de la página blanca Hurga la roja cresta y el cuello negro En los signos de la lamilla. Gaviotas vocean en el arrebol del otoño Que ha deshojado los árboles. El río de cisnes ha disminuido su caudal Su plumaje se lo ha llevado la negra marea. II . Los ensangrentados cisnes del rio Ya no pueden vender sus verduras Pues las aguas con que riegan Están forradas con metal. Aterrizan aquellas aves en el patio De un niño cisne poeta quien lo envuelve Con su blanca mirada. III . Mi hijo Ave Veloz que amanece dibuja Cuatro aves de negro cuello Una es su madre quien lo lleva arriba de su espalda Otro soy yo mismo quien sigue y dirige el agua El viento y las nubes del paisaje: Un ave de estas somos ensimismados por el sol en el dibujo.

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IV . El signo del cisne del que habla Martínez Aparece y no como significante Troquelado también es el hombre entonces Que ve en la orilla del camino Cuatro criaturas volando Debajo del mismo lenguaje. V. El lago formado por la sangre de Licarayén Hundida el agua y la tierra Expoliadas A cuyas aves canta Lucila En el idioma de los Licanantay y del mundo Porque sólo quedan ellos Otros Han sido desplazados por ley y carabina A la cordillera pelada para que olvidemos Lo nuestro. VI . Mallarmé tu proyecto poético absoluto Pudo tal vez ser Escribir sobre miles de cisnes en invierno Con múltiples palabras en una sola página O decir de memoria poemas Que representen los signos de la imaginación Como Rubén Darío o Alfonsina Storni Cuyo sueño frente al mar se respira en silencio. VII . Oye Lucila Fantasma ya he subido Al huemul al hombro Y al otro lado a un Pingangu Color albino Mutro le decimos Hijo de un ave encanto Que ha salido al borde del lago

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Appendix B: “Río de cisnes,” by Paulo Huirimilla

Amar a la gansería Que no vuela en los humedales Ahora cubierto de pesado metal. VII I . Doy vueltas en el desierto de la isla como el cisne negro de cresta roja. Alrededor vuelo buscando la laguna imaginada. He visto en esto otros cisnes negros de cresta roja. Ver también el mundo con sus cuatro direcciones. A una la veo danzar y cantar como lo hacía su abuela y las abuelas de sus abuelas y pintar una tela blanca con muchos puntos de colores que son los sueños paralelos de mis abuelos desaparecidos quien hablan por mi saliva. Han robado a los hijos de los cisnes negros de cresta roja Lo han hecho volar a las ciudades y cuidar su ganado Aves hermanas quienes no han vuelto. Que naden ahora los cisnes Koori con todas sus serpientes del arco iris Que las han creado Que busquen por debajo del agua el alga Que las hará respirar eternamente contra el olvido. El cisne negro de cresta roja se me aparece en otra isla en una página Pero su color es más luminoso que la rebeldía. IX . Lenon veo dos cisnes completamente blancos en el Thamesis Yo les canto mientras se levanta la lluvia y la policía recoge los cuerpos De los enajenados de este mundo quienes ven aquellos signos que nadan por el paisaje de esta lúgubre ciudad vigilada.

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X. De dos andan en el mar los negros cuellos Y los cuerpos nadan por entre los sargazos y la página negra La lluvia ácida moja su plumaje y ellos se picotean buscando parte del arco iris en el agua suben a orillar el río y se bañan después de la lluvia esta nuestra ave que un poeta ha dicho cortarle el cuello y un músico la ha hecho danzar en el lago yo mismo las llamo desde la playa de los petrificados alerces y ellas nos siguen y emprenden vuelo por el aire cubierto de humo y ceniza.

Rivers of Swans1 I. The river of swans sprays foam On the ocean of the white page, Searching for the red crest and black neck In the signs of the lamilla. Seagulls shout out in the red glow of autumn Leaves stripped from the trees. The river of swans has receded Its plumage taken by the black tide. II . The bloodstained swans of the river Can sell their vegetables no longer: The waters that irrigate Are full of metals. The birds land in the courtyard Of a young swan, a poet who envelopes the patio With his white gaze.

1

English version first published in Cooke, “Two Mapuche Poets: Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla (introduction and translations),” 58–62.

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Appendix B: “Río de cisnes,” by Paulo Huirimilla

III . My son, Ave Veloz, awakes to draw Four birds with black necks One is his mother who takes him up on her back Another is of me, who follows and channels the water The wind and clouds of the landscape: We are absorbed By the sun in the picture. IV . The sign of the swan of which Martínez talks Appears but without meaning So the man is also die-cast Who sees from the shore Four creatures flying Beneath the same language. V. The lake filled by the blood of Licarayén The sunken water and earth Exploited Birds to whom Lucila sings In the language of the Licanantay and the world Because only they remain Others Have been displaced by law and rifle To the mountains stripped so that we might forget What is ours. VI . Mallarmé your entire poetic project Could have been, perhaps, To write about thousands of swans in winter With multiple words on only one page Or to speak from memory poems That represent the signs of the imagination Like Rubén Darío or Alfonsina Storni Whose dream before an ocean breathes in silence.

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VII . Listen Lucila Fantasma I’ve already lifted The serf onto my shoulder And onto the other one a Pingangu Colour albino Mutro we say Son of an enchanted bird Who has left the bank of the lake For folly Who doesn’t fly in the wetlands Now covered with heavy metals. VII I . I turn around in the island’s desert like the black swan with red crest. I fly around looking for the inland sea. I have seen it in these other black swans with red crests. To also see the world with its four directions. I see one dance and sing the way her grandmother did and the grandmothers of her grandmothers and she paints a white fabric with many spots of colour which become the parallel dreams of my kidnapped grandparents who speak through my sweat. They have stolen the children of the black swans with red crests They have been made to fly to the cities and care for their cattle Bird sisters who have not returned. May you swim now, Koori swans with all your rainbow snakes That you’ve created May you search beneath the water for the seaweed That will allow your snakes to breathe eternally against oblivion. The black swan of red crest appears to me on another island on a page But its colour is more luminous than rebellion. IX . Lennon sees two completely white swans in the Thames I sing to them while the rain thickens

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and the police collect the bodies Of the world’s alienated, who see those signs swimming across the landscape of this gloomy guarded city. X. In pairs the black necks walk on the ocean And the bodies swim between the black page and the sargassos The acid rain wets their feathers and they peck at themselves searching for part of the rainbow in the water they climb to the river’s edge to bathe after the rain these our birds whose necks should be cut says a poet a musician made them dance on the lake myself I call them from the beach of the petrified cypress and they follow us and launch into flight through the air choked with fumes and ash.

Rubén Darío (1867 – 1916), born in Nicaragua, the most important modernist in Hispanic literature. la lamilla – a coffee-coloured seaweed eaten by the swans. Licarayén – a young virgin sacrificed in order to calm the fury of Añuñauca Volcano (today known more commonly as Osorno Volcano). Licanantay – indigenous people from the north of Chile. Lucila – Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, Gabriela Mistral’s real name. Juan Luis Martínez – Chilean poet; says that in a poem it is only the sign that is important. Mutro – (Mapuzugun) an albino swan, which is generally of a golden colour. petrified cypress – the alerce is known as the Patagonian cypress, common in Southern Chile. Pingangu – (Mapuzugun) a swan. Alfonsina Storni (1892 – 1938) a major Argentinean poet of the postmodernist movement. Ave Veloz – ‘Fast Bird’, another name for Lautaro.

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/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0071-17132005000100011&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 16 March 2009) Roe, Paddy, & Stephen Muecke. Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983; Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1985). Rojas, Gonzalo, & Peter Minter, ed. Espejo de tierra (Earth Mirror) (Canberra: Chilean Embassy, 2008). Rose, Deborah Bird. “Dance of the Ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal Religion of Place,” in Experiences of Place, ed. Mary N. Macdonald (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2003): 163–86. ——. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1992). ——. “Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between,” Religion & Literature 40.1 (Spring 2008): 109–22. ——. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004). ——. “What if the Angel of History were a Dog?” Cultural Studies Review 12.1 (March 2006): 67–78. Rosenfeld, Andrée. “Structural Convergence in Arrernte Art and Song,” in Many Exchanges: Archaeology, History, Community and the Work of Isabel McBryde, ed. Ingereth Macfarlane, Mary–Jane Mountain & Robert Paton (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 2005): 171–84. Rothenberg, Jerome. Pre-Faces & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1981). Rowe, Noel. Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics, ed. Bernadette Brennan (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2008). Rutherford, Jennifer. “Kairos for a Wounded Country,” in Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces, ed. Jennifer Rutherford & Barbara Holloway (Crawley, W A : U W A Publishing, 2010): 1–11. ——. “Undwelling; Or Reading Bachelard in Australia,” in Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces, ed. Jennifer Rutherford & Barbara Holloway (Crawley, W A : U W A Publishing, 2010): 113–25. Ryan, Gig. “Uncertain Possession: The Politics and Poetry of Judith Wright,” Overland 154 (1999): 27–33. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1996). Schopf, Federico. “El problema de la conversión poética en la obra de Pablo Neruda,” Atenea 488 (2003): 47–78. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1998). Stavans, Ilan, ed. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). Strehlow, T.G.H. Songs of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971).

320

SPEAKING

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

Suárez, Eulogio. Neruda Total (Santiago de Chile: América Morena, 1994). Tarn, Nathaniel. The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2007). Tedlock, Dennis. “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” boundary 2 3.3 (Spring 1975): 707–28. ——. “On Translation of Style in Oral Narrative,” Journal of American Folklore 84/331 (January–March 1971): 114–33. ——. “Toward an Oral Poetics,” New Literary History 8.3 (Spring 1977): 507–19. Trujillo, Carlos. “Poesía para todos: Paulo Huirimilla,” Chiloeweb (2006), http://www .chiloeweb.com/Datos/Noticias/Noticias.asp?No_Id=200636001 (accessed 21 April 2010). Turpin, Myfany. “The Poetics of Central Australian Song,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2007): 100–15. Vial, Sara. “Neruda viaja a Inglaterra (o entrevista con terremoto),” Atenea 489 (2004): 123–36. Vidal, Virginia. “Sobre lucha y poesía del pueblo Mapuche,” Araucaría de Chile 12/37 (1987): 158–81. Walker, Shirley. Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright’s Poetry (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1991). Warrior, Robert. “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn,” Cultural Studies Review 15.2 (2009): 119–30. Watson, Christine. Piercing the Ground: Balgo Women’s Image Making and Relationship to Country (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003). Watson, Sam. “From The Kadaitcha Sung,” in Macquarie P E N Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, ed. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008): 131–33. Woese, Carl R. “A New Biology for a New Century,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 68.2 (June 2004): 173–86. Wright, Judith. Because I Was Invited (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1975). ——. Collected Poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994). ——. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1965). ——. Selected Poems: Five Senses (1976; A & R Modern Poets; North Ryde, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1989). Zagala, Stephen. “Aesthetics: a place I’ve never seen,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 20–43.

a

Index

“A mi partido” (Neruda, Canto General) 95

Aboriginal and Mapuche cultures (comparisons and consanguinities) 1, 5, 13, 15, 16, 228, 273 —ancestral identity 31 —ecologies 292 —literary creativity 19, 23, 273 —notions of country 31 —orality 20, 267 —philosophies of language 18 —poetics 20, 35, 226, 260, 262, 263, 265, 269, 273, 278, 281, 286, 287

—poetry anthology 227, 280 —(song-)poetry 20, 22, 23, 24, 32, 163, 267, 269, 270, 274, 278, 285, 287, 289 —spaces 5 —See also: song-poetry Aboriginal Australians 115–53, 157, 189–221, 227–30, 237–47, 265–66 and passim —and Judith Wright 39–71 Aboriginality 13, 63, 142, 196, 219, 238 Abram, David 34, 103, 104, 127, 186 abstraction 48, 49, 53, 59, 105, 293 acculturation 301 actualization, as transcriptional principle 147, 148, 163, 187, 238, 244, 298, 299

adjectives, absence from Aboriginal poetry 122, 124 adjectives, in Neruda 92, 98, 108 affect, in reception of song-poetry 18, 29, 49, 143, 146, 153, 208, 273 after-modern condition 19, 20, 24 Agamben, Giorgio 28, 216 a-grammaticality 93, 239, 245, 260 Aitken, Adam 238, 239 Alberti, Rafael 75, 82 “Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Las” (Neruda) —See under: “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” Álvarez–Santullano, Pilar, & Eduardo Barraza 233, 253, 256 anaphora 78, 79, 80, 193, 204, 284 ancestors, significance of, in indigenous cultures 8, 25, 30, 105, 108, 110, 111, 119, 129, 131, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 181, 192, 194, 201, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 243, 244, 248, 249, 251, 253, 266, 271, 285, 288, 299 Aranda people 61, 126 Araucana, La (Ercilla) 4 Araucanía 9, xiii, 3, 4, 87, 88, 110, 155, 156, 181, 187, 258, 262 Árbol de agua (Huirimilla) 233 “Árbol de agua” (Huirimilla) 247 Arendt, Hannah 216, 219

322

SPEAKING

Arnhem Land 14, 122 Arrernte people 124 Ashcroft, Bill 21 assemblage, principle of, in performance 17, 28, 29, 76, 96, 99, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130, 133, 142, 149, 160, 161, 173, 204, 267, 276, 287 “At Cooloola” (Wright) 40, 41 “Atardecer” (Lienlaf) 181, 182 Australia, and Judith Wright 39–71 Australian–Chilean commonalities 223 —See under: Aboriginal–Mapuche cultures (comparisons and consanguinities) “Ave de tu Corazón, El” (Zurita) 164, 187, 188 Azul, in Mapuche cosmology 110, 161, 162, 178, 235, 236, 243, 285 —See also: Dreaming, in Mapuche culture “Balance Earth 20057 Corroborate Love” (Fogarty) 228 balangan (Aboriginal ancestral spirits) 119, 125, 131, 132, 133, 136 Bannon, Kevin 25 Barwick, Linda 125, 127, 133; & Allan Marett 124, 129 Bate, Jonathan 294 becoming, ontology and poetics of 6, 29, 37, 58, 67, 92, 93, 96, 99, 126, 130, 137, 153, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 183, 192, 208, 211, 223, 224, 230, 240, 241, 249, 250, 252, 256, 258, 260, 261, 263, 269, 270, 279, 286, 287, 288 Bengoa, José 3, 4, 14, 107, 158, 183, 232, 297, 298, 300 Benjamin, Walter 218 Bennett, Jane 17, 27, 28, 49, 67, 278

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

Benterrak, Kim, Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe, Reading the Country 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 26, 115, 118, 125, 131, 144, 145, 148, 193, 194, 195, 199, 206, 207, 211 Berndt, R.M. 116, 128 Bernstein, Charles 259, 260, 268 Biblical language 43, 44, 46, 97, 98 “Bina Open Hearts Precendents” (Fogarty) 228 binarism, cultural 7, 64, 89, 109, 220, 275

black swan, Australian 224, 226 black swan, Chilean 224, 226, 227, 239, 309 Blanchot, Maurice 1 blue grass (Minter) 292, 293 Blundell, Valda, & Robert Layton 116 bora ring 44, 45 “Bora Ring” (Wright) 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 64, 66, 290 Bos, Robert 14 boundaries 2, 21, 26, 37, 116, 127, 160, 192, 220, 239, 267 Bourassa, Alan 18, 148 Bradley, John 28, 121, 126, 144, 208, 270

bricolage 198, 199, 200, 245, 246, 267, 270, 275 Brock, Werner 60 Brotherston, Gordon 42, 89, 91, 100, 108

Bruns, Gerald L. 128, 141 Bulu songs 119, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 196, 286 Butcher Joe —See under: Nangan 132 “Caballero solo” (Neruda) 77, 78, 79 Calbuco 232

a

323

Index

“Camino” (Lienlaf) 167 Caniguan, Jaqueline 158, 159, 170, 176 cante jondo (flamenco) 146 “Cántico” (Huirimilla) 233 “Canto a la cascada” (Huirimilla) 255 Canto de guerrero (Huirimilla) 252 Canto general (Neruda) 2, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 186, 260, 269, 271, 287, 291; “A mi partido” 95; “I . A Lamp on Earth” 2, 85, 96, 98, 99, 100; “I I I . The Conquistadors” 2, 89; “I V . The Liberators” 84, 111; “V I I . Canto general de Chile” 87; “X I I . The Rivers of Song” 75, 112; “X I V . The Great Ocean” 92; “X V . I Am” 90, 92, 99, 106 Canto y poesía mapuche (Lienlaf) 164 Capra, Fritjof 15 “Carnicería ‘La Realidad’” (Huirimilla) 250

Carrasco, Hugo 173, 297, 298; & Selva Mora 251 Carrasco, Iván M. 164, 166, 167, 173, 176, 183, 184 Carter, Paul 16, 40, 117, 126, 127, 141, 142, 148, 153, 197, 205, 206, 211, 212, 220, 221, 269; The Lie of the Land 126, 127, 142 Casey, E.S. 118 Cassidy, Bonny 40 Celan, Paul 11, 271, 289 Central Australian Aboriginals 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132, 135, 139, 147

Ceremonias (Huenún) 253 Chambers, Ross, Room for Maneuver 205, 216, 217 Chávez, Guillermo 163

che (Mapuche = people) 1, 169, 171, 181, 188 Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve 237, 238, 244 Cherry Pickers, The (Gilbert) 162 Chihuailaf, Elicura 109, 110, 158, 176, 177, 183, 187, 236, 300; Recado confidencial a los chilenos 5, 30, 157, 159, 161, 162, 166, 225 “Child, The” (Wright) 53, 55, 56, 279 Chile 155–88, 224–27, 231–37, 247–59, 297–301 —and Neruda 73, 74, 75, 83, 85, 88, 90, 92 —See also: colonization, Spanish; Mapuche Christianity 15, 98, 247 Clarke, Patricia, & Meredith McKinney 55

Clunies Ross, Margaret 122 Colebrook, Claire 7 Colipán, Bernardo 236, 300 collaborative orality 242 collectivity, indigenous cultural 1, 16, 83, 85, 90, 103, 123, 160, 162, 176, 230, 259, 287 colonialism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16, 23, 32, 33, 39, 40, 42, 44, 47, 65, 142, 144, 157, 175, 176, 183, 218, 230, 243, 244, 253, 254, 258, 271, 286, 289, 298 colonization 1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 14, 16, 20, 27, 48, 62, 64, 71, 84, 107, 157, 164, 167, 178, 180, 181, 188, 199, 216, 218, 228, 230, 249, 268, 272, 274, 278, 280, 282, 295, 297, 298 —and Neruda 74 —Spanish 2, 84, 89, 109, 110, 158, 253

Columbus, Christopher 2

324

SPEAKING

communalism, indigenous 53, 116, 117, 142, 149, 173, 200, 204, 218, 241, 244, 245, 253, 256, 257, 262, 267, 271, 291, 293, 298 communism 83, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 103, 110, 112, 229 Cooke, Stuart 174, 252, 306 corroboree 43, 44, 212, 242 country 7, 2, 7, 8, 9, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 42, 50, 63, 64, 66, 73, 76, 87, 88, 106, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141, 144, 147, 150, 155, 156, 161, 166, 171, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 206, 208, 211, 213, 214, 217, 219, 220, 221, 223, 229, 237, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 266, 274, 282, 288, 290, 291, 294, 295, 300 country and western songs 119 “Creación” (Lienlaf) 169 creacionismo (Huidobro) 274 creationist poetics (Neruda) 274 Creeley, Robert 17, 35, 52 creole, Chilean 173, 247, 249, 257 Crnkoviü, Gordana P. 146, 147 cultural evolution 261 curse song, Aboriginal 43, 121 Daly, Herman E. 277 Darío, Rubén 90, 256, 309 Dark Side of the Dream (Hodge & Mishra) 21, 23, 142, 149, 196, 198, 211, 219 Dark Writing (Carter) 16, 117, 141, 148, 153, 197, 206, 211, 212, 220, 221 Darkie Point 48, 49 Darwinism 3, 239, 261

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

de Landa, Manuel 16, 33, 34, 99, 118, 123, 129, 137, 163, 204, 205, 261, 278

de-centering the self 258 deforestation, in Chile 181, 182 Deleuze & Guattari, Deleuze, Gilles 6, 7, 8, 16, 18, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28, 36, 37, 61, 85, 95, 97, 98, 137, 148, 159, 208, 230, 249, 259, 260, 262, 269, 275, 276, 279, 293; & Félix Guattari 29, 59, 61, 120, 159, 197, 198, 219, 293; A Thousand Plateaus 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 36, 37, 96, 97, 98, 116, 121, 123, 133, 160, 181, 220, 221, 223, 242, 245, 250, 255, 261, 265, 276, 278 deterritorialization (Deleuze) 230, 250, 259

dialogue 5, 24, 40, 100, 199, 211, 217, 293; between man and environment 1, 12, 19, 24, 67, 124, 125, 153, 163, 164, 187, 198, 236, 251, 291 difference 3, 6, 13, 23, 34, 36, 52, 66, 68, 73, 83, 90, 93, 94, 95, 99, 102, 127, 132, 136, 143, 148, 169, 190, 207, 219, 220, 239, 241, 260, 263, 267, 268, 269, 300 Disch, Lisa Jane 216, 219 discursive heterogeneity 175, 176 dispossession 1, 5, 65, 181, 216, 228, 230, 278, 289, 298 “Diurno doliente” (Neruda) 76 diversity 24, 33, 66, 96, 98, 99, 110, 113, 115, 130, 132, 176, 196, 268, 270, 274, 277, 278, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 300 Djabirr-Djabirr people 8, 26, 190 “Djaringgalong” (Roe) 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 212, 213

a

325

Index

Dodson, Michael 13 “Donkey Devil” (Roe) 209 Donne, John 98 Dreaming, among the Mapuche 159, 165, 166, 184 Dreaming, The (Australian Aboriginal) 8, 14, 17, 25, 26, 30, 62, 64, 110, 119, 124, 128, 129, 136, 141, 161, 192, 194, 202, 215, 220, 221, 226 “Dulpai – Ila Ngari Kim Mo-Man” (Fogarty) 241 Dworkin, Craig 269 Dyson, Freeman 239, 261 Dyunggayan, George 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 150, 151, 152, 187, 196, 199, 243 Easter Island 3 Eckermann, Ali Cobby 286, 288; “Intervention Pay Back” 280, 281, 282, 284, 285 ecofascism 290 ecology 6, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 41, 46, 48, 57, 67, 83, 90, 91, 96, 112, 113, 130, 163, 177, 181, 191, 197, 201, 203, 218, 219, 224, 240, 241, 247, 256, 261, 262, 270, 277, 278, 279, 286, 291, 292, 294, 295 “Ecology” (Fogarty) 239, 240, 260 ecopoetics 290, 291 ecosystem 16, 54, 113, 225, 240, 241, 266, 272, 279, 291 Edenic themes 45, 46, 47, 64, 65 El Salvador 228 Eliot, T.S. 75 Ellis, Catherine J. 125, 126, 127 eloquence, value of, among the Mapuche 157, 158, 175; among the Huilliche 233

“Embassy” (Fogarty) 228 “Encounter, The” (Wright) 60, 62, 131

English language 1, 23, 34, 227, 243, 271; as lingua franca 197; Standard 242, 246, 260 English, Aboriginal 195, 221, 239, 242, 244

“Entrada a la madera” (Neruda) 79, 80, 81, 93, 94, 106, 112 environment 12, 16, 17, 23, 27, 29, 30, 41, 46, 52, 56, 71, 76, 78, 82, 84, 87, 94, 97, 99, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118, 122, 124, 130, 132, 145, 208, 218, 219, 230, 231, 243, 250, 258, 266, 270, 272, 275, 276, 277, 282, 288, 290 environmentalism 11, 39, 40 equilibrium 15, 19, 33, 34, 245, 255, 263, 276, 287; of organisms 15 Ercilla, Alonso de, La Araucana 4 errantry (Glissant) 275, 278 “Escribo con el otro que me desdibuja” (Huirimilla) 254 Espejo de tierra (Earth Mirror) (ed. Rojas & Minter) 227, 280 “espíritu de Lautaro, El” (Lienlaf) 167 “Estatuto del vino” (Neruda) 81 European culture, in Australia 3, 67, 195, 216; in Chile 2, 111, 251 extra-linguistic features of performance 124, 159 “Extranjero” (Lienlaf) 178 federalist culture (Hodge & Mishra) 23, 196

Fletcher, Angus 30, 51, 76, 78, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 112, 113, 270, 271, 291 fluidity, in Aboriginal ontology 37, 129, 135, 136, 137, 139, 199, 278, 281; in Mapuche culture 157, 158 Fogarty, Kargun 241, 242 Fogarty, Lionel 20, 22, 25, 32, 45, 176, 223, 224, 227–30, 237–47, 251, 253, 255, 259, 260, 261, 262, 267, 271,

326

SPEAKING

274, 276, 277, 285, 286, 287, 288; “Balance Earth 20057 Corroborate Love” 228; “Bina Open Hearts Precendents” 228; “Dulpai – Ila Ngari Kim Mo-Man” 241; “Ecology” 239, 240, 260; “Embassy” 228; “For I Come – Death in Custody” 227; “Heart of a european...” 243, 246; “I Sus I” 228; “Kath Walker” 45; “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’” 228–31, 259, 262; Minyung Woolah Binnung (What Saying Says) 227, 228, 245; “Ningla-a-na” 228, 229, 259; “Tired of Writing” 244; & Philip Mead 230, 237, 238; Yvette Walker & Kargun Fogarty, Yerrabilela Jimbelung: Poems about Friends and Family 228, 229, 241, 242, 245 “For I Come – Death in Custody” (Fogarty) 227 “For Precision” (Wright) 68 fragmentation, as aesthetic structural principle in (nomadic) poetry 11, 23, 94, 106, 122, 160, 218, 219, 271, 275 —in Aboriginal song-poetry 142, 168 —in Huirimilla 235, 236, 250, 258, 288

—in Lienlaf 271 —in m¥tis 12, 267 —in Minter 293 —in perception of country 32 —intertextual, in Aboriginal narrative 196

fragmentation, cultural 253, 256, 299 Franco, Jean 76, 77, 78, 97, 101 free indirect discourse, as fundamental linguistic mode 160, 162, 262 “From ‘Speech Launching the Petition of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement’” (Noonuccal) 66 fusion, cultural 6, 7

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

Garadjeri people 189 García Lorca, Federico 82; “Memento” 145; “Poem of the Deep Song” (“Poema del cante jondo”) 146 García, Mabel 235; Hugo Carrasco & Verónica Contreras 36, 171, 175, 176, 181, 231, 232, 236, 248, 249, 297, 298, 299 “Garden, The” (Wright) 42, 45, 46, 52 Gelder, Ken 7 gender 19, 65, 193 Gibson, Ross 6 Giddens, Anthony 24 Gilbert, Kevin 161, 238; The Cherry Pickers 162 glimpse, the, as reading strategy 10, 22, 25, 115, 117, 118, 128, 140, 141, 143, 153, 172, 179, 207, 208, 218, 278 Glissant, Édouard 142, 198, 208; Poetics of Relation 2, 143, 199, 207, 263, 273, 274, 275, 278, 286, 287 globalism 1, 4, 24, 25, 42, 46, 50, 89, 90, 176, 193, 223, 228, 241, 262 Glover, Richard 3 Goic, Cedomil 109, 112 Goldenfeld, Nigel, & Carol Woese 16 Gray, Robert 69 Great Cinnamon Tree, in Mapuche cosmology 161 Griffiths, Tom 14 Guattari, Félix, Three Ecologies, The (Guattari) 28, 29, 218, 224, 287 guerrilla poet 239 guerrillas, Aboriginal 239 Gularabulu (people and territory) 8, 10, 26, 189–221 Gularabulu (Roe & Muecke) 7, 8, 162, 189–221, 266; cinematic quality of 207

“Gum-Trees Stripping" (Wright) 59, 69

a

327

Index

gundurr line (Aboriginal song-poem cycle) 128 Guyotat, Pierre 269 “Habitat” (Wright) 67, 68 “Harp and the King, The” (Wright) 50 Harrison, Martin 11, 33, 35, 40, 69, 78 Hartman, Geoffrey 46, 47, 53, 68, 69, 70

Healy, Chris 118 “Heart of a european...” (Fogarty) 243, 246

Heidegger, Martin 6, 11, 28, 60, 61, 68, 141, 183 “Heights of Macchu Picchu, The” (Neruda) 64, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 166, 290 Heise, Ursula K. 24 Heisenberg, Werner 59, 68 Henry, Elisabeth 128, 129 heterogeneity 19, 199, 251, 256, 260, 261, 277 high modernism 3, 24, 100 Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra 20, 21, 23, 142, 149, 196, 198, 211, 218, 219 Holas, Sergio 111 Hölderlin, Friedrich 60, 61 “Hombre Invisible, El” (Neruda) 58 homogeneity 6, 19, 263, 300 Huenumán, Rosendo, “Yo recuerdo a Neruda” 155–57 Huenún, Jaime L. 236, 250, 251, 300; Ceremonias 253 Huidobro, Vicente 274 Huilli Mapu 30 Huilliche people (Chile) 30, 232, 233, 236, 247, 253, 297 Huirimilla, Juan Paulo 20, 22, 23, 25, 32, 176, 223, 224–27, 228, 231–37, 239, 241, 244, 247–59, 260, 261,

262, 267, 271, 274, 276, 277, 285, 288, 299, 300, 303–309; Árbol de agua 233; “Árbol de agua” 247; “Cántico” 233; “Canto a la cascada” 255; Canto de guerrero 252; “Carnicería ‘La Realidad’” 250; “Escribo con el otro que me desdibuja” 254; “Ngillatukar” 257; El Ojo de vidrio 233; Palimpsesto 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 286; “Rahue” 247, 249; “Rahuina” 248, 249; “Ríos de Cisnes” 224, 230, 231, 239, 240, 241, 254, 259, 260, 262, 276, 288, 303–309; “Ul: Canto” 234, 235 humanism 24, 47, 48 Hunter, Richard 295 hybridity 64, 183, 237, 238, 239, 249, 250, 253, 257, 260, 270, 274, 276

“I Sus I” (Fogarty) 228 idealism 13, 54, 56, 57, 142, 143, 197, 255

immanence 17, 28, 40, 48, 56, 84, 98, 105, 106, 113, 115, 126, 131, 160, 161, 162, 197, 220, 229, 235, 243, 279 Inca colonization 13 Inca culture 109, 158 Indian, South American, and Neruda 108, 109, 112 indigeneity 7, 102, 108 industrialization 268 Indyk, Ivor 44, 45 interculturalism 37, 175, 176, 183, 247, 256, 298, 299 internationalism 1, 21, 42, 47, 73, 74, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 237, 267, 300

“Intervention Pay Back” (Eckermann) 280, 281, 282, 284, 285

328

SPEAKING

invasion, Spanish, of indigenous territory 232 isorhythmic units, in Aboriginal songpoems 126 Jofré, Manuel 85, 86 Jones, Jennifer 39, 62 Joris, Pierre 1, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 85, 105, 141, 153, 163, 173, 190, 201, 223, 250, 251, 252, 253, 269, 270, 271, 276, 289 Judaeo-Christian tradition 43, 44, 64 Kadaitcha Sung, The (Sam Watson) 42, 44

Kai Kai (Mapuche creation serpent) 226, 234, 285 Kane, Paul 44, 46, 55, 56 “Kath Walker” (Fogarty) 45 “Kay Kay y Treng Treng” (Lienlaf) 178, 179

Keogh, Ray 119, 123, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 199, 298 Kinsella, John 239, 241, 245 Koori, meaning of term 226 Kristeva, Julia 11 kujika song-cycle 144 kultrun (Mapuche ritual drum) 9, 168, 169, 171, 173, 185 “Kürüf” (Lienlaf) 171 Kutjungka people 136 Küymin (Mapuche trance state) 162 Lafken Mapu 30 land rights, indigenous 40, 237 land-rights struggle, Aboriginal 237 “Langgur” (Roe) 212, 213, 214, 215, 295

language, and identity 227 Latin American poetry 86, 230

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

Lautaro, Mapuche leader, and Neruda 110, 111, 167, 309 Lawrence, D.H. 75 Lawson, Elizabeth 55 Licanantay people (Chile) 309 Lie of the Land, The (Carter) 126, 127, 142

Lienlaf, Leonel 22, 23, 32, 155–87, 195, 196, 221, 231, 236, 243, 249, 251, 267, 271, 274, 276, 288, 299, 300; “Atardecer” 181, 182; “Camino” 167; Canto y poesía mapuche 164; “Creación” 169; “El espíritu de Lautaro” 167; “Extranjero” 178; “Kay Kay y Treng Treng” 178, 179; “Kürüf” 171; “Mi corazón está despierto con la tierra” 171; Pewma dungu (Palabras soñadas) 169; “Rebelión” 179, 180, 243; “Le sacaron la piel” 174, 175; Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón 164, 165, 167, 169, 172, 174, 178, 179, 184, 187, 276; “El Sueño de Mañekean” 172, 178, 179, 180; “Temuco – ciudad” 165, 168; “Ülkantun” 169, 170

liminality 133, 267; territorial 116, 118, 182, 183, 192, 259, 261, 267, 290 logocentrism 207 Lungkata, Shorty 221 Luritja language 281 Lurujarri Heritage Trail 8, 9, 118, 206, 290

Lurujarri Song Cycle 26 Mori 4 Ma, Ming-Qian 272, 273 Macchu Picchu 115, 268 Machi (Mapuche shaman) 162, 163, 168, 172, 233, 254 Maddison, Sarah 5 Malpas, J.E. 192

a

Index

mapu (Mapuche = earth) 1, 17, 171, 177, 187

Mapuche 5, 9, xiii, xv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 107, 109, 110, 111, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 188, 223–27, 228, 229, 230, 231–37, 247–59, 262, 267, 269, 276, 278, 280, 285, 287, 297– 301

—and Neruda 109, 110 “Mapuche ‘Campesinos’” (Fogartyy) 228–31, 259, 262 Mapuche poetry 155–88, 265, 266 Mapuzugun (Chilean language) xv, 18, 109, 110, 157, 159, 162, 163, 164, 167, 169, 170, 173, 177, 178, 179, 224, 225, 232, 243, 249, 253, 255, 257, 309 Marett, Allan 124 Marri Ngarr Lirrga songs 133 Martínez, Juan Luz 309 Marxism 47, 83, 91, 99 Massumi, Brian 7, 9, 19, 33, 70, 76, 85, 98, 105, 109, 160, 161, 177, 178, 196, 197, 230, 231, 245, 251, 258, 259, 262, 263, 272, 279, 286, 287, 293 McCaffery, Steve 148 McCarthy, Bridie 230 McKernan, Susan 43, 60 McKinney, Jack 47, 52, 54, 55 McKinney, Meredith 52, 55, 57 Mead, Philip 10, 11, 23, 40, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 67, 68, 69, 89, 90, 227, 230, 237, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 286

meaning, instability of 262, 271 meaning, variability of, in Aboriginal aesthetic 135, 147 Meli Witran Mapu 9, 30, 31

329 “Memento” (García Lorca) 145 mestizaje 237, 249 mƝtis (first-hand knowledge) 12, 13, 25, 117, 223, 267, 268, 278, 282, 285 “Mi corazón está despierto con la tierra” (Lienlaf) 171 Miñche Mapu 30, 168 Minter, Peter 44, 246, 280, 292, 293 Minyirr Park 26, 117 Minyung Woolah Binnung (What Saying Says) (Fogarty) 227, 228, 245 “Mirdinan” (Roe) 193, 196, 205, 212, 217, 218 Mistral, Gabriela 225, 256, 309 modernism 3, 4, 7, 11, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29, 44, 55, 62, 66, 68, 69, 82, 86, 112, 117, 118, 200, 239, 250, 285, 288, 289, 309 Modernismo 90 modernity 24, 35, 40, 89, 102, 104, 207, 249, 265, 285, 300 Montecino, Sonia 158, 298 movement (general): and subjectivity 160, 192; concealed, in Western poetry 141; faster in orality 273; free, poem as 11; in Relation, generating dialogue 199; linked to diversity 291; random, on cultural maps 25; resistant to closure in poetry 29; resisted by Wright 58, 59 movement, as indigenous aesthetic principle 245, 255, 262, 278; as key to survival 278; intermittent when reading indigenous poetry 10; non-linear 275; without telos 293 movement, in indigenous cosmology and ontology 37, 226; Aboriginal 8, 122, 133, 142, 192, 193, 194, 201, 206, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 287; conjoined with stasis, in Nyinga philo-

330

SPEAKING

sophy 213; Mapuche 181; of indigenous spirits 115 movement, in indigenous narrative and poetry —Aboriginal: as becoming 208; as non-linear 118; circular and recursive 139; conjoined with stasis 193, 205, 212; constant 121, 204, 209, 219; corporeal 149, 269; cumulative 139; enervated through writing 147; fostered by communalism 200; frozen by Western analysis 142; in Gularabulu, as narrative linkage 191; in ecological processes 29; resistant to stasis of logocentrism 207; spatial 200

—Mapuche: 236, 258; controlled by country 181 movement, in specific poets: Fogarty 246; Huirimilla 235, 251; Lienlaf 185; Neruda 81, contradictory 105; Minter 293; movement, nomadic 288; adaptive 34; in country, and accrual of knowledge 18; and conundrum of settlement 27; counteracted by state boundaries 26; defeated by unity 219; nomadism not always defined by 8, 9, 10; spatial, frustrated by colonialism 32 movement, rhizomatic, in indigenous poetry 260, 267, 286; telos of countermanded by the rhizomatic 36 “Moving Image, The” (Wright) 69 Muecke, Stephen 7, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 25, 35, 115, 116, 117, 125, 130, 134, 140, 143, 144, 148, 152, 168, 173, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 290, 299; & Paddy Roe

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

115, 152, 218, 221

—See also: Gularabulu multiculturalism 250 multilingualism 23, 24, 197, 247, 260, 262

multimedia character of song-poetry 24, 124, 267 Murray, Les 39, 40, 108, 268 Murri, meaning of term 227 Muse, in poetic creation 131 mutability, perceived through connections 141 myth 40, 53, 54, 67, 69, 98, 115, 116, 128, 141, 151, 245, 274 mythology 14, 44, 46, 86, 128, 150, 151, 256, 258 Nag Mapu 30, 168 Nangan, Butcher Joe 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 143, 148, 150, 151, 152, 187, 190, 196, 199, 288, 298 nationalism 11, 21, 24, 49, 74, 227, 228, 230, 258, 260, 261, 286 nation-state 5, 7, 25, 30, 107 Native Americans 21, 74, 101, 189, 210, 229, 276 neo-colonialism 273 neo-colonization 13, 23, 142, 183, 237, 241, 282 neo-evolutionism 260 Neruda, Pablo 2, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 41, 42, 47, 58, 64, 68, 73–113, 115, 116, 123, 138, 155, 156, 157, 164, 172, 229, 250, 260, 266, 268, 269, 271, 274, 279, 284, 287, 289, 291; “Caballero solo” 77, 78, 79; “Diurno doliente” 76; “Entrada a la madera” 79, 80, 81, 93, 94, 106, 112; “Estatuto del vino” 81; “The Heights of Macchu Picchu, The” (“Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu”) 64, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 94, 96,

a

331

Index

97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 166, 290; “El Hombre Invisible” 58; Odas elementales 58, 68, 87, 113, 289; “Ode to the Earth” (“Oda a la tierra”) 87, 88, 89, 116; “La Palabra” 74; Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra) 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102, 111, 112, 113, 287; “Sistema sombrío” 77; Todos los cantos / Ti kom vl 110; “Tres cantos materiales” 79; Veinte poemas 75 Neruda, Pablo Canto general 2, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 186, 260, 269, 271, 287, 291; “A mi partido” 95; “I . A Lamp on Earth” 2, 85, 96, 98, 99, 100; “I I I . The Conquistadors” 2, 89; “I V . The Liberators” 84, 111; “V I I . Canto general de Chile” 87; “X I I . The Rivers of Song” 75, 112; “X I V . The Great Ocean” 92; “X V . I Am” 90, 92, 99, 106

—See also: “The Heights of Macchu Picchu, The” (“Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu”) Networked Language (Mead) 10, 11, 23, 40, 42, 47, 48, 49, 58, 68, 69, 90, 227, 230, 237, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 286 New England (N S W ) 42, 47, 48, 49, 52, 63, 166 “Ngillatukar” (Huirimilla) 257 Nietzsche, Friedrich 28 “Nigger’s Leap: New England” (Wright) 42, 48, 49, 52, 66, 166 “Ningla-a-na” (Fogarty) 228, 229, 259 Nolan, James 74, 83, 84, 91, 100, 101, 102, 109, 113 nomad poetics 266, 276

Nomad Poetics, A (Joris) 1, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 85, 105, 141, 163, 190, 201, 223, 250, 251, 252, 253, 269 nomadism 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 26, 27, 32, 33, 36, 43, 114, 120, 121, 122, 141, 153, 163, 166, 167, 178, 181, 182, 183, 186, 190, 192, 195, 200, 204, 206, 221, 223, 226, 239, 242, 243, 249, 252, 253, 258, 259, 261, 265, 266, 267, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 285, 287, 288, 290, 291, 295 nomadology 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17, 34 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo 39, 44, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 238, 316; “From ‘Speech Launching the Petition of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement’” 66; “We Are Going” (as Kath Walker) 44, 45 North America 1, 224, 227 Northern Territory National Emergency Response 282 nuclear annihilation 50 nurlu (Aboriginal song-poems) 76, 119, 123, 124, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 196, 198, 218, 242, 298 Nyigina (Aboriginal language) 18, 132, 135, 147, 149, 196, 199, 202, 243 Nyigina people 190, 200, 213 Nyul-Nyul people 190 “Oda a la tierra” (Neruda) 87, 88, 89, 116

Odas elementales (Neruda) 58, 68, 87, 113, 289 “Ode to the Earth” (Neruda) 87, 88, 89, 116

Ojo de vidrio, El (Huirimilla) 233 Olson, Charles 17, 35, 52 Oodgeroo —See under: Noonuccal, Oodgeroo

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SPEAKING

opacity 11, 32, 135, 143, 146, 200, 206, 207, 208, 266; as non-Western principle 143 open-field poetics 17 oraliture 166 orality 1, 20, 22, 23, 34, 35, 36, 76, 82, 83, 84, 101, 102, 136, 144, 147, 149, 153, 163, 164, 166, 168, 173, 179, 180, 183, 186, 189, 193, 198, 206, 207, 210, 211, 214, 221, 231, 236, 238, 242, 265, 266, 267, 270, 272, 273, 276, 281, 284, 297, 298 organicism 50, 56, 75 Orpheus myth 128, 129, 131, 141 orphic tradition, in poetic creation 60, 78, 81, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133 Osorno 232, 280 Ovid 129 Pacific as transcultural nexus 1, 224, 226, 230, 231, 262, 267 Paisano (Chilean creole) 257 “Palabra, La” (Neruda) 74 Palimpsesto (Huirimilla) 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 286 Papunya, Aboriginal paintings at 197, 221

Park, James J. 110, 301 Paz, Octavio 57, 82, 83, 86, 87 performance 22, 34, 82, 83, 100, 101, 102, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 149, 153, 169, 176, 194, 196, 198, 205, 207, 210, 211, 234, 236, 242, 244, 245, 251, 258, 266, 267, 273, 274, 284, 288, 298 Pewma dungu (Palabras soñadas) (Lienlaf) 169 Pitjantjatjara language 281 Plumwood, Val 89

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

ʌ.o (Australian poet) 286 poases (Joris) 141, 201 “Poem of the Deep Song” (“Poema del cante jondo”) (García Lorca) 146 poetic, nomadic 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 23, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36, 122, 153, 164, 176, 180, 181, 185, 186, 193, 200, 201, 207, 221, 223, 251, 265, 267, 269, 270, 275, 291, 293 Poetics of Relation (Glissant) 2, 143, 199, 207, 263, 273, 274, 275, 278, 286, 287 poetics of the Americas (Bernstein) 260 poiesis 131 polyphony 24, 115, 196, 236, 256, 257 “Pool and the Star, The” (Wright) 58 post-colonial poetry 54 postcolonialism 5, 7, 21, 24, 60, 62, 67, 70, 71, 113, 148, 187, 188, 230, 231, 237, 260, 262, 263, 265, 268, 269, 274, 278, 281, 286, 287, 294 post-logical imagery 22 Predmore, Michael P. 97, 98 pre-linguistic contexts, in Aboriginal expression 59, 177, 196, 208, 243; in Mapuche expression 177 Prigogine, Ilya 33, 125, 131, 140, 288 print culture 34, 35, 185, 266 projective verse (Olson) 35 prosody, Mapuche 170 Puerto Montt 232, 248, 249, 250 Queensland 47, 63, 227, 237 racism 3 “Rahue” (Huirimilla) 247, 249 “Rahuina” (Huiramilla) 248, 249 rainbow serpent, Aboriginal 226 Rajchman, John 20, 208, 249, 259, 260, 269, 275 Ramazani, Jahan 37

a

333

Index

Rarrdjali 168 Rarrdjali song 144 rationalism 89, 268 Raviola, Victor 91 Read, Peter 18 Reading the Country (Benterrak, Muecke & Roe) 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 26, 115, 118, 125, 131, 144, 145, 148, 193, 194, 195, 199, 206, 207, 211 “Rebelión” (Lienlaf) 179, 180, 243 Recado confidencial a los chilenos (Chihuailaf) 5, 30, 157, 159, 161, 162, 166, 225 Relation, poetics of (Glissant) 199, 262, 274, 278 repetition, as aesthetic principle 29, 53, 78, 80, 82, 101, 106, 111, 119, 122, 125, 127, 139, 146, 151, 168, 170, 175, 177, 189, 192, 194, 203, 204, 205, 218, 271, 277, 279, 281 repetition, of life forms 54 Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra) (Neruda) 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102, 111, 112, 113, 287 resistance, Aboriginal nomadic 13, 26, 205, 283 resistance, discursive 7, 11, 29, 33, 122, 143, 144, 156, 166, 231, 232, 233, 238, 243, 256, 258, 261, 267, 271, 272, 273, 276, 299 resistance, ecological 29 resistance, indigenous nomadic 7, 16, 33, 228, 259, 276 resistance, Mapuche 2, 13, 110, 167, 178, 181, 233 resistance, of m¥tis 267 Reynolds, Henry 157 rhizomatic structure (Deleuze & Guattari) 8, 16, 20, 23, 36, 37, 191,

199, 223, 235, 242, 261, 265, 267, 270, 292 rhythm 9, 22, 43, 63, 69, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 92, 100, 101, 102, 106, 113, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 151, 168, 169, 170, 192, 194, 199, 203, 204, 210, 211, 212, 242, 246, 250, 270, 274, 281, 284, 287

Rilke, Rainer Maria, “Sonnets to Orpheus I, 3” 128 “Ríos de Cisnes” (Huirimilla) 224, 230, 231, 239, 240, 241, 254, 259, 260, 262, 276, 288, 303–309 ritual 22, 32, 42, 43, 46, 76, 78, 115, 119, 125, 128, 129, 130, 142, 147, 171, 206, 231, 235, 236, 247, 258, 285 Ritual of the Blue Serpent (Mapuche) 285

“Rituales de la serpiente azul” (Rupailaf) 280, 283 Rodríguez, Claudia 231, 236, 252, 256, 276

Roe, Paddy 5, 7, 9, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 32, 115, 122, 125, 132, 134, 136, 138, 139, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 176, 189–221, 238, 243, 246, 249, 267, 271, 272, 288, 290, 291, 295, 299; “Djaringgalong” 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 212, 213; “Donkey Devil” 209; “Langgur” 212, 213, 214, 215, 295; “Mirdinan” 193, 196, 205, 212, 217, 218; & Stephen Muecke, Gularabulu 7, 8, 162, 189– 221, 266; cinematic quality of 207 Roebuck Plains (W A ) 118, 130, 131, 136, 194 Rojas, Gonzalo, & Peter Minter, ed., Espejo de tierra (Earth Mirror) 227, 280

334

SPEAKING

Rokha, Pablo de 101 Romanticism 44, 50, 68, 90 romanticization 4, 22, 24, 40, 46, 53, 55, 56, 69, 71, 89, 90, 125, 131, 227 Room for Maneuver (Chambers) 205, 216, 217 root identity, factitiousness of concept 274

Rose, Deborah Bird 1, 15, 17, 30, 32, 45, 124, 137, 139, 140, 141, 187, 189, 192, 193, 195, 215, 220 Rosenfeld, Andrée 124 Rothenberg, Jerome 1, 22, 29, 142, 147, 205, 206, 208, 265 Rowe, Noel 43 Rupailaf, Roxana Carolina Miranda 284, 285, 288; “Rituales de la serpiente azul” 280, 283 Rutherford, Jennifer 3, 43, 269 Ryan, Gig 39, 60 Ryan, Simon 4 “Sacaron la piel, Le” (Lienlaf) 174, 175 Santiago de Chile 2, 3, 4, 109, 247 Schopf, Federico 90, 105, 106, 112 Scott, James C. 12, 13, 25, 34, 68, 109, 112, 113, 267, 268, 272, 277, 279 Se ha despertado el ave de mi corazón (Lienlaf) 164, 165, 167, 169, 172, 174, 178, 179, 184, 187, 276 self-organizing systems 19 settler culture 6, 7, 39, 62, 64, 65, 142, 143, 176, 187, 199, 217, 219, 220, 266, 278, 287, 291 Shakespeare, William 48, 49 shaman 25, 61, 107, 162, 193 —See also: Machi signification 18, 29, 55, 129, 210, 216, 225, 287, 309

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

silence 2, 35, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 58, 60, 81, 84, 101, 105, 107, 167, 175, 176, 180, 192, 212, 230 “Sistema sombrío” (Neruda) 77 smooth space 118, 121 smooth space, as ambiguous Aboriginal ambience 118, 119,120, 122; as Mapuche ambience 181, 182; nomadic 7; of Western lyric poetry 290; of Western rationality 289; of white page 226; vs chaotic networks 274

—Cf. striated structure solipsism, in Wright 48, 53, 57 “Song of Myself” (Whitman) 91 song-cycle 8, 128, 133, 136, 139, 143, 144, 167, 279, 289; Aboriginal 8, 115, 116, 125, 129, 140, 144, 234 songline, Aboriginal 8, 125, 140, 148, 152, 208, 220 song-poetry 20, 76, 163, 166, 168, 178, 185, 204, 208, 231, 234, 236, 255, 266, 267, 274, 275, 276, 287, 297, 298

—Aboriginal 115–54 song-poetry, multimedia character of song-poetry 24, 124, 267 “Sonnets to Orpheus I, 3” (Rilke) 128 sound of the body 269 “South of My Days” (Wright) 42 Spain, and Neruda 4, 5, 75, 82, 92, 112 Spanish Civil War 41, 83 Spanish, as expressive medium 23, 157, 164, 167, 169, 170, 176, 177, 178, 180, 186, 225, 235, 247, 253, 254, 257, 260, 298; Castilian 100, 101, 107, 157, 248, 249, 254, 256; in poetry of Fogarty 228 Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) 28

a

335

Index

spirits, indigenous ancestral 9, 31, 115, 117, 119, 132, 134, 147, 167, 187, 229, 234, 235, 256, 258 squattocracy, Australian 47 stanzaic structure 41, 48, 62, 84, 168, 180

Stavans, Ilan 74 Stolen Generations 282 Storni, Alfonsina 309 Strehlow, T.G.H. 61, 120, 121, 126, 127, 147, 298 striated structure 19, 26, 116, 118, 121, 189, 286 —Cf. smooth space 121 Suárez, Eulogio 79 subjectivity 17, 162, 163, 176, 251, 285 “Sueño de Mañekean, El” (Lienlaf) 172, 178, 179, 180 suppleness, principle of 25, 26, 183, 184, 185, 250, 251 syntax, destabilization of 255; in Aboriginal song-poetry 120, 123, 124, 126, 141; in indigenous poetry 262; nomadic 18 syntax, in Huirimilla 255; in Lienlaf 168; in Neruda 79, 91, 92, 123; in Roe 199, 212; in Whitman 91, 123 systems biology 15, 18 tape-recorder, as anthropological topos 127, 143 Tarn, Nathaniel 84, 107, 108, 109 Taylor, Louise 5 Tedlock, Dennis 34, 35, 153, 189, 210 Temuco 164, 165, 166, 247 “Temuco – ciudad” (Lienlaf) 165, 168 tense 94, 123; motile, in nomad poetry, 33; past 92, 121; present 91, 121, 259 terra nullius doctrine 4 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze & Guattari) 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 26,

28, 36, 37, 96, 97, 98, 116, 121, 123, 133, 160, 181, 220, 221, 223, 242, 245, 250, 255, 261, 265, 276, 278 Three Ecologies, The (Guattari) 28, 29, 218, 224, 287 Thrift, Nigel 16 “Tired of Writing” (Fogarty) 244 Tjampitjinpa, Old Walter 197

Todos los cantos / Ti kom vl (Neruda) 110

topography 1, 81, 82, 85, 92, 104, 108, 111, 156, 166, 186 topological connectivity 123, 125, 126, 139, 204, 287, 290 toqui (Mapuche chief) 157, 158 tourism 10, 27, 118 tracking, as dialogic performance principle 125 tracks, Aboriginal 26, 118, 128, 148, 192, 194, 195, 197, 206, 220, 269; of indigenous nomad 223 transcendence 7, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, 40, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 80, 84, 85, 90, 95, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 131, 143, 156, 218, 228, 229, 249, 263, 271, 272, 273, 274, 278, 279, 284, 287 transcription 7, 129, 142, 143, 144, 148, 164, 196, 197, 200, 204, 207, 210, 219, 228, 273, 286, 298 translation xv, 13, 17, 21, 23, 52, 62, 73, 86, 109, 110, 117, 119, 121, 134, 135, 137, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 176, 177, 178, 186, 190, 194, 199, 205, 206, 208, 210, 211, 214, 218, 225, 227, 233, 236, 242, 243, 252, 255, 257, 258, 267, 270, 271, 275, 286, 289, 293, 298

336

SPEAKING

transparency, as principle of Western thought 142, 272 —Cf. opacity Tren Tren (Mapuche creation serpent) 226, 234 “Tres cantos materiales” (Neruda) 79 Trujillo, Carlos 236, 249 Turpin, Myfany 119, 135, 147 “Two Dreamtimes” (Wright) 62, 65, 67, 102

Two Fires, The (Wright) 50 Two Men, in Aboriginal mythology 119, 128, 129, 130, 131, 143, 288 typography, in transcription 83, 200, 207, 209, 210 ül (Mapuche song-poem) 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 175, 176, 185, 186, 231, 233, 255, 274, 297, 298, 299 “Ul: Canto” (Huirimilla) 234, 235 ülkantufe (Mapuche singers) 231, 298 “Ülkantun” (Lienlaf) 169, 170 vagabondage 118 Vallejo, César 82, 100, 101, 108 Veinte poemas (Neruda) 75 Vial, Sara 73, 75 Vidal, Virginia 156, 157 voice 123; first-person 69, 123, 160, 229, 295; second-person 92, 101; third-person 111, 123 Walker, Shirley 39, 42, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 68, 69, 70 Walker, Yvette 241 walking, as essential to Aboriginal poetics 8, 9, 23, 45, 92, 117, 118, 140, 141, 192, 194, 269 Walmadany (WA campsite) 26, 190 Walsh, Donald D. 78

THE

EARTH’S LANGUAGES

a

“Wama-Dupun (Sugar Bag and Hollow Log)” (Arnhem Land song) 122 warfare, among the Mapuche 5, 82, 156, 157, 158, 276 Warrior, Robert 21 waterfall, as sacred Mapuche site 255 Watson, Christine 137 Watson, Sam, The Kadaitcha Sung 42, 44

“We Are Going” (Noonuccal = Walker) 44, 45 Wentriao (Mapuche ancestral spirit) 248

Wenu Mapu 30, 168 West Kimberley (WA) 115–54, 155, 189, 193, 195, 202, 220 Western aesthetics 22, 34, 42, 46, 50, 53, 74, 83, 120, 128, 141, 142, 144, 173, 194, 198, 232, 237, 238, 243, 266

Western culture 173 Western metre 126 Western music 120, 127 Western musicology 119 Western song 120 Western thought 1, 3, 6, 15, 24, 27, 43, 89, 90, 127, 130, 137, 142, 143, 147, 189, 198, 205, 207, 220, 224, 242, 301

westernization 301 weupin (Mapuche orator) 158, 160 Whitman, Walt 78, 93, 95, 107, 123; “Song of Myself” 91 “Wildflower Plain” (Wright) 50, 51, 52 winka (non-Indigenous Chilean) 163, 165, 174, 175, 176, 180, 183, 184, 186, 236, 297, 300 Woese, Carl R. 262 Woman to Man (Wright) 48, 55, 56, 58 “Woman to Man” (Wright) 55

a

337

Index

Wright, Judith 11, 22, 23, 24, 39–71, 73, 74, 75, 79, 84, 85, 89, 90, 131, 138, 166, 250, 255, 266, 268, 269, 274, 279, 289; and Aboriginal Australia 39–71; “At Cooloola” 40, 41; “Bora Ring” 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 64, 66, 290; “The Child” 53, 55, 56, 279; “The Encounter” 60, 62, 131; “For Precision” 68; “The Garden” 42, 45, 46, 52; “Gum-Trees Stripping” 59, 69; “Habitat” 67, 68; “The Harp and the King” 50; “The Moving Image” 69; “Nigger’s Leap: New England” 42, 48, 49, 52, 66, 166; “The Pool and the Star” 58; “South of My Days” 42; “Two Dreamtimes” 62, 65, 67, 102; The Two Fires 50; “Wildflower Plain” 50, 51, 52; Woman to Man 48, 55, 56, 58; “Woman to Man” 55 Wright, Mary 45

written culture xv, 1, 17, 20, 22, 23, 33, 34, 35, 36, 60, 63, 73, 75, 106, 142, 143, 145, 153, 157, 164, 166, 167, 173, 178, 179, 180, 186, 187, 193, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211, 231, 235, 251, 256, 259, 266, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 282, 298, 299, 300

Yanyuwa people 28, 144, 208, 270 Yaour people 190 Yawuru people 13 Yerrabilela Jimbelung: Poems about Friends and Family (Fogarty, Walker & Fogarty) 228, 229, 241, 242, 245 “Yo recuerdo a Neruda” (Huenumán) 155–57 Zagala, Stephen 219 Zurita, Ave de tu Corazón, El” (Zurita) 164, 187, 188 Zurita, Raúl 164, 176, 187, 188

a