Abstract
There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.
Keywords
Let us sing a song for the Nungas a song for the Gaeliges brave at Knowth I stand in reverence my art carved by your hand
There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other (Smith, 2012). Surekha Davies (2017: 35–37) argues that these representations were reinforced by writers, cartographers, artisans, and public figures who aligned Indigenous peoples against existing characterizations of monsters from older literary texts, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (c.1300). The dissemination of Indigenous-to-Indigenous comparison stimulated interest in what Davies (2017: 6) describes as the production of differing “perceptions of human diversity”, a multi-layered global hierarchy that established the distinction between primitive and civilized civilizations. In an Australian context, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to be marginalized by the representations of Captain Cook’s First Encounter with two men of the Eora Nation at Botany Bay in 1770 that would later justify British settlement through the doctrine of terra nullius. From that point, representations of Indigenous agency have been burdened by “deficit discourse”, a concept I use repeatedly in this article to relate the way in which representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people underline a continuous narrative of negativity, deficiency, and failure (Fforde et al., 2013). I will seek to intervene into these representations by asking whether a renewed focus on Indigenous planetarity can puncture through the historical resonance of “First Encounters” and better value the contributions of Aboriginal writers to develop and sustain an ethics of contact beyond colonial demarcations of social experience.
This phrase, Indigenous planetarity, is used in this article as a critical term to conceptualize the strategies used by Indigenous Australian writers to broaden their representation from within a national sphere, and contest their being reduced or made peripheral by a world-system. World-system here refers to the way in which the world rather than the nation can be used as a unit of social and poetic analysis to identify dynamics in global forces. The phrase is indebted to Immanuel Wallerstein (2004: 23–30) who posited that our current world-system is distinguished from previous systems by powerful and wealthy core groups gaining economic control of the world by capitalizing on the labour of those in peripheral and semi-peripheral world areas. My use of the phrase also borrows from Gayatri Spivak’s (2013) notion of planetarity, as articulated in her collection of essays An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Spivak makes the case that planetarity offers a phenomenological inversion of the way in which a capitalist world-system has shrunk or abstracted the world. She writes, “If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures, rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us [ … ] it contains us as much as it flings us away” (Spivak, 2013: 339). This phenomenological inversion is produced in the writing of Yoogum and Kudjela poet, Lionel Fogarty (2014: 70), who acts to preserve the opacity of the Pacific when he writes, “Pacific is not anglosacktion”. By punning on the phrase Anglo-Saxon, Fogarty alludes to the way in which the Pacific is compressed in globalized histories and narratives that take as a starting point the violence of European arrivals.
The amount of scholarly work on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness (Allen, 2012; Banerjee, 2016; DeLoughrey, 2009; Huang, 2013; Nelson, 2014; Somerville, 2012). We might say that Indigenous scholars and literary figures are the new cosmopolitans in their political solidarities, cross-cultural translations, and international reading tours. While predominantly linked to a specific location in cultural, spiritual, and legal sovereignty, Indigenous peoples are extremely active in planetary contexts. I will demonstrate this through attention to the local and global agencies of poets, Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann. Fogarty is from Southern Queensland, while Eckermann is of the Yankunytjatjara communities of South Australia. From these respective locations, they poetically inscribe an ethics of relation between Indigenous worlds that break from a colonial matrix of relation — efforts that are yet to achieve adequate attention in literary criticism. To think of their being triangulated by colonial history would imply that Indigenous peoples can only be understood in a fixed position in relation to a common colonizer, detracting from the diversity of different epistemes, linguistic forms of expression, and philosophical approaches that converge in such moments.
A fitting example, Fogarty’s writing is most often read in conjunction with his role in political activism. As Ali Alizadeh (2013: 129) writes, this ensures that the poet’s unique manner of writing is “most commonly seen as a representation of his staunchly decolonized, Aboriginal identity”. One of the first to adequately respond to the “interesting things” (Kinsella, 1999: 158) taking place in Fogarty’s poetry, Australian poet and scholar John Kinsella (2013: 10) sums up this critical bind when he suggests that for Fogarty, “Freedom doesn’t come solely by making territory and occupying a conceptual space, a space linguistic in nature. One must reterritorialize lost ground.” Here, Kinsella distinguishes between the freedoms of poetics and the necessities of anti-colonial politics, suggesting that these are not necessarily reconcilable. The same position was recognized by the editors of Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980–2017, who suggest that Fogarty’s poetry is “to an extent overdetermined by the interpretive frames of resistance, activism, anger and protest” (Morrissey, 2017: 19). Kinsella’s response hints at two conclusions: that activist politics has served as a critical frame for Fogarty to forge out a position within Australian literature and that freedom is his desired end condition. Freedom in Kinsella’s given sense infers the ability to move freely once a lost Australian ground has been recaptured, but freedom might also be interpreted as freedom beyond a situated political reading. I would respond here by asserting that a more complex understanding of Fogarty’s freedom can be gained in context with his dynamic relationships with other Indigenous nations. This has the benefit of acknowledging the diversity of Indigenous means of expression in a planetary sphere. As Chickasaw academic Chadwick Allen (2012: xiv) writes of his own turn to the Trans-Indigenous: “The point is to invite specific studies into different kinds of conversations, and to acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts”. Allen’s work is a valuable precursor to this article in suggesting the benefits of trans-Indigenous reading, where he makes select, careful juxtapositions between Indigenous cultural and aesthetic traditions to highlight the wider impact of Indigenous literary texts. I seek to add to this scholarship by suggesting that beyond evaluating trans-aesthetic exchanges, the physical circulation of Indigenous writers through different cultures and locations should merit our attention as underscoring historical and material flows that exceed the conventionally understood position of Indigenous peoples.
It is worth stressing, however, that open circulation is not synonymous with self-determination (Cheah, 2016: 331). As the notable Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 198) has posited, Under European imperialism indigenous peoples were positioned within new political formations which ruptured previous relations, strategic alliances, trade routes and ways of communicating with other indigenous nations.
As Fogarty’s poetics are not free from the language of his colonizer, so too are the means of relation afforded to Indigenous writers a product of historically violent separations of Indigenous nations from one another. In the contemporary period, writers are often forced to negotiate the complexity of shared trauma to forge these relationships. An excellent example of this is Eckermann’s poem, “At Knowth”, where Eckermann develops the complex relationship between Indigenous Australia and Gaelic Ireland by locating the reader at “Knowth”, the largest passage grave of the Brú na Bóinne complex in Northern Ireland. Aware of the ethical issues that arise when visiting a foreign place of spiritual value, Eckermann’s (2013: n.p.) engagement with the site reflects onto her own experience of colonization and language loss: we are all just passing through this place of tabernacles and tombs scripted in a language we can no longer read.
Dubious of making a relation on the basis of shared knowledge of trauma, Eckermann satirizes the encounter taking place, fully cognizant of how relations can be manipulated to convey a negative idea of Global Indigeneity. Literature becomes a tool to engage these points of rupture and entanglement.
As such, there might appear to be a gap here between the aims of literary study and the lives of the Indigenous peoples involved. In this respect, it is worth stressing that Australian literature does continue to play a role in the deficit discourse (Fforde et al., 2013) that affects the lives of Indigenous Australians. As Yiman and Bidjara academic Marcia Langton (1993: 81) has written in regards to televisual mediums, Aboriginal Australian identity, or Aboriginality, is constructed as a result of a series of intersubjective events: The first is the experience of the Aboriginal person interacting with other Aboriginal people in social situations located largely within Aboriginal culture. The second is the stereotyping, iconicising and mythologising of Aboriginal people by white people who have never had any substantial first-hand contact with Aboriginal people. The third is the construction generated when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in actual dialogue, where the individuals test and adapt imagined models of each other to find satisfactory forms of mutual comprehension.
In light of Langton’s conceptualization of Aboriginality, this paper will provide a historical and material dimension of intercultural contact alongside the discursive exchanges of Global Indigenous literature. As Aboriginality is understood by Langton to be changed through subsequent representations of Aboriginal identity, it follows that a planetary idea of Indigeneity can be reshaped by new representations of the movement of Indigenous peoples through different regions, cultures, and languages.
The field of literary studies may not seem an effective tool to read the social networks created by Indigenous peoples, but as this article argues, it has an undeniable relationship with representations of the world. Pheng Cheah (2016: 193–194) has written that literature can fundamentally reshape our teleological perceptions of the world, and as such, world literary studies should concern itself with constructing a “world that remains open to the coming of other worlds”. Cheah implies that as a wielder of narrative, literature can world in the sense that it retains power over the subjective process by which a world is perceived and adapted. Stuart Cooke (2013: 128) makes this point also when he states that as poetry is fundamentally generative, it is intrinsically “linked to the process of world-making”. In the context of Langton’s conception of “Aboriginality”, literary expressions of Indigenous planetarity can help to facilitate the dissemination of more ethically grounded representations of Indigenous identities that break from their conventional position within national boundaries. Furthermore, poetry’s negotiation of the relationship between language and ontology helps us to determine the differential philosophical and linguistic positions emerging from inter-Indigenous encounters without reducing them to universalized understandings of “difference” or “exoticism”. A fine example is Eckermann’s “At Knowth”, where she establishes an ethical relation on the basis that she and her Gaelic counterpart have mutually intersecting philosophies that relate the subject’s connection with the earth. In a brief essay introducing the poems, Peter Minter (2013: n.p.) notes the extent to which “the complexities of our technologies and linguistic apparatuses” may conceal our planetary relations but implies nevertheless that these poems figure an expression of “the deepest of commons, the shared information — geological, biological, cosmological, cybernetic — that is central to our core relations to the earth and each other”. The complex relation Eckermann sets out to make is predicated on a pre-historical commons that exceeds the systematization of the world itself.
Methodological Issues
I will note here two critical problems that must be addressed in relating the inter-Indigenous encounter as a turn to Indigenous planetarity. As noted above, the Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounter cannot be triangulated to an imperial power or imperial history. As Allen (2012: xiv) identifies, comparative analysis on Indigenous subjects is ingrained within a eugenic, colonial history where connections consolidated hierarchical racial boundaries: Rather than producing an enlarged view of evolving cultures or their (post)colonial histories, or a more precise analysis of self-representation, the form of Indigenous-to-Indigenous comparison recenters the (uninformed) dominant settler culture and produces hierarchies of Indigenous oppression — or legitimacy or authenticity — that serve only the interests of the settler, his culture, his power, his nation-state.
To make a connection based on communal Indigenous identity is to highlight a historical accident by which two cultural groups became linked together via their oppression. The practice of triangulation reifies the critical enclosure I discussed earlier, where the aesthetics of the Indigenous writer can be neglected in favour of the political necessities of achieving freedom from the dominant settler culture. As Allen identifies, this practice reproduces hierarchies of Indigenous oppression that only serve the colonizer and the dynamics undergirding his position. To break from this practice, I emphasize what Allen (2012) discusses in his work as juxtaposition, using focused comparisons on diverse texts, contexts, and traditions as a way of foregrounding the inherent diversity of Indigenous nations and aesthetic cultures. In this sense, juxtaposition becomes the ethos underlying my appreciation of the highly complex social and poetic exchanges that take place in the poems to follow.
Second, the new opportunities generated by a planetary scope of Indigenous literature does not guarantee any degree of emancipation for Indigenous writers. As Cheah (2016: 331) has written: The power of postcolonial world literature is fragile because it draws on the incalculable force of worlding that can also undermine progressive projects of world-making. This force is real and immanent to the global capitalist system. It always remains and cannot be destroyed without annihilating existence itself.
To turn to the world is to enter a larger set of complex critical parameters. In a global setting, there are forces at play that are dedicated to the centralization of the settler culture. To enter this space also risks projecting an international idea of what Langton described as “Aboriginality” into being. An understanding of this critical challenge benefits from Latin American scholar Walter Mignolo’s study of local histories and global designs, where he designates the various points at which certain local histories were universalized through global forces. These universalized local histories are primarily “within” the modern world system, including “Europe and the United States, the local histories of Spain and England” (Mignolo, 2012: 64–65). How might we work through these problems? If an Indigenous planetary rubric were to be established, it would inevitably enter into relation with a world-system, necessitating greater efforts to resist the structural inequalities generated by global capitalism. In his work, Mignolo (2012: 54) points out that to engage global conditions one must transform the terms in which discourse is conducted, and therefore, “Decoloniality […] means both the analytic task of unveiling the logic of coloniality and the prospective task of contributing to build a world in which many worlds will coexist”. If we follow Mignolo’s argument that to decolonize is a collective undertaking, then locating and analysing these discursive connections between Indigenous communities has a radical impact upon world literary studies. This coexistence, however, must be predicated on specificity. As Maori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville (2007: 662) suggests, Tracing the range and stakes of various Indigenous-Indigenous connections not as a stocktaking of similarities but as a historicized matrix of self-recognition, mutual recognition, and misrecognition is more productive and, ultimately, more useful. This more nuanced articulation of Indigeneity will, rather than undermine the value of comparative work, enable us to more confidently, productively, and ethically elaborate its possibilities.
What is required then is a valuation of each poet’s perception of how they are read beyond their immediate context, and equally, how they might be positioned in a global context.
To speak to the way in which Indigenous means of expression and knowledge production would be marginalized by globalized forces, I will demonstrate in my reading of Eckermann and Fogarty that they are representative of a molecular expression of a larger social field. This reading takes inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2012) work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and her critical renovation of the “border” as “borderlands” to speak to the complex position of those who are dislocated by the U.S. Mexican border. As such, it is necessary that planetary perspectives are held without obfuscating a localized bio-cultural fabric, an academic and poetic practice Anzaldúa (2012: 100–101) describes as being “on both shores at once, and, at once, see(ing) through both serpent and eagle eyes”. My reading of Indigenous planetarity in the works of these poets does not suggest a removal of specificity, but an enhanced and located understanding of the complex ways in which Indigeneity is established as it is met, defined, or nullified by global forces, and ultimately, how it might counter this condition. It remains to be asked whether future work on the poetics of the encounter can resolve the problem of a literary world-system that Franco Moretti (2000: 55) has described as “one, and unequal”.
Ali Cobby Eckermann and Gaelic Ireland
Ali Cobby Eckermann was born on Guarna country in Southern Australia and has kinship connections with the Kokatha and Yankunytjatjara language groups. She is a member of Australia’s Stolen Generation, adopted to a German Lutheran family at a young age. In her youth, Eckermann spent most of her adolescence and adult life looking for her birth family. After a series of failed attempts, she eventually reunited herself with her birth mother, Audrey Kinnear, at the age of 34. This experience would inspire Inside My Mother, a poetry collection that Molly Murn (2018) reads as similar to Anzaldúa’s (2012: 341) borderlands for its exploring the conceptual threshold of having “mothers — plural”. As an Aboriginal writer first published in 2009, Eckermann is far less known than Fogarty in Australian literature. There has not been a substantial amount written about her work (Cooke, 2013; Etherington, 2016; Hall, 2018; Murn, 2018). I seek to enter this void carefully — I do not wish to suggest that Eckermann is solely a worldly figure, as the poems I read here are derived from a specific point in time. Rather, I wish to indicate that her poetic encounters extend relation to other Indigenous nations through a specific habitation of place, what Stuart Cooke (2013: 285) describes as “an ability to shift between regions thanks to an intimate knowledge of the history of the places they are in”. An understanding of Eckermann’s poetics of relation can be found in the image of the fish-trap that adorns the cover of her poetry collection, Inside My Mother. The image signifies that Eckermann’s poetic practice is somehow linked to the act of weaving textiles together. Responding to Eckermann, Stuart Cooke (2013: 288) has identified the “sprawling” textual aspect of her work, suggesting of the poem “Intervention Pay Back” that it seems “as if each stanza were part of a series (often linked by the repetition of the phrase ‘and from there …’)”. Eckermann’s featuring of the fish-trap, while seeming innocuous, demonstrates powerfully the fact that her poetry is built on the interweaving of singular and collective perspectives. Much of the limited scholarship that has been written about Eckermann reinforces this idea. As Hall (2018: 159) has written in regards to Eckermann’s poem, “Thunder Raining Poison”, her work explores the distinction between an “individual and collective narrative of land and creation”.
Eckermann has recently been recognized beyond Australian literary circles, winning one of the world’s most generous literary awards, the Windham-Campbell Prize (worth $US165,000) awarded by Yale University. As such, her poetry negotiates the difficulty of relating local knowledge to audiences that are unaware of her experiences, or are reading translations of her work. In this way, Eckermann shares Cheah’s concern for postcolonial world literature. Responding to a question regarding the relative brevity of some of her poems in an interview with Ben Etherington (2016: 13–14), Eckermann herself notes that this is her strategy to avoid misrepresenting Aboriginal Australia to a national readership that is Very immature and ignorant around the topics that I choose to write about, which relate to Aboriginal people and their histories. So just to give two or three lines at a time and then a pause is because I really want the reader to absorb the words.
Her poetic brevity has enabled her work to circulate widely in a short amount of time, having travelled to Indonesia, Vancouver, North America, and India to read her work. In that time, she has influenced other writers among the global south, such as Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe, who commented on Eckermann’s work in 2013 (see Bekers, 2016). Together with Fogarty, Eckermann participated in a creative relationship with Dalit writers of India, giving the prestigious Annual Lecture for Navayana, an independent anti-caste Indian publishing house based in New Delhi and Kolkata in 2015. During this period, her poems were translated for distribution among Indian readers.
As Eckermann recounted of the connection she found with the Indigenous Dalit poets she met, The Dalit and tribal poets who I have met, they’re not just appreciating the words on the page, they actually get a whole sense of the experience of what you’re writing about and understand that impact straightaway because they are cultured people and treat you accordingly […] I think that when the readership can reflect their conversation back to you it also grants healing by understanding beyond the words on the page. (Eckermann, 2016: 16)
This ethics of contact, as Eckermann herself notes, is predicated on mutual experience of the colonial wound that continues to define Indigenous modes of knowledge production as limited or primitive via deficit discourse. There are of course problems of comparability between Indigenous Australia and India that must be noted here, theirs are different postcolonial situations linked by a common colonist, Britain, and put simply, they have irrevocably different poetic traditions. A study of Indian and Indigenous poetics is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article; however, my aim is to stress here that Eckermann has a positive experience of being read and translated far beyond a national readership.
This aspect of Eckermann’s work is further underscored in “At Knowth”. The poem explores the complex relationship between Indigenous Australia and Gaelic Ireland, both of whom have experienced extensive cultural and language loss at the hands of a colonial power. Moreover, to ignore their common history shared on the Australian continent might also foreclose the resonance of a rich history of cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic exchange, an early example of which can be found in the research of Irish-Australian anthropologist, Frank Gillen, in Central Australia between 1875 and 1903. One can hardly suggest, however, that Irish Australians were not involved with frontier violence against Indigenous Australians, nor that Irish Catholicism did not play a role in the separation of Aboriginal children from their families in the Stolen Generation. Given these histories, to value Eckermann’s ethics of contact between these groups might retrace the violent ruptures of Aboriginal colonization. As a mirror of Édouard Glissant’s (1997: 3) Poetics of Relation, where he describes the violence of “shared understanding”, we might understand Eckermann’s engagement with Gaelic Ireland as being predicated on “the alluvium” left behind in “the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed” (Glissant, 1997: 7).
Eckermann’s encounters were undeniably shifted by the overarching frames of neo-colonialism and global tourism as she travelled throughout Ireland. Named as the Australian Poetry Ambassador, Eckermann could not have avoided the irony of travelling to Ireland as a direct representative of the Queen’s Commonwealth. As she is aligned with the hierarchies responsible for Indigenous oppression, her relations to other Indigenous nations might, as Allen (2012: xiv) recognizes, “serve only the interests of the settler, his culture, his power, his nation-state”. In the opening lines of the poem, Eckermann (2013) responds to this predicament by problematizing the possibility of experiencing an automatic (automatized) relation to the site: we are all just passing through this place of tabernacles and tombs scripted in a language we can no longer read.
In these lines, Eckermann presents herself as a wanderer through a land estranged from itself by language loss. Her movement, however, is not of her own control. She is ushered by as a tourist (“just passing through”), possibly the only mode of encounter left when there is no available language that can fully interpret the spiritual geography of the burial mounds. The site does not speak to her idea of Indigenous planetary agency. First, that a “tomb” refuses discourse is of course at odds with an Indigenous conceptualization of death, whereas Deborah Bird-Rose (2004: 27) argues, “one’s death belongs not only to one’s self but to others as well: to those who mourn, to those who remember, to those who incorporate the death into a community of memory”. However, it also appears that another layer of mutuality underlies the poem, given that a similarity could be struck between the erasure of the Gaelic language and Eckermann’s own endangered Yankunytjatjara dialect, both languages “we | can no longer read”.
By reflecting on the adjunct experience of Gaelic and Aboriginal peoples, Eckermann appears self-conscious that her writing takes place within a cultural tour that traces the extension of an imperial language into its colonies. This complex engagement with language loss is reinforced in the following stanza as Eckermann targets her Gaelic counterpart with a series of rhetorical questions: do the concentric circles carvings freeze the breath of your sentimental heart? are the zigzag lines accounts of storms when lightning led the way? (Eckermann, 2013: n.p.)
Eckermann’s repetitive rhetorical questioning of her Gaelic counterpart’s sentimentality satirizes the possibility that she, perhaps more so than others, can find connection with the burial mounds. By doing so, Eckermann intervenes into how the terms of discourse are constructed between Indigenous peoples in the world — questioning whether the basis for this encounter is the proximity given by a tourist visa — and the global networks of circulation it grants access to. In the lines to come (“zigzag lines accounts of storms| when lightning led the way”), Eckermann’s poem presents a superficial reading of Indigenous forms of expression. While one might be reading these lines as a genuine attempt at translating the spiritual meaning of the burial mounds, given the repetition of her satirical register, I would argue that this image is emblematic of Eckermann subjecting the “the spectatorial gaze” among tourists to poetic critique (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 91). Her making light of a sentimental attachment to Indigenous tradition critiques the ways in which sentiment, nostalgia, even desire, may reproduce the triangulated importance of a common colonizer by way of characterizing a culture as past history.
The following stanza begins with a series of full-rhymes that reinforce her satirical tone (sky/rely/mankind), before juxtaposing the desire to categorize, map, “know” the burial mounds with the desire to exist in subsistence with an environment: oh the different stars and planets in your sky are the living compass on which we all rely mankind can journey in simple form or pave poetic paths. (Eckermann, 2013: n.p.)
The end lines “mankind can journey in simple form | or pave poetic paths” imply the human tendency to impress human form on the landscape in order to fully extract its value for tourists. “Simple form” becomes an analogy for the cartographic principle that maps things in opposition to other things that are fixed in their place, typically centres of power, an idea that Glissant (1997) interprets in his work as the “arrowlike” desire to conquer space. Eckermann alludes to the fact that the burial mounds are not dead things fixed in their place, as they themselves take on active roles in the determination of a collective ecology. Her allusion to the wayfinding skills of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific in “living compass” demonstrates her acknowledgement of a planet-wide relationship to the environment that is not aligned with the “fixing” of non-human elements. A consideration of this in an Indigenous Australian context is best demonstrated with reference to the distinction between Country and landscape. As Deborah Bird-Rose (1996: 7–10) puts it, a landscape might be “lived in”, denoting a “distance between the place […] and the person or society which considers its existence”, but Country is “lived with”.
Eckermann uses poetry here to apply the ethics of Bird-Rose’s statement regarding the interconnectedness of humans within a conscious universe. She encounters things as they emerge in a common ecology and is given a responsibility to uphold their existence. To negotiate this environment, as Minter (2013: n.p.) recognizes in the essay introducing the poem, is to participate in “a human commons and a politics of speciation, the deep unfurling and substantiation of organic and cultural form”. In this way, Eckermann is inferring a transnational interpretation of what Howard Morphy (1998: 103) described as a “totemic geography”, a spiritual understanding of the land as a landscape bearing the marks of the movements of ancestral beings. These connections between Aboriginal peoples and an “ancestral present” (Morphy, 1998) allows the land to be experienced or engaged with as “a sign system because it was implicitly encultured at the moment of its creation in the Dreamtime” (Minter, 2013: 259). Minter (2013: 259) explains further that what is required is not a romancing of the natural landscape from a human vantage point, but a complex ethics of recognition: “More than just caring for or appealing to Country an ethos of Country calls upon histories of ‘character’ as they appear within networks of connection, interdependence and signification”. Eckermann’s poem implies the need to awaken the tourist site as a place alive to its own ecologies in order to more adequately engage with the “zig zag line accounts of storms”.
Having moved from a position of a mis-encounter, a dialogue that fails for its reliance on triangulation back to the colonizer, Eckermann (2013: n.p.) closes the poem with a curious gesture, finding that the art she finds is not simply identical to forms she knows of Indigenous Australia, but that it shares the same author: how did your people learn my art? did your people adorn their skin did they share Songlines from my country on their return to you let us sing a song for the Nungas a song for the Gaeliges brave at Knowth I stand in reverence my art carved by your hand.
These final lines indicate Eckermann’s acknowledgement of Gaelic movement into Aboriginal Australian environments. For example, she describes the intersecting flows of Aboriginal and Gaelic diaspora, “on their return to you”. Rather than limit the poem’s potential to make new literary connections in remembrance of a complicated colonial history, the end of the poem prioritizes an ethics of healing that allows Eckermann to move past this complex situation and the bind presented to her as a tourist/ambassador. Eckermann moves from within a local occupation of space outward, extending the direction of her Songlines, lines that mark the movements of ancestral beings across the borderlines of her Country, beyond the national borders of Australia as they speak to a mutually encultured geological commons in precolonial time. That Eckermann stands by the side of the “Gaeliges brave” indicates that both figures find each other via their shared occupation of two temporal commons — one ancestral, the other revolutionary — and as such, their relation contests narratives of colonial superiority and exceeds the teleological view that normalizes colonial epistemologies.
Lionel Fogarty and the Pacific
Like Eckermann, Lionel Fogarty is a frequent traveller, having travelled to Africa, Asia, the Americas, and India to perform his poetry. As a political writer, Fogarty has described his emergence into public discussion as stemming from his reading of international works of literature, such as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which helped him to develop his own poetic voice. Fogarty’s engagement with these texts has recently been evaluated by Ameer Chasib Furaih (2017) as evidence of the “transpacific impact” of African diasporic literature on Fogarty’s (2017: 1) political thinking. Despite his writing for over 40 years, the relational aspects of Fogarty’s writing are only beginning to be written about (Furaih, 2017; Hall, 2018; Wakeling, 2016). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Fogarty was predominantly interpreted as a “Guerrilla poet” who weaponized the English language (Johnston, 1986; Shoemaker, 1989). As a result, responses to Fogarty have tended to reiterate that the first point of analysing Fogarty is to recognize that “abstract, Western theories alone are not sufficient for an interpretation of Fogarty’s texts” (Hopfer, 2002: 45) and that responses must suggest a linkage between his poetic work and his political purposes. In the words of Ali Alizadeh (2013: 129), this interpretation of Fogarty’s work ensured that the poet’s unique manner of writing was “most commonly seen as a representation of his staunchly decolonized, Aboriginal identity”. This interpretation narrowed future approaches to Fogarty, often at the expense of close reading, a fact recognized by the editors of Fogarty’s most recent poetry collection, who suggest that Fogarty’s poetry is “to an extent overdetermined by the interpretive frames of resistance, activism, anger and protest” (Morrissey, 2017: 19). At a point that Corey Wakeling identifies as moving beyond a “pre-2000” understanding of Fogarty (2014), literary scholars have moved to a more flexible appraisal of Fogarty, often prioritizing the poetic effects of his writing as opposed to his cultural identity.
In wake of this scholarship, I argue that Fogarty’s a-grammatical use of language is necessarily disruptive, it stakes out a linguistic position where he is able to express himself without clarification. As a result, non-Indigenous readers may feel estranged from the text, but as Sabina Hopfer (2002: 63) has shown in her description of the different reading experiences generated by Fogarty: Estrangement need not be negative, provided that we are willing to understand it as a challenge to set out and let ourselves be educated, knowing at times we will be overpowered by not knowing.
As Hopfer indicates, estrangement is its own relational framework. If we value Fogarty’s work as an effort to set out decolonized terms of encounter, then Fogarty’s disruption of language becomes a necessary act to remake the terms of relation as his writing circulates into the hands of readers who might not be familiar with Aboriginal histories and cultures. As he expresses in an interview with Philip Mead (2008: n.p.), 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, into communities where they can understand the great intelligence of Aboriginal writers in this country.
Fogarty’s poetry straddles the needs of specificity and relation, necessitating that we think of his poetic expressions of encounter as taking place within the flows of our world-system. That Fogarty does not simply “give up on” an international readership signifies that Marcia Langton’s concept of Aboriginality may be applied beyond a national framework, as Fogarty utilizes poetry to educate others as to the relationality of the Aboriginal writer.
In Fogarty’s later poetry collections, he makes explicit references to the need to imagine new social and political connections that Corey Wakeling (2016: n.p.) describes as an effort to imagine a “post-colony” Australia. These later poems seem to establish new terms of engagement over false connections premised on international politics, national dialogues, and cosmopolitanism, which as Wakeling (2016: n.p.) argues, “sustain violent neo-colonial interventions into geographies and codify or demand certain kinds of participation and production of subjectivity”. For example, in the poem “Advance Those Asian And Pacific Writers Poets”, Fogarty (2014: 70) proposes dialogue across a shared ocean floor: At our arms is the Pacific of knowing We need to unite for rights in all writing powers. Our Asians are on our earth if we walk under the seabeds we sleep together Think where there’s no sea the waves of our humanity is the same.
The poem’s title here operates as a satirical play on the Australian national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair”, critiquing the way in which the open borders figured in the rhetoric of the song (“with boundless plains to share”) belie a racist ideology of singularity and protectionism. Fogarty (2014: 70) also appears cognizant of the internationalist rhetoric from the halls of Parliament House, calling to mind Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 1992 speech “Australia and Asia: Knowing Who We Are” “Him began to like the Asian Pacific forgive but don’t forget | Don’t like the collar reserve sir to the loudly thunder statures”. By intervening into the discourse defining the Pacific as a space characterized by the interaction between nations, Fogarty actualizes Tongan Epeli Hau’ofa et al.’s (1993) claim that the Pacific should be understood not in its sparseness, but as a sea studded with islands. In a way similar to Eckermann’s “At Knowth”, Fogarty identifies the discrepancy between Western and Indigenous ways of thinking about space. Fogarty’s poem is predicated on the assumption that Geologist Patrick Nunn makes in remarking on “the continuation of the islands under the sea”, as Nunn (1994: 112) explains that most islands “are no more than the tips […] of huge ocean-floor volcanoes: to pretend that their formation can be diagnosed solely from looking at those parts above sea level is ludicrous”. In this case, Fogarty appears interested in subterranean depth and relation below the opacity of the surface, an ecological commons, a “Pacific of knowing”.
Fogarty counters the idea that the Pacific can be understood via emptiness or isolation by emphasizing the ocean floor as a mutual space that is not defined by those attempting to penetrate the ocean’s surface. Within this space, Fogarty amalgamates an Indigenous worldview with those of other nations. His description of the Pacific as a body intimates that Indigenous nations are mutually occupied with a common desire to negotiate the diversely encultured Pacific, an interstitial landscape of dialogue for contemporary Indigenous writers such as himself. Regarding the poem, Fogarty states that “I wanted to connect to the Asians, Pacificans, Indians, and avoid making a business of the struggle. We’re all trying to get to humanity, as the human beings when we first started out” (Fogarty and Moore, 2019: n.p.).
This is established through Fogarty’s (2014: 71) insistence on different philosophical perceptions of the ocean environment, hinted at in the lines “All people of Pacific Asian are star travelling poetry”, which reference, like Eckermann, the wayfinding practices of the Polynesian peoples. This radical acceptance of different Indigenous knowledge systems is reinforced by Fogarty’s (2014: 72) emphasis on multiple religious frameworks: “Yet Dreamtime multiple declare all mistakes be a past tears for those unfriendly warpaths | Familiar our write-to-write together now Pacifica Asian’s narrow and bigger …” By identifying streams of writerly connection across the Pacific, Fogarty phenomenologically inverts the way in which oceanic space works. Here, space is not “sacked” as it might be from an “Anglosacktion” perspective. Instead, it is paradoxically “narrow and bigger”, an opening that is simultaneously discrete, yet expansive. His use of the word “familiar” is equally complex, suggesting resonances of “family” that retains the need for specificity that Somerville asks of Indigenous-to-Indigenous writing. The retention of Indigenous specificity reinforces the potential of Fogarty’s phrase “Dreamtime multiple”, whereby he alludes to a mutual unfurling of spiritual and environmental space onto the ocean.
Conclusion
As Eckermann found that Gaelic art was carved by the same hand as hers, Fogarty multiplies his spiritual worldview through poetic expression to include the prospective readers his poetry might find. Both figures locate challenges in establishing relationships with other Indigenous communities, but nevertheless find mutuality by utilizing the linguistic space of the poem as a reflection on the common enculturation of the landscape. In this way, language becomes a recognition not only of inter-Indigenous encounters but of the encounters between all life forms that share the Pacific. That an exact commonality is struck at the close of both poems (“carved by the same hand”; “Dreamtime multiple”) references Eckermann and Fogarty’s shared application of an ethics of relation based on the integration of difference. Their writing about this experience of inter-Indigenous contact serves a worldmaking purpose, in establishing literary precursors for new social and poetic links to emerge. Both poets have evident differences in their means of poetic expression and cultural heritage, and yet, in these poems, they understand the social force of their writing regarding the representations of Indigenous peoples. By drawing attention to the diversity and mobility of Indigenous peoples, they actualize a social ethos of contact that answers Minter’s (2013: 157) call for a “renewed ethical and aesthetic architecture” in Australian poetry. The poetry of Fogarty and Eckermann poses interesting challenges to those interested in the expansion of Indigenous Studies, provoking a poetic examination of Indigenous identity that is interwoven with the philosophical practices of other Indigenous peoples. Their inter-Indigenous connections suggest that understanding Indigeneity necessitates highly flexible scholarly practice as the reader manoeuvres through multiple geographical frames simultaneously. While the encounter was a constitutive trope for the construction of Aboriginality throughout the colonial period (Langton, 1993), its poetic redevelopment offers a chance to think of the poethical and the social as a decolonial tool.
