Review of Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear

    by John Kinsella

 

Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear contains what I consider one of the best stanzas in ‘Australian poetry’:

 

Because to hold him is to hold the tree

  that holds these birds I cannot name,

                          and a word spoken here

           might almost sound like home

 

This is from ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’, and Araluen is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation. What makes this stanza so potent is the language-searching of the poem that holds it — learning names, knowing words that come out of a totemic relationship with country means knowing bird or plant in essential and consequential ways. Earlier in the poem we read:

 

It is hard to unlearn a language:

             to unspeak the empire,

             to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,

a topographic intonation

 

Dropbear is a book-work of incredible depth and complexity — complex in its structure, and also, as Derrida thought things need to be when under pressure, complex in its thinking. It meticulously excoriates colonial storytelling in which allegory is trauma operating insensitively and with disturbed and cruel irony. A poem such as ‘Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives’ satirises such story-making while gaining intensity through modulating tone from adult telling to children’s reception, and exposing many levels of patronising crypto-mythmaking. We read later in ‘Appendix Australis’ of ‘atavistically charged Banksia Men with their skinny black legs and wide black mouths’. Araluen’s poetry ridicules and exposes the Gibbs story’s inversion of who the threat to children’s lives actually was (official white government policy). Dropbear is a book of agency and recuperation.

 

The ash of fire is a reality on so many levels; the spectre of death is traumatically visceral and also an elusive but familial presence. Ghosts are throughout this collection, but we are not all capable of perceiving them. There is no simple formula to unravel this book. Fire, so imbued in the language and function of country, becomes disorientating across the colonialism of climate change (and geographical displacement), and the poet suffers across the distance — visiting England, then Ireland, disturbed by the pains of being at colonial centring.

 

In a deeply affecting and quite revealing prose-poem ‘essay’ piece, ‘To the Parents’, we read, apropos of the undoing of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in ‘Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives’: ‘My siblings and I consumed those stories, we were/ never taught to settle for them. My parents never pretended/ these books could truly know country or culture or/ me — but they had both come from circumstances in which/ literacy and the access it affords was never a given. They just/ wanted me to be able to read.’ And so effective was the mediation between the coloniality of available reading, and its recontextualising in how and why it was read, that their daughter has created a language of lyrical-critical skill that might be part of the new language of redress.

 

The beautiful poem of familiarity, ‘See You Tonight’, presents what is possibly, in the light of the book, a resolvable paradox: ‘You play bunyip, I’ll be dropbear’. The cryptomyth of the killer carnivorous koala — the dropbear — becomes the vector for the misrepresentations and lies about Aboriginality in colonialist historicising, society and narrative.

 

Araluen’s language-flow is even mesmeric when it is most confronting, and trauma is almost lulled into consciousness, making a shock of realisation (‘Inland sea’ is an example of this). This is a work of such ‘lyrical’ intensity that it undoes the colonial lyric by showing what song can be. Araluen works in a language that is its own and of its own cultural belongings — not English as it would appear, but a shifting language that tells more truths of history than the erasures official English has built into it, whether we know it or not.

 

Brilliant Indigenous writers have excoriated the colonial nature of literary text-making in Australia so that the white gatekeeping of Australian literature has been shown up for what it is. Books of poetry such as Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear enact remembrance and confrontation with methodical purpose. A new poetics is revealed in a poetry that contests the shape of received form come about through colonial imposition, but is also delivered through the commitment to learning, reading, and comprehending what empowers colonial story-telling to impose in obvious and subtle ways. Araluen plays back these conventional devices and tropes, and undoes them so effectively that no colonial shibboleth is left unchallenged or undecoded.

 

This book of resistance won’t allow for the specious arguments about ‘some versions of pastoral’ being more sensitised to the theft of country, dispossession and  destruction of families and communities. It calls out literature, especially poets and poetry, for culpability. As Araluen writes pointedly and loudly at the end of ‘Fern Up Your Own Gully: ‘RIGHT   WHERE   YOU   WROTE   US’.

 

Araluen’s Dropbear is a deeply nuanced, sophisticated and self-aware book of poetry that in challenging colonial persistence also provides an array of entry points into understanding and perception for non-Aboriginal as well as Aboriginal readers. The use of the prose-poem essay as exemplar of not only ‘telling’, but also hearing oneself speak, is remarkable, and such works act as interludes for pause and reflection within the poem and protagonist, and within the book’s arguments.

 

In poem after poem, literary manners are undone and hypocrisy confronted — ‘The Last Endeavour’ (the first thing I thought of was Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’, and checking the thorough back notes, we indeed find it is one of the intertexts as well as anti-models for this remarkable undoing of voyages of exploration and invasion). ‘Acknowledgement to Cuntery’, ‘The Trope Speaks’ and ‘Appendix Australis’ with its anti-axioms of enquiry (‘23. no permissions were granted by community for this usage’) are examples.

 

It is easy to say an activist book is full of ‘fury’ or ‘anger’, but to my mind, that is too easy and even reductive. This book is intense in many different ways. It’s also a book of love and respect — of ancestors, family, community, a partner, and the power of language and country. But love and respect are contingent on mutuality, and understanding the reality of ongoing wrongs. ‘To the Poets’ finishes: ‘But no-one’s ever asked how we are both colonised by and inheritors of these words. J asks — what is a world, and what does it mean to end it? I want to know what it means to lose the world you’re still standing in?’ And this from a poet who takes nothing for granted, but knows what should be able to be taken for granted.

 

Dropbear can teach us all if we are willing to learn how to read, to listen, to comprehend.

[Note: this is a longer version of a review that appeared on 1/5/2021 in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers]

Signings, Inscriptions, Augmented Texts

            by John Kinsella

In this time of pandemic, with much anguish in many places, and every signing-off a false signing-off because of ‘second waves’ and uncertainty about recurrence and persistence, the location of the book is a strange and disturbed one. Where does it sit as a tool of address, redress, scrutiny, respect, dialogue, certainty as record?

As I notice remaining ‘intact’ or persisting environment not only still being devastated, but often increasingly devastated or marked/’pegged’ for future exploitation under a blanket of lockdown and human-planetary crisis — via obfuscation through distraction, and the new economics of ‘recovery’— I think more and more about the site of the book: its conceptual liberations, its pragmatic costs of making (in so many ways), and its sanctuaries, too.

Going through many ‘physical object’ copies of books in recent times, I have been reading and thinking about ‘signed’ and ‘inscribed’ copies, and the notions of gifting and possessing, and the politics and ethics of personal and public ‘libraries’: of restraints of access, of ‘borrowing’, of ‘open access’, of versions created specifically for digital access.

And I’ve also been considering the issue of ‘older books’ scanned to recreate the (vicarious) experience of encounter with books made closer to their time of writing (books written with very different and differing views of how they were to be encountered over the centuries and locales of making), and maybe edging towards some notion of where the augmented text meets the earliest published version. And by ‘augmented text’ I mean: interventions by people reading, dialoguing, recording, highlighting as engagement or prompt to memory, or gifting the books — inscriptions, annotations, marks etc; and the authors themselves dedicating, signing, gifting, correcting annoying missed typos, arguing with their own printed or published texts... revising for reissue or resaving...

In processing all of this, I came across a few signings by Jacques Derrida, whom I liked and greatly admired, but find myself often (and in some ways increasingly) arguing with, which I am sure he would have expected. These books were gifts, and though the signings don’t ‘show’ that, the fact they were alters the nature of reading for me/us — the personal in the private realm of the page, the public in the act of doing something (signing) he had done many times before over his life.

Derrida was a poet’s philosopher and a philosopher of poetics in whom all textuality encountered a politicising matrix, all words and marks were signs that had and have consequence. He told me once that he had dreamt of John Donne not long before I spoke to him on the phone, and he could see handwritten poems, if I recall correctly. Were they in English or French?!

Below are scans from three books he gave me, or me and Tracy — of their covers and their signings. Signings that are small poems as significant to the recipients, maybe, as a Mallarmé’s fan stanzas. Names and dates, and maybe a place — yes, shaped, placed, the circumstances of writing (and reading)... that’s what makes poems. And consider their contexts... ‘What is Poetry’... and so on and on. From other Derrida signings I have seen, I note the familiar positioning and slant on the page, the dating, the sharpness of the moment of delivery. Quick as a flash. Done. But part of something flowing and continuous as well. Episodic, and yet points of repair [repère]. How many did he remember doing?

And vitally, which page to sign was chosen to sign? — a blank page, a half-title... the written text speaking with open field of the ‘blank’ or in dialogue with printed text, the nature of lettering, of calligraphy. The pen and the printing block. But each is a case itself, as well.

So, Genette’s paratext and something extra? Maybe, but each enactment in the book carries its own traces, and its own echoes, even consolations and maybe consequences. So let’s acknowledge:

'... the dedication, understood as trace, is necessarily linked to individual memory. The dedication has that demiurgic capacity that allows a memory to be reactivated upon each reading.'

(translated by Tracy Ryan — see here for the original French) 

The book is a concept that doesn’t need old-growth trees to die, to be turned into pulp — in fact, over thirty years ago a friend and I were trying to make paper in a large vat from straw-stubble and other materials, spread and rolled and so on in the sun, for a book of my poems... and I did a few things on wheatpaper in those days.

The burnt offerings of stubble that add absolutely unnecessarily to global warming have a future as poems and fans and books and places for both inscriptions and signings... for imprint pages, for front matter, for afterthoughts, for affections and questionings, for recording a moment, its temporality and spatiality.

Reverence ['Part One'] — Further Collaborative Work With Urs Jaeggi

    by John Kinsella

Urs and I spent an intense afternoon in late January working on this new collaboration entitled Reverence. It was on a day of protest against the rapacity of industrial capital. Urs's print-out texts and ink drawings are interwoven/interleaved with hand-written replies by me (with some hand-scribed moments by him, too!): extensions, riffs, diversions, responses and (copied-out) citations. Scribbles, scrawls, diagrams and 'errors'. It's intended as a 'living text', a rhizome testing the nature of the world around its coming into being. A conversation that took place in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (thanks all there) with Finnegans Wake and commentaries (in the Joyce library), and with much else. So over a series of posts, I am going present the work: page by page... this is the first batch, and two more follow before the D & G 'body without organs' takes shape into something... corporeal vs. machine?

     [go to Part Two of Urs Jaeggi and John Kinsella Reverence]

John Kinsella -- poems to accompany Niall Lucy's essay in Derrida Today

John Kinsella -- Five Derrida Poems

Fourth Essay on Linguistic Disobedience

“A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the laws of its composition and the rules of its game.”
Derrida

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.”


Taking the fifth, he avoided the traffic. The organism
wasn’t feeling comfortable, though the sun bright and everything blue.
In the canyons, prayers are trapped halfway; cooling,
eventually dropping — churned up by pedestrians and cars. Advocacy
redecorates, brings in old fireplaces, pronounces
death-again sentences on leather chairs.
I have no clubs and no belonging, though the marks — amatory, elegiac, territorial,
arbitrary — left by beak of ladder-backed woodpecker, or the claws
of the twenty-eight parrot, on the bark of differing geographies,
erase none of my loyalties. This is not romanticism.
Continuation of lines of branches and twigs in the leafless woods
takes us back, imploded to fractals, hesitant at the solid point
of interruption: soundless. In the rock-garden
skinks move out of the tepid, a willy-willy
weaves garlands out of the crop: gamenya,
tall and high on protein. This house is stranded in that field,
the roof is giving way and red brick crumbling.
There’s a well nearby fed by a spring. Salt-rings
mark decline. Birds here are shunned
and strings of fragments come undone.
What’s of me here? he asks, memory
faster than time, the whole lot imploding.
His Auntie will not visit the farmhouse she raised
children in; her new place is decorated with photos
of the old place, a curatorial space. Recently he went out
to take a look, preparing a report then abandoning it to a carmine sunset —
insects thick on the windscreen. The twenty-eights tracked the car
as always, white cockatoos abandoned mallee trees.
At the cross-roads a shearer or young driver
cut sick: figure-eights and ‘doughnuts’ engraved deep.
On the sign at the corner of Mackey and Cold Harbour Roads,
a fox was impaled — its tail bristled like headgear.
Bounty hunters call it ‘poling’, or ‘shishkebabing’.
It’s what you do with ‘foreign muck’. A sharp taste
in their food brings it on. The Needlings burnt without
touching the paddocks — it doesn’t happen like this anywhere else,
as far as we know. Sheep spread out evenly,
as if placed to make something happen.
Belonging to this is not desirable.
Unbelonging, I make conversation
with like-minded people. A wedge-tailed eagle is seen
on a fence-post and none of the party wants to shoot it. I select
this society. The guns will overwhelm you! a sceptic declares, safe
in the anonymity of the world wide web. We will absorb
consequences. Sun burns even in winter here,
skin mutating. Its despotic face is passionate and unrelenting,
making language form. A spoonbill sifts units of water,
silt-heavy and charged with mosquito larvae,
in the gulch, creek, ravine, stream, gulley…
solubility, intactness… not a technical piece in a legal sense,
an ‘impressionistic’ account as a means of redress,
just ice concurrent with heat.


[From Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, WW Norton, 2003]


Scratchings

That's the best place to look — today,
this morning, at this time of year:
it's bright and hot around there.
Two absences — the echidna

and meaning. Proof is here,
as told. Durable trees that hold
their leaves: hooves
breaking ground like Sensurround

and axe-blows ringing settlement.
Scratchings, markings that work
when working's almost done:
scant evidence of termites,

though phonic libraries resound.
In listening, close to ground.
Plosive catch and guttural plough.
Mother tongues and history.

You can't refer, an English critic
says: Saussure apocryphal and sporting
with locals — shooting signs
in road holes. Shout down,

public audit, echidna in parenthesis —
keeping low within perimeters
country town not promoted
within its written prejudices.


Heidegger and Poetry (Istrice 2)

for Niall Lucy

The logic
of the damaged
animal
outside the zoo —
a rarity —
ethical
as Greece,
gathering
of crows in twin dead trees
near the glue works: chain
lettering, so many;
so many of them.


So, opposition
in the open,
on the roadside
slightly out of view:
so low so slow
in abstaining
tall trees — just white gums
and red gums — people
passing knowing
only colour
generally —
you know, verticals,
the higher ups
the stretches
over the lower dead.


How do you timeframe fire
burning down
to prevent fire
in summer:

unfinished,
like heart
of lines:
behind
crow clusters
picking remnants:
vocabulary,
concordances,
lexicons,
third party
insurance?


I take the rollover,
quilled ball of tale,
give ground.


What do we give
on the up and up?
It’s the Southern Highway
I drive home. Honest,
that’s the route
of the errant.
Accidents
waiting to happen,
even where lanes
double — briefly
duplicate.


Echidna Elegy: IMM Jacques Derrida


Gross diagnosis is signed by the roadside;
or what a roadside might be if they wreck the trees,
take up access, if in scanning we take our spoken
presence; those diggings acclaimed and celebrated
prove to be rabbit testings, and not the echidna
we’d hoped for; does it make a difference?

I sense an echidna nearby and take pleasure
in this desire I might have as photograph
taken in shadow — a risk, an actual distance,
a narration wished out of hiding, though it’s too bright
for an echidna, blazoned affirmative to roll as cylinder,
coil in the tree-base hollow, bristle out of the cinders.

In everything the word echidna is echidna
where population is depleting, where a short
burst of termite activity — intense — brings
the liveness of monsters to propensity; where
are the anomalies? Where the historicity
of domestication and trauma? After the show

you sat with us and translated echidnas —
no language you’d have yourself recognise,
no language you’d have as event: the claw
clasped over our hands is the hand that digs,
its marks a transmission of shocked awakening,
diverting us from trails of proper meaning.


Canto of Abandoned Hope (Derrida and Dante, Inferno 3)

This is back-engineering. I have passed through the gate
and been through the bowels of the earth, passed out
into lambency. Today I took the children to Gwambygine,

to the bird lookout over one of the few permanent pools
left to the river. We stood quiet and then in the splay
of a dead tree a pair of Splendid Fairy Wrens

appeared, the bright male a gift out of death,
all tropes shed and risen over the riparian foliage.
Though its colour was muted and mutable,

the twitching of its tail diced bathos, calling
the female to the tine of the fork opposite. Intense.
Though vulnerable and breaking down,

swamp she-oak, paperbark, and even needle trees,
meliorated the floodfringe, bone-white with salt. The kids
were quiet but ecstatic, and said that though a sad window,

a precipice into a shadow place, the lookout becomes
a warning sign that passers-by just don’t get: it’s better
going there than avoiding the damaged remnants.

The light wasn’t strong though it was hot, an overcast
valley that compelled you to breathe slightly short, the end result
a semi-neutrality that was deceptive. We read on a metal sign:

possums might feed at night, hiding at day in a paperbark hollows
along the river, but foxes have probably caught them out,
on nights where dark translates the lambent less and less.


[From The Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography, WW Norton, 2008]