Moving from the ancient Greek of Theocritus, to the Latin of Virgil, I am ‘reminded’ of Lisa Robertson’s anti-genre, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchy and anti-pastoral and feminist poetry work XEclogue. In her ‘Two Pieces’ Commentary in the context of this work, Robertson writes:
Certainly on this 500th anniversary of the so called New World, we must acknowledge that the utopian practice of Liberty stands now as a looming representation of degrading and humiliating oppressions to the (pastoral) majority, and that pastoral utopias efficiently aestheticize and naturalize the political practices of genocide, misogyny, and class and race oppression. I consider that now pastoral’s obvious obsolescence may offer a hybrid discursive potential to those who have been traditionally excluded from utopia.
I ‘feel’ the same, of course, even if I come out of a different gender construct and might be assumed to occupy a different reality in that construct. In the critical processing of voice and privilege in the uber-gendered canonicals of historic Euro-centric verse, it might also be assumed that I have been more easily ‘resolved’ as a ‘male’ (though I deplore many attributes of ‘maleness’ and probably all of ‘masculinity’) into a line of pastoral discursiveness through the ‘raw ingredients’ of body and the ‘geographical demographics’ of speaking from a rural ‘location’ (she might or might not speak from the ‘rural’ now or then).
The dialogues of the eclogue are based in a privileging of the male voice (as Robertson notes and deconstructs), especially in rivalry/competition. Her intervention into the ‘form’ is so essential because it generates new hybrid possibilities for not so much reclaiming as disclaiming the values of possession and occupation. This speaks to colonised spaces conceptually, but I imagine can be enacted through invited reading on country as well. This is about undoing the literary trope of pastoral, and also undoing the pastoral as an enacted mode of controlling responses to capital, control of land and control of people through wealth, class, gender and ethnicity. She also notes:
Historically, from Virgil to Spenser to Goldsmith, the pastoral poem narrated the exigencies of land tenure, labour’s relation to the state and capital, and the establishment of a sense of place as a ground for philosophical being and discourse. The trajectory of the pastoral poem has prepared a self congratulatory site for the reproduction of power.
I also strongly concur with this, and in the Australian context have only been able to read pastoral impositions in such a way. In tracing the invasive and destructive forces of colonial agricultural practice in wheatbelt Western Australia and juxtaposing that with ‘landscape poetry’ acclimations of non-Indigenous presence on country (maybe the dominant subtext of settler-colonial poetry in Australia), I have tried to de-map the routes of exploration and redefine (and contest) localised colonial notions of ‘Liberty’.
The anti-pastoral eclogue might introduce non-colonial voices, but contained in its construct it risks imprisoning those voices. Even in, say, a collaboratively composed anti-eclogue, the fact remains the eclogue breaks down and the pastoral dissolves because it has to — being the only ‘legitimate’ outcome of such a process. The poem dissolves into a concrete return of land to its people/s without caveats and disclaimers, without footnotes that are catches. Robertson mediates via Mary Wortley Montagu (the ‘Lady’ being part of the problem, I won’t prelude her name by inserting it in a syntactic way), which reinvents potential utopias as active fields of engagement in the face of versions of oppression (class, gender, ethnicity, wealth, access to disseminating ‘views’...).
One thing that seems ‘worth’ considering is the fracturing of pastoral as a mode of valorisation across ‘food production’ and other ‘primary industry’ allowing us to see the toxic ‘values’ underpinning its authority. Literary pastoral is a copywriting arm of the agrichemical industry, of farming advocacy groups, and conservative ‘family’ valu(ation). In other words, making (anti) pastoral works allows us to expose the modernising and adapting versions of pastoral that hide themselves in ‘greenwash’ (such as mining ‘green metals‘ and destroying habitat to ‘reduce carbon’).
Robertson might (I am guessing) also claim that weather (which greatly interests her, too) is not climate, but I expect that the rhizomes of her brilliant XEclogues would reach into the privileging of discussion and action around climate to show that it becomes the weather report that vested interests want to hear. The nuclear industry uses climate change to put the planet at ultimate risk, the ‘battery miners’ cloak consumerism with saviour narratives. They each have a deep ‘investment’ in the idea of peril yoked with the promise of ‘rescue’. And it’s all about the weather. And discourse/contests/declarations/public relations in the eclogues of power. That’s what we want to contest and rewrite to the point that the ‘genre’ cannot be wielded as propaganda by the state, military, corporations or other institutions of control.
John Kinsella
