Professor Stephen Muecke
Challenges to Perform: History, Passion and the Imagination
Three Historical
Passions
I am with Greg
Dening, here to talk about the passions of history, and I shall do so with a
performance taking three parts. I want to speak about the passion of the intellectual,
the passion of the emerging identity and the passion of the scavenger. I will
be performing three voices, one of an Aboriginal man with whom I have worked,
Paddy Roe, and the others those of two younger Australian writers, Katrina Shlunke
and Paul Magee.
1. The Passion
of the Intellectual
I want to use
the word ‘intellectual’ again, without apology. In the face of a whole lot of
anti-elitism and dumbing down, I want to re-assert the value of intellectuals
as storytellers. Intellectuals are not just university folk or bearded avant-gardists;
they can be found in all walks of life. So my first performance will be from
Aboriginal Australia, the North-West, around Broome, where Paddy Roe, Krim Benterrak
and I put together a book called Reading the Country.
We are having
a theological discussion. Paddy Roe remembers a man who came to see him once,
a priest, and he laughs as he says, ‘he’s one of the man got bugarrigarra
too, you know, that priest and that church, you call it, that’s bugarrigarra
too.’
Bugarrigarra
is the Nyigina word for ‘dreaming’. And he goes on: ‘That’s only bugarrigarra
because nobody never seen true person (laughter) you know I don’t think, did
they? did they ever see true person?’
What he is
getting at is the fact that no-one has ever seen God: ‘I know Jesus was a human
being, then he gone but his father; nobody don’t know, nobody never see-im because
he’s a bugarrigarra.
Paddy compares
this Christian god with the figures from his dreamings who people believe in
and tell powerful stories about, even though they have never seen them. The
stories told about them persist as traces in the landscape, like a dinosaur
footprint: ‘Well that’s marrala bin walkin’ there, that’s his track ...
he’s a man he bin singing but that’s his track.’
This story
with the track as its concrete evidence has given the local people a law about
mothers-in-law. ‘from bugarrigarra he [the mother in law] got daughter
well that daughter is mine he might be promise me you know.’
What should
a man do with his mother in law? ‘I gotta feed that mother tucker anything,
plenty this way and bit of everything you know ‘til the baby grow big, little
bit I take-im ‘way, might be that high then I grow him up you know ‘til he get
woman.’
We have a situation
here of mature Aboriginal men in the company of little girls they call their
wives, a paedophilia scenario which Paddy Roe recognises: ‘like that ah English
say, ‘What that?’ ‘That’s my wife’ (Incredulous)’WHAT?’ (laughter) ‘Yeah’ ‘You
should be in jail’ but that man know what he’s doin’ (Laugh) he’s not silly
... he know how big he gonta be before he come to woman but he can feed him
take him everywhere whatever he likes and nothing happen (Laugh) he got too
much this one too (Gesture ‘brains’, laugh)’
And then he
spins this out into a story:
I remember
one time -
One bloke went
in jail for seven years
because eer
the girl was twelve year old
but that’s
his promised girl (Laugh) you see?
Krim: Mm
Yeah, that’s
his promised girl
Now I come
back, I dunno too
I bin working
out in Roebuck plains country
In the windmills
I told you
about that cyclone come, not very long
So when I
come back I hear that man in jail
‘What’s wrong
with ‘im?’
‘Oh well, they
took the girl away, put-im back in the convent
and put the
man in for seven years
‘Yeah, what
wrong?’ I said to welfare
welfare, they
bring me there
‘No, no, no,’
I said
‘That’s his
promised GIRL
that’s his
PROMISED girl
he married
about that high (laugh)
he can carry
his wife
anyway where
he travel around if he can’t walk (Laughter)
if he get tired
you know till
he grow big
when he grow
big, he know, he got this one,’ I said (Laugh)
you know
when he grow
big, then he see, he’s a woman
THEN he know
what to do
make a woman
out of him
But he can
walk around for years and years, just like that
Nothing else
Oh I got mad
too
‘You people
try and dig little bit more deep
you bin digging
only white soil
try and find
the black soil inside’ (Laughter)
YEAH
I said to him
(…)
Oh they get-im
out
They got-im
out again, let-im go
That man, ‘You
look after ‘im’
‘Oh I will
too,’ I tell-im (pp. 193-4)
And then I
wrote:
From the discussion
with Paddy Roe, and his story, it is easy to see how different cultures produce
different sorts of truths which hold good only within their own systems. But
Paddy Roe’s approach is ‘intellectual’ in the sense that he doesn’t dismiss
the white man’s institutions out of hand; he reads them from a perspective which
takes into account cultural similarity and difference. Christianity and bugarrigarra
thus have ‘invisibility’ in common.
The intellectual
is on the margins of the common body of knowledge. By knowing things which come
from elsewhere (the ‘frontiers’ of science and technology, the strange almost
perverse discourses of the humanities, and other cultures) he or she makes raids
on the common myths at the same time as building up new ones which will come
to count as common knowledge one day. It is Paddy Roe’s confidence in the knowledge
of his own culture which enables him to challenge in such a forceful way European
notions of marriage, and he saves one of his countrymen from seven years of
suffering. This is perhaps the power of the intellectual; to intervene in a
situation and tell a story which can change the conventions for understanding
things.
2. The Passion
of the Emerging Identity
Katrina Schlunke’s
Autobiography of the Bluff Rock Massacre, was a PhD, and will be a great
book. It is a kind of ‘ficto-history’, by which I don’t mean a history corrupted
by fiction writing technique (history always was!), but a text which is explicit
about the relation between history and fiction. Like a designer telephone with
a clear perspex, it shows us its workings. It disentangles and re-tangles the
local history of the Bluff Rock massacre which took place around the Glen Innes/Tenterfield
area 150 years ago. What took place is hard to figure out, as it partakes of
all those ‘Niggers’ leap’ and cliff stories which are the condensation of truth
and fiction, siphoning off the real horror of the wars of conquest and localising
them in some landscape feature which both impossibly is and isn’t the place
where something happened.
Katrina’s feelingful
and intensely local history comes out of her own growing up in the area as she
remembers and researches a history which is her ownBUT, not quite as she
remembers it THEN, and not quite as she tells it NOW: ‘History is part of an
unfolding invented by imaginative temporality and locality rather than distance
from the present,’ she says.
We were always
taught that histories are fixed in past time, rather than being inflected through
‘imaginative temporality and locality’, or even in her case, inflected through
her identity: but that is how new histories are made. We remember how
the powerful metaphor dreamed up by Henry Reynolds (The Other Side of the
Frontier) was a lightning strike of the imagination which relaunched Australian
history in a new direction: suddenly there was a pre-history to whitefella history,
and a parallel other history, held apart at that moment, but perhaps reintegrating
in interesting ways in Shlunke.
Schlunke’s
deployment of her identity in locality has that same ‘lightning strike’
potential. She’s a Glen Innes girl, but going back there as a scholar she has
to contrast the historical evidence of some sort of massacre with her ‘memory’
that there were no Aborigines in the area (people kept saying they were from
Moree), contrasting with another memory that there were Aboriginal kids
in her class at school. But those kids didn’t identify according to the ‘modernist
meta-categories’ of race, class and gender. The ‘local’ classifications were
‘baroquely particular‘. You didn’t ask was someone Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal
or whether they were rich or poor but were you respectable or a tart? Did you
play netball of hockey? Did you know my family? Were you an outcast or did you
have a group of friends? Were you a townie?’
She goes on
to say:
I don’t think
it helped to go back as a lesbian. Caught in the act of becoming postcolonial
I was/am tremulously ‘lesbian.’ ... So this is not a lesbian pilgrimage but
rather attempts a queer odyssey, arriving home only to set off again ...
And there is
nothing queerer than the experience of a small town. Nothing more demanding
of politeness-as-performance and nothing more likely to produce emotional maelstroms.
Nowhere is more suited to the thought ‘She has got to be a dyke’ as you recall
all that horse talk and the many women-only spaces of Churches, ‘Clubs’ and
‘Associations’. Nowhere is there a better example of what can and can’t be said.
You can never be certain where an ally or enemy might be and you feel the physical
threat in your heart/cunt/gut all the time you are loving the landscape and
readmiring ‘country’ values. An intense dislocation and relocation occurs at
the same time and in the same place. You can barely touch your girlfriend in
anything like a semi-public place but long to experience the most sensational
passions, hidden behind shearing sheds, in anonymous motels further along the
highway, on walks along struggling rivers, because they re-awaken your desire
for revenge, for something that has become the Big Secret that gives you energy
to live in a place like this. You don’t want them to know, you want them
to be like you. You long for them to speak your language, which of course some
of them do, some of the time. Home is a safety net with holes. You begin to
live in an odd world of recognition and mis-recognition. The laugh that you
have when you go into the fish-and-chip shop wearing your ‘I can’t even THINK
straight' T-shirt and the middle-aged, over-worked woman behind the counter saying,
‘Oh I know exactly how you feel love’.
The thesis
is written pretty much in a subjunctive mood, full of maybes, possibility and
doubt. In this sense it is an antidote to the pastoral call for certainty in
the land-rights debates and the conservative political call for finality (a
wiping out of the problem). It enacts or performs a critique of history-writing
without making this critique explicit, methodical or even confrontational.
3. The Passion
of the Scavenger
The scavenger
finds useful things, and each one is a little piece of an archeological jigsaw.
It involves a love of material which makes the ideological edifices of institutional
histories fall away into immateriality. Paul Magee’s ethno-history, From
Here to Tierra del Fuego, is a scavenging kind of writing which has been
praised by one Australia’s greatest expatriate intellectuals, Michael Taussig,
author of Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.
Magee takes
you to the end of the world and then steps off into pure intellectual effusion.
He's the tour guide you dream of when all roads lead nowhere and silence grips
the soul.
Magee says
that his approach is actually via the ‘ethnography of dispassion.’ He
meets and speaks to travellers in Tierra del Fuego (themselves full participants
in the neo-imperialistic Third World tourist economy) who are there ‘just to
say I've been there.’ This makes him reflect on the theoretical tendency to
imagine that people speak as they speak, and act as they act, out of
a pursuit of truth, and a belief in the authenticity and/or moral probity of
their actions. His travellers to the end of the world are purely cynical: ‘just
to say I've been there.’
‘Why else would
you go to the End of the World?’ A Swiss woman I spoke to in Chilean Puerto
Natales was going there, she boasted, ‘just to buy the T-shirt that says I've
been there.’ Her friend, meanwhile, planned to bypass Ushuaia altogether
and fly to Puerto Williams, the Chilean naval institution on the other side
of the Beagle Channel. This place as The Travel Survival Kit will tell
you, is truly the Southernmost inhabited place in the world, despite Ushuaia's
claim to be El Fin del Mundo. Even though there is nothing to do there, you
may as well go anyway: ‘If you've come as far as Tierra del Fuego, you can hardly
turn back now.’ That such an empty, unbelievable, formality is so compelling
as to be enshrined in the ‘traveller's bible’ points to the impossibility of
explaining such a culture in terms of the pursuit of truth, or something enlightening
or even useful.
The fact that
a whole regional economy (tourism) could centre around a bad joke made him reconsider
the relation of humour to imperialism and power. ‘I decided that I would discover
more about the history and present reality of Tierra del Fuegian colonial travel
by investigating the bad jokes, silly anecdotes and offhand remarks I could
collect there.’ This lead him to ‘an ironic and even self-defeating notion of
salvage ethnography, a science that works by scavenging its way through the
rubbish which doesn't usually make its way home in one's cultural baggage’.
‘Remember the
future,’ says the French artist Orlan. A present tense reality we regard as
trivial, trashydispassionate evenwill take on epochal, passionate
(and perhaps atrocious) dimensions to our future historians and judges. Magee’s
comprehension of the trashy and trivial nature of Fuegian travel discourse (in
the face of the monumentally detrimental nature of Third World travel) led him
to rethink the atrocious Fuegian colonial past. This is certainly a history
to write of with passion. The near total genocide of the island's original inhabitants
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by wool magnates is almost
an icon of the evils of colonial capitalism (itself hardly a spent force). Yet
the uncanny fact is that the autobiographical accounts of that process areif you look for itreplete with jokes, anecdotes and ironies. Indeed
a salvage ethnohistory of the Fuegian genocide finds similarly dispassionate
and cynical materials as that evinced by contemporary backpackers.
For instance,
on the autobiography of one of the island's first colonists, E. Lucas Bridges
(his The Uttermost Part of the Earth), Magee writes ‘...instead of demonising
the colonist, attacking the imperial discourse he at times obviously expresses,
the words to which I wish to hold Bridges are his jokes. This is the point at
which those dead monuments of high theory might come back to life, as I focus
on the things Bridges clearly regarded as trash even back then, at the beginning
of mass world consumerism’.
So in effect
Magee equates the cynicism and dispassion of present day travel with the secret
cynicism of imperial history; this equation unsettling him in his very possession
of the present (how will we be judged, when our actions, shorn of all frivolity,
are seen in the same way we view the past?)
Magee uses
a quotation from Walter Benjamin at the frontispiece of his book:
The wrinkles
and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices,
insights that called upon us, but we, the masters, were not home.
I’d like to
finish with this : ‘We, the masters, were not home,’ belonging and identity
are crucial issues of the writing of Australian history. Whose home is this
and how is the ‘we’ constituted? How do we write it?
The discovery
of new Australian histories within this ‘home’ are no longer likely to be carried
by Reynolds' ‘frontier’ metaphor, inheritor despite itself of the heroics of
the overland explorer. The new histories will be carried by other voices, and
there is plenty of room to attend to the forms history writing can take
(the rhythms and dramatic dialogue of Paddy Roe’s oral delivery, effects which
deliver truth for his people). Shlunke’s identity anecdotes create flashes of
recogition for any historian of the local. And in the case of Magee, sifting
through the trash pile of history, laughter can erupt and dispel the joint cynicism
of imperial history and a consumerist ideology of the present. His work opened
my eyes to an idea: what we call the rubbish dump of historywhat is left
out of the official historiescould be our richest resource.
Let us absent
ourselves from the mastery of history, but let the great passions make their
mark on the wrinkles and creases of our faces, which are the way we write our
texts together.
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