SPEAK, COUNTRY
Authored by Andrew Robinson. Originally published in full here.
This article is human-made (wetware certified) and represents the thoughts, reactions and experiences of an individual human life form based on external stimuli during the course of its lifetime. Any company owning technology which uses any part of this article for training purposes without the express written permission of its author is liable for a fine of no less than US$5 million.
Key works discussed in this article:
Avatar: The Way of the Water, directed by James Cameron
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, by Amitav Ghosh
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta
Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
STRANGE BEASTS, UNCANNY LAND
Watching Avatar: The Way of the Water is like watching two movies at the same time: One about humans, one about nonhumans.
The human story is dominant, familiar, populated with many of the fully grown movie conventions Director James Cameron gave birth to years earlier. Grunting military space travellers (“Hooah!”). Exoskeleton battle machines. The idea that humanity is forever under threat by killer robots. It’s all there. It’s all testimony to Cameron’s brilliance and longevity.
Other conventions are older, birthed by other artists: Melville’s mad whale hunter in the 1850s, for example. Or the “feral child” raised in the wild, with dreadlocks and Tarzan’s loincloth.
Even the Na’vi, the blue, hissing, cat-like clan in Avatar, speak in American sitcomese. The father protects (lovingly) his family with a gun. The Metkayina, an oceanic Na’vi clan, sport moko-like tattoos, perform awkward semi-hakas and speak with a Maori lilt (reminiscent, perhaps, of the controversial decision to give Jar Jar Binks a Jamaican patois?).
All very familiar and human to Western audiences.
Filter out the human and you’re left with a story that’s magical and thrilling: Levitating islands, six-legged horses, luminescent sea-sprites, flying dragon fish. Sigourney Weaver had to train to hold her breath for over seven minutes so she could play the role of a dreamy, teenage daughter of the brave scientist she played in the first Avatar. So enchanted is the girl by the sea creatures around her, she loses herself for long periods underwater observing them, as if forgetting her need for air.
The character mirrors my own impulse. Go ahead, carry on with your human story, Avatar. I’ll stay here in your underwater paradise. The stories of the land, the nonhuman stories, are more than enough to keep me enthralled.
For many years now, the novelist and historian Amitav Ghosh has expressed a growing interest in nonhuman stories — particularly their glaring absence from Western art and literature over the last four centuries. He began to wonder why it is that nonhuman entities have played such minor characters in modern literature. Why have they been so ignored?
Sure, nature can reflect a protagonist’s mood. A storm, a flash of lightning. But rarely is the nonhuman given a chance to twist a plot or express its own motives. The idea of a volcano, Ghosh argues, deciding to destroy a hero with a well-timed eruption would be difficult for a modern literary audience to believe. Ditto, the idea of something like climate change having a will of its own.
There are exceptions, of course. On reading The Great Derangement, I thought of Joan Lindsay’s masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock. The 1967 novel tells the story of a group of upper-class girls at an English boarding school in Victoria, Australia. Dressed in long white frocks and corsets — the year is 1900 — the girls go on a school picnic at the nearby Hanging Rock reserve. There’s a sense of something eerie and supernatural in the landscape around them. Ghosh would call it the “uncanny”. During this otherwise ordinary field trip, some of the girls go missing.
Entitled English characters on fancy English picnics in exotic environments. We see the same in E.M. Foresters Passage to India. The protagonists live their romantic English lives as if the land, its antiquity, its culture, had no say in the matter. Until suddenly it does.
Writing about Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Australian essayist Kathleen Steele puts it nicely: “The manner in which Europeans denied Aborigines either present or history, created a gothic consciousness of something deeply unknowable and terrifying in the Australian landscape.”
Unknowable and terrifying. As a child growing up in Northern California, I used to have vivid dreams of strange wildlife roaming the hillside forest behind my home. These animals were nothing like the white-tailed deer, coyotes, skunks and raccoons that regularly visited our backyard. I can’t say they were terrifying, as such. But they felt ancient, native, mysterious and menacing. Something akin to Cameron’s bestiary, but spectral and richly infused with Ghosh’s “uncanny.”
Their story, I understood, wasn’t centred on me, or on my family, or on my daily awareness, but on the land itself. A story of a faraway past. A story cast backward through time.
HEAR ME BULLROARER
Stories about the faraway past were difficult to come by for a child in 1970s California. The history we learned was mostly about Spanish missionaries, or intrepid explorers like Sir Francis Drake, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Stories about the Coast Miwok people, who have inhabited the land longer than anyone (an estimated 12000 years) were archeologic, sterilised, past-tense: Teepee building, food preparation, arrowheads, games, dress, dances, rituals. The practices, it seemed, of a lost time.
Not that some of the history lessons didn’t stick. I remember an 8th grade archeology class in which we made a Miwok bullroarer, a flat carved wooden instrument attached to a long string. We each took turns swinging it in a circle above our heads to produce a low, haunting reverberation. Decades later the bullroarer would return to me in a poem I was working on:
America!
Your child-bard who madly swung
your throbbing bullroarer around
his head to hear the primal sound
of Quaoar — out there among
the muted witnesses of rape,
the oaks and willows and wild grape…
I can’t remember exactly what inspired the words, “muted witnesses of rape.” I was living far away from America when I wrote them. I remember discovering a book in the Australian National Library that described the genocides on the land around San Francisco where I had been raised. I wondered why I had never encountered such a book while living in California. To what degree, I remember thinking, had the history of my homeland been actively “muted”?
A quick aside: The filmmaker George Lucas was also born and raised on Miwok land. In a fit of teenage curiosity and daring, a friend and I once hiked through the woods to get a view of his Skywalker Ranch, a little township of blue-trimmed Victorian style buildings nestled amongst the trees. Exhausted, dehydrated, we decided to return through the Ranch itself. The moment we crossed the fence line, a utility truck came zooming up the hill, picked us up and escorted us out the front gate.
The “Ewoks” of Star Wars, those short, furry humanoid creatures, owe their name to the Miwoks. The Miwok culture had existed all around us. But to those of us who grew up there, it felt as remote and irrelevant as any galaxy, far, far away. I sometimes think the inspiration for Lucas’s space opera, set in a “long ago” time, could have only sprung from a land where the “long ago” felt so devoid of its own mythology. From a land where building Victorian homes in the middle of a wild space didn’t seem taboo or insensitive to its past.
Absence beckons genius. The myths and legends we learned in California — Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Pagan, Japanese, Hindu — fed our hungry imaginations. All the wonderful things Lucas gave us with Star Wars, the sorcery, swordplay, ceremonial costumes and so forth, it was all inspired by East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific Islands, everywhere but by the culture of the land where we were born.
Was this absence the result of the small Miwok demographic? Or was Miwok culture “muted” by the shame, disbelief, denial of the colonists who settled on their land?
Either way, the past had become unspeakable. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t be heard. Children are often good at hearing the unspoken.
Perhaps their dreams are a medium through which the past tries to speak.
THE PATHOGEN TO PROGRESS
Ghosh’s latest work, The Nutmeg’s Curse, deals with this sort of muted, unspoken, unspeakable history. The book’s epicentre is the Banda Islands in 1621. Dutch traders, seeking to control the cultivation and trade of the nutmeg plant, swiftly carry out the complete eradication of the Bundanese people and culture…
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