SPEAK, COUNTRY
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 be able 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.
Ghosh traces the many causes and effects of this genocide in many different directions — from colonial trading companies, to the modern oil economy, to climate change, the origins of the Gaia concept, the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests, to the ghosts that still haunt the Bunda Islands today.
The result is a convincing appeal for each of us to better understand how, geopolitically, economically, the voice of the land has not just been ignored, but actively, repeatedly silenced. Ghosh argues that if we’re going to address today’s planetary crisis — environmental destruction from climate change and biodiversity loss — we must pay greater attention to the nonhuman voice.
Ghosh compares the nutmeg to the Earth itself. Like our planet, “a nutmeg has two hemispheres…for one to be seen by the human eye, the other must be hidden.” Since the time of the Banda genocide, Ghosh explains, it has become increasingly difficult for the powers of civilisation to see the hidden side of nature, to hear the stories of the nonhuman.
Militaries play a major role here. War, weaponry, fighting machines (“Hooah!”). “No war without trade, no trade without war,” as Jan Coen, Governor General of the Dutch East India Company, would explain to his board of directors in the 1620s. It’s a line that could come from the snarling mouth of Avatar’s ruthless military commander, Colonel Quaritch. How can we expect to mine minerals from an alien exo-moon like Pandora, populated by Na’vi “humanoids,” without military force?
But war is one thing. Genocide another. And the total annihilation of life, or omnicide, is not just the stuff of Avatar madmen like Quaritch — or Captain Ahab, or Mr. Kurtz, or Dr. Strangeglove. As Ghosh lays out in Nutmeg, it’s been an undertone of empire and colonialism for hundreds of years. After all, why else would billionaires dream up colonies on Mars and bunkers in New Zealand if their ambitious projects to “save humanity” didn’t carry with them the whispers of apocalypse?
Few places offer a clearer example of this theme than the place — and moment in time — from which I’m writing now. I’m in Sydney. It’s also the 26th of January, which is “Australia Day.” For some people this day celebrates the nation’s founding in 1788 by the arrival of the First Fleet from England. For others, the landing of these settlers just a kilometre or so from where I sit, marks a day of invasion and occupation. Wars broke out. Militaries fought. The common colonial story of murder, massacre and genocide ensued.
But what of the nonhuman story? What would the land have to say?
Few of the settlers would ever find out. Few would ever hear the voice of the land. For one thing, they brought with them the most powerful biological weapons of their day — cattle, pigs, sheep, cats, dogs, mice, the entire arsenal of European agrarianism. Like Cameron’s robots leaping off their mother ship, these creatures invaded the Australian landscape with a singular purpose: Annihilation of the local environment.
We might think of this as innocent, accidental, a case of ecological naïveté. After all, there was no biosecurity force to meet the settlers at the border. No TV crew to broadcast the drama on Channel 7. Without knowing what we know today, the myth goes, these early settlers couldn’t have predicted how these foreign plants and animals would cause such devastation.
But of course, even after establishing border security, Australian settlers still figured out ways to import invasive species. A recent headline that captured global attention: “2.7kg Cane ‘Toadzilla’ found in Australia.” The giant toad’s ancestors arrived in Australia from Hawaii as part of a government-planned strategy to wipe out native beetles. This was as late as 1935. Do we know any more today?
In California we were taught the deaths of up to 90% of Native Americans in the 1800s were caused by smallpox, measles and flu. Disease, it was suggested, was unrelated to murder and genocide. Such biological devastation, therefore, was an accident, unintentional, unforeseeable. It’s similar to how Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the German Holocaust, used the term “natural causes” to describe Jews who died of starvation, exposure, exhaustion and illness. Never mind these deaths were the direct result of being relocated to ghettos and concentration camps.
But terminology cannot absolve the shame of genocide. There is plenty of evidence, writes Ghosh, settlers in America knew that pathogens were highly “effective allies.” American settlers spread vials of smallpox, shared infected blankets, and forced people into living conditions which they knew would hasten the spread of disease. This, in turn, helped further their racial narrative that Native Americans were, as per some manifest destiny, physically inferior and unfit to survive into the modern age.
In the same way, many settlers and strategists of Australia’s colonial project understood how their imported plants and animals were “effective allies” in driving away the Indigenous people. By letting their livestock roam the land, they knew they were terraforming the environment — passively, from a safe distances — in a way that couldn’t sustain Indigenous lifestyles. The animals not only eroded the soil, killed native plants, trampled sacred sites, but they drove away sources of food on which native populations depended.
The strategy was so effective at devastating the local people that as the settlers expanded outward to places like Far North Queensland in the late 19th century — a place with the world’s largest reef system and oldest living rainforest, a place perhaps richer with biodiversity and food sources than anywhere on Earth — the native people, according to accounts from the period, were starving to death.
Starvation, exposure, exhaustion. Or as Hydrich would say, “natural causes.”
MUTED PLANTS, UNHEARD FIRES
This kind of biological warfare no doubt muted the voice of the land. But it’s not like there weren’t artists, poets, naturalists, farmers, land-loving people among the settlers who deeply experienced what the late biologist E.O. Wilson has termed “biophilia” — an instinctive human love for and connection to nature. Many early settlers were concerned about the impact their invasive species and agricultural practices were having on the land. Denuded landscapes, the loss of biodiversity. It’s always been visible.
Much less visible, yet far more silencing for nature, was something else the settlers brought with them: Namely, their information technology. Or what the writer and scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, whose book Sand Talk we’ll discuss in a moment, might call their “knowledge system.”
Take, for example, the celebrated botanist Joseph Banks, shipmate to — and financial sponsor of — Captain Cook. Banks first arrived in Australia in 1770, eager to learn about the country’s plants and animals. No one was more passionate about nature and natural history than Banks. He even put his money where his heart was. So you would think, if any foreigner could hear the voice of the land, it would be him.
But what does Banks do when he arrives? He does what any Western scientist at the time would have done. He begins describing, through painstaking field notes and beautiful illustrations, hundreds of Australian species of plants, as well as birds, reptiles, fish, molluscs, spiders and insects. In other words, he translates Australia’s nature into a knowledge system that makes sense to him, his colleagues, his institutions in England. These were exciting discoveries, after all, specimens to be marvelled at back home. He secured his place in posterity: The entire genus of the Banksia plant, 170 species, is classified under his name today.
Since Banks’s arrival, Western-led scientists have classified about a third of the species estimated to exist in Australia. This knowledge system — recording, naming, classifying, cataloguing, mapping — continues today, but at a highly accelerated pace. Well-meaning scientists find themselves locked into a system of specimen drawers, museums, biosecurity departments, universities and other research institutes. They spend time solving problems created by their colonial predecessors, while creating new ones themselves. First the problem was, how do we store and preserve all the specimens for future scientists? Later it was, how do we digitise all the specimens in our collection drawers — so they deploy 3D scanners and create databases such as the “Atlas of Living Australia” to “catalogue life.”
Recently, with very good intentions, a group of botanists have begun soliciting the federal government for over a billion dollars in funding to finish what Banks started 250 years ago. They hope to describe every Australian plant species by the year 2030. Such calls for more local study are nothing new. “Surrounded, as we are, by shrubs and plants possessing medicinal properties,” wrote William Woolls in Flora of Australia in 1867, “there is a wide field for investigation. It is to be regretted that scientific men in this colony have paid so little attention [to it].”
The reason the Australian scientists “paid so little attention” to the local plants was because their careers depended on recognition from European knowledge systems of classification — systems which have done little to help people hear the voice of the land. On the contrary, money that could help rehabilitate eco-compatible knowledge systems gets funnelled instead into more specimen drawers, more digitisation, databases, catalogue programs, drones, DNA sampling kits, computer vision, overseas conferences, software from America and so forth. New technologies to solve problems created by old ones.
I was in Canberra during the Australian mega-fires of 2020. Smoke permeated our house and set off alarms. When it finally began to clear, weeks after the fires began, the Australian government wanted to know — how do we account for what just happened? What’s the value of what we lost? Sixty million acres had burned. Nearly two billion dollars in property insurance claims. But what about the environment? How do we account for the damage done to nature?
One statistic captured the media’s attention: “Over one billion animals lost.” An astonishing headline. But it merely amplifies the same human story told since Cook first arrived. For one thing, the “one billion” figure, it turns out, is limited to mammals, birds and reptiles. It presents a kind of simplified picture of life, things that people with limited knowledge of the land — like many Canberran bureaucrats — can wrap their heads around. Quantifiable, accountable, recognisable, classifiable life.
On a popular Australian news program, Victor Steffensen, an Indigenous fire practitioner, was asked: If the Australian government requested your advice on handling the bushfire crisis, what would you say? He replied: “Jump in the passenger seat and let us drive for a change. For once in this nation’s history can you just listen to Aboriginal people and our knowledge system?”
Steffensen’s statement received applause from the studio audience. It also exposed an uncomfortable truth: Australia’s institutions are simply not able to care for the land. Western government structures, as Nutmeg’s Curse so meticulously lays out, were never designed for that purpose.
The nonhuman story of the fires is much richer and more complex. Not just the types and numbers of plants, insects, fungi, rock art, culturally modified trees, countless sacred sites, but the rituals and storylines connected to these things. “The planet will never come alive for you,” writes Ghosh, “unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit the living Earth.”
The seen and unseen. The planet coming to life. This is beautifully said, and accurate, and critical to understand if we’re to reverse such things as climate change and the extinction crisis. Sometimes it might be necessary to just stop and pay attention. To hold your breath, like Sigourney Weaver’s character, Kiri, in Avatar, and lose yourself in the story of another life form.
But sometimes it’s necessary to ask the people who’ve been connected to the land longer than anyone — what is it trying to tell us?
SAND-DREAMING
It’s hard to overstate the cost to the Australian government of failing to learn the local knowledge system.
Even when the government tries to listen, I mean sincerely does its utmost to listen, it inevitably fails. Australian ministers will invite Aboriginal representatives into roundtable discussions, ask for advice, pledge their acknowledgement of the land and its history. Maybe it’s a video call these days. Maybe it’s an online forum. But it assumes that policies can take shape through a kind of centralised control room, rather than, say, through rituals connected to the land.
Which brings us to Sand Talk, a lyrical, supremely intelligent book by the Apalech writer and scholar, Tyson Yunkaporta. At one point Yunkaporta describes his response to a government call for some “big ideas.” He proposes “Indigenous Knowledge Centres all around Australia,” where “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can gather to discuss solutions to sustainability issues.”
To his surprise and delight, the government agrees. The idea is accepted.
A few years later, when he visits one of these centres, Yunkaporta finds “a couple staff curating exhibits in a beautiful room filled with artefacts in glass boxes, dot paintings and stirring tributes to Indigenous Australia’s most famous sporting heroes and country music artists…It was not what I had hoped.“
This is what can happen when knowledge systems clash. Ghosh makes a similar point about academics and scientists, who will record and include what they often call Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in their research. It “assumes Indigenous understandings are usable ‘knowledge,’” writes Ghosh, “rather than an awareness created and sustained by songs and stories.” The end result is often nothing like what anyone hopes for.
Which is why, in writing such a book as Sand Talk, Yunkaporta has undertaken a precarious task. Lean too far one way, toward published credibility, and your book becomes trapped in precisely the dead and dehumanising catalogue of ideas he’s hoping to set free. “My oral culture,” writes Yunkaporta, could become “fragmented and warped as I write.” But lean too far the other direction and it vaporises in a kind of activist frivolity, even new-age cultism — “with me assuming a position of moral authority over other points of view.”
To achieve a kind of balance, he invents a unique narrative voice and tone, which includes such things as pictograms, meta-metaphors, a combined first and second pronoun (“us-two”, “us-both”), an easy, poetic, self-deprecating, even self-contradicting style. He champions open, equal, two-way conversations, what he calls “yarning,” and what the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas might call “ideal speech.” The end result, Sand Talk, is what Yunkaporta calls “a translation of a fragment of a shadow, frozen in time.”
This “fragment of a shadow” strikes me as perfect. It’s both precise and profound, and has a well-proven literary legacy. We see it, for example, in Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” the full title of which is “A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.” In presenting “Kubla Khan” as a “fragment,” inspired by an opium dream (itself inspired by a book on the Yuan Dynasty and interrupted by a knock on the poet’s door), the printed words feel generated by a narrative beyond the imagination of their writer. Something bigger and more powerful is at work than any single one of us.
Because true knowledge, Sand Talk makes clear, cannot be contained in print. It cannot be contained in any single medium created by humans. Which may be why Western science, which often seeks to capture, contain, control, has struggled to understand just how advanced and enduring the Aboriginal knowledge system is. Those who think Aboriginal knowledge needs preservation in print, or paintings, or museums, or “knowledge centres” with free wifi, or in a digital databases with TEK copyright labels, are missing the point.
As Yunkaporta puts it, “the key to Aboriginal Knowledge lies in the processes rather than just the content.” It’s not as if Star Wars is a more compelling story for film than Miwok mythology. Or that a history “written” by the victors, as the cliche claims, will endure any longer than the history of the vanquished, told through other media — spoken poetry, songs, plays, musical conjurings through yet-to-be discovered rituals of the future.
Or even through a child’s dreams.
In California I grew up in a world of books, newspapers, television, radio, movies, record albums, schoolrooms, museums, churches, synagogues. These are mediums of communication that Western scholars such as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and James Carey would call “spatial,” as in designed primarily to transmit stories over geographic space.
Other forms of media, such as songs, rock art, dance, musical instruments, message sticks, the land itself (sand, songlines, sacred sites), even the human body (“The mnemonic device is my hand,” writes Yunkapunta. “Your hand. Us-both hand.”) — these are more “temporal media,” designed to transmit stories over time, over generations.
The bullroarer I once swung around my head is an example of a temporal media — which may be why, out of all my lessons, I was able to vividly recall the experience so many years later. Bullroarers are made of the local wood and carved with symbols passed down through generations. They require the training of human muscles and motion to speak, a skill passed down from elders. They produce an earthy, sonorous tone (as opposed to, say, phonetic code), made by the rush of air across its surface as it spins. They are a media of the land.
People accustomed to Western media often struggle to recognise these nonhuman forms of media — trees, fire, sand, rock outcrops, the currents of a river and so forth. They’ve even struggled, as Yunkaporta explains, to interpret human-made things, found and described by archeologists, as media devices. Carved sticks have been classified as tools for hunting or warfare, completely discounting their more important function as communication devices, study aids, mnemonic tools. Boomerangs are not just “throwing sticks” or “digging tools.” They also operate as time-messengers, a kind of telegraph that transmits symbols, designs, stories across generations.
“Knowledge,” writes Yunkaporta, “is encoded into them in a creation process that is sacred.”
Even dreams, we could say, are a form of time-based communication, transmitting stories between the past, present and a predicted future. Coleridge’s Xanadu, his “caves of ice,” his sunny, shadowy “pleasure dome,” were discovered in a dream. James Cameron says his vision for Avatar was inspired by a dream. Joan Lindsay said the same thing about her Hanging Rock.
Perhaps such dreams serve to scratch some atavistic itch. A temporal, place-based signal amidst a discord of distance. A kind of neural anchoring in an untethered story-life.
MAKING MONKEYS OF US
“Those who lived through the 19th century,” said the communications theorist, Marshall McLuhen, “lived through the most stupefying and fragmenting and systematising and categorising century in human history.”
Not that the 20th century got any better, or the 21st. It’s much easier to see the “systematising” of a previous century than the one in which we live. Kind of like war. Human-waged (by older adults), human-suffered (by the young) — and completely avoidable in hindsight. But in the present, an invading knowledge system, will possess a life of its own, with its own whims and mercies. Striking anywhere, impacting anyone. Determining who will live and who will die.
In his most recent novel, Afterlives, the Nobel Prize winning author, Abdulrazak Gurnah, tells a tender, deeply empathetic story about a group of characters at the mercy of, among other things, a new and invasive knowledge system. The novel follows their lives from within the German colonial power that controlled East Africa (today’s Tanzania) in the early 19th century, to the shrunken, bombed-out carcass of a Germany that finally retreated back into central Europe after WWII.
All the characters in Afterlives struggle with technologies that can both liberate and obliterate. Their anguish and despair, their pride, frustrations, loves, joys, dreams of the future — they are all, unbeknownst to them (but deeply understood by Gurnah), influenced by their adaptation to conflicting cultures and media: Oral traditions and print, carts and trains, western medicine and shamanism, military uniforms and traditional dress, signal mirrors, telegrams, photographs, film, postal services, steamboats, churches, mosques.
“I had never seen a train before,” recalls Ilyas, a native of Zanzibar who comes of age at the height of Germany’s protectorate. “The engine was groaning and puffing smoke, just like it was alive.”
Alive, alluring, but also wild and threatening. It’s hard to know how a new technology will behave toward you. For characters such as Ilya, it can offer freedom, adventure, a connectivity to the world (“Facebook will connect the world,” we were told). For others it’s less a symbol of liberation than of bondage. Describing the effect of trains on his country, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once observed: “The railway, the life-giver, has always seemed to me like iron bands confirming and imprisoning India.”
Most dangerous of all — the new, untamed technology which seeks to figure out, contain and ultimately control the world, can turn on its creators. It can stupefy and fragment and categorise.
It can not only re-classify knowledge. It can re-classify us.
At one point in Afterlives, the narrator describes a debate between writers of a settler newspaper, the East African Standard. Some of them want to “remove all Africans from Kenya and make it what they called A White Man’s Country.” Others desire to “remove all Indians and only allow in Europeans but keep the Africans as labourers and servants.”
Classify, fragment, control. To the local people living through it, such debates “sounded so strange that it was as if the settlers were living on the moon.”
We know this strangeness. We recognise it when people in power begin framing our futures; like when a billionaire talks about relocating humans to Mars; or when, as happened on the popular All-In podcast this week (1:02:50), the technology investor David Sacks begins ridiculing — publicly, unashamedly ridiculing — the idea that something like “humans rights” could ever retard the commercialisation of technology.
“New technology waves that are this powerful don’t get stymied by legal rights issues,” Sacks insists. “Nothing is going to stand in the way of the AI. The AI wants to happen! The AI is gonna happen!”
He’s right, in a way. The knowledge system has a will of its own.
Such belittling by people in power is rarely so overt. In Afterlives, the German officers, using their own idioms, tease one of the novel’s main characters, Hamza, for what they consider his stupidity. Hamza, however, is native to the region and it’s the Germans who, by comparison, are ignorant. It takes a fellow native to explain to Hamza the Germans were “making a monkey out of him.”
You can speak our language, maybe, but you can never know Schiller, explains Hamza’s deeply troubled and cruel German caretaker. But the thoughtful and intelligent Hamza does connect with the great German writer, Friedrich Schiller. After years of reading one of Schiller’s books, living with German officers, and “yarnin’ with his own mob” as Yunkaporta might say, Hamza, we realise, understands Schiller far better than the Germans around him. Schiller often wrote about the importance of freedom, and if anyone can understand that in early 20th century East Africa, it would be Hamza.
There’s a wonderful moment in Afterlives when Hamza is discussing with a German pastor a book by the Jewish German writer, Heinrich Heine. Hamza says, humbly at first, “I am making very slow progress. But I was interested to learn there was a time in Germany when men took [the nightingale’s song] for an agent of evil.” He then adds, provocatively, relishing the reaction his observation will cause, “as they did everything that gave them pleasure.”
The insulted Pastor responds that Hamza is an ignorant reader. “You can only understand the frivolous in Heine while his deeper thought escapes you.”
But of course it’s not the deeper thought that Hamza struggles to grasp. Heine’s satire against persecution and tyranny would make perfect sense to Hamza. Rather, it’s the physical book itself. The medium. The print. The possession of literature. The fact his German superiors have access to an object — a book by Heine — but Hamza doesn’t.
Not the content, but the process, as Yunkaporta would say.
Words can be memorised, content grasped, but the paper, the medium, must be kept in boxes to travel with us through time (how many backs have been injured from moving boxes of books!). When Hamza falls in love with Afiya, an orphan who escaped domestic abuse by learning how to write, he writes her a love note on a little scrap of paper. He includes lines from a poem by Schiller. The meaning of the words are far less important than the fact Afiya stores the little scrap of paper in a small locked box.
The box contains her most cherished possessions: A picture postcard, a notebook, a marbled ledger and Hamza’s scrap of paper.
That’s it.
“Fragments of shadows, frozen in time.”
TROPES TO POWER
“The question of who is a brute and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not, lies at the very core of the planetary crisis,” writes Ghosh in Nutmeg’s Curse. “Certain classes of humans, a small minority in fact, have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures who presence on earth is solely material.”
But it’s one thing to look at the past, as Ghosh has done, and see how the brutes were defined. It’s another to look at our own times and determine who’s “being made a monkey of” by whom. A lot of people are unaware of how colonial practices and legacies bolster their own voices while silencing others.
For example, Ghosh imagines a hypothetical ecologist. Concerned about climate change. Conscientious about carbon footprints. Solarising a house. Giving up meat. Flying less. This person, writes Ghosh, “would be willing to make every conceivable sacrifice to shrink [their] carbon footprint. But what about the geopolitical footprint hidden within the carbon footprint?”
Their university, of course, wields significant geopolitical power, and through it, so does the ecologist. Although the ecologist may not realise it, “influence of this kind is also linked to the power that lies concealed within the US military’s carbon footprint.” Which is itself a major contributor to climate change.
Ghosh is talking about geopolitical power, but the same applies to information technology. The ecologist’s university wields considerable power over how knowledge is communicated. Research papers, databases, digitisation, IP rights. The ecologist is also likely, as part of their social contribution, to donate to groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, National Geographic, the California Academy of Science and so on. All of these groups use social networking technology for awareness-raising campaigns, community building, data collection, even as such technology, owned by massive technology firms, has played a direct role in suppressing nature’s voice.
So every time the ecologist publishes in a scientific journal, or contributes data to a database, or creates a “citizen science” forum on Facebook calling for the public to help them conduct research (for free), the ecologist should ask, what about my “info-technology footprint” hidden within my carbon footprint? Would this person be willing to sacrifice their academic authority and financial security to allow nature’s story to be heard through Aboriginal elders, shamans, land custodians, matriarchs, in the form of time-based media such as song, dance, drawings and other scientific rituals passed down over 60,000 years?
Should we not be communicating more ecological science via sand talk?
When I read Ghosh’s lines about the ecologist, I thought of what the Native American Ojibwa scholar and writer, Gerald Vizenor, used to call “tropes to power.” I remember this phrase from when I was a student in his class in the 1980s. He once had us write an essay about the relation between trickster narratives and the theories of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (which, admittedly, I barely understood). Unknowingly tapping into Yunkaporta’s idea of “process” over “content,” I wrote about a student who writes an essay that is so abominable the teacher crumples it up in front of the entire class and throws it at the student. Which is exactly what Vizenor — my trickster-teacher, in front of my amused classmates — did with my essay.
Much of the practice of Western science, Vizenor explained, is a trope to power. It’s a convention, a kind of intellectual uniform, like the books on the shelves of those colonial Germans in East Africa. It allows academics in fields such as ecology and anthropology to elevate their positions and salaries above people with deeper knowledge — even at the expense of scientific practice and the quest for truth.
In other words, Joseph Banks was a damn good botanist. But had he only invited some of the Aboriginal Eora and Gweagal elders to sit on his peer-review panel, the results of his botanical research would have been more scientific. And by extension, more meaningful. Put another way, had he been able to resist the trope to power, generations of botanists might have seen the futility in surveying, classifying, recording and ultimately trying to impose a singular “spatial” map of biodiversity on a land that has been speaking in temporal systems for over 60,000 years.
Tropes to power exist not just in academia, but in every occupation. A contemporary example is the “technologist” (a term, as a founder of a tech company, I’m often labeled with myself). Many of the things we consider “technology” today — “artificial intelligence,” for example — are merely permutations of media that have been transforming human thought and culture since the dawn of storytelling.
The 11000-year-old rock formation at Wurdi Youang in Victoria, for example, is a form of information technology designed to augment human intelligence. Like, say, ChatGPT, Wurdi Youang created a power, often unseen, unappreciated, to “make meaning” of the world. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
The rocks at Wurdi Youang are no more or less “intelligent” than ChatGPT. Unless, of course, powerful “technologists” try to reclassify the meaning of “intelligence” as a way for them to secure positions of control.
The idea of the “technologist” as somehow a special breed of person is such a pervasive trope to power that even someone as deeply thoughtful as Yunkaporta seems momentarily caught in its spell. Talking about his refusal to use mobile phones for many years, he calls himself a Luddite. How often do we hear people say, “I’m no techie,” when in reality, if someone from the 1990s met them, or met just about anyone alive today (even the proverbial “my grandma”), they would be in awe at their skills in deftly manipulating symbols on a handheld slab of glass.
In truth, Yunkaporta is as technically literate as anyone. “I’ve been yarning with a lot of people and reading about [mobile technology],” he writes, “enough to see how it’s radically shaping my life and will radically change the world.” He adds, wisely, “There’s no way to separate the natural from the synthetic, the digital from the ecological.”
So Yunkaporta be spittin’, as they say. He’s absolutely right. The tendency to draw battle lines between technology and nature is outmoded. In fact, if we want technology to benefit humanity, we should be looking to Indigenous knowledge systems for its design.
But to the typical engineer at OpenAI, people such as Ghosh and Yunkporta are the modern day “brutes,” unfit for the future, people to be manipulated and controlled. Their vast knowledge — of literature, history, mythology, multiple languages, cultures and so much more — has been re-classified as worthless. Or “frivolous,” as the German Pastor describes Hamza’s knowledge of Heine. The AI engineers would consider such people (who I’m guessing have probably never deployed a regression algorithm let alone engineered a neural network) as incapable of understanding the deeper aspects of AI today. “Creatures whose presence on Earth is solely material.”
And they would hold onto this view, this trope to power, even at the expense of creating technologies that could truly benefit their lives.
In Nutmegs Curse, Ghosh is clear about the role of communications technology in perpetuating the myths of White, Anglo victimhood that helped fuel colonial violence. In 1623, the Dutch governor of Ambon Island ordered the beheading of 20 people, including 10 Englishmen, for treason. The British East India Company would spin this story in ways meant to stir up public support for Britain’s imperial escapades over the next 300 years. “Much like the even more powerful communications technologies of our own time,” writes Ghosh, “print was instrumental in generating vast amounts of ‘fake news’ that served to stir up waves of mass hysteria [about Britain’s victimhood].”
Reading this, I found myself wondering if Ghosh fully appreciates that “power” of communications technology. Not just in our own times, but in the period he describes. And not just print media. For example, the telegraph may be the most revolutionary spatial media in human history. Yet its impact on humanity, on the lives of people who may never have seen a telegraph, is rarely appreciated.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis explains the devastation the telegraph caused people in rural India in the 1870s. Telegraph messages, Davis points out, were priced according to the number of words, and how far the words needed to travel. Which means concision was everything. When an administrator in London wanted to know about the status of India, messages would arrived with only the most succinct and pertinent bits of information: The value of the rupee, threats of war with Russia to the north, legal rulings, the price of cotton, shipping news.
Data about Indians not having rice to eat wasn’t considered valuable to the people who controlled the technology. So the movers and shakers in England never heard about it. In other words, the telegraph allowed meaning to be made. To decide whose existence mattered and whose was “solely material.”
An estimated five million people died of starvation as a result.
RESPECTING THE GHOSTS
There are many similar examples throughout history, the most famous one being the role of the Hollerith machine in the genocides of WWII (see Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust). Or even the shipping news in Australia. These technologies are like the living, breathing entity that young Ilya sees when he spots a train for the first time. Or the relentless AI beast of David Sacks (“The AI wants to happen! The AI is gonna happen!”). We can’t foresee how these techno-creatures view us; how radically they might change our lives.
The idea that the Dutch, in 1621, sought to exploit the nutmeg plant by obliterating the people of the Banda Islands, their history, the island itself, would have been inconceivable — not just to the Bandanese people, but perhaps even to the majority of people in Amsterdam. So the only way the Dutch could succeed in this pursuit was to create their own mythologies. Mental models of brutes and savages, land and progress.
We see the same thing happening today, but on a much grander scale. A company like Microsoft can only claim ownership of a system such as ChatGPT (it has recently purchased $10 billion worth of shares), if we accept the kind of techie vs non-techie mythology they promote.
Techies make meaning. Non-techies accept it.
When we think of how many people built ChatGPT, the trope to power makes us think of some very smart engineers working at OpenAI. Maybe 50? Maybe 100 engineers? In fact, ChatGPT belongs to everyone who contributed — and continues to contribute — to the knowledge on which it’s been trained.
When I asked ChatGPT how many people globally had contributed to its training, I received the following response (smoke issuing from its wild nostrils):
It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many people contributed to the knowledge on which I was trained, as the data used to train me comes from a wide variety of sources, including websites, books, and articles. However, it is likely that the number is in the millions or even billions, as the internet and the written word are vast repositories of information contributed by countless individuals.
So how then does this “vast repository of information” get to be owned by the shareholders of Microsoft?
This myth of artificial intelligence, I fear, puts us on a precipice of biological devastation unseen in human history. Even after the international agreement on the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15), there seems scant recognition of what the colonial, nature-muting legacy looks like today: Genetic sequencing, drones, camera traps, satellite imagery, spectroscopy, ecologists with PhDs. That is, more and more classification and tropes to power.
In determining biodiversity health, “threatened species count, the amount of diversity found in any given area (genetic, phylogenic, taxonomic),” writes the ecologist and author Alexa Firmenich. But she adds, “they are mostly quantitative. Rarely do they account for the complexity of local relations and human presence.”
Meanwhile, any attempt to suggest to nature conservation organisations such as WWF, or the Audubon Society, or just about any natural history museum, that they’re practicing systems of knowledge that are silencing — and ultimately destroying — biodiversity, will be met with dismay.
They are like Ilya, admiring the train, the magnificence of German progress, but forgetting the suffering it can cause the people who lay the tracks. In one of his sand drawings, Yunkaporta represents “the shifting economies” in rural Australia:
From traditional river economy, to mission economy, to riverboats transporting cotton and wool, to rail doing the same after the river was destroyed, to the highway with oil tankers and trucks filled with low-grade ore buzzing past. From settlement onwards, locals in each era believed the system to be stable and planned their futures around it.
Ilya plans his future around the German system he believed was stable. But the Germans would come and go. When his friends question his unwavering Teutonophila, he says the Germans are “honorable and civilized people,” who have done “much good since they have been here.” To which one of the locals replies, “My friend, they have eaten you.”
Ilya is a good kid with good intentions. Polite, educated, loving. But he’s unable to see the bigger taxonomy and his place within it. He cannot hear the unspoken. So he follows the German-forged path laid out for him. He volunteers to join the army, he boards the train and is carried away forever from his family, from his beloved sister, from the voice of his land, from the voice of his own soul.
Is there a better path?
Ghosh writes about joining protests, about the messaging power of performance art, or of someone like Greta Thunberg. He often uses the word “activist” when describing people, as in “climate activist” or “scholar and activist.” Protesting on the streets is a form of activism. But so was Wikileaks. If activism is to take one’s narrative into battle in the hopes of reshaping, for policy outcomes, the prevailing tropes to power, we’d better be clear on who wields that power, the weapons being used, and who’s being relegated as “brutes” and “savages” in today’s world.
Perhaps the answer lies in reshaping info-technology in ways that empower individuals to be custodians of the land and hear the country speak. “Media can be toyed with in ways that call into question the solidity and supremacy of Western being,” writes Armond R. Towns, in an essay about America’s “underground railway” during the 1800s. The African Americans who created this “railway to freedom,” Towns points out, invented an entirely new communication system, which included such things as cryptic songs, knocking over flagpoles, cross-dressing, messages in quilts, sticks in the woods pointing north, enigmatic newspaper advertisements, a practical deification of the North Star.
And perhaps most of all, an abiding respect for ghosts. For the spirits of the past.
“What if the people who were regarded by elite Westerners as brutes and savages,” writes Ghosh, “were right all along? What if the idea that the Earth teems with other beings who act, communicate, tell stories, and make meaning is taken seriously?”
At one point in Sand Talk, Yunkaporta conducts a smoke ceremony to rid his guest house of ghosts. “There are ghosts all over this massacre-soaked continent but they generally don’t do much harm unless you fall asleep right on top of them.”
Ghosh, too, feels the presence of ghosts, or hantus (spirits), when staying on the Banda Islands. “I had the uncanny sense that someone, or something, was in the room with me — a presence that was a shadow of something human and yet nonhuman.”
In Afterlives, there is a second Ilya, nephew of the first. Unlike his uncle, this Ilya is more grounded to the place of his birth. He’s a storyteller, a dreamer. He hears the unspoken. So much so, in fact, that he communes with the dead. When he falls ill, a shekhiya, or traditional healer, is called in to perform a kind of exorcism. After many tedious hours of incense, drumming, songs, chants and so on, it’s the shekhiya who gives the most sensible diagnosis of Ilyas’s condition:
The young Ilya is hearing what others cannot. The voice, the shekhiya declares, belongs to a recently diseased matron of the household. This woman is grieving the disappearance of the older Ilyas, the boy’s uncle, whom she cared for like her own child. When this older Ilyas left and joined the German military, she never heard from him again. The only cure, then, is to find out what happened. To hear the unspoken. To not let the past remain silent.
It’s that simple. And it’s what the younger Ilyas ends up doing. He travels to Germany and learns of his uncle’s fate. How his uncle was, metaphorically, “eaten” by German colonialism, just as his friend had predicted. How his life became fragmented and warped: A Black African in a White nationalist military, dying in a concentration camp for having committed the newly classified crime in Germany of interracial marriage.
Giving voice to these ghosts of the past is how Afterlives, the book, has come to exist.
The new technology of country will need to do the same. It will need, like Yunkaporta’s book, to strike a fine balance. It will be alluring, fun, immersive, but also grounded in science while connecting its users to country — including to the stories and spirits from the past. It will be both instructive and artistic, friendly yet wild. The whale-like Tulkun of Avatar mingling with the ghosts and ancient river spirits of Spirited Away. Or like David Attenborough playing the didjeridoo; or maybe the didjeridoo playing him.
It will be a technology that helps us interpret the media of the land and observe the effects of our custodianship. It will celebrate and expand our minds. Encourage us to hold our breath underwater and watch the fish, until we realise that the human and nonhuman are one and the same.
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Postscript:
Thanks to everyone for your thought-provoking feedback. I appreciate all who made the journey (and those who didn’t). Perhaps such a long journey is a way of sticking it in the “I” of A.I., which is just a modern myth, a trope, and needs puncturing.
It occurred to me later, that Afterlives presents human love as a kind of inoculation against invading knowledge systems. Someone like David Sacks, a very smart guy who can also read long articles, may be correct that A.I. triumphs over human rights. But what about the human right to love? (“A.I. girlfriends!” he’ll say, and believe it or not, the fictitious A.I. of the movie Her is now a real thing).
Love is primarily a temporal language. In the win-loss record of invading knowledge systems, love remains undefeated.
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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.
