Saturday, July 7, 2012

what happened and how things were



First, the formal warning about these things: this post may contain the names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are deceased.

Now.

Lisa Hill shouted me a sandwich once and I have not forgotten it, therefore, because one thing leads to another, etc, I have been reading a chapter from the book Don't Take Your Love to Town, which is a memoir by Ruby Langford Ginibi, a Bundjalung woman from the town of Coraki in northern New South Wales. Lisa is running an Indigenous Literature Week on her blog and it was either this or I read Alexis Wright's Carpentaria again, which I wasn't in the mood for, or reviewed Doris Pilkington's Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, which is written in the language of comic strip information boxes, "Little did he know that soon devastation and desolation would shatter this tranquil environment," and so on until you want to kick somebody but probably not Doris Pilkington because she is a granny; hence it would be disrespectful and you would look like Satan.

My chapter (which I found on Google Books) is Chapter One. Langford is born and grows. "Autobiography," wrote Carole Ferrier in an article about the book (Ruby Langford Ginibi and the Practice of Auto/biography), "has been the dominant genre over this time for most Aboriginal women writers, including Labumore (Elsie Roughsey), Glenyse Ward, Sally Morgan, Doris Pilkington and Mabel Edmund. In writing autobiography, they have been able to construct a visible identity as indigenous women within Australian society, and to write about aspects of the past that have been hidden from view as Langford Ginibi puts it `so we don't get left out of the next lot of history'" That article was published inside a Langford study pack in the late 1990s but the idea of memoir evidently obtains in the same group of authors now, more than a decade later; the Wiradjuri Jeanine Leane's Purple Threads (UQP, 2011) is a fictionalised autobiography, like Proust, and when Crikey interviewed the Rembarranga-descendant Marie Munkara about Every Secret Thing, (UQP, 2009), her reason for writing was the one that Ferrier suggested, to construct a visible identity for indigenous women within Australian society, expressed by her like this: "I really only wanted to write down some of the funny stuff so that one day my daughters would be able to know what happened and how things were for their mother, grandmother and other people."

That idea of not wanting people to be left out was the most useful one to have while I was facing this bit of Langford's work because she puts a mass of people in, she names people, she describes people, a neighbour enters, the neighbour receives a name, the neighbour waves and vanishes, and various numbers of these souls have no bearing on the story as a story, by which I mean that they do not push a narrative forward or even provide insights into the behaviour of the autobiographer, but she remembers them and so they go in. They are not left out. Christina Stead, when she was a teenager, wanted to write an encyclopaedia of unfamous people. Langford has done something like that, but it is a memoir. It has connective tissue.

And when I look at one of the other books I'm reading at the moment, a translation by Lewis Thorpe of The Journey Through Wales, a twelfth-century travel account written by a highly educated Welsh-Norman Archdeacon named Gerald, I wonder if this is how Langford's book will seem in the future. Gerald's book is autobiographical too, and his sense of structure is somewhat like hers, he names and describes incidental people and events as he remembers them, with a chronological framework around it all like a box. His ambition is not exactly the same as hers, he is not recording his family, and yet he too is motivated by the idea of preservation and rescue. "I published the Archbishop [Baldwin]'s Journey Through Wales, thus preventing his far from easy mission from ever being forgotten," he says. "What one owns must perish, but what I have will live. Possessions pass away but my skills live forever."

The descriptions in both books sit there, Gerald's and Langford's, these fossils in the fossil-bed of autobiography, and by these fossils we detect the long-dead dinosaurs, which are both "a certain knight named Gilbert, surname Hagurnell" who "after a long and unremitting anguish, which lasted three years , and the most severe pains as of a woman in labour, at length gave birth to a calf," and also a teacher named "Miss Pie, and she taught us to sing" in the Australian town of Casino where the author's family "rented a wooden house on the Lismore Road."

Miss Pie and Gilbert Hagurnell are preserved because the lava of someone else's memory happened to wash over them just there, they are baked in place, two silhouettes created and maintained, not the full creature but an idea of them; and Miss Pie would probably not have recognised herself from that description. "Listen," she would have said. "I am an encyclopaedia of my own."


7 comments:

  1. *chuckle* Oh dear, I do have to agree about Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence: it was a wonderful story about an epic journey that made a wonderful film, but it was no fun to read even when I was lost in admiration for the girls and weeping for their sorrow.
    Lisa

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    1. The language doesn't live up to the story it's telling. The journey is "epic" -- and epic's a good word; this is an Odyssey in a desert, the protagonists doing as Homer's hero does and going home -- but it's Homer rewritten for Reader's Digest.

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  2. There is someone I know who, if you ask them how their day has been, tells you exactly what they've done all day, 'I got up, well, I woke up first, I didn't get up until I'd woken up, and after I woke up I didn't get up immediately - I lay in bed for about ten minutes, staring at the ceiling, well not just the ceiling, also out the window a bit and at the things in my room ....'
    What you're reading sounds as though it is structured somewhat similarly - ie not at all

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    2. Something like that, without the backtracking parts. They wander but they wander straight ahead. Langford will tell you that they moved to a new town, and the name of the town, and where it was, and there were shops, and then there was a person, and the person was like this, and then there was another person, and this other person had a limp or owned a horse or taught her to sing, or whatever happened, and so on, like that. She's shortwinded though. That dawdling in "I got up, well, I woke up, first ..." -- she doesn't have that. She goes through a series of tiny stories. Here's a person who was fun, the children liked him, he stole fairy cakes -- then there's a punchline about the fairy cakes. End of his little story. Move on to the next one. So there's structure, just not a strong sense of large-scale holistic structure. It's there, but not strongly there. It exists for the sake of the little stories.

      She wanders through physical events, Gerald of Wales wanders through knowledge; he tells you that they left the castle so and so and rode past a river, and the river was named such and such, and this name means whatever it means in Welsh, and then he has some facts about salmon, and then he'll remember that this is the only place in Wales where beavers are said to live, and then he has to remind you that beavers bite off their testicles when you chase them, which is a natural history lesson from the Ancient World that went through ages of recurring popularity among classically trained writers, I've noticed. How many centuries did serious men spend sitting around in their monasteries reading about beaver balls?

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  3. I think this issue of autobiography and indigenous writing is an interesting one. Not all do it of course but it does seem to be a strong strand of indigenous writing ...I've read both Munkara and Leane (tho have also read Wright and Scott too). I wonder if it does have something to do with their oral traditions ... But it did occur to me that documenting their history, particularly given so little of it has been documented from their point of view may be a driver.

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    1. There's an online transcript of an interview Langford gave (I think it's the same one Ferrier quoted in her article), and if her story about the genesis of the book is correct then the oral part came first and the importance of documenting history from her point of view only hit her afterwards. It was something like this: "I used to tell yarns about the family all the time and one day I was sitting at the table, and there was a pen in front of me, so I started writing it all down." But the documenting idea is the one she put emphasis on in the interview. Retrospectively that was the idea that seemed important; it's the idea she talks about. And Munkara's motivation (going by that Crikey interview) sounds similar -- I wanted to record some family stories -- but once it was finished it turned out that she'd written historical record. (Here's how these groups of people related to one another at such and such a point in time.)

      You wouldn't have to say that they were writing like this due to the oral traditions of Aboriginal people, you could just say that they were writing due to the oral traditions of families, and families are the most convenient source material to write about. You don't have to look them up in libraries, or go on study courses, or invent new characters; you can start straight away with, "Well I was born in the year nineteen whatever, and my father had a limp. Now there's a story attached to that limp ..." and off you go.

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