Antigone Kerala
Ania Walwicz
By Sneja Gunew*
In dreams begins the journey. . . (Kefala, 1973:5)
How easy is it, even now, to attach notions of the literary to ethnic minority writing? If not, then what are the implications for practitioners who wish to participate in selecting the words which, according to Barthes, consolidate social meaning? ‘Literature remains the currency in use in a society apprised, by the very form of words, of the meaning of what it consumes’ (Barthes, 1967:38). What kind of signification is ethnic minority writing permitted within Australia? Such writing is not usually received as ‘literature’ which, for the moment, can be described as a textuality which is visibly more worked over, and more conscious of textual conventions, than other forms of writing, and whose implicit opposite is the apparent ‘disorder’ of speech (ibid.:25). If we accept the suggestion that ethnic minority writing signifies only within the formations of sociology and history then, paradoxically, its value lies here with speech rather than writing. In other words, when made synonymous with migrant writing, it is the migrant’s speech (rather than writing) which is solicited, and the more disordered it is the more authentic it supposedly sounds. In those terms, ethnic minority writing is valued precisely in so far as it is inscribed with the marks of linguistic naivety and (even) incompetence: broken language is perceived as symptomatic of subjects not yet ‘assimilated’ (rendered the same) or ‘naturalised’.
In the little writing of this kind which receives limited exposure (whether autobiographical or autobiographically based), any obvious signs that the language has been crafted are read nonetheless as relatively unmediated confessions (see chapter 5). Complexities, if acknowledged, are thought of as provided by ‘life’, the complicated history of the migrant or marginalised subject–rather than by any consciously wrought textuality. To consider ethnic minority poetry, for instance, is under those circumstances therefore perverse. Poetry, the least transparently functional manifestation of linguistic self-consciousness, can be read only with difficulty for sociological or historical content. In Barthes’ terms, classical poetry is ‘a speech which is made more socially acceptable by virtue of the very conspicuousness of its conventions’ (ibid.:48). To write poetry means that one is staking a claim to the literary and hence to public cultural participation. On what grounds can this be legitimated, more particularly when the language used is patently either not English, or, if English, then filtered through other languages and literary traditions with their own codes, canons and conventions? Those ‘conspicuous conventions’ alluded to by Barthes are not simply acquired when setting foot on this continent, nor are they part of the naturalisation certificate. Rather, they belong to that cultural ghosting which floats above the home territory and signifies a mystery only gradually comprehended after many rites of passage. Poetry? From ethnic minorities? Classic realist narratives, perhaps, and reluctantly, but not poetry.
To some extent, as I have argued elsewhere (Gunew, 1985), the experience of migration, particularly when it involves negotiating another language, changes the conditions governing signification. In some ways, speaking psychoanalytically, it may be seen as analogous to re-entering the Lacanian symbolic (Wilden, 1968:xii), or (in classic Freudian terms) changing the secondary, censoring processes of the preconscious (Silverman, 1983). In either model we are dealing with a foundational process in the construction of human subjectivity, namely the conditions under which subjects both participate in and are produced by signification. To enter language is to become a social being rescued from the incoherence and anarchy of drives, ‘the mental representative of a somatic impulse’ (ibid.:67); but inevitably this is achieved at the cost of certain repressions, including degrees of alienation from the drive.
In the last few decades there have been considerable efforts to mark the discursive formation of Australian literature, in gendered and cultural terms, as predominantly Anglo-Celtic and male. Hence the work of those who consider the implications of treating Aboriginal writing as either true to oral traditions or colonised by white forms (Davis and Hodge, 1985; Benterrak, Muecke and Roe, 1984), and also of those who see women’s writing as throwing new light on, for example, foundation myths of mateship and the bush (Modjeska, 1981; Ferrier, 1985; Schaffer, 1988). The further complications offered by poetry written from non-Anglo-Celtic perspectives raise questions about the modernity of such writings that relate as much to form as content (Sollors, 1986). Those able to think from the beginning in more than one language find it impossible to consider language as a ‘natural’ and unproblematic expression of experience. And those who have experience of more than one culture may find it more difficult to regard one culture as universal. As David Malouf points out:
What we may have to be vigilant about is the groups in our society who feel that the culture belongs to them, who insist that their version of the culture is central or the only authentic one. Mostly the only cultural history we get of a society is the one that is passed down to us by those who have power, privilege and the use of language. (Malouf, 1985:61)
The reception of Walwicz and Kefala has been instructive in so far as it can be read symptomatically to gauge the ways in which ethnic minority writers are positioned in Australian culture. Let us consider Kefala first.
I am tired, living at home among strangers,
sitting at the same tables,
waiting for an acceptance that never comes,
an understanding that would not be born,
the measure in us already spent. (Kefala,1973:8)
To Koskino 