Marilyn Lake

The white poets who ‘imagine’ Australia into being can’t escape their own illegitimacy, just like the nation they write about. […] We ask Aboriginal people to dance for us, paint for us, run for us, but we have never said to them: ‘This is your country, may we live here, please?’ […] Those Indigenous writers by my bedside are trapped in a conversation with whiteness. [...] These black writers are my people in a way that the other Australian writers on my bedside table cannot be. And yet ... I feel trapped here too. I feel compelled to choose in ways that suffocate me. […] the need to prove we exist to a people who don’t truly see us. We are called on to perform authenticity: to be recognised, we have to be recognisable. […] It is a role [Pascoe] seems to revel in, carefully cultivating his public image […] an illusion for a white audience […] [offering] white Australians something they so desperately desire: absolution. […] They can even imagine themselves as Aboriginal people.

This is the stuff of Grant’s nightmares.

Herein lies the paradox – elsewhere in his writing on the imbrications of Black and white, Grant poses a simple question: do we have to choose? Why not accept the fact of overlapping yet contradictory affinities without turning to a fantasised wholeness, an essence that erases and recolonises even as it offers comfort and belonging to the settler or Black artist happy to write and perform in bad faith: one with a view to an empty, too easy reconciliation; the other with a disingenuous sense of cultural essentialism and singularity. Grant won’t play the yidaki or make dot paintings or read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or speak Wiradjuri because you ask him too, or thinks you might expect him to. But if he personally decides to do these things? Well, then he just might. His mode is distempered, angry, plaintive, perennially at odds with Black and white alike; an exile and journeyman, searching outside Australia for something of both his country and himself. One minute Grant will tell you of ‘a lost continent’ where ‘sovereignty resides in the First People; where we tell our stories in the first languages’; the next, insist ‘I have no need of authors, black or white, who tell me I must go back to find myself, that I can become whole in language or country or history.’ Grant, in other words, is someone who will tell you exactly who he is, just so long as he doesn’t think you are trying to tell him first.

There is an echo here of the boy in the Canberra schoolroom, railing against the ignorance of his classmates, the cool enclosures of terra nullius and narrow conceptions of Aboriginality – while also knowing that anger is an hourglass through which the sand threatens to never stop pouring. It’s Whitmanesque, really. Does he contradict himself? Well, then he contradicts himself. Or not: the implication, as I read it, is that although we have never lived a continent of Indigenous languages, of agreement between coloniser and First Nations, and perhaps never can – not so late in history, so late in the goddamned day – we still have to grapple with the broken and surviving histories we have inherited.

As Grant admits, briefly: ‘I too sell to whiteness.’ It is a shared entrapment, albeit one he has arrived at differently from Winch or Pascoe or Scott. He is fond of recounting contemporary French philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s description of liberalism as ‘a jailer – but one who slips you the key’. This is the cosmopolitan ideal of cultural syncretism, allowing people to live with difference, to speak across incommensurabilities and to honour the multitudes that they contain: as individuals, families, communities, countries.

He is angry and he is weary – and wary. He fears becoming a ‘man of ressentiment’

Yet if there is one word that might describe the cadence, the cumulative effect of Grant’s work to date, it is this: aggrieved. He’s not angry, just disappointed. ‘Don’t tell me, Tom, that you would not write Jimmie Blacksmith today. Don’t tell me it is not your place to write about Aboriginal people or in an Aboriginal voice. You have.’ Forget about asking permission – since when have other Australian writers bothered? We cannot police our imaginations, Grant says, paraphrasing Rankine. And what, Grant suggests, if we see them and our country more clearly because of it? The truth will set you free; but first it will piss you off. So let it, Grant says. Live with the difficulty. We don’t need to be completed or healed – just allowed ‘to live with all the pain; with all the broken bits’. As Natsume Sōseki’s protagonist is told by an old gentleman he encounters on a train in the opening of his 1908 classic Sanshirō, ‘Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan ... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself – not to Japan, not to anything.’ For First Nations, and anyone else on this continent who wishes to keep their eyes open, sovereignty of mind is the biggest estate going.

Grant’s critique of Jimmie Blacksmith’s emptiness, his existential void, is that he lacks the keys to the estate. Blacksmith, he says, has no telos, no sovereignty of mind or self. He is a paid-up member of ‘that country we have never written’; of the Aboriginal peoples who did not exist pre-colonisation because they were, and are, a European invention.

Jimmie’s passport, to borrow the Derridean formulation, has yet to turn up in the mail. It never will. If it were up to him, the reader imagines, Grant would probably say that Jimmie has no need to wait; that the most colonial and racist part of that continent called Australia is its desire, since invasion, to always be waiting. It would rather assimilate or kill off First Nations, or attach itself to England or the United States, then face its fictions. To paraphrase the Nobel Prize Academy’s citation for Patrick White, a new continent is advertised as being written and introduced into world literature every day – when there is no new continent to write. No forest to clear; no Stan Parker to bury the axe. Australia is already full. So quit waiting, Jimmie, hoping your passport will arrive. As Murrandoo Yanner recalled Tracker Tilmouth telling his community (recorded by Alexis Wright in Tracker [2017]): ‘If you think you’ve got sovereignty then don’t talk about it, act like it. [...] What are you waiting for? Are you going to kneel down and have the white man tap you on the shoulder with a sword and say, Arise ye Aborigine, I now recognise thee?’ g

Declan Fry is a writer, essayist, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. He is an ABR Rising Star.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.