This is the published version:  
 
Vickery,	Ann	and	Alizadeh,	Ali	2013,	The	political	imagination	:	postcolonialism	and	diaspora	in	
contemporary	Australian	poetry,	Southerly	:	the	political	imagination,	vol.	73,	no.	1,	pp.	7‐21.	
	
	
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http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30059966	
	
	
Reproduced	with	the	kind	permission	of	the	copyright	owner.		
	
Copyright	:	2013,	English	Association 
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH
The Political Imagination: Postcolonialism and
Diaspora in Contemporary Australian Poetry
This issue considers the relationship between contemporary poetry
and the political imagination. We see the imagination as a means to
explore possibility or transformation, but also a vehicle by which to
envisage or think otherhow to normative Western “forms of social explanation”
(Bhabha 248). Postcolonial studies as a disciplinary field has
long investigated the complex cultural and political relationship
between self and place. Yet, since its revolutionary inception in the anticolonial
struggles of the twentieth century, it has been increasingly
viewed as “an explicitly deterritorialising discourse in something close
to the Deleuzian sense – a discourse so fragmented, so hybrid, so as to
deny its constituent elements any sustainable specificity at all” (Hallward
22). While many of the essays collected in this issue challenge
established modes of postcolonial thinking, they also offer new, even
supplementary, ways of imagining a politically and ethically charged
contemporary poetics.
In “Why Waste Lines on Achille?: Tracing the Critical Discourse on
Postcolonial Poetry through Untimeliness to the Present”, Lucy Van
notes that the scholarship on postcolonial poetry has tended to be
somewhat belated to postcolonial studies. Whereas postcolonial studies
emerged in the 1980s, it would not be until the twenty-first century that
Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001)
was published, followed by Rajeev Patke’s Postcolonial Poetry in English
(2006) and Ashok Bery’s Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry (2007).
Van investigates this ‘lag-time’ and suggests that the generic form of the
novel is perhaps perceived as less ‘messy’ than poetry, particularly in its
secured origins within the scriptive tradition. Danijela Kambaskovic
discerns that none of the three most successful migrant writers from
SOUTHERLY 7
former Yugoslavia are poets, but is unsure as to whether this is due to
some difficult crossing between language and experience, or whether it
says more about the tastes of a broad readership (100). Unlike the novel,
poetry emerges out of a tradition of orality and may require attention
to aspects of sound and performance. It may focus on mood rather than
narrative or story. As Van points out, scholarship to date typically
examines the writing of postcolonial poets and focuses predominantly
on Western canonical poets. In this respect, poetry “is useful when it
functions like the novel” and when it most approaches an institutional
form (23). Van notes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s approach as an
example of a tendency to treat “poems as smaller-than-novel-sized compartments
for the transmission of the themes and attitudes found in
the larger postcolonial novel” (24).
For Van, instead of attempting to produce a canon of postcolonial
poetry, with a regressive reliance on classical poetic tropes and conventions,
the task of today’s theorists is to locate the work of postcolonial
poets in a national milieu, and by so doing, view the poem as a site for
the interrogation of nation and national literatures. Ramazani discerns
that a nation is often defined and expressed through its poetry, that is,
poetry is viewed as “the ultimate embodiment of the Sprachgeist”
(Hybrid 2). Anthologies add to this perception, in packaging poetry
predominantly as ‘national product’.
Lyn McCredden contends that one mode of responding to popular
discourses of national identity and nation “with their attendant
jingoisms, militarism and exclusions” is to “ignore or repudiate the
concept of the nation” (43). This might be equated with “writing as if
one is from New York, or London, or Hicksville, or somewhere supposedly
beyond the nation” (43). While one possible stance is to claim
to be writing “from nowhere,” an alternative is to write from a “cosmopolitan
everywhere” (43). In Transnational Poetics, Ramazani sees two
trends in poetry, the first emerging out of a modernist tradition and
the second from postcolonial poetry. Following a 1996 editorial in New
American Writing by Susan Schultz, Rob Wilson also delineates a similar
division between what he views as a local-based poetry that wants to
align itself with forces and forms of imagined identity that have since
come to be called postcolonial, and an experimental, postmodern poetry
SOUTHERLY8
where there is an emphasis on depthlessness in the scene of writing, “a
kind of perpetual displacement and deferral of the self being housed or
contained by any ongoing identity with space of place”(122). Yet these
are not mutually exclusive; indeed, Lyn McCredden notes that they may
be seen to have “tangled threads of influence and counterfluence” (48).
She cites Ramazani, who develops his argument away from a simple
either-or map of poetry:
Postcolonial hybridity ‘confirms yet alters,’ reworks yet revalues
modernist bricolage. It thus re-begets a poetic mode
that helped beget it. Only by breaking out of exclusionary
models of tradition as either Eliot’s ‘mind of Europe’ or its
postcolonial obverse (‘an autonomous entity separate and
apart from all other literatures’) can we begin to grasp the
continuous remaking of ‘traditions’ by one another across
the twentieth century and beyond, the mutually transformative
relations between the poetries of metropole and
margin. (Transnational 115)
Popular discourses and anthologies (which often present themselves as
museum-like cabinets) typically seek to ‘fix’ or reduce particular views
of nation or ways of belonging. Indeed, nation might be thought of as
a juridico-political entity formed by a population within a given territory.
It necessarily has regimes of power that are hierarchical and
exclusive in terms of citizen rights and access to institutional structures.
In her earlier study of global epic, Lucy Van focuses on how ‘identity
papers’ have mattered for subjectivities delineated by identities other
than race or ethnicity. She cites Hél`ene Cixous’ analysis of gender:
Right from the moment they venture to speak what they
have to say, [women] will of necessity bring about a shift in
metalanguage. And I think we’re completely crushed, especially
in places like universities, by the highly repressive
operations of metalanguage, the operations that see to it
that the moment women open their mouths – women more
often than men – they are immediately asked in whose name
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 9
and from what theoretical standpoint they are speaking,
who is their master and where they are coming from: they
have, in short, to salute... to show their identity papers. (353;
qtd. Van at 190)
Anne Brewster contends that both migrants and Indigenous people
occupy a position of marginality in Australia because they “do not stand
in the same relation of otherness” to the dominant white Anglocentric
culture (16). A number of essays in this issue examine how and why
potentially infinitely incoherent subjectivities have been fixed and
limited to being read as an articulation of a specific racial or ethnocultural
identity. Ali Alizadeh and Penelope Pitt-Alizadeh acknowledge
that positive essentialism can strategically challenge and disrupt racist,
unfavourable and subordinate representations of the Indigenous
people, as well as of migrants. Citing Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s statement
that “self-representation by Indigenous women is a political act,”
they suggest that claiming a particular identity may galvanise “a sense
of solidarity within their respective communities at key historical
moments” (61). They agree with Brewster that, at these moments, the
concept of Aboriginality or Aboriginal culture provided a valuable
means to harness cultural capital “in order to produce a nation-wide
sense of solidarity and common interest among Aboriginal people, who
had previously differentiated themselves into groups according to
kinship or in relation to specific areas of land” (Brewster 6).
The civil rights movement of the 1960s led not only to the rise of
Indigenous identity politics but also to the recognition of a broad
range of ethnic minority groups. The poet Antigone Kefala who
migrated to Australia in the 1970s found that policies advocating a
multicultural Australia “tried to recognise the place and needs of a
large group of people who were disadvantaged because of language or
cultural differences. [...] In my case I felt it was a very positive thing,
because before everyone was outside” (Digby 198-99).
Yet, extending the scholarship of Beverley Skeggs, Alizadeh and PittAlizadeh
discern that Indigenous and minority writers “do not usually
have influence over how they are positioned and therefore how their
work is positioned” (62). A poet may, in fact, be assumed to speak for an
SOUTHERLY10
ethno-cultural group, reproducing a chimeric vision of similitude for
that group, at the exclusion of differences. An idealised presumption of
authenticity is then implemented as a regulating tool by which actual
individuals are measured. As Moreton-Robinson states, “The traditional
woman is the woman against whom all Indigenous women are measured,
yet in her pristine state she does not exist” (88). While privileged
individuals can move between identities, Alizadeh and Pitt- Alizadeh
argue that this becomes more restricted for those less privileged. Indeed,
Indigenous and migrant writers can be ghettoised by their racial or
ethnic identity. They cite Antigone Kefala in interview: “We ethnics are
constantly being compared to other ethnics, but not to Australian
writers. Have you ever read anything in which some comparison was
made between my work and that of Les Murray, for instance?”
Alizadeh and Pitt-Alizadeh mobilise the philosophical method of
Alain Badiou in demonstrating how a poem by Western Australian
Wajarri-Bardimia poet Charmaine Papertalk-Green might produce a
reading that views the abandonment of the black female speaker by
her black partner as not ascribed to any one particular factor (racial,
sexual, or economic disadvantage) but perhaps as a result of interconnected
social factors that together create the material conditions
that produce such a destructive act. Badiou’s approach therefore offers
a generative interpretative alternative to the reductive lens of identity
politics, an approach that might articulate more of a Truth, and
therefore be viewed as a radicalising metapolitics.
In his essay, Timothy Yu reflects on both the limitations and
possibilities of identifying poetry as “Asian Australian”. As Yu points
out, the term “Asian American” was “a pan-ethnic coalition formed in
response to the racism of a white-dominated society” (79). That is, it’s
about “claiming place for Asians within America, rather than viewing
Asians only as foreigners” (75). While the strategic use of an “Asian
American identity” enabled “diverse Asian groups to understand [their]
unequal circumstances as being related,” Lisa Lowe warns that it “risks
particular dangers: not only does it underestimate the differences and
hybridities among Asians, but it also inadvertently supports the racist
discourse that constructs Asians as a homogenous group, that implies
we are ‘all alike’ and conform to ‘types’” (1037).
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 11
Similar to Alizadeh and Pitt-Alizadeh, Jacqueline Lo has shown how
the strategic use of a category like “Asian Australian” unites “people of
various Asian ethnicities thereby enabling a degree of political solidarity
and critical purchase” (15). Yet following Lowe’s American-focused
caution, “Asian Australian” might still prove more limiting than
liberating as a category. Poets like Michelle Cahill have preferred to call
themselves migrant writers. Others, like Lia Incognita, identify themselves
as persons of colour (80). Others again may prefer to be aligned
to a specific ethno-cultural background like Chinese-Australian or
Vietnamese-Australian. Hoa Pham claims there has not been an
“obvious ‘cohort’ of writers engaged in a ‘thing called Asian-Australian
poetry’” (qtd by Timothy Yu at 79). Yet, as Timothy Yu points out, this
may be changing in light of new interpretative frameworks such as
Adam Aitken’s “rhizomic (or de-centred) model of reading that can
complement a more Australo-centric view” (“Asian-Australian Diasporic
Poets: A Commentary” 81). As Aitken notes in “A poetics of (un)
becoming hybridity”, hyphenated categories like “Asian-Australian” “can
highlight relational descriptions of identity and [...] interrogate traditional,
or essentialist formulations of ‘Englishness,’ ‘Thainess,’ and even
Anglo-Australianness”. For Aitken, the “gap between East-West creates
a third space that splits the binary that separates self and Other”
(“(un)becoming” 125).
In “On Asian Australian Poetry,” Timothy Yu focuses on the case of
Ouyang Yu who continually negates an identitarian focus. As Ouyang
Yu’s speaker declares in Loose: A Wild History, “I am a poet. Not an
Australian poet. Not a Chinese poet. But a poet who temporarily lives
in Kingsbury” (151). Ouyang Yu sees himself as a bilingual writer, who
moves not between two nations or cultures but between two languages.
As his speaker in The Kingsbury Tales notes, “you can never be a tongue
/ Never be armed with the right tongue to teach the chosen” (italics
added, 19). This is a negation of a particularist, identitarian focus, and
gains power in its antagonism towards Australia’s “long-history of antiChinese
racism” (“On Asian Australian Poetry” 84).
The movement between two cultures or between two languages is
often not one of choice. Susan Schultz suggests that diaspora is usually
“an economic reality, a cultural tearing apart, often born of political
SOUTHERLY12
turmoil” (qtd in Aitken, “Commentary”). In “Cut Tongue and the
Mechanism of Defence”, Ania Walwicz enacts trauma through the
embodied process of writing:
A particular gratification of instinct is repressed, some substitute
is found for it (13). I cannot tell the truth. I am not
allowed. I am forbidden. Verboten. I don’t want to know
what I know or think what I think. It is too bad. I censor
that. I delete that. It is removed, erased. I forget that I forget.
What happened – why nothing happened to me, nothing at
all. Don’t tell them anything. No. Quiet as a mouse. I hide in
the house. I am hidden. I am not allowed to come out.
The act of orality; speaking, eating, reading out aloud –
as a form of displacement, repression. Teaching, yes, even
teaching. Anything, anything at all. Any thing. I cross something
out. Block it, stop it. I forget to eat. I just write and
write now. (91)
For Walwicz’s speaker, the speaker is always already a subject in process.
Just as much as being a “projection made by the reader”, the speaker is
written by language. That said, the poet–speaker also claims some
agency to reinvent herself, although there is a constant slippage
between her performed selves:
Words come to me. Dreams come to me. I will think about
this tomorrow. Fiddlesticks, I say. I am Vivien Leigh in Gone
with the Wind. I am the contorted Sabina Spielrein in A
Dangerous Method. I am Gloria Swanston descending the
grand staircase in Sunset Boulevard. My speech is cut up,
disjointed. I incorporate errors and breakages of language
and body. (93)
Walwicz’s writing is episodic, fragmented, associative, and dream-like.
As Walwicz herself elaborates, it is surrealistic, mixing aspects of dream
and the Real, revealing both conscious and unconscious desires and
anxieties. The cut tongue (of the migrant body) is reflected by the cutANN
VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 13
up style of Walwicz’s prose poem. There is a shift between the speaker’s
empowered riffing on and playing with words (a sense of languagegames
putting pressure on words), and a sense of loss and the emptying
out of meaning. This is made emphatic upon oral performance of the
work, where the voice gains then loses momentum, is cut short, but
empowered by repetition.
Significantly, Walwicz’s speaker does not situate the trauma as
linked to an identity of either gender or ethnicity, but as emerging
from social constraints that are resonating within the immediate
everyday (as signalled by the construction of a continual present in her
work) and from the creative and critical force of its audience.
In “Breaching the Social Contract: The Migrant Poet and the
Politics of Being Apolitical”, Danijela Kambaskovic writes of the difficulties
of returning to poetry in another language and the loaded
presumptions surrounding the figure of the migrant poet. Coming to
Australia from former Yugoslavia as an adult, she reflects in her autoethnographic
piece upon her decision to reinvent herself, but also
upon the continuing presence of a ‘ghost identity’. Kambaskovic contrasts
the comforts and control of intellectual distance with the
daunting, confrontational spectre of trauma and nostalgia, contending
that the migrant’s desire to be apolitical often stems from trauma.
Traumatic experiences have no verbal equivalent and can seem impossible
to talk about. And if there are attempts at articulation, there
is always the question of inauthenticity. The migrant exists in a double
bind, inauthentic if not speaking in the first language, but unheard if
she does. Beyond the politics between speaking and silence, there are
also the affective shifts between a sense of luck and survivor’s guilt. As
Kambaskovic points out, the struggle to signify oneself as a subject
“becomes even harder when one must show feelings in an assumed
language” (104). She cites fellow former Yugoslavian poet Tatjana Lukic
in describing the difficulty in ‘fitting’ experience to language or vice
versa: “a needle that I thrust into a thick coat to sew a button, but the
needle emerged in a different spot on the underside of the cloth, too
far from the damn button” (14). (The metaphor of sewing for writing
is one that Walwicz has also used.) There is the further conundrum
that mistakes made in the second language, which would actually
SOUTHERLY14
reveal a genuine foreignness, will often make the poem less publishable
because it does not ‘sound right’ or ‘look right’ (106).
Kambaskovic writes powerfully of the pressures to perform a particular
role, to claim a particular voice as a migrant poet, and of winning
awards when she did so successfully. The performance of an authentic
pain and dislocation is the way the migrant writer honours the social
contract between themselves and the reader from the host-country. This
is similar to but not quite the same as Timothy Yu’s questioning of the
Asian-Australian writer as “a kind of middleman figure, interpreting
and explaining rather than being heard creatively” (75). Adam Aitken
also notes that too often multiculturalism becomes a kind of colonial
paternalism where the dominant or host culture manages minority
cultures, imposing an editorial process on what the minority can be.
Accordingly, it becomes more about what the dominant or host culture
benefits from the migrant and becomes associated with the idea of
cultural accretion like ‘fusion food’ or festivals of world music (“(un)becoming”
123).
Aitken suggests that in “talking about coming from ‘two different
worlds,’ the subject ironically reproduces an ideological reductiveness”
(130). Both Walwicz and Kambaskovic question particular renditions
of ethnicity and gender, preferring instead to present complex subjectivites
that are in flux and responding to a dynamic spectrum of social
factors. Bill Ashcroft has argued for the concept of transnation to capture
this sense of flux:
Transnation is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that
begins within the nation. This ‘outside’ is geographical, cultural
and conceptual, a way of talking about subjects in their
ordinary lives, subjects who traverse the various categories by
which subjectivity is normally constituted, who live ‘in-between.’
The transnation occupies the space we might refer to
as the ‘nation’, distinct from the political structure of the state,
which interpolates subjects as citizens. These subjects may
indeed identify themselves as national, particularly in sport
and war, but the transnation describes the excess of subject
positions swirling within, around, and beyond the state. (19)
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 15
Is this “excess of subject positions swirling within, around, and beyond
the state” what Aitken calls cultural hybridity? Aitken argues for the
need to “decouple hybridity from race-based identity”, citing as
examples Pico Ayers’ global soul and Édouard Glissant’s CreoleCaribbean
poet of relation (127). To this, we might add Michael Farrell’s
Australian neobaroque. Thinking laterally from the Latin American
creolisation of the European baroque, Farrell considers the possibility
of a counter-conquest mode in Australian poetry that incorporates local
histories, subaltern knowledges, and Indigenous aesthetics.
Aitken argues that hybridity “is more than identity, it is a poetics of
Being without no dominant template”. He declares:
I would like see ‘hybridisation’ as a portmanteau term for a
whole range of cultural exchange that carries a positive
potential for social change, while at the same time posing a
possible critique of how standards of ‘authenticity’ are made
and who is entitled to call whom authentic.
For Aitken the ‘Asian-Australian’ poet “is a metaphor that could be
used to describe a space of creative practice that lies aslant to or
outside, but not detached from, the Australian context” (131). In “A
poetics of (un)becoming hybridity”, he employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of intentional, as opposed to organic, hybridity which deploys
an aesthetic expression which is provocative and challenges an identitarian
lens. As Pnina Werner notes, it “may also from a different social
position be experienced as revitalising and fun” (“Dialectics” 5). For
Aitken, such aesthetic expression would be “multi-vocal” and create “a
fluid trans-subject” (16). Accordingly, a hybrid poetics would be “adulterated,
bastardised, inauthentic, dis-placed and resistant to grand
narratives and ideological schema”.1
It would “explore a counterdiscourse
to the bourgeois romance of happy multiculturalism”
(Aitken, “(un)becoming” 134). Kambaskovic finds a freedom in trans-
SOUTHERLY16
1 Ramazani has also developed the concept of ‘artistic hybridisation’ from
Bakhtin, although he focuses on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism, doubleness,
and the carnivalesque as reading strategies of postcolonial poetry.
lating her own work, a process of transcription. In moving between
two languages, the poem is “taken apart or rewritten,” takes on variation
(119). As Spivak contends, the translator “must solicit the text to
show the limits of its language, because that rhetorical aspect will point
at the silence of the absolute fraying of language that the text wards
off” (193).
Aitken cites Susan Schultz who suggests that “Diaspora is rarely
shared, or shared easily, because there are so many versions of it” (128).
Aitken prefers to think about “specific localisms and how they connect
at a micro-level” (132). Accordingly, his poetry is “about where I come from
as much as the shifting terrain of where I am at” (132). In some respects,
this reflects Robert Dixon’s notion of “situated cosmopolitanism”,
which, he argues, recognises “the strategic value of self-fashioning, of
embracing a range of cultural identities and national affiliations” (72).
Yet Aitken also puts continual pressure on such cultural identities as
containing shifting modalities of Being. In Transnational Poetics, Ramazani
argues that, “For global and transnational studies of poetry, we need, in
short, dialogic alternatives to monologic models that represent the
artifact as synecdoches for a local or national culture imperilled by global
standardization, a monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to
alterities within and without, or a self-contained civilizational unit in
perpetual conflict with others” (12).
In thinking about this dialogic alternative, it is vital to consider “the
material conditions of both nationalism and transnationalism that
produce poetic material” (Lucy Van, italics added). It is worth noting
how Aitken’s cosmopolitan is shaped by his work, that he is part of “a
world-wide phenomenon of Asian and part Asian Anglophone teacher/
writers who could live anywhere where a school can support them”
(132). Ramazani argues that “Metaphor and postcoloniality are both
conceived of in terms of movement, transference, or alienation of discourse
from one place to another, a movement that involves not only a
one-way shift but inevitably a bi-directional hybridisation”(Hybrid 73).
Is this overlooking the material conditions that may make bidirectionality
uneven?
Van states that “it is important that notions of established transnational
cultural ‘routes’ do not preclude further investigation in the
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 17
less-traditional, unexpected transnational and transcultural connections
we might encounter in late-twentieth century poetry” (34). As
Werbner points out, “Some environments are more cosmopolitan than
others” (“Vernacular” 498). Van suggests that the “attempt to reconcile
hybridity with a sensitivity to local history is made perhaps at the cost
of reinstatement of regional categories” (29). There is a need in scholarship
of postcolonial poetry to consider, then, a geopoetic mosaic. This
includes the possibility of “shared trajectories and/or political commitments
between writers who have had no direct contact” as much as
attention to the political sensitivities of the local (Jennison 132). Farrell
reinforces this in his call for a focus on considering the application of
the neobaroque style that is nevertheless attentive to the specifics of
place.
In “Archipelagos of sense: thinking about a decolonised Australian
poetics”, Peter Minter expands on Les Murray’s line that “the whole
world is an archipelago”, proffering an archipelagic sensibility where
“locations on the surface of the planet can be understood as earthly
temporal and spatial archipelagos” (156). The archipelagos could
“describe a set of relations between outcrops or nodes of intensity”
amidst “oceans of inscrutability, or what Caribbean poet and theorist
Édouard Glissant termed the chaos-monde” (156). Each node would be a
domestic, vernacular, and intimate island of habitus in a constantly
evolving network. In this respect, Ouyang Yu’s Kingsbury might be
viewed as a node or island with its own intensity, as much as Michael
Farrell’s Melbourne, or Les Murray’s Bunyah. As Minter argues, “[T]hey
are all real” (160). For Minter, the archipelagic model “upsets normative
ideas about nation, cultural, and ideological homogeneity”. An
archipelagic sensibility might be viewed as an “aesthetic response to
place” but also could refer to the “spatialised network of poetry and
poetry communities” (160). Minter’s idea of archipelago developed from
John Mateer’s envisaging of Australia as “an archipelago, culturally
porous and edgeless”. In “Australia is Not an Island,” Mateer elaborates:
For the artists of the Australian archipelago, the mistaken
belief that Australia is one enormous island has the disadvantage
that it constantly forces them to talk about their
SOUTHERLY18
practices as if there were real commonalities that they all
shared, as if the art forms of the various islands could be
effectively grouped under the one cultural discourse, that of
the nation. Australians seldom have the opportunity to talk
about themselves as islanders, and yet this is one of the first
things that strikes the curious visitor: each island’s isolation
from the others ... the richness of Australia resides in the
cultural differences between the islands. ... If Australia is
appreciated as a network of islands, the colonial metaphor
for acculturation – that is, the development of the Land with
all its attendant technologies of picturing the landscape,
clearing the bush, dispossessing the Natives – can be replaced
with another, more ethical set of metaphors, a collection of
terms more in keeping with current experience in this region.
Those metaphors would be those of travel: art as magical and
commercial cargo, culture as the trading of information and
values, galleries as airports or trade fairs, the practice of the
artist as a means of diplomacy and as a technique of survival
after marooning or shipwreck. (qtd. in Minter at 165)
Lucy Van has noticed that a good deal of postcolonial poetry refers to
fluidity in relation to place and home (“Epic” 301), and Minter has
argued that in an archipelagic model, representability is that which
coheres “at the edges of ever shifting shores” (156). In “(Un)belonging
in Australia: Poetry and Nation,” Lyn McCredden draws attention to
John Forbes’ “On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem” in which he
considers “what model of Australia / as a nation could match the
ocean, / or get your desk / to resemble a beach” (qtd. at 50). This littoral
between representability and the perceived, and the unknown or
invisible, contains both attention to the vernacular, to local histories,
as well as looking outward, elsewhere. It is the site for a poetics of
relation. The beach is a predominant trope in Australian culture; it is
a place that is simultaneously there and not there, stable and unstable.
It is further associated with pleasure (leisure-time) and risk (of being
beached or stranded), both temporalities beyond the everyday routines
and labours.
ANN VICKERY AND ALI ALIZADEH 19
The political imagination is one that can be enjoyable, as Adam
Aitken suggests, but it can also be borne out of the pain of trauma, as
a number of contributors reveal. Emotions are nested together and
form part of the complexity of contemporary subjectivities. As Peter
Minter argues, there is still a need to decolonise reductive aesthetics of
nation. The essays in this collection consider how contemporary postcolonial
and diasporic poetries often present the reader with an ethical
charge. They link experience and aesthetics in ways that provoke, that
are porous, that incorporate or engage with the Indigenous or local,
that are hybrid without being co-opted to a cultural dominant, that
are constantly unbecoming as much as they represent a coming community.
And as such, they provide an expression of possibility and
social transformation in radical, nuanced, infinitely generative ways.
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Cixous, Hél`ene. “Castration or Deprivation”. Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary
Culture. Ed. Russell Ferguson et al. New York: New Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1990.
Digby, Jenny. A Woman’s Voice. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
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(2004): 67-78.
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Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
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