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Sabina Hopfer

Re-reading Lionel Fogarty:

An attempt to feel into texts speaking of decolonisation

This piece was first published in Southerly 62.2 (2002). It is 6,800 words or about twelve printed pages long.

Colonialism has transformed the world into a place where “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic”.[1] As a consequence, a global postcolonial literary debate challenges Western literary critics to take the responsibility of becoming active readers of postcolonial narratives and the realities that inform them. They are asked to listen to non-Western writers and focus on a decolonisation of their minds if their aim is to decolonise a still colonised world.

As a woman born and educated in the centre of Europe, my concern in this essay is to listen to Indigenous Australian poet Lionel Fogarty and offer a reading practice for his work that takes into account that a) abstract, Western theories alone are not sufficient for an interpretation of Fogarty’s texts, and b) the non-Indigenous readers” uneasiness and struggle with the writer’s message of decolonisation is a first step towards their understanding of an Indigenous anti-colonial discourse.

In order to refrain from a Western appropriative mode of reading Indigenous Australian writing, it is important for non-Indigenous critics to consult with the Indigenous writers whose work they wish to interpret and analyse. One of my main concerns was therefore to enter into a personal dialogue with Lionel Fogarty during my study of his work, and to consult with him as often as possible.

Not only was it important for both of us to talk about his writing, but also for him to take me to Cherbourg Reserve, where he grew up, as well as to different Aboriginal organisations in Brisbane, so I could better understand the politics and motivations that informed his writing. This paper would not have been possible in its present form without such an on-going dialogue.

Fogarty is one of the most challenging Indigenous Australian writers — one of the most “unassimilated” to Western standards of style and content. The challenge for any critic lies in making visible the value of a writer who, with a unique style, forces us to feel rather than intellectually grasp what it means to be an Indigenous person of Australia.


New and Selected Poems: a poem cycle of past and present

New and Selected Poems, Fogarty’s latest collection published in 1995, contains not only his latest poems, but also a selection of poems from earlier collections. It thus covers the first fifteen years of Fogarty’s life as a speaking poet and is relevant to a critical discussion of his work with regard to the diversity of his style.

Colin Johnson/ Mudrooroo wrote the introduction to the book as well as a poem titled ‘On Reading Lionel’s Poems’, with which the collection opens.[2] The poem summarises Fogarty’s legacy as a committed and revolutionary Indigenous poet whose ability lies in speaking and singing the written word: “His voice echoing, singing out the ages, / Present and past, his words singing / Shining from the pages”. Fogarty creates a song-cycle of past and present revealing a syncretism of the modern written and the ancient oral codes. His singing and dancing speak of love and hate, the needs of his people, injustice, and the need for change.

Fogarty also speaks of the achievements that give Indigenous people their pride and dignity back, as Johnson/ Mudrooroo further claims in his poem: “Lionel takes our lives into his mouth, / Spits them out, crying with our needs, / Our desires, our wants and triumphs.” In this sense, as the poem concludes, Fogarty’s words serve as a means “to read, breakdance into our cultures”.

Yet, how are we to read and breakdance into Fogarty’s poems?

In The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka, Johnson/ Mudrooroo devotes a whole chapter to Fogarty’s poetry suggesting we should read his new poems first: “The newer poems I feel are more accessible and the understanding gained may then be turned to his earlier and more difficult poems. A circular reading practice may emerge, the later codes of his new poems being used to decipher the thickness of some of his earlier texts”.[3]

Barry Hill in his review of New and Selected poems, on the other hand, suggests the opposite: “A good way to read this strong, complex and important book might be backwards, starting with the selections from Fogarty’s early works...”.[4]

Neither of these procedures, however well-meant, leads to an immediate understanding of Fogarty’s complex work. Sometimes it is necessary to enter even a single poem from as many angles as possible. I would therefore suggest a multiple, or retroactive, reading procedure: first reading the book forward, then backward, and finally from different points out of the centre. We indeed need to read the collection in circles, circles that develop from various points. Fogarty’s poetry defies linearity as he moves in circles through time and writing.

I would further argue that Fogarty’s style does not, as Johnson/ Mudrooroo claims, necessarily become more difficult the further back we move chronologically. I indeed find the earliest poems in the Kargun (1980) and Yoogum Yoogum (1982) collections the most accessible. They are straightforward in meaning and, although Fogarty’s individual style is already evident, the poems have not yet gained the complexity of the Kudjela (1983) or Ngutji (1984) poems, most of which come across as seemingly infinite accumulations of words. The words pound down on the non-Indigenous reader like hail stones, so that the reading experience is one of complete exhaustion and despair.

The Kudjela and Ngutji poems are also extremely long, sometimes covering up to three pages, and the lines are much denser in the number of words and ideas packed into them than the earlier poems. The Jagera (1990) collection, published after Kudjela and Ngutji, is again easier to access and is characterised by a developed Kargun style. Fogarty’s latest poems show a refined style in achieving a harmony between complexity and straightforwardness.


“We’ll sunrise the enemy”

Let us start with ‘Murra Murra Gulandanilli — Waterhen’, the second poem in New and Selected Poems, which can be seen as an epitaph Fogarty wrote for his brother, Daniel Yock.[5] Already, when trying to analyse the title of the poem, a non-Indigenous reader is faced with uncertainties. What does ‘Murra Murra Gulandanilli’ mean? These Indigenous words are not explained in the glossary at the back of the book.

From the dedication that appears with a reprint of the cover page photo on the title page for the new poems, we can assume that Murra Murra Gulandanilli is Daniel’s Indigenous name. The word “waterhen”, which is part of the title, may be understood as the translation of the Indigenous phrase. Murra Murra Gulandanilli, the waterhen, may have been Daniel’s conception totem symbolising his relationship to the place of his conception, as well as his relationship to the ancestral spirit world.[6]

“Yet I too bleed the Murra Murra Gulandanilli heart”[7] — this is how the poem opens. It is quite unusual to start a poem with a “yet”-clause which, grammatically speaking, always refers back to a previous clause or sentence. The question I asked myself was whether I was witnessing a conversation being resumed that began sometime in the past, or whether “yet” should much rather have been “yes”. Fogarty uses a lot of “yes”-clauses for emphasis, especially when he addresses his non-Indigenous readers and, as I shall argue later, they serve important functions in his writing.

When I consulted with Fogarty on the first line of the Murra Murra Gulandanilli poem, he told me that “yet” was in fact a misprint and that the line should read: “Yes, I too bleed the Murra Murra Gulandanilli heart”. With “yes” instead of “yet”, the opening is a lot stronger and fits in better with the rest of the poem.

In the second and third line, Fogarty’s circular style comes to the fore: “We blessed the body touched / We slipped to the earth feel with Daniel”. Rather than following Standard English syntax and word order, Fogarty develops what might be called a ceremonial kind of syntax that reflects a revolving and dancing around words. Indigenous dancing is acted out in his writing.

In the following lines the mourner dances his brother’s final dance, merging with him in spirit:

I stepped proud, yielded dance
...
Him smiling at you
Him a-laughing at you
Him eyes are dillil
Him understood the street lies
Him undertook eight and was mistook (5)

The stress in these first few lines lies very much on the emotions that are released through dancing and singing. The repetitious lines starting with “Him” intensify the image of the stamping and singing that are part of a ceremonial dance.

While a spiritual voice is echoing through the introductory verses of the poem, the author becomes more and more political the further into the poem he proceeds:

Dayock is a-calling contempt
To evil policies
Dayock is a-singing to the souls
Aborigine revolution coming
To those pigs sneer and judges too
Dayock want all you young to fight on
Not lurk on
To fight on To defend him
Dayock fear nobody
Cos him was a spiritual dancer
Was a Murra Murra dancer (5)

By merging first name and surname, Fogarty transforms the dancer and person Daniel Yock into the fearless freedom fighter Dayock, who represents a revolutionary Indigenous voice, a voice appealing to the young to continue their fight for justice. The new name contains the word “day” and thus evokes positive connotations of light rather than negative connotations of darkness.

Although mourning the loss of his dead brother, Fogarty does not aim at presenting him as a victim but rather as a strong and proud Indigenous fighter. He shows that Daniel has not become a victim of the material, political world because on a spiritual, metaphysical level he continues to live on. Daniel’s strong fighting spirit in fact continues to challenge the material world. The light of that spirit is emphasised in the next few lines:

Murra Murra Gulandanilli
Culture romancer
You’re on the other side, the light you see
The light you see is where you’re from
Is where you’re going to be the from of the feeling that was
within you (6)

We see here a criss-crossing of different realities and times: “where you’re from” (present), “where you’re going to be the from” (future) and “of the feeling that was / within you” (past). The simultaneous use of three grammatical tenses within one single statement reveals a circular pattern of time and reality informed by the interlinkage of past, present and future.

Although a very personal tribute to the author’s brother, the poem nonetheless captures the collective spirit of the “Aborigine revolution coming” in that the writer refers to Daniel as “our brother”: “To make him our brother Daniel dance that dance” (6). Through dancing he has become a “culture romancer” and a brother to all Indigenous people. Fogarty appeals to his people to fight for justice — justice for Daniel Yock as well as for all other men and women who died in police custody. Fogarty’s grieving for his brother encapsulates a grieving for everybody who has become a victim of European law and racist police.

The poet’s fight for justice needs to be understood in a metaphysical, spiritual sense. Just as the dancing unites Daniel and his people, their fight for justice is borne out on a spiritual, metaphysical level: “I’ll survive, we’ll sunrise the enemy” (6). The enemy, the white man, is lifted into a spiritual realm to be defeated. Fogarty makes a powerful and revolutionary political statement here. He attempts to bring about change with the help of a powerful spirit and not with the help of powerful weapons. The “Aborigine revolution coming” shall be a revolution of the spirit, achieved through “a Murri way of dancing” (6).

Fogarty’s poems are rarely either of a solely political or spiritual nature. Most of them combine both elements. As the poet says in his introduction to the New and Selected Poems collection: “[I] write to give spiritual and political understanding of the conventional social structure of [my] community” (ix).

Whereas the theme of death in custody is approached through the lamentation of Daniel Yock in the ‘Murra Murra Gulandanilli’ poem, it is related in general terms and addressed more directly in ‘Consideration of Black Deaths (story)’. This six-page story-poem is a highly critical text in which not only the white “correctional man” but also the black man who “goes and work for white controlled place” and has “to be coated paint of black but think white” is accused of supporting European law and a system that furthers black deaths in custody (21).

Fogarty is well aware that the theme of death in custody is a sub-theme of a much larger one, namely that of having been in the custody of a colonial society for more than 200 years:

210 years we are in custody of white people.
Even our homes, land, sky and air your law hurt us
make us sad when we are glad
give us grog and we take it to the limit,
like punching up in a fight between ourselves
yes we do kill one another
yes we do undo our race,
but this is helped by your work in keeping white power alive. (20)

The poet accuses non-Indigenous people of having “left my people in a unchangeable way” by keeping them in custody and exposing them to evils and crimes arising from a law and a system imposed on them (20). Foreign laws often lead the oppressed subjects not only to break those laws, but more tragically to fight against their own people: “Yes we do kill one another / yes we do undo our race” (20). These lines echo Frantz Fanon who showed that captive peoples most often release their anger by oppressing their own people.[8]

Fogarty not only draws attention to death in custody that results from torture by the police, he also comments on suicides committed while in custody. Once confined to a cell, many Indigenous people cannot cope with the physical/ mental constraint and the separation from their families, their country and their culture: “To be back with the family in jail is hard. / Yet they know there is a way out of every ways” (19). To be in jail for Murri people means to be of no more use to their communities, and thus “The sheets and blankets of the cells / are a danger to us / The disposable razor are a danger to us” (18).

To stop deaths in custody, Fogarty pleads for the establishment of a black law that fits the customs and needs of Indigenous people: “Now in jail Murri men and women needs a black law / so they can come to live a better life and give more / to their community” (19). He appeals to his people to prepare and become active through

... educated speaking, writing rap, dat will
kill them with the truth, rape their minds
tell pure in Murri thinking.
Leave their bodies for they undo themselves.
You Murri prisoner in there now
must fight with minds at ease (20)

Here it becomes clear what Fogarty means when he says “we’ll sunrise the enemy” (6). To “sunrise the enemy” means to rape the minds of the enemies by fighting them, not physically (“leave their bodies”), but spiritually (“fight with minds at ease”). Fogarty emphasises self-determination for Indigenous people, who must represent themselves: “first the representing of Murris must be Murris / get rid of migglou who are there” (20).[9]

Self-representation should replace organisations of black affairs that are “in the custody of the same white lawless society / that oppresses us” (19). The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody is one such organisation Fogarty criticises for its lack of activity. He makes practical suggestions for changes in Indigenous prisons: “My Murri prison will be a prison of learning to get ways / of not returning to prison” (22). And he asks: “how many more blacks must die before the white man will / understand?” (19).

With this question on his lips, the poet still manages to close his considerations of black deaths on a positive note that emphasises the strength of the Indigenous spirit: “The Murri prisoners are short in life / but long in spirits” (23).

Not only is Fogarty aware that death in custody is a sub-theme of the much larger social and historical custody, but he is also conscious of the fact that such deaths occur all over the colonial world. The Murri struggle for justice becomes an international one when a world of different voices cry out for justice in unison, as Fogarty illustrates in ‘Come Over Murri’:

Murris not only you die
in prisons or from poor conditions
Over other countries they’re dying too and prisoned for
surviving
...
We are not the only sufferers.
We are not just the ones fighting for land cultural rights.
...
We as Murri must look here and support necessary
struggles of other countries, for their fights affect our fights.... (25)

Fogarty understands that it is crucial to unite the fighting spirits around the world.

The struggle for land forms part of the struggle for freedom. Most of the ancient places and tribal areas lie beneath colonial layers. In an earlier poem, ‘Urban Black’ (from the Kargun selection), the poet appeals to the Indigenous people living in the cities to go back to their tribal roots and to fight for their land outside the domains of the city:

Urban Aboriginals, go back in time
you will find you are a tribal person
you’ll find the tribe
that roamed the land
that is now dumps.
You’ll find your customs are to carry on.
Once done, you know you don’t want the city core.
GO BACK
to find you are related to Aboriginals or faraway green
Go out, help them fight now for land rights.
It’s your land too. (137)

Indigenous people’s duty is to “move, move / go, go” and unearth the ancient layers (137). The articulation of place is very important for the reconstruction of identity. As Leigh Dale argues in her analysis of the poetry of Fogarty and South-African writer Mongame Serote: “ ‘Who’ is intimately related to ‘where’. Thus place, in the very broadest sense of the word, is crucial to the development and maintenance of personal and social identity”.[10]

Throughout his poetry, Fogarty articulates place and re-establishes identity through it. The titles of some of his collections and poems often refer to the names of tribal areas and places of significance to his people. New and Selected Poems is connected to the Beaudesert tribe “Munaldjali”. Other Beaudesert tribes are “Yoogum”, the title of Fogarty’s second poetry collection, and “Jukambe”, which is the subject of a poem called ‘Jukambe Spirit — For the Lost’ (94). “Jagera”, the title of the fifth collection, is the name of Murri clans from the Brisbane area.[11] “Kudjela”, the title of the third collection, refers to people of the Charters Towers area.[12] “Booyooburra”, used for the title of a children’s book by Fogarty, is the name of a sacred rock outside Cherbourg Reserve, where Fogarty grew up. “Musgrave Park”, another place often mentioned in Fogarty’s poetry, is a recreation park in the middle of Brisbane and a spiritual place for the Indigenous people from that area.

The connection an Indigenous person has to a particular place is affirmed by naming that place. Naming is to give a place “the POWER TO LIVE” (31). By re-naming stolen places, one gives them their ancient names as well as their ancient spirit back. The poem ‘My Cry is Lost in a Name’ (from the Kargun selection) bears out the poet’s reconstruction of his identity, which in the end leads him to reconstruct the place he belongs to:

Propelled
in giving me damned names
They gave me unknowing roots
White with jewels of nakedness
Sights — silenced
then demanded to catch shadows
travelling aware in innocence
But as mixed up in trickery
of my tree roots
I found myself
sucked by seed
I felt dressed in native trees
Then having urgency to wipe away
white values
I drunk healthyness
I learned more about my ended Shakespeare name
coming back
the snakes began attacking
Spears came travelling in my thighs
leaving me
Rejuvenated
No more my damned name. (135)

If Indigenous people want to reconstruct and re-name their land successfully, they cannot avoid unfolding the mystery of “damned” English names and their roots. As Fogarty says, he has “learned more about [his] ended Shakespeare name” while uncovering the dark shadows of an unknown identity and gradually finding his way back to his own roots.

Metaphorically speaking, the author needs to tear off his white mask, which is represented by the European name he was given, if he wishes to be reconciled with the land. ‘My Cry is Lost in a Name’ reflects the painful healing process every person who has been denied his or her own identity has to go through.

A European name is a constant reminder of the pain of colonisation. To heal that pain, a metamorphosis in the way Fogarty describes it is necessary. Once the past and the history of a people have regained their lawful territory within the present, the self can be reconciled. One can be initiated back into the land and rejuvenated (“sucked by seed / I felt dressed in native trees”).

Reconciliation of self and land, the core of a healthy Indigenous identity for Fogarty, is outlined by the law of the Dreaming. “People and land is law” (48), Fogarty states in the poem ‘Surviving Dreaming Surviving’, one of the new poems. The law of the Dreaming moves the Indigenous person to form an identity with the land — to guard it and not exploit it. The Dreaming, with its timeless law, shapes the political struggles of the present which evolve around the unison of people and land, leading back to the law of the past.

In Fogarty’s poetry, ancient Indigenous and imposed colonial reality seem always to be in battle. More often than not, colonial reality is swallowed up by ancient Dreaming reality — the spirit of the Dreaming cutting through in a most powerful way to “sunrise the enemy” (6).


“We are like tunes sung out of songs”

The imagery of “sunrising the enemy” captures in metaphorical terms the spirit of Fogarty’s mission to deconstruct colonial codes and reconstruct Indigenous ones. It is therefore also applicable to the medium of literature. Fogarty constantly “sunrises” literature by cutting through with Indigenous oral forms of past and present.

The reality of orality constantly challenges and transforms the reality of literacy, Fogarty’s aim being to reconcile the two. He creates oral performances in writing and is thus “a highly political modern songmaker .... [whose] poems resemble meditative chants of the oral Aboriginal tradition”.[13]

Singing and storytelling are part of the Indigenous self, as Fogarty shows in a poem called ‘She Sang’ (from the new poems section). Through singing and storytelling, the Indigenous people and the stolen generation in particular can find their way back to the true spirit of the land. ‘She sang’ represents the land singing to her children.

We are like tunes
yet you are to lose
MMM I’m yours told by law
We are to tune to be true
Come child, come child
Back to love life, a lovie
We are like tunes (39)

It is the spirit of the land that the Indigenous people are meant to pick up. For the poet, this means to tune into the spirit of Munaldjali, Mulinjari, Mununjali — the Beaudesert area he belongs to.

Although many Indigenous people have lost touch with the spirit of the land, as has the poet who lives in the city, they can become true to it again by tuning into the song of the land and reconnecting with the images of the past. Despite loss, as well as social and environmental change, they can stop, listen, look and begin to see, feel, touch and love the true spirit again — tune into that spirit to be true again.

By tuning into the spirit of place and territory, Fogarty names and articulates that place. When he opens his readings with the traditional Wakka Wakka chant “gurring ina narmee”, he sings himself and his audience into position to create the space within which he feels confident to act — the bora ring (traditional ceremonial ground) into which he welcomes his audience to share a poem with him.

Most of Fogarty’s poems are characterised by a singing and dancing spirit. A rhythmic style, which is often based on a repetition of a single key-image, belongs to that spirit. In the poem ‘Sue and Du — The Spirit of One Tribe is All’ the repetitiveness of the key-image “walking, talking, singing” is a powerful means to articulate place, and to emphasise the people’s connection to their land:

The Wakka Wakka are there
walking, talking, singing
in the land.
The Gabi, Gabi are there, walking
talking, singing in the land.
The Gurang Gurang are there walking,
talking, singing in the land.
The Dungidau are there walking,
talking, singing in the land.
The Booyooburra are there walking,
talking, singing in the land.
...
they are all there in the wind,
rain, sun bush morning and night (30-1)

The Australia Bookshow documentary made on Fogarty’s poetry in 1995, shows the writer walking off the stage “speaking” the ‘Sue and Du’ poem with his children following him dancing.[14]

Fogarty’s poems also often carry the rhythm of Afro-American songs, which have influenced the poet. The opening of ‘Where have you been’ bears out well such characteristics:

A-where have you been gone
A-where have you been, where have you been gone
With my Murri love
A-where have you been to go with my Murri love
You come from a time before
You come from a time forward .... (47)

Reading such lines aloud helps readers to grasp the ceremonial dancing style that echoes through the entire collection. We can almost feel the stamping on the ground — and I assume that the speaker in the poem wishes to express exactly that: the feeling of the sounds, the emotions expressed through dancing and singing.

Another poem called ‘Mad Souls’ (from the Jagera selection) reflects the feeling of Indigenous anger and again the speaking-singing style of Afro-American songs:

I am a moody Murri
my temper as black as me.
I am a moody Murri
drink and smoke,
Sail me away to Africa.
Yes, I’m a moody Murri
I live to swear
and shit anywhere.
I am the moody Murri
don’t like Aussies
don’t like Asians.
...
I’m the moody blue Murri
Please don’t take offence
your own negative reply.
I’m not mad
but glad.
...
Yet you people miss what I am
and
I am the moody Murri
My temper as black as me. (52)

The writer here satirises the common stereotype of the Indigenous person seen as angry, wild, drunk, and not capable of any good feelings. The strong rhythmic pace of the poem supports the Murri’s satirical outlook on, and anger at, being misrepresented all the time. In the lines “I’m not mad / but glad”, the satire is however cut through for an instant by a feeling of pride. Most of Fogarty’s poems, however much they express anger, contain a positive note of Indigenous pride.

Fogarty not only merges the singing with the writing, he also webs story-telling devices into his poetry. Among the new poems, there are three that are labelled as stories. One of them, ‘Consideration of Black Deaths’, which was discussed in the previous section, brings to the fore what Barry Hill in his review of New and Selected Poems calls Fogarty’s sense of social mobility.[15] The writer swiftly moves from talking to his own people to speaking to the white government man, the commissioner:

Yes, prepare now man in jail
the time has come to your time
yet when you get out, it’s back
to the same thing alcohol, drugs
and hurting each other.
...
Brother you were out there
in front of the demo but what
did it give you freedom or to go
back in for more.
...
Yes commissioner you’re white
The Murri prisoners are short in life
but long in spirits. (23)

The change of speaking positions is a rhetorical device used in traditional story-telling to keep the audience’s attention on the speaker. Fogarty, in his role as a speaker, does not give the listeners time to pause, but he moves on in a rapid pace from one direct address to the next. The “yes”-clauses function as markers of the writer’s mobility, each “yes” initiating the speaker’s move from one listener to the next.

In all his poems, Fogarty creates an acute sense of audience through the use of vocatives and imperatives. His singing and dancing style, influenced by the rhythm of traditional Indigenous Australian as well as Afro-American songs, and his use of repetitive key images are further devices with which he re-creates an Indigenous realm of orality throughout his poetry.


“Words beyond any acceptable meaning”

In terms of Fogarty’s style, I have so far spoken of a circular dancing style that has the words in constant motion, providing different meanings all the time. As to the writer’s language, it can be summarised as a mixture of Indigenous English, Standard Australian English and a dissection of the latter, interspersed with words from Indigenous languages. The poet is not interested in the linear word order provided by English syntax and grammar. On the contrary, Standard English grammar and syntax are put upside down to produce a new, Indigenous wor(l)d order.

Let me refer back to the poem ‘Murra Murra Gulandanilli’ and point out a few features of Indigenous English and examples of inverted syntax.

In “we blessed his body touched / We slipped to the earth feel with Daniel” (6) the writer creates, through his subversion of standard word order, a multiplicity of meanings in the eyes of a non-Indigenous reader. Am I to read the lines as: “We blessed and touched his body” and “we slipped to the earth and felt with Daniel”? Or are the lines to be interpreted as: “We blessed his touched body” and “we slipped to the earth that feels with Daniel”? The meaning differs according to the two readings, and Fogarty leaves it to his readers to decide on one of the meanings or to let both reverberate.

Further down in the poem, the following repetitive lines reveal other grammatical features of Indigenous English:

Him smiling at you
Him a-laughing at you
Him eyes are dillil

Him understood the street lies
Him undertook eight and was mistook. (5)

The object-pronoun “him” is used both for the subject pronoun “he” and the possessive-pronoun “his”. In the first two lines the verbs “smiling” and “a-laughing” lack the auxiliary verb “is”. The word “dillil” in the third line is translated in the glossary as “dilly bag”. “Dilly” is an Indigenous term from the Brisbane region and is the name for a bag or basket made from woven vine, grass, or fibre used in traditional societies.

I can therefore translate the third line as: “his eyes are dilly bags”. This might mean that Daniel’s eyes reflected his knowledge of ancient traditions and customs. In the glossary of the Ngutji collection we find the word “dilli” simply translated as “eye”. This would render a similar meaning: “his eyes are eyes”, suggesting that Daniel’s eyes were those of a young man initiated to the customs and laws of his culture.

In the line “Him undertook eight and was mistook”, the past form “mistook” is used instead of the past participle “mistaken”. And what does the word “eight” refer to? Did Daniel undertake eight street lies? The non-Indigenous reader is left in a void and may have to accept this phrase as an untranslatable and silent part of the text.

Such untranslatable parts seem to reveal to non-Indigenous readers what it feels like to find oneself at a loss for words and understanding, and to be overpowered by a foreign language and a foreign perception of the world. Rather than to translate, non-Indigenous readers are asked to let themselves be affected by the linguistic territory the writer has created for him and his own people.

In another poem, ‘Am I’, the simple confusion of singular and plural forms indicates the complexity of Indigenous thought and identity. There is no dividing line between the individual voice and the collective voice of his people; they become one:

Am we lonely these days
Am I grief in the wind
Am us friend to nature
well hooked me up and
we’ll fish
...
Am you hurt
Am you to see me
We am and dem gonna
sleep and dreams of my people (16)

Fogarty’s language allows a multiplicity of meanings created by the writer’s play with English words and his tearing down of Standard English language structures. The English language is re-created, subverted and the Western desire for recognisable sequence destroyed. The complexity of Fogarty’s poems may leave the English speaking reader confused by seemingly infinite sentences and an accumulation of words that seem to be randomly thrown onto the page, as in the following poem titled ‘Disguised, Not Attitude’ (from the Kudjela selection):

Distances run sport to a tested vessel
wander over teams, sailing with economics in mind.
Absorbed, unlawfully driving juvenile delinquency
they appeared.
Wrenching survival, peered bent engulfed dominances
inching advising, achieving came relieved into social skills
the pride fosters no interests in developed traditions.
Walks her texture of eternity
pedestals are matched cries in the winds.
Verandah rainbows shape, now mass rustling to shrieks
a star, relaxed when fell on this globe ... (89)

A poem like this causes despair in the English speaking reader. The title alone is complex enough to interpret. Is the writer speaking of a disguised attitude, or of a disguised behaviour that does not reflect an attitude? It is hardly possible for readers to follow the rapid pace of the poem and to decode its overall meaning. Non-Indigenous readers are overpowered by words, as Indigenous people must have felt when words of a foreign language were thrown at them. I am made to understand what language genocide feels like rather than what it means in abstract terms.

Such poems evoke the image of a shouting crowd with non-Indigenous readers in the middle of it, not understanding the words that hail them. Yet, rather than understanding the single words, we are forced to understand the feelings the words seek to evoke. As Fogarty says in ‘You Who May Read My Words’ (from the Kargun selection):

People — don’t talk!
Feel
Live
People — don’t talk!
Feel
Live
inside the core
an extension of my soul
my spirituality
That’s where
I
am. (143)

I am forced to feel myself into what I imagine is an Indigenous person’s soul, and to experience the emotions evoked by the pounding down of words felt yet not understood. Fogarty pushes not only the English language to its limits but his non-Indigenous readers to their limits too.

As Johnson/ Mudrooroo says in his introduction to the collection, Fogarty uses the English language as “a vehicle for feeling” (xiii). A comparison with symbolist or surrealist writers suggests itself; in a similar way they attempted to render the subconscious, emotional side of the world in word-images, or feeling-images.

Images and pictures are in general very important to Fogarty, as he says in his foreword to New and Selected Poems: “[T]he cultural symbols that belong to my people are more significant to my people than the A, B and C. What I want to achieve in my writing one day is to put Aboriginal designs of art inside the lettering to bring a broader understanding to the meanings of the text” (ix).

Fogarty’s manuscripts, some of which I was kindly allowed to read, are in fact characterised by a combination of image and word.[16] The words circle around painted signs and symbols and they form a structural entity with these designs. As Fogarty told me, he hardly ever writes poems without drawing pictures at the same time. Sometimes the drawings are there on the page first, and the words are then structured around them, or vice versa.

The drawings seem to emphasise the feeling-images contained in the written words. In one of the earlier poems Fogarty refers to the importance of a pictorial and subversive style: “You must see book sit there til picture rythmn [sic] and / recreation shakes a spear classics inter whata want by you”.[17] A spear is thrown into the English language and a rhythm of pictures is developed.

The imagery “we’ll sunrise the enemy”, which was discussed earlier, may be extended from the political to the linguistic; with a dancing style of feeling-images and a dissection of the English language the speaking poet “sunrises” language genocide and colonial power imposed on the Indigenous people of Australia. Fogarty’s words, rather than merely re-creating a material and physical world, express Indigenous reality: “I see words beyond any acceptable meaning / And this is how I express my dreaming ...” (109).


Colonisation in reverse

Throughout his poetry, Fogarty’s message is a political one. Even when not writing about political themes but singing the dreaming or the connection to the land into being, his language and style speak politics. Fogarty indigenises and subverts the English language and turns it back onto a non-Indigenous readership, thereby causing a kind of colonisation in reverse.

Instead of assimilating to British literary and linguistic codes, Fogarty distances himself from such codes. By breaking down the barriers of a foreign language and breaking free from the grammatical, syntactic and semantic structures of that language, he creates an Indigenous reality freed from language genocide — at the risk of producing texts that may be untranslatable and unintelligible to a great degree.

Through intranslatability and defamiliarisation an Indigenous discourse gradually emerges, a discourse that only generations to come may be able to understand entirely. Fogarty explains in his foreword to New and Selected Poems: “White man will never really fully interpret what a black man is thinking when he is writing. Maybe in the generations to come this may change” (x). In other words, a non-Indigenous reader is asked to read responsibly, which means not to re-appropriate through translation the linguistic territory the writer has created for himself.

Fogarty aspires to an Indigenous discourse based on a syncretism of past and present, black and white, ancient and modern, pre-colonial and colonial, based on a linguistic colonisation in reverse. Although superficially one might read Fogarty’s poetry as protest poetry based on a going-back-to-the-roots philosophy, this is denied by the poet’s awareness that culture is never static but changes constantly, due to influences from other cultures: “I am like the wind too, we change” (20).

What Fogarty does criticise or protest against in his poetry, is the suppression of Indigenous self-representation and self-determination, which has left Indigenous people in a putatively unchangeable state. His call for decolonisation is a call for a reconstruction of an Indigenous identity without the coloniser’s “patronising / pat on the back” (142). He supports an Indigenous voice that speaks for itself and is not constituted through the dominant (post)colonial discourses and stereotyped classifications:

You.
You hope that I speak of beauty
and tell of Dreaming
...
NOW!
Everyone wants writings of Aboriginals
Past, Present and Future.
But do they want the
REALITY (142)

Fogarty confronts non-Indigenous readers with his conviction that Indigenous writers need to construct their own postcolonial discourse: “For it’s back to survive in fine and stormy weather / sooner or later to drink through the white fella dreams / into our own reality” (131).

It is evident throughout all of his poems that Fogarty not only addresses non-Indigenous readers whose minds he attempts to decolonise, he also hopes “to give a direction to Aboriginal people coming up in the future, to stay away from European colonialist ways of writing, and the disease of stupidity in their language” (ix). Fogarty’s principal aim is to transform the negative image of a lost, confused and oppressed Indigenous person into the positive image of an Indigenality based on pride and spiritual health.

In his foreword Fogarty writes: “I know how white Australians write and I know how they talk. They’ll never come near the fourth world. White man will never know” (x). These words are quite strong and may estrange an otherwise sympathetic reader. I suggest one reads them with Fogarty’s aim in mind, to provoke an exchange taking place on territory that is more familiar to Indigenous writers rather than non-Indigenous readers.

Estrangement need not be negative, provided that we are willing to understand it as a challenge to set out and let ourselves be educated, knowing that at times we will be overpowered by not knowing.

Lionel Fogarty’s most recent (2005) publication is Minyung Woolah Binnung — What Saying Says. Southport, QLD: Keeaira Press, 2004. http://www.kpress.com.au/

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