by Stan Grant
Myself: I am black – uniquely and deeply black. But my blackness cannot be separated from that part of me that is white; that is my gaze – a world beyond certainty and closer to freedom.
THE AUSTRALIAN VOICE
What is the ‘Australian voice’? It’s an odd question. I am not sure what an Australian is let alone what is its voice. For much of my life, an Australian identity has sat somewhere out of reach. I was something else, something we call Indigenous. Even that word itself is a trap, an identity constructed by someone else, within which I am meant to find myself. There have been other words: Aborigines, Aboriginals, Abos . . . and worse, much worse, that don’t warrant repeating.
Sometimes, even though we share a language, we can completely misunderstand each other. For Aboriginal people, language has become a feature of loss. It was part of our invisibility; how who we were was extinguished. The names the first people of this land gave to their country remain largely unknown to most Australians; lost even to some Indigenous people. This is living with terra nullius: empty land. Where are the people?
Perhaps this is the Australian voice; the voice of terra nullius, the voice of empty spaces. Indigenous people know that voice . . . it was the voice of the frontier, the voices of settlers. Listen to them, taken from the pages of our history books, from the newspapers of nineteenth-century Australia.
Is there room for both of us here? No. Then the sooner the weaker is wiped out the better as we may save some valuable lives in the process.
Any doubt, therefore, as to the lawfulness of our assuming the possession of this island, must arise from the opinion that it was the property of it original inhabitants. Such opinion, however, would be incorrect; for the very notion of property, as applicable to territorial possession did not exist among them.
We know the Australian voice; it was written into the constitution:
In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.
Yes, the Australian voice we heard was the voice of exclusion. It was also the voices of doom: the prophets of extinction. Voices, like our second prime minister Alfred Deakin.
When we became a nation, the Australian voice, as Deakin heard it, was only ever imagined as the voice of whiteness.
A white Australia does not by any means mean only the preservation of the complexion of the people of this country. It means the multiplying of their homes, so that we may be able to occupy, use and defend every part of our continent; it means the maintenance of the conditions of life fit for white men and white women.
Of course we have changed, haven’t we? Or is this the Australian voice?
The push for globalisation, economic rationalism, free trade and ethnic diversity has seen our country’s decline. This is due to the foreign takeover of our land . . . Australia had a national identity before federation and it had nothing to do with diversity . . . If you are not prepared to become Australian, respect our culture and way of life then I suggest you go back to where you came from.
Yes, Pauline Hanson speaks for a minority, we keep telling ourselves that. But what, then, were all those senators doing lining up to hug her after her parliamentary speech?
Our constitution has changed. The 1967 referendum meant Aboriginal people were finally counted, finally included in the census. But still we are seen as a people apart, Australians but different.
I am reminded of the words of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, to the world considered Polish, but in fact Lithuanian. ‘I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian,’ he wrote. Perhaps this is my fate, am I an Australian to whom it was not given to be an Australian? Milosz lived within the sliding doors of identity, born and raised Catholic in rural Lithuania. He spoke Polish, Russian, English and French, yet not a word of Lithuanian. Later in life, he hired a Lithuanian language coach. Language, he said, ‘is the only homeland’.
My father says the same thing; he says language tells us not just who we are but where we are. He is a wise man; it is wisdom that comes from the certainty of being. He is a Wiradjuri man, born and raised on his country, the country on which he lives still. I have never known my father to have a crisis of identity. To him, being Wiradjuri is as natural as breathing. My father has language that speaks to his sense of place. The birds, the rocks, the trees, the hills and the waters have names that echo through millennia. To hear these words fall from his tongue is to know who he is and where he is.
‘Balladhu Wiradjuri gibir. Dyirramadilinya badhu Wiradjuri: I am a Wiradjuri man – proudly Wiradjuri.’
My father can speak those words with unflinching belief. There is no dissonance between word and man and place. In a country of many tongues that speak of other lands, who can say this? I am who I am and I am from here. It is a certainty I don’t quite possess; that I don’t seek to possess. My life has been lived in the worlds in between. If language tells us not who we are but where we are, then who am I? Where am I, when my language is English? I have made my life, my career, out of a love of the English language. I have had a lifelong passion for words and books. I love the rhythm and the musical quality of a beautifully constructed sentence. This is the language of Shakespeare. Who could not find the divine in the bard’s sonnets?
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
This is the language that set loose the imagination of Bob Dylan. It is the language of the rock music rebellion that I so identified with: Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Jam and The Smiths. It is the language of the great writers who have shaped my life and ideas.
My travels have opened up a world of languages and the people who speak them. My closest friend overseas was an Iranian cameraman steeped in Persian poetry. My Pakistani friends introduced me to the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I had no need of interpretation to feel the power of his words. I have the same feeling listening to the Tuareg rock band Tinariwen.
Other languages have words that speak with a force that eludes their English equivalent. The Arabic word for justice – adl – means to put things in order, to return to their rightful place. That has always felt more profound to me than our Western ideas of fairness, equity or objectivity. I love how dissident Chinese, their thoughts and words monitored and censored by the Communist Party, play with language and exploit ambiguous meaning. When I lived in Beijing, I became a fan of the underground rock band Carsick Cars, who had a song called Zhong Nan Hai – at once the name of the official residence and headquarters of the party leadership and a brand of cigarettes.
Being exposed to new languages, meeting different people, understanding how they see and express their world and the world around them has enriched me. These friendships have made me a better person. I can speak some Chinese, some Arabic and some French. I will spend my lifetime struggling and failing to master English. But in truth, Wiradjuri – the language of my father – was never a big part of my life. As a boy it wasn’t spoken, the old people kept their silence. We fashioned a patois – a creole mix of Wiradjuri and English. We had words for white people and police and food and animals; it was a language apart, it belonged to us, likely incomprehensible to others. But it wasn’t Wiradjuri. It was a language like us – people clinging to often shattered traditions, part of an old world and not yet finding a place in the new. Yes, language tells us not just who we are but where we are.
This Australia had supplanted us. Our languages fell silent as surely as our people were forced from our lands and herded onto reserves and missions, our lives controlled. My father’s grandfather was arrested and locked up after police overheard him speaking Wiradjuri to his grandson in the streets of his hometown. Now my father has kept faith with his grandfather. The old man’s language
is spoken again. My father is teaching Wiradjuri to a new generation.
To some Indigenous people recovering language is like recovering self. They see it not just as reasserting their blackness but rejecting whiteness. Some reclaim or create ‘traditional’ names, reaching back to an ancestral past that to them, feels more authentic than the names of the colonisers they were born with. Here is the struggle for identity of a people whose identities have been defined – indeed legislated – by others, with often devastating personal cost. Just who is and what is Aboriginal remains contested. Language and names are markers of identity. This is how we introduce ourselves to the world; how we explain ourselves to each other. I admire this conscious effort to keep themselves and their people alive in the world, but I am wary too. I am who I am and I am born of a country whose history is what it is. My struggle is to live free, to determine my identity unconstrained by the expectations or definitions of others, white or black.
Reviving Indigenous languages is in itself a response to a history of oppression and denial. It can be liberating and assertive, but like all identity it is a construction. Identity – to me – is not a singular thing. My life’s journey has added new layers to who I am. Inspired by my father and to honour his legacy and the traditions of our people I have learned more of the Wiradjuri language. I am proud when I see my children, raised in China and the Middle East as much as Australia, finding pride in being Wiradjuri.
Sometimes we must free ourselves from language as surely as we must free ourselves of our families, our countries. The Chinese-American writer, Yiyun Li, writes in English to forget Chinese. She says, ‘the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting and irreplaceable, yet it can also demand more than one is willing to give, or more than one is capable of giving’. Chinese language she equates with oppression and the heavy hand of the state; freedom and liberation come with renouncing the language and the Communist Party. The absoluteness of her abandonment of Chinese, she says, is ‘a kind of suicide’.
Yiyun Li says, ‘language is capable of sinking a mind. One’s thoughts are slavishly bound to language.’ This may explain why some Aboriginal people reclaim their ancestral languages; it represents more than just revival: it is a form of survival. Yet English is my first language – in truth my only language. To learn Wiradjuri is like learning Chinese, or French or Italian; I can speak the words but never truly hold the thoughts. That may be my loss, but in English I find the words to describe myself.
THE VOODOO OF RACE
Like millions of us, in 2018 I watched the royal wedding; our family put aside the usual cynicism and made a night of it. My sister-in-law was visiting from Hawaii, she came over to our house with my mother-in-law and her partner. There we were, me an Indigenous Australian with my non-Indigenous wife; her sister whose late husband was an Indigenous Hawaiian and who is now married to a Filipino; their mother whose partner of 30 years is a New Zealand Maori. A modern multi-ethnic mixed family watching a so-called mixed – half-black–half-white – American actress, Meghan Markle, marry a British ‘blue blood’ prince.
The scene revealed how in so many ways the whole concept of race is flawed, yet for that moment it seemed the world was fixated on it. The royal wedding commentary returned to it time and again, as the bride was referred to as ‘mixed race’ or ‘biracial’. One British commentator, part of the ABC’s coverage, even wondered ridiculously about the future children of Meghan and Harry who, in her words, could be ‘all sorts of colours’.
Race is a strange subject. Race is a lie. I know that now. In fact it is worse than a lie. It is voodoo, it is witchcraft. Race owes as much to science as the evil eye. Yet, just like witchcraft, we believe it. We give race its power. The crops in the field failed, why? Because Annie Smith is a witch, I saw her dancing at midnight around a fire, yelling obscene incantations. And so the local villagers turn on her. They ostracise her. Her family is banished. Her house burned to the ground. Is medieval fantasy any different from the idea that someone can be lynched, hung from a tree, set alight because that person is what is deemed to be black? Was that person lynched because of his colour? Consider this: a young black girl is ordered out of a swimming pool because the other children have complained. Is it because of her colour? No, it is because of what people believed about her colour.
Somewhere in human history, we gave colour power. There was something in the hue of skin, the kink of hair, the width of a nose or the prominence of a brow ridge that we believed determined a person’s character. Colour was immutable. Colour was permanent. In America one drop was all it took, one drop of blood, one black ancestor in a tangled family tree, and forever that person was black. A white mother could give birth to a black child, but was it conceivable that a black mother would give birth to a white child? Never. Black was what white wasn’t; it was the anti-white; it was opposite. It was the dark side. There it is in our language: blackmail, blacken a name, blackguard, the black sheep of the family. Why is it the white knight who comes to the damsel’s rescue?
Race crept in under the cover of science. It held sway for hundreds of years, from the 1600s to the mid-twentieth century, enough time to lodge itself deep into our consciousness. Just spend a moment searching references to science and racism, immediately there are images of skulls, an evolutionary chart supposedly tracking the progress of man from dark to light. Phrenology was the science of measuring skulls, feeling for bumps, from which intelligence supposedly could be deduced.
Who could argue with race, didn’t it come from the Bible? Blackness was the curse of Canaan. Canaan was the son of Ham, condemned by his father Noah. Like so many biblical stories it is open to interpretation, but Ham was said to have witnessed Noah drunk and naked, some religious scholars believe there was a sexual transgression. Canaan and his descendants would pay the price, forever to be the ‘servant of servants’. It was seized on to justify slavery and racism.
Here is how race begins, in fear and superstition: pseudoscience and distorted readings of the Bible. Race is a hydra, its many heads giving it different forms. I am something that is considered black in Australia, yet in other parts of the world I would be seen as white. History, time, place, these are the things that shape our ideas of race. Race exists in the eye of the beholder; just like magic what we believe we see. Black can be whatever we want it to be, Jews have been ‘black’; Irish, Greeks, Italians have been ‘black’. Funny thing, the more familiar we become – the closer we get to white – the less black we are. I have lost count of the number of times someone has said to me that I am not really black!
Race as an idea gained power in what we call the Enlightenment, the seventeenth-century philosophical revolution of thought that sought to liberate us from superstition, to demolish hierarchy, to elevate reason and bind us to a universal humanity where the individual was freed from the bonds of tribe. As Immanuel Kant wrote, ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-imposed nonage.’ Enlightenment was freedom; if it had a motto it was ‘dare to know’.
Yet the age of reason was also the age of discovery; race became a justification for colonisation. Rousseau spoke of the rights of man, but pseudo-science – the belief that there was a genetic hierarchy of colour – spoke of the exception of blackness. Together these two ideas animated the world. As Patrick Wolfe says, ‘Race reconciled the great taxonomies of natural science with the political rhetoric of the rights of man.’ We divided ourselves by race, we enslaved people by race; we dispossessed people by race; race defined power: the more white, the more powerful. As Wolfe, writes, race was applied ‘with the fixity of a curse’.
The truth is we belong to one human family, and advances in the study of DNA show we all draw our heritage from different parts of the globe. In this way, we are all ‘mixed’. As geneticist David Reich, says in his recent book Who We Are and How We Got Here, ‘the genome revolution – turbo charged by ancient DNA – has revealed that human populations are related to each other in ways that no one e
xpected.’ Humans have followed the same winding path out of Africa, the fossil evidence and now the genetic research connects us to our ‘ancestral Eve’.
Historian Barbara Fields and her sister, sociologist Karen Fields have dissected this thing we call race in their book, Racecraft. The Fields sisters, who are what we would classify as African-American, say race deflects attention from racism. Disguised as race, they say, racism becomes something African Americans are, rather than something racists do. Race is superstition, it belongs to the same family as witchcraft, but racism, they say, ‘belongs to the same family as murder and genocide’.
The Fields sisters ask us to look beyond race; to untangle ourselves from its pernicious twisted logic; to abandon the language of race. This is easier said than done. It extends beyond race. Gender, sexuality, class, politics: all of it seeks to define us and separate us. Ideas of ‘race’ have brought out the worst of humanity. They have inspired – and continue to inspire – genocide, holocaust, war, dispossession, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, lynchings, segregation, mass incarceration.
Personally and individually ‘race’ ties us in knots. Meghan Markle’s mother is considered black and her father white. Until very recently, America’s ‘one drop’ rule – one drop of ‘black blood’ – made Meghan too, black. The American census now allows people to self-identify, in ever more convoluted and exotic abstractions and hyphens. The golfer Tiger Woods has gone to ludicrous linguistic lengths to describe himself, inventing his own category ‘Cablinasian’ to reflect his Caucasian, Black, Indian, Asian roots. Meghan Markle, in an op-ed for Elle magazine, wrote of how she has embraced ‘the gray area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence’.
