After a business supper at the Rose Hotel with Paddy, chaperoned by the mother of Quent – oh and the supper was superb.  The Rose is, perhaps the finest hotel in the southern hemisphere.  After the supper, (we have faint hope it will not be the last,) C and Q charged a taxi with delivery to the Tiger Terminal, T4 at Melbourne’s noted international gateway, Tullamarine Airport.

Let Quentin take up the narrative.

Well, yes Cec, the trip has started auspiciously, has it not?  The Taxi Driver – a card, in fact a son of Sicily, and paid up mafioso, (who will not, hopefully, read this blog.) Yet we have nothing but praise for his total professionalism, his integrity, his tight zipped mouth.  With a small encouragement he told us of all his passengers in his twenty seven year driving history, accompanied by glossy photographs, and embellished with charm and wit, the sort only found in country born swarthy gentlemen.  He also told us of his sexual conquests, embellished with gutteral utterances, stiff arm movements and a slight shifting in his seat.

“Tiger” he enunciated when we directed him to T4.  “Hmm, I wont be seeing you again.” he said as a matter of fact.  He dumped us on the second try at what seemed like a disused freight shed, modelled on a 19th C rail depot.  This in fact was not T4, but a shed, under construction as the ‘New T4’, to be opened in ‘Autumn, 2012’ according to the signage.

We walked the quarter mile along narrow concrete pavement past the offering of luggage trolleys for hire – at some typically Melbourne gouging price.  (The lockers at the NT Museum and Gallery cost $2, totally refundable on return of the key.)  Into the sparse temporary terminal, impoverished in the extreme.

The staff were friendly, helpful, cheerful.  They were great.

The security was perfunctory, not in the least officious.  Maybe because if our fellow Tiger travellers were to be highjacked, or lost in some way, no-one would really care to much.

In some ways I feel like I’m in a Cormac McCarthy novel.  There’s this sense of resignation, not quite despair, but certainly one of defeat.   Once through security the terminal was filthy.  Nothing in Vietnam, Indonesia, Glasgow, Peru, or North America has prepared me for this.  The floor was in many ways cleaner than the tables.  None of the food outlets was open, and the ‘convenient’ food and drink slot machines mirrored the air of defeat.  I imagine the packets of crisps sitting assiduously in their rows praying not to be picked.  There is safety, if not privacy, in remaining in the glass fronted closet.  Cleaner in there too.

The generally young passengers are lined up waiting boarding.  They have a surfeit of flesh, tattoos and dyed hair, often on just one side of their heads.  (Take your pick.)

Personal space is observed to a greater extent than I’ve experienced elsewhere in air travel.   As if each and every passenger was not only a stranger, but carried something dire and deadly contagious.

So here we are, Cecil and I, on the flight to Perth.  Flying Tigerair.  Despite the 40 minute delay the staff, the stewards have been friendly and helpful.  The plane is clean and seems sound.  We have growing faith that Tiger will get us back to Melbourne at the end of the week and perhaps we will yet see another supper at the Rose.

Puzzled
By Mr Lionel Fogarty

Priced on lives
Once dressed in peace
Ripped justice apart
Discovering yourself that dressing up for the battle
cons promises
brings nothing
Puzzled – when crippling roos look to jump
Confused when gifted blacks – fall
Arms out above, raised
approaches none
Camps removed and moved
Nigger haters told to shut up
Nigger lovers told to shut up
Blacks so confused
Now we are forced into dumps
where nation upon nation
Turn to face each other
Puzzled
But struggle will bring life
There will be no puzzle.

To find out more of Lionel Fogarty look at “Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide.” from the past two days – here and here, and Lionel’s own take on his writing here

NEXT WEEK  our Poetry Editor Ira Maine returns from his sojourn in the antipodes refreshed in mind and body.  The filth expunged from every pore.

Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide. (CONTINUED)

If Lionel Fogarty rejects European models in his poetry, we may ask what models does he utilise?  We know that English poetics touched him less than Afro-American songs, less than incidents of his life, in his Aboriginality, in Aboriginal history an in the deep and abiding white oppression which necessitated a referendum to bring Aboriginal people into the human race.

Lionel’s poems are not derived from books, but from life as lived in Australia and the world.  His response to life creates not only his models but his words.  Aboriginal writers without exception are committed writes.  They are in no sense ‘closet’ writers of the Kafka ilk who see the world from the confines of a garret.  The garret of Aborigines was provided by the English and once freed from it, they have no desire to isolate themselves from kith and kin.  Lionel Fogarty was born in the garret of Cherbourg and what this means may be gleaned from a reading of the Queensland Acts governing Aborigines and also the rules and regulations of these so-called settlements.  He was born under the heel of the oppressor and this has affected his view of the world as well as his poetry.

Everyone who has heard Lionel speak has found it a deeply moving experience.  He is perhaps the best Aboriginal speaker I have heard, and it was of little wonder that in his first   speaking before an audience, he came through.

Lionel’s peotry has a sweep of style and a breadth of content which no other poet in Australia can match.  His style is all his own and he sometimes writes in a simple style akin to the poems of Jack Davis and Kath Walker.  These poems are open in meaning and sentiment to all, but especially in his later poetry, he excels as a guerrilla poet wielding the language of the invader in an urge to destroy that imposition and recreate a new language freed of restrictions and erupting a multi-meaning of ambiguity.  This hints at the many possibilities of meaning in a feeling language freed from the intellectual dreariness of academic verse.  In fact his use of language reminds us of the Indian theory of Rasa rather than the dried out theories of the head people who demolish poetry in their quest for intellectual understanding and not heart understanding.

When we read verses of Lionel’s we appear to be in the presence of an anti-language which may appear meaningless if we seek for intellectual understanding, and fail to understand that we are confronted by groups of feeling-images rooted deep within the Aboriginal psyche and experience.  And we may well be in the presence of an anti-poetry, a turning away of all that the critics hold dear, and in which even the rhythms are flattened out, sometimes changed abruptly, oven discarded so that no sweet victory is held out to entice the reader who must grasp an entirety of feeling structure beyond dictionary meaning.

Lionel’s poems are exceedingly complex and far from those nineteenth-century models said to be favoured by other Aboriginal poets.  Lionel is different in that he is attempting to push meaning and at least the structure of the English language towards and absolute end and liberate his language from that cultural imperialism of the spirit imposed on him at Cherbourg.  He is aware the the English language is which he writes is not really his own, but a thing apart from him, but the feeling is his, as are the Aboriginal words scattered throughout his texts which reveal that here is no Gubba writing, but a Murri able to use the language of the oppressor as a weapon captured from the enemy.  He is Fanon’s native, but he has not been assimilated into the language of the coloniser.  He has captured it in a guerrilla action and made it over into a free one of the Aboriginal spirit.

by Mudrooroo.
This is the second part of a piece written by Mudrooroo as introduction to the Lionel Fogarty anthology New and Selected Poems Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera  published in 1995 by Hyland House, Melbourne.

Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide.

‘Every colonised people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created the the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation…..’ Franz Fanon

What happened to the Aboriginal languages of Australia?  The English invader sought to destroy them utterly.  The native was to be forced into the state of English civilisation, and this meant the death and destruction of Aboriginal language and culture.  In the sttled areas there was imposted a deliberate policy of language genocide, and in a few decades Aboriginal languages became broken collections of words falling haplessly into English language structures of varying degrees of worth – from the invader’s viewpoint!  This forced adoption of a foreign language was in itself judged from the view of European tradition riddled with class and racial prejudice.  Kriol and Pidgin became objects of scholarly study and Aboriginal writers in English were criticised on their use of English and Aboriginal remnant words.  What would be the Aboriginal response to this cultural and genocidal imperialism, and who would make this response?

Lionel Fogarty refuses to surrender to the critical norms forced upon poets in Australia.  He writes in a manner which is the response of anb Aboriginal songman against the genocide inflicted on his language and the tyranny imposed on him by a foreign language.  It is impossible to read Lionel without realising that he is Black; it is impossible to read him and not realise the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, and it is impossible to read him and not realise that here is a poet using the English language in a unique and new way.  He wields a black pen, and writes a language reflecting the mixture the Aboriginal cultures have become in such concentration camps as Cherbourg, where the invader language was forced on people.  He uses that language in an effort to tear down the language structures that have been imposed on him and his people.

I would like to stress that Lionel does not rely on European models for his poetry, and that it is his genius which shapes his verse.  He was born a victim in a world in which he and his people had no say.  In Franz Fanon’s sense he (and his people) was the native Other contrasted with the coloniser subject which sought to destroy the blackness within him, to render him as object into a subject reflecting the coloniser.  In the coloniser’s world the only subject to aspire to be was that of the coloniser, and the native object was seen as a coming-to-be subject fashioned on the British model.  Generations of Cherbourg managers tried to force his people, fashioning white masks for their black skins.  They tried to force Lionel to don such a mask and the only result was the coming-to-be of Lionel Fogarty the poet whose genius born from the struggle gave birth to a new style, or system, of poetry drawing from a myriad of influences to forge an essential quintessence of Aboriginality. Here was no ersatz Bourgeois black in white face, but an Aboriginal man, a poet guerrilla using the language of the invader in an effort to smash open its shell and spill it open for poetic expression.

Lionel’s poetry is moral to an extreme and brooks no opposition.  It may be argued that victims of oppression have this extreme morality because they know what it is like to be on the receiving end of immorality, or an amorality masquerading as altruism.

This is the first part of a piece written by Mudrooroo as introduction to the Lionel Fogarty anthology New and Selected Poems Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera  published in 1995 by Hyland House, Melbourne.  The second part will appear tomorrow.