filiations and affiliations

Question 1

If we’re looking at the question of filiations in novel like Carpentaria, and any Australian novel for that matter, it becomes a complex problem for historical reasons (here, the Stolen Generations).

Answer 1

It is no exaggeration to talk about attempts to sever these Aboriginal filial links by successive Australian governments. Even though Alexis Wright does not overtly reference the Stolen Generations, it cannot not be there in the background.

Question 2

In the face of that history, what Alexis Wright is doing is asserting very strong filiations and affiliations that have managed to prevail notwithstanding the historical violence.

Answer 2

They are both a form of resistance and a celebration. At the same time, this is not a sugarcoated expression of Aboriginality; not idealistic, but complex. The relationship between Norm and Will give a clear sense of that complexity in filiation.

Question 3

Filiation

Answer 3

concerned with family ties, stemming from the latin. It is necessarily
linked to lineage, ascendency, in some ways to patriarchy. Filiation also means the relation of one thing to another from which it is derived. It broadens the definition to englobe the ways cultural relations are marked by filiation.

Question 4

Affiliation

Answer 4

moves us beyond family, community and ancestral ties to the larger question of association through forms of fellowship.

Question 5

no real division between the filiative and the affiliative in Aboriginal culture, except

Answer 5

filiation happens despite oneself, while affiliation implies a sense of agency.

Question 6

It is also important to not focus our reading on our European definition of these terms

Answer 6

Filiation in this Aboriginal Australian context is partially linked to human relationships but it’s also deeply connected to the land, to water, to memory and to history

Question 7

Family ties and tensions

Question 8

The Phantom family

Answer 8

at the heart of Carpentaria even though the novel resists the notion of centrality of certain characters.

The Phantoms frame the novel, from the first chapter to the last.

The fractured relationships in this family make sure that there is no idealisation of filiative links within Aboriginal culture. Number 1 house, the family house, is already literally and metaphorically constructed upon the myth of the rainbow serpent: it’s literally on the space the rainbow serpent is buried, and it’s also haunted (p16). It seems to confer a kind of peculiar status upon it. It seems to jar with the name Normal even as it resonates with the surname Phantom.

Question 9

Conflict is embedded in Norm’s and Will’s names (wilfulness and spectrality).

Answer 9

Colonial friction playing out in their relationship: Norm “an old tribal man”, incensed by Joseph Midnight and his crew, but Norm doesn’t wish to militate against the mine despite being against it.

Question 10

Norm fills his days enjoying his long-standing affection for Country. p15 “He loved the sound of the clear waters running through petrified forests […] lining the river.”

Answer 10

Tension on the one hand with stasis (petrified forests) and movement (running through) melded together in a harmonious image of the land. Ancientness of Aboriginal culture. “He believed the world would look after itself against the odds because it always did.” p222

Question 11

Norm is not a militant figure: he represents the wisdom of the ages. Will, on the other hand, actively strives to counter the mine. One of the reasons for the conflict between him and his father is that he doesn’t understand his
father’s apparent disinterest in all this. “Norm had inherited his father’s memory of the sea” but Will is presented from the beginning as not having inherited much from his father. Norm is very static, reflective; Will enters the narrative running on p27.

Answer 11

He appears as the polar opposite of his poised father. The adverb quickly is immediately associated with him, closely followed by the expression “as fast as his legs would carry him”, and other words of precipitation and urgency. Disdain and hatred that Norm nourishes towards Midnight are undermined in the passage at study today.

Question 12

Will is also presented as in rupture with the filial tradition Norm is so attached to; Will is worried about his inability to feel these affiliative links: p194

Answer 12

“Could it be that he was different?” Will sees himself as in rupture with familial and ancestral traditions; it is a burden to him.

Question 13

Weight of inheritence.

Answer 13

Rather than focus on native titles and Indigenous infighting which paralyses Norm, Will is involved in contesting and combatting a much more nefarious enemy: the mine. p352

Question 14

attempts at sabotaging the mine.

Answer 14

“A new war on their country, this was a war that could not be fought on Norm Phantom’s and old Joseph Midnight’s terms… it was a war for money.” p363

Question 15

Coloniality of power goes well beyond the borders of Australia.

Answer 15

This new war is configured on different terms because it is international: the mine is American. Independence does not mean freedom from coloniality. Will who is much more urgently engaged against this international polluter (p371) “Mining changed the way people had to think about looking after themselves.”

Question 16

The ways in which Will feels called to oppose the mine is not compatible with the way Aboriginal elders think about time.

Answer 16

“His time, stretched over the millennia.” (p371) Wright uses the
relationship between norm and Will to present two different ways to protest; sources of friction, nevertheless sense of communion by the end of the book.

Question 17

Country and community

Answer 17

Affiliation dating back to time immemorial. All three of Will Phantom’s Indigenous mentors (he has four mentors: his father, Joseph Midnight, Mozzie Fishman and Elias Smith) present a celebration
of their connection to time immemorial: inherited knowledges through affiliation.

-p417 Mozzie “the many fathers’ fathers before him” several gens in one go, or

-p358 Joseph Midnight “speaking to his dead relatives”. Numerous moments where we have temporal compressions and expansions.

-p442 time is simultaneously compressed and expended for Will. This simultaneous expansion and compression of time operating in the Aboriginal communities is juxtaposed to the fixed reality of settler colonialism.
-p56 “on the scale of things, their history was just a half-flick of the switch of truth—simply a memory no greater than two lifespans.”

Question 18

Colossal number of uses of “navigation” noun and verb.

Answer 18

Will manages to navigate his way thanks to his four mentors, all of who impart different knowledges to him. They’re all mentioned in one
paragraph

p410 (“Will perfectly understood…”)

Notwithstanding the tensions among the mentors, their collective wisdom which is inextricably linked to Country is channeled into Will and this is what enables him to escape and ultimately survive. Even when he is ostensibly “alone” (p376)

he is in fact surrounded by past voice and also “guardian spirit of the place” (p377).

His filiation with Norm and his ancestral ties to the river people is asserted very strongly at the end of the novel:

p385 “it was high tide; Will knew how the tides worked simply by looking at the movement of the tree […] He felt its rhythms.”

Question 19

Move from learned knowledge to embodied knowledge.

Answer 19

moment of “Aboriginal realism” when Will is sequestred in the mine and visited by Norm’s thoughts, which are granted an agency of their own. p386 The memories of his father were not done with his thoughts: Norm appears in a spectral form but the memories of the knowledge he has passed on are present.

Question 20

Filiation transcends the tensions among various Indigenous groups, it is greater than the universe.

Answer 20

It cannot be fully understood following Western understandings of filiation. p493

1. Will has access to an apparently boundless knowledge thanks to his connection to Country.
2. Aboriginals looking towards Country, cosmos, outward looking at all times; Uptown “a community closing in on itself” p85
3. Desperance rejects any politicians from the South etc. Lot of the names
   are paradigmatic for their behaviours. They don’t leave any room for other forms of affiliation, programmed through their names to behave a certain way.
4. Any affiliation that there is is based oncolonial supremacist discourses. “They were the mainstream and if anyone thought different, they
   must be the ones …” pp85-86 names of different characters from Uptown; Pedigree, Damage, Clone, Torrent, Easy, Bruiser… these names suggest white supremacist sentiment and a mockery of it by choosing
   these names.

Question 21

Literary affiliations

Answer 21

Part of Alexis Wright’s agenda in this novel which took her 2 years to write, is a search for an adequate expression of the sovereignty of Aboriginal Australians.

Question 22

Martin Renes reads Carpentaria as a search for “an original and authentic Indigenous voice in literature.”

Answer 22

In some ways, authenticity is a problem here; what is authentic and who defines it? Marked by storeytelling traditions that Wright grew up with, and the orality that is so prevalent still today in Aboriginal communities; this is why the novel toys so much with temporality.

Question 23

Many different ways of being a country, and given the massive scope of the novel, the epic genre might be the best fit for it. Wright has commented on the fact that “the everyday Indigenous story world is epic.”

Answer 23

Each story combines the merits of the oral tradition going way back to ancestral laws and customs with contemporary events

Question 24

We know the European epic was traditionally was a long narrative poem in an elevated style and was usually about the heroic achievement of someone. Carpentaria interacts with these different narrative genres and uses them to celebrate Indigenous stories. If Norm Phantom is the main
heroic figure, the tension with Will diminishes that and Norm is like a semi divine character with the agency he wields;

Answer 24

Will attributes the final cyclone to his father.

Question 25

To substantiate the idea that we can use epic to think about Carpentaria, certain parts of the novel contain epic statements:

Answer 25

p374 “All moments in time are the mysterious and powerful companions of fate…” (The oldest epic is actually the Mahabharata, 200,000 verses long, in the 3rd century BC, in Sanskrit)

Norm is like an Odysseus figure, lost at sea, tempted by the creatures resembling sirens in some way;

Will is also a kind of Ulysses lost at sea at the end of the novel and we don’t know if he’ll get back or not;

Hope is not a Penelope character waiting for him at home, but instead she goes out to find him.

These literary affiliations are phantomatic and it’s not really that we can map the Illiad or the Odyssey on Carpentaria; certain motifs might resemble each other. Motif of homecoming.

No need to go too far with the epic, Wright might not be interested in the establishment of these affiliations.

Question 26

The Bible is obviously present in the story:

Answer 26

origin story features a serpent. Missionary contribution to colonisation. Undue importance to the Bible might lead to neglect of Aboriginal frame of reference / Downplaying of the Bible is another form of injustice because the refs have become part and parcel of the interactions Aboriginal Australians have been forced into.

Mozzie is a bastardised version of Moses and is literally a nomadic figure leading a group of people.

Fishman part of his name also because Jesus was a fisherman

Question 27

Fairytales

Answer 27

“once upon a time” and then backtrack from that. Aspatial and atemporal qualities of fairytales were what settlers used to colonise (notion of terra nullius)

Question 28

Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Answer 28

prototype of the colonial novel with all the tropes of what we come to
expect of colonial narratives of the 19th century: discovery of this “new world”, domination of the environment, submission of the native population; notion of the regenerative power of exposure to a pristine virginal world, starting over again.

Will on desert island of trash from capitalism which then rots from underneath him (metaphor for capitalism still)

Question 29

Few refs of The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Answer 29

see p354 rendering oneself invisible as a strategy of resistance. No photographs of Will yet he exists and it empowers him to sabotage the mine and escape from it.