territories Flashcards
for Stuart Elden, the creation of territory is
an “already a violent attack of exclusion and inclusion. Maintaining it requires constant vigilance and the mobilisation of threat and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression.”
The organisation and maintaining of territorial limits as an enterprise fraught with violence is obvious in the colonial context
Colonisation involves transgression of certain parts of land, the boundary-ing of those lands once usurped by the settlers, deciding who gets to live within these boundaries or not. Ever since European colonisation began in 1492, borders have been drawn and redrawn, and very often the way in which this has been done has not factored in linguistic, cultural and historical affinities. If we look at a map of Africa, all we see are straight lines cutting right through ethnolinguistic communities. Current Australia contains these same straight lines that mean nothing to Aboriginal Australians
Alexis Wright’s novel signals its attention to territory in its very title.
Carpentaria indicates to us something to the geographical area which will be the focus of this novel. Most of the novel in fact revolves around the occupation of or the passage through territories, whether this is carried out by the Uptown residents, by various Indigenous groups or even by the mine workers. We also need to factor in Native title and the claiming of land. It’s worth pointing out that the dictionary reminds us that territory etymologically stems from the Latin word terra, meaning the Earth.
If we are to consider the term, terra, root of territory at all, we need to factor in the way in which Country is represented in Carpentaria.
How does Wright write about Country? How does she manage to intertwine and juxtapose the very divergent Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of Country? How does she negotiate the territories of
fiction?
Mapping territories
It’s impossible to consider territories or space in this novel without paying attention to time. In Indigenous thinking, space and time are absolutely intertwined.
Mapping is very often colonialist in its origins: you map a place out partially so that you could stake a claim to that mapped out land, appropriate it. In many ways, the whole colonial endeavour is what exactly this
At the same time, the novel foregrounds lots of different forms of mapping, including Indigenous forms through the dream tracks.
Mapping in the Indigenous sense has got nothing to do with owning the land, but everything to do with locating yourself in relation to the
land
It is fully related to question of memory, history, identity, language… In order to make sense of this question of mapping, we will first look at how the novel seems to negotiate this spectrum that separates the cosmic from the microscopic; we will then move on to the question of the local and the national/international. The cosmic and the local combine in Desperance
The cosmic
The novel opens with this very detailed description of territory in the gulf of
Carpentaria, which immediately combines the mythological and the material aspects of land. p.2 “sunken valleys, rivers, planes,” and colours “yellow, ocean blue”. The natural formation of land over time is inextricably linked to the origin story and is presented as a dynamic process. The movement of the serpent is emphasised with prepositions: past, over, through, under. Powerful vitality “thunder of tunnels,” “swirling tracks”. All this culminates to p.2 “this is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground.” This is presented as an incontestable truth.
The appearance of incontestable truth is compounded by the following sentence, “they say”, illustrating how that truth is circulated and passed on. This leads up to “its being is porous, it permeates everything … attached to the river people like skin” (p2)
From the outset Wright makes clear to what extent this creation story, Country and people are all connected in the present and to the past since time immemorial. Lexical emphasis on the porousness, reinforcing the organic link and giving a strong haptic dimension to this link.
Wright chooses to open the novel with this creation story central to Indigenous beliefs, and yet through this opening chapter we move from the creation of the gulf and all its agency attributed to the land, the serpent (check out p3 for non-human agency), to the specificity of “a time intended to serve as a port” except it loses all its waters and now redundantly subsists with “more or less nothing to do”.
the spiritual poverty of Uptown
From cosmic to local, and it’s only at the end of page 3 when the narrator shifts from the cosmological perspective to a settler colonial one. It’s only after the introduction of the settler colonial perspective that the name of the town is given, Desperance, in which we mostly hear desperate.
non-human agency
it’s not just personification, but a reflection of Indigenous ontologies
Contrast between settler colonial boundary making and Indigenous conceptions of land.
We see this very quickly on page 4: “The descendants of the pioneer families who claimed ownership of the town said the Aboriginal was not really part of the town at all.
The Aboriginal was dumped there by the pastoralists… the lot of them.”
Several degrees of irony are packed in this quote.
The use of the word “claim” already indicates a power struggle. A claim is only ever rhetorical. It alludes to a certain tension over territory.
The italicised “the Aboriginal wasn’t part of the town at all” carries the narrator’s distance from Uptown attitudes and serves the exclusionary
discourses which have such currency in settler colonial society.
The blame is laid elsewhere; the reason for the Aboriginal presence in Desperance is because of the “pastoralists”. This displacement of blame allows the Uptown residents not to face up to their own exclusionary behaviours
The Aboriginal was dumped there by the pastoralists… the lot of them.”
There is no place in settler colonial viewpoint for Indigenous agencies.
When the Aboriginal communities are referred to, it is with passive forms. The verb “dumped” is evocative of the vocabulary of waste. When Indigenous voices are the focaliser, Uptown are presented as “sequestrators” (p50) and Norm is described as “the rightful traditional owner” (p50).
