Speaking out

CARPENTARIA By Alexis Wright, Giramondo, $29.95

It would be difficult to characterize Carpentaria as either a short or quiet or an easy read. Unsettlement can be very invigorating, but it takes a bit of getting-used-to. This is Alexis Wright’s second novel. Perhaps in good measure because of its unabashed topsy-turvying of grammar and syntax, it travelled to and from several publishers in Australia before Giramondo would take it on in 2006. The challenge of the novel is clear —in order to access the different reality that is life of the dispossessed aboriginal in the Gulf of Carpentaria, one needs to learn a different language. To me, it is an empowering challenge.

The novel opens with the implosive (and even nervous) energy of the ancestral serpent denting-bending-creating the river and the land on which the story of the humans is to be set. It breathlessly moves ahead in time into a plethora of potentially bewildering details — storms, evidence of human existence in the shape of cartridges (which were used for the massacre of local tribes), and people who “[k]now the moment of climatic change better than they know themselves”. Then, it comes to talk of Normal Phantom (what other kind of phantom can there be? — Normal is, after all, fisherman, traveller of rivers and seas, and fish-embalmer) and Angel Day (wife to Normal, and queen of the rubbish-dump that is home to the aboriginal people at the edge of the town), living in the precarious settlement that is the coastal town of Desperance (is that closer to the French d’ésperance, which is ‘of hope’, or to the French désespérer, which is ‘to give up hope’?). Normal Phantom and Angel Day are leaders, as it were, of the Pricklebush people who are fighting, at the same time, Joseph Midnight’s Eastend mob, and the white officials of both Uptown and the mining company, Gurfurrit.

The economy and daring of the novel are really in the rendering of a conglomerate of generations-rich oral texts onto the page — complete in their moods of utter explicitness and almost simultaneous taciturnity. With the story-teller in front of one, not all communication needs to be verbal, does it? And Wright’s greatest achievement is possibly this assurance of an active story-teller right there on the bland and printed page.

A few words are perhaps in order about the lady of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria — since she is not exactly a household name in this part of the world. Wright has been a writer for a long time. Not the way we would think, though. To begin with, it was more along lines of (even bureaucratic) work, and activism for the rights of the aboriginal peoples. Her non-fiction includes Grog War, on alcohol abuse in outback Tennant Creek and Take Power, Like this Old Man Here, an anthology celebrating twenty years of land rights in central Australia, which she edited with the all-too-real awareness of the difficulty with which the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was obtained. In fiction, besides several short stories, there has been a novel, Plains of Promise, again about dispossession and the brutalities of colonization. At the risk of labouring the obvious, I would point out that for all the unassuming rhythm of Carpentaria, one would be foolish not to realize the literary sophistication involved, or Wright’s understanding of the empowerment that comes from speaking out. But remarkable as Wright is, I do not wish to convey the impression that this is why she is to be read — Carpentaria is adventure and reward enough.