Rent from DeepDyve- Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics by Stuart Cooke, and: Special edition of Cross Cultures 159: Readings in Post/Colonial Literature and Cultures in English ed. by Gordon Collier et al.
In his 2013 book entitled Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics, Stuart Cooke argues that through poetic discourse, indigenous Australian and Chilean societies resisted a form of colonization based on environmental dispossession and exploitation. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s francophone theory of nomadology and on Pierre Joris’s nomad poetics, Cooke calls the scholarly exercise of his book a nomadic poetics that successfully moves away from a reductive way of thinking about the world predicated on the colonial Self/Other divide. In doing so, Cooke identifies poetry as the paragon genre for the expression of a nomadic poetics because only in a poem can the speaker “feel everywhere at home” (11). Necessary operands in his postcolonial poetics equation reflected in the book’s ingenious title are the concepts of home/country/earth and language/voice. First, the home space that sets the stage of the nomad poem is not affixed to a certain geographical locale, but delineates a flow of energy between bodies, landscapes, and ecosystems. Cooke calls this space “country.” Second, the nomad poem incorporates the voices of other poets as they contain an acquired, collaborative knowledge, reflective of an indigenous historical and cultural continuity. In this (eco)logic of utterance, the “words [of a nomad poem] are not representations, but are expressions of country” (35). Delineating Cooke’s nomadic poetics, the book explores the contentious exchange between indigenous knowledge and postcolonial heritage. [End Page e-1]
Cooke sets his analyses in the Australian and Chilean poetic contexts in order to underscore the fluid and permeable intersections that build poetic transnationalism. The book contains eight chapters devoted to the investigation of high-modernist poetry and indigenous responses to high-modernist, postcolonial designs. In an alternate pattern, six of Cooke’s eight chapters explore the poetic work of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda and the Mapuche-Chilean poets Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla on the one hand, and on the other hand of Australian artists such as high-modernist poet Judith Wright, songman George Dyunggayan, Aboriginal elder Paddy Roe, and indigenous Australian poet and activist Lionel Fogarty.
Chilean poetics rests on a postcolonial paradox, where colonization constitutes simultaneously a known evil and a necessary advantage. Cooke argues that, for Pablo Neruda, the horrors brought by the colonizers constitute the genetic making of the new world and enhance his fascination with geography over anthropology. For Neruda, natural processes are recurrent and reveal a plane of transcendence where one cycle of existence inherently hints at the next one. The poet communicates this transcendence in a language that explicitly reveals its Spanish cultural and linguistic heritage and disfavors it for the benefit of local indigeneity. However, while he acknowledges the destructive repercussions of colonization, Neruda also sees the gains brought by colonial conquest. Cooke elucidates this Chilean postcolonial enigma by substantiating Neruda’s appreciation of both the necessity of modernism promoted through colonization and its corollary loss of the earth’s innocence.
Neruda’s double-edged spirit of resistance influences the poetry of Mapuche-Chilean poet Leonel Lienlaf, through which the poet’s subjective presence reasserts its rights to inhabit the country. For the Mapuche, poetry represented a way to make war because oratorical skills offered an individual not only social prestige, but also political agency. Poetry reinforced the poet’s relationship to the land and the ancestors. The body, the country, and the language in the Mapuche society did not constitute separate elements. “To be Mapuche [is] to be of the earth is to be a process of becoming” (161). Despite these “modes of resistance,” Cooke argues that the Mapuche society...
