Forced Poetics in Lionel G. Fogarty's "Disguised, not attitude" and "Bam Gayandi"

This article considers the linguistic structures of Lionel G. Fogarty's poetry as consciously reflecting processes of language acquisition and relexification and posits the speaking subject as a condition of forced transculturation. Utilizing Fogarty's "Disguised, not attitude" and "Bam Gayandi" as primary examples, I will seek to substantiate an argument that the "forced poetics" of Fogarty's poetic historicity is made manifest through an intermediated subject. As I conceive of it, the intermediary subject is one in which poetic intelligence is split between the aggressively interiorized and the distant other of the self (Sutherland, "Blocks" 00:22:00–00:24:00). This subjective identity is structured on Australian Indigenous culture and history, including "archives of character, genealogies of cultural memory, [and] histories of the present" (Minter 259) in which identity is latently or implicitly conceived. As Fogarty writes across and outside national traditions, linguistic disobedience is expressed through the embedding of Indigenous languages and language systems within poems ostensibly written in English. While emphasizing diverging and often conflicting energies within the poetics, these linguistic features of his work are often critically analyzed via notions of contrariety, without critics giving due consideration to processes through which asymmetries in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic exchange are foregrounded. The contention that this essay will advance is that the expression within Fogarty's poetics bears witness to and records the events and processes of "forced transculturation," functioning within the parameters of a linguistically experimental literature.

The poetry's intermediary subject will be examined for the manner in which the event inaugurates in the subject a process of desubjectivization, in which, according to Alain Badiou, the event itself ruptures and redoubles the writing subject. I argue that the event forms a plane of composition in which the subject must engage and intervene, and through the process of recording the poetic event, Fogarty creates a field for the articulation of this struggle. The subject therefore is conceived and expressed in a form of mediation between temporal frames and projective or remembered subject identifications. Fogarty's poetry can be considered in relation to a process of creolization (Shih and Lionnet 24), in which cultural formations and their expression are neither yoked to a past in which there is no escape nor arbitrarily abstracted from the present but are recognized through Édouard Glissant's "relational" notions of cultures (Poetics). Following the precedent set by Peter Minter, in opening Indigenous poetics to culturally relational readings, I have applied the theories of Glissant and Stuart Hall to my analysis of Australian Indigenous poetry, to militate against the dictates of a philosophy of language that is linked to colonial power. The concepts that these Caribbean theorists foreground include cultural relationality, creolization, and contesting the relationship between the colonizer and formerly colonized peoples. The contemporary Australian Indigenous poetry analyzed here tends to align with this pattern of philosophical thought, given its focus on reclaiming lost history and reassessing the hierarchical considerations of culture and language.

Considered through this lens, the subjective expression of Fogarty's poetics is inextricable from an asymmetrical history of colonial power relations. The speaking voice reflects the experiential mediation between interiority and exteriority, between the culturally conditioned body and its relation to social frames of colonial history. The poems represent this mediation between languages and lexical systems through Fogarty's satire, linguistic unpredictability, and novel expression. Where Fogarty's linguistic disobedience exemplifies the breakdown of standard English, it begins to represent the "forced transculturations" of colonial oppression (Hall 186). Fogarty's linguistic experimentation is an enactment of a forced poetics, designed to reframe expression as resistance to cultural oppression and the displacement of Indigenous thought. For Glissant, forced poetics exists "where a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression" (Caribbean 120). As in Fogarty's writing, Glissant argues that "a forced poetics is created from the awareness of the oppositions between a language that one uses and a form of expression that one needs" (121). From this position, we can establish a critical purview of the creolization incorporated in Fogarty's poetics and the ends he may...