Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture

2. Proximities: From Asymptote to Zeugma

2 Proximities: From Asymptote to Zeugma Alan Lawson Ihave had some time off from teaching recently. I thought it might be a good moment to think about my midlife crisis. It seems that one of the characteristics of a good midlife crisis is learning how to deal productively with unfinished business. As a distraction from my own midlife crisis and unfinished business, I started thinking about unfinished business in other domains. The field of postcolonial studies might be having its midlife crisis: but I am hardly the first to notice that! What might be more interesting to think about, though, is the way our particular sort of cultures —the ones we have got used to calling ‘‘settler’’ cultures—deal with their unfinished business. In particular, I have been trying to think of a useful way to talk about how certain kinds of business, narrative business, textual business , remains unfinished. How certain kinds of stories keep being recirculated , just how readily they can be reactivated, recognized and read. As a way of concretizing my discussion of the return of the repressed, let me offer you something my friends and I wish had stayed repressed—something that if it circulates too widely might lead to Australia being repressed by the international community. Since the 1996 election in Australia, an extraordinarily ignorant but highly opinionated populist politician called Pauline Hanson has been drawing apparNotes to chapter 2 are on p. 36. 19 ently substantial popular support for some very ugly racist views. In April 1997 she established a new political party, called Pauline Hanson One Nation; to mark the launch, her support movement published an oddly anonymous book called The Truth ([Hanson] 1997:). Since the book is difficult to get in Australia, let alone here, I will quote some choice bits. There are many documented examples of horrific acts committed by blacks against blacks. A former chairman of the Northern Lands Council described his ancestors to me as ‘‘murderous nomads.’’ A famous singer proudly described how his grandfather led raids to massacre men from a neighbouring tribe. So why are out schoolchildren now taught a false history that depicts Aborigines as a peaceful, non-violent people living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the brutal Europeans? Why are schoolchildren not taught some aboriginal tribes killed mixed-race babies by placing them on ant’s nests? Why are they not taught about contemporary racism resulting in extreme violence between the various tribes? ([Hanson] 1997:131) The book then presents a number of ‘‘sources, some of which include eyewitness accounts of Aboriginal cannibalism’’ ([Hanson] 1997:132); it concentrates especially on tales of Aborigines eating their own children . As one of our MA students, Paul Newman, has noticed, this really is the ultimate disappearing race narrative. Then, the Hanson book says, these sources ‘‘refute the view of the Aborigines held by the new class. . . . [T]hey weren’t romantic liberals’’ (1997: 137). And, it goes on, Another example of [real] genocide is the Maori occupation of NZ. The Maoris arrived in NZ around 1000 AD. The land was occupied by a people closely related to the Australian Aborigines. The Maori exterminated them. . . . The ancestors of the Amerindians, celebrated by liberals in films such as Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas genocided [sic] the original inhabitants to dominate their land. (1997:138) Not unexpectedly, the next step is to cite the now-discredited view that there were several waves of Aboriginal immigration into Australia and that in this process the ancestors of contemporary indigenous people had—violently, indeed genocidally—displaced an earlier, truly original first peoples. Three narratives are dependent upon this bad history: the revisionist-racist claim that our violent dispossession is a minor part of a longer history of violent dispossession founded by indigenous peoples themselves; the second is the liberal-nationalist view that the Aborigines are really like us (since they are said to be descended from Dravidians expelled from India); and, thirdly, the assimilationist-nationalist 20 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture view that the Aborigines are Australia’s first immigrants ([Hanson] 1997:139). It intrigues me that we know how to read this stuff. At crucial moments we can predict what the next narrative element will be. We recognize some of these elements as belonging to the form of urban myths—just as in the cannibalism story in Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes we recognize the...