Summer Reading #1 — Decolonising
By Robert Wood
Poet Robert Wood is the Liminal Summer Reading columnist for 2021.
Join us over the summer for six columns, on Decolonisation, translation, resistance and more.
The formula appears simple. Just add writers of colour to your journal and you are doing diversity. Adding First Nations writers counts for extra points in the white settler imagination. But, those of us in the community, must now accept that ‘diversity’, and, to a lesser extent ‘inclusion’, have become reified, assimilated, and part of a structure that itself has not changed. All of the prize winners, all of the new voices, all of the good anthologies, have not coalesced into a movement to structurally change the bedrock of power relations in the culture industries let alone the political, economic or religious system here. How does that change? And why should it? The answer to those questions, lies in decolonising diversity. That is a spiritual task that matters to writers of colour, but it also matters to people beyond those identities with ongoing lived experience here. We have to find a good way of living together, one that transcends our identities and actually reflects the bonds of shared lifestyle, where a materialist understanding of reality underpins our writing.
What is wrong with diversity right now is that it does not adequately alter the structures in which it is embedded and participates. It places the burden on particular writers of colour to constantly explain and shoulder the work of expressing and unpacking race, history, craft, form, voice, identity, non-violence. It ends up being fundamentally liberal where exceptional individuals are accepted, tolerated, included, without being allowed to bring our people with us. But, diversity is not up to white people to simply be benevolent gatekeepers that allow some in and keep some out. It is not about patronage. It is about actually giving things up, letting go, going home, stopping work, leaving the sector, being silent, moving on, and doing that in a safe way by letting other people come through. This is about who is mentored and being able to get into an industry where there is even more work to do. It is about letting us speak on things that are not our identity.
If I had a dollar for every time a white settler told me how to interact with other people of colour, especially First Nations people, I would not be writing this. I would be sipping piña coladas in Kerala or planting trees on reclaimed farm land on Noongar Country or starting a publishing co-operative that only uses beetroot ink. I have seen so many cases of white settlers, under the pretence of allyship, telling people of colour, telling me, how to work in a literary organisation. But, I do not think white settlers are in a position of moral authority when it comes to whitesplaining how we act in this sector. They are not in a position to tell us how diversity should be done, or, to simply add a bit of colour to their board and think the work is over. That is what I am starting to see happen now more than ever. It seems then that diversity in its initial phase is coming to an end because it is becoming part of white settler imagination just like 'ethnic literature’ and ‘multiculturalism’. We cannot allow that to happen, which is why we must continue to work for decolonisation.
Whitesplaining is especially the case when it comes to white settlers telling non-Indigenous people of colour how to engage with First Nations writers, audiences, places. I can recount several meetings where I have been lectured by white settler arts administrators on how to effectively engage with ‘Indigenous stakeholders’ without being asked about my (Ngarluma) family, my experience with remote (East and West Pilbara) communities, my personal archival labour (on Pinningu), or my own identity as a Malayali, or any other aspect of what it means to be something other than white. That might be because I pass, but I also think it is because of the structural reality of white settlement here as it permeates into individual actions, conversations, interactions.
Precisely when it is not being promoted as a spectacular, extractive, tokenistic engagement, white settlers have a hard time seeing it for what it is. What may be the cultural dissonance between us, it is that we must make sure we have to promote things in an entirely obvious way. You could never say the practical, agricultural, anti-intellectual, sporting, barbaric tendencies of white settler Australia picks up on the subtlety beyond itself. It is part of the reasons I am spelling it out right now. That might account for its insularity, arrogance, and marginalisation when it comes to a global stage. And I say all this as heuristics for a messy and porous reality that should be responsive to historical forces. I say this as someone with space in the heart for people who perceive themselves to be part of this group.
And that is the crux here—white settlers as an identity grouping is a powerful fiction that itself needs decolonising. The discourse around settlement, the discourse around colonialism, the discourse around diversity, all need to be ‘dissembled’ and not merely ‘deconstructed’. That might be when ‘white settler’ becomes a straw man that can then be burnt on a funeral pyre that makes it possible for everyone to get on and be better, get on and change the things that matter, get back to being ‘workers’ together; or maybe, just maybe, learn how to be suburbanists beyond race alone well into the future.
After all, decolonising white settlers is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it is currently beyond the realm of practical imagination. All of the right gestures, all of the well meant rhetoric, all of the good feeling, can dissipate in an instant. And this is despite the belief that diversity is succeeding. At the moment, it is about diverse people being asked to join white settler systems of power when it should be the reverse. But, such is the reality of white fragility. This is especially the case when one recognises who has power, including the state’s monopolisation of violence, and the unconscious flinches that are made in light of dominant reading audiences. What matters are actions of solidarity that go towards healing and become institutionalised without reification in a way that matters for daily life. After all, decolonising diversity only matters when it leads to knowing oneself, living a good life, changing the world.
So, what is to be done?
First, there can be the movement towards broader conversations. On the first point, I think of politics here as a good example. At the moment, treaty is separate from republic is separate from refugees. The views of parties might display some coherence across all three - the Greens, for example, might promote themselves as ‘compassionate’ or ‘progressive’ or even ‘decarcetory’. But, what matters to this article is the fact that all three conversations are separate even as they all refer to a new relationship between a people and their government. Treaty needs to talk to republic needs to talk to refugees. There can be a new document that does all three. It might need to be a new constitution, but animating those conversations means decolonising away from the British Crown, precisely because it inhibits everyone from First Nations people to Asian-Australians to white settlers to others. Getting people talking across the identity aisle is fundamental to meaningful progress of a kind we can believe in. Decolonising means coming into a new understanding of how we can see ourselves and each other, collectively so.
Second, is to build up the resilience of white people so they can participate in the process of their own decolonisation. I do not think blaming white settlers, harassing white settlers, perpetuating violence towards white settlers, is all that useful. I might have even spoken about them too much already in this article. If decolonisation is not about non-violence, then it is not decolonisation. I remember when my first book was due to come out. I was threatened by a prominent white poet, perhaps the most prominent poet of his generation (nationally speaking) and certainly the most famous in my home state. The threat was to sue me, to see me in court, to put me in my place, because he thought that I was going to defame him. All without seeing the complimentary passage that referred to him. It is not only that I lost respect for this person. The incident was a symptom that showed the fragility of the white settler imagination, no matter how experimental, how awarded, how activist it gets. I wrote to them to assure them that it was all good. What I learned though was that we have to acknowledge that there is a raced fragility that informs the tone of culture here. In response, we, as a community, have to teach resilience to white settlers who are willing to listen. That is our burden, but it is also our opportunity. They need to be told there are some things they will never know and that it is ok. We need to build their resilience at knowing limits, at being quiet, at sitting inside oneself, especially when it comes to boundaries with the secret-sacred. In other words, we need to build their resilience for a sovereignty they cannot quite understand, not only a tolerance for our identities as they stand.
At the end of the day, we have to live with white settlers if we live in ‘Australia’. We can leave, go back to homelands, like ‘India’, or even to places on the continent that are free of whiteness, like ‘Woodbrook’. We can create safe spaces away from the white settler gaze. We can do all that. We have done that. We can continue to blame white settlers, or turn away, or reverse the commitments of violence. But surely, the hardest and most rewarding labour of all is to help white settlers decolonise themselves, to follow our lead when it comes to being free, to help them see that diversity matters, especially when we decolonise it further into their heartland. That means doing far more than simply getting writers of colour to sit at the same table, to publish in those journals, to offer them opportunities they deserved long ago and long before. It means continuing to find solutions to all our problems when they seem intractable. And that is why it matters most of all.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.