Summer Reading #6 — Republic
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.
My family, like every family in this nation if not the continent, is still fighting for its freedom from the British Crown. We have a long history of that where I come from in India, Singapore, and now here, in ‘Australia’. In decolonising we can come into our own sovereignty, but it takes collective effort in order to realise this, to see that we are already paracolonial subjects who are able to resist this power through silence. What though is to be done? I ask this question especially at the level of culture and politics, and, in recognising that LIMINAL is a journal of both, also means thinking about how to politically realise our lived identity experiences as Asian-Australians. I think, in that way, the issue that matters most is one that is occupied by angry, old, white men - the republic. We must remember that South Sea Islander activist Faith Bandler and Asian Australian icon Jenny Kee were also original signatories on the Australian Republican Movement list.
The story of Indian Independence is dominated by the figure of Gandhi, and, the Partition of the country with Pakistan being sliced off into its West and East portions. The story for us Southerners is a little different, and, it also happens in the context of longer if no less acrimonious tensions between us and Northern India in general. When it comes to Kerala, there is also a complication when we look to our neighbours in Tamil Nadu, and, going even more local, in my ancestral village of Puthucurichy, we see that it remains somewhat unchanged by world historical forces. When I went in 1994, we still got water from the well, picked our own coconuts, bought fish on the beach each morning. It was still like that when I went in 2017 even if satellite television and the internet had changed what one could watch. My family left India after Independence, and, went to Singapore. Singapore’s own Independence happened somewhat after India, and it is Lee Kuan Yew who dominates, but it was not necessarily about returning a land to a people that had long been there. Singapore went from being a British colony to a modern state that is self-consciously multicultural. It dovetails with the history of settler colonialism because its contemporary citizens have not long been there. And this is where ‘Australia' can learn what kind of decolonisation is possible here, and, whether that is enough to hang your hat on or to push it further.
My concern with decolonisation is also a concern with what it looks like politically—what vestiges of the British Crown are to be found here after all is said and done. In India, there are buildings and turns of phrase, but no-one on the money. In Singapore, there are buildings and complete sentences, but no-one on the money. In Australia, the task of decolonisation is an ongoing one, but I think it is important for a broader coalition to reclaim the Republican Movement lest the new system of governance repeats too much of the old.
Right now, I see a lot of well intentioned, activist energy from white settlers about racism here, perhaps even on treaty, deaths in custody, removal of children. They perform, and are in fact, good allies. Maybe they even act in solidarity, and there may be some foundation to their belief they can help change an unwilling, or unlistening white hegemony, of their political beliefs towards First Nations and people of colour. But sometimes, it also reads as a kind of fetish. Why aren’t they concerned with their own (white) people? Won’t they leave us (non-white people) alone? To work for decolonisation does not only mean resisting the nation at the pointy end of state violence. It is not all about the cops. If anything, white settlers can be good allies by caring about the politics that matters in their own communities and putting pressure on authorities to change the system. That is why a republic is an issue for decolonisation. That is why changing the structure matters at the level of government.
A republic proposed by the official Australian Republican Movement thinks we should simply cut off the head of the snake, and, get an Australian head of state, who is appointed by members of parliament. This might be considered a type of gestural decolonisation, a simply symbolic one, which does nothing to undo the foundation of violence here. Other steps along the path could be to:
change the currency
change the flag
write a new constitution
abolish the states and replace them with ecological geographies
deport settlers
return to different Law systems
It depends on what decolonisation means, and, when we see it as a process that is never finished, we might come to a more philosophical and less political question. Land back is obvious. What happens afterwards is up to the people who are on it.
I can think of a great many historians in the Western tradition that move further and further back in time with each research project. They might start in the 1800s then go to the 1500s and before they know it they are in Ancient Greece thinking about what they consider to be the bedrock of their profession and their eras, given, of course, their predisposition for the written word in the first place. And so, if we keep decolonising further and further, what are we led to? That means taking a leap of faith into some other kind of philosophical system that makes sense for you on your own journey. It might mean ending up when the world was soft, or, in the cosmos. In other words, how do you transcend from one lived reality, one categorical analysis, one way of thinking, into another? It seems to me that we do this in the same way we began with - by talking to different people, by reading with new glasses, by experiencing the world in a distinct way. Our concerns can change, our context can change, and, we can make sense of that according to ideologies, materials, purposes that were not obvious until we hit bedrock, whatever that is. We might have turned from historians into poets, from poets into song birds, from song birds into rocks. And that is where we know becoming a republic takes up our thinking when we have decolonised into a contemporary reality as Asian-Australians where we are not even thought to belong.
The challenges for decolonisation here are structured by global forces, but the focus of resistance has to be local. It must be grounded in a bodily sovereignty that draws its power from Country and people allowing one to sit inside oneself with a custodial autonomy. By emanating from that centre, we can practice non-violence with the hope of institutionalising this without reification and towards materialist, demonstrable, and practical understandings that influence culture. Holding space in our own being demonstrates what it is to hold space in public. We will realise then that we have always been sovereigns and that might be enough to know oneself, live a good life, and change the world.
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.