You ferment myth into the bush and the billabong to give yourself history, and there’s enough there to make a man and call him native born.
—Evelyn Araluen
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonise the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
— James Baldwin
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I believe it is misguided to call contemporary discontent towards white literature on identity and landscape mere reflection of literary taste. Neither, an effect of a political decision, nor a literary opinion. These attitudes inherently presume optionality, as to whether literature should be politically contextualised or not. Acceptance of this optionality presumption thus grants writers and critics the decision whether or not to conceptually engage with politics — in this essay’s case specifically, colonialism.
This optionality presumption legitimises a supposedly apolitical, or ‘politically neutral’, creation or analysis of literature. Accordingly, optionality in literature is an extension of liberalism; political ‘centrism’; a philosophy captive to dialectics by nature. Optionality, thus liberalism, necessarily share an incapacity to value revolutionary political arguments in isolation, because each argument must be understood through its antithesis. This intellectual deadlock can be exemplified through Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s decolonial criticism of Joseph Conrad’s canonical novela Heart of Darkness. In his response essay An Image of Africa, Achebe’s anti-colonial critique of Conrad seeks to devalue Heart of Darkness through a compelling moral, anti-racist argument:
“Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality.”
Nonetheless, Heart of Darkness remains canonical because its moral defence rests upon optionality: believing it is analytically possible and appropriate to distance Conrad’s values on race from his own text. The philosophy of optionality therefore remains consistent, decisions artists and critics make can be unbinding. Because optionality has become naturalised into literary debates, all existing decolonial criticisms are counteracted by ‘apolitical’ arguments. Heart of Darkness is analysed ‘apolitically’ by perceiving the main character Marlow’s racist opinions as common, fictional representations of nationalism and social Darwinism during the colonial ‘Scramble for Africa’. This analysis seeks to deligitimise decolonial criticism by separating Conrad from the blatant racism within his own text; racism literally becomes excused. In truth, these arguments should not be understood as mere attempts to decontextualise a text from an abstract proposition; to ‘politically neutralise’ an analysis. Nor should it seem natural for compelling decolonial analyses to have an equally sound, antithetical moral argument. On the issue of race, a defence against decolonial criticism must be realised as morally sympathetic towards white supremacy.
I now return to my introductory point: how should contemporary discontent towards white writing on identity and landscape be understood if not as the option to dislike it? Decolonial politics, and decolonial literary criticism by extension, is abolitionist in nature. Accordingly, decolonial literary criticism is better understood as an allergy towards the canon; a compulsion to revolutionise art and literature within the confines of a colonial language. As literary decolonisation is a fixed, critical epistemology, the dialectical notion of optionality is incompatible. If a writer or critic were to decide not to conceptually engage in literary decolonisation, they are seen as complicit; equally as undesirable as blatant perpetuations of
white supremacy. The option to be politically impartial, in such a context, implies the writer does not perceive white supremacy as an urgent existential threat to criticise and abolish.
There is uniqueness, however, in decolonisation in our contemporary art world. Decolonial writers and critics today are not concerned with the same blatant racism as those in (what I perceive to be) the ‘first wave’ of literary decolonisation (1950s–1990s) had been; revolutionaries including Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others. In rejection of ‘post–colonialism’, I affirm we are rather living in a new era of colonialism; neocolonialism. As a historical phenomenon, neocolonialism is an evolved form of colonialism; naturalised into the psyche of settler-colonies in particular. It is therefore necessary for decolonial literary theory to adapt. In response to neocolonialism, what I call neo–decolonisation has since manifested, largely defining anti–colonial writing of the 21st century. Neo–decolonisation specifically criticises the illusion of a ‘post–colonial’ world; that art and literature produced today is informed by, and therefore absolved of, the old ‘first wave’ understanding of colonialism. Instead, we are now concerned with a more subtle neo-colonialism which has attempted to make itself invisible, subconscious, and omnipresent. De–neocolonial literary criticism is accordingly precise; as old colonial writing sought to ‘other’ Indigenous peoples and culture, neo–colonialism instead seeks to appropriate it. Existing within a settler–colony requires such self-awareness, the more a settler writes about ‘Australia’, the greater a metaphysical appropriation of land and identity becomes.
Neo–decolonisation is my attempt to synthesise contemporary discontent Indigenous writers have towards white ‘Australian’ writers on literature concerning identity and landscape. To explain, I will feature Tim Winton’s writing. In his ‘landscape memoir’ Island Home, Winton represents neo–colonialism precisely:
“In my own lifetime Australians have come to use the word ‘country’ as Aborigines use it, to describe what my great-great-grandparents would surely have called territory. […] A patriot need no longer devote himself to an abstraction like the state. Now a patriot will be as likely to revere the web of ecosystems that make a society possible, and a true patriot is passionate about defending this – from threats within as much as without – as if the land were kith and kin. This is why we write about it.”
Winton claims his intergenerational occupation of land has allowed time to transform a colonial perception of landscape, thus identity, into one seemingly indifferent to indigeneity, effectively practising cultural appropriation upon a landscape and philosophy which his kin had originally colonised. He attempts to erase thus absolve himself of colonial history, rejecting the concept of settler–colonialism. Settler–colonial studies academic Patrick Wolfe captures the neocolonial attitude inherent in Winton’s work fluently:
“In Australia, by contrast [to Israel], the erasure of indigeneity conflicts with the assertion of settler nationalism. On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the mother country.”
The extractive nature of neocolonialism is criticised in Evelyn Araluen’s poem To the Poets:
“Cover up the earth that knows me but leave wells so you can drain it. Take our language from our bleeding mouths and give it to your songs. All of this to keep giving him sounds to speak himself as something separate from whence he came.”
De–neocolonisation necessarily highlights and deconstructs the settler–colonial attitudes inherent in Australian statehood and identity. Such questions arise: is the concept of ‘Australia’, thus an ‘Australian’, legitimate? Is it possible to ‘become’ an Australian? Must an ‘Australian’ be defined as settler-colonial? These are the successful effects of neo–decolonisation, revolutionising writers’ depiction of subject matter, conceptualisation of language, thus rightfully rewarding originality in works grounded in true indigeneity. Therefore, to believe art and literature can be ‘apolitical’ is to ignore the continuous colonial underpinnings of English as a language and artistic medium, and the defining intellectual movement of today.
