African Nations
In October 1988, I went to the Australian instalment of the “Common Wealth of Letters”
series presided over at Yale University by the Jamaican-born Michael Cooke (1934–1990).
This was a cornucopia of stimulation, and it was here that I first met Australian scholars and writers such as Kevin Hart, Ivor Indyk, Andrew Taylor and Michael Wilding, who con-tinued to be important reference points as I delved further into the intricacies of books from down under. But the unquestioned star of the conference was Thomas Keneally.
Though the filmSchindler’s List(1993), based on his 1982 Booker Prize-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, had not yet been made, Keneally was already a world literary celebrity.
From my reading of hisConfederates(1979), I knew him as a writer with an astonishing ability to imagine times and places distant from his own, and to do so with impressive economy.
At the conference dinner, I was fortunate enough to be at Keneally’s table. This repast was distinguished by Keneally, in the middle of a voluble discourse, realising that he had not yet touched his main course, a Salisbury steak, and popping the entire thing into his mouth in a gesture of genial, offhanded machismo worthy of Paul Hogan. More seriously, Keneally was addressing the topic that had convulsed Yale over the past year. This was the revelation that Paul de Man, the acclaimed professor of comparative literature and nonpareil of deconstructionists, who had died in 1983, had, during his youth in wartime Belgium, written articles that were collaborationist or pro-Nazi. Keneally spoke wisely of writers who had made mistakes, or ethical lapses, both of the right and of the left.
Keneally’s own books had been equally critical of Nazi and communist totalitarianisms.
His clear-eyed moral witness was a refreshing change from Australian writers such as Katherine Susannah Prichard, Frank Hardy and Eleanor Dark, who, out of an excess of radical zeal, had been frankly toadyish in their attitudes to the Soviet Union, which had proven itself a monstrosity.
Keneally addressed the scandal of de Man’s collaborationist wartime journalism from a conceptual angle as well as a political one. He found the speculations about language characteristic of deconstruction to be arcane trivia, comparing deconstruction to the theological differences in the fourth century AD (a comparison first made a few years
before by Richard Rorty).1In contrast, he spoke of his recent visit to Eritrea, an insurgent area in northeast Africa at that time governed by Ethiopia. Here, a rebel Eritrean army was opposing the malignant Soviet-allied Ethiopian government of Mengistu Halle Mariam.
The Mengistu government was responsible for the atrocious famine that had garnered headlines worldwide in the mid-1980s and had inspired, “records, tapes, and perfor-mances”, as Keneally later put it in his Eritrean novel,To Asmara(1989).2 A year before the dinner, Keneally had written for theNew York Times Magazineabout his visit with the rebels in Eritrea. In his engagement with Eritrea, Keneally was witnessing real hope and real pain, far from what he saw as the academic hair-splitting of deconstruction.
I was aware that the Eritreans, like their Ethiopian suppressors, were Monophysite Christians (or as they prefer to call themselves, “Miaphysite”) who separated from the rest of Christianity over theological disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries.3I pointed out to Keneally that the Eritreans were descendants of those for whom these arcane theological disputes mattered, my implication being that deconstruction ultimately might also matter.
Considering all the other people at the table were scholars of world eminence and I was an unknown 23-year-old who had not yet published a word, Keneally was admirably toler-ant of my cheekiness. He aidedAntipodesmany times in the years ahead, once personally sending me two books of his that the journal was unable to obtain from the publisher for review.
Keneally is thus a writer capable of showing concern in matters both large and small.
On a more abstract level, in this chapter I address the issue of “concern” as a general affect in contemporary Australian literature. What are the ethics of writers caring about people of different origins and backgrounds? Is this a manifestation of altruism or liberal guilt?
In an era when so many philosophers, from Martin Buber to Emmanuel Levinas to Adri-ana Caverero, have written about the ethics of addressing, speaking for, caring about or presuming upon “the other”,4and if, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, compassion on an individual level is “a central bridge between the individual and the community”,5 what does the idea of concern, which generalises compassion across communities, mean in moral and affective terms? Does the potential bad faith of feigning concern for others or using that concern to make oneself look good outweigh the benefit of showing concern for the social conditions of other groups? Is even a hypocritical or self-deluding concern better than callous indifference?6Is concern inevitably a part of what Ruwen Ogien calls the “non-coercive means” by which prescriptive agents try to move people in directions they have not willed for themselves?7Or is concern a solution, albeit a piecemeal one, to problems that emanate from neoliberalism itself?
1 Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention”,Critical Inquiry11, no. 1 (1984): 22.
2 Thomas Keneally,To Asmara(New York: Warner Books, 1989).
3 Gawdat Gabra,The A to Z of the Coptic Church(Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 76.
4 Martin Buber,I and Thou(New York: Scribner, 1937); Emmanuel Levinas,Alterity and
Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Adriana Caverero, For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul Kottman (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005).
5 Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion”,Social Philosophy and Policy13 (1996):
27–38.
6 Bernard Williams,Moral Luck(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
7 Ruwen Ogien, “Neutrality Towards Non-Controversial Conceptions of the Good Life”, inPolitical Neutrality: A Re-evaluation, eds Alberto Merrill and Daniel Weinstock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 106.
This chapter starts with Keneally in Africa, but I will chiefly consider how white Australian writers have addressed Indigenous Australian issues, concentrating on Kate Grenville, Gail Jones and Alex Miller. I will conclude with an Indigenous writer, Alexis Wright, who in The Swan Book (2013) writes from an Aboriginal perspective of the asylum-seeker issue as it has manifested itself in Australian politics since the 2001Tampa crisis. All the above gestures towards social altruism are aspects of what the Canadian the-orist Northrop Frye called “the myth of concern”, a collective social vision that, through means both social and imaginative, postulates an interest in humankind as a totality, and includes altruism in a sense of the creative.8Frye calls concern “the response of the adult citizen to genuine social problems”, and contrasts it with anxiety, which depends on a ner-vousness about protecting ourselves manifested by buttressing ourselves in self-buffeting groups – like Martin in Tsiolkas’ Barracudawhen he castigates Danny Kelly as a loser.
The concern–anxiety dichotomy, however, does not neatly align with differences in po-litical or socioeconomic philosophy. It is about a fundamental attitude to the world that might include politics but also supersedes them. Concern is about what cannot be fulfilled at present in legal or formal terms, which is why it is a myth rather than a doctrine. It is speculative more than it is polemical.9
Frye stated that once “a myth of concern is recognised as such, it becomes clear that you cannot express its truth without lying”. This is because concern is “contradicting ac-cepted truth with something that is going to be made true but isn’t true now”.10When contemporary Australian novelists write about global inequality, racial differences, and the mistreatment of Indigenous people, they are fostering a hope for something not currently true but which they hope to make true; this is precisely why the imagination is needed.
The imaginative writer cares about people in a way that it is impossible currently to care through conventional socio-political means. Concern is what remains of a collective hori-zon once the state is no longer seen as a vehicle to bring us towards that horihori-zon. While all of these writers are aware of the pitfalls of concern, they nonetheless maintain it as the central agent of their affective mission.
Part of themodus operandiof concern can be linked to “the relational turn” in 1990s psychological thought, particularly as exemplified in the work of Axel Honneth. Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognitionis subtitledthe moral grammar of social conflicts, and concern, as a concept, argues just that: that social conflicts have a moral basis and can be regarded ethically as much as polemically, interpersonally as much as ideologically. Honneth’s work represents the socialisation of psychoanalysis, which in Freud’s era had emphasised the in-dividual ego and its relation to the society, but in the postwar era, with the dominance of the object-relations school, emphasised how inner and outer circumstances mutually and constructively adjusted. Honneth takes this dynamic a step further, seeing the individual’s experience as meaningful only in the context of other individuals; individuals constitute one another in relationships of mutual recognition, which “must possess the character
8 John Robert Colombo and Jean O’Grady, ed.,The Northrop Frye Quote Book(Toronto: Dundurn, 2014), 84.
9 Frye is often criticised for being apolitical, but here he was really being speculatively political in ways comparable to such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou.
10 Colombo and O’Grady,The Northrop Frye Quote Book, 85.
of affective approval or encouragement”.11Importantly, for Honneth, recognition is built upon, but is larger than, Eros, “supplementing libidinal drives with affective”.12
The Australian novelists of concern have similar insights: in depicting the romantic relationship of Bo Rennie and Annabelle Beck in Journey to the Stone Country, Alex Miller makes clear that the erotic is subtended by a deeper connection to land and values, premised on the recognition of both self and other. Annabelle thinks about how she might speak of Bo to her ex-husband in Melbourne: “I knew him as a child. There are connec-tions between us you would not understand. In this place I am becoming myself again.”13 Love is not just Eros, but recognition, concern, an implicated acknowledgement. Analo-gously, concern is political altruism ramified by the acknowledgement of affect. It is an awakening not just to political inequality but to interpersonal feeling. As Joel Anderson says in his introduction to Honneth, “justice demands more than the fair distribution of material goods”, and the “emancipatory struggles” of “marginalised groups” must be situ-ated within a social world that is interactive and affective, not just economic or political.14 To care about a place there must be some sort of affective tie. It cannot simply be a matter of short-term political or ideological pilgrimage.
It was clear at that Yale dinner that Keneally was aware of the pitfalls of political en-gagement on the part of writers. The American scholar Paul Hollander, earlier in the 1980s, had writtenPolitical Pilgrims, featuring intellectuals who had made trips to communist countries and become convinced that these societies represented positive achievements.15 Earlier in the century, there had been a wave of Anglophone intellectuals who adored or at least tolerated the Nazi regime in Germany. In both cases, these outsiders assumed they could assess the situation in a foreign country and take a political endorsement back to their home countries. Keneally has been aware, unlike the aforementioned political pil-grims, of the dangers of speaking of and for another people. The book that brought him to international fame –The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith(1972), powerfully adapted to film by Fred Schepisi in 1978 – was told from the point of view of its Indigenous protagonist. By 2001, Keneally had reconsidered this, stating that he was wrong to presume he could speak from inside an Indigenous person’s experience.16By the time ofTo Asmara, Keneally did not funnel any of the narrative through the point of view of African characters and thus avoided accusations of cultural appropriation. Yet his stake in the Eritrean situation was nonetheless open to question. Keneally was in the difficult position of exploring a conflict in which he had sympathies – for the Eritrean rebels, against the Ethiopian government – but which he did not mean to present in a moralistic or propagandistic way. This can be seen in the last line of his novel, attributed not to the protagonist Darcy but to an au-thorial over-voice: “and all the incidents fail to be separate”.17If the earlier writers who
11 Axel Honneth,The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts(London: Polity, 1995), 95.
12 Honneth,The Struggle for Recognition, 97.
13 Alex Miller,Journey to the Stone Country(Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002), Kindle edition, location 2704. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
14 Joel Anderson, translator’s introduction to Honneth’sThe Struggle for Recognition, 1.
15 Paul Hollander,Political Pilgrims:Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
16 Thomas Keneally, “A New Chant for Jimmie Blacksmith?”,Sydney Morning Herald, 25–26 August 2001,Spectrum4–5.
17 Keneally,To Asmara, 290.
had been naive about the nature of the Nazi or Soviet regimes and trusted too much in the brotherhood of man and soil, Keneally disclaimed what the theorist Louis Althusser termed an expressive causality, a yoking of historical currents. And yet, try as he might to see things cautiously and analytically, the narrator has to grasp for a collective lens, even while aware of the totalising flaw in such a gesture.
While the American edition of the book was titledTo Asmara(Asmara being the cap-ital of Eritrea, which the rebels hoped to liberate from its Ethiopian occupiers), the British and Australian title wasTowards Asmara.This was surely intended to be a micro-linguis-tic distinction, reflecting the fact that American English uses “to” as a directional while British and Australian English might favour “towards”. Yet there was also a semantic dif-ference: “to” is more inspirational, even martial, as in “marching to Pretoria” or the cries of
“À Berlin!” at the end of Zola’sNana, whereas “towards” seems more tentative, a setting-out that never quite gets where it is headed. In the book, the rebels do not reach Asmara, but in actual history they did: the Ethiopian government fell and, in 1993, Eritrea was recog-nised internationally as an independent state under the presidency of Isaias Afewerki, the rebel leader whom Keneally had lionised. Keneally praised Afewerki’s concern for edu-cation, his respect for the value of each individual, and his promotion of a progressive, humane, business-friendly Africa, while attributing to Afewerki’s opponents a desire to see Africa fail. Keneally hoped for an Africa that the West would not have to feel sorry for, an Africa that could avoid white patronage. At the beginning ofTo Asmara,a rock singer who talks with Darcy about the region finds Eritrea uninteresting because he cannot see its peo-ple as simply passive agents of compassion and patronage.
Keneally recognised the principle of statehood in Africa, that contemporary Africa is a set of states that exercise sovereignty. Westerners who make cultural or anthropological generalisations about Africa are unconsciously hearkening back to colonial days in deny-ing the importance of African state sovereignty, and in seedeny-ing Africans either as an undif-ferentiated mass of poor people who need Western help, or as an “uncontaminated” people who can teach Westerners alternative wisdom. The phenomenon of “Afropessimism”, what Manthia Diawara terms a “fatalistic attitude towards economic and social crisis” in Africa, is but the inversion of an overly utopian and categorical expectation of the African future.18 Keneally was trying to change that, or to challenge it.
Keneally’s hope for Eritrea, alas, ended in disappointment and bitterness. The Eritrean regime got bogged down in a border war with the new Ethiopian government and Afewerki remained in power for twenty years, amid accusations of human-rights violations and political repression. In a 2004 interview, Keneally spoke of Afewerki possessing “pu-rity” and noted that Afewerki did not cultivate a Stalin-like cult of personality; there were
“never posters of him anywhere”.19Keneally further averred, “If he’s a tyrant, he’s pretty remarkable.” Although Keneally makes no bones about criticising the Eritrean leader’s re-pressive policies, there was still a more than sentimental attachment, much as a teacher might still see promise in a former student who has not realised his potential. One should not be too hard on Keneally here, for the mistake he made – hoping an African leader would break the continent’s perceived cycle of failure and establish a model state – has been repeated by others, most recently with the independence of South Sudan in 2010, which
18 Manthia Diawara,In Search of Africa(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 239.
19 Thomas Keneally, interviewed by Mark Corcoran,Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV, 25 May 2004.
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004/s1115693.htm.
excited the same sort of energised partisanship as occurred in Eritrea. In both cases, one suspects Western interest was inspired in part by the Christianity of the rebel regions, and by their proximity to the lands of the Bible (Cush, Punt and Havilah, in what today is the region of Eritrea and South Sudan, are even named in the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden).
Keneally can be said to have written about this region once before, in his 1973 chil-dren’s bookMoses the Lawgiver. In addition, there is a traditional Australian tie to the region through the Suez Canal, the British Empire, the two world wars, and the explo-rations of Alan Moorehead in East Africa. Thus there is a larger point here than just Keneally’s endorsement of a leader who ended up disappointing. All of us make mis-takes; Western imperialism colours even benign attitudes towards Africa; no intellectual is infallible, certainly not politically. More largely,To Asmarais about a search for affec-tive understanding, however partial and foredoomed. At the end of Darcy’s narraaffec-tive, he admits, “We could not share the same table.”20He is not speaking about the Eritreans but about Anna, a German woman who has witnessed scenes of untold carnage and horror, and is unable to accept Darcy’s more detached and touristic attitude, however compas-sionate his intent. Darcy’s perspective reveals the limits of individual compassion. Keneally anticipates critiques of his inevitably partial and inadequate relationship to the material.
He realises that the same social concern that animates the altruistic thrust we so often value in fiction might also impede our awareness.21
Settler Land Claims: From Sustenance to Fragility
In his next book,Flying Hero Class, Keneally contrasted different kinds of subalternity – Palestinian and Aboriginal – by having an Aboriginal dance troupe fly on an aeroplane hi-jacked by Arab terrorists. In 1991, when the book was published, readers might have seen Palestinians and Aborigines as two populations with legitimate grievances. But they may also have seen Australian Indigenous people, as Keneally tends to, as more “spiritual”, as
In his next book,Flying Hero Class, Keneally contrasted different kinds of subalternity – Palestinian and Aboriginal – by having an Aboriginal dance troupe fly on an aeroplane hi-jacked by Arab terrorists. In 1991, when the book was published, readers might have seen Palestinians and Aborigines as two populations with legitimate grievances. But they may also have seen Australian Indigenous people, as Keneally tends to, as more “spiritual”, as