Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide.

‘Every colonised people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created the the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation…..’ Franz Fanon

What happened to the Aboriginal languages of Australia?  The English invader sought to destroy them utterly.  The native was to be forced into the state of English civilisation, and this meant the death and destruction of Aboriginal language and culture.  In the sttled areas there was imposted a deliberate policy of language genocide, and in a few decades Aboriginal languages became broken collections of words falling haplessly into English language structures of varying degrees of worth – from the invader’s viewpoint!  This forced adoption of a foreign language was in itself judged from the view of European tradition riddled with class and racial prejudice.  Kriol and Pidgin became objects of scholarly study and Aboriginal writers in English were criticised on their use of English and Aboriginal remnant words.  What would be the Aboriginal response to this cultural and genocidal imperialism, and who would make this response?

Lionel Fogarty refuses to surrender to the critical norms forced upon poets in Australia.  He writes in a manner which is the response of anb Aboriginal songman against the genocide inflicted on his language and the tyranny imposed on him by a foreign language.  It is impossible to read Lionel without realising that he is Black; it is impossible to read him and not realise the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, and it is impossible to read him and not realise that here is a poet using the English language in a unique and new way.  He wields a black pen, and writes a language reflecting the mixture the Aboriginal cultures have become in such concentration camps as Cherbourg, where the invader language was forced on people.  He uses that language in an effort to tear down the language structures that have been imposed on him and his people.

I would like to stress that Lionel does not rely on European models for his poetry, and that it is his genius which shapes his verse.  He was born a victim in a world in which he and his people had no say.  In Franz Fanon’s sense he (and his people) was the native Other contrasted with the coloniser subject which sought to destroy the blackness within him, to render him as object into a subject reflecting the coloniser.  In the coloniser’s world the only subject to aspire to be was that of the coloniser, and the native object was seen as a coming-to-be subject fashioned on the British model.  Generations of Cherbourg managers tried to force his people, fashioning white masks for their black skins.  They tried to force Lionel to don such a mask and the only result was the coming-to-be of Lionel Fogarty the poet whose genius born from the struggle gave birth to a new style, or system, of poetry drawing from a myriad of influences to forge an essential quintessence of Aboriginality. Here was no ersatz Bourgeois black in white face, but an Aboriginal man, a poet guerrilla using the language of the invader in an effort to smash open its shell and spill it open for poetic expression.

Lionel’s poetry is moral to an extreme and brooks no opposition.  It may be argued that victims of oppression have this extreme morality because they know what it is like to be on the receiving end of immorality, or an amorality masquerading as altruism.

This is the first part of a piece written by Mudrooroo as introduction to the Lionel Fogarty anthology New and Selected Poems Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera  published in 1995 by Hyland House, Melbourne.  The second part will appear tomorrow.