Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide. (CONTINUED)
If Lionel Fogarty rejects European models in his poetry, we may ask what models does he utilise? We know that English poetics touched him less than Afro-American songs, less than incidents of his life, in his Aboriginality, in Aboriginal history an in the deep and abiding white oppression which necessitated a referendum to bring Aboriginal people into the human race.
Lionel’s poems are not derived from books, but from life as lived in Australia and the world. His response to life creates not only his models but his words. Aboriginal writers without exception are committed writes. They are in no sense ‘closet’ writers of the Kafka ilk who see the world from the confines of a garret. The garret of Aborigines was provided by the English and once freed from it, they have no desire to isolate themselves from kith and kin. Lionel Fogarty was born in the garret of Cherbourg and what this means may be gleaned from a reading of the Queensland Acts governing Aborigines and also the rules and regulations of these so-called settlements. He was born under the heel of the oppressor and this has affected his view of the world as well as his poetry.
Everyone who has heard Lionel speak has found it a deeply moving experience. He is perhaps the best Aboriginal speaker I have heard, and it was of little wonder that in his first speaking before an audience, he came through.
Lionel’s peotry has a sweep of style and a breadth of content which no other poet in Australia can match. His style is all his own and he sometimes writes in a simple style akin to the poems of Jack Davis and Kath Walker. These poems are open in meaning and sentiment to all, but especially in his later poetry, he excels as a guerrilla poet wielding the language of the invader in an urge to destroy that imposition and recreate a new language freed of restrictions and erupting a multi-meaning of ambiguity. This hints at the many possibilities of meaning in a feeling language freed from the intellectual dreariness of academic verse. In fact his use of language reminds us of the Indian theory of Rasa rather than the dried out theories of the head people who demolish poetry in their quest for intellectual understanding and not heart understanding.
When we read verses of Lionel’s we appear to be in the presence of an anti-language which may appear meaningless if we seek for intellectual understanding, and fail to understand that we are confronted by groups of feeling-images rooted deep within the Aboriginal psyche and experience. And we may well be in the presence of an anti-poetry, a turning away of all that the critics hold dear, and in which even the rhythms are flattened out, sometimes changed abruptly, oven discarded so that no sweet victory is held out to entice the reader who must grasp an entirety of feeling structure beyond dictionary meaning.
Lionel’s poems are exceedingly complex and far from those nineteenth-century models said to be favoured by other Aboriginal poets. Lionel is different in that he is attempting to push meaning and at least the structure of the English language towards and absolute end and liberate his language from that cultural imperialism of the spirit imposed on him at Cherbourg. He is aware the the English language is which he writes is not really his own, but a thing apart from him, but the feeling is his, as are the Aboriginal words scattered throughout his texts which reveal that here is no Gubba writing, but a Murri able to use the language of the oppressor as a weapon captured from the enemy. He is Fanon’s native, but he has not been assimilated into the language of the coloniser. He has captured it in a guerrilla action and made it over into a free one of the Aboriginal spirit.
by Mudrooroo.
This is the second 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.