AAnniimmaall SSttuuddiieess JJoouurrnnaall Volume 7 Number 1 Article 3 2018 AAlleexxiiss WWrriigghhtt’’ss LLiitteerraarryy TTeessttiimmoonnyy ttoo IInntteerrsseeccttiinngg TTrraauummaass Meera Atkinson University of Sydney, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj Part of the Art and Design Commons, Australian Studies Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Education Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Philosophy Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Atkinson, Meera, Alexis Wright’s Literary Testimony to Intersecting Traumas, Animal Studies Journal, 7(1), 2018, 41-58. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol7/iss1/3 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] AAlleexxiiss WWrriigghhtt’’ss LLiitteerraarryy TTeessttiimmoonnyy ttoo IInntteerrsseeccttiinngg TTrraauummaass AAbbssttrraacctt This article proffers a reading of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), hailed as ‘the first truly planetary novel’ (Gleeson-White), arguing that Wright’s poetics of transgenerational trauma witnesses to intersected trans-species injustices and traumas. Exploring the way Wright testifies to entanglements of human- nonhuman trauma, I challenge entrenched humanist and speciesist preoccupations in trauma theory to address trauma transmissions with particular focus on trauma as a social and political force generated by patriarchal imperialism. In doing so, I show how Wright’s fiction serves as a form of advocacy for nonhuman sentient beings. KKeeyywwoorrddss trauma, affect, transgenerational trauma, trauma transmission, literary testimony, poetics, intersectionality, speciesism, Alexis Wright This journal article is available in Animal Studies Journal: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol7/iss1/3 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS Alexis Wright’s Literary Testimony to Intersecting Traumas Meera Atkinson University of Sydney Abstract: This article proffers a reading of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), hailed as ‘the first truly planetary novel’ (Gleeson-White), arguing that Wright’s poetics of transgenerational trauma witnesses to intersected trans-species injustices and traumas. Exploring the way Wright testifies to entanglements of human-nonhuman trauma, I challenge entrenched humanist and speciesist preoccupations in trauma theory to address trauma transmissions with particular focus on trauma as a social and political force generated by patriarchal imperialism. In doing so, I show how Wright’s fiction serves as a form of advocacy for nonhuman sentient beings. Keywords: trauma, affect, transgenerational trauma, trauma transmission, literary testimony, poetics, intersectionality, speciesism, Alexis Wright 41 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS Introduction ‘My sweet Lord, they only see what they want to see. They are blind, not stupid. They see, but they are blind ...’ [italics in original] (Wright 21). Activists use the term ‘tipping-point’ to describe those moments at which the ascent of awareness around a particular injustice peaks, translating to a groundswell of support for radical change, or at least its beginnings. Anti-colonial nationalist independence movements, unionism, anti-slavery and the civil rights movement, Indigenous rights, disability rights, child rights, animal rights/protection and multiple feminisms all sought, and continue to seek, to address and redress systemic traumas and injustices rooted in patriarchy, imperialism and capitalism. Each of the aforementioned movements represents innumerable lives and indignities. The experiences these movements embody need to be, communicated and addressed specifically, in accordance with their specificities of suffering. ‘Intersectionality’ (Crenshaw), both as a conceptual framework and a grass-roots political activism, seeks to identify shared underlying structures between socially interrelated injustices and traumas. At its best, intersectionality does not attempt to replace the specific focus necessary to each struggle, or to dilute it, but rather it builds upon it with a view to more effectively challenging the stranglehold of the patriarchal, imperialist, and capitalist social organisations that underpin structural trauma and disadvantage. In this spirit, I employ an intersectional framework in considering the ways in which Alexis Wright, Australian writer from the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria, testifies to intersected traumata in her groundbreaking works of experimental fiction, Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), with particular focus on the latter. The Swan Book is unique in its depiction of trauma transmissions that exceed human society and in its revelation of traumatic intersections of injustice in society in relation to gender, race and age, but it is its engagement with nonhuman animals that I want to draw attention to in this article, though I do tend to those other aspects in my recently published monograph, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (2017). Despite receiving a number of nuanced and glowing reviews (Webb, Gleeson-White, 42 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS Mulcrone), this aspect of Wright’s work has not to my knowledge been addressed in a sustained way. Nonhuman animals are threatened and becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, and there are claims from the scientific community that the consequences of climate change are poised to increase to levels that endanger human life and community (Barnett and Adger; Berry, Bowen and Kjellstrom). This suggests that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions operate as a form of trauma transmission in as much as they appear to be having devastating consequences for the environment and nonhuman beings, which can be considered fundamentally traumatic. Psychic trauma describes an experience that occurs too quickly or suddenly to be processed, that alters brain function and other aspects of subjectivity, returning in delayed symptomology, which often appears pathological. The literary trauma theory of the 1990s ‘trauma turn’ was a purely humanistic concern, which is to say it involved an emphasis on human experience and language (and the perceived difficulty of representing trauma linguistically in conventional terms). While that is understandable to some degree given the precedent set for trauma theory by Holocaust Studies and cultural trauma theory’s focus on literary testimony, the continuing overlooking of the many among us not human is not ethically justifiable. Trauma is not simply the upsetting memory of an event located in the past; it involves a complex psychic operation that challenges the notion of a distinct psychic past and present. As Cathy Caruth puts it: For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence. (18) This has obvious implications regarding human society and testimony, but though the implications are somewhat less obvious for nonhuman animals, it has been convincingly argued that nonhuman animals do experience trauma and that focus on this is warranted (Bradshaw; Bradshaw et al.). As Wright shows us in The Swan Book, the mass traumatisation of nonhuman animals is one of junctures of injustice wrought by contemporary settler-colonial society in Australia. 43 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS If intersectionality is a useful framework through which to re-think traumatic affect and transmission, it is also a potentially tricky one. Specific struggles warrant their own platforms and primary representations by those affected (and/or their allies and advocates), but it is also compelling and productive to examine the ways in which oppressions and injustices intersect, even if some compromise is inevitable in terms of pointed focus. I am aware too that any consideration of nonhuman animals in the intersectional matrix in relation to trauma will likely attract charges of anthropomorphism. As Teja Brooks Pribac says, the stalwart opposition to so- called anthropomorphism is a convention that ‘favours an unwarranted, highly separatist view in regard to different others’ (76) that has, through its negative connotations and exposure over time, induced a knee-jerk fear of being associated with it. As she observes, the emergence of Critical Animal Studies and Human-Animal Studies means the dogma of anthropomorphism has come under scrutiny in contemporary Western academic discourse, drawing strong criticism for ‘engendering reductionist views’ (76). I am allied with David Brooks when he insists that rather than being wary of the capacity for empathetic affect to inform our view of, and relations with, nonhuman animals, we should rather embrace it. We must, he says, ‘develop, articulate and amplify’ the feelings we experience in engagement with the world. We must sensitise ourselves to it, experience and relate to it the only way we can, ‘which is to extend our senses into it, and guard ourselves against – consider most carefully – any voices which would have us turn our backs on it’ (52). If either Wright or myself are culpable of charges of anthropomorphism it is my view that Wright’s is – and my contention that mine is also – ‘an anthropomorphism that serves to remind us of anthropomorphism’s inadequacies’ (Finlay 75). When it comes to the ‘immense question of pathos’ that Jacques Derrida summons (‘The Animal That Therefore I Am,’ 395), I stand with the ‘minority, weak, marginal voices little assured of their discourse, of their right to discourse and of the enactment of their discourse within the law’ (395) in advocating on behalf of nonhuman animals. I make no apology for championing nonhuman animals; I only regret the perpetration and ‘organized disavowal’ of their subjugation (395), for which my own kind is wholly responsible. 44 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS Traumatic Intersections and Entanglements in The Swan Book Intersectionality emerged from the work of African American feminists dissatisfied with the ways in which (white) Western feminism failed to reflect their experience. Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix describe it as ‘signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis of differentiation –economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts’ (76). The framework of intersectionality enables examination of the ways in which patriarchy, imperialism and capitalism have thrived on overlapping oppressions and discriminations around gender, race, class, species and so on. Awareness of intersected injustices and their transgenerational impact also affords more equitable acknowledgement and restitution of oppressions, discriminations, and histories of violence. Even though there have been welcome developments in terms of public consciousness of abuses and injustices relating to nonhuman animals, many people still minimize or are oblivious to the systematic suffering of animals. Wright was already paying mind to nonhuman trauma in her writing back in Carpentaria. When Norm and Bala return to the post-cyclone flattened ghost town of Desperance on the second-last page in that novel, the only living beings they encounter are dogs: He was met by the bony, hollow-ribbed, abandoned dogs of the town that had run to the hills and back again after the cyclone. Now, having appeared from nowhere, they roamed along streets that no longer existed, searching for their owners. They did not bark or howl. The shock of the cyclone had left them like this: speechless, dumbfounded, unable to crack a bark. Unable to emit a sound out of their wide-opened mouths. (518) This scene of dogs stripped of voice, abandoned by humans, and traumatised by the effects of possible human-induced climate change is painfully affecting. For the reader, it is the deadening of the naturally expressive nature of dogs, to whom our historically strong bond renders us especially sympathetic, that makes this such an unsettling scene. 45 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS Nonhuman animals figure so significantly in Wright’s fiction that when Sophie Cunningham posed a question during an interview beginning with, ‘At what point did Oblivia, the main character ...’ she stopped and corrected herself with, ‘the main human character’ [my italics] (The Wheeler Center). And when Cunningham pointed out that animals ‘have as much authority’ as human characters in The Swan Book, Wright replied: ‘I’ve always liked animals, since I was a child, but also in the Indigenous world everything is sacred and animals are sacred and have stories’. Wright went on to discuss her perplexing discovery, during the course of researching the book, that Australian black swans have been disappearing from typical habitats and appearing in odd numbers in unusual places. The Swan Book is not an easy story to summarise, largely because it proceeds less by way of plot and logic and more by way of character- and affect-driven imagination. In stripped back terms, it tells the story of Bella Donna, an old woman and refugee of the climate change wars in the Northern Hemisphere, who rescues a mute Aboriginal girl called Oblivia, severely traumatised following a gang rape. After Bella Donna’s death, Warren Finch, a magnetic Indigenous hero of dubious integrity, risen to the rank of Deputy President of Australia on the back of mining deals, kidnaps Oblivia, believing her to be his promised wife, and imprisons her in a southern city, from which she eventually escapes to be reunited with her country and the swans that populate the book from the title to the final page. In these pages, contact with humans and human-influenced environments are nothing less than a traumatising catastrophe for nonhuman animals. The book matters politically because it speaks poetically and profoundly to many pressing concerns in twenty-first century society. In Wright’s hands, violence against women, child abuse, racism and neo-colonialism, climate change and the ravaging of the environment, unethical corporatism, the exploitation and suffering of nonhuman animals, and reprehensible immigration policies and practices are woven together, along with love and the fleshed goodness of beings, human and nonhuman, with their many idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. Wright’s extraordinary ability to bring an Indigenous conception of animals alive in stories set in the contemporary world reveals nonhuman animals’ involvement in the traumatic cycles of, and 46 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS beyond, humanity. Passages like the following recount routine scenes of horror, testifying to the traumatic effect of human civilisation on animals as collateral damage: A crescendo of dead – the carcasses of splattered or bloated bullocks and native animals lay over the sealed or unsealed corrugated roads, where the eyes of dingoes and curlews gleamed in the headlights ... the girl watched as they collected those still with a trace of life: small rodents, mangled rabbits, various marsupials, broken-back snakes, a bush turkey, a smashed echidna. (165) This is the work-a-day world divorced from the land it plunders, disconnected from relatedness and conscience. Here, Wright depicts the price nonhuman animals pay for whitefella ways, contrasted throughout with Aboriginal people’s understandings of nonhuman others. As Patrick Condliffe has asserted in his reading and defense of the work of B. Wonger (later outed as Serbian immigrant Sreten Božić), the distinction between animals and humankind in First Nations cultures is made very differently and less completely than in non-Indigenous cultures. ‘In terms of representation, symbolism, and totems,’ Condliffe writes, ‘the animal and the human are considered part of the same spiritual and creative order’ (186). There are many examples of inter-species affective communications and transmissions in both Carpentaria and The Swan Book; for example, in the latter, the cuckoos and cockatoos hear ‘every single thing and, it might be, their nervous flinching and tapping of beaks on wood were imitating insecurities in the hearts of the children’ (51). Condliffe proclaims that B. Wonger’s ‘Kafkaesque narratives’ challenge the ‘colonial language of racism by making corporeal and spiritual identity a liminal thing that shares, at least within the human mind, something of the same space as animality’ (184). This might also be extended to Wright, although The Swan Book not only deals with a history of racism in which ‘taxonomies of descent’ ascribe ‘differentiation between groups’, between ‘those with voice and rights and those without’ (Condliffe 189), it also tackles the history of imperialist ‘anthroparchy’ (a term coined by Erika Calvo in a 2008 essay to represent the nexus of patriarchy and the anthropocene) as it plays out across a range of intersections. It is the sheer depth, breadth and complexity of Wright’s vision that led Jane Gleeson-White to proclaim The Swan Book ‘the first truly planetary novel’. Gleeson-White’s assessment signals an important point about Wright’s 47 ALEXIS WRIGHT’S LITERARY TESTIMONY TO INTERSECTING TRAUMAS reach in The Swan Book. One of its great achievements is the way it addresses both local and global concerns showing how the injustices of settler-colonialism relate to the multinational corporatised capitalist project. That the two are intimately entwined has been evident since Europeans developed the seafaring means to venture forth to exploit the wealth of riches, resources, and inhabitants of the ‘New World’. So it is that Wright is also writing against what David Brooks has called ‘saturation capitalism’, which he defines as consumerism driven by the ‘deep wound’ and ‘ontological distress’ (47) at the divide between head and heart and human and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman Animal Inclusive Intersectional Trauma Testimony The controversial ‘ethical philosopher’ Peter Singer popularised the term ‘Speciesism’ in his seminal 1975 book Animal Liberation. It refers to the assumption of human superiority and the relegation of nonhuman animals to the status of things and property, leading to systematic dominance and exploitation. Speciesism is widely considered among many scholars working in Critical Animal Studies, and activists at large, to be a central feature of Western culture, along with sexism and racism (and other structurally established bigotries). With roots in patriarchal history, attitudes and customs, speciesism is now being interrogated across a diverse range of academic fields. The Institute for Critical Animal Studies’ website states that the intention in creating the term Critical Animal Studies was to denote an interdisciplinary field ‘dedicated to establishing a holistic total liberation movement for humans, nonhuman animals, and the Earth.’ This was deemed necessary in order to address speciesist tendencies within the higher education sector by bringing diversely disciplined scholars together ‘under one common field of study, similar to that of other marginalised fields of study (such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latina/o Studies, Native American Studies)’ (ICAS). An exciting and eclectic array of (often interdisciplinary and intersectional) scholarly approaches to critiquing interspecies relations between humans and nonhuman individuals has emerged via a wide range and diversity of avenues. It is within this multi- and inter-disciplinary development that I seek to make a critical contribution toward the end of speciesism within 48