For the uninfected, a summary; Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is a work of speculative fiction that extrapolates from the circumstances of the Howard and Gillard government’s draconian interventions into Northern Territory First Nations communities in the first decades of the twenty-first century, to a future where the radical, destabilising effects of the Anthropocene on climate, on cohesive social fabric, are experienced through the fragmented understanding of a mute Indigenous woman, infected, devocalised, by experiences of violence and the ongoing effects of the colonising virus within her mind.
We begin in a swamp, in Oblivia’s head (whom autocorrect tells us is either Bolivia or Olivia, and who are we to argue?) strewn with the derelict carcasses of ships; a history itself written in the seeping diesel and staining rust of trawlers, hulks, warships, refugee boats, inhabited by discarded people. Raped by petrol-sniffing youths as a girl, and we might suspect from her name alone partaking of the oblivion granted by the fractionated remains of long dead forests and dinosaurs, Oblivia sleeps hidden in the hollow bole of a mothertree for twenty years, before being found and cared for by an elderly European woman, also an inhabitant of the ship’s graveyard, part of a largely abandoned community of internal and external refugees, overseen by the dubious patronage of the state, eking out an existence on a swamp claimed by thousands of black swans, in the hinterlands of Australia where no swamp, and no black swans previously existed.
Later, Olivia is kidnapped by Warren Finch, the Aboriginal wunderkind of Australian politics, who believes Olivia was betrothed to him when they were young. By his fervour we suspect he was one of those oblivion-seeking abusers, though we can never be quite certain. With Finch and his chorus of three muses/bodyguards, Olivia is taken on a latter-day odyssey through the inverted Australian landscape, where desert has become wetland, temperate forests subsumed by parched, encroaching sands, the cycles of growth and rebirth at risk and disrupted, until finally she is abandoned by Finch and held like a captive princess in a marvelled city tower in the nation’s capital. Now, The First Lady of Australia, like Hamlet (as Ophelia describes him, and perhaps our Oblivia is Hamlet/Ophelia in one) her noble and most sovereign reason/like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh, (Act 3 1.155) we can but accompany her on her quest to “regain sovereignty over my own brain.” A quest to free herself from Finch, from the invasive conditions of postcolonialism, from the virus-like madness it has created, a quest in which she is both haunted and comforted by the sounds and images of her displaced, native swans.
Indeed, it is a text that despite its difficulties, demands of us Ophelia’s subsequent imperative; T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (Act 3 1.159)
There is a presumption (and in the postcolonial legacy of our innocence and our guilt, who are we exactly to presume?) that despite its contradictions, we should accept the intended literality of this experience. Honni van Rijswijk in her article Archiving The Northern Territory Intervention in Law and in the Literary Counter-Imaginary quotes Wright as saying that through this kind of narrative she is trying “create a truer replica of reality.” Van Rijswijk herself describes it as both a counter to the historical, legal, state sanctioned archive, and a counter to the way the public imaginary narrativises the consequences of occupation. That in amongst its haunting scenes of surreal and implausible disruption and decay, a decay imbued with and referencing the operatic, gothic beauty of European high culture, that we should accept its projections at face value.
Of course nothing is ever as it seems, and perhaps we should take the haunting, improbable presence of Olivia’s black swans as a cue; Wright describes herself how until their “discovery” by Dutch venturers in 1697 off the coast of Western Australia the black swan was considered a rara avis, something thought nonexistent, the phrase itself meaning, up until the point (or indeed, counterpoint) of the bird’s discovery, something from the realm of the fantastic. Then it became a “celebration for science, a fact stripped from myth.” Upon becoming real, it transforms as symbol, as metaphor, becomes both a signifier of the extraordinary coming to life, and also, according statistical philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his monograph Silent Risk, a metaphor for a significant, unpredictable event, that we rationalise with the benefit of hindsight as something eminently predictable. In the postcolonizing discourses of the Anthropocene, the confluence of these contradictory imaginaries, where something remains both mythic, symbolic, metaphoric, unimaginable, imaginary, insane, transforms into something exotic, wonderful, mysterious, and then again into something at once real, prosaic, unpredicted but predictable we are left in kind of dissonance in which a tripartite truth masks (with an operatic glory) a madness that can be quite real.
Oblivia Ethyl(ene), whose very name seems at once a poetic interjection and a symbolic extrapolation from the more prosaic Olivia Ethyl, we might in these terms understand as having been damaged by the violence of rape, the violent self-erasure of hydrocarbon inhalation, and rather than sleeping inside a tree for two decades, fell into a coma or dissociative state, not on the fringes of an abandoned swamp, but perhaps in the haunted, twilit swamp of a state facility for the damaged, the unsane. We can perhaps imagine the old white woman who cares for her, the aptly named Bella Donna of the Champions, as her psychiatrist, the other figures imagined projections from the fellow inhabitants of her demi-real world.
Such a reading does not quite gel with interpretations of the book as a rendering of, as Cornelis Martin Renes terms it in the conclusion to his article on Alexis Wright’s fiction, Aboriginal Realism, and the Sovereignty of the Indigenous Mind, an “Aboriginal realism [that] posits Indigenous life experience as the basis for an Australian epistemology, in which Dreaming narrative flows from a sovereign universe whose spiritual and material effects question the legacy of the Enlightenment.” Providing a parallel in fictional narrative to Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s assertion in her article, I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place In A White Postcolonizing Society, of the Aboriginal relationship to land as being one of “ontological belonging,” and Indigenous ontology that confronts and unsettles the postcolonizing belonging asserted by non-Indigenous Australians.
In Pemulway: Rainbow Warrior, Eric Willmot’s novelisation of the life of Pemulway, the Eora warrior who lead the resistance against the British in the first, apocalyptic years of colonisation, an Eora storyteller recounts the fable of the girl Yanada, who, due to a quirk in the marriage laws of her people, found herself promised to one of her clan’s leading hunters, but in love with and eligible to another. The loss of either, or both hunters through injury or death in their rivalry, could potentially harm the whole clan. One day, the clan wakes to Yanada making inarticulate sounds, barking, raving, tearing at her hair, kicking over campfires, as if possessed by a bad spirit. The Eora storyman describes how in that madness there are three parts of truth. The first; the truth that is easily understood by all; that she is mad. The second; the dialogical truth, the truth that is in the minds of others; that her madness can harm the community, so she must be expelled, banished, forbidden from having children, a socially constructed and necessitated truth.
The third part of truth, so the Eora storyteller tells us, is a truth that we can only learn for ourselves; a truth not readily apprehensible; that as a catalyst for conflict, disharmony and trauma, the girl served her people by bringing herself into madness.
Madness has its own value, its own ontology, its own often more compelling way of revealing truth in the world, the story within the story. When, with Ophelia, we lament, oh what noble mind is here o’erthrown! (Hamlet Act 3, 1.148) we should perhaps understand that unsovereign unreason makes its own legitimate demands.
Moreton-Robinson’s assertion, that land and being are inseparable, in its way disenfranchises all those who have already been disenfranchised. Those people who for so many reasons are separated from land, from culture, from tradition, from language, from that ontological belonging that for her defines Indigeneity in relation to postcolonising realities. That like Oblivia, like Yanada, conduct themselves into madness. The phrase itself, the philosophical discourse in which it is argued, the philosophical tradition from whence it comes, even this discourse in the tradition of rhetoric that proposes to refute it, is alien to that sometimes necessary beingness.
Whether that viral, colonising invasive culture can ever be overthrown while we continue to use its tools, its systems, its structures, its prosthetics to make our world and make ourselves remains moot. What we can, perhaps do, as our immunity is curtailed by the stressors of our ongoing contradictions, is hope for a competing virus, a competing symbology, a competing language, a competing, yet more amenable madness. If we ignore the rhetoric, the analysis, the critique around The Swan Book, and similar works, and rather, open ourselves to its poetics and contradictions, with one ear harkening to the distant buffeting of wings, we may understand that, while there is absolutely no way back, we might, in these discourses of magic realism, of Aboriginal realism, of hallucinatory realism, just be holding the beginnings of a map.
