Matthew Hall interviews Jeanine Leane
I first met Jeanine Leane in Canberra at the 2016 ASAL conference, and we very quickly established a correspondence in relation to contiguities in our ongoing scholarship. It was with great excitement when, some time later, I discussed Jeanine’s work with Kent MacCarter, Cordite Poetry Review’s main editor, and discovered that he had reached out to Jeanine to see if she would be interested in publishing a new book of poems with Cordite Books. This book, Walk Back Over, is forthcoming in 2017.
‘All is not lost or hopeless when there is poetry.’
Natalie Harkin, Rabbit 21.
It is not lost on me that the name of this journal tugs against the current issue’s dedication to Indigenous poetries—the rabbit is a pest, an interloper, on Australian soil; a signifier of colonisation. I grew up with rabbits all around: big white bunnies with brown spots that were our pets, dragging the hutch across the lawn to mow another patch of grass; wild rabbits in the paddocks that had to be controlled; Nanna’s rabbit stew; Nanna saying KFC was actually rabbit meat; rabbits in the headlights with myxo-eyes; a hind leg and two kidneys deposited by a fox beneath the car. When I was born, my sister gifted me her toy rabbit, and he is still a constant companion.
As we grow, we develop an awareness of heritage, history, context. We learn to question what we have been taught, what may have been left out. When I was in high school, the history of Australia was taught through a sweeping and warped lens; Indigenous genocide and dispossession was a subject brushed over on the way to studying the harsh conditions endured by settler colonies. Literature classes were white-washed; Indigenous writers unquestioningly avoided. I knew more about rabbits than I did about the traditional peoples on whose land those rabbits flourished.
Poetry helped to correct my vision. As I developed a love for poetry, my awareness and appreciation of Australian Indigenous literatures advanced alongside, and part of this was due to the powerful and educating influence of poetry communities. Tony Birch, at one time my university tutor, introduced me to the work of poets such as Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty; poetry friends and colleagues educated me on fierce women writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Ali Cobby Eckermann.
More recently, festivals and poetry events have enabled me to connect with indomitable poets Ellen Van Neerven, Natalie Harkin, and Alison Whittaker. ‘Indigenous poetry’ is irreducible; yet, as the poems in this issue demonstrate, indigenous writers are frequently seeking to test and push the boundaries of language and the line in writing place, voice and history.
I am grateful to the hard work of Alison Whittaker in editing the poetry for this issue and in bringing together such a rich confluence of tal- ented indigenous voices—both established and emerging—from around the globe. It is equally wonderful to celebrate indigenous art and writing through the reviews, interviews, essay and artwork.
This Rabbit wishes to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which it is published; to acknowledge all traditional owners globally who have suffered the effects of colonisation, who persevere, rally together, find voice in beautiful art; to welcome indigenous voices to contribute to many Rabbit issues to come.
This interview originally appeared in Rabbit 21: Indigenous.
Matthew Hall: How do you define the relationship between Aboriginal Women’s Writing & Sovereignty?
Jeanine Leane: I see sovereignty not as a geopolitical concept but as something Aboriginal people can enact as a movement—a ‘soft power’ if you like, as opposed to the hard power of mechanisms of state such as the colonial government itself, the military, the constabulary etc. Aboriginal sovereignty comes through the power of Aboriginal people to influence and educate the socio-cultural mindset of settler Australia. Writing has a big role to play in this as does Aboriginal media, art, performance, scholarship etc.
I see writing as particularly important in enacting sovereignty because from the early days of invasion Aboriginal people were stolen, captured, imprisoned in the name of writing. Early examples of this are Bennelong and Boorong abducted in 1789, held, (particularly Boorong) against their own will and made to learn English and to read & write. This marks the beginning of the long relationship between Aboriginal people, writing and incarceration.
Australian settler history is full of attempts made to force writing upon us as a superior form of recoding and cultural transmission. Yet while it was the colonial expectation that we would be ‘civilised’ through writing and reading, we were, as my own and many of the educational experiences of my Aboriginal peers show, not expected to achieve the same standards, reach the same intellectual capacity, as whites. Yet the blooming and continued growth of Aboriginal published works from the 60s onwards, and especially since the 80s, is a testimony to the fact that we have mastered the settler tool of writing without losing our culture, connections to Country and story, and we use it now as a tool to express many things. That to me is enacting sovereignty in a particular space and time & locale that is part of a bigger picture of Aboriginal intellectual sovereignty.
MH: Given that much of your writing speaks to the idea of home, Country, and belonging, I was wondering if you could address Benedict Anderson’s idea that ‘the nation might be defined as an imagined community.’ As a prominent female, Indigenous author, how do you imagine your community, and by extension, your nation?
JL: In 2013 I was invited to give the Dorothy Green address at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. This is home for me—I was born in Wagga Wagga & this is my Country. I chose to speak about the long and continuing misrepresentation of us in settler literature as a continued settler colonial effort to ‘write nation over Country.’ This is what I had to say:
I would like to offer an Aboriginal standpoint on some familiar tropes in British settler diaspora literature that have written and still write the Aborigine in the white imagination. It may be tempting to think, as the permanent invaders of this Country, that the British might be ‘settled’ but the journey for settlement and resettlement is ongoing; the two post-Mabo texts I look at show that the continuing settler quest is to ‘write a nation’ because you do have to write nation. In contrast, you do not have to write Country because Country is. But a nation, as Benedict Anderson pointed out in his seminal work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, is an imagined political community. In Australia, the nation attempts to write over many Countries. This paper tracks Aboriginal containment in the settler quest to belong.1
Also, as a writer I draw great strength & inspiration from my ‘home culture’ & I spoke about this in an essay called ‘Home Talk.’2 That essay talks about how my Country, family & stories have been the grounding for my later life as a writer, teacher & academic. The locale of my Country & People is powerful & as a writer I see it as my responsibility to keep writing my Country back into this imagined settler nation.
MH: Connected to my previous question is the idea of the Indigenous writer as activist; is this still the case for your writing? And will this always be the case for Indigenous writers?
JL: I think I have partly answered this above. But, yes, for me it is always some form of activism that drives my poetry, prose and scholarly writings. Whether it be injustices in the national or international picture or whether it is a comment I hear at work, in a shop or on public transport, being a writer for me is being able to respond to such things in a medium that has the potential to reach a wider audience.
I am not inspired to write poetry that is clever in image and style or that is ‘experimental’ (whatever that means—the term annoys me but it gets bandied around & I think it means something that ‘looks different on a page’ or ‘has some shock value’ just for the sake of being experimental. I can’t get inspired just to craft something because it may look or sound good—something has to move me or really affect me to make me want to write about it, in a way that I hope might bring it to the attention of others. I am lousy at doing activities where an object is sat in front of me and I am asked to paint or write about it—because it has no context & therefore no ‘soul’ for me.
I do believe, though, that you can write activism into many things and one point of my writing—especially my first volume of poems Dark Secrets After Dreaming: AD 1887-1961 (Presspress 2010) & my first novel Purple Threads (UQP 2011)—was to speak to the activism of the women who raised me, that was mainly enacted through the power of secrets held and passed on to future generations. Aboriginal women are the great gatherers of many things—food of course, but also stories and inner strength. The women who raised me had vast reserves of inner strength & to pass that on is a powerful act of activism that should never go underrated or unnoticed.
Likewise, my most recent piece of scholarly writing was inspired by comments German-American author Lionel Shriver made last year at the Brisbane Writers Festival on cultural appropriation. I was outraged.3
MH: How do you see the interplay between fiction and poetry, the two genres in which you write?
JL: Many people have commented that I write across a number of genres— poetry, extended prose (novel & short story) & scholarly articles, essays, book chapters etc.
As someone who grew up with stories I don’t see the lines of categorisation between poetry & prose so clearly drawn as is sometimes made out or implied. I see a conversation happening in writing and often I start with an idea that drives me and experiment about the best way to write about it.
The power of poetry to tell a story, though, I think is largely underrated— as a short form much is made of the aesthetics—and ‘literary devices’ per se—all things I never consider when I’m starting a poem. I’m focusing on story—what is my story here?
Something common to all my writing though is that it is driven by an inner stirring—some restlessness that won’t let me rest until I have written something.
Natalie Harkin speaks of a ‘haunting’ in relation to the colonial past & the experiences of women in her family that has ‘called her’ to revisit much of what was stored in the archive & to respond to it through poetry. I believe in ghosts and ‘other presences’ as I was raised that way—not to fear the spirits of those past but to listen to them.
My Aunty & Nanna said restless spirits from the past should be listened to as they can guide you in the present—there are lots of restless spirits from my past. This belief in particular cuts across all my writing. This may seem a strange thing to say about some of my academic writing but I strive to get away from ideas of objectivity and distance between reader and writer signified by use of impersonal language & jargon and see all my writing as ‘a story.’ A story has special reverence where I come from & recently I reviewed the republication of Paddy Roe’s Gularbulu where Paddy says in the introduction ‘See this is the thing they used to tell us: Story, and we know.’ That’s powerful & I think for a long time I was intimidated by other forms of writing & I felt like I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t ‘fit my words and sentiments to the conventions.’ It wasn’t until I started writing with other Aboriginal writers in a writers group we formed in Canberra in the late 90s that I got the confidence & found the support network of like-minded people who also realise the value of story for Aboriginal people. I wrote about this in more detail in the essay ‘Home Talk.’
MH: How do you situate contemporary Australian Indigenous writing within the constructs of global Indigeneity?
JL: Just briefly here—outside of Australia there is a lot of interest in Aboriginal writing post-Mabo. Lots of the scholarship is dynamic & comes out of the USA & Europe.
There is a trend that bothers me, though, as both an Aboriginal writer and as a scholar and that is the tendency (in what I think is poor & superficial scholarship) to ‘lump all people of oppression together’ and make tenuous connections between caste & class systems of oppression & the situation in Australia. Australia is a settler colony—it is not post-colonial in my view—even though the post-colonialists are retreating/revising their original definition to now mean ‘continuing problems of colonialism.’ The definition was borrowed from India that is a completely different type of colonialism. Recently I was in India as a guest at the Hyderabad Literature Festival & I stayed on at the University of Hyderabad to discuss further research collaborations I have with some Indian scholars around women’s writing more broadly. Heavily driving this agenda as a cause for concern was the recent ‘forced & externally driven comparisons made between minority groups under the broader umbrella of oppression theories.’ I see this as one of the ongoing & detrimental legacies of post-colonial theory—a one size fits all approach to Indigenous peoples.
Australian Aboriginal literature is something on its own & grows out of its own locales and should be viewed as such. Just as Dalit literature should & all other minority literatures.
MH: Can you provide a pretext for your forthcoming collection of poetry with Cordite Books?
JL: It’s what might loosely be called docu-poetry in that much of it responds to a body of written material—archives, records from now defunct institutions, for example; Joseph Harrington defines it as poetry that contains reproductions of documents or state not written by the author & it relates to historical narratives, whether macro or micro or human nature past & present; or Marianne Moore— ‘poetry including history by including business documents & school books.’
But it is important to say that my work also looks at what has been LEFT OUT of the official records, like emotions—the other side of the paper—what is not said.
It’s an engagement with the interventionist and ongoing nation state in the lives of Aboriginal people in the crime scene that is Australia. In contrast to state institutions such as archives, museums, libraries, universities, collection agencies, schools, orphanages, hospitals etc. & their methods of ‘recording’ the lives of Aboriginal people, my work explores the body as an archive where memories are stored, anchored & etched. This is a living archive that I inherit and my body too becomes a repository of my family’s Aboriginal history—even before it was told to me & even now as some of it still remains untold or is missing. It’s about re-membering a dismembered past that pervades the present.
The title ‘Walk Back Over’ eludes to a bridge across the Murrumbidgee River where I grew up but more symbolically the need to revisit the past. Much was made of the 2000 Walk Across the Sydney Harbour Bridge & many settler Australians walked across this & other bridges & I am not cynical about that, but, there are many bridges in Australia that need to be walked over & not just once—walked back over.
MH: Finally, can you comment on what you are presently writing and what has been the focus of your writing since moving to Melbourne?
JL: I have had a lot of creative energy since I came to Melbourne. I’ve just completed an MS for a new novel, the working title of which is WISE. Without giving too much away about an as yet unpublished work, I’d describe it as a piece of gritty, urban realism that relives the booms, crashes and excesses of the 1980s—the decade that changed Australia forever. Told from a third-person perspective, it details the life of a young Aboriginal woman, Honey, living in the National Capital in the lead up to the bicentenary of the 1788 Invasion. It is set against the backdrop of Canberra in its halcyon days before the Self-Government of 1989: and, when the rest of Australia knew it as the Sex and Drugs Capital.
Paralleling the highs and lows of the turbulent decade in the big political picture are the personal experiences—booms and crashes—of Honey as she emerges as a young adult and is part of a growing Aboriginal urban middle class in a city of excess and liberal laws poised on the brink of change.
And, because I love it I have been working on some new poetry—non-fictional poetry in particular and mostly around something that is ‘stirring inside me’ at the moment around the differences between Gatherers & Collectors.
Gathering is an important and ongoing practice of Aboriginal women—not just in the physical sense of food, but also, the metaphysical aspect of gathering stories and storing family knowledge & secrets. Collectors on the other hand ‘take things’ including people & put them in collections, displays, cabinets, boxes etc. or collect information on others and choose what they do and don’t make public. Secrets too, draw me; the duplicity of secrets themselves—secrets as a national disgrace & secrets that have allowed me to survive, re-member & remember my family’s history.
I have some new poems coming out this year & early 2018 in various literary journals. And as always academic/scholarly publications—a few of which are forthcoming later in 2017.