Translating aboriginality: A look at the limitations and the strengths of “universal” storytelling
How do we tell an Aboriginal Australian story to the world?
The realm of representation always mediates the real through the symbolic, fundamentally bound up in a process of translation. Representation is always of something, by someone, and to someone [1], in a complex triangle of subjectivities. The question always arises: Should representation mean tailoring and adapting one’s own lived experience to fit another’s understanding of lived experience (often distorting the original experience), or should it attempt the reverse instead: a foreignization of experience to remain true to its very subjectivity and un-relatability? There are advantages and disadvantages to both - one loyal to form and uniqueness, and the other to the carrying-over of sentiments, desired feelings and messages.
Contemporary Australian films Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), by Philip Noyce, and Ten Canoes (2006), by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djiggir, are extremely strong works in their own respects, yet they feature Indigenous Australian protagonists and stories through radically different ways of seeing and knowing. Ten Canoes, a film co-directed by aboriginal Australian director Peter Djiggir, seems to have more “rights” to the reconstruction and reimagining of Aboriginality than Rabbit-Proof Fence because it stays true to Aboriginal ways of storytelling at the expense of the foreign audience’s ability to relate. However, more mainstream films like Rabbit-Proof Fence that universalize culturally specific experience hold an important role in celebrating unity and humanity, above culture and nation.
“In aboriginal ways of knowing, story, time and landscape are bound together very literally.”
Ten Canoe chose authenticity of representation over foreign relatability.
While ‘Western’ ways of knowing and seeing are based on clear and fixed definitions of individuality and property, Aboriginal ways of knowing could be described as a process of constant reiteration and tracing of knowledge: turning and moulding the environment into one flowing creation-story that is always being retraced. Story, time and landscape are therefore bound together very literally - a merging of the world of language and that of physical reality that allows for a constant fluidity of meaning.
Ten Canoes was inspired by photographs depicting a goose-egg hunt traditionally held every year, and interestingly the film revolves not around telling a story that stays true to the photographs, but rather writing a story through the photographs. Just as in traditional Aboriginal ways of knowing kinship and ownership is reiterated through one’s rights to tell a certain story (to retrace a landscape through language), only the person who was a direct descendent of one of the ancestors in the photograph was allowed to play that ancestor’s part in the film.
The main shot required weeks of preparation because ‘[t]hat shot of the Ten Canoes became central. It became the quest. It was the Holy Grail. It was to that shot’ (de Heer 2006c).” [2] To the Ramingining community, reproducing the images from the Thomson photographs collection rendered Ten Canoes an exact insight into the ‘real life’ of 1930s and 40s Australia. “In viewing the Dayindi story the local audience were literally re-experiencing those days.” (Hamby, 128) That act of re-experiencing is in fact central to Aboriginal ways of knowing, and is part of what gives the story its authenticity of representation.
In Rabbit Proof Fence arises the issue of a dominant foreign culture “packaging” indigenous experience into a globally-relatable story.
In certain ways, the framework of Rabbit-Proof Fence, in allowing a white audience to relate to the Aboriginal protagonists, could be seen as detrimental to the representation of child removals. While the film conveys the experience of confronting an unjust ‘white’ authority, the director of the film is nevertheless not of Aboriginal descent, and his representation of the girls’ point of view could be said to come from a conception informed by ‘Western’ ideas - within Western normative biases - of what it means to be a child taken from home.
This is reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s question of whether the subaltern can ‘speak’ or represent itself, or whether they can only gain a semblance of “voice” through the foreign discourse of the dominant culture. In “Kooramindanjie: Place and the Postcolonial,” Jackie Huggings states, “Whites must not [take] advantage of their privileged speaking positions to contract an external vision of ‘us’ which may pass for our ‘reality.’ There must be limits to the ways our worlds are re-written or placed in conceptual frameworks which are not our own.”[3] With its universalized, culturally-unspecific modes of storytelling, Hollywood is, in a sense, giving a denatured voice to the stories of Aboriginal people.
However, in spite of its Western-style, triumph-vs-adversity themed narration, Rabbit Proof Fence and the universal emotions it engenders has an immeasurable value of its own.
Noyce defends his film’s Holywood elements in their ‘appeal to the senses,’ and the fact that ‘Holywood knows how to reach audiences’ and that its set of skills are ideal to ‘sell an Indigenous story to the mainstream.’”[4] In fact, although the plot line of the film is highly-politicized and dramatized, explicitly focused on ‘communicating the findings of Bringing Them Home, including the racist, genocidal thinking that underpinned policies of Aboriginal child removal” (Collins, 139), it is vibrant with human emotion. This is what ensured its success worldwide. “For critic Evan Williams, […] ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence has been made with such transparent humanity and idealism it scarcely seems to matter whether the story is true or not’” (Collins, 136). The love and care between sisters, the endurance and unwavering persistence of the human spirit, an incredible journey exemplifying our potential as human beings: Rabbit Proof Fence is a celebration of humanity, transgressing - rather than misrepresenting - culture, community and nation.
“It is vibrant with human emotion. This is what ensured its success worldwide.”
“What we know is that the thousands of untold, ‘buried’ stories of Aboriginal child removal cannot be fully recovered for the public record. We cannot use film to magically reconstruct lost or, to use Carthun’s term, unclaimed experience […] The film has, however, allowed for a better understanding of the truly traumatic nature of […] child separation as an event that is repeated in various forms of loss, like a nightmare, long after the original injury.” (Mabo, 144)
The deep humanness - rather than specific culture - that is present throughout the film allows Noyce to assume his representation of Aboriginal children and form a believable portrayal of their struggles. Aboriginal filmmaker and historian Frances Peters Little argues, “To think that Aboriginal filmmakers can shoot any Aboriginal community and capture the core of their history, politics, culture, personal relationships and social interactions without offending or misrepresenting anyone is presumptuous to say the least.” He adds, “Sometimes you just have to be a good filmmaker.” [5]
Rabbit Proof Fence does re-imagine and universalize the emotions of the trauma of the stolen child in a way that makes it relatable to a global audience, but it does so in a self-consciously respectful and careful way.
For one, the film does not force its Aboriginal characters into two-dimensional paradigms. Molly is a well-rounded character, determined, resourceful, beaming with intelligence and touching in her devotion to her little sister. Though the characters are ultimately also constructions within the ‘Western’ frame of the film, they are undeniably human.
The film also does not fix stereotypes or myths that would otherwise stifle it. When Molly emerges from the desert first as a child and then as a grown woman at the end of the film, she no longer symbolizes the ‘lost child,’ but rather Aboriginal survival and “the recognition of Aboriginal people as being at home in their country” (Collins, 149). It is in this way the film is almost a kind of apology in itself, burning with an aura of guilt and full of heartfelt sympathy and recognition. The film, like all works of art, is a form mediated, distorted, reconstructed reality, caught in a net of epistemology, but it successfully tells a very human story.
“The film, like all works of art, is a form mediated, distorted, reconstructed reality, caught in a net of epistemology, but it successfully tells a very human story.”
If we adopt the solipsistic view that experience is subjective and therefore unknowable to all those who exist outside that subjectivity, the authenticity of representation depends on where the delineation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ actually is. Lacan describes the self as an entity constituted by, inextricably bound to, dependent on the other.[6] Identity depends on the interplay of differences. There is no self if there is no other to be compared to. “Aboriginality is a field of inter-subjectivity remade over and over again in the process of dialogue, imagination, representation, interpretation,” and one that also incorporates white constructions of what “aboriginal” means (Marcia Langton). There has been lots of theorizing and debate about what Aboriginality actually means, and why it has entered into a “self”-“other” dichotomy that relates it to a form of identity. Much of its significance sprang from the racism around it - from its race-based labelling as “other” by the white settlers. Spivak says, on discourses of identity:
“I think the literature of ethnicity writes itself between ethnos-a writer writing for her own people (whatever that means) […] and ethnikos, the pejoratively defined other reversing the charge, (de)anthropologizing herself by separating herself into a staged identity. The literature of ethnicity in this second sense thus carries, paradoxically, the writer's signature as divided against itself.”[7]
The idea of a “staged identity” and a writer “divided against [himself]” brilliantly evokes the concept that by asserting our selfhood - whatever it may be, in this case Aboriginality - forces us simultaneously to acknowledge, and in fact reinforce, a status as dehumanized “other” in the eyes of those external to “us.” When Higgins states that subjective Aboriginal experience, from a goose egg hunt to the experience of child removal, is untranslatable to a “white audience,” she only further concretizes those racial differences which whites had so strongly vowed there were between them and the Aborigines. Spivak goes on to describe alterity as ‘mysterious and discontinuous,’ always informed by the question: “How many are we?” (Spivak, 33)
To delineate too drastically between ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘white’ blinds us to the actual constructedness of these categories and the fact that underneath all cultural and ethnical differences are the fundamental, grounded templates of human consciousness: love, hope, justice, desire, will, etc. Rabbit Proof Fence is ultimately about hope, love and will, and Ten Canoes revolves around themes of justice (the spearing of the stranger in Ridjimiraril’s story), and the letting go of desire (Dyindi’s impatience with the slow unfolding of the story).
All identity-fixing narrations are bound with the urge to order, but representation in all its forms is irreconcilable with reality.
Despite its adherence to Aboriginal modes of storytelling that give it a form of authenticity that the discursive framework of Rabbit-Proof Fence lacks, Ten Canoes is still a film based on a reconstruction of truths. It too is caught in the frustrating inadequacy of representative forms (such as film) as mediating lived and past experience. The scenes in Ten Canoes are meant to be set in a pre-contact past from which “all traces of outside life have been removed” (Hamby, 136), and yet that past is narrated through the meticulous reproductions of photographs from a time of invasion and trauma.
Thus, “the authentic” in the eyes of the Aborigines becomes both an anxiety-ridden sign of loss and a redemptive fetish. [8] This could be taken in itself as a symbol of the fact that representation is irreconcilable with reality but used as a substitute, and that identity-fixing narrations are bound with the urge to order, remember and internalize trauma that can in reality never be re-experienced or, due to the subjective nature of experience, collectively remembered. […] Although the memory of the original event can be reinterpreted afterwards, there is always something enigmatic or untranslatable in traumatic experience” (Collins, 98).
Trauma and oppression inform a nation’s attempts to establish its identity.
Benedict Anderson argues that to understand the nation, we don’t need to look as much at democratic entities as to look at the legends and the myths that nations “invent” about themselves. The pan-aboriginal identity that connects all aboriginals despite diversity of culture comes from a contemporary bond of collective oppression. “The perpetrators were seen as heroic pioneers who had entered into the place they saw as ‘wild’ but which we called home. […] The killings and mutual hatred created during this period went on long after” (Collins, 170).
The invasion of Australia by white settlers irreversibly shattered the Aborigines’ way of life, and it is this process of displaced and crushed identity that spurred the forging of a national narrative against the colonial power. The opening of Ten Canoes greatly informs this idea: “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away. [Laughs] No, not like that. I’m only joking. But I am going to tell you a story. It’s not your story, it’s my story. A story like you’ve never seen before.” The reference to Star Wars - this modern Western myth - and to Disney makes a statement about replacing an imposed narrative with an ‘enabling’ one for the colonized subject.
“To understand the nation, we don’t need to look as much at democratic entities as to look at the legends and the myths that nations ‘invent’ about themselves.”
What is fascinating about Ten Canoes is the fact that it has become, for the Ramingining people, a mythical truth of the past, despite being built upon a myriad of reconstitutions. “The fictional story that we have told has been consumed by [the Yolgnu] into their culture. So what it is now is that this story has always been” (Hamby, 145). Ten Canoes could not have been created without the photographs - without the invasion - and yet it has become a fundamental part of the Aboriginal communities’ narration. Therefore, the strength of the film does not actually lie in whether or not it is accurate in its representation - because in the end, it is only “a body of fiction based on a skeleton of veracity” - but in what it has accomplished for all the people involved in the film. “The Ramingining Yolngu have indeed been brought closer to their ancestors’ past and their way of life.’ (Hamby, 145)
In both Ten Canoes and Rabbit-Proof Fence, cultural origin is, in Spivak’s terms, “detranscendentalized into fiction.”
We live in an evolving world full of human interactions that force us to blend together our ways of seeing and knowing. Even such a culturally-specific film as Ten Canoes is prone to this. To return to the narrator’s Star Wars joke at the beginning of Ten Canoes, that reference is also part of the film. Not only does it denote a certain global consciousness and a feeling of connectedness and congeniality between the narrator and the global audience, but it recognizes the impossibility of leaving representative forms untainted by the presence of the “other,” which, being human, is not so different, in the end, from the “self.”
“All of us inhabit an interdependent world at once marked by borrowing and lending across porous cultural boundaries, and saturated with inequality, power, and domination.”
Renato Rosaldo
In fact, I agree with Huggins’ statement that the recognition of a “certain co-habitation between the global and the local, the commodified and the vernacular, the mediated and the ‘real’” (my italics) would make a more productive notion of identity. (Huggins, 172). Here Huggins surprisingly advocates the idea that the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ should merge.
Power relations, notions of identity, ideas of nation, are constantly in flux, motivated by an urge to understand and give meaning to ourselves and to the world around us. “If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects […] planetary creatures […], alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. […I]n spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous” (Spivak, 73).
If we forget the ultimately ill-defined boundaries we create between “self” and “other,” we can give value to films like Rabbit Proof Fence not based on a truth-status of representation but purely on the basis of its ability to convey universally-human emotions, and to tell a beautiful story about persistence and will, as worthy of recognition as another, differently-told human story of justice, patience and the beauty of storytelling: Ten Canoes.
[1] Michael Strysick, “Post-Colonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity by Francois Lionnet,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 61, No. 3, Conventional Program Issue (Summer 1996), 169.[2] Louise Hamby, ‘Thomson Times and Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006)’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 1.2 (2007), 132. All further references to this work are cited after quotations in the text.[3] Jackie Huggins, Rita Huggins and Jane M. Jacobs, “Kooramindanjie: Place and the Postcolonial,” History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), 164-81 (p. 167).[4] Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, “Australian Cinema after Mabo,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 137. All further references to this work are cited after quotations in the text.[5] Frances Peters Little, “The Impossibility of Pleasing Everybody: A Legitimate Role For White Filmmakers Making Black Films,” https://www.australianhumantiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Jan-2003/peterslittle.html[6] “Lacan: The Mirror Stage,” http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/index.html[7] Spivak, G.C,. “Chapter 3: Planetarity,” from Death of a discipline. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 71-102 (p. 83). All further references to this text are cited after quotations in the text.[8] G. Huggan, “Ethnic Autobiography and the Cult of Authenticity” in The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, by G. Huggan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 155-176 (p. 157).[9] Benedict R Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (Verso: London, 2006), p. 189.