Lionel Fogarty

The publication of this collection marks a retrospective moment for the Australian literary landscape. Yoogum and Kudjela Lionel Fogarty, born in South Burnett in Southern Queensland, is a poet praised by John Kinsella as ‘the greatest living “Australian” poet’ (2013, 190). The controversial writer, Colin Johnston, also described Fogarty in 1990 as ‘Australia’s strongest poet of Aboriginality’ (26).  I mention Johnston’s voice above others in this review to juxtapose Johnston’s and Fogarty’s fortunes in the last two decades as somewhat tragic and ironic. In this way, I write in heed of the deeply tenuous position Johnston occupies in publishing and scholarship (as explored in depth by Anita Heiss in Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight). In the 1990s, Heiss posits, ‘Johnson published Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature. At the time he was regarded as the authority on Aboriginal writing, and anything associated with it’ (4). As Johnston's authority to speak on Aboriginal Australian issues was questioned, the question of Aboriginal identity in literature remained marred by decades of false claims and appropriation. Within these debates, it is possible we have overlooked another candidate. Despite the earlier praise, Fogarty might be the most unrewarded, or even unrecognized figure in the literary landscape.

Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of ‘a nomad poetics’ – not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes.

The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally.

The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–).

Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.

The possibilities of an Australian literature after the postcolony is the subject of Lionel Fogarty’s more recent work, Mogwie-Idan (2012), and Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future) (2014). Fogarty the decolonising literary critic is a neglected subject for discussion which I hope to illuminate. Yet, such a discussion seems obvious given poems such as “Anthology Our International” (2014, 118) and “Advance Those Asian and Pacific Writers Poets” (2014, 70–74), which explicitly flout literary and national borders in imagining new social and political relations through writing. Fogarty is one of a few writing in a tense explicitly after the postcolony. This essay tries to piece together what appears to be a complex dream of a particular kind of literature postnation, after the colony.

Published in Plumwood Mountain: an Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics 3.2 (2016), https://plumwoodmountain.com/lionel-fogartys-literary-criticism-after-the-postcolony/, n. pag.