FACTA UNIVERSITATIS

Series: Linguistics and Literature Vol. 2, No 9, 2002, pp. 313 - 325

MAPPING THE OTHER, MAPPING THE SELF:

B. WONGAR'S NOVEL RAKI (1994)

UDC 820(94).09-31

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade

Abstract. This paper was presented at the sixth conference of the European Society for
the Study of English, held in Strasbourg, France, from August 30 to September 3, 2002.
It was contributed to the seminar on Mapping the other, mapping the self - discourses
of travel from the 18th century to the present. The seminar topic corresponded perfectly
with the remarkable life, and unique literary opus, of the Australian writer B. Wongar,
pseudonym of the Yugoslav émigré Sreten Bozic (b. 1932). Wongar's travels through
Europe and Australia, and the circumstances which lead to his witnessing (and
sharing) the suffering of the dispossessed Aboriginal peoples, provided insights which
he deepened through study of Aboriginal mythology and history, and dramatized in
poems, plays, short stories and, most extensively, the four novels which comprise his
Nuclear Cycle. Raki, the last novel in that series, is a study of two locations (the
Serbian Balkans, and the Aboriginal Australia) where 'civilizing' invaders (the Ottoman
Turks, the European settlers, the Nazi Germans, the NATO and UN 'peacekeepers')
mapped the conquered, primitive 'others' in ways that justified their extinction. Wongar
studies the ways in which overt or covert genocides are legalized, and rationalized as
inevitable and desirable march of progress. He exposes the horrible nature of post-
civilized barbarism, and the strategies through which it continues to spread and plague
us. The paper sets his concerns in the context of similar undertakings by such authors
as J. M. Koetzee, Wendy Lill, Christopher Hampton, John Pilger, etc., and points out
how archetypal criticism and new historicism can shed additional light on the works of
this remarkable artist.

In a video recording of Harold Pinter's guest-appearance at the ICA, set up to

mark the opening of his play One for the Road, we can see him losing patience with the
interviewer's repeated efforts to force him to "classify, or categorize himself", and retort-
ing that he is simply a "critical independent mind". The explicitness with which he was
forced to defended himself was unnecessary, since everything he said on that occasion
represented a demonstration of that independence: his criticism of the US global take-
over, and of England's shameful satellite position; his reasons for being a 'conscientious

Received October 15, 2002

314 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

objector'; his views on his role as a playwright. His responsibility, he said, was to
determine, independently, what is going on, and offer the audience a chance to enlarge
their views. Encouraged and enabled to be independent, critical, and self-reliant, people
would not, Pinter insisted, willingly give power to politicians and bureaucrats, whose
actions in an increasingly grotesque fashion betray democracy and degrade humanity.
The Australian writer Sreten Bozic (b. 1932), better known as B. Wongar, with whom
this paper is concerned, possesses an equally critical and independent mind. Throughout
his life he has battled against the seductions and coercions of bureaucrats and politicians,
both in Europe and Australia, and has celebrated in his works values and attitudes that
Western civilization continues shamelessly to defile and destroy.
Those who love classifications and theories can find several established strategies
useful in approaching Wongar's art. Certain qualities of his work can be assessed more
deeply through the archetypal criticism of Leslie Fiedler and Northrop Frye, others (his
incorporation of previously overlooked historical documents into his fiction) through new
historicism, or post-colonial criticism. Moreover, since he lives in Australia and writes in
English, yet comes from Yugoslavia, from the cultural background of the 'other', he is, in
that respect, as 'hybrid' as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi or Arundhati
Roy.
Certainly, Wongar's attitude to the Australian Aborigine can be seen as the resurfac-
ing of the archetypal relationship of racially mixed couples that Leslie Fiedler found in
Cooper (Natty Bamppo/Chingachook), Melville (Ishmael/Queequeg), Twain (Huck/Jim),
and others, and treated, in Love and Death in the American Novel, as the key to the
proper understanding of American literature.1 As in Cooper's novels about the vanishing
Indian, in Wongar's works about the vanishing Aborigine, a resurfacing of what in the
Australian psyche has been repressed, stifled, and "starved to death" occurs. In Wongar's
stories, poems, plays and novels about Australia, as in the work of the great American
classics analysed by Fiedler, "guilt speaks", identification with the injured and vanishing
'other' is attempted, dissociation from the ideology of exploitation, and from exploiters,
dramatized.2
One divergence from Fiedler's paradigm, however, is significant. If Australia's Patrick
White felt that the hidden wound of the Catholic/Calvinist soul of the West could be
healed through contact with the spirituality of the Orthodox Christianity of the East (ex-
perienced in his private life in his relationship with his faithful Greek lover Manoly),
Australia's Wongar, who is of Eastern Orthodox background, recognized his soul's ful-
fillment not in the lifestyle of his antagonized Western brother, but in what became ac-
cessible to him in life through his contact with his beloved, lost, Aboriginal wife Dju-
mala3. This heterosexual, transcultural love was the most important event in his life. His

1
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 66, 82), Penguin 1984.
2
Ibid., Part One: Prototypes and early adaptations, section 7, James Fenimore Cooper and the Historical
Romance, pp. 195-6.
3
See Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass: A self-portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), dedicated to Manoly,
and B. Wongar's autobiography Dingoes Den (ETT Imprint Book, Australia, 1999), dedicated to Peter Handke
and his son Stefan. Wongar's novel Walg (1983) is dedicated to Djumala. In his dedication Wongar writes to
her: "You shall be born again as a bird, a tree, or a star, as the tribal elders taught us." In the review of the novel
printed on the back cover, Simone de Beauvoir says "Djumala reminds me much of a Polynesian face painted
by Gauguin, as she endeavors to regain the magic of life stolen by the invaders. I will harbor her in my heart for
a long time to come. When the nuclear madness spread over the world strangles us too, I will know: the fallout
will be the ashes of her soul and country."
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 315

astonishing works grew out of the understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal life and
spirituality that Djumala made possible, and real. Thus, for him writing became, as Leslie
Fiedler defines it, a record of "elusive moments at which life is alone fully itself, fulfilled
in consciousness and form". It also became, simultaneously, "an act of total moral en-
gagement".4 This paper will try to set in a wider context the nature of this moral engage-
ment, and trace some steps in its development that eventually led to Raki (1994).5

***
Maps satisfy the human need for better orientation. Geographical maps direct physical
journeys towards desired destinations. Spiritual journeys, on the other hand, require maps
that chart the moral heights and depths of human experience, and provide ethical orienta-
tion that can save individuals, as well as whole cultures, from getting 'lost'.6 Several quo-
tations from recent sources can serve as reminders of the quality of moral maps that keep
our modern civilized world in order, and of the true nature of laws that protect and per-
petrate the desired ethical orientation of western citizens.
On March 22, 2002, TLS published a photograph of Gandhi breaking the law by
picking up a grain of salt from the Indian Ocean. The photograph, taken in 1930, is a re-
minder that only several decades ago the long development of Western civilization cul-
minated in the legal act which denied the citizens of India the right to use the salt from
the Indian Ocean because the Law proclaimed it the rightful property of an authorized
British firm. On the photograph we see Gandhi becoming a 'criminal'.
On October 4, 2001, London Review of Books published another 'reminder' of what
the situation was like thirty years later, in the sixties. The review of the book The Assas-
sination of Lumumba, by Ludo De Witte, contains a detailed description of the independ-
ence ceremony in the Congo, 'derailed' by the intervention of the young Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba. Like Gandhi, Lumumba, was killed, among other things, because on
that occasion (where he was not scheduled to make a speech at all), he refused to allow
the farcical pretentiousness of the 'civilizers' and the 'liberators' to go unchallenged.
To the claim made by the Belgian king Baudouin that "the independence of the Congo
is the result of the undertaking conceived by the genius of King Leopold II" (the monster,
the reviewer reminds us, who ran the Congo basin as his private estate, used forced la-
bour, mutilation and massacre to extort its ivory and rubber, and reduced its population
by many millions, until the world's outrage obliged Belgium to take the colony away

4
Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, Preface to the First Edition, p. 16.
5
B. Wongar, Raki (1994, 1997), London and New York: Marion Boyars 1997.
Raki is the fourth and last novel of Wongar's Nuclear Cycle, the other three being Walg (New York: George
Braziller, 1983); Karan (New Work: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1985), and Gabo Jara (New York: Dodd, Mead &
Co., 1987). He has also written a book on Aboriginal Myths, with Alan Marshall, as well as several plays and
poems. His two collections of stories The Track to Bralgu (1978) and Bararu were first published by Jean Paul
Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir in their magazine Les Temps Modernes. Stories collected in The Last Pack of
Dingoes were published in Australia by Angus & Robertson in 1993.
6
Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient (1992) is a brilliant meditation of the two types of maps, and
two types of orientation human beings need. Ondaatje is a 'hybrid' writer as well, and his study of love and war,
human nature and history, is a very independent, critical account of the development of Western civilization,
traced from its roots in Antiquity to the moment in the twentieth century when ending one world war it
announced itself fully prepared for the next. It is a pity that the filmed version was purged from the most
provocative political questions the novel had the courage to ask.
316 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

from him) Lumumba replied that independence was not a "generous gift from Brus-
sels", but had been won by the people's struggle for freedom against the colonialists.
Leopold's 'Congo Free State' was no more than "humiliating slavery imposed on us by
force", said Patrice: "We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon
and night, because we were 'niggers'...We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms
of what was supposedly the law of the land but which only recognized the rights of the
strongest. We have seen that this law was quite different for a white than for a black: ac-
commodating for the former, cruel and inhuman for the latter. ...We will make sure that
our country's land truly benefits its children. We will review all previous laws and make
new ones which will be just and noble."7
In the Introduction to his book Learning To Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture,
Stephen Greenblatt states that "If there is any value to what has become known as 'new
historicism' it must be in an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the
past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts". His essays are full of
examples similar to those quoted above, 'early modern', and several centuries younger than
the Gandhi and Lumumba incidents of our 'late modern' times. However, Greenblatt is
careful to draw the distinction between "the post-structuralist confounding of fiction and
non-fiction" (which he finds important but inadequate) and his own efforts to read all the
textual traces of the past in order to study better the difference between the past's fictional
and non fictional records of itself, in order, as he says, to "speak to this difference." 8
Not all critics, or authors, wish to do that. Many pursue and celebrate, in their fiction,
the fun and fashion of their time, without wishing to examine, in detail, the non fictional
'text' which the fun and fashion disguise or distort. The nature of the total moral engage-
ment of B. Wongar has a great deal in common with Greenblatt's desire to achieve a
reading of all the textual traces of the past. In fact, it is possible to claim that Wongar was
driven to become a writer precisely by the desire to examine, most fully, the appalling
differences between historical facts, and fictional texts fabricated to reinterpret, distort
and disguise them.
For example, in chapter four of his autobiographical Dingoes Den, Wongar provides a
very detailed account of how he, accidentally, came to attend a court hearing, held in
1969 in the city of Darwin, involving a case brought up by some tribal Aborigines against
the Australian government. Until 1967 the Aboriginal population of Australia had been
deprived of citizenship rights and excluded from national statistics. The court case was
the first of its kind, and eventually brought about some changes in the Australian law.
Wongar's account, however, is a shocking revelation of the 'ethics' which the Law pro-
tected in 1969, and used to justify the exploitation and dispossession of native Austra-
lians. The Australian judge, quoted by Wongar in his autobiography, sounds very much
like the Belgian King Baudouin addressing the dispossessed of the Congo, or the authors
of the law enforced in India, which made the salt in the Indian Ocean the property of a
British firm: "The native claim is made on the basis that the law of this land recognizes
Aboriginal ownership of the land, but there is no such recognition under the law... The
land of Gove Peninsula is Crown Land and it was only due to our generosity that the

7
See London Review of Books, 4 October 2001, pp. 17-18.
Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001)
8
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp.
14-15.
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 317

natives used that land until we needed it for other purposes."9 This is the logic of the
'justice' on which Western democracies are built, applied in Australia in the second half
of the twentieth century.
As Greenblatt notes (in respect to an even grimmer seventeenth century account of
British colonial conquest in Java), documentary evidence of this kind was being repub-
lished, without any critical comment, as late as 1943. Today, documentary accounts of
Australia with critical comments, can be found, for instance, in Robert Hughes' study The
Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868, pub-
lished in 1987, or in John Pilger's A Secret Country, published in 1989.10 Both of these
non-fictional accounts from the late eighties, support the 'fictional' texts on Aboriginal
history that Wongar started producing in the seventies, just over ten years after he first set
foot on the Australian soil, with little formal education, and no prior knowledge of Eng-
lish.
These seeming drawbacks may have been blessings in disguise. What schools do to
human beings is a very controversial issue. Books as diverse as Allan Bloom's The Clos-
ing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished
the souls of today's students (1987), Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Alice Miller's
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (1981), Donaldo Macedo's
Chomsky on Mis/Education (2000), or David Mamet's Oleanna (1993), etc., testify with
what great alarm and concern is education viewed by academics and artists alike. The
critical view of Western education, incorporated by Howard Barker into the closing scene
of his brilliant play Scenes from an Execution (1986)11, is perhaps most relevant for
Wongar's case.
A painting, commissioned by the Venetian government to celebrate the victory at
Lepanto, is painted by a very critical and independent woman artist Galactia. She does
not depict war as triumph of civilization, and is duly imprisoned. She is released (and her
paining publicly exhibited) when a critic, another woman, Rivera, produces an accept-
able, politically correct interpretation of her work. The review is printed and officially
distributed to the literate and educated public.
Through what follows, in the play, Barker makes the point that while education obvi-
ously appears to 'give' to its beneficiaries, it is certainly also conceived to 'take away' -
spontaneity, individuality, self-reliance. The literate, who parade in front of Galactia's
painting, see the world in the way they have been trained to see- not with their own eyes,
but through the eyes and mind of the mediators (teachers, political and religious leaders,
'authorities'), whose version of reality they have been forced to assimilate. Only the ap-
proved view of the world is tolerated. They read the instructions they have been given,
and check Galactia's canvas for what they have been alerted to see: not the ideological
meaning of her whole composition, but her formal skill, displayed in the execution of
small details they are advised to find admirable.
Fortunately for the artist (and, Pinter would add, the survival of our common human-
ity) some of the Venetian public have remained illiterate - unprocessed and 'uncivilized'.
They understand immediately what Galactia thinks of militarism and war. A common

9
B. Wongar, Dingoes Den (Australia, ETT Imprint, 1999), Chapter 4, p. 65.
10
Robert Hughes, Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 (London:
Collins Pan Books, 1987);
John Pilger, A Secret Country (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989, Vintage 1990)
11
Howard Barker, Scenes from an Execution (London: Jonathan Calder, 1985)
318 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

man, in the last scene of the play, returns five times to look at her canvas. The Doge ob-
serves him kneeling before it, not cheering but crying over what Galactia has given him a
chance to comprehend and contemplate. He sees what the educated have become blind to:
the waste and destruction of human life that civilization has schooled itself to perpetrate,
rationalize, normalize, and glorify.
Wongar had little formal education ("The year I was sent barefoot to our village
school, World War Two broke out" is the first sentence in his Foreword to Raki) but,
instead, grew up on the living oral tradition of his native Serbia. His father knew by heart
the ancient epic poems preserved since the fourteenth century, and often recited them to
his family, not only during their evening rest at home but often while they were working
together in the fields. Love for the land the family tilled, and admiration for the living
world of nature that supported them, was instilled into Wongar mostly by his mother, to
whose soul his novel Raki is dedicated. Love for the creative word was passed on to him
by his father. These powerful childhood experiences enabled him to understand and love
Aboriginal Australia. In Raki, the two strands of Wongar's life - the stories of Serbia and
Aboriginal Australia - come together and, in a unique literary fashion, become one.

***
To understand better what cherishing such forbidden loves (for Aboriginal Australia
in the sixties, or for Serbia today) entailed, several 'reminders' will be cited. The first
comes from chapter two of Pilger's book A Secret Country, entitled "A Whispering in Our
Hearts". The entire chapter is important because it records Pilger's academic discovery of
what, for Wongar, represented lived experience and first hand knowledge of Aboriginal
life. In his account Pilger writes:
"From 1952, when I entered high school, a standard history textbook was Man Makes
History: World History from the Earliest Times to the Renaissance by Russel Ward. It
sold more than 200,000 copies. This is an extract: Boys and girls often ask, 'What is the
use of history? Answer: There are still living in Arnhem Land people who know almost
no history. They are Aboriginal tribesmen who live in practically the same way as their
forefathers and ours did, tens of thousands of years ago. ...We are civilized today and
they are not. History helps us to understand why this is so.(p. 25)
A 1970 reprint of The Squatting Age in Australia by professor Stephen Roberts con-
cludes that: It was quite useless to treat the Aborigines fairly, since they were completely
amoral and usually incapable of sincere and prolonged gratitude. This was a departure
for Roberts, whose History of Australian Land Settlement, regarded as a classic account,
included not a single reference to Aborigines. When a chair of anthropology was en-
dowed by the Australian Government at Sydney University, it was for research into the
origins of the indigenous people of New Guinea, not the indigenous people of Australia
who had been banished into a silent absence. (p. 27)"
It is only after some significant archeological discoveries in the late sixties (for in-
stance the Obiri paintings along the escarpment of Arnhemland, where Wongar lived
with his Aboriginal wife and family) that the attitude began to change. In a wonderfully
appreciative passage Pilger writes: "Aborigines lived lives whose intrinsic value, whose
'Aboriginality' took for granted qualities of generosity and reciprocity and could not con-
ceive of extremes of wealth and poverty. The wellspring of this was Aboriginal reverence
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 319

for the land of Australia, which they equated with life itself. They were the guardians of
the land, and the land was critical to the sustenance of all human identity. 'The land is us;
it is our mother,' a Walpiri man of northern Australia told me, 'To know the land, to know
and love where you come from, and never to go out and destroy it, is being right...is be-
ing civilised." 12
After quoting a poem by the Aboriginal author Hyllus Maris, in which the continuity
of such views is beautifully expressed, Pilger writes: ""The Australian story, centered
upon the original Australians, remains white Australia's secret. With the Aborigines
written out, the Australian story seems apolitical, a faintly heroic tale of white man
against Nature, of 'national achievement' devoid of blacks, women and other complicat-
ing factors. With the Aborigines in it, the story is completely different: It is a story of
theft, dispossession and warfare, of massacre and resistance, It is a story every bit as ra-
pacious as that of the United States, Spanish America, and colonial Africa and Asia. It is,
above all, a political story." (p. 31)
The resistance to change of this 'political story' was demonstrated in the first week of
September, 2001, during the anti-racism conference held in Durban, South Africa. On
September 10, 2001 (only one day before the 9/11 event) two articles in the New States-
men reported on the conference, which "collapsed in recriminations against Israel, against
calls for an apology from Europeans for the Atlantic slave trade, against calls for repara-
tions for one of the most horrible, barbaric, evil, vicious, corrupt moment in the history of
humanity" (Darcus Howe, p. 22). The other text, entitled "Slavery was theft: we should
play" (p. 4-5), explained more fully the use of the term 'reparation', which had sent the
white civilizers packing. After eloquently pointing out that slavery involved the theft of
people's labour, and that it represented a clear cut case of criminality legally backed by
American property law and licensed by the British government, the article claimed that,
in view of such evidence "Justice demands debt relief for Africa and opportunities for
African countries to sell their goods to the developed world. The word reparation is
merely a recognition that these are obligations, not acts of charity. ...Africa is ravaged by
war, disease and starvation, and the US inner cities, populated overwhelmingly by blacks,
are scarred by drug dependency, gang warfare and poverty. They need help, and they
need it now. People who talk about reparations may seem to be off with the fairies, but
they are more realistic than those who babble about reconciliation. There will be no rec-
onciliation until white governments and white public opinion unreservedly accepts the
need for justice".
While white governments and white public opinion continue to have reservations
about justice (one of the New Statesmen articles mentions F. M. Conford's book Micro-
cosmographica Academica from which it quotes the frequent conservative objection that
"one should not act justly now, for fear of raising expectations that one will act still more
justly in the future"), numerous artists are fleshing out the 'political story' with facts-in-
spired works which, like Wongar's, disclose and condemn unabandoned colonial prac-
tices. Canadian playwright Wendy Lill (b. 1950) worked as a community health worker
in Indian reservations in Nova Scotia. She started writing in order to come to terms with
the unexpected discoveries she made there. Her play Sisters (1991) is an account of a
12
In one of his epigraphs to Walg (the word means the sacred uterus) Wongar reminds his readers that
"According to the fertility cult of the Australian aborigines, the land is an extension of man's body and soul.
This unity with nature ensures the regeneration cycle, and if the same be disturbed, life would consequently
cease."
320 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

Catholic school set up for Indian children, for the purpose of civilizing them and bringing
them closer to the white man's God. The children are taken away from their families,
forbidden to speak Indian ("You could wash their mouths with soap. They'll never
amount to anything speaking their native tongue"13 the young music teacher Mary is
instructed by her Mother Superior), and not allowed even to attend their parent's funerals
for fear of "reverting to type". The play is set in North America in the fifties and the
sixties, but it is an account of the state of thing in the 'hidden Canada' Lill discovered
much later.
Perhaps the most unbearably shocking work inspired by continued colonial practices
is Christopher Hampton's play Savages (1974)14 The continent in this play is different
(South America), the story the same. In his Introduction Hampton (b. 1946) writes: "On
23rd February 1969, the Sunday Times Colour Magazine published an article by Norman
Lewis called 'Genocide', which dealt with the destruction of the Brazilian Indians. Among
the many appalling examples of systematic extermination discussed by Mr. Lewis and
ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day was one which involved the
slaughter of large number of the Cinas Largas tribe, supervised by the Francisco de
Britto, 'general overseer of the rubber extraction firm on the river Juruena' in the early
sixties. 'It was seen as essential', Mr. Lewis writes, 'to produce the maximum number of
casualties in one single devastating attack, at a time when as many Indians as possible
would be present in the village, and an expert was found to advise that this could best be
done at the annual feast of the "Quarup". ...A Cesna light plane used for ordinary com-
mercial services was hired for the attack and its normal pilot replaced by an adventurer of
mixed Italian-Japanese birth. ...On the first run packets of sugar were dropped. They had
opened the packets and were tasting the sugar ten minutes later when the plane returned
to carry out the attack." (p. 9-10)
The genocide, in the play, is explained by the Minister of Indian Affairs (the head of
the Fundacao Nacional do Indio) as the removal of ethnic cysts from the face of Brazil.
The sale of Indian land ("in more enlightened times ceded in perpetuity to various Indian
tribes") could proceed unhindered after the ethnic cleansing 'solved' the problem of in-
fringement of property rights. Yet, as Hampton points out in his play, ethnic cysts were
removed through integration just as successfully as through extermination. "Exterminate,
integrate...its the same thing, only slower. Integrate them, give them the benefit of civili-
zation, the government says. What they don's say is that the first two benefits of civilisa-
tion the Indians are going to be given are disease and alcohol. All they mean when they
say the Indians have got to be integrated is that the Indians have got to give up their land
and a totally self-sufficient and harmonious way of life to become the slaves of slaves."
(p. 38)
As in Barker's play, and in Wendy Lill, in this business the church and the state pro-
ceed together. One of the most powerful moments in Hampton's play is the account of the
activities carried out by the missionaries, given in Scene 11: "Alongside of preaching the
Gospel, which is of course our primary task, there are other ways in which we have to
change the lives of these savages. For instance, we have to instill in them a work ethic
tied to a reward system, which is something quite new to them. Now if you do that, natu-
rally they are going to have to look at a whole lot of things in a new way, things like

13
Wendy Lill, Sisters (Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1991), Act I, p. 29.
14
Christopher Hampton, Savages (London: Faber, 1989)
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 321

property and personal possessions, and they're going to want to preserve and protect
them". The Reverend ends the account of his mission in Brazil by saying. "This govern-
ment may have some terrible problems as of now, but it's working very closely with the
United States government, and I think together we're going to be able to lick most of
them." (pp. 54-61)
The activities of the American government are well known, but a reference to the play
Miss Evers' Boys, written by David Feldshuh in the eighties and presented by the
Goodman Theatre in Chicago in the 1991/92 season, may remind the public how far it
dares to go in 'treating' (or licking) even its own citizens. The play is based on the 1972
Senate investigation into the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male",
the most notorious episode in American medical history. The play rises above its factual
foundation and becomes a study of 'informed consent', but it does not fail to question the
ethics of a government sponsored program that singled out an exclusively black study
group, and withheld treatment and continued the experiment long after penicillin, the cure
for syphilis, was discovered and made readily available.
Lill, Hampton and Feldshuh spent years thinking about the factual processes and
events they had encountered before they shaped them into works of art. To Wongar inspi-
ration and creation came in much the same way. In a note to Karan (1985) he wrote:
"This book is fiction. However, in 1950s and 1960s the British carried out nuclear testing
on tribal areas of South Australia. It was revealed to the Royal Commission, set up in
1984 by the Australian government to inquire into this activity, that the testing, which
lasted for about a decade, had a lethal effect on Aboriginal tribal man and his culture. The
testing preceded a severe drought."
The Author's note to Raki is similar: "The Serbian section of this book is historically
factual. The Australian section is imaginary but inspired by evidence of the rounding up
and forceful separation of Aboriginal children from their tribal families, purportedly to
protect them from the evil spell of campfires. You are free to view this as you please; the
choice is yours."
His autobiography shows in a much more detailed way how things seen or heard ma-
tured into art. Chapter six, for instance, contains a most memorable account of his meet-
ing with Carol, a well educated elegant girl on her way to France, whom he suspected of
being half Aboriginal, and one of the 'stolen' generation. In his very discrete efforts to test
his suspicion Wongar told her of his encounter with a dispossessed Aboriginal mother
whose tragedy inspired him to write a ply. Carol offered to correct the spelling. When he
eventually went to see her off at the airport, he noticed that she had changed her plans
and was going to Perth, not Paris. "Perhaps to search for her Aboriginal mother", mused
Wongar, and added: "But she still pretended she was white, for being even part-Aborig-
ine in the 1960s meant you were deprived of citizenship; in some cases, of even the right
to live."
When Carol's story, and the story Wongar tells to Carol, begin to coalesce with a
similar story, remembered from the Serbian past, the structure of what was to become
Raki begins to emerge. Wongar's own account of how facts encountered in the sixties,
through his total moral engagement became fictions in the nineties, is worth citing at
length: "We came across a band of Aborigines who kept aloof from the whites and
though these people knew Jo well, at our approach, the children fled the camp into the
bush and only the elderly stayed behind. Among these was a woman, almost blind from
trachoma, busy grinding acacia seeds between two stones. I doubted that she was able to
322 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

tell the colour of my skin but she may well have recognised the smell of a white man. She
rushed to me, thrusting her face just a few inches from my own, repeatedly asking me to
bring her children back until her voice cracked and became incoherent. She constantly
repeated the same two words, gulwiri and bogo, while tears streamed from her milky-
white, bulging eyes and down her grief stricken face. At last the woman sagged forward
and slid to the ground, grasping me around my ankles, and then I, too, broke down with
the shame of being the same colour as those who had stolen her children away. I heard
her name was Gorogil and she had no other relatives but those two children, Gulwiri and
Bogo. Every day she would harvest seeds from the bush, grind them on stones and make
damper in the hot ashes for the children to eat. Every evening the damper was made
ready but the children never came back. ...I stayed with her and the others for a few
weeks and I wrote a stage play which I called after her children. ...Something irresistible
forced me to write my play Gulwiri and Bogo and having seen poor, blind Gorogil, I had
no option but to complete it. For years I had heard stories of the sadness and horror when
Aboriginal children in remote tribal communities were snatched away by the whites. This
policy, begun in 1920, of 'assimilation', was disguised as a humanitarian drive to 'save
Aboriginal children from the evil spell of the camp fire'. The practice lasted until the
1970s, depriving Aboriginal communities of new generations and destroyed their culture.
The practice was akin to the seize of Serbian children by invading Ottomans, during their
occupation of Serbia. The practice, which lasted four centuries, was to raid Serbian vil-
lages once every seven years and take Danak, a Tribute in Blood. The stolen children
were taken to Istanbul to be indoctrinated into the Islamic faith and eventually became
janissary, the brutal foot soldiers of the Ottoman Empire. In Australia the stolen tribal
children were not destined to become warriors. Many of them were sent to the Kahlin
Compound and similar centres near Darwin and from there were passed to white families
throughout the country, or even abroad, for adoption. Many ended as domestic servants,
receiving scant education and alienated from their tribal culture and relatives. The few
who did receive proper parental care by their new white families may well have grown up
without being told of their original background. I could guess that the couple who
adopted Carol had given her the love and education needed to succeed in the whiteman's
world. She was probably one of the few lucky ones to find a caring family and despite my
revulsion at the idea of children being forcefully taken away from their natural parents, I
felt it would be a tragedy in reverse if Carol rejected their love and expectations now.
...Conquerors, whether in my old Balkan country or in Australia, differ little in their tyr-
anny, though in Australia it was often disguised under a certain parliamentary ordinance.
In 1953, while politicians frequently mouthed words such as 'freedom' and 'democracy',
the Australian government brought about the notorious Welfare Ordinance, giving tyran-
nical powers to the Chief Protector of Aborigines. It became policy to segregate Aborigi-
nal people, isolate them in compounds or reserves, refuse marriages between couples and
take children away from their parents - never to be seen again." (p. 98-103) In Pilger's
chapter "A Whispering in Our Hears" many additional facts and anecdotes related to
these civilizing measures can be found, but in Wongar's case, the loss these documents
describe is personal: he himself is a white parent who never found his aboriginal children
again.
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 323

***
Wongar did not persist in writing his books in order to make an unpopular subject (the
Aborigines and the Serbs) popular. What he had to say in Raki about the Nazi occupation
of Yugoslavia, and the role some prominent historical figures played in it (Kurt Wald-
heim, Father Draganovic, Bishop Stepinac, Curzio Malaparte15), may have been an addi-
tional reason why the book was confiscated by the Australian State Police. Since the
manuscript was not returned, in spite of the efforts PEN International made to retrieve it,
the published novel represents the second version Wongar had to write. He may have had
some satisfaction when, soon after Raki's publication in 1994, long withheld war-crime
records of Kurt Waldheim were released. Waldheim was condemned for his activities in
the war and barred from entering the USA. The fact that, prior to the disclosure, he
served as the General Secretary of the United Nations, makes Wongar's documented dis-
appointment in the UN, and mistrust of its 'humanitarian' interventions (especially ex-
plicit in Chapter 15, the closing chapter in Raki), doubly justified. Wongar, "he who
comes from the spirit world of dreams, or, loosely translated, the outsider", writes not to
gain popularity or fame but because he desires, like Lumumba, to make a juster and a
nobler world possible for all.
Through Wongar's mapping of the cruelty, exploitation and destruction that mark the
history of the white West, the seed of the juster and nobler world becomes more visible.
Cruelty could not be named without the kindness that shames it and reveals it. His map
contains a record of an Australian 'other' who came to help and love suffering Serbia just
as simply and directly as he loved suffering Aboriginal Australia. During the First World
War there was in Serbia a Scottish Women's Hospital Unit, with a large number of Aus-
tralian/New Zealand volunteers. Two women, Miles Franklin and Evelina Haverfield,
achieved legendary status in the minds of the people they cared for. They were referred to
as vilas (good fairies) and had monuments built to them in gratitude for the commitment
they showed to the people of Serbia. In the seventh chapter of his autobiography Wongar
notes: "Miles Franklin returned to Australia with immense experience as a witness to
human tragedy and the horror of war. The experience forever influenced her way of
thinking and her creative work. Though she wrote a considerable body of literature about
her experience in those Balkan wars, very little of it was published. The world preferred
to forget about the war and the unpublished manuscripts were left in the Mitchell Library,
to gather dust". (119-120)
Later on in the same chapter he tells the story of Evelina Haverfield. He was taken to
the local cemetery in Bajina Basta and shown an old gravestone with her name engraved
on it. She, whom the people called vila Evelina, was a friend of Miles Franklin and a very
prominent member of the Scottish Women's Hospital Unit in Serbia. "After World War I
ended," continues Wongar, "Evelina Haverfield stayed in Serbia and opened an
orphanage at Bajina Basta - a remote and barely accessible little town nestled in the steep
Drina Gorge. The place had retained a medieval way of life and seemed centuries away
from the rest of Europe. Upstream, at Visegrad, stood one of the finest monuments man
has ever made - a stone bridge built by Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic, who had been
abducted as a village child by the Turks and taken to Istanbul to be enslaved. He later

15
It would be useful to have at hand a copy of Ratlines, or Curzio Malaparte's novel The Skin, to have the
documentary evidence on which the closing section of chapter eight, for instance, is based illuminated from
additional sources. See Raki (London, New York: Marion Boyars, 1997), pp. 118-120.
324 LJ. BOGOEVA SEDLAR

rose through the janissary ranks to become one of the Ottoman Empire's most liberal rul-
ers (portrayed by Ivo Andric in his epic novel Bridge on the River Drina). Andric, Yugo-
slavia's only Nobel Prize winner, remained Wongar's inspiration throughout life and his
Raki can be read as a literary homage to the great precursor.
Wongar has won many prizes, and although not the Nobel, he has been praised and
supported by some of the most refined literary minds in the twentieth century: Samuel
Beckett, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alan Paton (who wrote a Foreword to
The Track to Bralgu), Thomas Keneally, Thomas Shapcott, and most recently by Imamu
Amiri Baraka, whose praise is printed on the cover of the latest edition of Raki: "Won-
gar's is a world that is magical and beauteous yet grim and unrelenting. We see the world
many times through the eyes of animal totems, the brothers and sisters of the narrator's
people. ...There is a tone to this work that is absolutely unlike anything you have ever
read before". Although this is very true, and the magic of Wongar's magic realism inimi-
table, impossible to categorize and classify, one last background link is certainly to J.
Coetzee and his brilliant opus from Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), to Life & Times of
Michael K (1983), even finally to Disgrace (1999), and his most recent interest in dogs
which feeds into Wongar's old-standing rapport with the dingoes. But, ultimately, what is
important in both Wongar and Coetzee, is how the mapping of the other is done, and
what it accomplishes. What one discovers, reading their novels, is freedom, even in the
midst of concentration and detention camps which so frequently figure in their works as
metaphors for the corner we have driven ourselves in. Characters may come from Serbia
or Australia, be black or white, but such things are transcended without being devalued or
denied. The space where they meet in our experience of the novels is a space unfamiliar,
as Eliot would say, because nowadays we so rarely seek it16. Harold Pinter would call it
our common humanity, for which even Francis Fukuyama is now nostalgically yearning
in his latest book The Posthuman Future. The road we travel with Wongar in his works is
very hard and, as Baraka says, unrelenting, but we always arrive, recognize, in the images
of war and injustice that surround us, our own other face, the face of justice and love.

REFERENCES
1. Aarons, Mark and Loftus, John. Ratlines: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Inteli-
gence to the Soviets, London, Mandarine, 1991.
2. Barker, Howard. Scenes from an Execution, London, Jonathan Calder, 1985.
3. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and im-
poverished the souls of today's students, London, Penguin, 1987
4. Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines, London, Picador, 1987.
5. Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians, Penguin Books, 1980.
6. Life and Times of Michael K, Penguin Books, 1983.
7. Disgrace, London, Secker & Warburg, 1999.
8. De Witte, Ludo. The Assassination of Lumumba, London, Verso, 2001.

16
See T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the ending of "Little Gidding" (We shall not cease from exploration/And the
end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time./Through the
unknown, remembered gate/When the last of earth left to discover/Is that which was the beginning;/At the
source of the longest river/The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not known,
because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea./Quick now, here,
now, always/A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)/And all shall be well and/All
manner of things shall be well/When the tongues of flame are in-folded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the
fire and rose are one.
 Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel Raki (1994) 325

9. Feldshuh, David. Miss Evers' Boys, American Theatre, November 1990, New York, TCG.
10. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel, Penguin Books, 1982.
11. Fukuyama, Francis. The Posthuman Future, New York, Profile Books, 2002.
12. Greenblatt, J. Stephen. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York, Routledge, 1990.
13. Hampton, Christopher. Savages, London, Faber, 1989.
14. Hughes, Robert. Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868, Lon-
don, Collins Pan Books, 1987.
15. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society, London, Penguin Books,1982.
16. Lill, Wendy. Sisters, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1991.
17. Macedo, Donaldo. Chomsky on MisEducation, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
18. Miller, Alice. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, London, Virago, 1981
19. Ondaatje, Michael. The Englsih Patient, Toronto, Vintage Books, 1992.
20. Pilger, John. A Secret Country, London, Jonathan Cape, 1989.
21. Pinter, Harold. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1946-1998, London, Faber, 1998.
22. White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass: a self-portrait, Penguin Books, 1981.
23. Wongar, B. Dingoes Den, Boni Junction, Australia, ETT Imprint Book, 1999.
24. Aboriginal Myths (with Alan Marshall) Melbourne, Gold Star, 1972.
25. Track to Bralgu: Stories, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1978.
26. The Last Pack of Dingoes: Stories, London, Harper Collins, 1993.
27. Walg, A Novel of Australia, New York, George Braziller, 1983.
28. Karan, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985.
29. Gabo Djara, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987
30. Raki, New York, Marion Bayars, 1994, 1997.
31. Zinn, Howard. The Twentieth Century, A People's History, New York, Harper Perennial, 1998

OTKRIVANJE SEBE KROZ ISTRAŽIVANJE DRUGOG:

ROMAN RAKI AUSTRALIJSKOG PISCA B. VONGARA
Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar
Rad je izložen na šestoj ESSE konferenciji održanoj u Strazburu avgusta/septembra 2002.
godine, u okviru seminara koji se bavio mapiranjem 'drugog' u putopisnoj literaturi od
osamnaestog veka do danas. Rad se bavi životom i stvaralaštvom australijskog pisca B. Wongara
(t.j. Sretena Božića, rodjenog 1932. u Jugoslaviji, iz koje je emigrirao šezdesetih, i u Australiji, pod
novim aboridžinskim imenom, na engleskom jeziku počeo da piše sedamdesetih). Iz njegovih
putovanja po Evropi i Australiji, i nomadskog života sa Aboridžinima prema čijoj je civilizaciji
(razumevanju prirode, harmoničnom i miroljubivom načinu zivota, mitologiji, umetnosti) osećao
duboko divljenje, proizišla su brojna dela: pesme, drame, kratke priče, i Nuklearni ciklus koji
sačinjavaju četiri romana, od kojih je Raki (1994, 1997) poslednji. Boreći se protiv surovog
uništavanja aboridžinskog načina života (kulturne i duhovne tradicije tako oprečne
eksploatatorskoj kolonijalnoj 'etici' anglosaksonske civilizacije) Vongar je shvatio i povezao
stradanje australijskih starosedelaca sa stradanjima i svih ostalih osvajanih naroda, čije se
istrebljenje tokom istorije tumačilo kao progres i napredak. Roman Raki je duboko doživljena
epifanija o vezi koja postoji izmedju stradanja koje je u svojoj istoriji doživljavao narod na
Balkanu, i stradanja kojima su izloženi Aboridžini u Australiji. U radu je Vongarova osuda
genocidnosti i varvarizma takozvane civilizacije stavljena u kontekst stvaralaštva autora kao sto su
J.M. Kuci, Vendi Lil, Kristofer Hampton, Džon Pildžer, Robert Hjuz, i drugi, koji, slično Vongaru,
ne opraštaju genocide koji prate progres Zapada kroz Kanadu, Juznu Ameriku, Juznu Afriku, i
drugde. Rad ističe načine na koji arhetipska kritika (posebno pristup Lesli Fidlera) i novi
istoricizam (posebno načela Stivena Grinblata) mogu upotpuniti razumevanje Vongarovih
izvanrednih ostvarenja.