On Identity by Stan Grant (author)

Author:Stan Grant (author) [Grant, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875522
Amazon: 0522875521
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

These storytellers of exile speak to me. If I am Aboriginal, then read through my eyes they become ‘Aboriginal’ writers—they help explain my world. Glissant is an ‘Aboriginal’ writer. He speaks to me of possibilities. I have read many ‘Aboriginal’ writers: James Joyce, WB Yeats, Czesław Miłosz, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus. Richard Flanagan is an ‘Aboriginal’ writer; he is a brother to me as sure as anyone who may claim to be Indigenous. He is an exile, too, who writes in what others might see as a distant and cold place, but all the better to see the world. Flanagan taught me that Camus was a Tasmanian writer, because Flanagan was a Tasmanian and he read Camus there and it changed his life.

To Flanagan, ‘writing at its best exists beyond morality and politics.’ He says, ‘Nations and nationalisms may use literature, but writing itself has nothing to do with national anythings.’ So it is of identity—identity warriors may use writing but writing has nothing to do with identity anything. Kafka said, ‘How can I have anything in common with the Jews, I have nothing in common with myself.’ These writers—these ‘Aboriginal’ writers—these exiles, they are people between, set apart from land or memory. And where land and memory crushes in on them, solely defining them, they push against it.

I read Yeats and Joyce with the old Irishman John Grant looking over my shoulder. He joined his name to the roll call of resistance, those who sacrificed life and liberty for a free Ireland:

From where shall we draw water,

Said Pearce to Connolly,

When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.

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