One contemporary poet whose work brings many of these issues most clearly to light is US-born Billy Marshall-Stoneking. His Singing The Snake collection (1990) contains many poems derived from his relationships with the Pintupi on the Papunya community in central Australia. Unlike the work of Cataldi (see 4.4.1), which is based on a similar sort of experience teaching and working as a linguist with the Warlpiri people, Marshall-Stoneking muddies the waters yet again, introducing methods and themes which engender the same criticisms a modern reader has of Jindyworobak poets.
Many of the poems in Singing The Snake take the form of reported conversations with the poet’s friends in the community. In others, Marshall-Stoneking’s narrators are Aboriginal elders or story-tellers, and he takes on the voices of the people around him, and appropriates their stories for use in his own work.
This raises some interesting questions. Readers of the poems do not know the relationship of the words to the Aboriginal people or the stories they have told. Marshall-Stoneking certainly attempts to convey both their speech patterns and the sentiments precisely. Yet we are unsure of the process of telling and recording the stories: it does not have the clearly stated methodology of anthropological collections of stories, such as those gathered by the Berndts.
But is Marshall-Stoneking’s process, and hence the work, collaborative, or collected, or imaginative, and how does the writing process occur?
Important factors include the poets’ own cultural background, and the nature of the relationship between the poet and the people whose stories he or she tells. In this situation, it is often measured by the amount of information given by the poet on his or her actions (similar to ethical questions faced by a journalist or documentary film-maker), and the power able to be exercised by the story teller.
These are questions that create an instinctive unease within this reader, and these concerns are echoed and expanded upon by Neumann in the essay ‘A Post Colonial Writing of Aboriginal History’. Neumann asks also whether Marshall-Stoneking is conscious of the potential ethical and historical confusion created by the use of Nosepeg Tjupurrula’s story in the poem ‘On Bringing in the Pintupi’:
Doesn’t he exploit the poetical qualities of Nosepeg’s oral history in his own endeavour to please a predominantly white readership? Who is the poem’s author? Does the relationship between the poet and his source reproduce the colonial imbalance of power (which is also one of the implicit subject matters of the poem)? Is it proper for Marshall-Stoneking to take Nosepeg’s quote out of its context, not mentioning the speaker’s original intent, and employ it to reprove his readers? (1992: 287)
Poems using the device of a storyteller’s words provoke quite appropriate questioning, particularly for modern Australian readers. For many years, Aboriginal people have had their stories collected by white anthropologists or scholars who have given the story tellers varying degrees of credit for their participation in the collection of their own oral history, just as white poets such as the Jindyworobaks have attempted to include aspects of Aboriginal culture in their work (with sometimes embarrassing results).
Therefore, when reading poems which include the words, or supposed words, of Aboriginal people, many readers will view the poems with some, often justifiable, suspicion. As readers of poetry, we have no means of judging the integrity or accuracy of the poet.
The process of appropriation, the use to which it is put, and the cultural positioning of the poet outside the community on which he is reporting, place much of this work firmly in the Aboriginalist tradition. Yet Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s rendering of the stories of the Pintupi people (with whom he worked and lived for several years) are clearly more sensitive to the issues that concern the community, than earlier Aboriginalist work by poets who, as Elliott has confessed, had rarely, if ever, met any Aboriginal people.
In his autobiography, Taking America Out of the Boy, Marshall-Stoneking recognises some of these dilemmas:
It’s difficult writing about it [Papunya] without remembering Joan Didion’s cautionary observation that “writers are always selling someone out”. Being a whitefella writing about Aborigines is even more problematic. The English words only approximate what one sees and hears. It’s too easy to sound self-righteous, or naive, or almost anything but truthful. (1993: 134)
Yet he later claims that the knowledge he holds about the land and its people is in some ways privileged, revealing echoes of “We are initiated men”:
If you would know this land, in whatever way you think it might be possible for you to know it, then you will have to go there. It’s always better to see it and hear it for yourself. That is, if you think you are entitled to such information. Here, on the page, the voices are missing, and the storytellers reduced to cameo parts without hands or eyes, and no breathing in your ear, no smell of kangaroo meat and campfires. (1993: 135 — the italics are mine)
There is no recognition here, either, that it is the very act of placing these stories into the framework of another person’s (an outsider’s) poems which reduces the story-tellers to cameo parts in their own world.
The title poem of Singing The Snake draws out these motives for understanding country through the stories of the traditional landowners (“if you would know this country/ you must know its stories”). ‘Singing The Snake’ (6) provides one story of the spiritual basis of the people’s relationship with their land. The story teller is Old Tjupurrula (Nosepeg), and his narrative is framed by a “montage” of images of Uluru in a television documentary, and the poet’s descriptions of, and interaction with, the story teller.
The story is of the giant rainbow snake who hides in a rockhole near the top of Uluru, and the people who come from all over the land to sing to the snake to remind him of their need for water in a time of drought. It is also the story of the connection with the land, and the power of this relationship, and that of the poet and the storyteller to the stories they are conveying:
Take time to look, look again -
feel the land through your feet;
the Snake will not harm those
who show the proper respect.
Those who rush in must be strangers.
‘It will attack strangers.’
…If you would know this country,
you must know its stories…
The story is similar to that told by Oodgeroo in her ‘Community Rain Song’ (see 3.5.1), in that the land is in drought and the people gather to use their power to change the dry to wet.
‘People travelled up here
when the land filled up
with children who had no memory of rain.
From Putardi, Triinya, and Karli Karru;
from Muruntji, Atila, and Wimparraku,
they came’
The children may have no knowledge of rain, but all the people know the songs that are needed: they have “carried the Song” for generations. Old rivalries and “payback” are forgotten as the people from all the different communities start their Song to wake up the Snake:
‘With one, special Song, they knew,
they had the power to sing the Snake.
They could make him remember them;
They could change his mind.’
The spell of the Tongue:
a hundred hundred round the Rock,
crying out for water,
deep-lunged
cracking the voice,
mimicking thunder, chanting:
‘Kapi! Kapi! Kapi!’
But it is not rain that comes. The mystery here is greater, the power more profound than merely changing the course of the elements. The water comes, not from the sky, but from the Snake’s rockhole on top of Uluru.
‘Course,’ he says;
‘in early days, olden times;
you know,
before the whitefellas came,
when bush people had the power
to sing the Snake.
Water everywhere -
all the way, everyway,
no worries,
from the Rock, and
fall down, fall down,
fall down ...
without clouds ... without rain!’.
Marshall-Stoneking’s poem, ‘Corkwood’ (7), is also concerned with the bounty of the Earth, and the connections between the people of the land and the spirits that inhabit it. This is fruitful country, filled with fragrance and foods available to the women who know the secret ways of the country and of releasing the spirits who guard the food sources. The poem’s form pays tribute to the traditional song-cycles, with its place-naming, chants, and spirit-calling; the people crossing over between their clock-time and the time when those who created the features of the country were active. Both times are happening at once.
At Katatjurta,
longer than can be remembered,
women have pounded the boulders -
the bodies of two corkwood sisters -
to wake the spirit,
to release the life-giving mist.
Like the Snake, the Witintji (the Corkwood sisters) know the songs, and the cycles of action of which they form a part. The spirit comes alive to provide life, responding to the women’s song, and renewing the relationship between people, land and spirit:
And the land understands the voices
of the women who carry the memory.
And the stones that hold the corkwood spirit
know the songs they sing:
‘Witintji tree, witintji tree,
bring us large blossoms full of honey…’
And suddenly,
the world is filled with flowers.
Surely this is equivalent to any miracle producing loaves and fishes! And yet, as in other poems describing these everyday miracles, it is a process that provokes no astonishment from those involved (only from the white reader). The songs and stories, the spirits and places, the needs and results, are all known to those who belong to them.
The numerous poems by Aboriginal writers, or by poets who have spent some time in Aboriginal communities, which concentrate on the bounty of nature are a fascinating contrast to the early (and even later) European view of this as an arid, joyless, lifeless country. The two perspectives are not simply differences of opinion. Rather, there is a subtle difference of acceptance, of belonging (or at least believing that it is possible to belong), of understanding the country through vastly different ways of knowing.
Again, in this poem, the song is not secret/sacred knowledge (although obviously it is special knowledge known to women responsible for the collection of the corkwood honey). It is necessary information, possibly even taken for granted, that is passed in song and in story through generations, as the poet also attempts to convey in his light-hearted poem from the same collection, ‘Instructions for Honey Ants’ (8):
Work with the end of your dress
tucked up between your legs.
Speak in whispers; laugh silently;
do not whistle. Whistling, especially,
brings bad luck. Do not be afraid
to feel where you cannot see ...
If you find them, it is better
when children are waiting.
This is marangkatja: a gift.
Love what you are after.
These are detailed instructions for a task which is clearly hot, hard work, but still fun (“laugh silently”). Honey ants may well be a source of vital nutrients, but they are mostly a treat, dessert for the children, an adventure to collect, a prize, a gift.
Marshall-Stoneking expounds more clearly in ‘Passage’ (9) his understandings of the meaning of Law and the timelessness and power of the Song. This poem is about “the oldest man in the world”, who wears shoes, a cowboy hat and red bandanna, and bumps around the modern world in the back of the truck. He tells of the Dreaming, his real world, which is past, present and future, and the way in which he sees and understands the land:
‘That tree is a digging stick
left by the giant woman who was looking
for honey ants;
That rock, a dingo’s nose;
There, on the mountain, is the footprint
left by Tjangara on his way to Ulamburra’.
His knowledge and his words are the same as his father’s and grandfather’s have been; this is a story that changes only in minor detail over generations. This is the story of how the land was shaped.
‘it has been like this for many years:
the Dreaming does not end; it is not like the whiteman’s way.
What happened once happens again and again.
This is the Law.
This is the power of the Song.
Through the singing we keep everything alive;
through the songs the spirits keep us alive.’
The oldest man in the world speaks
to the newest man in the world.
The “oldest man in the world” is one of many in the generations of singers and storytellers who keep alive one of the world’s oldest cultures. The “newest man” is the poet, placing himself, just as the “initiated men” of the Jindyworobaks would have, at the heart of the narrative in a place of privilege and sacred trust.
One of Marshall-Stoneking’s most successful poems in this collection is one which, interestingly, does not rely on the words of those around him. His own response to the central Australian landscape is explored in the mournful ‘The Mountains Haven’t Moved’. (10) The poet is considering his imminent return to Sydney, with the mountains as a backdrop (seen through his window as he prepares to leave) which keeps intervening in his thoughts and life. The poet here is a transient, a visitor who has been changed by the immense country and its people, but feels he has had little impact on them:
There are mountains behind my house,
big mountains; I see them from my kitchen window.
I have been watching them closely
for a long time. Today,
a letter arrived from Sydney:
a friend reminding me that soon
I will be coming back to the city.
She says I will love every minute of it;
she can hardly wait.
I wash the dishes and walk around the house.
The mountains outside my kitchen window
haven't moved.
Those mountains will not leave him alone, and he can hardly bring himself to leave them. He lists drawbacks of both city and desert living, the changes that the years and the country have made in him and his family:
and my wife, at twenty-seven, complains of getting old
... For four years I have watched
the hairs in my beard turning grey.
... Jenny tells me things have changed in Sydney.
There are soup kitchens again -
first time since the Great Depression.
... I’ve got a skin cancer on the bridge of my nose.
And the mountains still don’t move. The country is so old, the cities that are only two hundred years old are already decaying, the people within them are aging, all the poet can do is look out of his window, recollect, indulge in a little wry self-pity (even “all my friends are splitting up”), and ponder the classic Australian geographical dilemma:
Where does one go from the centre,
except a little closer to the edge?
The windows. The mountains.
The poem does not specifically address the poet’s cultural dislocation as a North American living in Australia, but focuses on the thoughts of the city-dweller reviewing life in the great Australian outback.
Marshall-Stoneking’s continuing sense of alienation in a land to which those around him do feel they belong is perhaps characterised best by this passage from Taking America Out of the Boy which concerns the return of Marshall-Stoneking’s “granny”, Tutama, to the country from which he and his family had been forced twenty years earlier:
There was no single place on earth I felt connected to, not in the way that Tutama did. Where was the land I could cry over? My country, it seemed, was only a location on a map. And yet, I felt connected to him, and through him, to this place —a tiny patch of dirt you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed it in a car. (1993: 130)
Perhaps it is this need to feel connected to a landscape and its people which motivates the poet to appropriate the words and stories of those people for use in his own work? The poet feels he has no connection of his own to the landscape, and must be vicariously connected through those around him. He does not sense, as Wright and Cataldi have, that a vicarious link to the landscape can never be an authentic one, and that the poet’s own genuine feelings for the country, expressed clearly in his own voice (as in ‘The Mountains Haven’t Moved’) create a more direct and effective poetry.