IMAGINARY EXILE
Shortlisted for the Australian Book Review Calibre Prize 2012.
First published in Life Writing Vol 10, No4 (2013) pp. 441-458
A secondhand copy of An Imaginary Life opens on my lap. In the 1980s, when I first read David Malouf’s novel, the prose invited me to cry — but I resisted. Collingwood inner city towers surrounded me, the closure of nature seemed complete and a dead Roman poet was the last thing on my teenage mind. If the book had a message for me, a reader who lived in another century from the story, I refused to decipher it. Years later, living far from home in a small French village, I revisit the poet Ovid and the Wild Child called The Boy to follow the shifting path of imaginary exile.
The child I once was had a borderless body. She had no reason to fall. Nights were lit by candles, kerosene lamps, the Southern Cross and under their glow she dreamt of fool’s gold calling under platypus water. Her home was a log cabin with mud floors and at homemade tables she ate food gathered from volcanic topsoil and wrestled from cows and chickens by leather adult hands. Her first friends were gum trees and the lens through which she viewed the world was shot with speckled sunlight.
Exile is traditionally understood as a state outside the Law. It is geographical banishment to the peripheral lands outside the privileges of citizenship. An Imaginary Life is Malouf’s fictional account of Ovid’s exile where the poet is banished to the edge of the Roman Empire for talking too much and finds refuge in the small village of Tomis with people who don’t speak his language: Latin. Alienated from his culture and out of sorts, Ovid befriends a Wild Child in the forest called The Boy. The Boy was raised by deer, and is not only outside human language, but human civilisation. With the other men from the village Ovid brings the child back to the village and tries to teach The Boy human language. During a long winter the villagers fear The Boy is possessed by demons so Ovid and The Boy flee into the frozen wastelands. In this all encompassing wilderness and isolation, the relationship between The Boy and Ovid allows the Roman Poet to learn, or perhaps recover from his childhood, the language of nature. We are led to believe that Ovid dies embedded in the poetry of the earth that holds him. ‘An Imaginary Life’ speaks to me about the possibilities of exile, the recovery of interiority and poetic fusion with the environment.
The novel penetrates my autobiographical skin. At the end of the 1960s, when history’s pages rushed towards globalisation and advanced capitalism, my parents sought a world other than the one they inherited and, with the help of Benedictine spirituality, a bush block and other rustic idealists, decided to live outside the mainstream in deliberate exile. In the middle of the Australian bush, without rancour, indignation or advertising they quietly turned their backs on the world, picked up shovels and wooden crosses to ‘chop wood and carry water’ for the first ten years of my childhood. There was no need to justify, convert or evangelise. The lifestyle of ‘St Benedicts’ simply was, but its simplicity was well considered retreat from contemporary times — no electricity, no television, no shops and no respect for bureaucratic laws like property, administration or registering cars. Surrounded by Henry Lawson bush there was no lovesick Wordsworthian adoration of daffodils and it was no hippie wonderland of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The life was hard labour on the land while Gregorian chant and Leonard Cohen swayed side by side on the tape player. Strangers were welcomed with smiles and given beds, but not sought out, as this community lived to be overlooked, ignored, and did not think that the world, only a few kilometres down the road, was going to end or needed saving. Influenced by ancient myths and Judeo-Christianity, exile was a good thing and if no-one bothered to banish them, they’d do it themselves, so I was raised in the beauty of the periphery.
‘St Benedicts’ believed in exilic distance. While fighting bushfires and growing tomatoes they tried to create an in-between space where a different language and understanding of the world might find breath, and sought to live the Christian edict “To be in the world but not of the world.” To be ‘of’ the world was complete possession and spiritual imprisonment by the laws ‘of’ the land. The greater law resided ‘in’ the land and notions of Christian love. In order to achieve this, like Malouf’s Ovid and perhaps Voltaire and St Francis, they tended gardens at the periphery of the Empire, in a place apart, in order to experience the quietest kind of exile – conscious withdrawal from their time in order to clearly understand the world they’d been born into. To be ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ the world demanded two sharp eyes and deliberate footsteps. These people kept one eye on the world, read newspapers, discussed politics and indulged in cask wine and blues guitars, but their other eye turned to thunderstorms coming down the mountain, the gum leaves underfoot and the gurgle of tadpoles becoming frogs. My parents walked carefully with eyes trained on two worlds, for there was always a danger of becoming cross eyed and falling into mad polemical rage or being sucked into a time that my dad, with a grin and leaning on his spade, said was ‘mad as a cut snake.’ They sought to be irrelevant to the state, the Law and the corporation by playing with a lifestyle from the past, for they didn’t want to unconsciously fall into the madness of the here and now. ‘St Benedicts’ followed a long tradition that believed exile, even if deliberate, possessed the potential for radical spirituality and clear thought.
Unlike the adults in the community, who were on the run from their middle class heritage, I wasn’t in exile. I was at home. As a child I ran around the banks of circular time. Vibrant banskias crackled at me, ferns sought connection with my bare arms and trees burned with invitation. I was held by an environment snapping with bracken, cicadas, frogs and the hum of the old Holden coming up the track. I sat under ferns and wondered at how the sun made its way down, slow and eternal into my lap, then through me. Language ran through my body without the need for texts or words. Flashes and sparks appeared in the landscape daily, hourly and every second in what Michel Serres describes as “a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate” (Serres, 9). Rather than calendar visions of static European fields, the bush was constantly in flux, constantly swinging. There was no point of single emergence – no historical spine - and I dived into it. Back then my body was committed to pre-history – there was no such thing as an inner life. Like Ovid experienced at the end of his life, at my beginnings the universe talked from everywhere: inside and out.
For St Benedicts the Law was an empty set of rules for those who had no consciousness, no gods, no love or community. Those who believed the Law was the main prescription for a good life had given up on ancient wisdom and their own interior. The one earthly law was neither biblical nor metaphorical – it was a fear of snakes. I was ordered to walk noisy through the bush to warn snakes that a predator with a big stick was on the march. I was told there was a God but he never appeared. ‘St Benedicts’ sought god between them and, like Ovid, felt rather misunderstood by Rome, so barely paid attention to church hierarchies.
Our bodies are not final. We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another. Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we each move an infinitesimal space towards it. We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for whose delight we have prepared a landscape, and who can only be a god. (Malouf, 23)
St. Benedicts made god by breaking home made bread around altars fashioned from tree trunks and swung incense over a homespun congregation that knelt before its smell in remembrance. Latin was spoken by the creeks and sung at processions along dirt tracks and although I participated in rituals it was pure play. I never knew there was a place called Australia or a Catholic Church. “No more civic virtues…. No more patriotism’ (Malouf, 19). There were no limitations besides the weather. No boundaries except for the ultimate natural law spelt out by hail, rain, bushfires, snakes, and wombat holes.
Exilic distance sounds intelligent but when the world is so wonderful it’s hard not to fall in love, go cross-eyed and get lost. At age three I left the community and went walking along the bush roads with a kettle in my hands and didn’t come home for lunch. For hours they hunted through the creeks, along the ferns and down wombat holes fearing me dead. I was found, hours later, offering an old neighbor a cup of tea. The world was ripe for exploration and I was besotted. I wanted to be ‘in’ the world and perhaps I even wanted to be ‘of’ it. I was Wild Child fearless. Life was a gum tree and hessian wonderland and embedded in its coarse, but homelike substance, I had no reason to fall.
Seven years later the Law invaded the community in the form of banal land contracts. Catholicism tightened its grip around the adults’ necks and, amongst other things, they fought over doctrine and methods of worship. Language tied them into knots. The Law ran in with lots of words — both the church and the state — to divide and disperse a sublime childhood. The community disintegrated and, thrown into the world, Wild Children entered the centre with Eucharistic English on their tongues, not the best language to navigate the playground. At age ten I sat in the old Holden and we drove away from our bush block into a nuclear world. From that moment on the bush reclaimed our log cabin home by drawing its regenerating tentacles around its organic walls.
Reading ‘An Imaginary Life’ raises my temperature. Remnants of an antipodean Eden must still reside under the skin. Under my aged fingers the book feels beautiful, impossible and tragic – like the resurgence of sepia blood across the computer screen where I try to write. A taste of an Ovid kind of exile, one fused with nature and free from human Law and language, would feel freshwater divine — like childhood.
Ovid and I experienced opposing kinds of exile. Suddenly our family was smack bang in the mainstream. The reverse journey from the periphery to the centre, from the bush to the city, from self-sufficiency to modernity was my experience of exile: of being caught between two times. Exile is about being severed from your past and thrown into an unreadable future.
Between two cycles of time, the millennium of the old gods, that shudders to its end and a new era that will come to its crisis at some far point in the future…where you, dear reader, sit…translating this…into your own tongue.(Malouf, 11)
I had to learn a new language. I had to learn to translate, and fast. The old gods had shuddered away and on an intoxicated freeway, the future sped towards me.
Without language for the mainstream I threw myself into substances I’d never met. In the 1980s, when my Wild Child was banished from the periphery and exiled into the real world, I flew in with Walt Whitman enthusiasm.
…following no plan that we could annunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creature we long for and must become. (Malouf, 23)
I loved this place of pink ice-cream and polystyrene cups. I dived into the vibrancy of soap operas, drove through teeming cities and walked through rainbow crowds. Rubbish dumps were spell binding: all that sparkling matter heated together as bubble wrap and orange peels competed for glory. The irony of being raised with a body free to blend with its environment backfired on any principle of remaining a reserved hermit. The new world was a pile of kaleidoscopic trash, the stink from exhaust pipes, chip packets falling from car windows – and the times, sick with overconsumption, created a dance floor for a Whitman waltz over polluted landscape.
But my knowing that it is the sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Child is otherwise. I try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and am immediately struck with panic, as if losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it off from the tip of my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back. (Malouf, 92)
I congealed. I fizzed. I stunk. Our poetic souls long for our bodies, our tongues, to fuse with the landscape we inhabit. We long to love the stuff that surrounds us because that’s what being at home is. This love is the opposite of exile.
Our family of four kids, two exhausted adults and a confused dog moved from house to house, country to city, suburbs to inner city but movement didn’t erase what I held in my body. Childhood and virginal nature had been banished but something unacceptable to reasonable people still existed within – the cellular memory of gods’ time and a longing for distance from the mainstream. Sometimes I was laid out on my back with nostalgia. I rose, determined not to yearn perpetual innocence, for arrested development. I didn’t want to recapture, preserve, or restore childhood time into flesh, but neither would there be a funeral, for it wasn’t dead. In exile, it lay under the asphalt hardly able to breath, but remained the solid stuff we walked on. It needed no chasing – it seemed part of the dissolving landscape.
The gods are alive
Yes, but yonder, up there, in another world overhead.
There they are endlessly active. (Holderlin, 43)
Unlike Holderlin, I believed the gods were endlessly active down below: in the dirt and body.
When I read about Ovid and the Boy out in the wilderness their speech fuses with the landscape. Stuck in the city, my childhood flesh had no language for the modern so I melted into it. My past was too sepia to resist the spangles and tinsel of the late 80s. But by adolescence the language of the new world was all over me. My body was clothed in synthetic fabrics that rubbed into my skin so easily I needed my own warning label on my bare neck: “Beware: Flammable”. “We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of our minds.” (Malouf, 26)
Like many, adolescence damaged my body. Untethered from the past and flung into a future that approached like a series of drunken trucks, the illiterate body, without a language of resistance, flung itself into vodka prematurely and ate American hamburgers in fluorescent drug-dens masquerading as McDonalds outlets. I vomited into toilet bowls, let myself get inebriated in midnight parks and lay under bushes while boys tried to colonise my body. While the boys failed, the spangled and eternally hungry world managed to possess me. I was thoroughly ‘of’ the world. The love of substances exceeded my vocabulary. In my mouth I felt my tongue die and wished it would resurrect. In nightmares I lay naked under hot streetlights, the body unable to scream for ‘help’ because it was without alphabet. The exilic distance of those who raised me seemed like a cruel joke.
Universal language doesn’t fall down dead at the city gates. Exile is a space where new languages arise because our eyes open in new spaces and maybe Ovid might have found a new poetic language if he’d been a barbarian cast adrift in dirty Roman streets. In late adolescence, around the same time I first read An Imaginary Life, I stood on the highest Melbourne skyscraper and peered into an obscure dusk. The city lights were a thousand waking eyes greeting the oncoming night. In the distant sky there was no difference between planes and birds. I wondered about the origins of this urban landscape. All these substances must come from divided mixed and concocted natural elements, because the earth is all we have. As Hannah Arendt said “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition,” (Arendt, 2) and here we were - plastic, concrete, rubber and oil dancing over the skin of depleted dirt. The spectacle was alluring, like a painted lover inviting you into the darkness of his circus tent. Even at the top of Melbourne’s highest building the bush was shadowed by pink pollution and might not exist. The only green below seemed deliberate. Trees rose robotic from sidewalks and grass, itself a stranger here, was cordoned off into neat squares. “Even the seeds are out of place”(Malouf, 14). But, inebriated by a filthy sunset, the light grabbed trees, buildings, planes, birds and me until we mixed together in a mauve haze. That evening beauty made love to the synthetic universe. Romantic exile was everywhere.
When you are kicked out of home, or in Ovid’s case, Rome, the past can rise up stronger than when you lived there. Carrier pigeons historically carry messages only one way, to their home. My body, my flesh, was the carrier pigeon of time. All it took was the scent of hessian, a waft of burnt gum leaves, the sensation of bare feet on naked rocks, a bellbird to shoot song like a bullet from a shot tower, and my body was punctured by messages from St Benedict’s – from childhood. My skin would respond with little quivers, my eyes would swivel around searching for something in the sky, and it felt like air bubbles travelled through my veins. I clung to this corporeal homesickness for, without it, I’d have been imprisoned to a present I felt a deep ambivalence towards. After these sensations receded I glanced with new eyes at the inherited world. My body moved between Wild Child wonderment and painful retreat: starving itself, aestheticizing itself with alcohol, hiding in dark rooms, pulsing with unnamed anxiety. Then it would dance in train stations, laugh at rock concerts and dissolve into the heat of the street. Believing myself in some kind of exile, two cycles of time battled within – hessian and plastic - and they were loved in equal measure.
The time came to choose what to do when I grew up but, far from exilic distance, the lights of my time had me blind. My shiny results for Year 12 arrived and because I could, I applied to lawschool. Ovid did what his father wanted and became a lawyer. My father had no preference, but I didn’t want to be poor, powerless and locked into eternal nudity under a polluted sky. As Ovid looked back on his life in Rome he said,
My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my nerves in restlessness, variety, change, educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings. (Malouf, 32)
Substitute the word ‘books’ for trees and that’s how I felt about my Wild Child past life.
An elder of ‘St Benedicts’ moved to the last tip of Tasmania. After the community’s dissolution she sought the furthest place apart and still lives there. Carrier pigeons brought her voice to me on the mainland. When someone dobbed, and told her I was going to start lawschool, she crinkled her brow and scowled. “The law?” Hearing this I felt the scorching memory of hessian on skin. There was no need for the smug messenger to explain. I was entering the ultimate profession of being ‘of’ the world. I was confessing a desire to be completely possessed. I had betrayed the principles of exilic distance, of being irrelevant. But I believed in justice and humans and clung to a Whitman orientation as well as a naiveté that the law would never be my master because I was born apart. I thought I was a better man than Ovid and believed my Wild Child would always be in the wings to save me.
But pride has made me stubborn. And guilt. I have just told my father, as we move into single file, that I am leaving, and will not return. I have already begun to leave.... I am already on my way to Rome. I am already, though I cannot know it yet, on my way to exile. (Malouf, 39)
Descartes and Kant infected me until I was sick and skinny and timid. Unlike childhood, the Latin didn’t sing in this place, but was insipid with authority. “My soul aches for the refinement of our Latin tongue” (Malouf, 13). For years I slunk around the law quad wondering what meteor collision had misfired to land me within reasons’ stonewalls. I lost contact with Ovid and the Wild Child. They’d been exiled to the periphery. My inner life was colonized by someone else’s language. “When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin” (Malouf, 94).
Twenty years later a European autumn decomposes outside my window. A memory hovers over the open pages of ‘An Imaginary Life’ until the words are obscure. It doesn’t fit my plan or imagination. It threatens to shred the narrative. I abandon the desk to clear my head. When I return the pages remain haunted by a dark flutter at the margins of Malouf’s magnificent prose. It occupies without language or form. There’s nothing to do but either leave the desk, or translate the shadow. Like a defeated heretic – I write against romantic exile.
The man in the dock was a ghost. He had already died and the whole court felt it. It was the periphery of everywhere, Broome 1998, and the wet season was at its height. The judge was dressed in red robes, the barristers clothed in clerical black and all these men covered their ageing skulls with white wigs. Fans sloped overhead. Outside, men and women lay on the grass or walked slow through the dirt barefoot in singlets and sweat; but inside, the law, dressed for colder climates, was unwilling to shed its skin for the weather. Circled by red dirt, desert and tropical seas, the Broome courthouse, with its colonial architecture from last century, was a cast iron eye in a dust storm downpour.
The accused was from an indigenous community, but it was established he had enough English to stand trial. As the court discussed jurisprudential points, his head slumped between his knees. His body was still open with scars from the spearing he’d received from his own people and the court’s evidence, complete with experts flown in from Perth and Melbourne, traced the journey of his girlfriend’s death at his hands. He had beat her with a stick when they were both high on petrol, then left her lying, dying, out along a lonely track. He didn’t remember it, but her people remembered it and, following customary law, had shot ancient spears into his thigh and his sister and mother had been hit with nulla nullas. All three were banished from their land. When he fell to the dust of the football field after being speared, the ambulance and the cops waited outside the boundary line to escort him to hospital and into the arms of white man’s law.
I was witness to total exile. Two histories hovered over the accused. One tried to get into his mind; the other had condemned and banished his body. The white court, faithful to its own notions of causation, argued between petrol and wood. If petrol sniffing had contributed to the girl’s death, then the accused was guilty of manslaughter. If the blow to the head was the main cause, a verdict of murder was demanded from the jury. A voir dire had established his police confession in hospital had fulfilled the ‘Anunga’ rules designed for indigenous interviews but, by the time he was before the court, the accused was mute. Even when the court-appointed translator attempted to give his spirit words by muttering proceedings into his ear, he was deaf, monosyllabic, un-cooperative and limp. Many wondered whether he even spoke his traditional language. With precedents from other times in other lands open before them, and in costumes of some other nation’s past, the court wrestled to locate his intention, to push his consciousness into the abstract crack between murder and manslaughter. Either way, the accused was going to prison for a long time.
A stranger to Broome, and only passing through, I sat in the public gallery of the court caught between my own cycles of time. On the cusp of becoming a qualified lawyer I was also in the midst of a corporeal metamorphosis. Pregnant with my first child, the future had embedded itself in my body and I was exhausted. In the courtroom I couldn’t concentrate on the mannerisms of barristers, the flat jury faces, or the way the water in the glasses seemed to evaporate by itself. I couldn’t take my eyes off the accused.
For the whole three weeks the nineteen year old barely lifted his head. Was the brain damage more extensive than the experts attested? Did the fast English and court procedure alienate him? Was he immersed in ‘shame job’? Was he living what Stanner calls the lack of tragedy and absence of self-pity that is part of traditional indigenous outlook? (Stanner, 68). Every effort was made to give the accused/condemned a voice, but he refused to give narration to his actions. His body spoke of an absence of longing, lack of grief for the past and no fear for his future. He looked like he didn’t care what was said about him or what verdict would be delivered. At the time I wished he’d speak, throw a hand in the air, scratch his arm or ask the translator to repeat, but my wishes were married to the court’s wishes. The accused’s refusal to invite empathy breached unwritten laws of white culture. Relatively, white people don’t shut up and become uncomfortable when silence enters a conversation. ‘Our’ citizenship is conditional upon the delivery of coherent individual narratives and this noise comes in the numerical demands of affidavits and echoes back to Aristotle’s poetic rules. Without his voice, the court, and his barristers in particular, pieced together his actions with the help of science, psychology, witnesses and by dissecting time frames. Other people’s stories filled the court but, maybe, despite all its words, the court was illiterate. Maybe the accused’s narrative was all over his skin and in the way his body slumped into bare visibility.
Exile is punishment for betraying the kingdom’s laws. It removes citizenship privileges. It is outside civilization. When the accused/condemned was exiled from one form of citizenship, another civilization rushed in to claim his body. It was impossible for him to gain distance from his time or his crime. Caught between the weight of two civilizations, two worlds, two times, he was, understandably, criminal in both but upon banishment didn’t meet the terror of irrelevancy, upheld as leading to the possibilities of an idealized spiritual state or, for Judeo Christians, redemption – instead, he met more law. This man looked beyond loss, beyond grief – at the limit of human belonging but snared in its foreign demands. There was no periphery to seek retreat within. There was no option to not be ‘of’ the world. The world possessed and owned him. No wonder he was mute. My translation of the here and now became riddled with fear and unreadable. My tongue got tied up in legal light and exilic distance felt impossible. I asked, is the whole world now Rome and all of us so thoroughly Roman that we’ll never have the opportunity to meet our own inner Wild Child? Romantic exile smashed apart.
“We are not bound by the laws of our nature, but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws without doing violence to our essential being”(Malouf, 62).
In between court I walked along the turtle blue sea and flat-palmed streets. I sat in the bar drinking tonic water. I lay on my bed feeling like it was such a long-long way between white law and the land, but their intimacy suffocated. The air boiled with humidity. The baby shuffled against my organs. My lungs strained with every breath. I couldn’t imagine the kind of exile the accused/condemned endured.
When Ovid crossed the River Ister into the lands beyond Empire he said, “the earth goes on…. There is another world out there” (Malouf, 137). This no longer feels true. An Ovid kind of exile is denied us. The periphery and the wilderness have shrunk. As technology spins webs over the globe CCTV cameras capture anonymous movements. Barbed wire chokes geography. Each minute hectares of rainforest are razed. The Internet traces each click and every communication remains in its infinite memory. Our advanced cities make it illegal to sleep in public space then the police demand addresses from the homeless – who have nowhere to go. Satellites trace weather, cars, criminals and tourists. From my computer in France I locate my brother as he travels across the Pilbara. Seven billion of us make our home on one tiny orb of dirt and, in this maddening crowd, have we embedded the periphery of everywhere with our power, our Law and, blinded by the importance of our own time, shattered precious darkness? Space shrinks. Technology grows. Everything is increasingly tracked, recorded, watched, and double jeopardy of the cultural kind occurs across the world’s jurisdictions, in every race, gender, within and between nations. Caught between states and, unwelcome by all, refugees sew their mouths together in detention centres. Indigenous communities are invaded by the nation’s military under the guise of moral panic and led by leaders reminiscent of Stanner’s ‘Flesh Creepers’ (Stanner, 157). Every cell and every substance is stamped by copyright. The Law, the state and the corporation have wound inorganic tentacles across deserts, under seas and into the clouds. At the periphery of our time lies not the wilderness, the poet, the Wild Child or the prospect of interiority, but a regulated territory of camps filled with those banished but unable to be exiled. Those caught in illiterate displacement. Exilic distance, the distant cousin of exile, could be a delusion of a privileged few who never have to face the real terror of not belonging.
Exile hurts. It can occur without leaving home. In the particular case of Australia, the fusion of crime and banishment in that Broome courtroom recalls Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, where the crime is written onto the surface of the prisoner’s body with a torture machine. In that courtroom the white legal linguistic torture machine could only scratch the surface of the accused, for some other, more visceral, law was already inscribed deep into his being. For traditional indigenous peoples the separation between body and land is slight, and across Australia Kafka’s torture machine is written all over the landscape – the mining punctures, the roads, the oil wells, the salinated flat plains. The land continues to be banished from under the feet of its people. “The pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the question.” Banishment from one’s roots, one’s history, for indigenous people, can occur without stepping foot from one’s literal dwelling. In the poem ‘Municipal Gum,’ by the poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, an isolated gumtree is imprisoned in a city street with ‘hard bitumen’ around its feet. It is ‘castrated’, its ‘hell prolonged’ – stranded from country and the ‘cool world of leafy forest halls.’ Noonuccal asks, “O fellow citizen, What have they done to us?”(Noonuccal, 45). The tree is powerless, alienated and in a strung-out state of static exile. Are we all on the tip of becoming Noonuccal and the Municipal Gum? The present world closes in around a lone citizen, imprisons it on the spot and castrates its translation.
“I felt a funeral in my brain” (Dickinson, 15) In the Broome courtroom I held my pregnant stomach. What world was my child entering? Without the breathing space of some kind, without access to her own tradition of exilic distance, she might end up consumed, eaten, and made mute by the suffocating contemporary where a periphery seemed imaginary. Would she ever have a chance to translate this world into her own tongue, or would she be blinded by a multitude of colliding inheritances? In that court romantic exile was an impossible utopia, irrelevancy a privilege of the few and metamorphosis felt dead. There was no Whitman dance over landscape – only red dirt dust storms that hit against the skin like dried out blood of our country. A conversation between Ovid and The Boy seemed more like fiction than ever. I fell out of love with my time. There was every reason to do so. The world felt tiny. For those three weeks in Broome, I despised the Law. My Whitman smile became fake because inside a dark Kafka storm brewed and, for a moment, my Wild Child kind of died.
I might call to (her). I have voice for that. But do not. To call (her) back might be to miss the fullness of this moment as it is to be revealed, and I want so much, at the very end of here, to be open to all that it holds for me. (Malouf, 152)
It was the funeral site of an imagined interior that had sustained me for decades. My body and my mind were strong enough to read my time, to become a translator, but the narrative fusion of autobiography and affidavit slammed a coffin over my romantic head.
The red dirt that surrounded the town varied in strength but not intelligence. It brushed sweet powder over the skin then whipped up from the cemetery edges to grate welts onto the legs. Solid brick homes huddled along the shoreline weren’t safe from its advance. It snuck in under the soles of sandals. At the resorts it lay in a thin film on the skin of umbrella cocktails sipped by lipsticked mouths. Without permission tropical winds carried it until it poured through mosquito nets to stain white sheets. If it had a mind it was penetrative. It beat the battle against the kilometres and wasn’t bound by time or had a language I could read. In between court and my temporary home, my belly a hot furnace, I’d find myself stuck in the heart of red dirt dust storms. The court closed, I could only go forward to the concrete bunker we were staying in. There were no in-between times. There was no in-between court and home. Both thought they were separate and apart, but the red dust was everywhere and articulating a language I couldn’t decipher. There was nothing to do but abandon myself to the unknown words of red dirt. “To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth. How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile is” (Camus, 60). I was pregnant. From here on in, I was touching someone else perpetually and, unlike the past, I couldn’t imagine myself away from there.
The accused was pronounced guilty of manslaughter. He was flown to Perth, thousands of kilometres away in the municipal centre, to be incarcerated for a minimum of twelve years. No family, no friends and no country – what did prison mean to a man already exiled? The futility of the verdict was seen on the accused face - nothing to read except a blank stare at the ground. I sat at the back of the court and wiped my eyes. For the rest of our time in Broome my partner and I visited communities and threw nets into crocodile rivers to gather mud prawns for dinner. We sat with old indigenous folks around the BBQ and listened to histories unspoken in books. We sang ancient fishing songs with polyglot locals as the moon dared ascend a sand staircase away from there.
So dear Ovid what would you do if a memory like this seized your conversation with The Boy, the Wild Child? What would you do if a shadow passed through your argument about exile to fracture a sweet narrative? In An Imaginary Life your exile was liberation into new possibilities of language. In the weakness of your dissolution you found the universe resided inside. But this red dirt memory makes me wonder if your periphery, a wilderness of stars, trees and seeds, was as yet untouched by Rome. In my time Latin’s authority is everywhere, embedded even within the sacred difficulties of exile, and its tongue whips the Wild Child away from the interior.
The rumour is that animals have no language or interior life. When we left St. Benedicts our beloved black Collie came with us for Chloe was part of the family before any of us kids were born. In dog years she was 70 and for all of her life she was used to sleeping on the dirt path outside our log cabin as if on guard, as if to protect us. In the bush this was easy for no cars came down the path at night. When we moved she continued to sleep outside out the front door but this time she curled up on a bitumen city street. Dad used to go out and bring her inside but she always make her way back to her spot, where she could keep an eye on the comings and goings of our home. This futile act of protection meant that Chloe, a black dog lying on a black road on a black night — was hit by a car.
Dad carried her onto the verandah. Her back was broken and she hung limp in his arms but there was no money for rent let alone a vet. As Mum and Dad stressed about what to do, I sat on the verandah staring at the lifeless Chloe laid out on a mat. Sensing I was there, she tried to turn her head, tried to rise and come towards me in a “kind of conversation that needs no tongue”(Malouf, 145). Through unimaginable pain she attempted to wag her tail and her crooked legs moved towards me, but instantly buckled. She fell and whimpered. I rushed over to hold her still. Apparently lacking an interior, Chloe’s body expressed more love than words ever could. Her death sent the whole family into a mourning spin.
Was Chloe fatally addicted to patterns of a redundant version of home? Haven’t we always longed for notions of home, the opposite of exile? Ovid did, so is this age really so different to any other? The problem is that amidst constant change it’s hard to grasp the here and now, let alone how it differs from previous eras. Is it mortgages, collapsing banks, terrorism, adventure parks, internet, shopping malls, dying rivers, DNA testing, exploding quarks, millions protesting in squares? Is it a body struggling to cope with the quick movement from a bush paradise onto synthetic streets? Is it witnessing a nineteen-year old pinned still by a legal system that means nothing to him but holds his life in its grip? Is it the ring of refugee camps that circle our world? Is a dying dog with a broken back that tries to rise? To her own detriment Chloe couldn’t adjust to the demands of her new environment. She was old and maintained the patterns of the past in order to love us, as she knew how. She was an irrelevant animal stuck in the city, but even broken in two she tried to rise towards connection with another body. The opposite of exile is love – the condition of suddenly feeling at home wherever you are, but it’s not necessary a safe place to be. In An Imaginary Life we are led to believe that Ovid died in the landscape he was suddenly at one with.
Ironically, if romantic exile has left any remnants with me, it is the persistence of living and loving at the fracture point of experience: the disorientation and confusion that’s inevitable in any era. Honest romantic exile doesn’t come from lusting for geographical or temporal escape away from this world. The kind of love that Ovid experienced with The Boy transfused into the landscape and allowed Ovid to experience a new poetic language that was ancient. The kind of painful love that made Chloe reach for me, despite the contemporary world breaking her spine, is the kind of love that can’t run from witnessing a world quickly filling with the un-exile-able accused/condemned. It’s the kind of heretical love that might dare admit Justice and the Law have never been synonyms and neat reasonable arguments sometimes demand to be disrupted. This kind of love feels weak, un-reasonable and tragically poetic but the pathetic gesture from a beloved animal is a tiny ambiguous light along an increasingly crowded path.
For years I worked as a lawyer with many accused/condemned. I navigated Roman terrain while raising children and my body absorbed the stories of the raped, the beaten, the violent, the addicted, and the crazy. These people got under my skin but ten years after Broome I quit the law and followed my partner to live far from home in an anachronistic farming village in France with nothing to do but love my kids and observe how seasons changed the way the villagers moved their bodies. Accidentally I stumbled into a place that resembles St. Benedicts. The village is populated by stocky natives who ban advertising in their streets, celebrate centuries old rituals, live off the land, leave their kids to wander wild in the woods and ignore bureaucratic bribes from the French government to amalgamate with bigger, more developed villages. The conditions for exilic distance, irrelevancy and the possibilities of reclaiming an interior life are here. It’s now possible to be ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ the world.
“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance.”(Malouf, 90) Nevertheless, sometimes I stand on the hill and, overtaken by delicious landscape, feel I’ve lived too long for the Wild Child to ever speak again. I’m filled with many voices, opinions, languages and images so that, even in perfect conditions, Babel confusion overwhelms the view. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben says,
We have had to grow used to thinking and writing in such confusion of bodies and places, of outside and inside, of what is speechless and what has words with which to speak, of what is enslaved and what is free, of what is need and what is desire. This has meant - why not admit it? – experiencing absolute impotence, bumping against solitude and speechlessness over and over precisely there where we were expecting company and words. (Agamben, 138.9)
I stubbornly stand on that hill, out-stare European cities and wonder if the Wild Child still plays in this noisy world. Facing the crowded horizon I hear my father’s voice – when years before at St. Benedicts he leant on his spade and, with an affectionate smile, laughed that “the world was mad as a cut snake.” Remembering Chloe’s loyalty I try to rise towards these many voices even though my metaphorical spine feels fractured by experience. These days there’s no thirst for redemption but instead a yearning to understand the patterns of clouds, the way water runs down the plughole in the reverse direction to home and wonder why the shadow of the accused/condemned knocks at my skull until I’m forced to write the memory alive. These days it’s radical and intriguing to look into the eye of a flower and find I no longer belong in my skin. These days occasional poetic moments shiver through my limbs to reconcile me to Malouf’s Ovid and my own Wild Child. Chance of birth has spared me exile’s ravages, but if I remember to cultivate irrelevancy every now and then, exilic distance, exile’s imaginative cousin, might smile through foreign flowers to take me home.
There are salt remnants on my cheeks. I’m sure Malouf never meant An Imaginary Life to be a self-help book, but as I close its pages it feels like fresh water has tumbled old questions through the imaginary mind. I leave the desk to cook dinner. My adolescent daughter stands beside me at the sink. Her long hair hides her cheeks. “Mum, what do you think I should do when I grow up?” For the last five years she has lived far from her birthplace. Her tongue is now tri-lingual. Judging by our negotiations over the mess on her bedroom floor, she has the makings of a great lawyer. Her paintings also draw the world into poetry. She wanders clear-eyed in the wild forests above our house in silence. What to say to this beautiful creature beside me? The one incubated within inarticulate dust storms on the other side of the planet. For she looks at me with eyes that so love the world.
The Anunga rules are the judicial guidelines established for the interrogation of Aboriginal and non-English speaking persons by Police to ensure that admissions were voluntarily obtained.
References
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