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eBook details
- Title: Politics of Indigeneity in Fogarty's Poetry (Lionel Fogarty) (Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 200 KB
Description
The Murri writer Lionel Fogarty is perhaps best known to a non-Indigenous readership as an Indigenous poet who writes in a complex way. This complexity is bound up in the way he challenges and subverts the conventions of standard English and filters it through his Indigenous reality to create a distinct anti-colonial position. Fogarty has therefore been described as a guerrilla poet because of his complex poetry and the difficult themes he writes about. In this article I suggest some ideas on how Fogarty can be read by engaging with his role as a songman, thereby providing a critical framework to engage with his poetry. To do this, I employ Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia and dialogism to engage with Fogarty's poetry, as those theories provide an avenue for reading complex literary constructions. Finally, my analysis of Fogarty's poem "The Buzz" (New and Selected Poems 69) shows how Fogarty deals with gender relations and sexual issues within his Murri community. This analysis is performed in relation to the political debates that have arisen since the Little Children Are Sacred report was made public and since the intervention in Australia's Northern Territory, both of which occurred in 2007 (see Anderson and Wild). Many non-Indigenous readers attempting to read Fogarty's poetry are confronted with a construct of aboriginality that is unfamiliar or inaccessible and many non-Indigenous Australians have little first-hand knowledge or experience of Indigenous Australians or, if they do, it is filtered by a limited understanding of Indigenous history and negative media constructions. This situation is problematic, as Marcia Langton suggests: "Textual analysis of the racist stereotypes and mythologies, which inform Australian understanding of Aboriginal people, is revealing. The most dense relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists" (33).