"Our write-to-write": A Poetics of Encounter Across Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean

Abstract

Encounter narratives are often associated with the accounts of first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous inhabitants of New Worlds. However, they are also the means by which writers assert their self-determination from the coloniser. Notable examples can be found in the works of Martinique scholar Edouard Glissant, the late Barbados poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty, and Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. Each poet validates the encountered figure's right to refuse the reader's comprehension, a shared signature demonstrating their commitment to resist the self-Other tradition of Western metaphysics. This dissertation is the first scholarly effort to examine their works together and one of the first comparative studies of Aboriginal and Caribbean poetry; drawing out formal, conceptual, and historical affinities between these poets' projects. Aboriginal and Caribbean writings on the encounter are commonly framed by an overarching structural opposition between Caribbean rootlessness and Aboriginal rootedness. More provocatively, I suggest that a range of Aboriginal and Caribbean writers themselves affirm this structural opposition by portraying one another in obverse terms. In doing so, I resituate these poets in a host of new theoretical figurations that challenge the given cultural or political groupings with which their poetic extrapolations of the encounter are read, most notably the rootlessness of Caribbean literature and the rootedness of Aboriginal literature. Having shown that the rootless-rooted binary limits our understanding of the relational complexities of these poets' projects, I upend this opposition by reading from an inverted theoretical perspective: Brathwaite and Glissant as the forbears of an Indigenous literature, Fogarty and Eckermann as mobile writers in a planetary context.