Versuch zur Völkerverständigung #6: Know what I´m sayin'?
12 03 2008Mt. Isa, Australia (08.11.2007),
completed in Puno, Perú (12.03.2008)
This article has taken me almost four months to complete. Language-wise it might be very rough, but I just don´t have the patience to postpone posting it any longer. It is dedicated to Clive Sam from Mt. Isa, Australia. I hope time has not tampered with the impressions of our encounter too badly, and this text will be as true as possible to the reality of that afternoon in the outback town of Mt. Isa. But what is reality anyway?
I heard about Clive at the Kalkadoon Tribal Centre in Mt. Isa, a mining town in the western part of Queensland, Australia. When I got there, a young and seemingly white lady, who turned out to be quarter aboriginal, told me that their cultural guide would turn up in the afternoon, so I made sure that I would be there.
I was almost desperate to get a different impression of the aboriginal people of Australia. The only encounter with the indigenous population so far had been with the aboriginals in Cairns, a terribly touristic town on the northern east coast, where the only natives you could meet were ragged, depressed people on the dole who avoided you as well as they could, they would not even look at you if you tried to get some eye contact. I knew that these people were being marginalised by the white society around them, but I still maintained a more romantic idea of people in tune with their environment, so I headed for the outback.
Clive looked different from the ragged people in Cairns. When I got back to the centre in the afternoon, he was sitting outside on the lawn, a little off the entrance. I first tried to open the door to the centre, but when I found that the door was locked he beckoned me to come over to him. Two Aboriginal women were with him; they turned out to be his wife and daughter (we were not introduced, though, and they kept ignoring me through the whole conversation that I had with Clive).
His skin was very dark, much darker than what I had seen in Australia so far. Today, there is only a small number of full blooded Aboriginals, many have mixed with the white settlers over the past 200 years. He was the first of his people who was really looking at me, the first time that I felt I was being noticed by one of them. His face was very serious, yet I found it hard to really distinguish the emotions in his features.
"Can I ask you some questions?"
"Whatcha wanna know?"
Aboriginal English is quite distinct from the accent of the Australians (who speak a rather weird British accent). It has some of the typical Black English features that can also be found in the U.S., such as softened fortis consonants (p, t, k), a chewing gum quality of the vowels and a lot of shortened verb endings.
I wondered how I could start a conversation with him. After all, I was a white person and I knew that I would not be perceiced as being very different from the white population of Australia.
Since most of my questions revolved around culture, and I decided to refer to the artwork I had seen in the Centre in the morning. Clive mainly confirmed what I had already learned from Bruce Chatwin´s "The Songlines" (for details see our section "Bücher"). Traditional Aboriginal painting (unlike much of the contemporary art) often displays a certain style that is characterised by the use of dots instead of solid shapes. The dots sometimes form larger shapes or simply stand for objects in a very reduced manner that need interpretation.
(Take a look at examples of aboriginal painting, both traditional and modern, either here, here, here, or here.)
Many of the paintings are in fact maps of so-called "dreamings", describing the path of one of the ancestoral spiritual beings that, according to native creation myths, shaped the world. As the ancestors walked across the country (on a walkabout or bushwalk, which is still common among the Aboriginal people today) they created the landscape along their path by the sheer power of their movements or sang it into existence. Therefore, aboriginal art mostly also has a spiritual dimension, it is a form of honouring and communicating with the Dreamtime, the utopian paradisic place of pre-existence. There are no gods in Aboriginal spirituality, instead the humanoid ancestors are the object of worship in rituals.
Clive was not particularly interested in answering my amateur ethnologist questions, but instead went on to tell me who he actually was. "You know I´m a Kalkadoon? We are the people of this land. We had a big war in the past, and today there are not many of us left, and most of our language is gone."
The Kalkadoon were one of the few tribes in Australia who actually succeeded in defending themselves against the white invasion for some time. At kalkadoon.org I found a good summary of what Clive told me: "In the war of invasion of Australia the Kalkadoon defended their territory against wave after wave of police attacks until the battle of Battle Mountain in 1884. Here police reinforcements were drawn from around Queensland and beyond. As well as the resisting warriors, nearly all of the Kalkadoon were masscred." The forces that were used against the Kalkadoon partly consisted of members of other aboriginal tribes who had been recruited as a kind of native police force. The irony of this is obvious, the lack of solidarity amongst the natives groups was part of their own demise.
The pain that arises from this heritage, these cultural memories seems to pervade in the whole of Clive´s appearance. I can suddenly and immediately sense the loss and the injuries inflicted to the people who have lived in this continent for around 40,000 years, before a group of aggressive foreign settlers diminished their people and their culture to the verge of annihilation within less than a century.
And I find it hard not to feel guilty. Not because I am in any way related to the people responsible for this genocide - not even the present day white population of Australia, no matter how ignorant many people there are, can be blamed for what happened back then - , but I realise that the fact that my culture is the legacy of an imperial past and we carry something like an original sin, whereever we go in the world. (In fact, most of the countries on this journey were at least at one point in their history colonised by Europeans, and it is most doubtful what benefit that brought: the British who turned the Maori "Island of the long white cloud" into New Zealand, the variety of Europeans who became Chileans and turned the Mapuche into a repressed minority.)
Yet, there is also a sense of somethng else in Clive´s manner of speaking. I tried not to take it as arrogance, but he certainly was very distant and remained suspicious. There was no chance that a white person like me could be trusted. That was a painful experience, since I had arrived with the intention of a cultural interchange, to create trust and understanding at least for myself and the person I was going to speak to.
But he wasn´t interested. He remained stubborn, I thought. In fact, he simply did what he felt was the one thing that could help his people survive on a larger scale. Sharing their knowledge has brought the Aboriginals nothing but pain. Enthusiastic, but presumptuous ethnologists, be them amateurs or professionals, have been extracting knowledge, in particular about spiritual matters, for the past decades, and by scientifically or popularly dealing with it made things public that should have remained secret, confined to the people who really know how to appreciate the value of this knowledge. It has been used against them, in many ways, and so it is no big surprise that they don´t want to share it anymore. (To me the lack of Cultural Centres in Australia seemed a reflection of the lack of interest of the white population, an expression of their loathing of the Aboriginals, or maybe of their underlying feeling of guilt, but maybe it also has to do with the fact that the Aboriginals have cut the connecting cords themselves.)
"You know, I lived in the city on the coast until I was 16. I had a white life. I had white values. I didn´t know where I came from, I didn´t know who I was. When I was sixteen, I learend about this place, about Mt. Isa, about my mob. And I left the city to live here, to learn about my people, about my culture, about my roots. This is where I belong."
It was hard to tell Clive´s age, I guess he was about 55 years old, and when he said "sixteen" it should have rung a bell. But it was not until later that I realised that he was probably a child of the stolen generation. (For more information see the Wikipedia article or other references.) How could he trust anyone who was white?
"Where are you travelling?" I told Clive my approximate route. The laugh he gave was genuinely arrogant. "If you want to learn something about the people of Australia, you have to go and meet them. You won´t see any on your journey. Go to the East Cape. Go to the Northern Territory. Get a 4-wheel-drive and get off the roads." I knew that I was not off the beaten track, not even close to what the heartland of aboriginal life is today. I was on a petty little ego trip through the world, trying to have my romantic ideas of indigenous life confirmed, just to be able to condemn the western way of life with more conviction. But I knew that I wasn´t prepared to let go as much as would have been necessary. Reading Chatwin´s book had taught me that already.
"There was this guy, he wanted to talk to the elders of some nothern tribe. He patiently waited, day and night, just in sight from their camp, until, after five days or so, they invited him." I had to think of Clive´s beckoning gesture outside the Tribal Centre, as of a miniature version of this invitation, but much less significant.
"You know, I talk to a lot of people. American Natives. People from Scotland. They understand what I´m talking about when I tell them things about our life here. You know what I´m sayin'?" I thought I knew what he was saying, and I was getting desperate, trying not to remain in the category "ignorant white man", but by contributing "The Scots were also organised in tribes, so they probably had similar forms of community life?" I put myself straight into the category "presumptuous white man". "You see, that Scottish guy told me about these wooden spoons his ancestors used to communicate over distances. We had something similar. Know what I´m sayin'? When I say, for example, what is your "skin", would you know what I´m talking about? The people from other tribal communities would. You would understand if you had that background. We are all old cultures, not like the Christians who have been around for some miserable 2,000 years, but who think they can conquer and destroy what has been there for much longer times."
"Know what I´m sayin'?"
I had stopped looking for the bits and pieces of knowledge I had gathered about the aboriginals. I was wondering what I was doing there. I was doubting the whole idea of meeting people from different cultures to find that connection that might be there, to overcome and appreciate the differences at the same time, when Clive, all of a sudden, asked me a question that I never expected: "Where is your mob from?" Mob is a word for tribe, not derogative at all. I told him where I lived, that I had grown up in a different place, that my parents were yet from other parts, and that my whole family was scattered over the whole of southern Germany and Austria.
Clive nods, as if I had just confirmed something he had sensed earlier. It might also just be prejudice, but when he said "You look lost", I sensed that he touched something inside of me.
I must have looked at him with a blank face, because he kept explaining himself: "You need to know where you come from. Otherwise you will never be at one with yourself. I can see that you are looking for something."
Today I am not sure if he kept on talking, but there is a phrase that seems to grow out of what Clive had said: "There is no point in travelling to far away countries, if you don´t know where you come from."
This idea still resonates in my mind when I doubt the whole idea of such a long journey. I have long satisfied the need to relax from the strains of my job and to get new impressions and a free mind. In fact, the trip is starting to litter my mind more and more, it is an overkill of impressions, especially if you avoid organised tours and really talk to local people. It´s impossible to gather the best of all worlds and turn everything into a world view of your own, because it´s all just "too much", as Nanda J. from Tü would say. It´s time to go home and get back in touch with one´s roots again, get to know where one comes from, make a connection, just like Count Dracula who would never travel far without a few coffins full of native soil.
"Know what I'm sayin'?"
"Well, I reckon."
Thom
completed in Puno, Perú (12.03.2008)
This article has taken me almost four months to complete. Language-wise it might be very rough, but I just don´t have the patience to postpone posting it any longer. It is dedicated to Clive Sam from Mt. Isa, Australia. I hope time has not tampered with the impressions of our encounter too badly, and this text will be as true as possible to the reality of that afternoon in the outback town of Mt. Isa. But what is reality anyway?
I heard about Clive at the Kalkadoon Tribal Centre in Mt. Isa, a mining town in the western part of Queensland, Australia. When I got there, a young and seemingly white lady, who turned out to be quarter aboriginal, told me that their cultural guide would turn up in the afternoon, so I made sure that I would be there.
I was almost desperate to get a different impression of the aboriginal people of Australia. The only encounter with the indigenous population so far had been with the aboriginals in Cairns, a terribly touristic town on the northern east coast, where the only natives you could meet were ragged, depressed people on the dole who avoided you as well as they could, they would not even look at you if you tried to get some eye contact. I knew that these people were being marginalised by the white society around them, but I still maintained a more romantic idea of people in tune with their environment, so I headed for the outback.
Clive looked different from the ragged people in Cairns. When I got back to the centre in the afternoon, he was sitting outside on the lawn, a little off the entrance. I first tried to open the door to the centre, but when I found that the door was locked he beckoned me to come over to him. Two Aboriginal women were with him; they turned out to be his wife and daughter (we were not introduced, though, and they kept ignoring me through the whole conversation that I had with Clive).
His skin was very dark, much darker than what I had seen in Australia so far. Today, there is only a small number of full blooded Aboriginals, many have mixed with the white settlers over the past 200 years. He was the first of his people who was really looking at me, the first time that I felt I was being noticed by one of them. His face was very serious, yet I found it hard to really distinguish the emotions in his features.
"Can I ask you some questions?"
"Whatcha wanna know?"
Aboriginal English is quite distinct from the accent of the Australians (who speak a rather weird British accent). It has some of the typical Black English features that can also be found in the U.S., such as softened fortis consonants (p, t, k), a chewing gum quality of the vowels and a lot of shortened verb endings.
I wondered how I could start a conversation with him. After all, I was a white person and I knew that I would not be perceiced as being very different from the white population of Australia.
Since most of my questions revolved around culture, and I decided to refer to the artwork I had seen in the Centre in the morning. Clive mainly confirmed what I had already learned from Bruce Chatwin´s "The Songlines" (for details see our section "Bücher"). Traditional Aboriginal painting (unlike much of the contemporary art) often displays a certain style that is characterised by the use of dots instead of solid shapes. The dots sometimes form larger shapes or simply stand for objects in a very reduced manner that need interpretation.
(Take a look at examples of aboriginal painting, both traditional and modern, either here, here, here, or here.)
Many of the paintings are in fact maps of so-called "dreamings", describing the path of one of the ancestoral spiritual beings that, according to native creation myths, shaped the world. As the ancestors walked across the country (on a walkabout or bushwalk, which is still common among the Aboriginal people today) they created the landscape along their path by the sheer power of their movements or sang it into existence. Therefore, aboriginal art mostly also has a spiritual dimension, it is a form of honouring and communicating with the Dreamtime, the utopian paradisic place of pre-existence. There are no gods in Aboriginal spirituality, instead the humanoid ancestors are the object of worship in rituals.
Clive was not particularly interested in answering my amateur ethnologist questions, but instead went on to tell me who he actually was. "You know I´m a Kalkadoon? We are the people of this land. We had a big war in the past, and today there are not many of us left, and most of our language is gone."
The Kalkadoon were one of the few tribes in Australia who actually succeeded in defending themselves against the white invasion for some time. At kalkadoon.org I found a good summary of what Clive told me: "In the war of invasion of Australia the Kalkadoon defended their territory against wave after wave of police attacks until the battle of Battle Mountain in 1884. Here police reinforcements were drawn from around Queensland and beyond. As well as the resisting warriors, nearly all of the Kalkadoon were masscred." The forces that were used against the Kalkadoon partly consisted of members of other aboriginal tribes who had been recruited as a kind of native police force. The irony of this is obvious, the lack of solidarity amongst the natives groups was part of their own demise.
The pain that arises from this heritage, these cultural memories seems to pervade in the whole of Clive´s appearance. I can suddenly and immediately sense the loss and the injuries inflicted to the people who have lived in this continent for around 40,000 years, before a group of aggressive foreign settlers diminished their people and their culture to the verge of annihilation within less than a century.
And I find it hard not to feel guilty. Not because I am in any way related to the people responsible for this genocide - not even the present day white population of Australia, no matter how ignorant many people there are, can be blamed for what happened back then - , but I realise that the fact that my culture is the legacy of an imperial past and we carry something like an original sin, whereever we go in the world. (In fact, most of the countries on this journey were at least at one point in their history colonised by Europeans, and it is most doubtful what benefit that brought: the British who turned the Maori "Island of the long white cloud" into New Zealand, the variety of Europeans who became Chileans and turned the Mapuche into a repressed minority.)
Yet, there is also a sense of somethng else in Clive´s manner of speaking. I tried not to take it as arrogance, but he certainly was very distant and remained suspicious. There was no chance that a white person like me could be trusted. That was a painful experience, since I had arrived with the intention of a cultural interchange, to create trust and understanding at least for myself and the person I was going to speak to.
But he wasn´t interested. He remained stubborn, I thought. In fact, he simply did what he felt was the one thing that could help his people survive on a larger scale. Sharing their knowledge has brought the Aboriginals nothing but pain. Enthusiastic, but presumptuous ethnologists, be them amateurs or professionals, have been extracting knowledge, in particular about spiritual matters, for the past decades, and by scientifically or popularly dealing with it made things public that should have remained secret, confined to the people who really know how to appreciate the value of this knowledge. It has been used against them, in many ways, and so it is no big surprise that they don´t want to share it anymore. (To me the lack of Cultural Centres in Australia seemed a reflection of the lack of interest of the white population, an expression of their loathing of the Aboriginals, or maybe of their underlying feeling of guilt, but maybe it also has to do with the fact that the Aboriginals have cut the connecting cords themselves.)
"You know, I lived in the city on the coast until I was 16. I had a white life. I had white values. I didn´t know where I came from, I didn´t know who I was. When I was sixteen, I learend about this place, about Mt. Isa, about my mob. And I left the city to live here, to learn about my people, about my culture, about my roots. This is where I belong."
It was hard to tell Clive´s age, I guess he was about 55 years old, and when he said "sixteen" it should have rung a bell. But it was not until later that I realised that he was probably a child of the stolen generation. (For more information see the Wikipedia article or other references.) How could he trust anyone who was white?
"Where are you travelling?" I told Clive my approximate route. The laugh he gave was genuinely arrogant. "If you want to learn something about the people of Australia, you have to go and meet them. You won´t see any on your journey. Go to the East Cape. Go to the Northern Territory. Get a 4-wheel-drive and get off the roads." I knew that I was not off the beaten track, not even close to what the heartland of aboriginal life is today. I was on a petty little ego trip through the world, trying to have my romantic ideas of indigenous life confirmed, just to be able to condemn the western way of life with more conviction. But I knew that I wasn´t prepared to let go as much as would have been necessary. Reading Chatwin´s book had taught me that already.
"There was this guy, he wanted to talk to the elders of some nothern tribe. He patiently waited, day and night, just in sight from their camp, until, after five days or so, they invited him." I had to think of Clive´s beckoning gesture outside the Tribal Centre, as of a miniature version of this invitation, but much less significant.
"You know, I talk to a lot of people. American Natives. People from Scotland. They understand what I´m talking about when I tell them things about our life here. You know what I´m sayin'?" I thought I knew what he was saying, and I was getting desperate, trying not to remain in the category "ignorant white man", but by contributing "The Scots were also organised in tribes, so they probably had similar forms of community life?" I put myself straight into the category "presumptuous white man". "You see, that Scottish guy told me about these wooden spoons his ancestors used to communicate over distances. We had something similar. Know what I´m sayin'? When I say, for example, what is your "skin", would you know what I´m talking about? The people from other tribal communities would. You would understand if you had that background. We are all old cultures, not like the Christians who have been around for some miserable 2,000 years, but who think they can conquer and destroy what has been there for much longer times."
"Know what I´m sayin'?"
I had stopped looking for the bits and pieces of knowledge I had gathered about the aboriginals. I was wondering what I was doing there. I was doubting the whole idea of meeting people from different cultures to find that connection that might be there, to overcome and appreciate the differences at the same time, when Clive, all of a sudden, asked me a question that I never expected: "Where is your mob from?" Mob is a word for tribe, not derogative at all. I told him where I lived, that I had grown up in a different place, that my parents were yet from other parts, and that my whole family was scattered over the whole of southern Germany and Austria.
Clive nods, as if I had just confirmed something he had sensed earlier. It might also just be prejudice, but when he said "You look lost", I sensed that he touched something inside of me.
I must have looked at him with a blank face, because he kept explaining himself: "You need to know where you come from. Otherwise you will never be at one with yourself. I can see that you are looking for something."
Today I am not sure if he kept on talking, but there is a phrase that seems to grow out of what Clive had said: "There is no point in travelling to far away countries, if you don´t know where you come from."
This idea still resonates in my mind when I doubt the whole idea of such a long journey. I have long satisfied the need to relax from the strains of my job and to get new impressions and a free mind. In fact, the trip is starting to litter my mind more and more, it is an overkill of impressions, especially if you avoid organised tours and really talk to local people. It´s impossible to gather the best of all worlds and turn everything into a world view of your own, because it´s all just "too much", as Nanda J. from Tü would say. It´s time to go home and get back in touch with one´s roots again, get to know where one comes from, make a connection, just like Count Dracula who would never travel far without a few coffins full of native soil.
"Know what I'm sayin'?"
"Well, I reckon."
Thom
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