I’m having an interesting time trawling virtual and dusty papers from that fun period of 2002 - 2006 when immigration detention activism was all the rage. Do any readers know of/have any critiques from that time (within loosely ‘anti-detention’ activism/debates) regarding the work of groups like ChilOut and the Circles of Friends?
1519: map of Brazil issued by Portuguese explorers.
30 May 2008: “Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre along the border with Peru.” (Sydney Morning Herald).*
* (29 May 2008: “Funai fotografa índios isolados na fronteira do Brasil com o Peru” (National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, the government agency for “protection and education of indigenous peoples”).)
When I google my surname in a fit of idle introspection I find it imprinted on a town in Haiti, a slave revolt in Louisiana, church registers in the Channel Islands, various papers in France and Canada, and a colonial governor’s family in Angola (which perhaps accounts for the Haiti connection). The indexing that the internets does is odd like that: a chain of random connections showing up the circularity of history as the-named, its shaping in and by violence, its traces of resistance and liberation, its surprising affects. A series of patented, popular links scream at me: FindYourPast.com and so on.
We don’t want to bear certain histories or historicities, we don’t want to make space for it in suspensions or sorries. But we will fight for our names (my good name, not in my name). Our misplaced names reflect the displacement of history onto us. It’s bigger than us, like our names. We wear it, we wear them.
It’s endlessly fascinating and frustrating to follow the e-debates going on about the apology. I’ve been idly watching the ones going on under news items on the ABC website and that of the Daily Telegraph (if I didn’t have a thesis to write, I just know I’d start up a website like this one).
I am so struck by the way in which ‘debates’ like these open up a space for white settler descended Australians to, seemingly unconsciously, pour out so much of their own hurt and bitterness: ‘My Mum was white and taken away too, where’s her apology?’, in other words, ‘I’ve been so hurt in my life and no one came to help. Where’s my apology?’, ‘Aboriginal kids were taken away because they were NEGLECTED. They are still being NEGLECTED.’, in other words, ‘I have been NEGLECTED. I feel NEGLECTED’. Or, ‘I didn’t do anything, why should I have to apologise?’, i.e. ‘OGOD PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME CONFRONT WHAT THIS MEANS I LIKED THAT JOHN HOWARD FELLOW MUCH BETTER’.
So many seem so unable to give any ground because they are so obsessed with holding onto their own victimage: my ‘personal property’ is painful, poisoned - but goddamn it it’s mineminemine.
Image: Gertrude Duby Blom with Lacandan friend, date unknown.
“We formed the first governmental expedition of the State of Chiapas to establish contact with the Lacandon Indians. A contact not to exploit them, nor to study them anthropologically. The mules carried very little of our things, the majority of the cargo were gifts for the Lacandon from the government. Our goal was to investigate the necessities of these remote Indians, to construct modern houses and to establish a relationship between them and the government.”
- Franz and Gertrude Blom, La Selva Lacandona, Vol. 1, p.69, 1955.
He has died, leaving a life in seeming stasis.
His body’s it-ness: weight, tactility, laboured breath - seems to transfer onto the bodies of all those with whom he lived. (Friendship is mourning).
His body is felt in the weight of grief (stop the clocks, put out the stars), in the regular rushes of familiarity: things we see, say, do, that are of him and our connection to him (for I am not gone).
To re-member is to re-configure our bodies to accommodate loss, and slowly; more in the order of phantom limbs than of prostheses …
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