Sung by an Indigenous Siren: Epic and Epistemology in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.

Cornelis Martin Renes

doi:10.1344/co20192752-71

Abstract

One of Australia’s most distinguished Indigenous authors, Alexis Wright, stages the fleeting presence of a popular character of Northern European folklore, the mermaid, in an awarded novel of epic proportions. The mermaid is not a haphazard appearance in this Antipodean narrative, but one of the multiple, cross-cultural ways in which Carpentaria, first published in 2006, invites the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions between the disenfranchised Indigenous minority and the empowered non-Indigenous mainstream, and their serious lack of communication due to the antagonistic character of their respective universes, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation and the other in a holistic, environmentalist one of country. This essay addresses how Carpentaria, by writing across Indigenous and European genres and epistemologies, makes a call for the deconstruction of colonial discourse, for an invigorating Indigenous inscription into country, and for intellectual sovereignty as the condition sine-qua-non for the Indigenous community to move forward.

Highlights

The fleeting appearance of a mermaid in Carpentaria, the Miles Franklin award-winning 2006 novel written by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright, reflects innovative uses of the epic in postcolonial contexts, that is, how epic may bridge across antagonistic
Hayward argues that “the mermaid’s distinct physique allows her to manifest diverse and often disjunctive aspects” (2018: 3), and in this sense, the perceived hybridity of Barcelona the mermaid trope — both fish and human, unable to live on land but fatally attracted to it — both defines the existence of, and appeals to, the merging of antagonistic worlds: water and land; foreign mainstream and indigenous margins; European invaders and Indigenous Australians who must learn to coexist and communicate across two divergent epistemologies that meet in Australia’s coastal contact zone, both sea and land-bound
Carpentaria and epistemology In Nourishing Terrains, Deborah Rose addresses epistemologies from an eco-scientific perspective, closely linking respect and care for the local natural environment to the observance of Indigenous belief systems known as the Dreaming or Dreamtime

Summary

Carpentaria and genre

An evocation of the sovereignty of the Indigenous mind, Carpentaria is concerned with the search for an original and authentic Indigenous voice in literature and in doing so constitutes a generic innovation. It links the Indigenous oral tradition to the literary, and should be seen as a mixed epic It uses the centrality of the hero and his semi-divine character, Norm Phantom, and his ability to influence the weather through the Dreaming within the cosmic setting of the Gulf of Carpentaria, including its land, sea and sky. Other critics have drawn attention to Carpentaria’s political agenda as ecologically inscribed, promoting awareness of the interconnectivity and interdependency of all life forms in their local habitats

Carpentaria and epistemology

Carpentaria and Capricornia

Indigenous sovereignty and the imagination