The mesh, the poetics of (not)being and the hauntings of identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper aims to establish how ecological thinking, or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, from the Indigenous onto-epistemic view in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart warrants a poetics of being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, or leaking, never rigid or definitive. It builds on the idea of the mesh and the aesthetics of uncanny and how this view attunes to the Indigenous openness for kinship with, companionship of, intimacy and becoming with other beings. Such a view thus enacts Harley, the main protagonist, as regenerating his effaced Aboriginal identity through entanglements and becoming with all beings, humans and nonhumans, or Country at large, in both the latter’s material and spiritual aspects.