Colonial Politics and Problem of Language in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

Language plays a critical role in postcolonial literature. English has been the dominant language of European imperialism that carried the European culture to the different colonies across the world. Australia is the settled countries where English has become not only the official and mainstream language of the country but has also put the indigenous languages on the verge of extinction. David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is a postcolonial text that re-imagines the colonial history of Australian settlement presenting the early socio- cultural and linguistic clashes between the settlers and the Aboriginals. The present paper tries to analyze the various dimensions of language envisioning its micro to macro impacts on the individual, community and nation as well. British used English language as the weapon of spreading European culture in Australia causing the systematic replacement of local dialects and other vernacular languages; hence the issues of linguistic and cultural identities would also be among the focal points of the discussion. The paper also attempts to examine how David Malouf provides a solution by preferring and appropriating native languages and culture for the future ofs Australia.

Not Today, Old Man

‘Not Today, Old Man’ was written to the journal’s call-out theme ‘Tropical Gothic’. Informed by these ideas and a long tradition of women’s writing from Austen to Atwood, ‘Not Today, Old Man’ interrogates the relationship between women and violence.Throughout most of the twentieth century, ongoing abuse of women in a domestic environment was not considered a mitigating factor in violent action performed against the perpetrator, or indeed ‘self-defence’, unless taken at the time of attack. Unable to physically shield themselves from their abusers, and without a legal defence should they seek to protect themselves outside the temporal boundary of a violent attack, women were in a sense imprisoned within these relationships. In the comparatively rare instance that a woman was the perpetrator of domestic violence, ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ was not available for defence in the context of Australian provocation law until the end of the twentieth century (see R v Kontinnen 1991; R v Runjanjic 1992). It is worth considering that in this same era, a man making unwelcome sexual advances to another man was considered reasonable grounds for ‘self-defence’ (R v Green 1997).The landscape in ‘Not Today, Old Man’ is predominantly set in the tropics, but the story also alludes to the diversity of countryside and climate within Australia, both in the text itself and through allusions to authors like Gerald Murnane. The dark undertones of the piece are embedded in the depiction of these landscapes and the images they evoke. The oppressive heat, humidity, and comparatively low population of Australia’s tropical regions lends itself to gothic exploration. This dark undertone was modelled on writers like David Malouf, whose fiction and poetry have been significant in endowing Australia with a sense of mythology associated with its Northern environments. As Malouf has explained, re-mythologizing the postcolonial Australian landscape gives its diverse inhabitants a renewed, ‘symbolised place’ to ‘exist in’ (cited in Mulligan & Hill, 2001, p.110).

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism

As the British empire rapidly contracted after World War II, how did writers living outside the United Kingdom respond to the history of colonialism and the aesthetics of modernism within a global context? In fourteen original essays, distinguished scholars consider these questions in relation to novelists, playwrights, and poets living in English-speaking countries around the world. The introduction not only examines how modernism and postcolonialism evolved over roughly two generations but also situates the writers analyzed in terms of the canonical realignments inspired by the new modernist studies and an array of emerging methodologies and approaches. While this volume highlights social and political questions connected with the end of empire, it also considers the aesthetics of postcolonialism, detailing how writers drew upon, responded to, and sometimes reacted against the formal innovations of modernism. Many of the essays consider the influence modernist artists and movements exercised on postcolonial writers, from Yeats, Conrad, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf to impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, Dadaism, and abstractionism. The volume is organized around six geographic locales and includes essays on Africa (Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee), Asia (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy), the Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul), Ireland (Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney), Australia/New Zealand (David Malouf, Keri Hulme), and Canada (Michael Ondaatje). Among the topics considered are the narrative construction of time and space; the engagement with realism; and the handling of aesthetics, globalization, and cultural hybridity.

Major Authors: Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Malouf

This chapter examines the work of three Australian novelists who are read in the context of modernism, introducing a new dimension for the exploration of individual and national identity. David Malouf defines his Old and New World cultural heritage in a significant body of non-fiction prose, encompassing memoir and cultural commentary, along with reviews and interviews, that runs in tandem with his fiction. His intense literary self-consciousness is manifest in an extended mythology of place and history that emerges in his writing, such as Johnno (1975) and Remembering Babylon (1993). Patrick White's spiritual evocation of Australian landscape is evident from his first novel Happy Valley (1934) through The Tree of Man (1956) and Voss (1957), while issues of the construction of gender and identity are explicit in his memoir Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (1981) and the posthumously published The Hanging Garden (2012). Christina Stead's later international career, initiated by the republication in 1965 of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) followed by For Love Alone (1944), reveals her radical modernist techniques, her radical politics, and her focus on gender issues, particularly her concern with women artists, ending with the posthumous publication of I'm Dying Laughing: the Humourist (1986).

Australia

This chapter examines the development of the Arab Australian novel since its beginnings, surveying works produced in Arabic and English by three generations of Arab Australian authors. It first considers David Malouf, whose Johnno (1975) marks the beginning of the Arab Australian novel, before turning to first-generation immigrants who introduced the Arabic-language novel in the 1980s and the English-language immigrant novel in the mid-1990s. It then discusses the contribution of the second-generation Arab Australians in the literary field. It shows that the Arab Australian novel is more than just an “immigrant narrative,” or fictional “Arab voices in Diaspora,” and that all Arab Australian novelists, except for Malouf, are preoccupied with the questions of home and identity.