This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the 2020 Adelaide Festival as part of the international 150 Psalms Project.
guyang – fire
wiinyugamin – bush fire
birgili, birgilibang – scorched by fire
wiinybangayilinya – fire, make a fire for another
baluga – dark, fire has gone out
‘I woke to a bright orange sky unlike anything I’d ever seen. The smoke was murky and as the day progressed the sky got darker, three in the afternoon was like night. Ash was dropping and has continued and so everything is still covered in black dust and burnt leaves.’
Linda Heald was a stage four terminal cancer patient from the NSW south coast when she realised that fires nearby were headed for her Narooma home. She prepared to flee, sorting through photographs, looking for what to save, and what to leave her family after death. In the face of disaster, she was forced to imagine it, the time when she’d no longer be here. ‘If I have nothing after Saturday, will this photo be important to me?’ If I walk out of the house and never see any of the personal things, the sentimental things, the useful things again, what will that be like? How can I start again?… I have to have something for the other side of this.’
Linda lives on Yuin country. Not far from her town is Gulaga, also known as mother-mountain—the Yuin’s sacred birthplace. It’s an area I’ve grown to love, and I can’t picture the rolling hills behind that ragged coast as anything but incandescently green. ‘The ancestors would be wild about what’s happened to the country, to our totem animals,’ said local elder Warren Foster. ‘We need our country to be healthy so we can be healthy. We need the animals. If that is all lost, our spirits die when they die.’ We live on land that was once managed very differently, using ancient knowledge, and the destruction of so much of it is a stark reminder of our obligations—not just to ourselves, but to the natural and human systems that sustain us.
***
After Australia’s ‘summer of dread’ many of us realised we can no longer find safety or solace in the usual places—in our homes, our landscapes. We’ve seen fire so hot the trees in the blackened forests turned grey as spines in an x-ray. We’ve witnessed pyrocumulus clouds and fire tornadoes. We’ve heard that birds, at the height of the blaze, fell dead from the sky. Some of us lost homes, communities, friends, relatives. Some days we could no longer breathe the air outside. We are ground zero in the climate crisis, we are climate suicides, we are a great experiment.
In the final tally, 7.7 million hectares and one billion animals burned, but the disaster’s effect on our inner lives is still unfolding, reminding us of our fragility, our dependence, our impermanence.
Many stories of the fires, told to reporters, seemed to address not one person but a whole community. Who else could we entreat, given the stunning absence of federal leadership? And it was local communities that ultimately responded with places of safety, with solace. As I read these anguished accounts, I thought of the way individuals and groups once directed their entreaties to a higher power. From Psalm 102, written some 3000 years ago:
‘Lend your ear to my wailing, and answer me quickly when I call. For my days come and go, vanishing like smoke, and my bones are charred like bricks from a hearth.’
In the time of The Psalms, these were pleas to God. In our radically altered secular world, in our country where leaders failed to respond to calls for safety, to what powers should we appeal for protection? Who will save us from disaster, injustice or death?
***
As a secular Jew from a diaspora family I’m not a godly person. But as a writer I appreciate The Psalms’ poetic intensity, how they distill feeling into concrete experience, and encompass both speech and silence. In The Psalms, people search for their condition humaine, their right to exist, their country and culture, writes James Keller. For translator Robert Alter, The Psalms speak, ‘for those who feel the chill threat of literal extinction here and now, for those who have suffered one sort or another of inward dying’.
Among the many forms these ancient texts take, is the communal lament—or, more prosaically ‘the complaint psalms’—in which a group or nation grieves a crisis or disaster. See Psalm 44’s cascading grievances. The speakers have retreated from the enemy, they’re taunted and derided by neighbours, rejected and abased, and God is squarely to blame: ‘you have broken us in the haunt of jackals and covered us with deep darkness’. These days our communal laments can be found in the hesitant, broken witness reports from people like Linda Heald, which help us understand what others have experienced. ABC radio was ‘a group trauma session’ during the fires, writes Nowra doctor James Best. ‘Call after call came from listeners, recounting their experiences. Voice pitch was high and speech cadence often quickened. Many choked up, a few cried. Yet they needed to be heard, they needed others to understand and validate. This should not have happened. This was not normal.’ Best’s description of the way people spoke reminded me that ‘demeanour evidence’ is often more expressive in testimony than the words themselves. Best suggested the scale of the disaster when he evoked Chernobyl, or war, to describe the south coast. It was a ‘visitor exclusion zone’. On the highway leading into town, illuminated signs warned approaching cars, STAY AWAY.
What happens once this urgent news passes into history? Now the fires are out—and we are deep in the grip of a new crisis, with even more urgent requirements for communal action—how do we make sense of our changed inner lives? How do we, confined as we are now in the midst of a global pandemic, have a communal experience?
***
In the aftermath of Hiroshima, a witness, Miss Sasaki arrived in the ruined city. ‘Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of the ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones.’ The bomb had not only left the roots of the plants intact, writes John Hersey in his peerless Hiroshima, but stimulated their growth. The writer knows this double life of the disaster; how the creative impulse can intensify during crisis since it is, after all, an urge to express. Everyday life under the artist’s gaze has ‘a kind of glow-in-the-dark quality which it did not have at first sight but which was hidden deep down,’ says author Patrick Modiano. The writer is a ‘seismograph’, able to detect ‘barely perceptible movements’.
Modiano was born right into upheaval, arriving in a Paris under German occupation in 1945. This was the ‘primordial darkness’ that came to shape his writing career. His efforts to uncover ‘the life-world’ of the German occupation, to evoke ‘the most ungraspable human destinies’ was celebrated in his Nobel Prize commendation. Much of his work has attempted to retrieve the lives of fellow citizens whose safety ended when the French collaborated with Nazi Germany.
I mention Modiano’s work for two reasons. First, to give a sense of where I’m speaking from. I track my relationship with safety, and my existence, back to the Europe Modiano describes which my maternal family fled in 1939. After they arrived in Australia, the immigration system that accepted them also turned other relatives, and countless refugees away. As my grandparents rebuilt their lives here, their parents, brothers and cousins—refused entry—were deported, enslaved and murdered. This history taught me that safety is not a right, but a matter of chance, or luck. It can be granted by individuals, regimes or institutions, and in an instant, taken away. Psalm 39 reminds us that these experiences are not new, or unprecedented:
listen to my cry for help;
do not be deaf to my weeping.
I dwell with you as a foreigner,
a stranger, as all my ancestors were.
My family’s history is overlaid on country I’ve never considered my own, on which I continue to live as a foreigner, a guest or stranger, and to which I feel an obligation. Another way to put it—from Tara June Winch: ‘there are two bloods running through me: where I come from and where I am’. For Modiano, a writer ‘is indelibly marked with the date of his birth and by his time, even if he was not directly involved in political action, even if he gives the impression of being a recluse…’ How am I marked by my time and what do I owe the country that granted my family safety, even as it continues to withhold safety from those who were here long before me? These questions haunt my creative practice, and my everyday life.
Modiano’s novel, Dora Bruder, is a short, sharp entreaty. It asks us to acknowledge the role France played in the genocide of its citizens. Throughout this compressed and brilliant detective story, the narrator investigates the fate of a French schoolgirl who disappeared in 1941. He searches an amnesiac city, at every turn trying to imagine Dora’s Paris, the Paris that expelled her. When he visits the Paris Police Archives he finds hundreds of letters, lying unopened for over half a century. Each contains an impeccably polite request for help.
To the director of the Police for Jewish Affairs, I implore you to have the great kindness to release my daughter Nelly Trautmann from Drancy camp.
…to the Prefect of Police, I beg you to have the kindness to release my grandson Michel Robin, aged three, French born of a French mother, who is interned with him at Drancy…
I venture to ask you a favour in respect of my husband, Zelik Pergricht, so that I may know how he is and have a little news…
In letter after letter, French citizens humbly begged, asked for ‘great kindness’, ‘ventured to ask’ and implored for news of family who, by virtue only of being Jewish, had been made stateless, and deported. Each entreaty was addressed to the Prefect of Police, who was unmoved to reply to a single one. And so, Modiano writes, ‘It is we, who were not even born at the time, who are their recipients and … guardians.’
I’ve never forgotten those pleas, which gave names and dates—humanity—to the disappeared. Nor the silence with which they were received by the nation that had expelled them. It took Modiano’s novel, 50 years later, to return these people to historical memory.
Alexis Wright, Tony Birch, Tara June Winch, Natalie Harkin and many indigenous writers are also engaged in forms retrieval. In their works of communal lament (not only elegiac, but also often wry and irreverent) we find our earliest Australian apocalypse—what it is to lose a home, a mother, a brother, a country, to be made unsafe and alone. In Winch’s boundary-shifting The Yield, this reclamation takes many forms, reflecting multiple losses—not just country, home, belonging and culture, but also words, and feelings. Threaded through Winch’s novel is a dictionary of Wiradjuri language, written by Albert Gondiwindi. It retrieves and preserves the lexicon and histories of his local people on the fictional Massacre Plains.
mambanha – cry, mourning
ngarradharrinya – cry or weep
yumarradinya – cry while walking along
yumbanidyilinya – cry, to be sorry for making one cry
waangarra – cry like a crow
wanhangidyilinya – abandon one’s self to despair
winhanga-dili-nya – feel, know one’s self
dhadhi? – belonging to what place?
giyalang – belonging
nganhi-gu – belonging to that, distant in space and time
By elevating loss of language in her novel, Winch shows how this is bound up with losing culture. Threaded throughout The Yield are letters from a Reverend Greenleaf of Prosperous Mission who labours for 34 years ‘to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes’, reminding us of the assimilationist fervour that drove missionaries, governments and schools to erase the 250 languages once spoken in Australia. For the novel’s protagonist, August Gondiwindi, Wiradjuri words are key to understanding her history, her place and identity. In her grandfather’s dictionary, the word for blood:
guwany, guwan, guwaan – There’s two bloods running through me: where I come from and where I am
As I read The Yield, which draws on extensive research, I recalled this testimony from the Bringing Them Home Report. Here is a woman removed with her three sisters from her mother in the 1940s, and placed in the Cootamundra Girls’ Home at 8 years old:
Most of us girls were thinking white in the head but were feeling black inside. We weren’t black or white. We were a very lonely, lost and sad displaced group of people. We were taught to think and act like a white person, but we didn’t know how to think and act like an Aboriginal. We didn’t know anything about our culture.
Since our nation was founded on the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty, on the erasure of language and culture, where do we find our condition humaine, our common humanity? The first step is for us to become the recipients and guardians of otherwise unheard stories. ‘Testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking…to somebody they’ve been waiting for for a long time’, says psychoanalyst Dori Laub, who worked extensively taking survivor testimony. Laub himself was five years old when he was deported with his mother to the Ukraine. For years he repressed all memories of the brutality in the camps of his childhood, remembering them instead as pastoral, ‘he talked of beautiful childhood summers…meadows, blue skies, a river, and a little girl sitting by him on the bank of the river, trying to convince him that you could eat handfuls of grass and not be hungry.’ To survive psychologically, he hid the truth from himself. Later, in his practice hearing the stories of other survivors, Laub realised he was entreated to do more than just listen, he must also be a future presence for those who had, in giving testimony, relived their suffering.
It’s difficult and gruelling to transform individual pain into something useful. Yet this is one of the many reasons we make, and consume art. In the wake of disaster, specific feelings also face extinction, replaced by a psychic numbing. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht, best known for his term solastalgia, has recognised that the same forces that destroy psychological, cultural and biophysical diversity can extinguish our rich emotional connections to place. He calls this destruction of feelings meaucide. In art, private anguish can be transfigured into a communal form. Today, artists have an even more urgent role—to preserve and articulate not just event and experience, but the emotions that accompany them.
In the Bringing Them Home Report I came across an uncanny echo of what Modiano found in the Police Archives. It is testimony from an indigenous woman taken from her mother at 2 years old and placed in Bomaderry Children’s Home:
We were all rostered to do work and one of the girls was doing Matron’s office, and there was all these letters that the girls had written back to the parents and family—the answers were all in the garbage bin. And they were wondering why we didn’t write. That was one way they stopped us keeping in contact with our families. Then they had the hide to turn around and say, ‘They don’t love you. They don’t care about you’.
What do archival letters from occupied France have to do with letters sent to and from the institutions that housed Australia’s stolen generation? Both describe what it is to lose the right to live in your own country, to lose home and family. Both describe the lasting effects of genocide, the struggle to belong in a country that granted safety but also took it away. I’m trying to imagine those letters, their unread replies in the garbage, since I can’t ever know their content. Can we be their keepers and guardians, the future presence that Laub identified as key to authentic listening? ‘Testimonies are not monologues, they cannot take place in solitude.’
***
During the fires that swept through Conjola, Samantha Kneeshaw sank into her backyard pool with a scuba tank while embers rained into the water. An odd thing—she can’t recall the roaring that other witnesses describe; her catastrophe was entirely soundless. Should you ask her to talk about anything but the fire she can’t finish sentences. She has ‘baby brain,’ she tells The Guardian. Here is as good an account as any of what pressure trauma puts on language, and what experiences demand precise expression.
I turn back to Winch’s novel—also about place, what it is to find safety. It suddenly strikes me, the canny beauty of it—a writer putting a dictionary at the heart of her work. It signals the survival of language. It turns readers into recipients and guardians, and demands a future presence for stories hauled from deep time, somewhere out on Massacre Plains.
wanhangidyilinya – abandon one’s self to despair
yumbanidyilinya – cry, to be sorry for making one cry
dhadhi? – belonging to what place?
giyalang – belonging
nganhi-gu – belonging to that, distant in space and time
Mireille Juchau is a novelist, essayist and critic. Her third novel,The World Without Us, won the 2016 Victorian Premiers Literary Award. Recent work is published in newyorker.com, Literary Hub, The Monthly, LA Review of Books, Tablet and Sydney Review of Books.
Works cited:
All witness accounts from the fire from The Guardian reportage.
John Hersey, Hiroshima, Penguin, 1946.
Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder, Gallimard, 1997.
Tara June Winch, The Yield, Penguin, 2019.
James Best:
https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2020/7/communal-trauma-one-gps-memories-from-the-fire-zone/
Patrick Modiano Nobel Prize speech:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2014/modiano/25238-nobel-lecture-2014/
Dori Laub: http://www.holocausttestimonies.com/mainframe.htm
