Well, it's mid week and I'm at that 'tired, but happy' stage. I'm absolutely charmed by the indigenous students I'm working with, who are intelligent, inquiring and engaged with their subject material. Which brings me to a problem that I have with a passage in Chloe Hooper's writing. On page 119 of her novel The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, she discusses reasons why Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley might have been attracted to working with indigenous populations on Palm Island. She asks the following questions: Do the things that draw a missionary to savage places also attract a cop? Does the cop get the same rush from lawlessness that missionaries get from the Godless? Further on, in a later paragraph on the same page she proposes the following: 'What if, I wondered again, fighting a war against savagery, you become savage yourself? She's not talking about the landscape of Palm Island, she's talking about the indigenous people who occupy it. I take issue with her use of the word 'savage'. A dictionary definition of 'savage' means - not civilised, barbaric, vicious, brutal, not domesticated - wild. I suppose that she can be partially forgiven for running this line of thought given that she's trying to work out whether it's possible that Chris Hurley was responsible for the injuries sustained by Cameron Doomadgee, which caused his death whilst in police custody. The autopsy report 'revealed four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein, and a liver almost cleaved in two' (p.47). However, in using the word 'savage', doesn't she actually reiterate and reinforce the 'wild savage' stereotype attributed by western thought to people with black skin? Her use of the word 'lawlessness' also causes some concern. Aboriginal people are not 'lawless', they follow their own traditional laws, which causes problems for indigenous and non-indigenous populations because those laws are not consistent with white man's laws. I feel a lot better now that I've got that out of my system. How can we teach people not to proliferate stereotypes, when we have respected writers doing so?
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Tried to resist commenting on this very difficult question. But can't help myself.
ReplyDeleteWe have a cultural tradition of using stereotypes to tell a story. Many have theories about that tradition, the monomyth (theorized by Joseph Campbell) being the most important to storytellers of this generation because of all the money George Lucas made from it.
When former Telstra boss Saul Trujillo complained Kevin Rudd's public 'adios amigo' comment to him was racist most comprehended it was a cheap parting shot at a (wealthy) man who challenged government policy. Rudd only got away with it because Telstra is so on the nose to ordinary Australians. He only said what everyone was thinking. Aussies are cheeky like that. But it illustrates how deep stereotypes are embedded, even in god-fearing christian Queenslanders like Kevin Rudd.
We see then politics and religion make no difference. Religion teaches tolerance, which is perhaps the precursor of understanding, but no substitute for it. Politics teaches inclusion, but naturally those who political inclusion excludes will be stereotypically "other".
The heavy lifting needs to be done where you are doing it. There is no substitute for knowledge and critical thinking. Those are taught in the usual way: slowly, methodically, painstakingly and through example. Perhaps a comparative cultural studies approach might speed things up, but unless people are shown how to conceptualize themselves in another's footsteps they will not recognize the stereotype trap.
We may have a cultural tradition, but that doesn't excuse the civilised/savage binary that is being used here by Hooper. However, having finaly read the book I can see that she is certainly questioning whether indeed it was Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley who was the 'savage', since it was he who inflicted those horrendous injuries on Cameron Doomadgee.
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