This is a guest post by Ameer Chasib Furaih, author of Poetry of the Civil Rights Movements in Australia and the United States, 1960s–1980s
When I arrived in Australia in late 2014, my original intention was to research African American poetry. However, I soon broadened the scope of my project to consider the impact of African American poetry on Aboriginal Australian poetry. Accordingly, I decided to immerse myself more thoroughly in Aboriginal culture and society to better understand the relationship between Aboriginal politics and poetics. In 2016, I was invited by Lionel Fogarty to attend a poetry reading called ‘Lost Language Found’ at the Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane. At this event, several established and emerging Aboriginal poets and activists participated, including Lionel Fogarty, Natalie Harkin, Ellen Van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen Corr, Alison Whittaker, Jeanine Leane and Melissa Lucashenko. Listening to the readings of these poets, I was astonished by their moving poetics and political resilience.
The book titled Poetry of the Civil Rights Movements in Australia and the United States, 1960s-1980s scrutinises the poetries of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), Lionel Fogarty (1958– ) and Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) and Sonia Sanchez (1943– ), focusing on their relatively comparable sociopolitical and literary concerns and aspirations, though they are ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed. What I have attempted to do here is an integration of their idiosyncratic differences. This objective is grounded upon the fact that the role of poetry in this struggle and the international connections between the political movements in which these poets were involved have been overlooked in historical narratives of Australia and the United States, although Aboriginal and African American representation in the political narratives did improve during the 1960s. Rather than examine the literary development of these poets via a timeline, which may render each chapter in the form of a literary history, I will examine the compositional and structural similarities and differences in the poetries of Oodgeroo, Fogarty, Baraka and Sanchez as they respond to relatively distinct literary and political influences. In other words, I have treated the poetries of these poets as an example of distinct poetics, which is not bounded by the borders of a territory or by geography as abstracted on a map, situating them along the lines of what Chadwick Allen (2012) calls ‘together (yet) distinct’. Although their poetries can be seen as an antithesis to the dominant literary thesis or canon, each has their own ‘distinct’ poetic mode.
Although Fogarty was indebted to the ‘first generation’ of Aboriginal poets, which includes Jack Davis, Oodgeroo and Kevin Gilbert (Fogarty, personal communication, March 17, 2017), he belongs to a new generation of poets with different objectives and aspirations. Unlike those predecessors, and unlike Baraka and Sanchez, Fogarty was not influenced by the literary traditions of the mainstream canon during his early writing career; he was a self-educated poet, who developed his poetic talent among Aboriginal Elders in his birthplace, Cherbourg. Baraka and Sanchez, in contrast, were encouraged by other American writers early in their literary careers, but both had a turning point in their literary careers. They had noticeable contributions to the Black Arts movement during the 1960s and 1970s. They adapt their Black Arts poetries as an aesthetic war machine to ‘disfigure’ Anglo-American literary traditions, through, among other poetic strategies, the ‘jazzification’ of their poetries. They also revived their people’s culture (particularly Black music) and language (Black English) to resist what they consider ‘white’ supremacy and cultural hegemony. Moreover, Baraka was a major influence on Sanchez, and both share some common themes and literary ideologies. Yet, each has a distinctive literary ideology. However, Sanchez creates a balance between her feminist (or ‘womanist’) perspectives and her participation in the Black Nationalist movement, which was plagued by male sexism towards African American women. This is to demonstrate the fact that the responses, attitudes and aspirations of African American poets of the Black Arts movement were non-monolithic as they responded in different ways to their shared sociopolitical experience. The inclusion of Oodgeroo’s formal poetics beside Sanchez’s Black Arts/feminist poetics and Baraka’s and Fogarty’s experimentalism is strategic here. Although Oodgeroo’s poetry has influenced Aboriginal poets of the second generation, Fogarty among them, the latter’s experimental poetics has expanded the range and achievement of Aboriginal poetry in English. Oodgeroo’s inclusion in this book is thus intended to show the diversity of Aboriginal poetics which resulted from varying responses to sociopolitical experience.
Instead of tracing the general development of Aboriginal and African American poetries during this period, I narrow the scope of my research to the poetries of these four selected poets, placing their works in broader, international contexts by drawing trans-Pacific connections between their poetries. The contribution of this book lies in its study of poetic intertextuality and common themes, and in the evaluation of the impact (direct or indirect) of African American poets, particularly those of the Black Arts movement, upon Aboriginal poets. Thus, the book should be seen as a starting point, rather than the final word on transnational exchanges between these movements. It should be noted that the poets I have chosen are not a comprehensive selection of Aboriginal or African American poets.