Modern Aboriginal Literature - Essay Example

? Modern Aboriginal Literature Australian’s modern Aboriginal literature has grown and now receives both national and international attention. This is a big stride given that its usefulness was at once facing relegation from the literature world. The growth of Aboriginal literature is far much reaching effect on social, political, and cultural contexts (Munkelt, 2013). This effect has come of age due to the exceeding popularity of its original works, which have come out to mark an indelible purpose in the literature context. Alexis highlights the literature of Aboriginal resistance, the literature of heroism, triumph, and survival against all odds. In this modern time, Alexis novel Politics of Writing explains that she comes out as a writer, an Australian, to wage war on ignorance, which according to her, was sinking the true cultural, social, and political status of Aboriginal people. In her assertion, the literature of Aboriginal writer helps to revitalize the stolen charm of Australian people, their long relegation, as ignorance has far much worked as the weapon killing the Aboriginal people. In so doing, Alexis literature is the weapon against the odds working to derail the political, cultural and purposefulness of the Aboriginal people (Wright, 2013). She further asserts that ignorance has long been more lethal than a gun in sabotaging the Aboriginal people. When she decisively talks of conjuring her own homeland in the novel, Alexis is kind of fuming and scathing on the seemingly pre-meditated selective blindness of the Australians. To her, the Australians prefer to perceive the misfortunes of other people from a safe distance of the other parts of the world. In this reference, she speaks of the effectiveness of the modern Aboriginal literature in shaping the social and cultural nature of Australian people (Munkelt, 2013). She expounds on how the Aboriginal literature has forced them to see what for long they have defied for more than two hundred years. This is about the existence of the Aboriginal people, their culture, and political development. Ironically, at the home of the Aboriginal society, this is passive literature. Lionel Fogerty, as part of the Aboriginal writers, together with Alexis, shares the political context of Aboriginal people. For example, they seem to share this radical understanding of how colonial imperialism has continued to shape the modern Australia (Munkelt, 2013). This is evident as the modern Aboriginal literature content on circulation touches on a wide range of social-cultural issues like homosexuality, racism, refugees, deaths in custody, kidnapping, and the universal subject on the dislocations of peoples’ experiences as they are split between country and the values of urban standards of living. In view of the Aboriginal writers, this, according to them, is not a piteous cry of victims, but rather tough, realistic perceptions of survivors. One cannot fail to perceive the realities of Aboriginal people in Rosie Smith’s writings, Screams of Fear (Wright, 2013). She extends the emotions of people from the moments one learns his child is to go the cell or is in it already. In her poem, Rosie escalates the realities of desolation and despair. This is all fed with the lack of recognition of what prison meant. The writer highlights how the social context of families faces misshaping and damaged by lack of comprehending the realities of colonization. This is the reason why another Aboriginal writer, Kerry Reed challenges the whites’ Australian prejudice on the meaning of family and country in his poem, By Choice. He highlights the choice made by the Aboriginal Australians in living in the conditions and the areas where they are, that it is their choice and not enforcement. The reality in these writers literature world is what Alexis describes as the love and interest in her culture and lives, before and after the invasion (Munkelt, 2013). This is the only path to social, political, and cultural liberation, the corners the Aboriginal literature has to take on in order for self-actualization gets its rights. The fable by Kim Scott, Capture, demonstrates how academics inevitably breed to a murderous violence on the indigenous, as well as blinded by their own cultural assumptions and ambition. In this fable, Scott’s political and social context of the contact between Aboriginal Australians and whites is overt. In her essence, whites encounter with Australian people led to similar behavior exhibited by Peter and Corey in their discovery odyssey, as non-indigenous academics. The same possibility is extended by Fogarty’s work. In his literature, he is out to change the Australian canon. His works and others like Jennifer Martiniello, show that the Aboriginal literature is not any more a mere supplement to the canon, nor is it minority literature (Munkelt, 2013). Therefore, in creating a renaissance point of view, Fogerty aims at decolonizing indigenous minds of the Aboriginal Australian people. This is through the reinforcing his original and indigenous writing for Australians and the love of modern Aboriginal Literature. As a result, this comes as a challenge to the non-indigenous readers in trying to connect with the literature of the indigenous writers, their culture, and social context, as seen in their own territory. This is the only way to transform and reverse the canon for the benefit of Aboriginal people. This is because the indigenous writers, in their collection, would help to transport their readers into engagement with the new Aboriginal experience, talent, and their passion in literature through the use of original language and structure (Wright, 2013). This is the rationale as to why Scott advocates for the change of social and cultural dynamics in the use of language. Through her literature, she says there is a necessity of the Aboriginal people to speak and find alternative ways to speak, and this falls as the metaphor that paves way to the changes in the literature canon of the Aboriginal Writers. Alexis has gone far to highlight that the contemporary life is mostly impacted and shaped by history and culture. In her statement that her interest goes into the reality of Aboriginal Australians struggling with the war against genocide, opens the social and political realities of whites against Aboriginal Australians. It should come as a remembrance that since the white people came to Australia in 1788, the writers have helped to bring into light the plight and the experiences of displacement, Australians, being the target of genocidal policies and practices into the full view (Munkelt, 2013). Aboriginal literature explores the extent to which families were destroyed through forcible removal of children, and the realities of racism. This world destroyed the original and indigenous social and cultural context of the Aboriginal Australians. When Alexis claims that she wants to explore the dreams and gifts of true inheritance of Aboriginal Australian, she talks of the re-birthing Australia, a different one, not a country choking in the whims of profound effects on health, emotional, and social well-being. She wants a reinstatement of the indigenous Australian context in the individuals, families, and the community at large. This nature of literature from the Aboriginal Australian writers brings into understanding the experiences that have seen relegation for so many years (Wright, 2013). In its senses, the Aboriginal literature explores the histories of resistance and resilience in the face of the alien context of colonization. This, according to the writers, has been much part of the contemporary indigenous culture and identity of the people of Australia, as the experiences of devastation. Therefore, for modern Aboriginal writers, literature, and in this matter written literature has come as way and the voice of claiming and articulating sense of cohesion as a person of Australia faced with the real threats in their rally to push and continue with their social and cultural setting. This is because the writers highlight that colonization and alien culture overshadowed the traditional culture, song, stories, which served to define allegiance and relationships both to others and to the land, they lived as the Aboriginal Australian people (Munkelt, 2013). Oodgeroo Noonuccal, in her novel ‘We are Going’, explores her moving account of her discovery of herself, family and the larger traditions of the Australians. This is a social and cultural history as again Kim Scott explores through it. These aboriginal writers have come out to enter into history as well as asserting their claim to the once relegated imaginative territory of Australia. They overtly have worked deep into the world of written prose in order to affect a process of mutual understanding and reconciliation. In conclusion, the political, social, and cultural context in which this Aboriginal literature stems comes through phases. The initial steps were the mapping of the difference and distinctiveness of a new society establishing itself (Munkelt, 2013). From this perspective, the literature has grown to find and articulate its own cultural voice. This then followed with the discovery of the differences within itself in terms of regional, cultural, and ethnic contexts. This has shaped the modern Aboriginal prose writing as their reflection bend into uncovering the true nature of the Aboriginal people. These writers have cautiously offered a positive outlook for the Aboriginal people. In their prose forms, their perspective comes as one that recognizes the difficulties of contemporary Aboriginal experience (Wright, 2013). Therefore, Aboriginal writers have created a space that had never been within the imagined borders as forced by the whites hence reshaping their cultural, political, and social context deletes them from the brand of being silent and passive people. References Munkelt, M. (2013). Postcolonial translocations: Cultural representation and critical spatial thinking. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wright, A. (2013). The swan book. Artarmon, N.S.W: Giramondo. Read More