Literature Entry Week 8
I wanted to use this week’s entry to explore further the Judith Wright poem ‘Two Dreamtimes’.
The focus of the tutorial and lecture this week was to demonstrate the diversity of Judith Wright’s style of poetry. The content of her poetry rarely ventured far from exploring the themes of nature and Indigenous issues, but the stylistic anomalies at different stages of her life gives great insight into Wright’s state of mind and perception of issues of the ‘human pattern’.
Our focus on excerpts from ‘Notes at Edge’ showed a poet who, nearing the end of her life was able to centralise and control her exploration of nature through her poems. The mood conveyed by Wright in these poems was a retrospective one, and she focused on even the smallest, or seemingly insignificant element of nature (for example, a rock) to illuminate its passage through time, and it’s significance to life.
To contrast that with her earlier written poem ‘Two Dreamtimes’ (1973) shows us an impassioned individual who is inspired, and incensed by the issue of Australia’s indigenous history, her implication to it through her own history, and the role the destruction of the natural landscape has on these social and human issues.
SIDE BAR
I particularly loved this poem because I had an opportunity to teach a Year Nine class about Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and her poetry. I played the class some Aboriginal music, and they read a poem of Walker’s to the beat of the sticks in this music. Her poetry raised issues of Aboriginal’s being excluded from white populations, and it spoke of the clearing of sacred land for factories and traffic. The class recalled their experience & knowledge of Indigenous issues (like Rudd’s Sorry speech) and they spoke of their knowledge of the brutality and massacres of Aboriginals in colonial times. The class loved Walker’s poetry and they especially loved connecting the poetry to music. I just wish I knew of Wright’s poem when I taught this class so I could extend the students through Walker and Wright’s complex relationship & poetry.
Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal)
‘Two Dreamtimes’ is presented as an unfolding narrative as Wright pens a letter to ‘Kathy’ her ‘sister’. The form of the poem is simple to follow with even tempered sentences and 4 lined stanzas throughout, and this made the poem easy to read.
Yet despite its appearances, the poem presents very important but subtle complexities.
The title ‘Two Dreamtimes’ refers to an instant division between Walker and Wright. They are sisters and share common bonds of friendship, but the difference of their histories, and the opposing sides from which they are born sets them at historical antipodes. No amount of apology or forgiveness, of explanation or empathy will change the difference of their roots, or as Wright calls it, their dreamtimes. But, as Bo Rennie says, they are pioneers of a future which forges friendship and forgiveness to move on from these histories of horror. Wright acknowledges this with ‘You were one of the dark children/ I wasn’t allowed to play with…..(I couldn’t turn you white).
Wright shows great empathy in her poem for Walker’s, and Indigenous experiences as a whole. She states; ‘over the drinks at night/we can exchange our separate grief’s’. She acknowledges her implication in Walker’s history of Indigenous abuse and death, yet she also acknowledges that ‘yours and mine are different’, and Wright, despite her empathy, will never know truly the experience of Indigenous plight.
Two important images which run throughout the poem are that of the rum, and the knife. Wright says ‘the sullen looks of the men who sold them/for rum to forget the selling’. My instant interpretation of this was that the people who committed terrible acts against Indigenous peoples would drink to forget the pain they had caused the Aboriginals, because at the heart of the human pattern is a human’s awareness that each life is sacred, no matter how humans convince themselves that skin colour is the higher imperative. But an interesting interpretation was introduced in our tutorial; that being that drinking is stereotypically associated in the media with Aboriginal abuse. Therefore, if you are to read the poem this way, lines like ‘Over the rum your voice sang’ could be Wright’s commentary that Aboriginal people may have been forced to turn to alcohol to forget the pain that was inflicted on them.
One final image is that of the knife. Wright says ‘The knife’s between is. I turn it around/ the handle to your side’. Our tutorial interpretation was that the handle of the knife has been given back to the Indigenous people. They now hold the power. But my interpretation is that at the time this was written, we had not had Rudd’s sorry speech, and Reconciliation was not an issue discussed with positivity in the greater Australian community. Therefore, my interpretation of this line, is that of the knife being turned and the wound being made deeper in Indigenous communities. I believe this was Wright saying that until we come to a societal push for Reconciliation, the knife wound between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australian will only get deeper.
Once again, this highlights the multiplicity of interpretation that can arise from a seemingly simple poem, and the genius of Judith Wright’s poetry.