Lionel Fogarty

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710560
ISBN-10:  1844710564
ISBN-13:  9781844710560
Author:  Lionel Fogarty
Title:  Dha’lan Djani Mitti
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-07
Extent:  800pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  45 mm
Weight:  1200 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 28.99
Price:  USD 37.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Of the Murri people, and born at the Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in Queensland in 1958, Lionel Fogarty is a leading spokesman for indigenous rights in Australia through a poetry of linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion. In resisting the colonising force of English, he has reterritorialised the language of the invaders and made of it a language that speaks for his people.

John Kinsella argues that Fogarty is the greatest living “Australian” poet, forging a poetics that captures the orality of his people’s millennia of song cycles and spirituality, and also engaging with codes and tools of international modernism. Fogarty is at once verbally affronting and celebratory of his identity. A deeply “political” poet, he is also a singer whose poetry seeks healing and redemption for the many wrongs done to his people. There is a rage in the work, and the murder of his brother Daniel Yock by police in 1993 (in a police van), as well as of his people in general, compels his poetic spirit.

In a significant interview Philip Mead conducted with him in 1994, Fogarty said: “… Daniel was a Song Man and he used to make songs up from his own dreaming, and he knew a lot of different languages. He was a really special person to my children. A very culturally talented guy, very dedicated to his culture.” And it’s that dedication to his culture that Lionel Fogarty carries into a poetry that is cyclical and declarative, deeply metaphoric and metonymic at once. The “timelessness”, the dreaming, the conversations between story and land, between the totemic and people, are beyond labelling. A unique poet, he has effectively managed to confront the persistent attacks by imperialist language, and (still) colonial culture/s, on his people’s voice, by preserving its identity, and also creating something entirely new (an extension of what existed before), to fight the invader.

A liberator, an innovator, and a writer with a purpose as crucial as the existence of his people. As Kinsella has said: “Fogarty has de-hybridised his own language by hybridsing English with his people’s language. It’s a poetry that demands respect. In the poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first century, he is as essential and skilled as any. All of us should listen.”

Table of contents:

Excerpt from book:  

Biral Biral

Biral came down one day
crystal stones went where none would dare.
Just a little boy, known by everyone
send a flower picked for this one, time expressed
Reply had to be made, springs invoked
‘Who is Biral?’
Walking alone sharp rocks cut my feet
leaf push upon my skin.
Bad tribes were known to never return
greatest healthful huge size spirit
enters manhood
taking violence away
fading in a day.
Morally, I’m not better off.

Ngunda supreme. Live spirally in my being.
Death inflicts existence
too real for this world.
Supernatural customs differ to human
now tribes who have lives on
fellow of the nameless kind.
Journeys, new born, mixture powder
a virility more wonderful than risks.
Magic escape compassion, no good to say.
Space veined howls around knowledge, bitter gift
the sucking bloodless fed strong men
feared in homeless whirl, by passwords.
Ambush admitted the tunnel of music
entered the little boy now known by everyone
Trumpeted the didgeridoos
operaed a stranger calls.
Speaking souls, race blows weird things onto faces
made u’fella look like creatures of another era.
Sweet simple bodies, paths shadows
dazzled masked ritual and religion.

She turned, asking her people
I’ve never seen Ngunda
So why show a boy meaning nothing
a little boy, smaller than an ant
looking for a fight with porky pines.
My answer shattered in storms.
and disposed in scrubs where none haunts
and where river parts inside my guts
for I am ‘belief’.

Beauty, parents may protect helpless creeping country babies
but will they point the way to waterhole.
Mountains lazy survived future dispensed
cause land felt slaughter to any who lifeless the hills
Fish and snake rest, while people eat rope
they hung themselves.
Wicked terrific scenes came
diversity sensational, all down the tracks at night.
This relationship I previously had, shorter
now it longer
so however highest degree or what the spirit dwells
deep and contemporary in us
it is within
Watching morning asleep
but gunya, sparkling stars windowed at darkness
a giggle swept tears
winning a day and night
no a stomach tight and empty, crawling
search a prey over near grasses
shapes stretched to marvel
then dreaming forced Mum, Nanna and lotta people
shouting, me to sing out
Weakness no more
Ngunda
Biral
Many influences, many spirits

Nguthuru too.
These words, not vocation
Born, inbred by Aboriginal people
I’m blood. Sheer and delightful.

                                                  17/11/82