The new black

1In Specters of Marx Derrida urges us to recognise the phantoms that haunt the literary, the political, the social, the corporate, insisting that ‘ [h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony’.2 Faced with the recognition of the heavily haunted landscape that we invariably inhabit, we have been compelled to seek out appropriate metaphors to represent such phenomena. Captured through the figure of the ghost, the vampire, the monstrous and the uncanny, the spectral is the new black—we all see dead people! The problem is, of course, that they are not necessarily the same people—or if they are, they mean different things to different folk. Where once these phantoms might have been seen to exist at the limit of the imaginary, they are now recognised as imbuing and infiltrating the very marrow of our being, both troubling and constituting the stories that we tell, the films that we make, the theses that we write.

2Roger Luckhurst refers to this embracing of the ‘language of ghosts and the uncanny—or rather of anachronic spectrality and hauntology’ as a ‘spectral turn’3 but reminds us, following Derrida, that we must recognise the way a situated Gothic voice might function ‘as a grounded manifestation of communities in highly delimited locales subjected to cruel and unusual forms of political disempowerment’ (Luckhurst 2002: 536). Given his focus on London Gothic in particular, Luckhurst understandably identifies these communities ‘at the colonial edges of England’ as Anglo-Irish or Scottish, but I would suggest that the geography of the spectral takes on particular relevance in the more pointedly disenfranchised colonial sphere where such disjunction is more acute. The need for a context-specific understanding, therefore, is vital, as does the need to insist on what Sneja Gunew, in Haunted Nations, calls, after Harraway, ‘situated multiculturalisms’—the need to understand in relation ‘to the local as well as global geopolitical and cultural dynamics’4. In this sense the ghost proves particularly useful given its ability to highlight, trouble and disintegrate borders and boundaries.

3As Shelley Kulperger has put it, ‘ [t]he adoption of the ghost in postcolonial contexts is... additionally meaningful and deployed to suggest an ethical uncertainty and moral imperative, and signal the imbrication of colonialism/colonist within postcolonialism/postcolonist’5. Needless to say this recognition—this interpellation of the spectral—has a complex role to play in contemporary narratives of belonging. Not surprisingly, it has proved central to both major and minor parties, to coloniser and colonised, mainstream and marginal interests, largely because the journey through such hauntings is approximate. If David Punter is right that ‘we live in a world peopled by ghosts, phantoms, spectres’6, then there is no healing of the past and no way forward, unless we learn to sit and talk with the ghosts.

4The focus of this paper is on the way Indigenous artists have chosen to speak with/to/through a myriad of spirits—local and foreign, self-generated and imposed, empowering and devastating. And yet it is impossible to speak one story without another. To talk of dispossession is to signal a relationship; to identify counter-measures is to identify policy; and to speak of struggles is to acknowledge special interests. The focus here on Australia and Canada also has an organising logic. Both nations have complicated histories as Commonwealth nations forged in the crucible of colonization practices that severely impacted, and continue to impact, on long-established Indigenous nations. They each negotiate in complex ways a relationship to a mythological white colonial origin with an equally longstanding (im)migrant reality that drives both historic and contemporary narratives of belonging and identity. Most importantly, they are each saturated with spectral narratives that seek to speak for, against and into the public imaginary in ways both similar and different enough to make for meaningful connections.

5To speak of interconnectedness is not to deny substantive difference. The story of entanglement is never simple. The question of possession is different for majority and minority interests specifically because, as Justin Edwards puts it, ‘Canadian conceptions of identity take place on the ground of indecipherability’7. For Gelder and Jacobs this is the tension between Australian secular modernity and the Aboriginal sacred where ‘reconciliation is never a fully realisable category; it can never be completely settled’8. Terry Goldie addresses the complex tension at the heart of settler-invader colonies by suggesting that in a desperate need to overcome the ‘separation of belonging’ the settler-invader constructs the Indigenous according to a rhetoric of fear and desire9, at once demonising and celebrating the Indigenous spirit of the land. In colonial-invader narratives, he argues, the impetus for ‘penetration’ is replaced by the desire for ‘appropriation’, but to do this the coloniser must somehow ‘go native’ and displace Indigenous priority. This is facilitated by powerful narratives that construct the Native as vanishing or dying, and as numerous critics have shown, such seemingly self-fulfilling prophecies have been used to underpin complex and brutal regimes of control and elimination.

6It would be commonplace to insist, for example, that Australia’s genocidal policies of child removal were supported by the belief that the demise of Aborigines was inevitable, and that humanist concerns and protests against such actions were well meant but misplaced.10 It would also be commonplace to point out that narratives about the inevitable disappearance of Indigenous peoples have been out-lasted by their refusal to disappear.

7As Daniel Francis points out, speaking of the Canadian case, ‘ [f]ar from being a vanishing people, Native Canadians seemed to be increasingly alive and kicking, determined to speak for themselves, and to be heard. It was hard to characterize them as passive, doomed people when they were in the headlines and in the courts. Despite a century of being told about their own disappearance, Indians were here to stay’11.

8As Renée L. Bergland puts it, ‘the figure of the Indian ghost is profoundly ambiguous. Although the ghosts register dissatisfaction with the European conquest of the Americas, the fact that they are ghosts testifies to the success of that conquest... But when we focus on Indian ghosts, we risk forgetting the fact that many survived’ (2-3). Francis goes on to argue that the result of this refusal to disappear is a transformation of the narrative itself, so that instead of regretting the actual disappearance of Indigenous peoples a case is made for lamenting the destruction of their once pristine spiritual dimension (Francis 1992: 57-58). The state of mourning empowers colonisers to have a second go at consuming the Indigenous and, through New Age style movements, of ‘going native’ all over again, this time as an act of restorative regret.12

9In the contemporary postcolonial moment, where writers and critics are supposedly more alert to the problematics of such appropriations, it is still surprising to see the resuscitation of an at times tortured story that returns us, strangely, to earlier articulations of belonging, where the settler desire to be Indigenous and the clear sense of its impossibility, forces a conflicted repetition. This moment of crisis is now increasingly spoken of as an ‘uncanny moment’, where the familiar and the unfamiliar, the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, the local and the foreign, the haunted and the haunting, somehow operate at one and the same time—both enacting and denying the possibility of simultaneous occupation.13

10For non-Indigenous writers this uncanny space may well produce peculiar appropriations of Indigeneity such as we might find in Jane Urquhart’s Away, where the Irish are produced as more Indigenous than the Natives, and the ghosts of the invaded are appropriated and/or shared.14 For Sugars, this is a paradoxical moment where the ‘unsettling and uncanny experience of being haunted is what produces a feeling of familiarity and home’—but for the settler, not the invaded15. Brian Johnson identifies this as an example of a reversal of earlier settler Gothicism that sees the ‘repressed content of its uncanny fears [a]s nothing other than a reassuring image of itself’.16 For many writers, then, the postcolonial moment of awareness is met with a gesture of retrieval and reinvention that once again functions to dislocate Indigenous stories and priority,17 and which returns us to the master narratives of settlement literature that imagined the ghost as both a conspicuous absence (identifying a nation’s lack of history), as well as evidence of its clear conscience. Susanna Moodie’s often quoted notion of Canada as ‘too young for ghosts’ in part because it is a place ‘where crime has never been committed’18, may well reflect Jenny Lawn’s notion of a post-enlightenment repression and the disavowal of traumatic and violent histories, but the postcolonial movement towards disinterring hidden Gothic histories in contemporary fictions also shows a commitment by many to confront what Dionne Brand has called the ‘stupefying innocence’ of settler-invader narratives19. Brand’s own work is emblematic of this process of recovery and confrontation with the trauma of history.

11David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is another case in point, where the idea of settler history, and the story of its fraught engagement with an Indigenous presence, is beautifully negotiated through the metaphor of a liminal figure imprinted with the sign of two cultures20—European and Aboriginal—though the spectre that is most feared is the atavistic savage that Gemmy signals for white culture: the evidence of the fragility of whiteness despite the rhetoric of imperial might. Here, arguably, is the point where the ghost is the insubstantial embodiment of the moment of uncanny misrecognition: ‘Ghostly Indians present us with the possibility of vanishing ourselves, being swallowed up into another’s discourse, another’s imagination’ (Bergland 2000: 5).

The returning hosts

12Although I want to move in the closing pages towards a discussion of both the resistances to European frames of reference and the haunting by white culture of Indigenous cultural production, as well as towards a sense of the dynamic way the ghosts are redeployed to transcend stereotypified expectations, it is important to return in more detail to the imbricated history of the spectral systems that govern our understanding of native and non-native interactions.

13The function of ghosts in settler-invader cultures is understandably complex. In both the Australian and Canadian contexts there is ample evidence of the need and desire for ghosts to legitimate the imperial project, especially where these are read as proof of a romantic history that may serve to validate settler claims to place and sideline or strategically replace Indigenous priority. These empowering ghosts, therefore, are attended by more unsettling ones—those manifestations of repressed guilt, of dispossessed peoples and of unfinished business. These are the hidden Gothic spectres of a traumatic history that will not be denied—as emblematised, perhaps, by the ghost of Betty Osborne who continually resurfaces throughout Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.21

14It is crucial, therefore, to recognise that these narratives of the ghostly, the monstrous, and the Gothic, are specifically connected to actual settler-invader policies, as well as with metanarratives that functioned to reinforce or accompany those policies. Again, to speak of the ghostly Indian is to buy into longstanding figurations of Indigenous peoples as dying or vanishing. To speak of monstrosity is to invoke the demonisation that attended accounts of Aboriginal peoples from pre- to post-settlement, narratives moreover that empowered settler-invaders to militate against their presence. And to speak of the Gothic is also to invoke the long history of racialising minority figures within the genre, a practice that underpins the ‘reading’ of Indigeneity and ethnicity as monstrous, spectral and villainous.22

15As I’ve noted elsewhere, the issue of spectrality seems particularly relevant to the Australian context, given its complex history as an ‘imagined’ Antipodean space with a long legacy of explorers and commentators speculating upon and then outright inventing it, as well as peopling it with monstrous presences well ahead of the continent’s actual discovery.23 And once ‘Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, Southern Land Not yet Known’24 was located, specific policies to invent, contextualise, but also dematerialise the first inhabitants were quickly put into place. Ironically, for many Aboriginal peoples, first contact was marked by a moment of mistaken self-recognition—a reading of the white invader body as a returned ancestor, leading to both overly generous and at times hostile encounters.25

16The policy of terra nullius, in which Australia was declared to be a land owned by no one, and therefore available for imperial consumption without resort to treaties of any kind, enacts this spectrality in law. The doctrine of terra nullius declares the land unoccupied, unowned—and yet the suite of exterminations, land grabs, removals of Indigenous peoples from prime land, and the existence of Aboriginal placenames, repeatedly puts the lie to this absence acknowledging instead a profound haunting that can only exist because of prior occupation. This erasure—this dematerialisation— continued until quite recently in Australia through the denial by the longstanding Howard Government that an apology was owed to Aboriginal people, or even that the Stolen Generations did not exist as such, as was claimed by Howard’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs.26

17In response to such denials it is especially important to remember that this notion of being made ghostly is not merely a rhetorical literary trope, a point made brutally clear in the following interview with elder Zita Wallace. Here she is speaking of her return to her home community some ten years after having been taken away:

I know definitely, with Eastern Arunda people, in our culture when a child is taken away, or lost, or dies, they’re not ever allowed to mention that child’s name again. So here am I popping up, and so are other children, and we’re supposed to be dead. My mother turned around and wouldn’t accept me. She just straight out said, ‘You’re a spirit child. You’re not my daughter, you’re a spirit child’. And just wouldn’t accept me...‘comminja’, which means I’m past, I’m of the past, I’m not here no more. And it took a long time. She actually rejected me and I just rejected her back, and for ten years I went back up to Darwin really broken inside. And I just didn’t have the guts or the energy to do it all over again. But after ten years I decided, ‘No I’m going to go back and give it a go one more time’. It took ten years for my family and I to get fully back together. Now I’m totally accepted. I’ve done women’s business, or part of the women’s business. I’m going through initiation even at my age. I’m learning all the women’s ways. I’m getting there, yeah, and I’m totally accepted by my family.27

18If this spectralising history has a particularly and ironically tangible quality in the Australian context, it is of course just as relevant to the North American story, where land grabs, broken treaties, the displacement of Indigenous peoples and their putative and actual eradication have similarly taken place. Needless to say such material practices have their equivalence in the stories of empire where a strategic rewriting of the historical records takes place to manifest a type of originary white narrative that displaces Aboriginal priority.

19An extraordinary metaphor for this physical and psychic imagining is captured in a series of images produced by an early Australian colonial painter named Thomas Watling. In 1769 Watling was given what he no doubt perceived to be the unenviable task of translating the unpicturesque landscape of Australia into terms ‘comprehensible to his majesty’28. He did this by redesigning the actual landscape before him using standard neo-classical principles, to make the view more pleasing. In this sense, given the transformation, it’s perhaps appropriate that Watling was a convicted forger. He translated the incomprehensible Australian landscape by dropping in ‘two pictorial embellishments’ (Smith 1985: 348, n. 82). One of these was a British ‘navel and military officer conversing’ (Smith 1985: 184), replete in wigs and accompanied by a British wolfhound, a detail meant to diminish the distance between the incomprehensible—the unheimlich—and the homely—a heimlich— to use Freud’s famous construction29.

20What is most of interest to me here, however, is a ghostly image in the painting that is difficult to detect even in the original. Around a campfire to the left of the Europeans there is a group of Aboriginal figures that is slowly disappearing from the image. In a stroke of extraordinary irony, Watling, according to the art critic Bernard Smith, was unable to produce an appropriate pigment from his European pallet to represent the flesh tones of his Aboriginal figures and so he created his own paint of ‘fugitive’ quality (Smith 1985: 348, footnote 82). As a result of its unstable nature, the Indigenous peoples have been fading from the Australian landscape, made ghostly even as the British presence was made manifest. And yet, their presence haunts the painting. Although they have faded, they have not disappeared. They remain around the campfire, a peculiar type of colonial pentimento, refusing to vanish. And here, I think immediately of Len Findley’s excellent reading of ‘The Last Huron’ in the context of a similar fictional spectrality in the Canadian context.30

21For many Canadian viewers this will certainly evoke a section in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water where the famed painter, Monroe Summers, is revealed to be a restorer of paintings of a very unusual kind. As a highly sought restorer of nineteenth century paintings, Summers travels the world over —‘they said my brushes were magic’ (King 1999: 129)—ostensibly to return colonial paintings to their former glory. ‘Nineteenth-century landscapes were my specialty’, he explains. ‘Have you ever seen a nineteenth-century landscape?... They all look alike... Snow on the mountains. Luminous clouds in the sky. The rivers tumbling over dark rocks. Blah, blah, blah.’

22Monroe makes a tidy profit at first, until he is invited by the Smithsonian ‘to handle a particularly difficult painting. It was a painting of a lake at dawn, and everything was fine except that the paint along the shore had begun to fade, and images that weren’t in the original painting were beginning to bleed through’ (King 1999: 129-30). ‘You know what they were?’ he asks. ‘Indians. There was an Indian village on the lake, slowly coming up through the layers of paint. Clear as day’ (King 1999: 130). Although he does his best to remove the phantom images from Sunrise on Little Turtle Lake, they keep ‘bleeding’ through, until finally he surrenders to the inevitable and paints ‘the village and the Indians back into the painting’ (King 1999: 133), acknowledging Indigenous priority. As Davidson et al have put it, ‘Monroe’s acute awareness of how certain Eurocentric images—like the ‘primeval paradise’ depicted in landscape paintings—have been used to cover up the existence of Native peoples, leads him to create his own artistic counter-images. These images contest the idea that North America was an uninhabited Eden, waiting to be colonized and civilized’31.

23And it is the figure of the ghost, strangely, that activates the ‘counter-images’—whether of the buffaloes that Monroe Summers ‘restores’ to the landscape or the Indigenous peoples he releases from beneath the whitewash of European landscape paintings. Like the church he renders invisible by painting it to blend so perfectly into the landscape it once dominated that it looks as though part of it ‘has been chewed off’ (King 1999: 43), Summers devours those symbols of the European legacy of dominance and control. In the process, however, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous are made spectral. The church, like the hollow metal buffaloes, is there but not there.

24The real spectres Summers is addressing, of course, are not symbolic but actual. Recalling Derrida’s warning not to reduce the spectral to a purely ‘aesthetic’ concern,32 it is worth noting that Summers also concretises his revisionist project by returning the bones of Indigenous peoples to the land. These he has repossessed from key institutions that regulate memory and history, mocking the notion that what is stored in museums is dead and buried. This point is made obvious in the following exchange between Summers and the novel’s narrator:

‘You know what they keep in museums?’
‘Old stuff from the past?’
‘That’s what they want you to think.’ (King 1999: 133)

25Recognising that the past is not dead, it is not even past (to paraphrase Faulkner), Summers reclaims the skeletons that have been locked away in ‘drawers and boxes and stuck away on [the] dusty shelves’ (King 1999: 250) of many of the top museums, emulating the wider repatriation movement taking place the world over, in an effort finally to lay the ghosts of past atrocities to rest. ‘Anthropologists and archaeologists’ he explains, ‘dig the kids up, clean them off, and stick them in drawers. Every ten years or so, some bright graduate student opens the drawer, takes a look, writes a paper, and shuts the drawer.... So I rescued them’ (King 1999: 251).

26Increasingly, Indigenous writers are enacting this sort of rematerialisation on the texts of empire, in the process disfiguring— dematerialising, dispossessing—majority cultures. Indeed, in one brief scene set in a cafe mid-way through Truth and Bright Water, Miles slides a newspaper towards the narrator. He shows him a story about ‘a research team from the University of Toronto travelling around Canada and the States, collecting blood from Indian people’ (King 1999: 166) in order to discover where Indians come from. The work is referred to as ‘the Vampire Project’ (King 1999: 166), and, as Miles puts it, ‘They sound like real blood-thirsty savages’ (King 1999: 168). For King, as for so many contemporary Native writers, it is the dominant, rather than Indigenous culture that is presented as monstrous, parasitic, vampiric or ghosted.

27For Punter and Byron, ‘The story of the postcolonial... is in the mouths of ghosts; the effect of empire has been the dematerialization of whole cultures, and the Gothic tropes of the ghost, the phantom, the revenant, gain curious new life from the need to assert continuity where the lessons of conventional history and geography would claim that all continuity has been broken by the imperial trauma’ (Punter and Byron 1999: 58).

28But equally interesting is the way this spirit world has been repossessed by First Nations and Aboriginal writers in works that do acknowledge the issue of contamination and dispossession, but that also celebrate the agency of a ghost system that predates European imaginings. This complex double movement has produced some of the most challenging commentaries, from Tracey Moffatt’s densely haunted films33 to Alootook Ipellie’s interfusional stories and drawings; from the ironic reiterative performances and print works of Destiny Deacon to the complex structures of Tomson Highway’s plays and novel.

29It would be wrong to suggest, however, that these tropes of haunting are exclusively the bi-product of European contamination. Rather, Indigenous works have always celebrated spiritual haunting in a relationship that is the envy of New Age audiences hungry for a connection to an ‘authentic’ spirit world. Indeed, it is the recognition of just such an impoverished yet insatiable European appetite that prompts Maria Campbell to insist that non-Indigenous peoples embrace their own ghosts before they can make peace with, or indeed possess, another’s.34 But it is no less true that the history of the cross-cultural encounter has, is, and will continue to remain haunted, and in this sense the figure of the ghost is the most obvious signifier of that complex interconnection, just as Pheng Cheah suggests that ‘the most apposite metaphor for freedom today is the haunted nation’35. As Buse and Stott have put it, ‘In the figure of the ghost, we see that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is always constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the future’36.

30This, in a way, is hauntingly evoked by the epigraph to Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen where Chief Seattle of the Squamish warns:

At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them, and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless.37

Like blood in the water

31This paper has touched on the way spectralising practices have been used to contain Indigenous writers in Canada and Australia both at the historical and the representative level; but it has also suggested the dynamic way such containment practices have been resisted and at times overturned through a sequence of revisionary narratives by contemporary artists. It would be useful, in closing, to connect these key arguments through a number of recent narratives that have crystallised the possibilities for a subversive spectralising of dominant practices.

32The title to this section is drawn from Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner the first feature length, and award-winning, film by Inuit filmmakers. The phrase appears in the pre-text to the film, on the website explaining the legend of Atanarjuat. It explains that the evil that haunts the community at the centre of the film was first summoned into the lives of the inhabitants through a son’s ‘murderous ambition’:

Like blood in the water, Sauri’s murderous ambition attracts a shark: an evil shaman, Tungajuaq (toong-GAH-joo-ahk), appears mysteriously in camp. The stranger quickly senses Sauri’s hidden desires and during a ‘playful’ competition in the spirit world, murders Sauri’s father and installs the young man in his place. Worse, the stranger singles out young Tulimaq, Sauri’s rival, as co-victim of his curse.38

33My paper has approached spectres not merely as aesthetic metaphors that speak importantly of loss and mourning, but also as powerfully real agents in a contemporary effort to re-engage— even build bridges—between cultures, in the context of a frank and at times even brutal acknowledgement of the present hauntology of the global/local. That this effort is difficult, if not dangerous, is invoked by this passage from Atanarjuat that reminds us of the high stakes at play when we engage the spectral. And yet surely the issue of engagement is tied closely to intent. What is in our hearts when we summon forth the ghosts will surely determine the experience. That any gesture of reconciliation is itself a spectralising enterprise is clear. As Gelder and Jacobs have argued, for example,

Reconciliation is a policy which intends to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past, restructuring the nation’s sense of itself by returning the grim truth of colonisation.... But it is not surprising that, rather than laying things to rest, these ghosts (and the past is always ghostly here) in fact set a whole range of things into motion. (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 30)

34What is remarkable in many contemporary works by Indigenous artists, however, is the way European contexts are no longer always at the forefront of the relationship. Atanarjuat is a pre-colonial ghost story that has little need of European stories. It is grounded in a metaphysical dimension that predates and has no reference to non-Indigenous mythologies. Indeed, its postcolonial effects are generated at the very end of the film, in the credits, where the film depicts its representational strategies, alerting us to the mechanics of filmmaking as a modern practice. It also cleverly reminds us that the postcolonial is articulated beyond predictable actions, making clear that Indigenous peoples are not removed from modernity.

35When contemporary artists do directly invoke master narratives the results are also similarly refreshing. The work of Canadian First Nations artist Brian Jungen is a case in point. One of his most famous series, the extraordinary repossession of corporate signifiers—Nike masks—in Prototype for New Understanding makes the point brilliantly.

36In an introductory piece to this now well-studied body of work, appropriately called ‘Shapeshifter’—another type of ghost after all— Julia Dault notes that ‘Jungen starts with a simple premise: recontextualizing consumer products to give them new meaning.... Jungen, though, has found a way to up the stakes. By starting with a loaded palette—Air Jordans have more history than some small countries—and reconfiguring Nike’s shoes into coveted, spiritual Aboriginal symbols, he’s breeding mythical objects from two antithetical sources. He’s also, amazingly, doing it with his tongue delicately planted in his cheek’40. The metaphor she uses— of the loaded palette—brings us back full circle to the ‘flawed palette’ of the forger, Thomas Watling, so heavily haunted by a profound lack that literalises the dematerialising effect of dominant representational practices upon minority interests. It’s a lesson that makes clear why revisionary, repossessive narratives are so essential. Jungen’s work haunts the corporate image in remarkable ways, and in so doing releases the hidden histories that in/corporate power masks—including the appropriation of Indigenous cultural product into mass-market commodities. At stake, surely, is the eventual repossession of tangible cultural agency with perhaps the spin-off effect of spectralising destructive dominant narratives.