Memory is Desire: Epistemological Premises and Desiring Textualities in Indigenous Australian Literature

Contemporary Indigenous culture of Australia is characterized by a paradox, i.e. the fact that any projection into the future has to be fuelled by the recovery of the past, which is necessary in order to overcome the pervasive sense of cultural expropriation and loss stemming from the trauma of the white invasion of the Australian continent in Nineteenth Century. In other words, it can be said that, in this cultural frame of reference, memory is desire, in the sense that this very culture needs to go back to its past as a form of desire, i.e. a propellent able to give new strenght to the (re-)affirmation of its own specificity. In this sense the role of literature is a leading one, both for literature’s intrinsic capability to re-construct and re-actualize (even) no longer existing worlds, and for its relation with a lost tradition in which what we define as artistic creativity had a substantial value of re-actualization of a precise Weltanschauung. This paper focuses on the relation between this traditional cultural background and the perception of writing in contemporary (written) Indigenous literature. In particular, it analyzes some Australian women’s texts, mostly poetical (Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lisa Bellear), as the expressions of the recollection and reconstruction of a past that has been stolen by the invaders, in a process that makes memory alive through writing and projecting that very memory in the future as a desiring dialectic