ALISON WHITTAKER, (ed.), Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today. St Lucia , QLD: University of Queensland Press 2020, pp. 192, € 24,99.
(pp. 95-96).

Except a few rare cases, in Europe Indigenous Australian literature is a niche product, and outside Australia its dissemination remains limited to academic circles. This - although the tradition of Aboriginal verse in English is substantial - is especially true for poetry. Such a limited diffusion can be linked to the fact that Indigenous art and culture do not belong to the cultures immediately most accessible to the Eurocentric-Anglophone public. In addition, as the title of the book reviewed here suggests (Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today), Indigenous writing has a strong political character. Most of the poetry is political, just as Ooodgeroo Noonuccal’s was back in 1964 when, as Kath Walker, she published We Are Going and for the first time brought the Aboriginal consciousness to the Australian literary world. At the time she defined her poetry, unapologetically, as sloganistic and civil-rightish. It is difficult if not impossible, today as then, to read Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors without an understanding of the cultural, socio-political, and historical contexts in which their texts sit.

While much remains to be done in terms of encouraging wider circulation and deeper appreciation, well-curated anthologies can be crucial in helping to spread Aboriginal literature internationally, attracting an outside an overseas audience. In the past years, authoritative examples were the collections Inside Black Australia (edited by Kevin Gilbert, 1988), The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, 2008), and Us Mob Writing (edited by Samantha Faulkner, Lisa Fuller, Jeanine Leane and Kerry Reed-Gilbert, 2013). Among the latest, Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today is a noteworthy case. Published in 2020, the book contains 53 writings by some of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, performers, and commentators, spanning from 1964 “Son of Mine” (a postcolonial classic by Oodgeroo) to 2019 “I Run…” (by the young slam poet Melanie Mununggurr-Williams). Edited and introduced by Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker, Fire Front showcases some of the brightest new stars – Baker Boy, Kirli Sauders, Evelyn Araluen (Stella Prize 2022), Pauline Whymann, Elizabeth Walker (a descendant of Oodgeroo) –, as well as leading writers and poets including award-winners Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe, Romaine Moreton, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Jack Davis, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Lionel Fogarty, Lisa Bellear, and Tony Birch. Seniors and juniors speak to each other, as well as to the past and the future generations. This intergenerational conversation is sometimes particularly evident, as in the case of the juxtaposition of Oodgeroo’s “Son of Mine”(1964) and Elizabeth Walker’s “Grandfather of Mine” (2018), both dedicated to the Aboriginal civil rights activist Denis Walker (p. 148-149).

Fire Front is structured in five sections. Each section’s title is the excerpt from a poem contained in the book and is accompanied by its own introductory narrative by a well-known Aboriginal thinker. Essays are by Cobby Eckermann, Pascoe, Bond, Araluen and Oliver, which Whittaker explains represents “five different kinds of firepower” (p. xi). The first section, entitled “Ancestor, you are exploding the wheelie bin”, is about relationships to ancestors and the past, and the impact of colonisation. The second part, titled after Kevin Gilbert’s 1971 poem “The New True Anthem”“Despite what Dorothea has said about the sun scorched land”, gathers poems about resistance to the colonisers. In the third section, introduced by Bruce Pascoe and entitled “I say rage and dreaming”, raw emotion and unfettered thoughts spill out as poets speak back and speak to one another. The fourth part, “Because we want it back, need it back, because they can”, accounts for the losses brought about by colonisation and considers ways of healing, repairing, and moving forward. The anthology concludes with the regrowth and regeneration seen after fire: in the last section, “This I would tell you” (a quotation from the abovementioned “Son of Mine”), we look back to Oodgeroo, “this great lady of our culture”, as Wright has recently defined her,[1] and then forward to the 1996-born rapper, dancer, artist, and actor Baker Boy, and consider how the experiences in between must inform how First Nations people move on.

In their variety, the anthologised texts have much in common. As Witthaker explains in a recent article for The Guardian, they all foreground memories and traumas that official accounts and archives conceal, producing a counter-reading of European historical and cultural memory. Plenty of Indigenous poetry, including that featured in Fire Front, has been written in response to something – whether it’s individual or collective trauma, major events in colonial history, political movements, moments of respite and joy, even other poems.[2]

All poems are written in English, the language of the white colonizers. Yet, they challenge the English language and the poetic forms and traditions of the West, creating space for other ways of thinking. It is no coincidence that language itself is one of the most recurrent topics in the anthology. In his famous song “Native Tongue”, for instance, Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga (known professionally as Mo’Ju) laments his language loss:

I don’t speak my father’s native

tongue

I was born under a southern sun

I don’t know where I belong

I don’t know where I belong (p. 86)

While in “My Ancestors”, Sachem Parkin- Owens’ conjures poetry as a means to reconnect with his ancestors:

I search for the origin of my hidden

soul through each line;

And through each line

I rewrite and retell

I realise, each rhyme, every poem I

write, isn’t mine.

They belong to the sovereign and free.

My Ancestors. (p. 152)

As these authors emphasise, writing, chanting, and evoking ancient stories allows connecting the present to the ancestral past. Some autochthonous terms, excerpts, or longer passages are left untranslated in their meaningful stratification of semantic values. In “Yilaalu – Bu –Gadi”, Lorna Murno makes a polyglot list:

MELALEUCA

YURALI (eucalyptus)

PAPERBARK

KURRAJONG

MOTHER TONGUE WILL ALWAYS

GUIDE YOU HOME BY SONG

TALLAWOLADAH

WHITE CLAY

MENS BUSINESS

WUCUNMUGULLY (p. 62)

Such a blend of English and Indigenous languages, according to Araluen, “subverts Eurowestern conventions of taxonomy and anthropology through a choral performance of the spatiality of culture”(p. 42). She also argues that none of these poems leave English, or the structures it has projected over our Country, unscathed […]. We invent new forms: post-canonical, land-centric, kinshipconnective, everyday-assertive” (p. 44).

And while Araluen discusses the tendency of Anglo Australians to control history when she notes how Oodgeroo’s poetry was “curated and contained, like the municipal gum she so forlornly looked upon” (p. 40; the reference here goes to Oodgeroo’s “Municipal Gum”, featuring in the book, a poem which compares the humiliation of the Aboriginal people to that of an urban eucalyptus), in Fire Front the perspective is that of selfdetermination. As Alexis Wright proclaimed on the occasion of the 2020 Fryer Lecture in Australian Literature: “This is a self-governing literature that belongs to our place”.[3] That is, Indigenous people speak for themselves.

From this viewpoint, Fire Front is a highly ambitious project. Witthaker presents it as a reference work offering “the sharp front of blak poetry” (p. xii): poems written from imprisonment (Dylan Voller’s “Justice for Youth”: “I remember that time [name removed] told me to kill myself. I thought about it for days If only you could feel the pain I felt. / I’m not gonna lie theres been times I have cried. And thought to myself am I gonna die in side.”, p. 154), written for performance in the streets (Elizabeth Jarret’s sloganistic and hortatory “Invasion Day”: “For realise we are still still still / Prisoners of war / Two hundred and twenty-nine years / Of terrorism on our shores / So on today we stand strong together / We have survived / We’re black / We’re proud / We’re strong / And we’re alive.”, p. 84-85), performed as song (Archie Roach’s “Took the Children away”is paired by Briggs’“The Children Came Back”, p. 23-28) and rap (Baker Boy’s “Black Magic”, p. 160-164), scholarly exercises and literary prize entries (Steven Olivers’“Why Not Be Brothers and Sisters?”: “Cause only when people are truly equal, you see / Is when we can say, we are all free.”, p. 89), private memories (Tony Birch’s “Visiting”: “Sitting at the falls again, I skip stones and think of us, together here on summer nights.”, p. 134).

Ultimately, some poems appear to be more effective than others in illustrating “the big sovereign renaissance happening right now” (p. ix-x) and advancing the editor’s explicit ambition - the emancipation of First Nations. Yet, the book has the undoubted merit to illustrate the variety of contemporary Indigenous poetry. Will these verses be enough to shift thinking and make a difference in Australian society?, asks Pascoe (“Will our words be enough to battle the tea-cosy nature of Australian comfort?”, p. 74). Will the relatively marginalised art of poetry contribute to disseminate the Aboriginal culture in and outside Australia, challenging cultural presumptions and ethnocentrism? While questions linger, “The ancestors of course would keep wording, even to the deaf” (p. 75).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       (Margherita Zanoletti)