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Forbeserama : The Virtual Arcade of John Forbes

(Status : Public)
Coordinated by Duncan Hose
  • Fatal as ... but far less idle

  • Propagandas

    Here is a final draft of part three of ‘On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem’, staging the clash of cultures in the dirty business of invasion. Structured as a six piece diorama, the poem models or fugues six different models of Australia and six different versions of the poet as professional mythmaker, beginning ‘Your vocation calls/  you answer it…’

    This particular ‘act’ is a performance of history in the pedagogical mode: a mock public lecture. It satirizes the enunciative posture of another mode of representation: the discursive mode of the public intellectual addressing ‘middle Australia.’ In this comic vignette, the Royal Navy bustle on stage as a troupe of actors bursting with industry, the stiff rituals of discipline and British spunk. This is quietly contrasted with the subtle poise and patience of the blue-ringed octopus, a more ancient and deadly biological technology, but which exists only for itself and seeks no greater dominion. It is also a parody of the assumption of British technological and cultural superiority: ‘Fatal as … but far less idle … I mean didn’t you know?’ The invaders can only recognize their own cultural complexity, and point to their own sophisticated rites which structure identity, and which the poem show to be fairly ludicrous. The insignia and ritual of the pageantry of empire underscores the arbitrary nature of cultural signification and its assumed value.

    Poem ‘3’ presents itself as a kind of teleological review, setting up a hectoring subject for racist discourse, built of enmity and blinding self-regard. This subject reaches its pitch with the sneering dismissal of Aboriginal resistance: ‘All you did was throw sticks and jibber’. This is a rehearsal of the stock rhetoric of Australian racism at its most pure, and Forbes’s savage parody threatens to spill over into its target bastardy. It is heavily ironized, and as such it is almost a smooth, non-resistant surface: there is no moral grip. This is an address to Aboriginal people, and one imagine if the poem were to be performed, its ironic tone would crystallize and become apparent, but cold on the page the orientation of the speaker seems malevolent, and Forbes makes no move to exculpate himself. The tone remains evenly facetious, but the discourse morphs from the flat-out racist to a more soft-palmed patter of modern image management and branding:

                    but I guess

    you’ve worked that one out,

    now that you’ve got a flag of your own.

    So here’s some tips for the future

    i.e. the past considered as farce: be absolute and suave

    & know that what they gave you when they took your land

    is just a foretaste of what you’ll get

    now your religious imagery looks subtle on a fabric.      (CP 130)

    Forbes recycles Marx’s famous gag from The Eighteenth Brumaire that ‘all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Just as the style of discourse had shifted here, so have the unsubtle procedures of the colonial-capital culture of acquisition. This is the threat of absolute cultural appropriation, of Aboriginal culture incorporated into the commodifiable ‘model of Australia’ and made to pay. Forbes plays here with the nihilistic precept of eternal recurrence within history ‘… the past considered as farce..’. The poem suggests that dispossession and colonization are not things of the past, but have evolved and enveloped indigenous cosmology as a kind of spiritual capital to be exploited. Highly mobile hedonistic Capital has arrived, and we sense the inevitability of its transgression into the sacred and the unconscious. In a 1991 interview, Forbes observed that:

    The 70s were a good decade for self-disillusion, to become aware. The older you get, I think, the more radical you get, but the more aware you become of how difficult it is to change anything. I never felt, I never believed in anything politically – so I didn’t have any illusions shattered, but I just became more and more aware of how society is organized and … the breathtaking brutality and ruthlessness that underpins everyday reality. (Kenneally 117)

    So Forbes’s speaker gives us this truculent advice that is an ironic invitation to modernity, the quasi-quixotic ‘be absolute and suave,’ with ‘suave’ being looped back and neatly crippled by the rhyming ‘farce.’ The poem shows the post-colonial as being merely a suave allotrope of the colonial; they exist on a continuum, and the ‘post’ can be seen as an articulated appendage that allows for more diabolical techniques of appropriation.

    In his ‘3 Songs for Charles Darwin’, Forbes treats the violent contact of radically different cultures in a radically different fashion:

      here,

    the only precision’s / a scribbled

                gumtree calligraphy,

    so exact against the blue

    it could almost be

    that subtle code

    by which the blacks / could read

                                       their country

                          & themselves

    & our scabbed ancestors

    in a shamed rage against complexity,

    killed them off to deny      (CP 252)

    Forbes approaches a felt apperception of both the sensuousness and violence of country and of code, and hints that the Australian ‘Commonwealth’ as a hoard of booty is underwritten with spook.

  • Anthropological to Art-Historical

    700
    914
    assertion
  • Fatal as the Blue Ringed Octopus.

    This letter to Donald Brook seems to have been accompanied by a draft of  'On the Beach', which became the central poem of 'The Stunned Mullet,' published in 1988 and funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority, as part of an official (governmental) festival of mythomania invented to celebrate two hundred years of settler occupation. Forbes is caught up in the nexus of money and mythmaking, and it is a tribute to the Bicentennial Authority's indifference to current poetry culture of the late 80s that they chose this poet, as they could hardly have chosen a more skilled antagonist willing to take apart what they were so carefully trying to put together. Forbes has risked a position to make a point, perhaps on an angry spur, and here he seems scared that the ambivalence between racism and its caricature is too finely set. The other spook clinging to him is the 'Spirit of Capitalism,' and the aethereally greasy aura that comes from having its hand work you as the ventriloquist's dummy. The poem as a machine for thinking has continued to work on its creator. More like the blue-ringed octopus the poem has delivered its toxic load of nerve agent: it would have us think of Aboriginal sovereignty, of the execution of oppression through bureaucratic power 'ecstatic for routine,' and the historical emergence of the neoliberal plague that attacks the most vulnerable members of the body politic, and lusts after a way to feed on the metaphysical common wealth of culture- the sacred. 

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