Always Coming Home is a work of speculative fiction, but the
Dream Time, or the Dreaming, is a real thing in the real world. Nevertheless it
escapes easy definition, since it doesn't originate in a way of thinking framed
by the English language, or even in any recognizably Western way of thinking.
The Dreaming is a central fact of life for the Warlpiri people of central
Australia, and as the daughter of an anthropologist, Le Guin likely came by her
understanding of it honestly. Most of what I've learned about the Dreaming
comes from an excellent ethnography by the anthropologist Michael Jackson, At
Home in the World, and it's going to be a challenge for me to do justice to
such a deep and complex phenomenon in so short a post. But I think it's an idea
worth exploring and honouring beyond the passing reference I made last week.
To begin with, At Home in the World is an ethnography that
challenged the way ethnographies were written. Published in 1995, it uses
elements of personal narrative, travel stories, conversations with Warlpiri
people Jackson met during his three years visiting and travelling with them,
poetry, and critical reflection on Jackson's own culture. He went to Australia
to find a new perspective on the idea of home by living among people who don't
build permanent houses, preferring instead to build temporary shelters out on
the land. His exposure to a way of life and perception so completely unlike
ours challenged him to write in a way that would convey the jarring sense of
newness he experienced constantly during those three years. It's not a scientific,
observational style, but one that reflects the messiness and ambiguity of the
people and situations he encountered.
It takes a bit of a leap of faith to read like this, not
knowing at all times what is going on, but by coming at his account obliquely,
Jackson is true to his subject matter. Anthropological fieldwork must involve a
great deal of not knowing what is going on. Nothing is explained completely,
except in snatches. The Dreaming, one of the essential elements of Warlpiri
society, is talked about not in absolute terms, but in terms of how individuals
relate to it. In this way individual contributions to the bigger picture of
Warlpiri life accrue meaning as we journey with Jackson deeper into the desert.
Early in the narrative Jackson goes to a place called
Lajamanu, called Hooker Creek by whites, and becomes acquainted with a Warlpiri
man named Pincher Jampijinpa. Later, Pincher asks Jackson to buy him some
paints at the store: red, yellow, and white, and when Jackson returns, Pincher
unfolds a few old canvases painted in the same colours. To white eyes they
appear to be covered in abstract designs, large circles and sinuous lines, but
as Pincher explains, they tell the story of the land his father came from. A
narrative unfolds which sounds mythical to our ears, but which conveys precise
physical details of the land across which the characters journey. The lines are
tracks across the outback, while the circles are campsites. This is a songline,
or a Dreaming, which belongs to Pincher and his kin, because it belongs to the
land that they in turn belong to.
Songlines tell the story of journeys, and they imply an
imperative to re-enact those journeys. Singing or chanting the story as one
walks the same route one's ancestors walked, through the same landscape, is one
way that Warlpiri people make themselves deeply 'at home in the world', in
Jackson's words. Their practice of walking hundreds of miles through the
desert, finding food and water and such shelter as they need along the way,
runs counter to white Australians' demands that they settle down, build
permanent houses, and contribute to the economy. When asked how far away the
sites mentioned in his particular Dreaming are, Pincher is vague, but even
sitting indoors he gestures unerringly in the direction his ancestors came
from, because he's made such journeys himself. "We don't use maps,"
comments Zack Jakamarra, an older Warlpiri man. "We got the country in our
heads."
Interactions like these give plenty of food for thought on
differences between Warlpiri and white conceptions of land. Jackson was born in
New Zealand, so like me he's a white man native to a land he can never truly
call his own. Of course, that's putting a sympathetic spin on centuries of
murder and forced assimilation, as took place in Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada. The white narratives that insist on whites' rights to lands we
inherited from thieving ancestors can never be made true, but where does that
leave us? If people like the Warlpiri are at home in the world, are we
permanently homeless, always to be known as 'settlers' in the only lands we've
ever known? For my own part, I accept and affirm the label 'settler', which
signifies to me that in many ways my people and I will always be immigrants to
Canada. But like Jackson, I'm looking outside my own culture for ways of
mending or unmaking the parts of that culture that have caused so much misery
across such vast swathes of time and space.
Looming in the background of all his interactions with the
Warlpiri is the feeling of alienation and exile many Warlpiri have experienced
as a result of settler encroachment and misuse of sacred lands. A sloppy
bulldozer operator accidentally destroys a certain tree that has great
importance to several families' Dreamings, and the whole community is outraged.
Another time, Jackson and several Warlpiri friends decide to try camping at a
white-owned campground midway through a journey by land rover, rather than in
the bush as they normally would. By this point I had become so accustomed to
Jackson’s vivid descriptions of the landscape, the stars, and the smoke from
the fires that I too was shocked by the strangeness of white people’s camping:
neat little coloured tents set out in rows, grass watered by sprinklers, and
store-bought food being cooked over a miniature gas stove.
Although Jackson repeats again and again that his words
cannot capture the experience of the Warlpiri world, his words do point us
toward a newness of vision. From the window of the land rover, Zack Jakamarra
points out landmarks Jackson has read about in the archived journals of white
explorers, each hill, rock, or tableland noted briefly and then left behind.
But in Zack's eyes each undulation of the land glows with meaning, a crucial
element in the story of who he is and where he belongs. As I began to see it,
through the distant lens of Jackson's eyes following Zack's gaze, the Dreaming
is the dimension of reality that gives it meaning, the source from which life
springs and to which life returns. It is ever-present, and yet one must be
taught to see it through ceremony and initiatory journeys.
Although it's impossible to really know what someone means
through words alone, even leaving aside the question of whether vastly
different cultures can ever truly understand one another, I think Ursula K. Le
Guin is on the right track. She's read widely and tried to see through the eyes
of others, but then she's returned to the land she calls home and tried to
imagine a way forward for her own culture. The key to this kind of imagination
is a respect for what is yours to take up and refashion, on the one hand, and
what belongs to others, on the other hand. The Dreaming belongs to the Warlpiri
as they belong to the Dreaming, but I think Le Guin's 'Dream time' points to
something different, a newness of her own making that borrows resonance from
her journeys into other ways of seeing. It's the ability to see other possible
worlds within the world we take for granted, and to believe that those
possibilities are ever-present, glowing in the landscape.
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