Unconventional Post-Colonialism

David Malouf – Remembering Babylon

The cover of the Vintage edition of the novel. 

REMEMBERING BABYLON is a short , but intricately written novel which I read in order to assist a student of mine. As an aside: It has been a while since I have gotten down to nuts and bolts of a text, and looked at it with a kind of closeness that only seems to occur at certain levels of education. It strikes me now, that the detail and closeness with which texts are looked at near the end of Higher Education seems to eschew a wider understanding of the text as a whole, and the text in its context – especially when students are told that they are going to be looking at “a selection from the following extracts.” Similarly, in Further Education, students are encouraged to find a theme, and then find their own extracts to support it – at this level, I think students miss some of the subtleties of the text and pass over some important themes.

Remembering Babylon is a somewhat atypical post-colonial novel about a white boy who grew up with aborigines in Australia and his return to white “civilization”, with that word being up for debate. Unfortunately, by and large, I find myself totally uninterested in that theme for the very reason that the text is written to represent a very specific viewpoint, it would seem.

Ordinarily, PC novels will write from a perspective of the colonized/marginalized – and from this angle, the colonizers/marginalizers will be subjected to analysis/scrutiny/criticism. And that’s all very well and good. Malouf himself stated that he couldn’t write from any kind of perspective than his own, and thus the text essentially tells the story of a “blacked-up” white boy. Obviously the words I have used here, highlight the potential offensiveness of this approach – that the position of Gemmy, our protagonist, is a perspective with as much artifice as the ordinary PC approach, and further, that Malouf’s approach would have pretensions of verisimilitude. The other effect of this very strange approach is that the text is not so much simulating or stimulating a dialogue between two cultures, but is rather a single culture criticizing itself.

For me however, I do not feel so much a case of whatever the reverse of White Man’s Burden is. Certainly, as much as it wasn’t The White Man’s Burden to education the savages, it certainly isn’t The White Man’s Burden to atone for the former. The persecution of Aboriginals is something I personally just don’t know anything about – so what is the dialectic operating in the novel for me? Self and Other? The novel is set in the late 19^th Century. The novel is about Scottish people whose dialogue is written in such a way that I have to read phonetically:

“For God’s sake, man, Ah’m no’ gonna hit ye. Ah jist want t’ tell ye again, ye’d better no’ follow the bairns aboot – Ah’ve telt ye a hunner times….” David Malouf, Remembering Babylon, Chapter 3

I’ll grant that it’s not difficult, but it doesn’t particularly inspire identification in this reader. Sure, I have criticized other texts on here for, shall we say, identification problems, but surely Scottish-Australian is a limited enough set of people as it is.

Is it a case of deliberate Alienation? Probably – the point being that we are to feel as alien with our “own people” as Gemmy feels amongst both the Whites and Blacks. Which, once again raises the problem of whether we are in fact (A) a party of said people [Identification) and (B) responsible for said actions [Burden].

As a final note, I’d like to add that the novel certainly wasn’t bad by any means. Racial “Politics” is not something I have a particular or vested interest in. It was certainly well written with some really beautiful metaphorically dense descriptive passages, which were both subtle and articulate.