Through a Wongar, Darkly

Dis-Located Readings - ASAL Mini-Conference Monash Feb 21-22, 2013.

B. Wongar, formerly known as Sreten Božić, is, in a manner of speak-
ing, doubly damned. On the one hand, he has received strong criticism
from the like of Indigenous critics such as Jackie Huggins who would
prefer that he ‘let [Aboriginal people] have a look at [the manuscript]
before it goes to print.’(Huggins, 1995)(89) Yet, white reviewers such as
Adams et al feel that they ‘found it difficult to believe in [his] book's
authenticity [and] needed to counter the strong attack on white people,
and to do this... needed to think about [Wongar’s] motives ... He
demands that you respond, demands that you react, because he’s as-
suming that he has the right to speak for Aborigines.’ (Adams, Kohut,
Webber, & Noyce, 1991)(8) To both parties, either affronted Aborigin-
als or incensed whites, Wongar has transgressed. This transgression
is steeped in the belief that the outsider to a culture has no position
speaking of or for another culture. Yet, the former complaint does not
completely take into account the importance of intended audience,
while the latter criticism is a direct result of it. Wongar, arguably, writes
for two audiences, both white, one is local the other international. If
Wongar’s novels could be said to have a hermeneutics, they one would
be to inform from a unique position on the repeated mistreatment of
aboriginals and the destruction of their, and our, environment and the
other, implicitly, is to shame. I argue that this can be explained as a
direct result of how Bakhtin’s notions of “outsidedness” and vzhivanie,
or “live-entering”, function within his texts, which are examples of
minority literature.
But first, a brief background of Wongar. Wongar arrived in Aus-
tralia from Serbia in 1960; he had travelled by way of Paris and Italy
after encountering difficulties under Tito’s regime. The nature of the
difficulties is somewhat vague, and, so, unfortunately unresolved as
of yet. After a fraught trip across the Tanami by way of camel Božić
began work on the Ord River Dam. Here he made some close
Aboriginal acquaintances; subsequently he spent much of his free
time travelling with his new friends, or spending time at Delisaville.
About this time Wongar met and married an Aboriginal woman,
Djumala, in a tribal ceremony. Sometime in 1970, Wongar claims to
have received a baptism of sorts. Travelling with some Indigenous
mates in Arnhem Land, in the forbidden zone, the group were
approached by a ranger. Wongar feigned extreme illness, face down
in the dirt, while his friend pretended to be a tribal healer chanting
over him. When questioned by the Ranger as to who the man lying in
the dust was, the men replied that he was ‘Wongar’, meaning amongst
other things “outsider”. The title stuck. (Wongar, 1999)(173) Wongar’s
first collection of short stories, The Sinners: Stories of Vietnam (1971),
disappeared into bargain bins as soon as it was published. His se-
cond, The Track to Bralgu (1978) shot to international acclaim cour-
tesy of Thomas Keneally’s review in the New York Times Review of
Books, in which Keneally praised Wongar as having a ‘fine voice’
and writing ‘arresting chants’, in reference to the poetics with his
work. (Keneally, 1978) It was at this point that Wongar’s ethnicity was
called into question. Little Brown had intimated that Wongar was in
fact an Aboriginal, Keneally reviewed it as such and Wongar did not
refute it; choosing, unfortunately, instead to play along. In 1981 Robert
Drew published the sensationally titled article ‘Solved! The Great B.
Wongar Mystery’ in the Bulletin magazine (Drewe, 1981). While a
friendly article with a not so politically correct cartoon, it prompted a
sea of invective. Wongar, however, continued to write under the same
name – producing seven more volumes of dystopian fiction set in the
Australian outback; winning among others the 1996 P.E.N Award for
his Nuclear Cycle of novels. He is still an active writer.
It is the notion of Wongar as the outsider that I wish to pursue today,
with the argument that engaging with his texts through the theory of
Bakhtinian “outsidedness” avoids and calls into question some of the
more tricky post-colonial critiques of his work, and the ad-hominem
attacks on himself as an author. The concept of “Outsidedness” is
elucidated in Bakhtin’s earlier essays Towards a Philosophy of the Act
(1993) and Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (1990). Outsidedness,
or “exotopy”, defines the relationship between author and protagonist
and author and culture. Michael Holquist states that ‘the term [“out-
sidededness”], as always in dialogism, is not only spatial, but temporal:
it is only from the position outside something that it can be perceived
in categories that complete it in time and fix it in space.’ (Holquist,
1990) (30) In other words, to gain a true understanding of an event
or person, it must be witnessed from outside. What occurs cannot be
truly witnessed from within. The protagonist can only be properly
shaped from without, just as the event can only truly be witnessed.
Insomuch as this relates to Wongar it puts him in an oddly unique
position. Wongar, or at this point in time, the young
Božić grew up during the Second World War and enjoyed his teen-
age years during the turmoil that befell Yugoslavia before Marshall
Tito came to power. He witnessed ethnic cleansing first hand in his
village, and was only too aware of the kinds of wholesale slaughter
that occurred at Jasenovac – the Nazi concentration camp colloquially
known as the Balkan Holocaust. Located just inside the border of
(what is now known as) Croatia it was an independently operated camp,
supervised by Nazis. It functioned on a scale comparable to Belsen and
Lublin, and “processed” mainly ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma at the
behest of the Ustaše. I think it can be safely argued that Wongar had
an education in the appearance and experience of genocide, through
the various unpleasant experiences of his childhood. This informs
the dialogism that he brings to his writing and also to his position
as an outsider. Wongar’s temporal position begins as past-historical
observer and segues into current observer.
This context marries well with Holquist’s interpretation of Bakhtin,
where ‘dialogisms primary thrust is always in the direction of the
historical and social specificity.’ (Holquist, 1990)(31) Wongar’s position
as witness and author then is unique, seeing from outside the historical
actions of White Australia upon Aboriginal Australia and drawing
his own natural correlation between one set of historical events and
another more contemporary, and continuing, issue found within the
treatment of Aboriginals in Australia.
Bakhtin utilises the foundations of “outsidedness,” to build what
would eventually become his theory of dialogue and dialogism, the
concept of vzhivanie. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson translate
vzhivanie as “live entering” or “living into”; for my and everybody else’s
comfort I shall refer to it “live entering” from here and spare us all the
trauma of my attempts at Russian. It is an idea not far removed from
empathy, the concept is such that one person actively considers and
enters into another’s understanding and perception of the world.
Yet, during this process the individual never loses sight of their own
individuality and history. Thereby translating one set of individual’s
experiences to another. This is the foundation of the relationship
between an author and his/her protagonist, as well as the foundation
for understanding the other as basis for the aesthetic act – in this case
writing. Bakhtin defines the process of “live-entering” in terms of inter-
personal phenomological relations. Such that, when ‘I contemplate a
whole human being who is situated outside and over against me, our
concrete, actually experienced horizons do not coincide... I shall
always see and know something that he, from his place outside and
over against me, cannot see himself; parts of the body that are ina-
ccessible to his own gaze.’ (Bakhtin, 1990)(23) In other words, it is
only from the position of “outsidedness” that one can truly develop a
complete picture of an event, or person. In this instance being “outside”
is a privileged position that allows the unembedded observer to see
events in their entirety. Bakhtin continues that ‘[a]s we gaze at each
other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes. It is
possible, upon assuming a different position, to reduce this difference
completely, it would be necessary to merge into one, to become one
and the same person’. (Bakhtin, 1990) (23) While it is impossible to
completely assimilate with another, that is precisely not Bakhtin’s
intention; rather the ‘I’ must remain intact, returning to itself after
‘living-into’. Bakhtin realises the impossibility of truly investing a
‘pure projection’ of oneself ‘involving the loss of [one’s] own unique
place outside the other’; and that even if it were possible it would be
‘fruitless and senseless.’ (26) The point of live entering is to experience
the suffering or emotional vacillations of the other, to completely enter
the Other would render impossible the reconciliation with one’s own
context, and from an authorial standpoint, dialogism.
The aesthetic moment for Bakhtin begins at the point of return
from “live-entering”. Upon return two sets of experience are reconciled