3 - The Land Holds All Things: Kim Scott’s Benang—A Guide to Postcolonial Spatiality

Summary

THE PROTAGONIST OF Kim Scott's 1999 novel Benang, Harley, insists that he is writing a “simple family history, the most local of histories” (10; see Slater, “Kim Scott's Benang,” 147). Harley tells the story of four generations of the family Benang, who have been subjected to relentless colonial violence. Scott's novel contests and disrupts national narratives of progress, heroic pioneers, and brave, entrepreneurial settlers by privileging the memories and experiences of Noongar people. The simplicity of the story might lie with the fearlessness with which Scott approaches his material, but there is a simplicity to Scott's determination, which gathers strength throughout the novel: he contests and complicates the British colonial spatial narrative. The colonial imaginary enfolds Aboriginal people into a narrative of European progress, but on the ground beneath our feet, as Scott writes, “there are many stories” (495). By weaving a novel from the fragments of colonial archives, Harley's eugenicist grandfather's diaries and jottings, family memories, the whispers of Noongar relatives, some long dead, and travels through ancestral country, Scott reinvests space with a multiplicity of stories.

Questions of space and place underpin Scott's narrative. In For Space (2005), Doreen Massey investigates the continuance of colonial spatial imaginary: a yearning, longing for spatial coherence, which she argues “enables the existence of only one history, one voice, one speaking position” (42). She calls this an “unthought cosmology,” and argues that we need to bring it into thought. I would add that we must understand the inherent violence of the colonial spatial imaginary and how it continues to shape settler-Indigenous relations. The repercussions of the colonial geographical imagination are that people, places, things, and worlds cannot be understood as independent of Europe. Massey's political interest is in reinvesting space with its interruptive and dislocating consequences. She argues that space is crisscrossed with “stories” (54). This is also the work of Kim Scott's Benang. It is driven by countermemory, and like Harley's ancestors, it is a guide for making space for the coexistence of multiple ontologies and epistemologies.

Style

Scott annexes colonial records and assimilationist discourse into his text and makes colonial Australia speak of its racist and genocidal intentions.