Towards 'A Postcolonial Practice of Writing'

The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002. This was a curious way to hold a discussion with a writer so interested in questions of embodiment and relationship to place. Without the nuances of faces and bodies to embody and represent writing/thoughts, the potential for missing meanings was heightened somewhat; over email, a 'huh?' could possibly last for days rather than seconds. But the mode of this exchange is significant in also illustrating the role of imagination and play in questions of embodiment and place. Both of these elements feature in Somerville's work Body/Landscape Journals (1999), a ficto-critical text which seeks to investigate what she calls a 'postcolonial practice of writing'; writing which both seeks and questions an embodied settler belonging in a (post)colonised landscape. B/L J follows two previously published collaborative texts, The Sun Dancin' (1994) with Marie Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson and Maureen Sulter, and Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (1990) with Patsy Cohen, both collaborations (1) having had profound effects on the ways in which Somerville now chooses to write. In the discussion that follows, Somerville elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape. FP: I'm interested in how you relate feminist methodologies to a 'postcolonial practice of writing' as you call it in B/L J. Many feminist and postcolonial critics are wary of bringing the feminist and the postcolonial together because both have been justifiably criticised for eliding questions of race in relation to those of gender and vice versa. In your work, questions relating to the differences between Western feminist and postcolonial frameworks arise frequently. To take just one example, on the subject of writing Ingelba you say that 'for these women, gender was not a structuring category of thought' (2) and yet you yourself work (albeit uneasily at times) with western feminist methodologies. Given this difference, how might you present the relationship between postcolonial and feminist interests in your work? MS: I am aware of the debates around feminism and Aboriginality, and that some Indigenous women have rejected feminism on all sorts of grounds, including that white feminists have erased race issues from their agenda. My intellectual thought has been fashioned in feminist debates around the question of difference, to which I believe feminism has contributed more than any other theoretical framework. However, if any framework is multiple it is feminism, and I believe that feminisms are probably so fractured now that those of us who have grown through the feminist debates of two decades no longer have a sense of any possible united theoretical position. I think feminist methodologies are different from feminism and are probably incorrectly labelled anyway. There is a whole range of methodologies that arises from a whole range of feminist positions, and some of these offer a highly tuned responsiveness to complex questions of difference and power relations. In my own development of feminist methodologies, I struggled to articulate questions of race from the beginning. I had come to feminism in a desert landscape with Aboriginal women. My awareness of myself as a woman in the landscape of this country was born side by side with those women. The first research project I undertook was Ingelba, so the two questions of race and gender were always inseparable in my work. My original research training, although in feminist methodologies, was within the tradition of interactive sociology; it wasn't until later that I took on board feminist poststructuralism when teaching in women's studies. I think the various theoretical frameworks and methodologies I have used have given rise to the approach in B/L J. …