The mesh, the poetics of (not)being and the hauntings of identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to establish how ecological thinking, or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, from the Indigenous onto-epistemic view in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart warrants a poetics of being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, or leaking, never rigid or definitive. It builds on the idea of the mesh and the aesthetics of uncanny and how this view attunes to the Indigenous openness for kinship with, companionship of, intimacy and becoming with other beings. Such a view thus enacts Harley, the main protagonist, as regenerating his effaced Aboriginal identity through entanglements and becoming with all beings, humans and nonhumans, or Country at large, in both the latter’s material and spiritual aspects.

KEYWORDS:

• Benang
• mesh
• poetics of being and identify

Acknowledgements

This paper is a summary of the fourth chapter of my doctoral thesis and so I hereby wish to thank the UNSW-Sydney Graduate Research School for granting me the Scientia, most generous Scientia scholarship for my doctoral training. I wish to also thank my supervisory team, Professors Brigitta Olubas, Elizabeth McMahon and my reader Emeritus Professor Bill Ashcroft for their hard-hitting feedback on my work, from the initial stages of my Scientia scholarship application, throughout the development of the full project proposal, to the thesis completion stage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga

Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga took his first degree in English (ISP/Bukavu, DR Congo), then an MA in Literary Stylistics (University of Birmingham, UK) and has just completed a PhD in English Literary Studies (UNSW, Sydney). His research interests broadly span Literary and Cultural Theory and Criticism, Aesthetics and Politics, and Philosophy and Literature. Bonaventure’s doctoral thesis was on Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction and studied how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings pollinates this literature, and how the texts’ aesthetics warrant their reading as sites of human and nonhuman entanglements. The intervention put the texts in the context of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies to substantiate how these underpin the texts’ writing and how the texts’ aesthetics in turn shape our reading and understanding of the writers’ commitments. The thesis ended by bringing ecological thinking in these narratives in conversation with African epistemologies, cosmologies and the relevant African literary archives. This end shapes Bonaventure’s current, and much narrower, interest in Comparative Black Indigenous African and Australian Cultures, Literatures and Arts, with a focus on epistemologies, (eco)aesthetics and poetics, posthumanism, postcolonialism and decolonial critique, as well as the possible synergies among these areas to forge contemporary and other (yet to be named) interdisciplinary literary and cultural research avenues.