The Australian apology and postcolonial defamiliarization: Gail Jones's Sorry

Abstract

Gail Jones's new novel Sorry (2007) seeks to allegorize the contemporary settler condition in Australia, especially as its sense of civic integrity is seen to have been compromised by the recent revelations about the Stolen Generations. Jones clearly wishes to displace the familiar narrative of settlement in favour of a more disquieting alternative. This article offers a decoding of Sorry's allegory of trauma, as well as a glance at its political implications for Australia post-apology – not losing sight of the latent ironies implicit in a frame of representation whereby the Aborigines emerge as the victims of history, and the settlers as those subjects who suffer traumatization.

Keywords:

• Australian apology
• Stolen Generations
• memory and trauma
• trauma envy
• postcolonial defamiliarization

Acknowledgement

The research for this paper was financed by the MEC/FEDER, Proyecto HUM2007-61035/ FILO.

Notes

1. This notion of “envy” could also be related to Terry Goldie's arguments in Fear and Temptation (1989). In his seminal book, Goldie reveals the ambivalence of white settlers to Indigenous culture through an examination of the stereotyping involved in the creation of the image of the “Other”. He argues that literary attention to native peoples is part of a white process of “indigenization”, a neologism conveying “the impossible necessity of becoming indigenous” (13) either by erasing and replacing the Indigenes (fear) or by incorporating and acquiring them (temptation).