Towards 'a Postcolonial Practice of Writing'

Abstract

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.