"I don't have any right to any rage. I'm one of the world's most fortunate people... I make a living explaining my position. I have a platform. I can use it, really, whenever I want to."
That's Germaine Greer speaking about On Rage, her essay for a new series described as "little books on big themes".
It's an apt description - Greer's essay of only around 10,000 words tackles the issue of violence and suicide by Aboriginal men.
Germaine details what she says is the one time she was ever enraged - her fiftieth birthday party. The host of the party had invited his cousin, a foreign television presenter who is identified in the essay only as Guy. She writes that this guest "decided to amuse himself by a little light mockery of us both for being concerned about the rights of indigenous peoples".
"He was baiting me and amusing the company who were all having a lovely time laughing at these racist observations," says Germaine. "When he saw that he was upsetting me he didn't stop."
Finally Germaine couldn't take it anymore. She had to vent her rage.
"I spoke for about ten minutes." she says. "I'm not sure if I'd made any sense at all."
"I couldn't be effective, I was spluttering," says Germaine. "My head was sort of booming and my eyes were pricking as if somebody was putting hot needles in them.
"I suddenly realised that rage disables you - it's like a fit, it's awful."
Greer's assertion is that a far more potent form of this disabling rage is driving Aboriginal men to self - and socially - destructive behaviour.
"People who suffer from disabling rage are generally people who are inarticulate, who cannot get it out," says Germaine. "So it stays within them, it becomes implosive and it becomes an aspect of passive resistance and passive resistance tears people to pieces it's extremely damaging."
In On Rage Germaine Greer goes into some harrowing details of white Australia's interactions with the Aboriginal population, especially when it comes to the rape and prostitution of Aboriginal women and girls. This is not something that only happened years ago. It's a practice that started with the first settlers and continues today.
The loss of their land, their women and their language, writes Greer, leaves Aboriginal men with nothing but their rage - impotent, self destructive rage. It's this rage which leads the men to suicide, domestic violence and child abuse.
She fears that the Federal Government "intervention" may tear communities apart, saying the women who supported the intervention may be "seen as having coluded with the enemy" by Aboriginal men.
Celebrated Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, who is cited in the essay as supporting the intervention, has hit back. She's called Greer's essay a "panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory" and "a cleverly disguised but nonetheless racist attack on Aboriginal people" in an article she wrote for the Australian.
"Perpetrators of violence and abuse should take responsibility for their behavior," writes Marcia Langton. "We are not in the mood for failed leftist excuses for the rising levels of homicide, femicide and suicide."
None the less, Germaine Greer is insistent that alcoholism, drug abuse and violence can not be treated symptomatically.
"It's not the substances that are the problem, it's the rage which is the problem," she says.
She says the current attitude from most Australians is that "they just better get over it and they just better get mortgages, get jobs, enter into the debt cycle and DIY and become like the rest of us".
The rage exhibited by Aboriginal men, she says, is a form of passive resistance.
So what can be done?
"There may not be an answer because we are very late on this," says Greer. "We had people reporting syphilis in small Aboriginal children in the 1920s."
"The difficulty is we don't know what Aboriginal men want because they're not telling us," says Germaine.
Aboriginal men are at the opposite end of the spectrum to Germaine's fortune position of having a platform she can use whenever she wants to.
"If I say that rage is the murderous child of inarticulacy one of the things you have to do is try to develop a way of articulating the situation," she says. "We really need the treaty."
"We need the treaty because it's something you can talk to in a negotiating situation in which you don't have to assume the posture of a victim," says Germaine. "I think we might end up with hundreds of treaties because we have to have different treaties for all the different groups."
"You use the treaty as a way of beginning the discourse, and in the context of the treaty you might actually begin to hear where the passive resistance is coming from."
No comments:
Post a Comment