Journal article
"That Tree E Listen To You": Bill Neidjie's Story About Feeling as Literary Ethnobotany
Tamkang Review, Vol.51(1), pp.57-83
01/12/2020
Metrics
11 Record Views
Abstract
This essay theorizes the concept of literary ethnobotany through a phytocritical, or plant-focused, reading of the work of Kakadu Elder ＂Big＂ Bill Neidjie. As a genre, on the one hand, literary ethnobotany comprises poetry, prose, scripts, verse-narratives, and other creative writing forms that engage cultural knowledge of plants as food, medicines, fibres, materials, ornaments, decorations, totems, teachers, agents, and personae. As a critical reading optic, on the other hand, literary ethnobotany illuminates the cultural-botanical dimensions of a text, such as Neidjie's Story About Feeling, published in 1989. Transcribed by ethnographer Keith Taylor, Neidjie's verse-narrative comprises eleven thematic chapters on, inter alia, the traditional botanical knowledge of the Gaagudju people whose ancestral country encompasses World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. Story About Feeling represents the potentialities of Aboriginal Australian poetry as a medium for preserving traditional botanical knowledge increasingly under threat in neocolonial Australia. More specifically, Neidjie's work hinges on the possibility of human-plant communication-that plant life announces itself, through a variety of means, to kin but also to members of other species, including animals and humans. For instance, the chapter ＂Tree＂ from Story About Feeling discloses a complex view of plants as responsive and expressive agents within Gaagudju cosmology, or Dreaming. Respect for-and dialogue with-the botanical world is integral to Neidjie's poetics of place. My application of a literary-ethnobotanical lens to Neidjie's verse-narrative elucidates the role of intercorporeality, affect, and voice in mediating human-plant communication. Once regarded as esotericism, the idea of plant communication has gained scientific traction of late as essential to the fitness of ecological communities. In an integrative and inclusive manner, literary botany facilitates a rapprochement between Indigenous, poetic, and scientific epistemologies of plants.
Details
- Title
- "That Tree E Listen To You": Bill Neidjie's Story About Feeling as Literary Ethnobotany
- Creators
- John C Ryan - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- Tamkang Review, Vol.51(1), pp.57-83
- Publisher
- Tamkang University * English Department, Graduate Programs
- Identifiers
- 991013024978102368
- Copyright
- Copyright 2020 Tamkang University
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article