The 7 Stages of Grieving

The European colonisation of Australia commenced in 1788. Despite an estimated 750,000 Indigenous people inhabiting Australia at the time, the colonists were led to believe the land was terra nullius (‘no one’s land’) following Lieutenant James Cook’s 1770 voyage around the Australian coast wherein he declared it as such. Colonisation brought to Indigenous people an oppressed existence which many consider still exists today. It is estimated at least 3 out of 4 Indigenous Australians did not survive colonisation.

While an attempt was made in 1835 by pastoralist and explorer John Batman to form a treaty with Indigenous people, this was not recognised by the then Governor Richard Bourke. By 1911, laws were passed in each Australian state that handed total control over the lives of Indigenous Australians to governments. These laws stated where Indigenous Australians could live and work and made all children of Indigenous Australians wards of the state. During the two World Wars, many Indigenous children, known today as the ‘stolen generations’, were forcibly removed from their families and raised in institutions.

A formal process of reconciliation, a recommendation from the 1991 Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, took place during the 1990s. The aim of reconciliation was to raise awareness among non-Indigenous people of the legacy of the past and continued policy failures that have affected Indigenous people and contributed to their disadvantage. Disadvantage is seen in their poorer outcomes in health and higher rates of unemployment, imprisonment, homelessness, substance use and family violence.

‘The lives of Indigenous Australians today are affected by what has happened to us and our ancestors over the past 230 years since Europeans arrived. This can be hard for non-Indigenous people to understand, particularly if you haven’t learned much about Australian history at school. When people have some knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and the history of our contact with non-Indigenous Australians since 1788, they have a much better feel for our achievements and our persistent problems. They are more likely to share our pride and to want to improve relationships between us as fellow Australians.’ (Professor Mick Dodson AM, Australian of the Year 2009)

Just prior to the release of The 7 Stages of Grieving, the concept of seven stages of Aboriginal history, coincidental to Kubler-Ross’s model of the seven stages of grieving, was gaining currency in academic circles in Queensland. While participating in the funerary rites after the death of his grandmother, Wesley was struck by the concept and together with Mailman wrote a one-woman show about grief and hope for reconciliation in which the stories of different Indigenous people from the region are interwoven. The collaboration involved Wesley and Mailman reflecting on the process of Indigenous grieving and the complexity of the process can be seen in the different forms of the play integrating personal with community grief.

The play was received by mixed reviews in Australia in 1995 but was well received in London, UK. It was re-staged in 2006 and 2008 by Ursula Yovich and in 2010 by Lisa Flanagan.

The Longest Memory

D’Aguiar is part of a younger group of talented Black British writers and critics including David Dabydeen and Caryl Phillips who bring to their novels a multi-layered awareness of the aesthetic, cultural, literary, and political debates surrounding race and representation. His first and most critically acclaimed work was The Longest Memory, a gripping novel that plays with voice and time, documenting life on a plantation during a time of slavery.

The Longest Memory is narrated through different characters including a slave, his son and granddaughter, a cook, a plantation owner and his daughter, the plantation owner’s workers, the overseer and the overseer’s son. A further voice comes from the editor of the slavers’ journal, The Virginian. These differing accounts offer a combination of emotional and intellectual responses to the same events. Each are presented within the philosophical construct of the character and reflect both the saddest of times and a glimmer of hope. The myriad of views give colour and rich depth to the novel showing dimension to an often oversimplified time. The retelling of events from various points of view, as D’Aguiar himself acknowledges, creates a circular structure. In many ways the text repeats like a sad memory, never letting the reader fully move on without a chance of it intruding on the mind again, after all ‘memory is pain trying to resurrect itself’.

Fred D’Aguiar’s books of poetry and fiction have been translated into a dozen languages with The Longest Memory and Dear Future well received for their intensity and intelligence. The Longest Memory won the Whitbread First Novel Award despite critics contending that D’Aguiar’s experimentation with narrative form caused his works to suffer from a lack of focus and depth. The counterargument suggests that D’Aguiar is a pioneer in the modern storytelling phenomenon regarding slavery in the United States. Before the era of Black Lives Matter, of harassment in coffee shops, of President Trump, who has been both overtly racist and also dismissive of racism, and of the disappointment at the first black president having been able to make little real change to poverty, criminalisation and exclusion, D’Aguiar finds the central nerve of reflective stories about slavery.

Like 12 Years a Slave, Feeding the Ghosts and The Bluest Eye, this text pulls no punches and lets the audience sit in the realisation of the author naming something African Americans work hard to avoid, how lonely they are to still live in a foreign land. Karla Holloway, professor of English at Duke University, says: ‘The irony is that the loneliness, is our collective legacy. We work hard to escape and slip past that loneliness, but inevitably we are captured, again, by the wake of slavery, a tidal wash as reliable as moonrise.’