How does Dunn use poetic language and techniques to explore ideas of cultural hybridity in her poem?
In your answer, you need to refer to at least THREE different examples of poetic language/techniques from the poem, e.g. metaphor, imagery, symbolism. Try not to simply retell the story of the poem. Rather, try and show how the author is using specific kinds of language/techniques to explore her key ideas.
REMEMBER:
the core focus of this assessment is on close reading skills and students do not need to include reference to any secondary/critical resources for this assessment.
Winni Dunn Talanoa poem from her 2015 collection Inside My Mother evokes Indigenous temporality to affirm the important, affective connection between ancestors and individuals that structures Indigenous culture. Addressed to and participating in an Indigenous collective, the poem celebrates cultural resiliency and recovery, challenging Australian national amnesia about its colonial past and pointing towards a future where the ‘truth’ will be washed clean of colonial violence.
Dunn makes use of an extended metaphor of excavation to structure the poem’s engagement with time and the past. The first lines, ‘let’s dig up the soil and excavate the past / breathe life into the bodies of our ancestors’, are a call to bring the past as held by ancestors into the present. The paired actions of ‘digging up the soil’ and ‘breathe[ing] life’ asserts an embodied connection between people and land that is vital to life. The poem blends present and future tense in its engagement with the past, disrupting a western idea of time that emphasizes ‘progress’ from past, to present, to future. Instead
Dunn shows how the past (both in its positive links to ancestors, and in terms of past injustices towards Indigenous people) is still a powerful presence now and in the future. The poem’s collective perspective—‘let’s’, ‘we’, ‘ours’—emphasizes group and kinship links, endowing the poem with vital, communal energy. Eckermann maintains this energy and a sense of urgency and agency through her frequent use of present tense verbs (dig, breathe, rattle, whips etc.).
The poem’s rich sonic imagery emphasizes song, spoken word and the sound of nature. The first stanza ends
with the line ‘boomerangs will rattle in unison’. In interview
Dunn explains that the boomerang represents ‘our senior men’, who ‘play the boomerang in time with the desert’. She continues: ‘sometimes when I am daydreaming, I imagine I can still hear their music. They are not too far’ (Red Room Company).
Dunn’s explanation points towards a felt connection between the present and the past, and between people and their ancestors. Eckermann also evokes the sound of the wind and ‘the noise of the poinciana’, a native tree that makes a particular sound when seed pods clack together in the wind. This noise resembles the sound of the boomerang, and Dunn says she used it to show that ‘nature and our old people are one’ (Red Room Company). The poem also evokes the sound of breath and breathing. The pairing of breath and breathing with the poem’s imagery of wind creates an intimate, embodied link between people and country and points towards the essential, life-giving effects of this connection. As such, ‘ reflects and models the significance of spoken word and song to the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous culture.
Throughout Talanoa Dunn develops a poetic voice that participates in oral and aural as well as written communication. This idea is furthered in the lines ‘in the future the petition will be everlasting / even when the language is changed’. The petition (a formal written request presented to an authority figure, often related to an issue under protest) that will be everlasting even when language is changed is an image of resiliency (especially in light of colonial violence which attempted to erase Indigenous language), and looks towards a future where Indigenous voices will not need to explain themselves in settler-colonial language.
Dunn mirrors the first and last stanzas of the poem, so that the poetic structure itself models the connection between past and present. The boomerang bookends the poem, as ‘boomerang bones […] return to memory’ in the first line of the final stanza. Boomerangs return when they are thrown; Dunn’s use here suggests Indigenous temporality and circular time, the continued presence of the past in the present and the act of recovering the past. Nothing has been lost that cannot be returned. The final stanza continues ‘excavation holes are dug in our minds’. These lines suggest how culture and memory is held by each person internally; however, the subtle physical pain evoked by the imagery of ‘holes’ ‘dug’ in the mind, especially when read alongside the subsequent line, ‘the constant loss of breath is the legacy’, suggests that this connection cannot be separated from the colonial violence that has damaged it.
The final line alters the poem’s register of imagery from life to death as Ecker reaches out to a settler readership: ‘there is blood on the truth’. This line stands apart from the rest of the poem through its short, five syllable structure, suggesting we as readers are to consider it in light of what we have witnessed in the preceding lines of the poem. In this definitive statement, Eckermann speaks directly of the violence of colonial history that still hasn’t been washed from the contemporary Australian state. By ending on the word ‘truth’, Dunn directs readers to consider what a ‘true’ version of their nation’s history might look like.
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