5 Questions with Robert Wood
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.
No.1
How should we think of your new book Redgate and the place it comes from?
I think of Redgate as beyond Australia. I mean this in the sense that it is not part of the nation’s power relations, network or taste. The book itself was also written and published outside those borders in New York and New Delhi. People are, of course, free to visit Redgate and it is on this continent, but that doesn’t mean they will be welcomed or get the book’s project. This seems different from Les Murray’s Bunyah for instance. Bunyah was a cottage industry for authentic intimacy enjoyed by many literati folk on the East Coast, which Ben Etherington highlights this in his meta-critical piece, ‘The Living and the Undead’ in the Sydney Review of Books. He explained what Bunyah was in the boomer hagiographies and even more so in the attacks on Murray at his death. Redgate, the place and the book, are for poets not Australians. Besides, I’m not a white settler nationalist (like Murray) or an anarchic decolonial Marxist (like his critics), and so I could not produce a Bunyah for a new moment. I am a saltwater Malayali suburbanist who has reached a personal enlightenment and then liberated myself from being a ward of the state. I am interested in mundane expressions that speak of Redgate’s true nature. In that way, it might be more like Bodh Gaya or Woodbrook, a place of awakening and a lawground. My hope is to then express that with sparkling clarity, to put my spiritual reality into language so that the everyday reader can understand it. This is Redgate’s essential poetry.
No.2
How does it make sense as an Asian-Australian?
I approach Redgate as a guest on Wardandi Noongar boodjar. The first poem is about traditional owner Sam Isaacs and his role in a shipwreck, The Georgette, in 1876; but the last poem is about crayfish from a timeless moment. It starts with reconciliation and survival, and ends with nourishment and a re-enchanting magic. Along the way, readers are taken on a journey about habit, about belonging, about dream, about violence, about nature, about family and self. Redgate is a safe space for me. I am a coastal person, and there is sanctity in the water here. I am from fishing people all the way back to Kerala, where there are 600 years of written records of my family. A lot of that time was spent on open water and backwaters, on wave and tide, on lagoons surrounded by coconut groves. That history includes British then Dutch then Portuguese colonialism then further back North Indian invasion and Tamil excursions, but also to a time when Kerala traded with Babylon and Ancient Greece and Egypt, back to when Parasurama threw his mighty axe into the ocean and it rose up to return it to him declaring the place a sovereign territory. That is where I am from. That is where my story is born. In saltwater. Those are my people and the ones I write for in today’s suburbs of meaning most of all. But something, maybe ancestors or elders, brought me to this place. So, if we start here in history, we also move back into myth which are the beginnings of the world historic.
No.3
What should we make of the politics in this book?
If you are a person of colour, if you are a Malayali, if you have been under parens patriae, you must be a political poet. I am all those things and it shows in this book also. I grew up in a family that cared about social justice and we went to rallies, protests and marches. But we also knew politicians - Geoff Gallop, Peter Dowding, Kim Beazley, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke. Still, culture matters too, and I am lucky to live on Noongar country and to hear from people like Ben Taylor, Len Collard, Richard Walley, Noel Nannup and Barry McGuire. And still again, if politics and culture matters, then religion does as well. With this book, I was thinking a lot about Taoism (China), Birdarra (Pilbara) and the worship of nature (Ocean). At what point do we say our spiritual experiences become religious? I certainly have had intense visions at Redgate and have prayed to many gods there, but writing this was about organising a belief system. I think that poetry has to have the idea of itself inside itself, which is to say, it must have a self-sustaining autonomy with a sovereignty from the heavens. Here then, it became important to reflect on the tjabi poets I have met - Bruce Thomas, David Stock, Frank Brown Jr, Charlie Coppin, Alec Tucker, David Walker. Tjabi has no restrictions on it, so we must open ourselves out to what it can teach us as a public expression of Law. That is something else that informs my work here.
No.4
Redgate is presented in both Hindi and English. How did this come about?
The bilingualism of the volume challenges the singular hegemony of either English or Hindi. Rather than doubling the nationalist impetus, they destabilise each other, informing both languages to have a view on mother tongue itself. There is so much work to do when it comes to minority languages, and, we cannot rest in either one of these, not in English or in Hindi, especially without thinking of how to learn, protect and repatriate ourselves to a space that is beyond language and into universal signs be that music, noise or silence. On another level, I had a correspondence with Abhimanyu Kumar after meeting him through Ranjit Hoskote who I met through an event called the Cappuccino Adda at Kitab Khanna, a bookstore in Mumbai. That introduced me to a world of poets there. Since then, Abhimanyu and I, and our publisher Dibyajoti Sarma, have been involved in many poetry conversations that are across borders be they political, geographic or linguistic. In Redgate, we wanted to speak to travellers and reach a wide and diverse range of people who know what a historical poetics can teach us once we learn to read it right.
No.5
Finally, what is Redgate connected to?
Redgate is an island in my archipelago. There have been others - Wembley, Lyneham, West Philadelphia, Montparnasse, Charlottenburg, Brunswick East, Fort Kochi, the Upper West Side, Roebourne, and now, West Perth is home. And they are surrounded by different waters. This island though has a few features - Isaacs Rock, Calgardup Beach, the limestone pit, the national park, the spider orchids, the bunny orchids, the house, the bookshelves, the neighbours, the possums, and so on. It is specific, it is singular, but it connects out to a sense of how we might relate across that water. I think here of the fact that everyone makes sense of imagined communities from their lived experience of being on islands and then projects that onto heuristic topographies. How can one make sense of ‘Australia’ or ‘India’ when one really looks around one? It is impossible because we are only looking at small parts of both of them. Redgate then is Redgate, its own place with its own rhythm. I tried to express that in writing this book.