Summer Reading #2 — Sovereignty
By Robert Wood
Poet Robert Wood is the Liminal Summer Reading columnist for 2021.
Join us over the summer for six columns, on Decolonisation, translation, resistance and more.
On February 29th last year, I wrote to Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth. It was, of course, posted to Buckingham Palace where it would have been read along with countless other pieces of mail from around the world. My letter was a declaration of sovereignty. The territory I lay claim to was my own body—kidney, lungs, heart, and so on. It was a sovereignty that I might be assumed to always already have, but one that needed to be stated, reclaimed, repatriated. It was about making sure my body was my own and from that base being able to labour for Others in a new common good. I learnt to do this from other people; perhaps, most of all, from Ngarluma in-laws of mine.
What does sovereignty mean nowadays, here, on this continent, in this place with its many laws, many countries, many names, many people, many languages? The place to start is with First Nations people, and, perhaps from that, in the many Law systems that cross over and into our politics. I only know a little of one system—Birdarra—but I am also aware of other Laws with other Lawmen and other song cycles and other rituals, governance, procedures, protocols, purposes, places. I have been very fortunate to have met and spent time with some of these people, especially in the Pilbara, but I also know that I know nothing at all. I am grateful to know the nothing that I do know, and, to know the shapes that are somewhat public in a way that informs my own appreciation of what is possible. If readers want to know more about Law, they have to talk to people that know. There are also adjacent, willing guides like Lou Bennett whose thoughts are more accessible for many readers of LIMINAL and worth listening to; and, there are others who more distant who have helped in my own life such as Bruce Taylor, David Stock, and Frank Brown Jr. Readers have to go to where it is discussed, and, to comprehend that there are different Laws and languages and songs, which means different worldviews, beliefs, lives that go with this as well.
How that matters for sovereignty is somewhat related, and, it inflects how we read our own responsibilities, positions, obligations as Asian-Australians. The conversations we participate in are multiple, some are those in diversity, but others, are in decolonisation. The colonial situation here affects everyone, even as it is more acute for some groups and particular individuals. White settlers are the most colonised of all, and, our freedom is tied up with theirs as well. The question of sovereignty is not the same question as decolonisation.
Decolonisation is an undoing, a letting go, a refusal, a negation, a response to a historical situation that looks to the past, seeks to redress imbalances, focuses on ‘the colonial’ even in negation. It says as much in the very word itself. There are, of course, associated issues such as the ‘paracolonial’, which I will come to and is intended as a way to see the routes, paths, ways that run in parallel to it, are coterminous but not of it, next to something broader. Or, there is ‘unsettling’, taken to mean a subset that applies to, say, undoing an agricultural practice of land occupation, especially in settler colonies. To my mind though, decolonisation often lacks a utopian impulse. It seeks to say no. We know we don’t want the Union Jack on our flag, but it doesn’t say what it would be replaced with. Imagine no flag at all. And not because you are a libertarian or an anarchist.
As I said before, the question of sovereignty is not the same question as decolonisation. So, what is it? Sovereignty is something I know best from my own experiences in my ancestral motherland of Kerala, something I know about as a Malayali. Kerala is a polytheistic place that has had many visitors to it, some of them empirical powers seeking to oppress, be they from Tamil Nadu next door, from North India, from Persia, Babylonia, Greece, all the way up to Portuguese then Dutch then British colonial forces in the modern period, which lasted for the relatively short period of 600 years. We, Malayalis, have always had our sovereignty in the place that matters, in the quotidian day to day, where decisions are made.
This is where we come to understand what kind of sovereigns we can be, perhaps always have been, perhaps the ones we carry in our bodies. Sovereignty of my own making, of the kind I declared over my body this February when I wrote to Her Majesty, is a kind of autonomous self-relation nested in a practice of communal care that holds space within itself. It is not expansionary, like we have come to expect (and resent) from colonial sovereigns. And nor does it rely on a historical relationship to an external (and higher) power like a God or ‘the people’ to substantiate its claims to importance. Rather, to be a sovereign is to own oneself, which is something we naturally do. It is not to ownership in the sense of licensing or property or a right. It is to be occupied as if by an inner child or a fool or a wellspring of animating energy that knows that the body is home. To take oneself into a custodial idea of being.
I think one of the conflations we see in political discourses around decolonisation is about property rights, especially land. We should work, as allies, for land back. There is no question in that, and, to the fretful private property owners who say ‘why should we “give” land back’, we could answer that we might gain something far more meaningful if it needs to be transactional beyond justice itself. What is to be lost in giving land back? I am not so sure this question is answered all that easily. After all, you can trade private property rights to custodianship and feel freer on a daily basis.
To return then to the conflation between decolonisation and land - it is a problematic one, especially for my own definition of sovereignty. The colonial situation here affects us as individuals over and above our identity categories - it stuffs our mouths with cottonwool so we cannot feel our true tongues, sometimes it even cuts them out; it hobbles our gait so we cannot walk freely, sometimes it even kneecaps us and takes away our legs; it masks our very faces, especially from the mirror that is each other, and sometimes it turns our faces away from their very reality. And it does all this no matter how good the weather is, no matter how cold the beer is, no matter if we are given medals that appear as good as any other. And this is where we have to realise decolonisation matters to the body. And when we are talking about the body then, we are also talking about sovereignty. This is where we must add a discussion of parens patriae to our discussion of terra nullius. We say kids back just as we say land back.
I assume many readers are familiar with terra nullius, of which, we could say that it is historical and has been overturned since Mabo even as we feel the full effect of this past on us today. Parens patriae is ongoing. It means ‘nation as parent’ and it determines the actions towards wards of the state. Wards include removed children, imprisoned people, some hospital patients, some mental health patients, refugees, and other people, many of whom are in total institutions. What changes it, however, is that parens patriae has an impact on all types of people, all of our most vulnerable, and while this disproportionately effects First Nations people, it also has an impact on anyone, and, potentially everyone. It is grounded in a false belief that the nation can do a better job of being your guardian than you can, or, that it is a better parent to you than your own self or your grandmother or a trusted person. I have been a ward of the state, which means I was under parens patriae, which means I have a personal stake in restoring my own sovereignty away from the laws of the nation. That goes part of the way to explaining why I wrote to Her Majesty this February.
One of the important realities in being your own sovereign is resisting the imposition of false, violent and counter sovereignties that will try to undermine you. This is the root of the colonial dynamic - the invasion of the body and all the techne of the self in such a way that you are no longer your self. We can recognise and value other sovereigns. We can have multiple relationships with sovereignty. We can change over time. We can welcome new ways of being in the world. But, we must be sovereign in a way that respects Others, and, their bodily need to live freely. That is not only a political task, but a whole of life and whole of world task that is essential to who we are as individuals and a people.
In knowing that there are many types of sovereignty, it matters then for the type of sovereignty you want to cultivate in yourself. We can resist our colonial situation, and, in calling for and recognising the task of decolonisation, it is important to then determine a collective sovereignty that can help in governance here. This is why it is important to acknowledge, learn, grown from, within, next to the multiple systems of Law on this continent. That is why sovereignty as a project matters beyond the intellectual cultivation of performative positions that do nothing to help the tongue move freely, unshackle the gait, and unmask the face in order to speak, move, see clearly once again. Beginning a conversation from a specific identity position means thinking about the space one takes up for oneself, in oneself, and towards the power that energises you, all as ways for thinking about the unique potential of expressing sovereignty in this place, which is your own body, which could be anybody’s because it matters to everybody.
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.