Black Swan Way
Ellen O’Brien on Alexis Wright
So how might we ‘exit’ from colonialism and refuse the limitations of recognition while not turning away from each other at a time in our history when we can least afford to do so?
— Tony Birch, “On what terms can we speak?” Refusal, resurgence and climate justice
What does it mean to be free?
At seventeen, freedom looked like following a pre-written narrative. A small-town girl leaves behind her troubled family and claustrophobic, low-socioeconomic town—the one constantly bathed in rotten egg gas emanating from the local lake ①—to move to the big smoke, eventually becoming rich and powerful and finding the home she’d always longed for. It felt as if I’d seen that movie a thousand times: that linear path of upward mobility, the dream that sustained me through personal crises and moments of pure self-destruction. I could starve and drink and hate myself all I wanted, but if I just kept working, then I’d eventually be seen and loved. I’d be worth something, and then I would be free.
A year after taking my first step on that journey towards freedom, which entailed getting accepted to attend a sandstone university in Sydney, the only person in my graduating class to do so, I transferred into a law degree. It seemed like the right thing to do, both in terms of achieving some sense of personal power but also fighting for the empowerment of those around me. I was coming into a greater political consciousness, beginning to understand that the people I was connected to, by virtue of being Aboriginal, queer, working-class, a woman, were purposefully limited in their agency, living lives controlled by systems that equally sought to keep them from acquiring too much power and determining their own path. Hadn’t I escaped that, though? I had the benefit of an education that, at least on my father’s side, none of my family had ever had before. I was my ancestors’ wildest dream: I would learn the right words to say and the right voice in which to say them. This way I would be heard, as would all the unheard voices in the world. This would be our liberation.
But in the process of trying to live this dream, it felt like someone was taking an eraser to me, making me a shadow of my real self, a hallucination, my voice changing so much that my sister poked fun at my accent when I came back home. Like Patricia Williams, I knew that ‘I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process.’ But who was the ‘real me’? She no longer existed outside of the prevailing system; she never really did. So how could I ever know what she needed to be free?
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In Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, as retold in the film Black Swan, Odette the White Swan is ‘trapped in the body of a swan’, desiring a deliverance that can only be provided by a man’s love. After the Black Swan, Odile, deceives Odette’s lover, the White Swan ‘leaps off a cliff, killing herself, and in death finds freedom.’ The film plays out this narrative, with the protagonist eventually stabbing herself with a mirror shard, slaughtering her submissive White Swan so the impassioned Black Swan can roam free. In other words, it was a film about white femininity and the idea that it’s worth killing yourself to make your way to the top. Il faut souffrir pour être belle, I suppose.
About a decade after I saw Black Swan, I encountered another Swan Lake. By then, I had finished my law degree and spent some time working as a policy lawyer at the Aboriginal Legal Service. I had also published my first poem then, feeling just as Timmah Ball did, that ‘a platform had appeared that felt exhilarating for a brief moment, like having your voice heard for the first time.’ Writing seemed a potential path to freedom. It was also around this time that I began turning to Alexis Wright’s novels, particularly after reading her essay ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story?’ I shared it with my colleagues, most of whom were white but spent their days telling their Black clients’ stories in the courts of colonial law, with the naïve hope that they might read it and truly hear her when Wright says:
The plot line has always been for one outcome, to erode Aboriginal belief in sovereignty, self-governance and land rights, even when it has gotten to the point where most Aboriginal people have been silenced, or feel too overwhelmed to fight any more.
In The Swan Book, the novel’s central character Oblivia calls the lake ‘Nowhere Special’—at least in her head, as she never actually speaks out loud. It is to the lake that Oblivia belongs: a place where people are stored once it’s been decided they should be both disappeared from and controlled by the state, ‘away behind a high, razor-edged fence from the decent people of mainstream civilization.’ The swans after which the lake is named are also masters of disappearance, arriving from somewhere in the south, ‘descending in never-ending ribbons from the sky.’ But their disappearance is couched in freedom through their ability to fly and move at will—movements necessitated by the ongoing climate crisis as much as ordinary migration patterns. On this matter, they become Oblivia’s teachers.
The novel begins with us inside Oblivia’s mind, but later we see her through the eyes of her keepers, including the old white Aunty Bella Donna and Oblivia’s new husband Warren Finch, who is also her abductor. Unlike Warren, a loud and clever Aboriginal politician who ascends to the highest echelons of the state as its conspirer (‘the only one Australians would listen to’) and who enacts the state’s desire to destroy Swan Lake, Oblivia is the ultimate non-performer. She spends the rest of the book resisting the declarative mode, but that doesn’t mean she is an unthinking person. Her presence is palpable, even if the locals see her as a disappointment—barely alive, gutless, a symbol of all the unspoken bad things that have happened to them, unable to ‘show some backbone like the rest of our people’. Meanwhile, a fight for sovereignty is deeply contended within her as she battles a virus that invades her thoughts, giving her ‘nostalgia for foreign things.’ Only Oblivia herself is privy to this.
After reading The Swan Book, I became fixated with Oblivia, who ‘would rather be dead, than waste her breath speaking to an idiot’—an all-too-familiar feeling. She felt like an inversion of the characters I imbibed growing up. These characters, like the protagonist of Black Swan, demand to be centre stage, all eyes upon them, no matter the cost. Oblivia, on the other hand, realises that, due to the way her body is gendered, raced and classed, she will not be seen or heard to begin with. It is against this backdrop that she decides not to speak.
I wanted some of that: the determination to refuse. Oblivia spoke to the futility that was rising within me, having entered the legal profession with the aim to use all the opportunities I had to learn within one colonial system to advocate for Aboriginal rights within another. But as I attended government meetings while working at the ALS, I quickly realised that it barely mattered what I said so long as I was in the room—a representative of not only my workplace but ‘Aboriginal people’ as a whole. This way the state could say it had engaged in ‘consultation’ and could move forward with its plans, waving away any concerns about how their actions might impose and encourage further violence. Justice was seen to be done, which in this system is more important than it actually being achieved.
Eventually, the very act of speaking into this void felt like an act of complicity—I was really letting the system off the hook by virtue of showing up. I quit that job after six months and the profession many years later. Oblivia stayed with me all the time.
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In my wildest fantasies, I live outside of what Audra Simpson calls ‘the liberal politics of recognition’—the idea that if someone like you is represented in government or writing books or—even better—on reality TV, then your life will change for the better in some radical, lasting way. It’s a tempting story, one that seems easy to believe in. You can’t be what you can’t see, as it goes. But the insistence that we have to speak back to colonial power is exhausting; as Christina Sharpe puts it, ‘Part of the work of white supremacy and antiblackness is to mire us in the same conversations, at the same junctures in reference to our lives; the very lives which those forces seek to control, occupy, own, use, and ultimately destroy.’ It’s as Toni Morrison had said in 1975: ‘[...] the very serious function of racism is distraction … It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.’ So much time and energy wasted. Why engage with, as Tony Birch writes, ‘governments preferring to maintain relationships limiting the rights and autonomy of Indigenous people’?
I want to refuse this mission to be recognised wherever it occurs. I believe Judith Butler when they say that suffering comes from the condition of being addressable, from trying to make yourself seen and understood within the state’s limited understanding of what a person is. That is, by engaging in the politics of recognition, which Simpson names as
‘seek[ing] to repair these injustices, elaborating upon the philosophy of being seen, of being seen as one ought to be seen […] Inherently it is putting one in a position still of asking and begging and giving the power to another to see, if they see fit to, as you ought to be seen.’
Fuck that noise. I don’t want to beg for anything.
Yet the idea of refusal troubles me too. I often hear it articulated by other people around me, their cries on social media, in songs and books and meeting spaces, communicating their rage and anguish at the world we have to live in, as well as a need to create alternative structures. This desire to say fuck the system is more than justified, a centuries-old drive to refuse all the things that control us in order to determine not only the paths of our communities and society-at-large, but also our relationship to and understanding of ourselves. But how do we meaningfully turn away from colonial structures and create something for ourselves, particularly when, thanks to those very same structures, we don’t possess a reservoir of wealth? We see it all the time: radical thinkers and groups swallowed up by the promise of a pay cheque. After all, by the time I arrived at the ALS, its grassroots beginnings were all but dead, the government’s grip so tight that my white manager wouldn’t let me write the word ‘colonialism’ in a parliamentary submission in case it upset our funders.
I want to perform in a different arena, on a different stage with different rules. But I also fear that instead of moving towards what Marquis Bey frames as a future that is ‘unraced, ungendered, unclassed, unruled, and unbound’—a kind of anarchist utopia, where self-determination might be a reality not just on a personal but also collective level—we might just end up creating microcosms of the same shitty world. Even saying that feels like a betrayal, as if I’m admitting a lack of belief in our collective powers. Perhaps I’m just revealing my own lack of tenacity. As Simpson says, ‘My own imagining of the future is hemmed in by the reality of the present.’
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Like the grimmest of fairy tales, there is no happily-ever-after in The Swan Book. Warren’s ‘life of striving for perfection’ ends in his death, which becomes its own representation; Oblivia notes that it ‘was just a matter of continuing on, keeping his ideas streaming out of centre stage in perpetual memorials’. Even in death, Warren is confined: his body is owned by the state and is used to continue ‘the propaganda of what he stood for in the world’—namely the pursuit of power and a perceived paradise. Oblivia, on the other hand, journeys back to the lake with her swans, on a ‘ghost walk’ to escape the city and the expectations that she perform the role of silent, grieving, perfect political wife. She also contemplates leaving the world herself: ‘Would you call just lying down in the grass to die revenge, pay-back, or a suicidal act?’ But she lives, and the virus continues to live too, that thing that made ‘the world seem too large and jittery for her, and […] stuffed up her relationships with her own people.’
Considering the fates of Oblivia and Warren, I am reminded of Sharpe in Ordinary Notes again: ‘Speech and speechlessness; each one has a cost.’ As experience has shown me, freedom is not just about asserting oneself as loudly as possible. As Oblivia shows us, there can also be a freedom in disappearing from the dominant narrative, which does not mean that you cease to exist, but allows the possibility to exist on your own terms—‘bring[ing] people into relation to one self’, as Simpson puts it. Yet Oblivia’s is not simply a reverent silence; there is a gap she lives in as a result of how her body and life are perceived. In the city, she realises that ‘she could move inconspicuously like any of the other darkened shapes covering the ground and no one would care less.’ Her invisibility is a result of the violence she experiences at the hands of the state and its desire to ‘solve the Aboriginal problem’ through a regime of disappearance. This violence seeps down into all our lives until we enact it on each other, something we see in Warren and his boys, the ones who kidnap Oblivia and detain her in order to support Warren’s destiny. What we think is striving towards freedom is so often just another hand on the back of our own peoples’ necks.
Yet this same invisibility is what allows Oblivia to find her swans and leave. When she is eventually invited into the locus of state power as Warren’s companion, she knows there’s no point in speaking, that these people only ‘talk […] endlessly of things of no importance to anyone but themselves.’ Already dead in the social sense, Oblivia is not seen as a living being within the state’s frame of reference, or even that of her own weary community. So why not shift her attention instead? It is her attempt to ‘win back [her] soul and even to define what it meant to be human, without somebody else making that decision for [her].’
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To resist the false promise of upward mobility—this is what freedom looks like to me now, more than a decade since I thought I’d found it. I think again of the White Swan’s death and wonder if there’s a possibility in killing all that the creature symbolises—constraint, perfection, respectability—and taking my Black Swan elsewhere, not to climb any ladder but to find some other place to flock.
As a lawyer, I chose to speak within those loci of state power, believing they would hear me because of what I had that made me believable to them: an education, proximity to whiteness. And I don’t blame myself for trying; as S.L. Lim notes, ‘Representation yields some access to capital both social and actual, so it’s a material demand to that extent.’ But who actually wins here? In order to be represented, to access capital, we must be legible or understandable in some way. We risk becoming nothing more than a symbol to the state. And while I’ll never deride the presence of more Black voices in the world, Black representation does not a revolution make. As Ball writes, ‘while this body of writing represented a significant ideological shift, it also felt hopeless, because the more I wrote … the less change I saw.’ Or, as Sana Nakata says, when speaking of Aboriginal citizenship and access to education: ‘it turns out it’s not enough—we want more.’ In other words, while the politics of representation may incorporate a material demand, it fails to bring us what we really desire—the new worlds that offer us all the chance to live safe and meaningful lives outside of the influence of colonial structures—and threatens to both distract us from the real work and tear our relationships apart.
This is where Oblivia’s refusal to speak comes back to me. Tony Birch, referencing Glen Coulthard, writes that ‘through the refusal of the offer of repeated gestures of symbolism, absent of a genuine tangible change in Indigenous/settler-colonial relationships, an opportunity arises, focusing our attention where it is most needed.’ Like Oblivia—who honours her relationship with the swans, those beings whom she feels she owes more to than the state and its performance of solidarity and progression—I long to turn towards each other, even if we might lose. Even when she is trapped within the gilded cage of Warren’s apartment, Oblivia finds a way to operate and live outside of the state’s confines. This refusal, as Simpson says, is a matter of ‘refusing the liberal gifts of citizenship’ and turning towards ‘our own politics, our own governance system, even when in the strangulated hold of the state.’ Oblivia could very well choose to be her other self, the one who swans along beside Warren as the perfect wife-to-be, but instead she turns her head towards the flocks in the sky and escapes.
As I was writing this essay, an image kept returning to me of that lake back in my hometown. On its shores and waters lived a bunch of black swans; at one stage, their numbers reached 13,000. The school I attended as a child sat on Black Swan Way, their likenesses built into the logo. The swans were an omnipresent part of everyone’s lives on this small inlet, but I never thought about them in any real detail; in my adult imagination, my memory of them is faint. I can’t remember how they sounded or how they flew, but what sticks most in my mind is how they moved as a bevy across the lake, gliding on the surface of the water, their silent frames reflected up at them, glinting. They were there as they always had been, even if most people’s attention had been diverted. And they lived under the existential threat of development encroaching on their home: companies wanting to take advantage of ‘empty’ land, as well as white locals who wanted to dig away the sand that separated the lake from the ocean, destroying the ecology on which the swans’ depended, just so the town wouldn’t be as smelly. But still the swans were there, and in the lake they continued to swim, silently moving across that watery mirror, with only each other and the other birds as witness.
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Footnotes
✷ 1. Apparently this smell was due to the high levels of hydrogen sulphide in the lake. A government agency once labelled it the smelliest lake in NSW.
Works cited
✷ Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, as quoted in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, (Graywolf Press, 2014).
✷ Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan, 2010.
✷ Timmah Ball, ‘Why Write?’, Meanjin.
✷ Alexis Wright, ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story?’, Meanjin.
✷ Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).
✷ Toni Morrison, ‘A Humanist View’, Portland State University, 30 May 1975.
✷ Tony Birch, ‘“On what terms can we speak?”: Refusal, resurgence and climate justice’, Coolabah.
✷ Audra Simpson, ‘Refusal, Resurgence, Renewal: Indigenous Independence in the 21st Century’, Forum Theatre, Arts West, 8 March 2018.
✷ Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Towards a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020).
✷ Alexis Wright, The Swan Book, (Giramondo, 2013).
✷ Cher Tan, ‘Interview #173 – S.L. Lim,’ Liminal.
✷ Sana Nakata, ‘Refusal, Resurgence, Renewal: Indigenous Independence in the 21st Century’, Forum Theatre, Arts West, 8 March 2018.
Ellen O’Brien is a writer and editor based on Bidjigal land. Her writing has been published in NANGAMAY MANA DJURALI: First Nations Australia LGBTQIA+ Poetry, among other publications.