I was flying from Alice Springs back into Sydney yesterday, thinking about some of the aboriginal art printed fabric I bought while there, and I started wondering what happens to Australian aboriginal artists who deviate from the art style of their community. There's not a lot of range in the art style. It's dot painting, similar to American pointillism, with a form of story-telling embedded in it.
But it's not an expectation that the artist uses the art style. Rather, it's gatekept, similar to their dreamtime stories (Tjukurpa). You prove yourself worthy of the right to take part, you earn your right to participate.
So if an artist decides that they really like impressionist painting... what then? They do it, and then... they have no community? No platform? No way to elevate their work, no way to promote themselves.
And so, I guess, your art is only as worthy as those around you deem it to be, and only once the people around you deem it worthy, do people outside of that community get exposure to it. There was one Arrernte artist in particular that I heard about while visiting, Namatjira, who did western style contemporary landscape paintings... but he was practically adopted by white people who promoted him.
And this is where my attention goes, as the alienated writer and artist, where the asymmetry lies, where the power and influence is truly derived from, who claims ownership of what's legible and real. And if I write it, does it matter, if it's not received by my contemporaries? What if my contemporaries lack influence? What if I have influence and refuse to see it or take it? What happens then?
I'm envious of people who travel and just enjoy themselves without having to use any part of their brain in doing so, who don't make all of these associative meanings, who just wander streets and say, "Oh that's nice," who have a little beer, who take a nice little photo with the backdrop of Bondi Beach, who enjoy the shittily loudly played "Great Escape" by No Doubt on the restaurant speakers. The people who aren't trying to root their reality to something deeper.
Because when I went to sleep last night, I woke up, my heart racing. I'd had a recurring dream I've had so many times, in so many different variants, all mapped to the same schema: It's years, decades possibly after something has happened... and I don't know what... and now someone is excavating land where something tied to me is buried in the ground, and when they excavate, they're going to find something and it may not be immediate, but eventually, they're going to tie it back to me, and whatever it is: it's dark and shocking and bad.
This time, the dream was semi-lucid. There were two versions of me, the semi-omniscient observer and the first-person. The first-person was panicked, finding out through local news or social media or something, that something had been dug up. She thought, "It's human remains." She sees a clear blue plastic box emerge from the ground with something inside, but what, her memory has lost the detail... just "human remains." Not bones, something fleshy. And the observer me, she thinks, "This girl has no memory of whatever it is but carries a sense of guilt and fear that she is about to be incriminated for whatever is found." The observer me knows that culpability is a spectrum, and that at whatever age the girl in the dream was when the thing happened.... the unnamed thing... the thing that is in a box, under the ground, being excavated... that she can't possibly be responsible for it to the extent that she believes she is.
But I continue to sit and observe this girl, this version of me... ageless as she is... experience the dread of living in the inbetween moments of exposure, where no one is naming her as a suspect, but she knows they know that she is somehow tied to it... and now she is being distantly quietly surveilled.
My mom shows up. My mom has never been in one of these dreams before. And I want to talk to my mom about it, but I can't because it's not safe to say words out loud, because to do so creates a record of my culpability. And my mom and I quietly go for a walk, return to the scene of the excavation, or near it... and I want to say something, but I know it doesn't matter, because the energy in the air is that she knows too, and she knows that she also can't say words for the same exact reason I can't.
Past versions of this dream have involved me fearing going to prison for murder. And I never know what the actual details are. There's no real memory.
And the thing I know about recurring dreams with trauma is that they're not always literal. But murder or not... it says a lot about me. That there is something in me that happened to me when I was too young to understand, was told I was a suspect, told that I had done something bad, that something was being hidden for my benefit... and that if I ever said a word... everyone would know how bad of a person I really am.
I'll be 42 in less than a month. I still don't know what I'm guilty of. And I still have no idea what's actually in that plastic box that they keep excavating in my dreams.
