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“Speaking for the Dead to Protect the Living”: On Audre Lorde’s Biomythography, Law, Love, and Epistemic Violence in the Coronial Jurisdiction in the Kimberley

2023; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1535685x.2023.2209445

1541-2601

Sarouche Razi,

Legal and cultural studies analysis

AbstractAbstractFrom 2017–2019 I was counsel representing the families in a coronial inquest which looked at Aboriginal youth deaths in the Kimberley region of Australia with a particular regard to self-harm. A coronial inquest is a judicial proceeding that investigates unexplained deaths, unusual deaths, or deaths in state custody. In this paper I consider the epistemic violence my clients experienced, and I particularly examine the potential for affect and relationality to create connectors between epistemes in the hope of a more emancipatory conception of justice. I draw on Audre Lorde's corpus as one that is worthy of serious regard in critical legal studies and useful in my work. In particular, I turn my gaze inwards and draw on Audre Lorde's creation of biomythography as a method for legal writing and legal practice, to offer an account of my role in the Inquest. Biomythography is a form of writing which grounds subjective individual and collective experience, and its interrelationship with history and myth to centre experiences of justice and injustice. In using this methodology, I consider ways the civil law, through its interpretive function and authority in the coronial jurisdiction, oppresses First Nations Australians. Through writing my biomythography I show that the Coroner's fact finding role arrives at truth in a way inherently embedded in Western knowledge systems and I regard the Coroner's truth determining function as violent. Finally, I consider the potential of affect as a connector between epistemes to create emancipatory possibilities for justice.Keywords: decolonisationAudre Lordesettler colonial studiesfeminist studiescultural studiesqueer studiesauto fictionthe KimberleyCoronial Inquestslawyeringpoverty lawyeringpolice misconductstolen wagesepistemic violencebiomythographystandpoint theoryIndigenousFirst NationsAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationNotes on contributorsSarouche RaziSarouche Razi is an interdisciplinary researcher and legal practitioner with expertise in the legal assistance sector, creative arts practice in law, critical legal and pedagogical theories, police and state accountability, and decolonising the law. He has worked primarily in legal service delivery in the community controlled and Aboriginal community controlled sector, and has been involved in significant court representation relating to historical injustices, and deaths in custody for First Nations Australians. Sarouche teaches a prison legal course at the Australian National University where he teaches on abolition, decarceration, and critical pedagogy. He is completing his Doctoral Thesis exploring biomythography as a method for legal writing, and mnemocratic power to describe (settler) state control over memory and process in the Coroner's court. He also works with the NSW Legal Assistance Forum, and Tangata Restorative Justice, an Oceanic led approach to restorative justice in Melbourne. Sarouche's first graphic novel, co-written with Dr Anne MacDuff and Kirsten Hoffman, Once upon a time in Australia: conversations about how our MeToo movement exposed the troubles of truth in law is under contract with Counterpress and will be published in 2023.Notes1 The thinking, writing, and practice of this work has been done on various countries, but predominantly on Ngunnawal and Ngambri, Miriwoong, Yawuru, Wallumattagal, and Nyoongar land. I want to pay my respects to those Nations, cultures, languages, peoples and lands, and recognise I am a settler and that sovereignty resides with our First Nations' peoples in spite of settler occupation.2 Letter from parent of a deceased person to the Coroner in Roslyn Fogliani, Inquest into the Deaths of 13 Children and Young Persons in the Kimberley Region. (Coroner's Court of Western Australia 2019) Out of respect and other considerations, identifying information has been anonymised or altered.3 The Kimberley is a region in the North-West of Australia. It is larger in size than the British Isles, with a population of under 40,000 people, and the closest capital cities are: Darwin, over 800kms away (from Kununurra), and state capital Perth, over 2,000 kms away (from Broome). It is an area where tens of different First Nations' peoples live. More resources can be found on the Kimberley land council website with the Native Title determinations: https://www.klc.org.au/native-title-map, as well as the AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia: https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia.4 While it is outside of the remit of this paper to enter that field, reading the debates on the 'ontological turn' for scholars like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, David Graeber, and Christine Black, these definitional differences seem of paramount importance. In my reading, the separation between a worldview and a form of knowledge inherent in that worldview seems forced. In this paper I use ontology and epistemology, not interchangeably, but relatedly. As a Muslim, my understanding of being and existence inherently manifests in my use of language, how I perceive knowledge and knowledge systems, and how I relate to others. I like the concept proposed by Viveiros de Castro and others in anthropological epistemological ethics stating: "always leave a way out for the people you are describing" (see Viveiros de Castro and others, 2014. "The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 13. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions) which I believe should be read into research.5 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, "An Interview with Audre Lorde," Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36.6 Audre Lorde, "Power" (The Poetry Foundation, n.d.), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53918/power-56d233adafeb3.7 Hannah McGlade, "All-White Juries Are a Symptom of Structural Racism," March 14, 2022, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/opinion-all-white-juries-are-a-symptom-of-structural-racism/0tr3eftl0.8 Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–14, https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf.9 Lorde, 1.10 Ibid., 2.11 Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007).12 Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Tucson, AZ: Kore Press, 2000).13 Sam McKegney, "'pain, Pleasure, Shame. Shame.' Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization," Canadian Literature 2013 (March 1, 2013): 12–33.14 Lorde, Uses of the Erotic.15 Cressida Fforde et al., "Discourse, Deficit and Identity: Aboriginality, the Race Paradigm and the Language of Representation in Contemporary Australia," Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 149 (2013): 162–73.16 Chelsea Watego and Lilla J. Watson, Another Day in the Colony (St Lucia: University Queensland Press, 2021).17 Lorde, Uses of the Erotic.18 Powerful literary examples include Farīd al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār, Dick Davis, and Afkham Darbandi, The Conference of the Birds, The Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York: Penguin Books, 1984), l. 674 While I'm taking some distance from Lorde's conceptions, I want to suggest here that there are echoes in the chaos and unexpressed desire in Lorde's erotic, with the unknowable wonder of phenomena (Asrar in the Arabic and Raz in the Persian) that I am referring to. .19 Many First Nations' scholars make this point, but see for example the body of work by scholars such as Irene Watson and Ambelin Kwaymullina.20 Lee Bloch, "Oral Traditions and Mounds, Owls and Movement at Poverty Point: An Archaeological Ethnography of Multispecies Embodiments and Everyday Life," Journal of Social Archaeology 19, no. 3 (October 2019): 360, https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605319846985.21 Irene Watson, "Kaldowinyeri: Munaintya in the Beginning," Flinders Journal of Law Reform 4, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 3–17.22 Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2002); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).23 McKegney, "'pain, Pleasure, Shame. Shame.' Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization," 9.24 Andrea Smith, ed., "CHAPTER TWO The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won't Deny," in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 43–55, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376613-004.25 Karla Jay, "Speaking the Unspeakable: Poet Audre Lorde," in Conversations with Audre Lorde (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2004), 109-15.26 Audre Lorde, Zami, a New Spelling of My Name, Crossing Press Feminist Series (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982).27 Heather Russell, Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 60.28 Heather Russell Andrade, "Writing Biomythography: A Study in Language, Form and Genre in African American Autobiography." (Rutgers, 1997), 166.29 Andrade, 165.30 Lorde, Zami, a New Spelling of My Name, 185.31 Lorde, 190.32 Ibid., 200.33 Maja Milatovic, "The Love of Women, Kind as Well as Cruel: Feminist Alliances and Contested Spaces in Audre Lorde's "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name," Eurozine, January 28, 2015, 3, https://www.eurozine.com/the-love-of-women-kind-as-well-as-cruel/?pdf.34 Fogliani, Inquest into the Deaths of 13 Children and Young Persons in the Kimberley Region.35 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).36 Ambelin Kwaymullina, "Research, Ethics and Indigenous Peoples: An Australian Indigenous Perspective on Three Threshold Considerations for Respectful Engagement," AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 12, no. 4 (December 2016): 437–49, https://doi.org/10.20507/AlterNative.2016.12.4.8.37 Decolonizing Activism, Deactivating Colonialism, Maysar Forum Discussion (Fitzroy, 2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEGsBV9VGTQ.38 The modern system of land tenure in Australia.39 Victoria Burrows, Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11–12.40 Milatovic, "The Love of Women, Kind as Well as Cruel: Feminist Alliances and Contested Spaces in Audre Lorde's "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name," 3.41 Two audio stories are available in relation to the matter on the ABC Awaye! Program: "The Carter Matter," Awaye! (ABC Radio National, January 20, 2017), https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/wungu/8203606; "Constable Care," Awaye! (ABC Radio National, April 6, 2019), https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/constable-care/10931600.42 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).43 To take this further, explore the notions of Philos and Sophos in Islamic philosophic traditions, which are inspired in part from the Ancient Greek traditions.44 ʻAṭṭār, Davis, and Darbandi, The Conference of the Birds673-675.45 From a Certificate granted under "Aboriginal Affairs Planning Act 1972 (WA)," § 48 (n.d.).46 I use Cody's name with permission.47 WA Police, "From WA Police to Sarouche Razi, Aboriginal Legal Services of Western Australia," October 3, 2015.48 WA Police.49 Robert Turnbull, The Coronial Process in Western Australia: A Handbook for Medical Practitioners and Medical Students., 2010, https://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/_files/Handbook_for_Doctors.pdf.50 Turnbull.51 Robert M. Cover, "Violence and the Word," The Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (1986): 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468.52 AIATSIS, "Welcome to Country," n.d., https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/welcome-country.53 Judy Barlow, AIATSIS.54 Fogliani, Inquest into the Deaths of 13 Children and Young Persons in the Kimberley Region. Transcript of proceedings, 26 June 2017.55 Fogliani Transcript of proceedings, 26 June 2017.56 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016).57 Kwaymullina, "Research, Ethics and Indigenous Peoples," 440.58 Fogliani, Inquest into the Deaths of 13 Children and Young Persons in the Kimberley Region. at 369.59 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).60 Justice Brennan Murray Islands Case (Mabo v State of Queensland [No 2]) (1992) 175 CLR 1, 29. (High Court of Australia 1992).61 Fogliani, Inquest into the Deaths of 13 Children and Young Persons in the Kimberley Region. Transcript of proceedings, 28 June 2017.