Not Telling
by Alison J. Barton
Reviewed by ANTHEA YANG
In Not Telling, Alison J. Barton paints an expansive portrait of memory, family, culture and the personal and collective grief and trauma caused by the colonisation of Australia. Weaving through the collection’s three main sections, and binding the themes together, is the concept and interrogation of language — how it has been used to silence Aboriginal history and how it can be reclaimed to enable truth-telling. The idea of muteness, whether by choice (secret-keeping as a form of protection of heritage) or force (the erasure of cultural narratives), is a recurring motif throughout the collection, and the title itself, Not Telling, places the possibilities and powers of language and storytelling back into the hands of Aboriginal peoples. In ‘The phases of psychoanalysis’, Barton suggests the act of reclaiming language, of speaking truth, allows for personal and collective history to live on beyond:
‘speech is the end to mortality
a place for hiding fragments’
(p.28)
The first of three sections, ‘Wild garments’ maps the effects of trauma on the body through a myriad of environments the speaker interacts with. From place to place, the poet creates a sense of movement through time and memory that gives emphasis to how trauma can cause exterior and interior worlds to coalesce, blurring the physical and psychological. In ‘I pass winter driving to my mother’s house’, Barton explores this through a complex mother-daughter relationship:
‘when we say goodbye
I wilt practise grief
she in her heavily unmedicated state
we
like two drops of water meeting on glass’
(p.17)
In ‘Birth dress’, the physicality of the book becomes interchangeable with the body: ‘this book will become strained, a weight’. Many of the poems titles in this section are grounded in physical objects or places: ‘Birth dress’, ‘Diary’, ‘the piano’, ‘Turner Contemporary, Margate’, ‘Marseille, winter’. The materiality of these titles ground the speaker and the reader is given a personal history of her. Perhaps it is in this way that the past is called into the present (from ‘Turner Contemporary Margate’: ‘I am tethered to where you left me.’). In ‘Diary’ and ‘Damned Honey’, Barton examines how one moves between the past, present and future through language. What happens when language fails? Or when language has no place to go?
‘I am worse for asking. I grip questions so tight that my tied heart told me not to and broke stories of silent families in cement. We bridge the night.’
(‘Diary’ p.4)
‘…came so close to telling but restless & still I was steadfast, unrecognisable / we know a tale we can never say, hold a treasure no one can hear’
(‘Damned Honey’ p.7)
Again in ‘A verb found’, Barton shows that the limitations of language caused by the invasion of Australia creates a sense of disconnection and dislocation between the speaker and her history:
‘in speak
we find each other or we do not
no window, no door’
(p.14)
Throughout the collection, Barton’s use of punctuation is selective and intentional. The lack of punctuation allows for the poems to move freely between each other. There is never a sharp ending, only a continuation. This sense of flow speaks to the collectivism and longevity of Aboriginal culture — it is multiplicitous and enduring. In the poems where punctuation is present, Barton uses this to create a sense of formality or junction. How does personal and collective trauma affect the physical state and what becomes of the body in these moments? In ‘Admitted’, Barton uses the sparseness of language combined with punctuated sentences to create the cold and clinical environment the speaker is in:
‘Flocked on wheels, I am an object stilted on a rolling bed. I am a body minus arrest — flawed, frail, efface, small. I am for observation, summoned by medicine, science uninterrupted.’
(p.5)
The second section of the collection, ‘Dreamscape psychobabble’, is a continuous exploration of the blurring of boundaries between the physical and the psychological—the speaker is ‘hunting beyond constructed and re-constructed borders’ (from ‘The phases of psychoanalysis’). ‘Dreamscape psychobabble’ works as a smooth transition from the themes of family and trauma explored in ‘Wild garments’, moving into a deeper and more theoretical interrogation of how history and trauma informs the present self. Barton weaves psychoanalytic theory with dream analysis to strip back the layers of one’s past and explore different versions of selves. In the opening poem, ‘I count in dreams of houses’, the ‘I’ presents itself as both a fluid and solid state that is moving through the dreamscape. Recounting the tangible, the imagery is rich—yet the self feels intangible:
‘I hike through stories of the self
I measure stares in movement
I carry heavy steps in my hands burdened by what’s behind eyes’
(p.27)
The gaze and seeing are concepts that are present throughout the poems in this section, tying together both what dreams and psychoanalysis allows for: ways of seeing the self from whole and fragmented perspectives. This is explored in two poems:
‘The work is in the repetition
the wrong way around gaze imaginary Other
you not you’
(‘The phases of psychoanalysis’ p.28)
‘reminding myself that I am lost the closer I get to him
we gaze into each other as ourselves
we are addiction it feels good, like the new drinking
….
Lacan’s delusion is that history is without patient
I keep my secrets knowing nothing, becoming illness’
(‘This is the poem of the moment’ p. 46-47)
Barton plays with form, working with the spaces on the page to build on imagery and silence, and to explore the different shapes that language, grief and trauma can take. As we move through the book, there is a sense that the poems are becoming more and more fragmented in form. By the time the reader reaches the end of the third and final section, ‘Buried light’, the words become increasingly scattered. This fragmentation speaks to the displacement of identity, history and memory of Aboriginal peoples caused by colonialism. But, however dispossessed, Barton addresses and celebrates the resilience of Aboriginal tradition and culture through history, highlighting the importance of preserving connection to community, land and Country. In the section’s titular poem, Barton draws connection between trauma, family and heritage, reclaiming cultural history through language:
‘we were bound by an era
by registers of speech
we made the shape of eagles
with our hands
and summoned our injuries
we spoke with foreign mouths
as if burying light
with forged blades
by rough white skies
we found ancestors together
in our talk’
(‘buried light’, p. 55)
This reclamation is cemented in the provision of factual accounts and documentation of Aboriginal history, which Barton reveals in ‘Wealth for toil’, a powerful redaction letter from Francis Tuckfield, and also in ‘taper’, which speaks to the years of silencing Aboriginal peoples and the harrowing trauma resulting from the Stolen Generations:
‘for the life of you
and the life of me imprisoned
dragged in dirt
head open
locked cuffs
hands chained
legs jagged
children ripped
from screaming arms
taper to
silence
weighted between the sound and the denial’
(p. 58–59)
The disintegration of colonial language paves the way for a decolonised way of speaking. One that allows room for remembering and truth-telling. In the beginning of ‘no site for hunting’, we see the speaker unable to move in either direction of time, stuck in colonial narrative:
‘I/you de-subjectify myself/me
in the end the beginning of the body
doubts itself in both directions’
(p. 62)
But later in the poem, is freed through the language of ‘murmuring women’:
‘I speak and my body releases
a trapped bird
we are singular living organism
we are the earth breathing’
(‘no site for hunting’, p. 63)
This connection to Country is what returns the speaker to herself. In the very first poem of the collection, the book is an extension of the body (‘strained, a weight’), and here the body is an extension of the land (‘my continent a mind and body’, from ‘because the butterfly’). In addition to connection to the land, Barton writes in connection and conversation with Aboriginal writers such as Alison Whittaker, Alexis Wright and Jeanine Leanne, and in doing so, the book becomes — like the body and like the land — a living thing. The final poem in the collection, ‘as we are’, connects the themes explored throughout the three sections together. Barton’s endurance to holding these expansive themes in conversation with, and in exploration of, each other to the very end results in not only a spectacular reading experience but a powerful and nuanced recollection of the Aboriginal experience. Although the end usually conveys a sense of finality, ‘as we are’ presents itself as an open-ended poem: the work of decolonising, of working through trauma, of understanding the possibilities of language to overcome cultural voicelessness, is not done. This captures the essence of Not Telling.
‘the mythscape alive and breathing
storytellers
break
grow
plait’
(‘as we are’, p.79)
ANTHEA YANG is a writer and poet living on unceded Wurundjeri land. She co-edited the anthology Resilience and was a recipient of the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2023