At the Peripheries and in Between the Parallels

The plantain trees (Musa acuminata) in our backyard, much like the occupants of the attached house, are not of this land. Its wind-battered broad leaves and sturdy green trunk are the sustaining cultural luggage that we hauled from residence to residence, passed on from family friends, in an attempt to establish a continuity with the intercultural existence inside the house. Every six months or so, my mother calls us to the backyard to gather around and gaze up at the newest bunch nestled amongst its big green. When it’s time, we’ll cut that tree down, and hose the bunch down on the grass, to be separated out into “some to fry, some for the fridge and some to give away”.

The construct of the backyard in Australia is, first and foremost, another device for the imposition of colonial power over the land and the Indigenous Peoples that pre-date that construct. The narratives of inhabitation that emerge from this reality are additive, imposed and complex.

The backyard is the least demarcated zone of the home property. It is (re)defined by its interactions with neighbouring backyards and at the same time constantly publicly perceived. It is a locus of behaviours, of networks, of organisms, and the policies that choreograph them. Complex neighbourly politics become apparent in how notions of tolerance, imposition and visibility are negotiated — how they are regulated by physical and behavioural boundaries — it is these interactions that reveal what we think about ourselves and each other. It is the space between an offensive smell and a nostalgic one, encroachment and enmeshment; your side versus my side in the context of our street.

In no more than a 5x2m patch of soil, smothered in grass mulch, and bounded by concrete and chicken wire, the trees bore their fruit and bore some more.

Their offspring, “suckers” they call them, all crowded into that rectangle in with the adults, at varying degrees of maturity, growing tall enough to sweep the bathroom window of our second floor

(and the neighbour’s wall too).

Definitions and identities are relative in the sense that they find their shape through proximities and interactions with other definitions and identities. Who is “we”? What is “yours”? Where is “home”? Sense of self is an approximation within the networks of the identities and relations we identify with in order to become apparent. These networks make us tangible and they validate us.¹ There is increasing recognition of intersectionality — the notion that it is through concurrent material and ideological conditions that we gain some semblance of identity.² Sense of self is artefacted into space, and these environments themselves are in flux. When we speak to the garden as a site of nurture, of pride and sustenance, but also of imposition and enforcement — we reveal our fears and hopes, familiarity and alienation. But as we position ourselves relative to the garden, the garden also constantly defines its relationship to us — and to the backyard, the house, the street, a suburb, a country, a continent. Ergo, the garden’s potential, to be used as a device to gain insight into the expressions of the migrant experience is apparent — our ongoing relationship with the living and changing land is an insight into the networks of identities and connectivity that frame our understanding of self, as individuals and communities.³ But if this analysis becomes possible through a conversation between people and land, there is a flip side of the story being lived in real-time — perhaps each side is mostly clearly understood in the context of the other; in the parallels.

Indigenous Australian senses of self are inextricably bound up in the land. Environment as a reciprocal participant in their histories and identities is poignantly expressed by Noonuccal poet, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, “We are their custodians. We not only share with them, we also guard them”.⁴ Western academic attempts to understand existence as relational are preceded many thousands of years by an Indigenous inheritance. In contrast, colonial understanding of self has often been defined historically with relation to a perceived power struggle with the land: an interaction of either dominance or surrender; here to subject, or be subjected by, the land. Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood writes about how the culture and character of the colonial home and public gardening projects are constantly preoccupied with lack of adaptation to the continent — concern with water, fire and drought, and a refusal to acknowledge the constraints of changing contexts.⁵ In some ways, the non-western migrant experience with adaptation differs from that of the colonial settlers. The entities that at some point asserted themselves over their lands back home are the same entities controlling access to this one, that they claim to have found. Understanding that there often is no other option means a degree of assimilation or adaptation that affords survival. In lieu of imposition, adaptation becomes essential to survival. Populations alienated from their own environments (in some way or another by global colonialism) bring what they can with them; settle where they can find space.

The plantain trees currently in the backyard are not mine — they are ours in the context of a wandering African diaspora on this land. They are the property of the now unknown individuals who passed some of the young plants onto

the family who, ten years ago, passed some of the young plants onto

the family who, eight years ago, passed some of the young plants onto us,

and the visitors we’ve sat with, and shared a meal of fried plantains.

These plants are ours.

We brought them from home.

To begin to recognise the voices of the peripheralised involves de-centring the loudest voices; and attuning our ears to simultaneous existences. Constructed categories such as national identity and race, which inform what we come to perceive as the truth, are not isolated examples. If “how you do anything is how you do everything”, then the systems of separation between humankind and “nature” (invisibilised and naturalised into the paradigms we accept unquestionably; language and taxonomy etc.), would also extend the universality of the experiences of division, invasion and discrimination. Here we begin to understand that the natural world we observe is more than an inert input into our self-identity; it is a world that we exist in and are not separate from. The experiences of our natural companions are interwoven with our own. In “Nature in the Active Voice”, Plumwood expands upon the way that an attitude of human-centeredness “weaves a dangerous set of illusions about the human condition right into the logic of our basic conceptual structures”,⁶ as force is normalised and wielded to subdue the ecologies we exist in. The possibility of extending empathy towards non-humans requires constructing the “mediated plant”,⁷ involving the deliberate provision of space, attention, and apparatus for the plant’s experience to be made intelligible to us. Otherwise, we risk “polarised and segregated vocabularies for human and nonhuman”,⁸ that further assert dominion over our environs. When we dismantle this arbitrary human-nature dichotomy, we allow for interspecies empathy, advocacy and learning — we see ourselves in each other, in all our fears and hopes.

Their leaves, broad and green, are shredded by the wind, and they rustle against each other in a nighttime percussion. No matter of being constrained by that little rectangle stifles their ability to make family (or, technically, clones). Produced as mini replicas huddled at their base, every elderly tree, retired after bearing just once, is followed closely by a younger mimic. Syrupy sap drips from the waiting bunch and blackens the concrete below, where ants frantically crowd. Branches are heavy and bellies are full.

Up in Queensland, scattered in the wild forest, wild pigs feast on the dropped fruits of another.

Musa banksii and Musa jackeyi they are, (same sturdy trunk and wind-battered leaves),⁹

But these ones, despite preceding them all, they call a weed:

as a threat to the [imported] commercial banana industry.¹⁰

Categories devised for ecological or anthropological scrutiny can become a means to exert force. The urge to classify and designate can deny the recognition of concurrencies. Refusal to read between the centralised and peripheral experiences as valid in their own right, allows for the exclusion of those peripheral experiences from the empathy they require for care and protection. It is clear that the centralised classifier performs this role from a position of privilege, a structure built from a single and convenient perspective. People quietly internalise these classifications; the terms give their experiences validity, even if the terms aren’t their own. Those who are othered, know. Migrants can intuit what they would need to be to classify as “ex-pats”. Survival requires prompt recognition of the “normal” from which they’ve been excluded. There are those who perceive themselves as “normal Australians”, but then there are those whose roots in this land pre-date the term “Australian”.

The thing about simultaneous realities is that they don’t cease to exist even when they are denied. In the peripheries, they can even find their way to each other and see themselves reflected. Notably, in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Australia watched as the identity “Black”, ultimately a colonial classification and imposition, became the unifying banner under which many people collected with purpose. Bla(c)k people in Australia, Indigenous and Afro-descendant alike, united with force to recognise shared and familiar pain. The possibility for labels to be reclaimed as symbols of solidarity is a function of the persistence and survival of alternate realities.

To be a migrant is to be simultaneously other and at the forefront of Australia’s concern. Both invisiblised and tokenised, when the relevance of your experience is determined by someone who is not you, you realise you have been essentially objectified. Often spoken of and spoken for, one of the more critical elements of representation is the opportunity to recognise the wholeness and validity in parts. “Self” here is more than the body; it’s the cloud of rituals, places, memories and processes that self is defined relative to. When we engage with these very real things, it is an act of self-affirmation — like looking in a mirror to know we have a face, or hearing your name and knowing you are known.

Our experiences are most clearly understood when read in parallel with all other stories that make, frame and sustain them, big, small, human and non-human.

Sometimes they are gathered in an unassuming backyard, or rooted steadfastly and surrounded by the thick of a lush rainforest.

The only definitive truth is that no matter where or how you’re looking,

We’re all here.