Decolonising Categories: Learning from “Water” by Ellen van Neerven
Keywords:
Ellen van Neerven, futurism, bildungsroman, decolonial fictionAbstract
This essay offers a study of Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven’s short story “Water”. It will look at its creative use of a group of futuristic characters, who turn out to be Indigenous ancestral spirits. How do their long-debated identity question all sorts of categories, making them appear as socially-constructed and highlighting their material effects? Traits pertaining to the bildungsroman will be elucidated through an analysis of the main character whose quest for her Aboriginal identity finds an auxiliary in the spirits’ leader and an opponent in a representative of the government. The story unfolds as a political one of becoming-as-resistant against the latest form of segregation conducted in the name of national reconciliation. Drawing on the past, reflecting the present and imagining the future, at the intersection of Western and Indigenous worldviews, it challenges the literary genres and definitions of the real and the fiction. In its imagination of Indigenous futures, navigating between epistemologies, it may be called a work of Murri realism which draws a set of parallels to reflect on current postcolonising conditions.
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