{"id":23046,"date":"2024-11-27T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-27T09:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=23046"},"modified":"2024-11-27T10:02:06","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T09:02:06","slug":"praiseworthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2024\/11\/27\/praiseworthy\/","title":{"rendered":"Praiseworthy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reading Alexis Wright\u2019s newest novel, Praiseworthy<\/em>, is a decision – at 700+ pages, it has to be. Wright did not create a story that is simply about<\/em> the Aboriginal town of Praiseworthy, she created a wholly Indigenous novel. Written to the sound of slow singing in ceremony, classical Indian and Chinese music, as Wright reveals in conversation with the Melbourne Writers Festival, she responds to questions regarding the lack of linear time in the book by saying that she felt \u201cthe book had to be written to a different beat, […] to an Aboriginal chord.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Praiseworthy<\/em> is at once the title of Alexis Wright\u2019s novel and the name of a small Aboriginal town in Northern Australia that one day gets covered with a haze leaving inhabitants feeling helpless and abandoned by what they call \u201cthe Australian Government for Aboriginal People\u201d. Meanwhile, the protagonist Cause Man Steel, also called Widespread or Planet, embarks on a series of journeys across Australia to construct the world\u2019s first (and only) climate resilient transportation system, constructed entirely out of donkeys, after having dreamt of the perfect donkey, one whose gray mirrored the gray of Industrialization. Through these journeys and the tension brought on by the presence of hundreds of donkeys in an otherwise infamously tidy town under constant threat of assimilation, we are introduced to other characters, such as Widespread\u2019s sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Tommyhawk brings to readers the most internalized, painful and private aspects of global capitalism and the \u201cpost-colonial\u201d present: At only eight years, he has absorbed white<\/em> Australian mass media\u2019s narratives regarding the sexual abuse of children in Aboriginal communities and lives in a constant state of anxiety, fearing the demonized men of his town and wishes only to be adopted into a white family. Through this character, Wright reflects on the 2007 Australian government\u2019s \u201cIntervention\u201d in the Northern Territories, and what happens to the children of demonized communities who grow up absorbing the narratives about their peers and elders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost entirely without dialogue, Praiseworthy<\/em> reads like Wright brought to paper the oral history of a simultaneously semi-speculative and semi-historical future. Wright\u2019s work is a decision that, in my opinion, has to be made. It is no longer enough to theoretically praise Indigenous storytelling, but almost mandatory to engage with an uncensored version of stories that do not necessarily match the expectations of Western readers. The characters, distressingly realistic and absurd, have to be met at eye level and engaged with thoroughly, and heard in their discomfort and their dreams. It is their conflicting human nature that balances out the story\u2019s slow unraveling and pulls readers into their world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Praiseworthy<\/em> has received widespread acclaim and many awards, this alone should not motivate readers to pick it up. Nor should this make it \u201cthe book of the century\u201d, as some reviewers have claimed. Rather, Praiseworthy<\/em> can, if we let it, open the door to a century of new and old literature, open to alternative narratives and new voices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wright did not create a story that is simply about the Aboriginal town of Praiseworthy in Northern Australia, she created a wholly Indigenous novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":23044,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2444,103],"tags":[2518,2519,2516,230,833,2304,1189,2423,2515],"class_list":["post-23046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poco_lit_space-en","category-review","tag-aboriginal-community","tag-aboriginal-literature","tag-alexis-wright","tag-australia","tag-indigenous-literature","tag-indigineity","tag-novel-2","tag-poco-lit-space-en","tag-praiseworthy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23047,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23046\/revisions\/23047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}