Roberta Sykes
Snake Circle
Allen & Unwin $24.95pb, 326pp
1 86508 335 6
Roberta Sykes
autobiography
TO HARVARD AND BEYOND
Cassandra Pybus
Roberta Sykes
Snake Circle
Allen & Unwin $24.95pb, 326pp
1 86508 335 6
Roberta Sykes
'IWISH YOU WOULDN'T keep calling yourself BLACK. You're not BLACK.'
Yes, perhaps sort of somewhere in between.
I am surprised that this white woman would think I should take her wish-list on board, as if I have no wishes of my own.
'So -- am I white?' My question is rhetorical, my dark-skin and hair a brazen confrontation.
'Well no. You're not black and you're not white. You're perhaps sort of somewhere in between.'
This sharp exchange serves as the epigraph to the third volume of Roberta Sykes' autobiography, Snake Circle. It is a curious piece to use as an epigraph, but it does point to a deep anxiety which percolates through all three volumes of the autobiography, but nowhere more so than this the triumphant final volume, which details how Sykes transcended the barriers of limited education and impoverished background, as well as her own deep-seated trauma, to achieve a PhD from Harvard University.
And Roberta Sykes is justly proud of her doctorate from Harvard -- not just any American university -- and that she was the first Australian black person to achieve such an honour. She has subsequently served as an inspiration and mentor to Aboriginal women who have also gained doctorates from Harvard, whose stories of achievement have just been published in a book by UQP, Aboriginal Women by Degrees. By her own admission Sykes has come a long way:
A Black girl born in a country which had let me know early on that my value would only be measured by my ability to scrub floors and do laundry. Abandoned by my father, who ever he might be, raped, my body thrown into the bush, I had, as a consequence, been left to my own devices to survive and ensure the survival of my two children on my own. The crimson robe and mortar-board in my suitcase, I felt, were testimony not just to my academic ability -- but to the ability of Black people everywhere, in the face of all manner of hardships, to continue to survive.
And her achievement is all the more impressive because she was not funded by the Australian government and had to find the money to keep herself at Harvard through the long slog of an MA and PhD. It is a source of some rancour that, having been invited by Harvard to do postgraduate work, she was denied funding in the form of the Aboriginal Overseas Study Award, because it was said she was not Aboriginal. Here then is the source of the anxiety which dominates this book.
Sykes details how even her close Aboriginal friends advised against her being funded (a move that she ungenerously attributes to chronic jealousy within the Aboriginal community) and she includes this exchange with a close friend from the Aboriginal Medical Service, Naomi Myers:
'Naomi, even though I can't prove I'm an Aborigine, you know I've been treated like an Aborigine all my life. I was put out of school, I've been insulted and abused, and even raped in terrible circumstances because those men thought I was an Aboriginal. I have been arrested, and worked hard to bring about changes, a better life for us all. Are you telling me --' Naomi cut me off. `Being raped doesn't make you an Aboriginal. Even white girls get raped.'
The same story is told in volume two, Snake Dancing, and it goes to the heart of Sykes's identity-anxiety which is in turn the core of her autobiography. Though the statement is deeply wounding, it is not unreasonable. The terrible truth is that being raped and left for dead by men who believed her to be Aboriginal does not make Sykes a person who can lay claim to the rights and privileges established for indigenous people.
Myers understood that and consequently she offered to use the resources of the Aboriginal community to help raise the money for Sykes to go to Harvard, but she could not support an application for an Aboriginal-designated scholarship. But Sykes did not understand: not then; not now.
The exclusion implied in this exchange with Naomi Myers, which is meant to stand for many such exchanges, is particularly hurtful to Sykes because of her deep identification with the Aboriginal movement in the seventies, which initially took its lead from the Black Rights movement in the United States. As a black Australian, Sykes was in her element at that time. But there has always been a crucial distinction between the Black Rights movement and the Aboriginal Rights movement. Aboriginal Rights has always been driven by a demand for the rights of indigenous people who were dispossessed by later arrivals; the critical issue was not skin colour, but connection to the country. Land rights has always been the fundamental demand.
The problem for Sykes is that she does not know her country or her people; she cannot say who her black father was. Her white mother will not tell her and she attributes this obfuscation 'to the racism in this country and my mother's desire to escape from the harshness and poverty of her upbringing'. Her mother has stated that Sykes's father was not Aboriginal, but would not be drawn further, although there are strong hints that he was an Afro-American. In one exchange with her mother, Sykes begged to be given some family background from which to draw her identity:
'You won't be happy with this answer either, dear. There is Scots and Irish floating in here', she said, indicating the blood pumping through the veins in her old and spotted hands, 'but if you go back far enough, we're White Russians.' So much for taking my identity from my mother -- I could already imagine the startled and sympathetic looks I would draw if I proclaimed myself to be a White Russian. Delusional, people would whisper.
I would look in the mirror every morning to ensure I was still who I was yesterday, and the day before, and I'd be very surprised if I ever saw a White Russian staring solemnly back at me.
The need for a concrete racial identity is a perpetual nag for Sykes which overrides the pride and pleasure in her considerable achievements. In the United States she felt no more at home. If anything she identified with Native Americans rather than Afro-Americans, for which she was criticised by black students on campus. Yet a potent identity was given to her at Harvard, when she was approached by an elderly black woman who wanted to congratulate her on her achievements. "'But I'm from Australia'', I said, feeling perhaps I was getting praise to which I was not entitled. ''A Black is a Black anywhere. Go with God'', the old woman said as she walked away smiling.'
On other days Sykes could look at herself in the mirror each morning and see 'a Black woman of modest good looks, striving to live the only life we are given'. It would seem this is not enough, which is perfectly understandable. We all need to know who we are and where we've come from. I think that's why so many Australians of non-indigenous descent are strangely envious of Aboriginal people who can say 'we've been here for 40,000 years'. A desire to belong in that profound way gnaws at us all. Sykes does not have it to herself.
It is one of the many tragedies of race relations in this country that we have not allowed space for the stories of people of colour who were not Aboriginal, especially those from the African diaspora. The lines were drawn very early on in our history: black indigenes versus white invaders. Yet it was never so. From the very first there were always people of the African diaspora among us. It is a barely known fact that the first fleet carried a dozen Africans among its human cargo. That was two percent of the invasion force. How many people know that Blues Point was named for a ribald Afro-American ferryman in Sydney Cove at the turn of the eighteenth century; or that the Myall Creek Massacre; which we presume to be a classic interaction of black and white, included an Afro-American among those murderous twelve 'white' stockmen? There are many Afro-Australian foundation stories if we trouble to search for them.
While Snake Circle is certainly a book of triumph, it is also a record of continuing confusion and angst. It reminds me in a perverse way of that marvellous book by Kim Scott, Benang, which has just won the Miles Franklin Award. Scott's book turns on the opposite identity dilemma to Sykes: the white Aboriginal rather than the black invader. Both of these writers are of mixed racial descent, like so many Australians at the turn of the twentieth century. The confusion and pain in their books is a strong testimony to the endemic racism of this country which has generated a politics of identity totally inadequate for the complexity of our multi-racial society.
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Return to Australian Book Review /July 2000