AustLit

'Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu enacts a movingly profound re-membering of correspondence and connection between the author and her mother [henceforth yagu] across 1978-9 while Papertalk Green (the daughter/gaja) was staying at an Aboriginal girls’ hostel and attending high school in Bentley, Perth. As Anita Heiss notes, this new work adds to Papertalk Green’s impressive oeuvre, which extends back to the mid-1980s and comprises bold writings that remain ‘eloquently powerful, respectfully challenging, and true to [Papertalk Green’s] role in life as a Yamaji Nyarlu’ (Heiss 2019: xiii). In line with Heiss, I see Nganajungu Yagu as a book that in addition to its vital insights about ‘respect for ancestors, connection to country, the role of the poet and Yamaji identity’ enacts an accomplished revival of ‘the nearly lost art of letter writing’ (Heiss 2019: xiii) and epistolary literature – a form powerfully deployed by feminist and anti-colonial writers including Alice Walker (1982), Monica Ali (2003) and Michael Ondaatje (1987) (see discussion in Bower 2017). In this review, I would like to extend Heiss’ point further by observing how Nganajungu Yagu profoundly reimagines literary possibilities of life writing, historical writing, fictocriticism, poetry and more. My touchstones for this argument shall include, first, Papertalk Green’s use of letters in combination with other texts, and then the poetic innovations she enacts, particularly visual and polylingual strategies. My decision to focus primarily on technique is informed by Alison Whittaker’s edifying keynote at the 2019 conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (Whittaker 2019).3' (Introduction)