Wild Song by Candy Gourlay

 
Cover: Leo Nicholls

A bright star on the horizon 

We are not yet quite out of 2022 and already I have found another novel for young readers destined to be one of the great books of 2023 - and beyond. Wild Song is a devastatingly important successor to Candy Gourlay’s outstanding and deservedly plaudited Bone Talk from 2018.

This one is perhaps aimed principally at YA readers. However, it is so accessible and yet so powerful that I think it will work for a very wide readership.

The history we should know 

The stortelling is superficially straightforward: a linear narration by Luki, a Filipino girl of the Bontok peoples, addressed to the spirit of her dead mother. However it is wonderfully constructed from an authorial perspective, evolving into ever richer and more thought-provoking understanding of hugely important cultural and human issues. Fiction, but based around events in US history of which many readers will have been unaware , it is a compulsively engrossing read, albeit horrifying, and, at times, heartbreaking. It is hugely impressive, not only as education about previously overlooked or distorted history, but also for our own time. It is a passionate and thoroughly justified tirade against colonialism, the subjugation and exploitation of minorities. It exposes the way so many treat with contempt and even demonise people who are different, whether in appearance, way of life or beliefs. More than anything it is about the need, the right, of all people to grow, change and move ahead without sacrificing their own identity, their cultural roots, their very integrity as human beings. It is a book that so very much needs to be read.

Human zoo

Wild Song is a recount of significant events in the life of Luki, along with a group of her people, including other principal characters from Bone Talk, although they are all now somewhat older. Following US ‘conquest’ of the Philippines, they are transported to the States to be exploited as part of a living exhibition of ‘primitive tribes’ from around the world at the  St Louis ‘World Fair’ of 1904. Canday Gourlay succeeds wonderfully in exploring major world events and appalling attitudes through the eyes and experience of this young individual, so that it remains an intensely personal narrative as well as one of global significance, Luki’s voice is beautifully caught and insight into all that happens is given the human perspective it needs to register most poignantly. Her joy, her pain, her aspirations, her learning and her recognition of the truth about the people she visits are all ours. She is a wild girl, but not in the sense of ‘wild’ the 1904 Americans used of her. Her wildness is closer to that we mean when we talk of re-wilding our planet, rediscovering what life was meant to be before some humans dehumanised it. Luki re-learns to sing her own wild song - and so must we.

Caught between worlds 

A strong thread of feminism is woven through the story and, whether in her home Bontok community, or in the America of ‘new opportunities’, Luki kicks against entrenched mores that seek to restrict severely her behaviours as a girl/woman. At the same time as she clings to many of the cultural and spiritual beliefs the are her heritage as a Bontok, she sees potential in her new surroundings, And this epitomises one of the particular strengths of this book. Luki does not represent a single-minded or prejudiced perspective, her thinking is often ambivalent. She may be an exhibit in the eyes of the Americans, but she is also an observer, and not always a hostile one. She is originally a willing participant in the invitation to travel to The States and, although ultimately appalled by the treatment of her people there, especially after she (and the readers’) make a most devastating discovery, she also sees some of the good  in it. 

‘. . . like a door had been wrenched open and a new world revealed to us. I felt like throwing my arms into the air and screaming. This is what I wanted! I wanted a chance to see this!’ (p 156)

Even when she chooses to return to her home, she has been changed by the experience. She has travelled forwards as well as backward on her journey to discover confidence in her own identity; to acknowledge her roots whilst still accepting her place in the world and her need to fight for a better one.

‘ . . .  it wasn’t about money or who deserved what or how to get more money. We were here, in America. We had seen things that we would never have seen in Bontok and none of it had to do with money. After this, how could we go back to our ordinary lives? 

     It was the one thing I knew for sure. My life was definitely never going to be the same again.’ (p 209)

Yes, the change in Luki’s life is most certainly not all for the good. However, Candy Gourlay herself, in creating Luki and  her story, is now an important agent in that vital struggle for better change 

The us in US

Damning indictment as it is, it is important that Wild Song is not seen solely as a condemnation of early 20th Century America and Americans. What is depicted here is a shameful episode in their history and reflects appalling attitudes of racial superiority. But such colonialism and its related treatment of indiginous peoples and their cultures is far from confined to The States. We English are every bit as guilty, if not more so, and the First Nation inhabitants of Africa, Australia and India, suffered equally horrendous expressions of presumed white superiority. Not to mention all the things that happened, and still happen, here. The 1904 World Fair provides a metaphor for so much more.

A voice, a song

Wild Song is a story powerful in its honesty and heartbreaking in its sincerity. At the same time it is unspeakably potent in communication of its devastating messages about the world’s treatment of ‘minority’ peoples, historically, but also, sadly, bleeding into our present. It is a vital voice for those justifiably seeking a way to be themselves, to accept and value their own cultural heritage, to sing their own song. Similarly it is a heartfelt cry for that heritage to be respected and valued in our contemporary societies and for its people to be treated with the equality that is their human right. 

Re-wilding our world is is not just an activity, it is a state of mind. Civilisation will only grow and flourish when it learns to sing a wild song. Candy Gourlay is playing a huge part in helping to lead us all towards this. Thankfully, she is not alone.

  

The Song Walker by Zillah Bethell

Illustration: Saara Söderlund 

‘I think about the pattern dream.’ (p 66)

The Song Walker it is just so good it’s breathtaking. If it doesn’t win major awards in due course, then there is something seriously wrong with the system.

Naming cats

Sandy Brownjohn, an inspirational writer on the teaching of poetry to children, prominent in the later part of the 20th century*, characterised a talent for creative thinking as ‘the ability to name cats’. My heart sings when I read that Zilla Bethell ‘walks in the hills’ and amongst her favourite things are ‘mint tea, swimming in the rain, cheesy fridge magnets, snow globes, Chopin, dancing and diphthongs.’  To me this immediately speaks of someone with what I now always think of as that ‘ability to name cats’. Not just in the lists’s contents but in its expression, this promises to be someone with a flair for idiosyncratic creativity, someone who plays with words and ideas in fresh and exciting ways. Delving into her children’s novels immediately and amply confirms this - and they are deeply affecting too. 

She set off, not too long ago, with a very fine MG debut (A Whisper of Horses) and an even better second book (The Extraordinary Colours of Auden Dare), but then really hit children’s literature heights when she wrote a novel set in the country in which she was born and spent her early childhood, Papua New Guinea. The Shark Caller was undoubtedly one of the children’s novels of 2021 and I am only sorry that I didn’t read it early enough to include in my ‘Books of the Year’ post for that year.

Now, however, I am able to make amends, for her latest book is the most special of all. 

Outback

This time her setting is the Australian outback. Whilst this may not exactly be Papua New Guinea, it is far closer to there than to here and Zilla Bethel obviously has a strong connection with it. She has deep respect, too, for the First Country Australians, whose home this was long before colonisation. The beliefs and traditions of these peoples play a fundamental part in her new story and that sincere respect is shown by the fact that the she sought the consent of representatives of the Alyawarre community before publishing the book. Integral to those beliefs, and right at the heart of her book, are the ‘songlines’, or ‘dreaming tracks’, musical maps that guide their people through both the physical and spiritual landscape of the outback.

Of course, the place and its indigenous culture will be far removed from the experience of most UK children, but Zillah Bethell’s handling of both is so knowledgably rich, and communicated in such skilfully vivid language, as to make both come fully alive for them.

Fugue state

The basic story is that of a young girl, the book’s narrator, who finds herself walking through the outback, carrying a strange case, and with a peculiar marble in her pocket, but without the least idea of where she is, how she got there, who she is, or even her own name. Very soon she meets a lone First Country girl, also travelling the land on foot, who is very reluctant to explain who she is or where she is going. As the two trudge ever onwards through the arid, yet surprisingly varied landscape of the Northern Territotry, with a good many incidents on the way, funny, awesome and terrifying by turns, they very gradually learn more about themselves and each other. 

There are times when the metaphor of the journey in the outback landscape (externalising, as it does, the inscape of the  girls’ mental one) becomes quite explicit. After watching Tarni make a fire with a steel, flint and dried grass, her lost companion says:

‘I try and ignite the dried grasses of the memories hidden away within me. Try and use the flint and steel of my mind to spark them back to life.’ (p 66) 

However, for much of the book it sits as an underlying but potent presence. 

If this were all there were to the book it would still be a very fine one. But this is not all there is. Not by a long walk.

Song

It is very hard to write about the later stages of this story without spoiling it for other readers - and I would certainly not wish to do that. Suffice to say that the narrative develops in a way that not only shocks and surprises but brings so many things in the preceding story into focus. However, this new focus is a strangely enigmatic one. What have so far seemed merely sights and incidents in the girls’ story suddenly shimmer as images of something much deeper.  A mirage experienced at the very opening, a bird in a cage, a musical instrument locked in a case, a wild horse rescued, a night gazing at the stars, all suddenly begin to take on significance. And then there is the strange way that Chapter One is titled as ‘The End’, which strikes one as strange at the time, but gets put to the back of the mind until later in the book. Yet at the same time as everything becomes clearer, reality becomes illusive, fragile, fugative. Dry earth spawns earth magic. The physical becomes spiritual. Time becomes dreamtime. 

These days the word enchanted has become rather debased, superficial in its use, but at root it means being enthralled by song. This book is enchanted and enchanting in the truest meaning of these words. At its spiritual centre is music, is the song and, towards the end of the book, there is a most beautiful, lyrical passage that honours and celebrates that song. It is deeply affecting. It is the heart of everything.

Dream Time

Just as in his book, Tyger, SF Said draws on the visionary thinking of Willian Blake, so Zillah Bethell reconnects to the earth dreaming of the First Country Australians to reawaken in us a forgotten spirituality. She and her book are helping to reweave the rainbow that two and a half centuries of materialism have unwoven. She has composed a song that guides us all, of whatever peoples,  along a dreaming track; one that leads us both forwards and backwards to a journey completed and begun, under a glaring sun that reveals the beauty of our own outback, under a dark sky where stars can actually be seen.

Very soon this book will join the songline of great children’s literature that meanders its way around the world and deep into human hearts.

*Footnote

Sandy Brownjohn’s best known books are probably Does it Have to Rhyme? (1980) and What Rhymes With Secret (1982). I warmly recommend them to any primary teachers who can manage to track them down. Teaching the writing of poetry does not date.