Mind, Body and Environment in Indigenous Anglophone Writing: Poetic Interventions for a New Modernity
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The project of European colonialism found intellectual support and legitimisation in Cartesian dualism, through which the environment came to be seen as a commodifiable and manipulable entity ready for economic exploitation. Indigenous populations and their worldviews were rendered primitive and backward as dispossession advanced relentlessly. Consequently, Indigenous sense of belonging was disrupted whilst their lands suffered unprecedented environmental damage in the name of techno-scientific modernity and progress. Recent advances in neuroscience shed new light on the interrelation between the brain, the body, the environment and other human beings. In this light, the principles of Cartesian dualism, on which our modern world is still founded, can be seen from a more organicist and integrative perspective and thus closer to Indigenous epistemologies. This chapter explores interrelations of mind, body and environment as they are elaborated in cognitive poetics and cultural geography (which draw inspiration from neuroscience) in the Anglophone poetry of one Palestinian (Sharif Elmusa), one South African (Mzi Mahola) and one indigenous Australian poet (Romaine Moreton). The metaphors emerging in the work of these poets show shared yet distinctive concerns in relation to the trauma of colonial dispossession, the disruptive interventions of industrial capitalism and their impact on Indigenous worldviews in a globalised world. Reading this poetry with the resources of cognitive theories can thus improve our understanding of Indigenous sense of oneness with the land because both cognitive theories and Indigenous perspectives share an interest in the body’s engagement with the environment.