PREFACE

Many voices can be heard in the work of Alexis Wright.Her storytelling takes different forms as she brings past time together with present time and with visions of the future. There is humour and sorrow, hope and despair,grandeur and intimacy, poetry and politics. She lets us hear the voices of her ancestors and the voices of her—and our—contemporaries: the silence of suffering, the cry of protest, the song of strength.

It has been a long journey. In a career of 25 years, Wright has published three award-winning novels Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book(2013), three major works of non-fiction, Grog War (1997),Take Power Like This Old Man Here (1998) and Tracker(2017), and many short stories and essays. Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007 and Tracker won the Stella Prize in 2018, two of Australia’s top literary awards. Her writing has an extraordinary range as. With each new work she creates a unique form and style to express her ideas. She is one of the few writers at work in the world today who can tell the stories of her country as they have been ‘passed down … through countless millennia’, in her words, and show us their meaning and value for the predicament we face together at a time of community and global crisis.

Alexis Wright is a Waanyi woman from the southern Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia. She was born in Cloncurry, Queensland, in 1950. Later she lived in Alice Springs in Central Australia for many years where she worked as an activist and organiser for Aboriginal rights.She now lives in Melbourne. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, where the translation of Carpentaria by Li Yao was launched by Mo Yan, the Nobel literature laureate, in 2012.

Wright explains that she tells ‘stories that relate to the Aboriginal world… [pushing] through boundaries to describe a complex home with many geographies of the mind and spirit’. She is inspired by writers from all around the world—the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, for example,and the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Galeano, and Patrick Chamoisseau and Edouard Glissant from Martinique, and other writers in Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. She draws on the literature of the world in solidarity and makes her own significant contribution to it.

Alexis Wright’s body of work speaks from the authority of the ancestral past. We honour the elders as we read her work. It speaks with powerful agency to the present and for future generations, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, it is a treasure and a resource.

‘Odyssey of the horizon’ is a new work by Alexis Wright and a good place for new readers to start. It is published here in Japanese and Chinese, translated by my friends Yasue Arimitsu and Li Yao. Part fable, part essay, part poem, ‘Odyssey of the horizon’ was created in response to the work of visual artist Tracey Moffatt called My Horizon, made for the 2017 Venice Biennale. This book is designed by Wright’s daughter Lily Sawenko. Its collaborative nature is part of the beauty of the moving and disturbing riff on history that Wright gives us. In a series of six linked sections, her prose brings multiple time periods together in a powerful fusion of image and emotion: the moment when the British ‘ghost ships’ of invasion come across the horizon at Sydney Cove in 1788,the ancient time of story, ‘continuously renewed … by the caretakers of their story country’, the traumatic layered memories of colonial violence, carried ‘far into the dreams of the generations to come’, and the movement of ‘millions of other war-torn people in the history of the world’, including nameless refugee children who today seek a new home in Australia. These experiences are inextricably linked as they flow together in Wright’s prose,overlapping in a montage of poetry and story. What the author calls ‘the history sadness’ echoes through the myths of humanity, as the unending Odyssey of the old Greek poet Homer continues in the twenty-first century.

It is my pleasure in this short preface to introduce readers to the work of this important writer. ‘Odyssey of the horizon’ is a richly rewarding reading experience. Listen to what Alexis Wright has to say.

Nicholas Jose
1, October, 2019