Language of Assertion in the Discursive Formation of Aboriginal and Adivasi Consciousness: Reading Identi ty Politics in Select Poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Parimal Hembram

Abstract

Indigenous writings across the globe have a lot of issues in common as the indigenes are the most vulnerable part in any nation of the world. Such writings often deal with the irreparable losses these people suffer due to various types of di spossession be it socio cu ltural, spatial or linguistic in the wake of British imperialism. The present article proposes to read the poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal from Australia and Parimal Hembram from India in terms of a shared sensibility of justice fo r their respective communities articulated through a bold and dissenting language of affirmation which is conducive to the construction of a counter hegemonic discourse of defiance to combat the severe damage to the indigenous ontological system rooted in their distinctive cultural ethos. It specifically seeks to explore the poetics of protest in the use of the language of self assertion and dauntless resistance as part of the struggle for the reclamation of indigenous rights in the face of forced displacem ent, cultural dispossession, linguistic imposition, strategic erosion of inheritance and abject subjugation of the tribal and aboriginal population in India and Australia as represented in Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poems in her volume We are Going ( and P arimal Hembram's book Fight for Existence (2022) comprising the English translation of the author's Santali poems. The poems in both volumes are remarkable for their deployment of a formidably assertive language infused with a defiant and provocative tone promoting a strong aboriginal and A divasi consciousness and seeking to spur their people into immediate action for the restoration of rights and social justice.