Songwoman

Songwoman by Ilka Tampke raises the question of connectedness to Mother Earth. In her extensive exploration of the meaning of an individual’s and a people’s ties to their land, I recall distinctive experiences of my own.

First, however, I would hasten to add, that a sense of ‘belonging to place’ is often and usually espoused in reference to indigenous peoples and less frequently in reference to non-indigenous communities or peoples. It is nevertheless, an experience I own.

Songwoman provoked recollection of three distinct occasions; each highlighted what I’ve always known within self. I believe this sense of knowing, of visceral connection and connectedness flows in and through all living things.

It is first remembered

… as the all-consuming, intensely powerful sense of wholeness, of being at one with the earth, the sky, the crops, the trees, the dry stream bed, the expanses of granite rock – the whole of the natural world around me. Tangible energy, call it spirit or source (or whatever one wants) infused and melded all.

Grief gave voice to this experience. At the time of my father’s passing, I walked on the land he’d farmed, the land on which I’d spent most of my childhood. I didn’t ‘look for’ him or this experience. It presented itself to me as I crossed a dry creek bed and walked the dirt track between two halves of a paddock sown with wheat. The blue sky domed over the whole, and I was swallowed in it, like Ailia, I imagine, within her serpent.

My father’s earthly presence had gone, yet his spirit was there, infused in all. Not to diminish what I experienced, I wonder, as I write this, if the land had belonged to generations of the same family, would it, could it, have been any more powerful. Like the Albion tribes, like indigenous communities claim.

My second claim …

to knowing a connectedness with ‘place’ is that which I know wherever I have ‘put down roots’. As our mere acre in Perth’s foothills blooms, as my feet walk on native and cultivated grass, as I spend time with family on the land that my home stand on, I feel a sense of ‘place’. It is shallower than my connection with the land of my childhood, yet it is equally tangible.

And a thirdly, feeling connectedness …

… where I’ve lived in cities surrounded by stone pavements, cement walkways, brick-walled buildings, these do not give rise in me to a sense of place that is mine. It is there, on a different level, like Ailia, perhaps, in Rome. For me, a city is a place of disconnection – noise, lack of touching raw earth with my feet, my hands, my senses. There’s a different smell – like London on a sticky, humid day, fetid with human sweat and endeavour. Perhaps those who’ve grown within such communities know a different way of being connected to place. It eluded me, except for brief moments – touching earth in a potted plant, or finding blades of grass with bare feet walking through a park.

I’ve no doubt that the sense of connectedness to inner self that is trendily promoted in retreats into the bush, forest escapes, and so on, is all to do with this sense of being connected within self from one’s core to that which we are essentially part of. It is about belonging to the unseen world.

Dressing the part

I enjoyed an evening at the local writing space, Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, in Glen Forrest, Perth. It was a few years ago that we dressed the part, to gain a sense of the period in which the novel is set.

I enjoyed Ailia’s journey as she grew into Songwoman. I enjoyed learning more about early Britain, during the time of the Roman invasions. It is my heritage. I hear the story whisper. My Place. It is in my bones. It is my song, too.

Is that too bold a thing to state? I think not. Tampke has created a persona which, in the absence of oral tradition, gives history a voice, and so perpetuates connectedness, that sense of belonging, in written form. She gives a fresh voice to our song and reminds us of who we are.

Another book I have responded to can be read here.

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