Snake Dreaming

By Roberta Sykes, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001, 689 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Melissa Bellanta in the June 2002 issue.

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Roberta Sykes' Snake Dreaming is a compilation of three autobiographical volumes: Snake Cradle (1997), Snake Dancing (1998) and Snake Circle (2000). Combined, these works trace Sykes' life from early childhood in the 1940s, to her graduation in the 1980s as the first black Australian with a doctorate from Harvard. (Evidently, a fourth volume is needed to cover Sykes' life since then).

The most striking feature of this three-part narrative is Sykes' indomitability. Sykes has attacked her life with ferocious energy, frequently working herself to the point of exhaustion and beyond. The length and pace of Snake Dreaming gives the impression of woman living manifold lives: freelance journalist, poet, performer, mother, activist, filmmaker, community health worker, de facto counselor and Harvard doctor. In Snake Cradle we read of Sykes' life as the black child of a single 'white' mother in a poor Townsville neighbourhood; her brutal gang rape at seventeen and the subsequent birth of her son. In Snake Dreaming we follow Sykes' stint as a cabaret dancer, the birth of her daughter and her increasingly frenetic involvement with Aboriginal activism in the Menzies era. Finally, Snake Circle is focused on her journey to and through Harvard, as well as to a new sense of self-affirmation.

In keeping with Sykes' indomitable energy, her output in literary terms alone is extraordinary. In a relatively short space of time, she produced two volumes of poetry; countless reports, speeches and articles; Mum Shirl's autobiography (ghost-written by Sykes in three days); and her doctoral thesis (written, after extensive research, in under three hundred hours). Along with the rest of her achievements, the description of these whirlwind productions invests Snake Dreaming with a sense of breathless compulsion. The work is indeed to be consumed in compulsive gallops, as fast as it no doubt was written. Reading Snake Dreaming is in fact like gulping an oversized egg, swallowing it whole and unskinned. It is an exercise hard to stop once begun -- and then, in all its inexorable detail, hard to digest once complete. How is it possible for one person to be so driven, so ungiven to the soft-boiled pursuits of leisure and procrastination like the rest of us?

One part of the answer to this question, of course, is Sykes' experience as a black woman in white Australian society. 'The racism I encountered, which all Black Australians encounter in their childhoods', Sykes tells us, 'is the breeding ground of militancy'. Her drive to bring justice to the black community is a consequence of this militancy. Another part to the answer, however, is Sykes' efforts to deal with her traumatic past. Working has long been her means of postponing introspection; of guarding herself against emotional upheaval and painful self-revelation.

Self-revelation is a complex issue for Sykes. At one point, for instance, she realises that 'over-disclosure' is a problem for many black Australians, often leading to the near-ruin of their political activism. 'We'll be at Parliament House in the morning, ten o'clock sharp, to demonstrate about this', an activist will announce -- only to be amazed at the mass arrival of police at the appointed time. Over-disclosure has other pitfalls for Sykes, constituting a continual source of betrayal in her personal life. At one point, for example, she confides in Germaine Greer the fact that she was raped. Later, she is appalled when Greer publishes this disclosure in a Playboy article. After this incident, Sykes says, 'every time I was approached by white women reputed to be feminists, suspicion and distrust arose in my mind', foreclosing intimacy. She also had fantasies of herself as an oyster, 'put[ting] down layer after layer of nacre' in order to conceal herself from the outside world.

Throughout her autobiography, Sykes' fear of self-disclosure runs beside that of her mother's. Sykes' mother identifies herself as white, and tries to prevent her children from spending time with 'Abos'. She refuses to divulge Sykes' father's identity, or to discuss the issue of her roots. She keeps up these obstinate refusals even after Sykes is harangued by both the black and white communities for her uncertain racial heritage. The crux of Snake Dreaming is Sykes' realisation that her mother's 'pain and secrecy' on this issue closely mirrors her own in relation to her son's conception. Both Sykes and her mother have wounds they wish to hide from their children, and are thus joined in a conspiracy of silence about the 'truer and uglier aspects of the world'.

The joint secrets of Syke's rape and her family history form the emotional core of Snake Dreaming. They are indeed responsible for Sykes' adoption of the snake as her personal totem. The 'silence of the serpent', she tells us, is a potent metaphor for her own life. The curious silence of the snake, however, begs a number of questions about Sykes' work. Autobiography is, after all, a genre in which one's life and self is supposed to be laid bare, where the shell of the oyster or the skin of the snake is cast away. Whilst Sykes' autobiography often focuses more on her public life than her private one, it is nonetheless concerned with a number of intensely personal revelations. It is also almost seven hundred pages long -- not to mention the rest of Sykes' publications -- a lot of talking for a woman given to silence. Snake Dreaming is in this sense an exercise in unrelenting self-disclosure, whilst at the same time an expression of hostility towards that disclosure's costs, both on a personal and a political level. What bargain did Sykes strike with herself in writing this autobiography, we wonder? How did she overcome her 'suspicion and distrust' in order to reveal so much about herself?

As readers, we are left to digest these questions as we will. Sykes says of her quest for her Aboriginal genealogy: 'as time passed I was able to acknowledge that there were some things unknowable [and] unattainable', and that it was important to swallow my tears and 'waste no more energy ... on things beyond my reach'. This bittersweet pill is what we too end up with at the close of Snake Dreaming, left to ponder its mysterious nacre and curious impermeability.

Citation

• Melissa Bellanta. 'Review: Snake Dreaming by Roberta Sykes' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 09 February 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• SNAKE DREAMING is Roberta Sykes's three volume autobiography.
  
  'Reading Roberta Sykes is to be engaged by a great tale and by an uncompromisingly fine writer.' Janine Burke, The Age
  
  'Sykes' three-volume memoir may well become and Australian classic.' Sun-Herald
  
  'It is a testament to the writing as much as to her life that the reader becomes so immersed in the story of Roberta Sykes. It is a story every Australian should read.'Anne Summers, The Age
  
  'Roberta ... that you not only survived but triumphed is an incredible tribute to you and the human spirit.'David Suzuki
  
  Together in a single volume for the first time, Snake Cradle, Snake Dancing and Snake Circle, tell of the remarkable life of Roberta Sykes, one of Australia's best-know Black activists. Published to extraordinary critical acclaim, the three books trace a life of hardship, tragedy, political activism and, ultimately, personal achievement.With a strong and unique voice, Roberta takes us on her very intimate and difficult journey from the small town racism of northern Queensland to Harvard University, where she became the first Australian Black to graduate with a doctorate. Along the way we learn of her vulnerability, her rape and the birth of her son, the dangerous and lonely life of an itinerant political activist, poverty and the constant struggle to keep her family together.Roberta's story is moving, exuberant, devastating and, ultimately, uplifting. A remarkable life. A powerful story. An exceptional woman. ion Prize, The Age Book of the Year Awards 1997, Winner, Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) Christina Stead Award 1997Winner, Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers, Nita B Kibble Awards 1998

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