Journal Article

Revisiting the Haunted Past: Christine Piper’s After Darkness

Kossew, Sue

2017

Overview

[...]the image of the 'dead trees ... their limbs stretching skywards, as if begging for forgiveness' (After Darkness 3)-while describing the immediacy of the Australian landscape-has resonance in the novel for the histories of both Australia and Japan. [...]the ideas of guilt and forgiveness are represented as complex and conflicted, involving personal as well as national histories. [...]the entire notion of national identity is brought into question in the novel. Piper's fictionalised encounter is itself based on the discourses of racism of the time (perhaps rendered understandable under the circumstances of perceived and actual invasion from the 'yellow peril'). [...]despite a long history of Japanese presence in Australia dating back to the late nineteenth century when small pearling communities settled in towns such as Broome and Darwin, and in the sugar-growing region of northern Queensland, a poster from the time declares that 'the Japanese who came to spy out our land, now attempt to return and enslave it'. [...]the novel ends with an act of retrospective revelation, perhaps even apology, by someone implicated in events that have been and still are largely unacknowledged.

• Publisher: Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
• Subject: 19th century / Apologies / Australian literature / British & Irish literature / Concentration camps / Guilt / Historical fiction / Ishiguro, Kazuo (1954- ) / Japanese literature / National identity / Native literature / Postcolonialism / Racism / Taylor, Cory / Trauma / Violence / World War II / Wright, Alexis (1950- )