Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel "Raki" (1994)
Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B. Wongar's Novel "Raki" (1994)

Summary/Abstract: This paper was presented at the sixth conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held in Strasbourg, France, from August 30 to September 3, 2002. It was contributed to the seminar on Mapping the other, mapping the self - discourses of travel from the 18th century to the present. The seminar topic corresponded perfectly with the remarkable life, and unique literary opus, of the Australian writer B. Wongar, pseudonym of the Yugoslav émigré Sreten Bozic (b. 1932). Wongar's travels through Europe and Australia, and the circumstances which lead to his witnessing (and sharing) the suffering of the dispossessed Aboriginal peoples, provided insights which he deepened through study of Aboriginal mythology and history, and dramatized in poems, plays, short stories and, most extensively, the four novels which comprise his Nuclear Cycle. Raki, the last novel in that series, is a study of two locations (the Serbian Balkans, and the Aboriginal Australia) where 'civilizing' invaders (the Ottoman Turks, the European settlers, the Nazi Germans, the NATO and UN 'peacekeepers') mapped the conquered, primitive 'others' in ways that justified their extinction. Wongar studies the ways in which overt or covert genocides are legalized, and rationalized as inevitable and desirable march of progress. He exposes the horrible nature of post-civilized barbarism, and the strategies through which it continues to spread and plague us. The paper sets his concerns in the context of similar undertakings by such authors as J. M. Koetzee, Wendy Lill, Christopher Hampton, John Pilger, etc., and points out how archetypal criticism and new historicism can shed additional light on the works of this remarkable artist.

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