Like many things vastly outside of the understanding of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic people it was perhaps not recorded or studied people studying Aboriginal languages might simply not have thought it as interesting as I do. ![]() Oral history is important to Indigenous ways of thinking, yet considered relatively worthless by Western academia. I have searched for proof of this but cannot find any except oral confirmation from people who speak an Aboriginal language, and Aboriginal dictionaries, which have only one third-person pronoun for each language. This is in stark opposition to the English speakers having trouble with a singular ‘they’. The use of ‘him’ as a non-gendered pronoun suggests that people for whom an Aboriginal language was the only language or a first language had difficulty with giving those pronouns a gender already. I cannot even imagine speakers of an Aboriginal language or Kriol complaining about the rise of the singular ‘they’ in the English language. Kriol, the language born out of the mission dormitories in Ngukurr in the Northern Territory, also has only one-third person pronoun – ‘im’, a shortened version of the English ‘him’. ![]() In many dialects of Aboriginal English, ‘him’ has long been a substitute for the original non-gendered third-person pronouns it is, in fact, used identically to the singular ‘they’ in English (or the older gender-neutral use of male pronouns in older versions of English). Gendered pronouns appear to be largely a characteristic of Indo-European (most of Europe) languages and Afro-Asiatic (North Africa and the Middle East) languages. I will keep searching for an Aboriginal language with gendered third-person pronouns, but I don’t expect to find one. The same word in Warlpiri, spoken mostly in a remote Western Desert community, is ‘nyanungu’. In the Noongar language – my ancestral tongue from the south coast of Western Australia – the word ‘baal’ means he, she, they or it essentially it has the same meaning as the singular ‘they’ in English, yet it is broader, as it is also used to refer to the inanimate. Many, if not all, Aboriginal languages in Australia do not have gendered third-person pronouns. It makes me wonder: what is the vector for hate? That might be the opposite of what you were expecting. I have never been afraid to hold hands with my girlfriend in any of the remote Aboriginal communities we have visited in the Northern Territory, north Queensland and northern Western Australia, but I have in the cities. This piece is an invitation to decolonise our minds from binary gender and the influence of religion. Texta/Gandhi is wounded and bloody, enfolded by the halo of a martyr we imagine a martyr’s death. In their piece Gandhi returns ( Self-portrait), 2013, the father of Indian anti-colonialism is recast in the non-binary space. Their self-portraits deconstruct race and gender, creating a liminal space in which those of us with an identity outside of white-straight-cis culture can find something resembling a home. ![]() TextaQueen is particularly interested in the bodies and lives of the ‘othered’ that is, brown, queer, transgender and gender-diverse people, such as themself. The works of contemporary Australian artist TextaQueen tackle questions of identity, particularly around ancestry and gender, which are unpacked in drawings in texta (felt-tipped pens).
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