Kunapipi XXVI:2

KEN GOODWIN
Dymphna Cusack as a Precursor of Commonwealth Literature

Although imperial and colonial discourse has existed in English since at least the sixteenth century, reaching extensive proportions in the United States both before and after Independence and in India during the nineteenth century,2 the forms of twentieth-century debate, often called postcolonialism (or, less plausibly, postcolonial theory) have altered in the direction of trying to displace the imperial power, perfidious Albion, from the centre of the discussion and to treat it contumeliously while concentrating on supposed similarities of culture among the colonies and former colonies. An early text for the first of these twentieth-century trends might be found in the half-hoping, half-despairing lines of W.B. Yeats in ‘Easter, 1916’:

For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said (Finneran182).

Novels and poems from and about the colonies tend to deal with the questions of imperialism. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is one example (see Cronin and Moore-Gilbert). Another, covering a wider set of colonies, is Herman Melville, in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi (see Rowe). But one Australian novelist and playwright, Dymphna Cusack, goes far beyond the sometimes off-hand comments found in these works to deal with the general question of colonialism, wherever found, and to anticipate much of the discourse to be found in postcolonial writing during the post-Second World War decolonisation process and later.

Shelley said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of mankind (Defence of Poetry). Al Alvarez, in his Introduction to The New Poetry says that they provide humanity with an ‘early-warning system’. Certainly, Dymphna Cusack’s The Sun in Exile, published in 1955, amply demonstrates Alvarez’s agenda. She raises, decades before most other Commonwealth novelists, virtually all the key issues in the decolonisation debate.3 In the fading light of the assertiveness, even menace, of high theory, it is sometimes difficult through the static to know whether the few persisting, unreconstructed theorists are saying that theory purports to explain existing texts or to generate new texts of a certain character. In either possibility, a persuasive case can be made that one writer, the Australian novelist and playwright, Dymphna Cusack, was a prophet, precursor, early-warning system, even unacknowledged legislator of many of the concerns of what later called itself postcolonial theory.