Guest post by Liar’s Test author Ambelin Kwaymullina
Ambelin Kwaymullina is an Aboriginal writer and artist who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She tells stories across a range of forms, including picture books, novels, essays and poetry. She is a previous winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Aurealis Award. You can read more about Ambelin and her work at akauthor.com.au.
About Liar’s Test: A gripping YA fantasy with a deadly contest to win a crown, a fierce heroine determined to right the wrongs done to her people, and a smoldering love story that could change everything…
I am a Palyku storyteller and a practitioner of Indigenous Futurisms, a term first coined by Anishinaabe academic Grace Dillon. Indigenous Futurisms are narratives of what-could-be grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and in our deep knowledge of injustice. Our Futurisms are as diverse as Indigenous peoples ourselves. But they are also shaped by the commonalities which thread through Indigenous worldviews, such as an understanding of reality as living, interconnected whole in which human beings are but one strand of life amongst many. My latest novel is set in a completely invented reality, but there are aspects of it which are inspired by my own reality as an Indigenous person.
The Aboriginal people of Australia refer to our homelands as our Countries, and in Aboriginal Countries everything is related and everything lives. This includes animals and plants but also other life such as rock, wind, river, sun and moon. In Liar’s Test, plants are relatives, teachers and guides, and they are often wiser and more farseeing than humans. This refects the Aboriginal understanding that loss of species is loss of knowledge that keeps the world turning, because all life has a role to play in nurturing the relationships that are Country. It is also why an understanding of the world is gained through acknowledging and nurturing the multitude of relationships that are reality, rather than standing apart from them. Or as the protagonist Bell Silverleaf puts it in the book, “Only an idiot would try to understand the whole of something by moving away from it. Treesingers understood our groves by getting close. By looking after them, as they looked after us” (Liar’s Test p 211).
It is also the plants in the novel – particularly the mighty Nexus trees – who are the holders of non-linear time. In Aboriginal sytems, time moves in cycles, not lines. ‘Near’ and ‘far’ refer to relative positions in the web of relationships that is reality, but not to the passage of linear years, which do not carry anyone away from, or towards, anyone or anything else. To concieve of time in this way is at once a gift and responsibility. It is a gift because it means that action can always be taken to heal relationships, even when that damage has occurred long ago in linear terms. It is a responsibility because what each of us do matters powerfully, radiating out across what would be thought of in a linear sense as past, present and future.
I was asked recently what I wanted people to get out of the novel. It’s a question authors get asked with any new book, and its one I find difficult to answer, because to me a story is a dialogue between reader and writer. Every reader brings with them their own understandings and experiences that influences how they engage with a book and affects what parts of the narrative resonate with them and what doesn’t. I suppose I hope that readers enjoy the story and that they come away with some understanding of what inspired the novel. Because in the end, that is surely what makes stories so powerful – the opportunity to speak across worlds.
