‘Debesa’ by Cindy Solonec
Kaya everyone, welcome to #DeadlyWABookClub! Over the next three months I’ll be analysing and celebrate the writing of Aboriginal authors from Western Australia. I’ll also be sharing some essays published in the journal JASAL, to raise awareness of the big thinkers of today who are discussing and critiquing Australian literature. This is all thanks to my writer’s fellowship from ASAL/Copyright Agency - thank you! Find out more at ASAL.
The family memoir novel Debesa (2021) by Nigena author Cindy Solonec started out as a PhD on coexistence between different cultural groups on Nigena country. But urged to tell her parent’s story through a more personal lens, an academic history paper became visceral memoir.
Debesa was the isolated station homestead of Cindy’s parents, Nigena woman Katie and Spanish migrant Frank Rodriguez. Through the fibro walls and open verandah of a true Kimberley-style house, the running of children’s feet and the buzzing of insects around kerosene lamps, we are told a story that spans different times, worlds, and cultures, defying segregation and hate, to collect and merge like an electrifying wet season storm in the form of the multicultural Rodriguez family at Debesa.
There is the history of the pastoral industry, built upon the sweating backs of Aboriginal men and women in indentured slavery, paid in rations of tea, sugar and blankets. There is the legacy of A.O Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, whose policies of stealing children would lead to the eventual meeting of Katie and Frank and the birth of Cindy herself. There is love, partnership, hard work and strong Christian values that kept a family together through thick and thin.
This morally imbued upbringing was inevitable. Cindy’s Spanish father Frank came to Australia to become a Benedictine monk, and although he decided not to take his vows in the end, he remained a strict Catholic all his life. Cindy’s Nigena mother Katie was a novitiate of the unorthodox ‘Black nuns’ at Beagle Bay mission, located north of Broome, and was equally inclined to follow the Good Word for the rest of her days.
This is a story of one family, written with care, admiration, respect and quiet gratefulness for a childhood spent on Country, with loving parents and plenty of opportunities for a young girl’s imagination and playfulness to run wild. Cindy is all too aware of the uniqueness of her situation - that their isolation kept their family relatively safe from feeling the full impact of racism, segregation and loss of learning culture. However they would never be entirely free of these things - the impact of the Stolen Generations and a strict mission upbringing for her mother Katie meant that a shroud of questions, unease and lack of full acceptance from the community remained with their family for many years.
By writing this memoir, Cindy attempts to shine a light on those foggy, complex histories. She joins a long line of Aboriginal authors seeking to ‘redress historical government definitions of Aboriginality, to reclaim pride in First Nations status, to explain the diversity of Aboriginal experience, and to demonstrate the realities and complexities of “being Aboriginal” in the 21st century (Heiss, 2014).’
In her essay ‘BLACKWORDS: Writers on Identity (2014)’, Anita Heiss also explains that apart from asserting identity publicly to educate others, writing memoir is also very much a means of catharsis and healing. For me, seeing the beautiful photo in the book of Cindy with her father Frank, trying to decipher his old Spanish diary entries, was the most poignant photo in the whole book (and there are many). This, and the foreward written by Cindy’s older brother Frank Rodriguez. These little simple additions told me so much about the love and respect the author has for her family and that the book has indeed been blessed by them.
This is a humble, respectful memoir in which the author’s sense of place and identity comes coolly off the page, strong and confident. The pain and hurt created by government policies and the histories of colonisation are indeed felt by Cindy’s ancestors, however, they don’t feel like the focus of her memoir. Love, not hate, presides over all else in this book.
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Question for your next book club: Debesa started out as an attempt to explore cross-cultural coexistence between people in the Kimberley. What examples of this did you find in the book and what do you think Cindy is trying to say about this theme?
Note: If you’re interested in reading more regular book reviews for books by Aboriginal writers, I highly recommend you follow @blackfulla_bookclub on Instagram, they are fantastic!
