The language of belonging
The opening line of Swallow the Air immediately draws us into May’s story with its conversational tone: “I remember the day I found out my mother was head sick.” In the same paragraph strong emotive language positions us as readers to sympathise with May’s mother and her story: “…Mum’s sad emerald eyes bled through her black canvas and tortured willow hair.”
In the next chapter the author further uses personal pronouns to position the reader (us) to identify with Aunty and her hilarious battle to win in the Tip Top Grocery Grab at Woolworths: “We saw her start to panic…You could see the dread…” Humour balances the awful reality that Aunty becomes a gambler and alcoholic.
Dialogue is used very effectively in Swallow the Air to show character and belonging. May and her family typically speak in broad Australian idiom and slang. Aunty in “Leaving Paradise”, for example, affectionately tells May and her brother “’Garn, get out. Go meet ya mates’” on Billy’s birthday. May is “stoked” to be asked to the movies and Billy playfully teases her: “ya reckon ya can handle that?” The informal, joking language they use with one another shows their belonging as a family.
How language is spoken is an important feature of Swallow the Air. Joyce from the Block speaks in a dialect that doesn’t respect the traditional rules of grammar and shows her outsider status. For example, she says “government putting fear on us.” Joyce peppers her conversation with Aboriginal words such as “moguls” that show her belonging to the Block, rather than mainstream white society. Her son Johnny also calls May “his wontok, his black girl ally.”
The tension, the drama of the crises May lives through is often heightened with imaginative language. As May drifts into drugs and homelessness with other aimless teenagers, her sentences become fragmented: “One-step forward, two-steps back, no home again.” Vivid imagery shows the tension of living on the streets with similes such as: “Some of us leapt out of windows like high jump horses.” Winch also uses metaphor: “They shot paint into the officer’s face, his eyes bleeding his blindness. Savages.”
Often the grim details of May’s and her friends’ and family’s harsh lives are contrasted to the beauty of Aboriginal Dreaming. While in the lock-up, May gets a message from Wyndradyne and the prose changes to poetic language: “The stars scattered free and became sea birds…carving lines and unzipping the wet universe.”
Descriptions of the land are written in particularly rich, imaginative language. Winch uses personification to make May’s experience come alive to the reader and emphasise the importance of her belonging to the land: “The river sleeps…tree bones of spirit people, arms stretched out and screaming.” Without this belonging, May and her family and friends seem lost.
May’s developing sense of Aboriginality and belonging to the earth and sea is particularly strong in the language of the last chapters. At times, May states simply: “They are part of this place…”. The chapter ‘The Jacaranda Tree’ connects “the purple-belled loveliness” of the jacaranda to the memory of her mother. The jacaranda is personified with “its milky coffee skin”, “a sacred bloody pest”.
Finally, metaphor is usedthroughout Swallow the Air to unify and link ideas of belonging and alienation. In the beginning of the novel, May finds a dead stingray that had “swallowed its struggle” and “wondered if it had suffocated in the air.” May describes the stingray as “an Angel fallen, lying on its back”, just as later May imagines Aunty “as an angel, laying out her wings beneath the satellites of the sky.” May cuts the stingray open so it is “spilling at the sides – it was free.” Later when May decides she has to find out where she belongs, she says of Johnny’s rejection of her idea: “And I leave, with our dreams spilling at our feet”.
Throughout the book, breathing is also used as a metaphor: “We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we’d forget to breathe. Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air.” Think about the title Swallow the Air – explore this metaphor in your preparation of these notes.
