The Theme of Violence in Kim Scott’s Taboo

English

The Kukenarup massacre, which took place in the wake of John Dunn’s fatal spearing in 1880 on the Wirlomin Noongar people’s ancestral grounds, is the focus of Kim Scott’s 2017 book Taboo. Taboo explores the complexities of silence that follow a slaughter in the lives of Noongar people and their settler descendants. The story emphasizes that even while a massacre may take place at a specific location and be honoured with monuments, rituals, and plaques, its reality is ultimately inextricably linked to the interior lives of those who survived and their offspring. This study makes the case that Scott’s depiction of the massacre terrain is primarily extimate- a term established by Jacques Lacan to characterize the private outside of psychic reality. The idea of the extimate aids in naming the place that is regularly left out of the liberal capitalist system’s deployment of public and private realms, where social pain is relegated to a privatized interior and private violence is rendered inconsequential by meaningless public declarations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.