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The Aranda people of Central Australia have a vibrant and ongoing tradition of ‘sand storytelling’ in which narratives are simultaneously recounted orally and performed via drawings on the ground. The narratives are plurisemiotic: they combine the human voice, a broad palette of narrative structures, and a ‘drawing space’. The latter can be marked by the finger or by sticks or pieces of wire (which also become pointers ostending the accompanying gestures of the storyteller), but it also provides a performance arena where icons of story characters formed by sticks or leaves, or of other everyday entities such as shelters, shades, windbreaks and fire pits can be positioned (Green 2014: 1-2). The ‘sand stories’ of this Indigenous people of Australia are fascinating because their plurisemiotic idiom participates in all the registers identified by Peirce. It is simultaneously symbolic (a stick may stand for a person) but also iconic (the stick is the firwood it signifies; ibid: 16-19) and also indexical (all of the signs are closely linked, spatially, causally and associatively, to both banal everyday and ceremonial places and practices). More then this, however, the semiotic elements of the ‘sand stories’ are linked via their common physical environment, which is also their material base, that of the earth, known in Indigenous speech as ‘Country’.

The earth is not merely the material space of inscription for these Indigenous storytelling traditions in a manner analogous to its existential support for traditional and modern lifestyles. ‘Country’ signifies far more than a pragmatic base for livelihood. ‘Country’ implies a sacred element derived from the fact that the land is the embodiment of the still-present Dreaming ancestors who created the earth. To that extent, the land has agency—the agency that consists in sustaining life in a never-ending process of creation. That agency in turn has implications for language.

Thus the ground, once it is reframed within the perspective of ‘Country’, is not merely a surface of inscription that can be written upon by storytellers alongside the other semiotic resources at their disposal (voice, gesture, arrangement of natural objects). Far more, the land has its own language, and this means that it is always readable—even when human actants do not inscribe or narrate it. Indigenous people are skilled in reading the signs in the landscape, made by other humans, animals, the wind, water, or indeed the ancestors themselves as they are embodied in animals or natural features. As Green (2014: 2) notes,

The use of the ground for illustrative and explanatory purposes is pervasive in the environment of Central Australia where there is ample inscribable ground, and this attention to the surface of the ground arises partly from a cultural preoccupation with observing the information encoded on its surface.

Traces of this attitude are evident when one of Indigenous author Kim Scott’s interlocutors, gesturing to an adjacent place, notes, ‘That story comes from over there’ (Scott 2005: 220). Another Indigenous storyteller, Bill Neidjie, says, ‘that story … e came from the sea / Came up Mali Bay, north from here’ (1989: 40). Stories are embedded in Country and arise out of its materiality. Thus the title of the collaborative work assembled by Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country (1984), is in no way metaphorical or figurative, as evinced in many of the placed-based stories by Paddy Roe included in the book.

In the Indigenous Australian world, the ‘land speaks’ (Berndt and Berndt 1989) in ways that are not merely attributed to it by humans. Rather, the land’s speech is coeval with its creative agency. Humans read that language of and in the land as part of their custodial responsibility to ‘Country’, a responsibility that recognizes the primacy of the land over and above human agency, the latter being devolved and derived from the former. Humans are invested with custodial duties that include narrative as well as ecological curatorship. Speaking of traditional dance, Galarrwuy Yunupingu (qtd in Ashcroft 2001: 140) says, ‘When I perform the land is within me … So I perform whatever I do on behalf of the land’; for performance one could equally read language and narration here. The curatorial relationship to the land involves narrative responsebility as a form of translation. This conception of language places it first and foremost in the natural cosmos, and sees the creative agency of language as being coeval with the creative dynamic of the physical world itself. It is a conception that stems pre-eminently from the Global South. (It also gives rise to a peculiarly Global South-derived notion of translation that is located in particular, specific sites.) The project of this book is attentive to this ‘imperative of place’ (Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018) as it issues immanent statements about itself as the primordial creative idiom and of semiotic vernaculars as offshoots of that idiom.

A residual sense of this primordial language of the natural world as the enfolding context out of which a lesser human speech emerges can also be found in non-Indigenous contexts. Such a sensibility is manifest in Thoreau’s (2016: 104) injunction uttered from Walden Pond in rural nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Thoreau notes that

while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are but themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed.

Thoreau’s claim is that the language of the world speaks without metaphor. Like those who combat translation-as-metaphor, metaphor is for him a dirty word. But the relationship between word and world that Thoreau understands as the purview of metaphor is exactly the inverse of those who combat lazy, undisciplined metaphors. For Thoreau it is when language is ‘properly’ ‘confined’ within an identity with itself that metaphor weakens and diminishes language. For him, in direct contrast to the guardians of translation purity, the ‘drift’ towards the world gives language back its true stature.

The ‘drift’ towards the language of things is not metaphorical: Thoreau means it literally. Nor is it (literally) metaphorical in its workings: the drift functions via metonymy, that is, via contiguity. The language of things is a language of direct contacts, touchings, causalities, exchanges that are material and concrete, even as they are filled with signs and semiotic processes: ‘all things … speak’. Thoreau’s notion of a universal language of things demotes ‘books, though the most select and classic, and … particular written languages’ to the role of ‘dialects’ whose status is merely ‘provincial’. But if this may look like a diminishment of language, it is also an unparalleled and far superior enhancement of language. Thoreau’s gesture, like the ‘sand stories’ of the Aranda people, locates language within a metonymic network of worldliness that awards it a greater richness, which in turn devolves from the limitless context in which it finds itself.