This is the fourth and final part in a four-part essay by Piriye Altraide. You can read the first part here and the second part here and the third part here.
Part Four
“They had looked about themselves saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. 'Yes,' they had said, 'You are right.'”
The danger occurs in the transference. When the Western ideology becomes yours [ours]. With nothing else to contradict how do we stop the process? How do we even know it is happening? The frog sits in the pot of water. The heat builds over time. Over time, the heat builds. Slowly. Both indecipherably and not indecipherably. The main factor estopping resistance is not having an alternative. Not knowing there is a world outside the pot. Not knowing truth.
“We write to create, to survive, and to revolutionise; we aim to disrupt the State’s founding order of things, to disrupt the ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’… and the colonial continuum of history… to reveal what is missing in all the gaps, cracks and in-between silences we can find” – Natalie Harkin
[It is writing oneself back into the narrative. It is replacing old narratives and discourses with new ones. It is increasing presence, whether in the media or other literature, to build resistance and receptiveness.]
“I wanted people to write down more true things about me—wanted to start writing down stories about myself, making myself real: making other people see me” – Maxine Beneba Clarke.
More mirrors reflecting us back, so that we can smile, so that we can say, “I am fine. I am beautiful. Your standards of beauty are not the only ones.” More subversion, more breakage of dominant norms and stereotypes, so that the “I am beautiful” can stand. More and more contradictions to the lies. More and more re-definition.
“[A]trocities of colonisation must not be our defining point…
[W]e can choose to live beyond the genealogical scarring… To do so, we need to be present in sites that disrupt colonial narratives. Resistance. We can transcend and subvert” (Natalie Harkin again).
More overcoming, uninventing.
More becoming.
Closing Scenes:
“And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.”
Writers and other creators of fictional worlds can no longer excuse or ignore colonialism, marginalization, and other forms of oppression. Literature can be a site of critical reflection, of critical consciousness and articulations of self – of attempts at naming and thus transforming the world. Our stories can no longer repeat the same fantasy of a White world...we must open up the discourse. ‘Diversity’ is not important – it is reality. You cannot efface reality.
But the wait has been a very long one. I battle with the young girl who became the woman who still lives inside the woman who was taught to hate herself. Two conversations and more are a-go within. If you listen, if you watch, if you read closely… you just may hear them. I’m wondering:
for the parts of me that died, for those still the walking dead, for those already destroyed by the disease of self-hate, those already crushed by the hegemony, already their own oppressors as a result of its ideology. For the parts of me still being rescued from its clutches, now that the revelations and the truth and the word have poured like lava I am wondering, with Toni Morrison, whether, at least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late...
Piriye Altraide is a Nigerian born writer, spoken-word artist and self-proclaimed dancefloor extraordinaire. Piriye’s work centres on identity, belonging and the journey to self-acceptance in the context of the African-Australian diaspora. Piriye has featured at Afro Hub, Girls on Key and for Multicultural Arts Victoria. She is a 2014 Perth Poetry Slam finalist, co-curator of RMIT’s Un-lecture series, and has had her work published in Mirrors of Africa.
This is the third part in a four-part essay by Piriye Altraide. You can read the first part here and the second part here.
Part Three
“The master had said, ‘You are ugly people’.”
[I was seeing beautiful dark-skinned women all around me. I was seeing pride, dignity, self-love and self-respect. I was realising within more and more the effects, but most importantly the falseness of a social construct. I was seeing more and more the extent of the lies, seeing just how blatantly they were lies — a realisation that made me nauseous. “How could I have believed this for so long?” And why are they still saying these things? I was going to the right spaces—more to the point, finally I was in a city where these spaces could be found. I was watching and reading the right media, online and in print. I was purposely seeking them out. A necessary separation and immersion was beginning. As Manal Younus explains in her TEDx talk, “Because maybe today, I might not feel like explaining myself and justifying myself and negotiating who I am.” Maybe not today. Maybe not ever.]
Representations are stigmatising. The effects of characters, and indeed other aspects of narrative, can be quite real. The representation of marginalised peoples, and especially of colonised or oppressed peoples by those who have inherited the benefits of colonisation or oppression, remains a fraught area. Much harm is caused by negative stereotypes. Students of writing and by extension, writers, need to understand that they are in essence inventing a discourse when they create characters. ‘Bad’ representation being accepted as the norm leads to more harmful representation, more stereotypes, more offensive caricatures, leaving a negative psychological effect on the people represented. Additionally it affects how “gatekeepers” judge a piece of media — that is, what gets allowed, what gets produced and filtered through the social ideological apparatuses, to be seen and recieved by society.
This is where the creative writing space and theory can do some of its greatest work. Literary practice and the arts offer a space to interrogate the racialised-archive and its role in forming national consciousness and identity. For readers and viewers, seeing one’s self represented on the page or screen can open up to them what's possible. As Justina Irelandreflects:
“In all of my reading and book devouring, not once did I read a book that featured a black girl or woman. There were no black girls slipping into fantastical worlds and saving prophesied kings. There were no dark-skinned girls facing down their serial killer boyfriends or black women falling in love with their millionaire bosses…
Magic, love, and heart-stopping action just didn’t happen for black girls. We didn’t exist in those spaces, in those books. It was an apartheid of a different kind, a literary genocide for black women, and by extension, an apartheid of the imagination. By reading those books, I began to believe that those things also didn’t and couldn’t exist for me.”
A different representation of ourselves. A complex representation of ourselves. A powerful representation of ourselves. A reclaimed and owned identity for ourselves. That’s what was possible.
Writing is a song. I see a new concerto. I had the vision: the whole thing falling and crashing yes an almighty crescendo, the whole thing a tsunami.
The piece moves with me.
Sometimes the answer is in not saying.
The piece goes round and circulates to the things that were always there and circulates back to the things that have been asked and that the piece is still asking. The things that are still being lived. Still being understood. You see, these are more than just dry words on a page, more than just black on white, more, than just exercises. More than just objectives. What you see is blood. And it is still bleeding and it is still healing and so—
I changed my mind, changed my tune, but just to look at everything as clarity pierces the cerebrum (the crescendo crashes it reaches the shore) till we get to see it’s everything one and the same all is within me the life the lived experience the things I’m trying to write—all of it they are piercing arrows (the answer is still not saying) they are in the soul until I find the animal within until it howls and rips through the page this broad question I can let it fly I can let it ravage and it will leave ashes and it will leave burns I am a dark-skinned woman and I am on voracious-vengeful-apocalyptic-destructive-holy-sanctified—FIRE.
~
Once Upon a Time, or
I Pretended to Be Brave
Has it ended yet? Is it over yet? Tell them to wait. Tell them a voice like theirs like ours is coming. Don’t worry, don’t go yet tell them not to cry not to try to scrub scrub scrub their skin away into the shower into the water to wonder wonder about bleaching and lightening isn’t that better isn’t that nice there’s a brand called “Fair and Lovely”; you know, childhood is lost before it begins.
Tell them to stay in the spaces that edify them and build them up don’t stay in the ones that slowly slowly chip away insidiously creeping in until there’s nothing left. You end up losing your backbone; a cancer has eaten you from inside out. Read the books about your heroes and heroines watch the good films oh wait: I’m sorry there weren’t those voices and stories and movies for you I’m sorry they still aren’t really there they got erased they gotten hidden they got overwritten white-washed out these Hidden Figures I’m sorry no one ever told you. I’m sorry your parents were too hard on you and didn’t make home home didn’t tell you any other truths to combat the lies you internalised the bullets swallowed I guess they didn’t know any better, either. At that time they were just trying to survive. But I’m coming just wait don’t disintegrate yet don’t fall into yourself like the stars no longer shining. Tell the little ones the ones after me the ones now that follow that will look to me to us—tell them never to be quiet tell them never to accept the bullets but to throw them back never lick the hand that beats you don’t try to be palatable, “acceptable”, in an acceptance that will never accept you. But yes yes maybe maybe that’s what I’ll do I’ll come home I’ll come straight home and I’ll write and I’ll write and I have no choice I have to make the words be and this mess— it’ll produce something and I’ll write and I’ll write that’s what I’ll do I’ll come home I’ll stay up I’ll write and it will do you good please don’t disintegrate I hope pleez I tink it may be alrdy b happning pls wayt I primise ders anthr wy to be u cn b u cn bcome….
~~~
Flying: She had to go back to Perth for this one. She had to take herself someplace she could hear her soul speak. Her mind has moved: She’s at the beach. The sand is making imprints on her palms. She’s trying to balance a notebook on her knees. The wind is blowing, but... hear that…? She gets lost in the sea. Gets lost in the 'hushhh… hushhh…', folding over and over; the waves tapping the shores. She gets lost in the water. A blue so strong it hurts.
You can read the first part here, the second part here and the final part here.
Piriye Altraide is a Nigerian born writer, spoken-word artist and self-proclaimed dancefloor extraordinaire. Piriye’s work centres on identity, belonging and the journey to self-acceptance in the context of the African-Australian diaspora. Piriye has featured at Afro Hub, Girls on Key and for Multicultural Arts Victoria. She is a 2014 Perth Poetry Slam finalist, co-curator of RMIT’s Un-lecture series, and has had her work published in Mirrors of Africa.
This is the second part in a four-part essay by Piriye Altraide. You can read the first part here.
Part Two
“And they had each accepted it without question.”
As this is the pernicious nature of the ideologies. That internalised form of social control, making certain views seem ‘natural’ or invisible, such that they hardly seem like views at all, just ‘the way things are’. Values and assumptions implicit, often unrecognised, yet permeating all the artefacts and culture of a given time, entering and shaping our national discourse.
And they can eventually destroy you — a slow, psychological death. If you are lucky, the death may be mitigated earlier than later. Or you may die, and not know you have died, or deny that you have died and keep pressing on as if your way of “dealing with it” is okay, and then much later discover the death, and then begin the journey of trying to recover and resurrect that which had died, and grieve for wasted time. But how will you know if nobody tells you? What does one do when life commences without even a chance for the ego? Begins in rejection, on-going humiliation and self-loathing? These are the "the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident” (Toni Morrison).
The issue of racialized beauty intersects and interrelates with that of representation, of whose umbrella it sits under. [Here, the hydra is at work]:
There is a clear link between representation and perception. A lack of 'diversity' not only influences how diverse peoples see themselves, but how they are seen (or not seen) by those of the dominant culture. It is not simply about the amount of representation but the type — and recurrence of that type. The fact that there is a long history of distortion of marginalised identities in narratives written about the (so-called) “other” does not help. Literature (and by extension other creative/narrative mediums) can be windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors. As windows, they offer "views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange". They are also sliding glass doors, through which the reader can "walk through in imagination to become part of that world". And they can be mirrors, transforming human experience and reflecting it back to the reader, allowing them to see their lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. This is why then, "reading (and viewing) become a means of self-affirmation. We seek ourselves, our mirrors, in books, story and literature."
Ironically and paradoxically, fiction can be most powerful for this because of its necessary 'truth'. It can be easy to say ‘truth’ is conceptually out of vogue, that Roland Barthes’s author is dead, and the text is now about reader response. Even its name announces artificiality, yet it must somehow be true to hold the interest of its readers, telling them about experiences both imaginary and relevant to their own lives. It is this deeper “truth” that is so poignant. The power of this truth, the power of stories to move audiences, is what allows the building of empathy, the bridging of gaps, the illuminating of suppressed and erased voices. The understanding of lived experiences that are very manifest, very now, very here. Writing provides the opportunity to enter another’s world. Indeed the call to arms is essentially this: all narrative has the power to impact culture and individuals...it's up to creators to choose.
And as creators we will choose. Most hallowed be the taking up of tools, the reclaiming of stories, the language we will express them in. Most hallowed be understanding the lived experiences. Translating them into language. Making them palpable. What we may call:
Theory: as a role player in the transformation of human societies.
Theory: as a means to uninvent the world.
Theory: behind a movement. Behind art. Art: an active element in such change.
Theory overlap theory intersect theory cross over theory—
deliver the struggle of men and women to free themselves.
Most hallowed be our words. “Writing is indeed one of the most powerful tools of protest which can allow us to transcend, to live passionately, imaginatively and creatively beyond embodied and genealogical pain” writes Natalie Harkin. “Our words are weapons, our books are time bombs, already breaking down the many barriers on their way across the world”.
To resist. To uninvent. To empower. To take control.
To write our own bodies. To possess our own voices. To re-label. To remake.
To “speak loud, speak unsettling things and be dangerous...” – Natalie Harkin
I am a dark-skinned woman. My skin is kissed by the sun. They say, the good words say, it is Nubian queen. It is goddess skin. Non-ageing, exotic beauty. I am a dark-skinned woman.
~
A good chat. A long chat. A complex chat, collapsing and unmerging and folding and unfolding over itself. It-Self.
~
I am overcoming. I am becoming. I’m in the process.
~
It’s a daily psychological battle.
~
There are continuous narratives, obvious and not so obvious narratives. Subliminal and pronounced narratives. Narratives in TV shows and in novels. In movies, as well as plays and video games. In advertising just as much as social and new media. In social conventions and attitudes and behaviours and snatches of dialogue.
Sometimes I’m kicking underwater.
“But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back… re-map events and landscapes, piece together lives
fragmented
heal
wounds”
– Natalie Harkin
Healing is two steps forward, two steps back. I’m assessing the damage. You need to be rescued before you can breathe. But first you need to know you’re drowning.
I am a dark-skinned woman. Doubly oppressed—subjugated by patriarchal family, dysfunction, subjugated by society in two and more parts: Stay there. Don’t move—we want you to stay. down. there. Which means it is hard for me to extricate which part of my past is playing up when I sit nervous in a café, warding off a panic attack, waiting for my coffee. Thinking the man next to me is judging me. Thinking me stupid and insecure and weird and horrible and undesirable and unattractive. Noticing the awkward placement of my bag, my stumblings, my indecisive, uncertain movements. That he is just singing the same song as everybody else, the ‘forever tune’ placed in my head: You are undesirable you are bottom of the ladder bottom of the ladder bottom of the ladder.
~
(And halt. I’m thinking):
… Which isn’t to say this is every dark-skinned woman’s experience. Which isn’t to say it’s always or has always been like this, even for me. It’s never one way or straight forward or easy or “one size fits all”. Be careful of the single story, dear Reader. Again, the nuances. The individualities.
But this is to say that we, women like me, are all impacted by the same hegemony and colonialist attitudes and perceptions in different ways and to varying extents. Some worse than others, some being able by circumstance and placement and fortune to be shielded or supported more so than others. By the fortune of exposure to better education about themselves. By community, family, more tolerant country or society.
And,
This
Is… also what I’m thinking (excuse my mind as it runs ahead. Or don’t excuse it):
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, this piece— poem-ish, story-ish, essay-ish— will be swallowed up by them and maybe move them ever so slightly but then disappear. The fatigue in trying to appeal to wider society. Whiter society. As a good woman in a good space said, “All that energy wasted on trying to change other people’s minds, we can spend on building up ourselves.” That’s what I think that’s what I think that’s what I think. And even what I have produced, late and jaded and broad it’s… well I’m not entirely sure what it is. But…
I should be here tomorrow. Early in the morning, perhaps. I’ve seen the start of something. I’ve seen the start of many things. Sometimes they stay, in my mind, as something true. Something self-evident. Such that it will negate the “truths” of before. Sometimes they don’t stay and they shift and stir. Saplings in the wind. Sometimes get bent and trampled.
And so I sit.
You can read the first part here, the third part here and the final part here.
Piriye Altraide is a Nigerian born writer, spoken-word artist and self-proclaimed dancefloor extraordinaire. Piriye’s work centres on identity, belonging and the journey to self-acceptance in the context of the African-Australian diaspora. Piriye has featured at Afro Hub, Girls on Key and for Multicultural Arts Victoria. She is a 2014 Perth Poetry Slam finalist, co-curator of RMIT’s Un-lecture series, and has had her work published in Mirrors of Africa.
He doesn’t notice his eyes wandering across my body. He pauses on my sharp jawline, catching a glimpse of stubble so golden blonde you can only see it when sunlight hits it. His eyes travel down towards my breasts and then back up to my face.
Before I look at him in the eye, I take him in: his white face, his short cropped hair and the sunnies dangling from the buttonhole in his shirt. For a moment he holds my gaze, confused and hungry.
He waits for something to give it away – my voice, my posture, my expression. I look back. Am I the Minotaur to him – hairy and horned, muscular and violent?
~~~
In The Oppositional Gaze, bell hooks writes:
I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown ups [...] Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents “Look at me when I talk to you.” Only, the child is afraid to look.
Growing up, I knew I’d really done it when my mother would stop mid-sentence, leave the house and slam the door behind her. She’d be gone anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours. Then she’d come back, take her seat in the lounge and summon me from wherever I had been hiding. I would sit down across from her and she would light up a cigarette and stare; her lips razor thin, her hands working ritualistically back and forth, ferrying the cigarette to her mouth. Smoke curling out of her nose.
Wilful, I would stare back; petulant, defiant, defensive, terrified. As insolent as I was, the act of looking back burned, every time.
~~~
For a woman to look back at a man – to hold the gaze of a man who is looking at her – it is both a challenge and an act of shaming. It demands of him the question: who are you to look at me?
On a train home one night, a man began to watch me. It was a type of watching that, by design, was supposed to fuck with me, to put me in my place. Slumped comfortably in his seat, arms crossed and legs spread, he looked at me like this was a theatre – like he’d payed for me to perform and he was here to get his dollar’s worth; he was the type who would write a bad review, no matter what you did.
I looked back at him, something that usually works to shame someone who looks, but he didn’t turn away. I held his gaze as long as I could before my anxiety consumed me like a wave. I went into my backpack, pulled out my sketchpad, and began drawing him openly. Caught in my gaze, he looked away. Unsatisfied and furious, I kept sketching. He shifted in his seat. He began glancing at me furtively. By the next stop, he got off the train.
~~~
I learnt the power of watching people from my mother. She would surreptitiously snap photos of people at the beach swimming, leaping over the waves or picking up shells. The terror of her being caught doing this always consumed me, but I was equally appalled by the prospect of her subjects’ discomfort with the knowledge that they were being watched.
Growing into my own artistic practice, I now realise that creating work from people on the street; of sketching them, of painting them; is one that is incredibly common. This is not just among my peers, who have readily confessed to sketching people in public as I do, but one look at the work of Adrian Tomine, for instance, and it’s impossible to imagine a world where he, too, is not snatching glances at the people around him.
To paraphrase bell hooks, critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when there is push back against the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking – when there is participation in a broad range of looking relations by contesting, resisting, and inventing our own gaze. This resistance comes from being conscious in the act of looking.
When that man watched me on the train, he was making explicit for both of us the act of his looking. I was the object to his subject. When I returned the gaze by sketching him, the subject-object relationship was not reversed, necessarily, but matched. Through my gaze as an artist, I was enforcing my agency as a human and asserting my reality as the centre of my own existence outside of his. Like Medusa, I was capturing him, turning him into stone.
~~~
The phrase is ‘to take a look’ because there is an act of taking. Whenever I have been caught looking at a subject I am sketching, I am wholly aware of the power exchange that happens.
Foucault, in adapting Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon – a disciplinary institution in which inmates are under constant surveillance, unable to tell when they are being watched and, as such, behave as though they are being watched at all times – expanded the implications of what the feeling of being watched does to us to our concept of society and to the ways we behave in public:
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
In other words, to know you are being watched catapults you into a space of hypervisibility. The person who is watching you becomes a stand-in for the whole of society.
That feeling of being watched, if it is constant, means that you eventually police yourself; you become aware of your actions and any subsequent fallout that you may incur from them. You ‘watch yourself’ – a saying that my mother would give me if I was trying her patience.
~~~
A woman passes me at reception and waggles her eyebrows at me, telling me I’m handsome. On her way back out she catches sight of my curving chest and calls me beautiful, then handsome, boy then girl. Flustered, she has accidentally queered herself on me. I am now the object of upset, the thing she is attracted to and the thing that troubles attraction.
By virtue of my existence alone she has revealed herself to me and to herself. In a spiralling fashion, she is surprised by my body, then by her attraction to me. She suddenly must contend with whatever that surprise might say about her. Finally, like a gymnast nailing a complex finish, she realises that her surprise can be read on her face and she finishes with a cocktail of embarrassment and shame.
As a result, she oscillates between being apologetic and flustered before she hurries out the door. Women who queer themselves on me almost always go through this spiral of confusion and self revelation. They are ashamed to be attracted to me, so I, by proxy, am an object of troubled attraction.
Having my gender bend and shift through time, a look – and my relationship to looking – bends and shifts with it. Unlike this instance, most interactions yield no clear indication on which side of the gender-fence I am being placed. The absence of this crucial information puts me constantly at a disadvantage as, perhaps without being aware of it, all our interactions are contextualised by gender.
For instance, where sustained eye contact from a man used to be most often about sex, it is now more likely to be in relation to violence.
~~~
It is late Saturday morning and I am on my way to town. The train is busy, but not packed. A man takes the seat next to me. I feel the hairs of my leg stroke gently against his. I feel his body stiffen next to me and he shifts minutely away from me in his seat. He gets up and waits at the door for the next stop. He makes a point to stare at me. I can see him through my sunglasses, out of the corner of my eye. A look from me would acknowledge this infinitesimally small, sexually laden communication. A look from me would almost certainly end in a fist to the face.
If only I looked how I used to. I miss that desirability capital that I had, if only to manoeuvre around the relentless demands of men.
~~~
To both men and women, I am a chimera, a gender hybrid, a technological leap, a freakish monstrosity. People look at me for longer and with very little shame now. I am a thing, to them; a puzzle they happened across that they use to keep their mind busy on the way to work.
These days, when I catch them, neither men nor women look away. They stare like they’re in a stupor, slack jawed and hazy eyed. I pass them on the street and feel their eyes on me, that familiar burning as their gaze slips down my body and back up again. I will sometimes beat them away with my eyes twice, three times as they creep back for seconds and thirds.
Who are you to look at me?Who are you to look at me?
When women look, I feel isolated by their hostility. As I am, I am ostracised from the sisterhood. Before, when a man was stepping into our space or leaving his bags all over the seats, we would catch each other’s eyes and roll our own in a quiet solidarity. If I saw a girl or woman uneasy, I could signal to her with a look, asking if she wanted help and she would feel comfortable signalling back yes or no. Now, these interactions are grenades. To exist in this body is like to have all the passwords to a kingdom I am no longer welcome in.
It is strange to acknowledge it, but I could feel these shifts in the interactions as my shoulders stretched out and my jawline widened. They started noticing the thick, fine hair on my legs, my shaped, elegant nails. They noticed the light makeup and the product in my hair that keeps it swept back. They noticed the middle-aged-lesbian Birkenstocks and the frat boy chinos on my neither-of-those-things body.
Knowing what I do, when women look at me and I look back hard, I find it fraught. I know how I straddle the fence of man and woman. When I look back at women, it’s never a clear-cut. The linear line between underdog and overlord is corrupted. They have power over me, but they don’t know that. If they think I am a man, then I am that man on the train. I am threatening. If they read me as freak, then the power they hold won’t feel like power to them as they will fear me. They’ve unwittingly cast me as ‘the monster’ and my disgust at this role will only ever be interpreted as aggression.
Because of this, I am in a no-win situation. By not pushing back against the people who look at me, I feel complicit in my own victimisation.
~~~
My body is a site of constant mourning. Under a stranger's eyes, it is the site where my womanhood dies and my manhood miscarries. In the eyes of others, I am offered only narratives of the monster.
Coming into my gender transition felt like experiencing a siren song. The rocks were jutting out in the surf, sharp and apparent to everyone but I was compelled forward despite myself. I find myself still swimming forward, still chasing that song. No one knows really if there is something inherent in gender. We only know that – cis and trans people alike – there is something overwhelming and compulsive drawing us to the things we are. Being non-binary in one’s person feels like that satisfaction you feel when unravelling a jumper by pulling on a stray thread. Being non-binary in body feels like I am everything and nothing to the world. A god of body and gender, and a monster of the highest decree. I stand between strangers and they look at me, skittish, unsure, defensive and afraid. They see something in me, but they are not sure what. They want to touch my face and they are terrified of doing so.
It is clear, now. I am the Sphinx.
From the Collection 'Men Who Look at Me' by Fury
Fury is a despicable changeling creature birthed from the sulphur swamps of greater New Zealand, currently inhabiting the desolate desert landscapes of Melbourne’s CBD. It is not advised to read their guileful work as their words encourage restless sleep.
It’s a commonplace to say that the path to book publication in Australia for most emerging writers is not just a long one, but also often quite opaque and mysterious. Sure, there are writing courses to finesse your craft, and a number of fine journals, magazines and websites to write for and build up some publication history. But what do you do with that book-length manuscript that you’ve been working diligently on? Are you feeling that it might actually be ready for submission?
'By Numbers' is a recurring feature that appears in our print magazine – where we use numbers in a snapshot way to try and reveal the true breadth and depth of an issue. This ‘By Numbers' on the Australian Prison System, using the most recent data available at that time, was originally published in March 2017 in Issue 33 of our print magazine.
Number of adult prisoners nationwide: 38,845 Of female prisoners: 3,094 Percentage by which Indigenous women are more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous women: 21.6% Number of Australian Prisons: 101 Year Borallon Correction Centre, the first private prison in Australia, opened in Queensland: 1990 Increase in Australia’s prison population since 1990: 171.5% Number of privately owned and operated prisons run by private contractors (the GEO Group, G4S, Serco) today: 9 Percentage of prisoners in private prisons: 18.5% (the highest per capita in the world) Penalty fee set by NSW government for prison operators following a death in custody: $100,000 Average daily cost of incarcerating a prisoner: $224 Annual net operating expenditure on corrective services nationwide: $3.7 billion Percentage of adult prisoners who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander: 27% Of offenders in juvenile detention: 59% Percentage of adult Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders within the total population of Australia: 2% Percentage of prisoners previously incarcerated: 50% Of Indigenous prisoners: 76% Australian prison population awaiting sentence: 1/3 Number of prisoner deaths from unnatural causes in 2015: 17 Of Indigenous prisoners: 4 Estimated number of deaths since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: 340 Proportion of prison entrants whose highest year of completed schooling was below Year 10: 32% Of Indigenous prison entrants: 40% Percentage of eligible prisoners participating in education and training courses: 31.6%
Number of full-time teachers’ jobs cut from NSW jails in 2016: 132 The number of escapes from secure prisons: 3 Proportion of prison entrants who were unemployed in the month prior to imprisonment: 48% Who were homeless: 25% Proportion of prison entrants who had one or more of their parents/carers imprisoned while they were a child: 17% Of Indigenous prison entrants: 26% Proportion of prison entrants who have children who depend on them for their basic needs: 46% Who have been told by a medical practitioner that they have a mental health disorder, including drug and alcohol abuse: 49% Who have ever intentionally harmed themselves: 23% Who, in the last 12 months, consulted with a medical professional while imprisoned: 57% Who needed to consult with a health professional while imprisoned but did not: 15% Who, on release, have a referral or appointment to see a health professional: 50%
Sources: The Australian Bureau of Statistics ‘Prisoners In Australia, 2016’ report; the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s ‘The Health of Australia’s prisoners 2015’; Chapter 8 of the Australian Government Productivity Commission’s ‘Report on Government Services 2016’; The Guardian’s reports on Ms Dhu’s inquest; ‘Schedule 8: Key Performance Indicators and Performance Linked Fee’ of Corrective Services NSW’s contracts for working with CSWNSW; Right Now, ‘Private Prisons in Australia: Our 20 year trial’; ABC News ‘NSW teachers rally outside Parliament over cuts to jail jobs’.
What happens after Yes? I am at the State Library, drowning in rainbows. The number is announced. A friend bursts into tears and says,
“40% of this country hate us,” and a woman with grey hair and violet eyes puts a hand on her shoulder and tells her she is loved. I hold her. I have nothing. There is confetti everywhere. People are cheering.
This series gets harder to write as the weeks tread past me. The pain of the last little while becomes a smear compared with Manus, with another black death in custody, with another lone gunman.
I keep doing small things that feel like big things: two weeks ago the sticker on my letterbox; this week going to Hares & Hyenas to buy a rainbow flag which now hangs in Zach and Benji’s window; moving piles of books around to clear surfaces at home; resting in my post-infection fatigue.
Red things: buoys, fire trucks, fire hydrants, fire blankets, stop lights, letter boxes emergency signs, power and abort buttons. They are red because you are supposed to notice them – and at first glance. The colour signals danger, demands attention.
My hatred is not academic but visceral, producing a distinct physiological reaction – a pounding heart, sweating, shaking and, in extreme cases, fainting. I wish this were an exaggeration, but what would be the point of that?
Recovery is slow and I don’t have the energy to make butter icing. Instead I buy ready made vanilla icing and blue food colouring. The icing is too heavy for the cake, which crumbles itself off into the thick blue. I add hot water to the icing and try dropping one of his feet into the bowl and turning it over and over with a fork. He nearly loses half a foot that way. I pull the bits of foot out and press them against the bottom of his legs until they semi stick. The icing is the same colour as horseshoe crab blood. Robert is collapsing. I take skewers and push them down through his head, along his legs, across his hips. Robert is collapsing. I break three skewers in half and shove them into his back. I text my girlfriend to come now, before he falls apart completely.
Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali poet, author and editor.
For many within Australian literature, she is a sibling, mentor, friend, platformer and tastemaker. Ellen is at the forefront of an Indigenous literary renaissance, and builds for others to follow. Her work, on the page and off, echoes across the very architecture of writing in Australia today and will echo long into the future.
To bring all this resonance into the public eye in the most authentic and sincere way we know, we asked this lot to tell you about Ellen in their own words, as the person and as the creative force.
(Note: the usual contributor fee for an online piece has been donated to the Indigenous Literary Foundation, and TLB has also donated the same amount of money to the ILF, because that organisation is so terrific.)
When I first encountered Ellen van Neerven's work in 2014, I knew immediately I was in lyrical and capable hands. Ellen's short fiction collection Heat and Light was released around the same time as my book Foreign Soil. I'll always be grateful to have had Ellen on the writing trail with me that year, and I feel privileged to have launched Heat and Light in Melbourne. One of my most cherished memories is being named a 'Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist' that year with Ellen, alongside Omar Musa, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Alice Pung: writers from diverse backgrounds working powerfully and successfully across multiple genres. Ellen's prose is at once poetic and incisive; both raw and restrained. Ellen's poetry is soulful; unpretentious; complicatedly lean. Ellen's non-fiction is sharp, deeply meditated, and disarming. Of all the talented young writers in Australia, for me it is Ellen who best represents all that Australian literature was, is, and will surely be, in the decades to come. –Maxine Beneba Clarke
(Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and slam poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2013 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award, the 2015 Indie Award for Debut Fiction, and the 2016 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction. Her latest poetry collection Carrying The World (Hachette) was released in May 2016, and her memoir The Hate Race (Hachette) was published in August 2016. She writes for the Saturday Paper.)
I stand with Ellen van Neerven, my friend and colleague. As a writer and poet she has contributed to the beauty and value of Australian literature. As an editor she has aided and empowered others in the further development of their work. Further, as an Indigenous woman she has shown grace and strength in the face of the racism inherent in the culture of this country and the daily sexism all women must face. –Claire G. Coleman
(Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar author. Her debut novel Terra Nullius was edited with the assistance of the black&write! project editing team and project senior editor Ellen van Neerven.)
When I opened up Comfort Food I drifted into a variety of worlds. From Coffee in Toronto to West End bars, Ellen has a way with words that is both beguiling and real. But there is one thing that sets her apart from so many other writers and that’s her uncanny ability to see through our flawed country with scary accuracy. In Chips she proclaimed ‘what is happening with the dialogue of this country’ a statement which requires urgent attention in light of recent events. –Timmah Ball
(Timmah Ball is an emerging Ballardong Noongar writer whose work is
influenced by Ellen van Neerven. She has been published in Meanjin, Island, Westerly and The Lifted Brow. Ellen has played an integral role in her development offering her advice, support, opportunities and most importantly friendship.)
Before I read Heat and Light, I first heard Ellen in conversation with Tony Birch at Deakin Edge, and was intrigued by this young, quiet woman with the monumental writing voice.
Reading Ellen was a revelation, here were stories laid bare and vulnerable; they stirred so much emotion in me that I was shook. Ellen has a way that solicits confidence in my own voice and story telling. I had the pleasure of being in one of her masterclasses at the Blak & Bright festival and felt nurtured, safe and encouraged. Then I got to enjoy the launch of Comfort Food at Readings Carlton, listen to Tony and Ellen in conversation again and couldn’t wait to sit down with it.
Tony read one of her poems; and it prompted me to keep striving for my own storied and writing dreams, to one day read at Readings myself. Because of Ellen commissioning me to write for The Lifted Brow in 2016, this November I will get to read from one of these stories that Ellen edited ever so kindly and gently, and I get to be where she showed me was possible.
Thanks Sister girl. –Paola Balla
(A Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman, Paola Balla is an artist, curator and writer who lectures at Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre, VU where she is a PhD candidate researching Aboriginal women’s art and resistance, and is the inaugural Lisa Bellear Indigenous Research Scholar. Ellen van Neerven is an early supporter of Paola’s work and commissioned a vignette of stories for The Lifted Brow from her which has exposed her work to a broad audience and has led to numerous publication and speaking opportunities. Paola’s work also appears in Etchings Indigenous, Peril Magazine, Weather Stations for Tony Birch and the Victorian Writer.
In 2015, Paola curated Executed in Franklin Street at City Gallery, and in 2016 co-curated Sovereignty at ACCA with Director Max Delany.)
I remember Ellen van Neerven reading aloud her poem, Chips, the one that begins, “white people really bore me sometimes” and I felt anxious and I felt scared and I felt wounded and I also remember thinking, It’s good that I’m feeling anxious and scared and wounded, it’s good that I am feeling not safe, so while the largely senseless and ignorant voices of those young people attacking her on social media have made me furious, I’m also glad that her work has made those students feel pissed off and not safe, art can be many things and do many things and one of the many things that it must keep doing is to disturb us and Ellen writes words that make me breathless at their beauty and she also writes words that make me scared. The white noise on Facebook will disappear back into the vacuum it was shat out of, but please, keep writing the words that make me breathless, keep writing the words that make me scared. Please, keep making us feel unsafe. –Christos Tsolkias
(Christos Tsiolkas is an Australian writer who has learnt about poetry and tennis from Ellen.)
Being lucky enough to be a recipient of the Black & Write program in Brisbane, Ellen started as my teacher and ended up being a wonderful friend. Ellen inspired me to write, to edit, to be greater than I can be, and I’ve seen her gentle-natured way of guiding others to do the same.
Her tender temperament and sharp mind are found in all that she writes, and I particularly found traces of her cerebral Ellen-ness quietly dabbed throughout Heat and Light, giving each lucky reader such a unique and significant insight into a mind so great. Because Ellen is magic, and no one else I’ve ever read or met comes close to this, and it’s such a valuable gift to be her friend and just talk to her about the world, because her presence in it makes us remember that there is still magic out there. –Carissa Lee
(Carissa Lee is a young Wemba-Wemba writer and actor based in Narrm (Melbourne). An active member of the First Nations Australia Writing Network (FNAWN), her writing has appeared in Uni Junkee, The Melbourne Writers Festival, The Conversation, Lip Mag, and Book Riot. When she’s not writing or acting, Carissa is also a research assistant at the University of Melbourne, while completing her Master’s Degree in Indigenous Performing Arts.)
I remember the first time I read Ellen van Neerven’s book, Heat and Light, and I was struck by the freshness and the strength of her writing. It was immediately apparent that she was a fearless new Indigenous voice. She has the gift of every great writer – the ability to get to the truth – the authenticity – of the world she writes about. Her following work, Comfort Food, was a further revelation. Her eye for detail, her ability to capture the essence of a moment or the heart of a deeply complex situation are evidence the deftness of her craft. She is so accomplished it is easy to forget that she is so young. I also admire the way her genuine love of her culture permeates throughout her work. Over the last two years I have worked with and interviewed Ellen on several occasions and I have always been struck by her gentleness, generosity and wisdom. She is a beautiful, wise soul. –Larissa Behrendt
(Larissa Behrendt is Chair of Indigenous Research at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a writer and filmmaker and the host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio.)
I’ll keep it short and sweet: Ellen is the brightest star in my generation of authors. She’s a brilliant writer and poet who has that rarest combination of talent, dedication, and kindness. She is unfailingly generous with her time and her knowledge, the former of which is limited and the latter expansive. I’m truly grateful to have her as a peer and a friend. –Omar Sakr
(Omar Sakr is an Arab Australian poet who met Ellen nearly three years ago through the Sweatshop collective at a writers’ dinner in Bankstown. They watched a soccer match after and have been friends ever since.)
Comfort Food and Heat and Light are extraordinary collections, a reflection of an extraordinary writer & poet. Ellen’s gentle and caring personality belies a fierce intellect – a gifted & powerful poet, writer, editor & thinker. Someone who deeply cares and builds platforms for others.Someone whose belief in one’s work, caries it over from the shadow into sunlight. Someone whose gentle words can soothe that nagging writer self-doubt. I’ve just finished working with her on a story for The Brow’s “The Feeder’s Digest”. I was so honoured with her invitation, it was an opportunity to deepen a friendship, an opportunity to know my writing better – a mirror that only an editor with incredible skill is able to gift a writer.
While words can hurt, words can also heal, and I hope that this amazing tribute sends powerful ripples that shines a light on how extraordinary Ellen van Neerven is. –Lian Low
(Lian Low writes across performance text and creative non-fiction. From 2009-2016, Lian undertook various editorial and board member roles with Asian Australian arts and culture online magazine Peril.)
Ellen and I were together in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program (WrICE) in
the Philippines and then in Australia, along with ten other writers from around Asia and the
Pacific. I had the privilege of listening to her speak not only of her creative process and of
writing issues, but also of social issues that matter to her as an advocate, as a citizen. I was
struck by how she interweaves these concerns seamlessly, and can see how this interweaving
manifests artfully in her writing, in the way she interacts with the other writers. At this year’s
Melbourne Writers Festival, during the On Revolution panel, I was deeply moved when, instead
of reading her own piece, she chose to use her allotted time instead to read from my essay on
living with trauma (as a writer in a country like the Philippines), where it is not so easy at the
moment to assert political beliefs and expressions of dissent, while remaining sharp and
relevant aesthetically. Her generosity, her profound understanding of the issues that we all
share, across borders, has been an inspiration to me. –Daryll Delgado
(Journalist, fictionist, and mango lover, from the Philippines).
Ellen’s work speaks for itself. Wherever I go, it’s checked out of libraries and the last copy in the bookstore has the oiliness of a well-thumbed favourite. I have conversations about contemporary Australian writing sometimes; people tend to find their way to ‘Have you read Heat and Light? Phwoar! Wow, you’ve just. You’ve got to read it. The latest is Comfort Food, and you’ve just gotta. You’ll never read anything like it –'. They’re right, and who can ever tire of talking about it?
Ellen would be excused if this genius made a monster of her, but it never has. Her generosity is unbounded and very humbling. When I talk with poets and writers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, it’s hard to avoid discussing how much Ellen has directly influenced our work – offering encouragement, abatement, advice, making space and ever urging us on. Ellen is already so much bigger than her works, which are themselves such looming figures on the shelves. She is in the work of others in a way that is never going to be properly unknotted. I have no idea what contemporary Australian literature would look like without Ellen. I suspect it would be hellish, invulnerable and boring. –Alison Whitaker
(Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet and law scholar. She worked with Ellen van Neerven as a black&write! fellow. They first met on a humid night in Brisbane, where they walked around to find pizza and to talk poetry – managing only to do one.)
My girlfriend puts two YES stickers and a YES poster on the door of her shared office at uni one day, and the next day discovers that they’ve been torn down. She gets eleven posters, and plasters them all over both of the office doors, and every day, as she treads up the stairs with the doors in sight, she counts them.
I am in Ballarat library running a ‘Ways to Write the Body’ workshop as part of their queer arts and cultural festival, Frolic. I am in Ballarat and there are eight of us in this room, writing our bodies. Most of us have on yes badges or rainbows of some kind.
While I am a first-generation migrant, I have never lived in an ethno-burb further than seven kilometres from a CBD, and therefore struggle with the tourist-who-looks-like-a-resident complex when I travel on the Liverpool train line for work. In the case of this new role, I was looking forward to being immersed in what I perceived as the vibrant cultural diversity of Sydney’s south-west, but wasn’t prepared for its working class dimensions. Diversity, you see, doesn't usually appear as beautifully packaged baklava topped off with pistachios. In the sprawling suburbs of ‘global’ cities, its layers are messy and incongruous, but usually still delicious.
When it comes to the spoken-word theatre genre, Black Honey Company never fails to deliver. As originators of the genre in Australia, Candy Bowers and Kim ‘Busty Beatz’ Bowers create innovative work. Each production speaks to the zeitgeist, giving their audiences the language and frameworks to articulate socio-cultural phenomena that we are either oblivious to (as a consequence of denial or privilege) or still grappling to find the words to articulate. As creators of cultural products in a context where the violence that is part of a colonisation perpetrated through continuing genocide, Black Honey Company produces work that simultaneously heals our colonial wounds, exposes the insidious ways in which neo/colonialism functions and has us all laughing raucously while pissing our pants.
Earlier this year, I flew from Melbourne to Sydney and made the long drive out to Campbelltown Arts Centre to see ONE THE BEAR: A FAIRYTALE FOR THE HIP HOP GENERATION. I had worked on the script as one of the dramaturgs but I was also keen to experience the story unfold – not just as words on the page but with the costume, set design, soundtrack, choreography and the rapport between two triple threat and Afro-descended Australian artists, Nancy Denis and Candy Bowers. Written and devised by Candy Bowers, One The Bear manages to challenge you to think critically; the power of comedy is intelligently fused with drama and a keen understanding of both local and global historical context. As with their other works (Australian Booty, The MC Platypus & Queen Koala Show and Hot Brown Honey), since watching One The Bear I feel better; I am better equipped with language to name the violence I experience and therefore I am better placed to engage in the conversations that are a fundamental starting point for anyone engaged in shifting culture and raising consciousness.
One The Bear premiered at Campbelltown Arts Centre during the same time that Black Honey Company’s production Hot Brown Honey played at the Sydney Opera House. This holds great significance. The chosen location required us to travel into Sydney’s Outer West, suburbs purposefully created to ghettoize migrants and Aboriginal people so as to maintain Sydney proper as a white business, social and cultural centre. This is a theme that also runs through One The Bear; the play opens in a garbage tip, and the action climaxes when One has ‘made it’ to the epicentre of material wealth and celebrity, which is an all-white space. On one level, the choice of location implies that all people, regardless of socioeconomic status and cultural background, deserve access to great art and well-resourced arts institutions.
I spent a few days in Campbelltown, getting to know the place that formed the consciousness of the Bowers’ sisters and the communities whose shared experiences of exclusion and oppression formed the backdrop against which Black Honey Company created work. As I walked the streets and listened to Candy speak of growing up in Campbelltown, I realised that, on another level, the choice of location teaches us that we should not separate art from social and historical context. We must learn to consume art in the context that created it and allow the people living in that context to take leadership over creating the art.
Interestingly, the premier of One The Bear (and the opening of Hot Brown Honey 2017 season at the Sydney Opera House) coincided with two or three Netflix releases that document and historicise the rise of Hip Hop from the ghettos of urban USA into the mainstream. Sitting in my living room in urban Australia, temporally and geographically, I am located far from the context that gave rise to a global culture. Yet, a growing and nuanced understanding of the rise of Hip Hop in Australia allows me to appreciate parallels on a global level – the poverty, the lack of basic healthcare, food deserts and so on. However, as I watch ‘The Get Down’ for example – although I appreciate the history lesson – I find myself asking why there is no in-depth analysis from women about women in Hip Hop and the era in which Hip Hop came to prominence. The erasure of Black women is very evident.
In comparison to One The Bear, these accounts are so male-centric that I catch myself questioning whether I actually grew up in an era listening to countless femcees and loving Hip Hop because I was more enamoured by their presence and their experiences. Women like Lauryn Hill, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Salt N Peppa (and the list goes on) were also part of the birth and rise of Hip Hop from the ghettos of the United States of America to the world. Where are their stories? Why have we excluded their narratives? One The Bear is a play that starts to explain the erasure of Black women’s voices but also offer their story for us to witness.
One The Bear is written from the Black radical feminist dreamer gaze. As such, One The Bear not only speaks to the cultural appropriation of the form and the watering down of its political edge for commercial viability and mainstream appeal, it also highlights the hypersexualisation of the Black female body by men and how this process of colonising the Black female body enables the commodification of the experiences that birthed art out of Black oppression. Hip Hop Artists like Akua Naru in songs like ‘One Woman’ and ‘The World Is Listening’ have long advocated for a Hip Hop culture that makes ample room for Black womens’ stories told in their voices and on their terms. One The Bear answers that call from the Australian context.
In Australia, we still live in a deep denial (fairytale) that erases the history of oppression and enables continuing injustice. One The Bear perfectly contextualises current social justice concerns in a history that we will not find in text books or on the television in Australia. In this way, One The Bear is a warning to everyone who has forgotten that the US Civil Rights Movement (which greatly informed Hip Hop) is anchored by the promise and push for a radical transformation of systemic and institutionalised oppression. The play reminds us that instead of liberation, we have settled for the opportunity to access material riches through and within the existing oppressive systems and structures. This is the challenge for One – access to material wealth is vital for survival, and yet it can also lead to a premature death.
Although this conundrum plays out throughout the play, there is also a strong sense of hope; in line with Black radical feminist dreaming, the play teaches us through the abidingly loving friendship between One and Ursula that our survival relies on our commitment to nurture connection, build community on the principles and practices of self-care, reciprocity and care for the natural environment, which is as badly exploited as certain groups of human beings.
Although we might think of the themes and issues under discussion as too mature for young minds, One The Bear is billed as ‘a fairytale for the Hip Hop generation’. It is a play written with young people in mind. On both nights that I attended, I saw Black (First Nations and African) artists with a first hand experience of the racialised and gendered dynamic of the Australian Hip Hop and entertainment industry. After watching the play, they all expressed a deep desire to bring their children along to watch the play. Why is that? Probably because they know that this celebrity crazed culture presents Hip Hop as an alluringly easy and comfortable road to riches and fame (a fairytale about a city with roads paved in gold). Like any concerned parent whose life experience has taught them better, they want their children to learn the lesson early and become savvy creators and consumers of the form.
One The Bear has arrived in time to speak intelligibly to a generation raised amidst readily accessible screens, 24 hour entertainment and celebrity culture. This is a play that not only gives language but also facilitates critical and consciousness raising dialogues about poverty, wealth, environmental degradation and the historic injustices that underpin the ever-increasing gendered and raced wealth-divide. These are the conversations which ought inform how our urban communities grapple with gentrification – not just of our physical spaces but also of our intangible cultural spaces. The same way my father introduced me as an eight year old to documentaries about Ghandi, Steve Biko, Mandela and so on, I highly encourage you to take your children to see this play and ask your school to host a workshop. The education on offer here is deeply transformative and will plant seeds that provide young minds with a nuanced and complex understanding of issues that will assist them to continue the work of making this world a better place for all.
Sista Zai Zanda is a storyteller, educator, radio producer and Dramaturg. She is the host and curator of the Pan Afrikan Poets Cafe, the home of new, cutting edge and classic Afrikan literature. Her latest work is God Is A Black Womban. On Sundays, catch Sista Zai playing tunes on the Hip Sista Hop show on 3CR.
One the Bearis the latest from the international award-winning team Black Honey Company. Two best-bear friends raising a ruckus against the dystopian rule of hunters, spit rhymes and fuse feminist hip hop, afropunk and global music to tell their tale. One and Ursula demand more for their tribe as they explore identity, friendship, exploitation and appropriation in a celebrity-obsessed world.
I’m writing this at a pub in Coburg. Opposite me is the office of Greens Senator Janet Rice, and there is a small rainbow flag flying from the shopfront signage, as well as a YES poster on the door. I look up from my screen and see two white men walking down the street, t-shirts and jeans, baseball caps, and one of them suddenly leaps, and tries to pull the flag down. He misses and doesn’t try again, keeps walking after a single regretful twist of the neck. I stare at him as he walks away. I remember reading earlier today about a woman who came home to find the YES posters on her house defaced with ‘vote no to fags’ in thick black texta.
A recent read of Roxane Gay’s heartbreaking and searing new memoir, Hunger, has compelled me to meditate on the deeply troubled historical relationship that Western cultures have had to fatness, a relationship that has resulted in a fat phobia so blatant and yet so insidious that it often goes unnoticed, even in progressive circles.
There are so many things in the world that I love. Dozing in the sun at the beach after swimming, limbs exhausted, salt drying stiff in my hair. Cutting up vegetables into neat, symmetrical pieces. Any food preparation, really, particularly if I’m listening to a good podcast. The way my dog presses his warm flank against my leg. Fragrant flowers: daphne, freesias, gardenias, violets, jasmine. Dramatic flowers: peonies, magnolias, proteas, foxgloves, hydrangeas, pansies. The strange sick swelling in my chest evoked by certain moments in particular songs, even happy ones, as though my body is unable to metabolise so much emotion. Flying into a city at night and seeing the lit gauze of its streets from the air. The scrunch of a stranger’s fingers at my scalp when the hairdresser gives me a perfunctory shampoo head massage. Cycling on a balmy night when the streets are quiet. Taking a bath when I’m a little drunk. Most things when I’m a little drunk, when my body loosens and the world softens at its edges. The quickening I get when I think of an idea for a story, or a solution to a problem of plot, or when a knot of words unravels in a clean sentence unexpectedly. Stretching out my muscles, sitting on the floor with my nose to my knees. The pearly pink light of a winter dusk.
On August 26th this year I was reading my work at the Queensland Poetry Festival alongside an astonishing line up that included Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ellen van Neerven, Tusiata Avia, Courtney Sina Meredith, and Andy Jackson. On the same day an estimated 20,000 people marched for Marriage Equality in my hometown of Melbourne. I’d been thinking a lot about who mobilises and for what. About numbers of bodies at protest marches—rallies for Ms Dhu, who died in police custody in 2014, don’t have estimates because they’re not big enough to. I wrote this as a way of trying to make sense of the complexities of fighting for social justice.
I can’t stop crying. Not a sob, not a weep, not a howl, this is a leak. You send me a link: 100,000 people registered on the electoral roll last night. For a moment I am elated: 100,000 people saying yes. The warmth of your thigh, my knee pressing in. And then I think: what if that’s 100,000 people registering so they can say no? The moment I write about the warmth of your thigh, my knee, you adjust yourself, fold your arms differently, and now there is a cold patch where you were. The purple pink light sends four shadows onto my page. I think about that slogan ‘love makes a family’. I think about a twenty-seven second video I have of Zach when he was four singing, “Can you feel it, can you feel that lo-ooove?” and feel sounds like fool. Can you fool that love?
I am at the Queensland Poetry Festival and Samoan poet Tusiata Avia asks what collection of molecules am I and I think about queer kinship and how do I trace my ancestors? Where is my lineage? My lineage is books, and dance floors, and documentaries – my lineage is not in my blood. It’s in Kathy Acker and Leslie Feinberg and Derek Jarman. That guy at Fair Day with a ‘MASC 4 MASC’ t-shirt on. It’s in protest signs. It’s in the slurs that we take and turn into love letters (faggot, queer, dyke, trannie, pervert, homo).
A few weeks ago I was walking home with a coffee and a four-wheel drive full of boys was coming fast along the other side of the road. One leant out the window and screamed
FAGGOT
while his mate leant out the other side and screamed
SLUT
Both words at the same time. They stared at each other across the car roof (that’s how far out of the windows their bodies were) and then dropped back inside, looking straight ahead, betrayed by their mouths and their desires.
I laughed. I laughed at being both and drank my coffee in the canopy of sun and cloud made by a Melbourne winter. I will call you later and we will fuck and you will whisper faggot and slut down the phone and I will come all over my own hand and those words will be like balsamic soaked strawberries rolling out of your mouth sweet full sticky bitter salt warm into mine.
Faggotslut. Faggotslut. Faggotslut. Balsamic reduced is a vinegary smear. Berry skin pulling the thick brown in. Seeds softened with acid and sugar. Citrus. Squirt. The feel of me between your squared teeth.
Writing in Brisbane is hot writing. Sweat under my arms, along the insides of my fingers, across my eyelids, in the crease of my belly, between my toes. Writing in Brisbane is writing inside music. Is a scream for what comes next. Is the burnished brightness of what comes later.
Yesterday you all marched for yes. I never thought I’d want to be there as much. Or that I would be so badly hurt by posters and campaigns that tell me my family is not ok, that the way I love should not be tolerated. The drilling down from complexity to one or two images: the darkness, menacing arms, rainbows with crosses through them, children with heads on knees and tear streaked faces.
And while all this is happening and I’m on stages telling people I don’t give a fuck about marriage but that the government needs to get their laws off my body, off who and how I love, and I’m overwhelmed and awed by the responses from people I’ve never met saying yes, yes, I think: queers seeking asylum are still in Manus and Nauru. I think: they are murdering gay men in Chechnya. I think: the intervention continues and people living in remote communities can’t buy an orange for under five dollars but they can get two minute noodles and they are starving on carbohydrates and msg. I think: there is such a thing as corrective rape in Uganda. I think: Aboriginal people in this country are still dying in custody. I think: doctors working in Syria have decided PTSD doesn’t cut it anymore and they’ve coined a new term—Total Human Devastation Syndrome.
So how does all of this stand up against a rally for Marriage Equality? Why do I leak tears every time I see another person campaigning for no? I don’t want to get married. I’ve never wanted to get married.
I leak tears every time I see another person campaigning for no because they’re not campaigning for no to marriage for queer folk. They’re campaigning for no queer folk.
And today I ran into an old colleague whose thirteen-year-old son went to the Equal Love rally on Saturday and came home covered in glitter and spent the night dressing up and dancing through the house. The same kid who attempted suicide two years ago and has seen the inside of more than one adolescent mental health unit. But how does this stand against Don Dale? Thirteen year olds in adult prison conditions being tear gassed and kicked in their small soft bellies on concrete floors. Hiding under blankets on steel cage beds. Stinging mist. Cop boots and the hell that is a white Australian man in uniform’s voice. How does this stand?
In Redfern there are two housing commission towers whose windows are slowly filling with cellophane to make a rainbow. Each night there are more coloured squares, shining into the polluted night. How does this stand? How does this stand against Ms Dhu who was jailed for failing to pay parking fines and spent four days in prison telling officers she was sick. She called and called from the cell and they didn’t come. Makin’ it up, they said. By the morning she was gone, an old broken rib turned sceptic, bled out under her skin. How does this stand? Who mobilises and for what?
Who mobilises and for what? Because suicide rates in the LGBTIQ community are high. Because trans women are killed for flesh where none was expected. Because an eleven-year-old wanted to die. But this mobilisation? This is for law, for marriage, for white people (?) for middle class people (?) for respectability (?) for family (?) for bringing us into the fold (?) for sanitisation (?) for making us known (?)
I can’t stop crying. Last week I tried to gather some friends together to drink red wine and eat and watch RuPaul’s Drag Race and forget about the no campaign. Four said yes, but only one came. The others (all at the last minute) texted to say they couldn’t make it.
I’m so anxious I can’t leave the house. Going to stay in and go to bed. Love you.
I really want to come but I can’t keep my eyes open. I’m wrecked. Next time babe xx
Hey I’m suddenly feeling pretty bad. Maybe I’m getting sick? Going to stay home :-/
Anxious, tired, sick. And on social media nearly every queer I know is saying they’re feeling wobbly and sad.
That week I had to have a conversation with my kids, who are six and eight, about bullying and homophobia, and to check whether anything is being said to them at school.
I get home from the festival. Somehow Melbourne is colder than when I left, but the plum tree in my back yard has started flowering and that makes me happy. Another piece of no propaganda is doing the rounds on Facebook. I think about Zach singing, and about him telling me confidently that there are no bullies at his school, and that no one is asking him questions. I stay away from social media. I try again to gather friends and watch Ru Paul. This time they come. There are five of us in my lounge room. Ru Paul is wearing a long turquoise blue gown and her hairline is perfect. We share food. We stay warm. We finish Drag Race and watch Season 9’s reigning Queen, Sasha Velour, doing a lip sync of No More I Love You’s by Annie Lennox in front of a light show. At the end a pink triangle is projected onto her and instead of mouthing “no more I love you’s” her lips form the words “I love you” over and over again. I leak tears and grin. We all do. This is how we stand.
Quinn Eades is a trans and queer researcher, writer, and award-winning poet who lectures at La Trobe University. He is the author ofall the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body,andRallying, and is currently working on a book-length collection of fragments written from the transitioning body, titled Transpositions.
Quinn Eades is appearing in two events as part of The Festival of Questions at the Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday 15 October, presented by The Wheeler Centre and Melbourne Festival. Book now at wheelercentre.com.
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