AustLit

'‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and then he was acquitted. Australia burned and did not stop burning and in the middle of that national crisis the Australian Prime Minister flew his family to Hawaii. He was an Australian being an Australian, and if we, like him, keep on being Australians, we will, as Australians, get through this. (This not being the national crisis of the past but the international crisis of the present.) Unprecedented rain flooded the North of England at the same time as new-normal rain emptied biblically into East Africa, quickly followed by a plague of hundreds of billions of locusts, forcing Somalia to declare its own national emergency. The Indian Prime Minister revoked the articles in the Indian Constitution that protected the safety and autonomy of the Muslim state of Kashmir, and, in Delhi, mobs burnt Muslim homes and lynched the people who lived in them, while the government and the police stood by and watched, and, in some cases, participated. The United Kingdom was paralysed by the extended death throes of Brexit, then Megxit – following one on the other like a fever dream of Empire’s end. And then came the collapse of our global health care system, a cataclysmic failure that held capitalism to the light like a soiled white cloth.' (Mindy Gill, Jeet Thayil, Editorial introduction)

'In ‘they rise’ Jazz Money, a Wiradjuri poet and filmmaker addresses the future of the stolen lands we call Australia as a proud blak woman (Cordite, February 2021). Her voice rises above inferiority, trauma or shame. The poem is defiant, a wry celebration of the same bodies that colonialism makes ambivalent and abject by enabling its ‘superior’, cis-gendered whiteness:

turns out the future is technicolour blak black brown turns out we’re all welcome here queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings if you been here since the first sunrise or if you come here now just now come here heart open come here hurt from those wars and those sea levels rising

How do we turn out poetry that shows we are all welcome here? How do we collectively transpose settler privilege and oppressive hierarchies and why does it matter? What is wrong with a received system of naming, making categories and borders, if our hallowed aesthetics are tone deaf and mute to the sound of blak, brown and hybrid bodies breaking, dying, suffering? Listen to the poems here: we are suffering not merely because our tears matter less, or are less visible in the capitalist settler colony, but also because there are families that have been wartorn, assimilated and broken; there are forests that have been denuded, oceans pillaged and polluted, sacred sites mined, vestiges appropriated and rebranded, and all of this touches us multifariously, yet still, our protest is being silenced.' (Lucy Dougan Michelle Cahill Foreword introduction)