5 Questions with A'isyiyah
A’isyiyah is a Batak and Jawa mama who grew up on unceded Cabrogal Land (South-West Sydney). They are invested in building strong communities founded upon intergenerational, ancestral and collective healing.
They organise in community both autonomously and with Anticolonial Asian Alliance, a First Nations solidarity collective. They dream and study prison abolition and transformative justice, and are the vocalist of anticolonial erratic hardcore band Arafura.
No.1
Tell us a bit about how Undocumented came about.
To be honest, the early days of this piece are a bit of a blur! Stella [who edited the book] initially asked me to write for an abolition-themed column in a publication, and expressed interest in writings surrounding collective care and the many abolitionist practices marginalised folks engage in daily that are invisibilised. I began writing it when COVID-19 first hit so-called Sydney, and there was a flurry of mutual aid and collective care networks being organised in response to restrictions, as well as a pushback against increased policing and surveillance.
Naturally, my mind was heavy with thoughts about organising community care and safety in strategic ways. I was using the time in isolation to deepen my devotion to god and to my ancestors—I really wanted to bridge that gap between strategy and faith with this piece.
I wrote most of the piece while talking out loud. It felt like such an embodied experience writing out these thoughts and telling these stories as they were happening in real time, and feeling stories of the past so present in my current life.
No.2
How do you think writing/making art and social justice is interconnected for you?
For my personal practice, I think art and writing help me push past narratives of survivorship and guide me into a space where I can honour my existence, and the continued existence of my people beyond our survival under colonialism and imperialism. I would hope that this celebratory sentiment can resonate with others in similar positions.
In Evelyn Araluen’s poem ‘To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic’ (which Stella showed me when I first started writing Undocumented), she says it is crucial that “we do not allow literature to keep turning Indigenous land and people into ghosts”. I really think one way to do that is through making and remembering life-affirming culture—making ceremony and ritual a central part of our movements—so that our presence on this earth is not merely linked to our resilience against violence and dispossession, but rather to our joy and interconnectedness with other human and non-human beings. Colonial institutions can’t touch that sacred joy and interconnectedness.
No.3
I found that there was such an underlying tone of hope in Undocumented. You frame abolition and intra-cultural solidarities in a way that feels transcendent, in the sense of it being this ongoing work that we need to do to further our movements, as we work on healing our selves and past traumas. Can you speak to this?
Healing as a practice involves heavy and dark work but it is a way to make space for ourselves to imagine how we can love each other better in this world. Healing intergenerational trauma means that we can better understand how we got to where we are in this world and with that, we can start to unpack how we enact or perpetuate harm, alongside how we ourselves have been harmed. I also recognise the continual violence that Bla(c)k, brown, poor, disabled, trans and incarcerated people experience daily so I think healing isn’t solely about reconciling the past but it is about how we can be emotionally and spiritually equipped to continue to resist current structural violences.
No.4
You also sing in anti-colonial hardcore band Arafura. How do you see yourself continuing to enact and situate your politics within music scenes?
When Arafura first started, I was carrying so much pain from moving through a scene that was uncritical of the ways in which we replicate structural harm like racism, anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. I resented the harm and violence that festered in alternative music scenes and wanted to confront those issues head-on. I was so frustrated and angry and heartbroken and really funneled that into the lyrics I wrote back then and tried to address this harm during our shows.
But I started to feel a deep discomfort when singing about pain and suffering to a largely white audience and have continually questioned what it means to be performing for that gaze. So again, I am trying to push past narratives of survivorship and these days I write love songs that celebrate Batak and Jawa people and Indigenous people everywhere, as an assertion of our sovereignty and a remembrance of our radiance.
No.5
In Undocumented, you write “…there is no bargaining with the state for better conditions.” Besides cultivating love and care amongst our friends and comrades, how else do you think we can sever ourselves from the burden associated with “working within the system”?
Mariame Kaba says “hope is a discipline” and I think that means we must consistently engage in abolitionist and world-building practices daily by investing in skillshares and knowledge-shares. If we can learn how to keep each other safe by learning harm reduction skills, first aid, childcare, community accountability, de-escalation, cooking food, fixing shit, support for spiritual and emotional well-being and all that stuff as a community, then we don’t have to rely so strongly on institutions.
And we have to be doing this work and building trust every day of our lives. I say that with full recognition that it is impossible to completely divest from capitalist institutions but marginalised communities who live out these practices every day prove to us time and time again that we can and do live outside of those confines.
A’isyiyah in Arafura (photo: Ben Westover)
Undocumented is a narrative essay that weaves ancestral remembrance together with dreaming abolition to imagine a world founded upon principles of love and nurturance. It was written in conversation with community, alongside those who practise insurgent care in their daily lives, in hopes to grow strong roots for the next world.
Get a copy of the book through Incendium Radical Library here.
Profits from this run of books will be split between the Annaliesse's Law fundraiser and the library. Money that goes into the library funds future publishing projects and the maintenance of the library.