Too Close For Forgiveness
Carissa Lee on poems & Healing
Edited by Mykaela Saunders
You ferment myth into the bush and the billabong to give yourself history,
and there’s enough there to make a man and call him native born.
Our bones mortar your buildings, your poems, but all the while we’re away in fringes and reserves.
Evelyn Araluen, ‘To the Poets’
Poems have played an important part in my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve found poetry an effective way to explore or articulate what I’m feeling; reading a poet’s journey through their poems can help me to express the feelings I don’t always know how to name or place. Sometimes, poetry can be the only way to talk about the state of the world, women, Country, and memory of place. Lately, I have been thinking through three poetry collections: Throat by Ellen van Neerven (2020); Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen, (2021) and Kindred by Kirli Saunders (2019).
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Place and Country is of particular importance for First Nations people, and Evelyn Araluen, Kirli Saunders and Ellen van Neerven write of relationship to place with compelling emotion, evoking senses, smells, feeling, belonging. Evelyn describes Country by interweaving history and emotional connection to each place; in ‘The Ghost Gum Sequence’, she reflects on the Boorooberongal, the place she visits monthly to cut lantana. Whether she’s writing of Country where ‘there’s ghosts on the reserve’, or of the trains she catches in Sydney, Evelyn brings the reader to the places she writes of in such an intimate way that it brought memories of crushed bark beneath my feet and galahs above my head. She tells us how many steps to take to arrive there and where the sun needs to be, and I’m warmed by the sunlight she brings with her words. In ‘Unreckoning’, she speaks of the sun burning behind the mountain to light campfires in the sky; in ‘PYRO’, the sun is a choking presence overheating solar panels.
Yet there is an acute tension in sharing her relationship with Country: ‘I’m not worried about you finding all this, I’m worried about how you’re gonna speak it.’ It’s always a risk for the wrong people to find certain places on Country, because as we’ve seen with cultural sites like Juukan Gorge, people will rip it apart in the search for profitable resources they can rip out of it.
White people probably don’t often think about the effects of climate change on First Nations people; the colony works to sever our connection to Country and to land, making us mere passengers on a journey toward the destruction of our lands. In ‘Footnotes on a Timeline’, Ellen brings attention to the detrimental effects of climate change that have been ignored for too long: ‘Don’t turn a blind eye, please, all we need for you to see is that climate is our only bank. If we don’t have healthy air, water, earth, we got nothing’. This is a call to colonisers who see our lands as commodity, as something they can rip money up out of. Ellen reminds us that money and material wealth means nothing, when you’ve killed your descendants’ access to clean air, water, or even a habitable planet. They invite their reader to pause over the fine print of the future they’re agreeing to. Just as ‘They burnt records of us in fires, / they stole evidence of our survival’, they don’t care who they’re killing on the journey to wealth. We’re just left to live with the trauma that latches to our blood for generations.
I hate that for so many of us mob there are moments—no matter how far we think we’ve come—where something pulls us back into our trauma. When I hear someone yell, I’m suddenly five years old and hiding under a table with my little brother. When dealing with police, it doesn’t matter what job you have, as soon as they realise you’re a blackfulla, the air in the room grows heavy and you’re trying to breathe normal and not seem suspicious while managing your shaking hands and heart as it beats faster and faster.
Child protection policies in Australia have led to what is known as the Stolen Generations. These are the generations of First Nations children who were taken from their families by government agencies, up until the 1970s. In current times, these protection policies continue, and families are still having to worry about minute details such as whether their house is clean enough being the deciding factor between whether they get to keep their kids or not. In Throat, Ellen reflects in their poem Vinegar on the haunt-walk of memories and the importance of clean houses. Australia has a history of child protection departments humbugging First Nations families and doing ‘welfare checks’ on houses to make sure children are being looked after in a way that white child protection services deemed fit. They write of the feelings they still experience when their house is unclean:
Sometimes, the house is unclean.
In this panic
I find myself in both past and future.
Sometimes home is the only refuge we have from all we have to face outside, the racism, the inequity in government policies, a country all too keen to weigh in on First Nations peoples’ human rights. As Evelyn writes—'home is something more to me than it might be to you.’ Evelyn further reflects on the warmth of home in her piece ‘Concessions’: watching VHS on a TV that always needed a second to warm up, seeing who was lucky enough to sit in her poppy’s chair. This poem transports me to my Nan and Pop’s house, Poppy falling asleep in the chair while we watch Robocop. With time, some of these memories also bring grief, like the way my Nan no longer sits on the couch beside my Poppy. A sinking comes as Evelyn writes, ‘I would give most things to read the careful way you spelt our names above the phone, or to watch an afternoon sink across the dam.’ The way she explores her relationship between past and future resonates with the connection a lot of mob feel to Ancestors. Our Ancestors, whether they are Elders we have known, or people interwoven in our respective histories, do not simply live in our past. Our practices, cultures, and us, don’t, either. No matter how much some people try to keep us as living artefacts, we’re an ever-present myriad of Peoples who live, love and grieve. A disconnect to Country has led to a further severance from culture for some of us. Evelyn writes of wanting to connect to culture in her poem Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal.
I am relearning these hills
and all the places wrapped around this room
we both have dagahral here,
lovers/fathers/friends/conquerers/
ghosts
She plays with the pleasures and pains of this (re)learning; she writes of teaching Bundjalung to someone who wants to know the name of all the birds. This reclaiming of language, of culture, is a significant element in Dropbear, exploring a reclamatory relationship with words, place and people, and the grief, joy or complicated feelings it can bring. Evelyn connects with this person through learning this language and the power of the place that have trees holding birds she can’t yet name:
We are relearning this place through poetry:
I open my book and say, wayan,
She writes of singing between two lands, and of discovering more than one meaning for the language she learns. It feels that despite her physical presence in Tharawal, her connection to Bundjalung is woven through a growing knowledge of the dialogue of her Ancestors. In ‘Secret River’, Evelyn writes that ‘the best way to learn a lesson is for it to find you, and drink.’ As she writes of the river breaking down the colonial structures that were not meant to be there, it makes me think of Ancestors. For a lot of us, our Ancestors bring us signs, prompts, and signals of hope for the future. There have been many moments I’ve felt achingly alone—feeling the twinge in my stomach when an ex spoke to my mother like that, or feeling the loss of opportunities when I chose to stay in Adelaide. But in times of need, I’ve been proven wrong, everything falling into place. I’m convinced I was being looked out for by my Ancestors on the winter nights I couldn’t find a bed, one night sleeping in a paddock with all my clothes stuffed under my jumper. ‘The trope doesn’t love you; the trope doesn’t even know your name.’ My new partner and I move to Melbourne, and I’ll never let a partner speak to my mother like that again.
Making it this far has me convinced our Ancestors always find us, just as the river does, in Kirli’s poem ‘Disconnection’. Kirli doesn’t ignore the grief of seeing mob disconnected from their Country, and by extension, their culture. Instead Kirli’s words honour these things without shying from the pain. Through writing of her own experience in rediscovering culture, language and connection to Country, acknowledging it’s something a lot of us feel, Kirli reminds us we’re not alone in this struggle.
I watch your
trembling limbs
ache to shake
in dance
and hear your lungs
as they gasp with songs unknown.I feel your
body sans
Spirit,
Ceremony
and secret
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First Nations women are consistently being left behind in national agendas, such as addressing family violence and deaths in custody. Poems like Ellen’s ‘Women are still not being heard—for Ms Dhu’, speak of deaths such as Ms Dhu’s which could have been avoided. Ellen writes of a continuing crisis of First Nations women dying:
children taken, and land
weeping and lonely.
Although it can be difficult to read, this nation has also grown desensitised to the news of Blak deaths, especially Blak women and nonbinary people. First Nations people are misrepresented and misidentified when they are alive; such brutality often doesn’t end when a person dies. There is only more of that when they report us as missing or murdered. It must be made clear—and these three poets do this so well—that we are not lost souls or guaranteed tragedies just waiting to happen, we deserve to live and not be the news someone avoids. These poems are not simply death or trauma; there is so much strength and light to be found in them too. In their poem ‘Gubbaleaks’, Ellen reflects on yarning with tiddas, trading war stories of attacks and racism from all sides, the hate they receive in their inboxes:
what makes gubbas
think they can get away with
disrespectin
our bodies
Cultures, elders, communities, lands?we owe them nothing
We tiddas are often trading war stories as we juggle cultural responsibilities while navigating a predominantly white world. When we speak our mind about atrocities like deaths in custody, the Stolen Generations, or champion Blak feminism (to just name a few), we then have to deal with racism, sometimes overt name-calling,. But it’s the mostly insidious stuff we’re having to navigate, such as casually racist acts of those choosing not to sit, walk, be somewhere because mob are there, people choosing to speak or write about us instead of alongside us because they assume First Nations people are unintelligent or unable to comprehend things. In addition to this, being First Nations people, we not only have to deal with racism, but as First Nations women and nonbinary people, we’re often having to deal with added misogyny, sometimes from our own mob.
Any attempt to disclose to others how we are navigating a nation built to hate us, of men who want to kill us, is often met with disbelief or distrust. Ellen reflects on this in ‘Expert’:
talks about drunks and sexual abuse ‘up north’
devalues my knowledge (too urban)
and anything I get from black media
(not the whole truth
I wouldn’t trust it)
she likes to argue when she’s had a few
I’ve had (and many mob have) so many instances in my life where people come at me with assumptions already ingrained into their perception of my character before I’ve even spoken. I’ve delivered lectures where white people have felt compelled to remind me that ‘not all white people are like that, you know.’ A lot of us have to spend a lot of our time convincing people we’re telling the truth. No we don’t get handouts, Native Title does not mean we’re gonna take your house, and yes Australia Day is a shit idea, and just because white people don’t understand, doesn’t mean we’re lying.
There is distrust ingrained in white Australia directed at our women, even when the cases of assault are so public, and done in places that are supposed to stand for something more. First Nations women are so disbelieved, there are multiple instances where we have been perceived as the perpetrator of the violence the cops have been called out for. This distrust of First Nations people is so far-reaching, police and prison guards don’t believe mob when they call out for help, when they are unwell in custody, to the point where the nation has reached over 500 deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report.
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They tried to eradicate us, our Countries and culture, tearing us from our kin. But we’re finding ways to fight back, to make this world better. In Dear Ancestors, Kirli writes of reclaiming culture, of teaching our young people about culture; through teaching our children, we find ourselves:
to show little eyes
where to look
to leave prints
for little feet
to follow
In this, Kirli circles around the importance of listening over speaking, as the Elders teach us. We’re here to carry these stories, this culture, for them, for us, for the little ones in our future. But, as Evelyn writes, we also need people to actually be there to help us, not offer platitudes like an Instagram caption. In Dropbear she reminds wadjullas: ‘You cannot put back into the earth what you’ve taken from it’:
we aren’t here
to hear you poem
you do wrong you get wrong
you get
gobbled up
In her piece ‘decolonial poetics (avant gubba)’ , Evelyn writes of when she’ll be aunty, and how she will talk to jahjums about the land she has made for them. Of walking through a Country she’s ‘never not known’ a place young ones will never have to leave. It’s a beautiful dream I hope all us mob get to have one day. We’re making names for ourselves, and getting our voices heard our way. As Evelyn writes, ‘I always knew poems were there to protest the poets. The world is sick with empty words.’
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Works Cited
✷ Ellen van Neerven, Throat (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2020)
✷ Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2021)
✷ Kirli Saunders, Kindred (Broome: Magabala Books, 2019)
Carissa Lee is a First Nations professional actor, writer and editor based in Narrm. She has recently completed her PhD focusing on cross-cultural collaborations in the performing arts through the University of Melbourne. She currently works as a commissioning editor for The Conversation and IndigenousX.