In Support of the African Communities in Tübingen

We wish to express our absolute support for the African community/communities of Tübingen in the face of the racism it has to endure, especially at times of distress and tragedy. Being 'green' (which Tübingen prides itself on being) is meaningless if human rights and respect for humanity aren't part of the equation. For context, see this article in The African Courier.

Forks

 

Lightning touched a clinic

near where the medical helicopter

lands and then it touched the old botanical gardens.

 

When a young African man was murdered

in the botanical gardens some months ago,

the mayor aligned cause with refugee status.

 

The dead man was blamed for his own death.

The man stabbed beneath the trees was said

to have been part of a drug syndicate.

 

The dead man under the trees which in March

were starting to reach towards their summer leaves

wasn’t numbered as a specimen in the arboretum.

 

In this ‘green city’ there is a failure of alignment

between cause and effect, and the behaviour

of the storm is placed on the behaviour

 

of others — behaviour, behaviouralism,

meteorology, shifting blame, enclave — a ginkgo

tree was planted for the 200th of the university hospital.

 

 

            John Kinsella

In memory of Ms Dhu, and for her family

These poems were written in January 2016, at the request of the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, to support a campaign for awareness about the death of Ms Dhu in police custody in South Hedland in August 2014.

The poems are posted here with permission from Aunty Carol Roe, via Ethan Blue.

Today the coroner has handed down her findings and recommendations. She stated that MS Dhu received "inhumane treatment" from the police concerned, and that her death was preventable.

According to one news source, the coroner

"found the conduct of the medical staff and police officers involved was well below the standards expected".

While it's clear to anyone reading the coroner's findings just what level of neglect and indifference prevented Ms Dhu receiving the care to which she was entitled, we are baffled as to the unaccountability of police (and medical staff) in this case.

The Guardian reports that a Senior Constable was

"issued an assistant commissioner's warning notice after an internal police investigation for the 'lack of urgency' she showed after Dhu hit her head, and 10 other officers were given disciplinary notices for failing to correctly follow lockup procedure. Most told the inquest they did not understand the notice and did not know why they had been disciplined." 

How long can this sort of inhumanity toward Aboriginal people go on?

In reproducing the following two poems, we wish to express our heartfelt support for Ms Dhu's family and our desire to see justice for Ms Dhu's memory.

Ms Dhu

A daughter begins so small but soon

outgrows her mother 

bigger than love can keep hold of 

from bud to blossom

and even thorn

we’ve no control of 

Out in the world, the future 

Yet to a mother,

a grandmother,

a father, she’s forever

–  some part of her –

that little slip they watched over      

We want respect for her 

When she cries out we want to come to her

or for others to do the same if we can’t be there 

Not the cold shoulder, the sneer

the hard voice out of nowhere

that says Faking it 

Not the indifferent she’ll-be-right, the failure

to listen when someone says pain 

is ten out of ten, what can it mean

if she’s treated like nobody’s daughter? 

What sort of blight are we under?

                                                     Tracy Ryan

In Marapikurrinya: for Ms Dhu

The uniforms won’t listen, ore heaped up,

long steel ships waiting to take country

away. They refuse to see themselves,

boots and all, march away

from all spirits. They laugh at body,

they laugh at words, but they

have no idea they are dead-in-themselves,

their faces dressed up for the cameras.

They kill with impunity. They are designed

that way. In another lock-up, I have

seen the body of a young Noongah bloke

tossed like a hessian sack, his bones

all busted, and the ring-a-ring-a-rosie

circle laughing and saying you deserve

what you get. The uniforms denied he was

in there, inside his own body. The sounds

that crept out were television – they all watched

American cop shows. It’s all there for them –

the land dressed up as state or nation:

they fancy their long arms reaching out,

they fancy their long arms reaching

across tribal boundaries, heaping it all

into the belly of those long ships

or into trucks or train. To furnaces.

Stretching fences across stone and sand

and far into sea? Their magnificent

jurisdiction of brutality. They are their

own totems. They worship their ‘order’.

I know that port. I have been in a house

where Nyangumarta and Yamaji

came together listening to Coloured Stone

and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

And stories were told then, back

then, as the death-toll rises and those

hunting parties of the Old North

find their latest manifestation.

This reaches out to you, Ms Dhu,

and to all those from past and present

who hold you close, who won’t see

you lost in the files of the ‘deceased’.

You will outlive them all.

You will hold back the uniforms

from striking more and more of your people down.

You will be the beginning. You will never end.

                                                             John Kinsella

'Guns for Votes'

The Australian Broadcasting Commission has been under pressure to 'convert' to the right-wing paradigm that has consumed Australian political discourse over the last decades. Despite extreme cuts and constant political verballing, vestiges of independence have remained. However, reading this pathetic piece of political journalism on the ABC's website regarding the (in my opinion) intellectually and politically self-serving and hubristic David Leyonhjelm's love of guns, I fear that those last vestiges have finally been eroded.

This article is without an opposing view, does not even follow the basic tenets of fair journalism, and functions as an almost light-hearted romp with the senator as he goes in to bat for gun 'fun'. As the American election has taken the right into its fascist soul-lands and found it both ripe and willing, so has Australia lurched further and further into a far right inhabited by racist apologists, exploitative industrial-military 'libertarians' and religious bigots. This is the worst Australia of the many Australias I have experienced in my lifetime.

The weapons that have destroyed liberty in the United States for so many victims will also completely destroy liberty for many in Australia. These bastards who trade in 'talk' and 'votes' and 'opinions' care only for themselves, not for you. Yes, 'people kill', but guns make it a whole lot easier for them to do so.

I grew up with an understanding and familiarity with guns, and turned away from them in my youth in a very literal and specific way. My poetry is opposed to violence in all forms, though it often 'illustrates' it. Guns are not fun — we are only taught that they are fun. And when they become semantic ploys of right-wing libertarians, they are distributed as tools of ideological conflict. Tools that maim and kill.

John Kinsella

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

  

The distance between a Facebook page

and a mineshaft, where vigilantes threaten

to drop the murdered, is so very small.

Behind screens is only part of the damage,

it’s when bigots emerge from self-

illumination, self-images in their eyes,

that it all comes together: the running down,

the killing, the justifications. In a mining town

the burrowing down to what might be at the core

of belief is also an attempt at erasure: to mine

away souls. But desecrators unearth

their own demons, digging deep to find

the white goods they desire: as Dr Plot

conjectured in 1667: ‘lapides sui generis,

naturally produced by some extraordinary

plastic virtue, latent in the earth...’ this fossil

record we turn ourselves inside out for,

reaching too low. And so, frontiers

are made on the field of the screen,

and Kalgoorlie — out there — epicentre

of the goldfields, cutting edge of race riots,

Superpit-proud of the venal seams in the Aussie flag,

flexes its Midas touch on God’s Own Country

while a dead boy’s family grieve and grieve and grieve.

            John Kinsella

Racism in Australia

By John, posted by Tracy

Once again, the ‘outside’ world has paid more attention than Australia does to the abysmal conditions many indigenous Australians live in and under. Australia is a racist country, make no mistake. And racist in so many complex and overlapping ways. It’s not just a case of ‘white’ and ‘black’ politics, but an amalgam of complex and also very subtle personal, religious, social and institutional prejudices. Whether it’s the muttering behind closed doors about ‘their’ behaviour, or overt rudeness in public, or it’s government agencies and politicians acting as mirrors for concentrations of (voting) prejudice, the overall effect is devastating for the recipients of this racism (in the sense of racist individuals differentiating themselves from and demeaning other people on the grounds of ethnic difference)... in the end bigotry is bigotry, and it’s a simple equation.

I was involved in an Amnesty anti-slavery forum just before the Sydney Olympics, and it’s a sad thing that the same discussion needs to continue. No progress has been made in addressing the core of these issues of inequality. See:

"Amnesty slams indigenous conditions"

Remember this as you read this blog or play netgames in general. This tool of our lives is still about choices made out of privilege. Not even access is equality: how it is used and what it provides according to wealth and advantage are key factors.

John Kinsella

Northam and refugees

Typed in by Tracy, as stated by John

We were in Northam today, our regional centre, where we do most of our shopping, other than what we are able to do in our immediate, much smaller town. One of our kids went to high school there, because it's the only Senior High in the region. Northam is the centre of the Avon Valley wheatbelt region in which we live.

It was disgusting to see a bloke arrive in town with his tray-top bedecked with large painted panels carrying maps of Australia with diatribes of racial vilification. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that there was a representation of a figure in a hijab with a line drawn through it, bearing the word "parasite", and referring to the Northam Army Base, intended site of a refugee detention centre, as "our sacred site" (meaning of the military). The ironies and insensitivities behind the use of this phrase are obvious.

I managed to control myself and not call out, "You racist bastard". But I feel it essential I articulate my opposition to the mass racism taking place in Northam and surrounding region at the moment. It was doubly disturbing to see bigots drive past this bloke in their utes, giving him the thumbs-up.

On top of this is the irony that Northam has a long history as a migration centre. But the racists are busy differentiating between the European migrants after the Second World War and the Afghan refugees who have left the country which those very same bigots are more than happy to insist needs the Australian military to be waging war against oppressive political elements.

My concern is with the fact that these refugees have to be kept in detention at all. It would seem a far more humane approach to treat them as migrants awaiting confirmation of their status, rather than as prisoners in a concentration camp.

In country that was stolen from the Nyungar people, it is bizarre that the non-indigenous residents feel they have a claim to this land through eternity.

During the 1890s, my great-grandfather, who was foreman of the South Champion mine at Kookynie, was dying of thirst in the desert when he was saved by an Afghan camel driver. Anyone with any knowledge of Western Australian history will know that Afghan people have had a long and important relationship with this place. But even if that were not the case, we are all humans, and all humans should be treated with dignity and respect.

It is many years since I and my fellow activists were involved in resisting the anti-Asian racism campaigns of Jack Van Tongeren and his ultra-nationalist cronies. But today, seeing those signs in Northam made me feel as if we have not progressed, not gone any further forward at all. Western Australia still reeks of racism.

John Kinsella

Henry Lawson and me - and the contradictions

By John

The garden has been dormant over the summer, but in the last couple of weeks, I've been turning it over, and today I put in two large beds of broad beans from the seed saved from last winter's crop. Surprisingly, some artichokes I thought had completely died off over summer have come to life again, with some lush, fervent growth. That's always a buzz. As autumn is taking hold, there's a new rush of bird life, ranging from robins, black-faced cuckoo shrikes, through to black-shouldered kites.

Have been working on my introduction to the Penguin Henry Lawson Selected Short Stories. I think that Lawson is a master of the short form, especially the sketch, and I can genuinely relate to his equivocal and ambiguous views of the bush, though I think I have a far more inherent love of the land and the bush than he did. His portrait of bushwomen (of "white settler stock") has been increasingly underrated by critics over the years, but I think it is phenomenal in its admiration and respect as well as insight into how this portraiture does and doesn't segue with the blokesy world of the bush.

However, I am really struggling with his racism, for which there is no excuse. There are occasions when his very brief portraits of non-whites show some empathy, sympathy, or recognition of something outside subalternity; but largely this is not so. I don't really know how in the end one can respect even the most astute writing of place as any more than a surface gesture where this is the case. Especially given he's writing about an Australia that is constructed out of the destruction and dispossession of the traditional owners of the land.

I've also been reading Manning Clark's Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend, and aside from finding it a ridiculously digressive book, I think he gets his readings of Lawson's stories quite wrong at times. He states that Lawson doesn't see the bush itself, that is, its flora and fauna, with a close eye, but there are numerous descriptions that I think contradict this. It is a mistake to think that Lawson's descriptions are generic; rather, they capture the bush-person's interaction with place, producing a different kind of description.

It is easy to admire Lawson's acute sensitivity to "mateship", that even swagmen up-country seemingly wandering without purpose can find moments of deep connection through anecdote, humour or recollection. However, Lawson's vision is ultimately a negative one, in which as he writes more of the country, a darker vision, a loss and lack of purpose overwhelms. Manning Clark is good at recognising this. Still, a figure like Joe Wilson with his poetic spirit and grim determination is always going to be admirable. To one, like myself, who has a shearer for a brother, the anecdotes of the bush that Lawson creates almost as refrains are entirely recognisable and transferable from generation to generation.

My brother says that humour in the shearing shed works as the escape valve on the pressure cooker. For Lawson, for whom humour was so definitive in characterising the ordinary Australian bush-person (white!), it was more than a release, it was an entire world-view, an acceptance of grimness and hardship that ultimately could not be overcome. It had to be cherished because it was the actuality.

Lawson feared that the old ways of the bush would give way to technology, but in many ways they are the same, including the inherited bigotries of the invader/settler culture. Lawson's parents, the feminist and later publisher Louisa Lawson, and the Norwegian prospector Niels (Peter) Larsen, had a notoriously difficult marriage that eventually resulted in their separation, and a kind of split view of the world in their son. The mother's moral rigour, and the father's belief in the outdoor outback world, really do create a tension and a fusion in Lawson.

Working with my five-year-old son in the garden today, it struck me that it is possible for the masculine and feminine comfortably to coexist within the one gender. Timmy likes being a little "bloke" but doesn't see that as excluding his mother or sister. I find this fascinating. Lawson's portrait of women often fuses elements of the masculine and feminine, and it's really in his portrait of sexual relations between men and women that the distance is created. Without consciousness of sexual difference, it is easy for a child of either gender to embody characteristics of both and not create a hierarchy.

I have been keeping Lawson, and my experiences on our block as well as in the district, in mind with my own short-story writing, which is such a slow process for me. As I use "description" so intensely in my poetry, I want to use some other way of seeing place and space in my short fiction. I have much to learn from this apparent "inadequacy" of Lawson's, technically, I think. I have certainly been looking at our place in a different light, having been reading Lawson so closely.

I am looking at description of the land through an empathy with the people "working" it. Of course, I take to this my politics and deconstructive sense of what that land has become through dispossession, so it could never be the same as Lawson.

Interestingly, Lawson came to Western Australia on a couple of occasions, but generally stayed around the city, even camping in East Perth. He also visited Albany, writing for the local newspaper, but loathed it, as he did Perth!

Between libido and language

Tracy here...

The Guardian (UK) yesterday published a review by Blake Morrison of George Steiner’s new book, My Unwritten Books (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), in which the reviewer remarks that Steiner “has always been interested in the relationship between the libido and language”, and proceeds to give entertaining examples from the work that illustrate this “startling” statement of Steiner’s (pardon alliteration!):

“I believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language. That the love and lechery of the polyglot differs from that of the monoglot, faithful to one language.”

It’s clear from what follows in the review that Morrison, while intrigued, finds the illustrations de trop – you can read them here and decide for yourself:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2242984,00.html

but it certainly had me thinking about the quality of difference in experience between languages – and George Steiner is in a position more than most to know about this.

I haven’t read the Steiner book yet but will be looking out for it. There are parts of my other-language vocabulary... much smaller and weaker than his, of course!... that I almost can’t bear to use (or dwell on) because of their too-close association with particular memories, people, physical sensations of the far past – certainly of love if probably not of “lechery”...

Of course it’s also true that particular words, vocabularies within just one language can come to be linked to past experiences in a personal, idiosyncratic way, but I suspect Steiner is meaning something far more differentiated than this. An Australian friend with whom I travelled in France when I was very young said to me, “You become another person when you are only speaking French, your entire personality is different, and you seem much happier.”

I don’t know that I was necessarily happier, but the general distinction was accurate, and I am sure that this is true for many non-monolinguals.

After reading the review, I was driving down to Perth (actually to the south-eastern suburbs, a couple of hours from here) with T (aged 5), listening to Jacques Brel on the way – between us, we always choose two to three CDs to cover the journey, sometimes replaying favourite songs many times over – sometimes – yes, naff/daggy I know, singing along.

T is growing up bilingual – passive French at this stage, because he won’t speak it but can understand it perfectly – used to speak it, but refuses now that he’s immersed in a social environment that only speaks English. So these car-journey listenings – like the watching of French kids’ movies together – are our “other-self” space, a strange bracketing of our normal lives and entering a shared alternative existence.

I know it’s hard for non-native speakers like me really to judge the quality of poetry in a foreign language, but Brel seems to me a true poet – and one hard to share with those who speak only English, because the translations I have heard (e.g. the English If You Go Away, compared to the French Ne me quitte pas) seem to take all the poetry out.

It seems to me too that Brel writes about love and passion – and sometimes even lechery? – in a very French-language way (okay, he was Belgian, but it’s still the French language). Despite having done a fair amount of translation, including of poems, I wouldn’t know how to begin to translate Brel – the lack is already in the words available. Which is not to say the Anglophone can’t love (or lech) just as well as the Francophone, only that there is disparity, a shape that can’t quite be mapped onto the other shape.

There’s a big website on Brel at http://www.jacquesbrel.be/

in four languages (including English) and I’m almost afraid to read it, in case I discover something off-putting, as I did recently about another favourite, Cole Porter, when I heard for the first time an older version of his Let’s Do It which included offensive (racist) lyrics that were missing from my Ella Fitzgerald version... Somehow that makes it harder to enjoy any of his songwriting. Some sources say Porter was racist in actual life too.

Not that I’ve any reason to suspect Brel of similar attitudes, only that it’s often disappointing when you learn about the person behind an artwork (why do we expect artists to be good people anyway?). Reading any poet’s biography (for instance) should disabuse us of that... But that’s another story, and this blog entry is already too long.