PEN ERASES PAPER

last year i edited an anthology of comics and cartoons about class. there were more than twice as many submissions as i was able to print, so the editorial process was challenging. i largely undertook this process myself, conferring with six other people along the way, from diverse racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. obtaining feedback from people from different contexts was very important in ensuring the publication was respectful and politically useful, especially since i grew up as a white boy in a middle class context, so a lot about class, and its intersections with other oppressions, is invisible to me. it’s important that i stipulate that editorial decisions for this project were made after lengthy dialogue and discussion amongst people from different backgrounds, genders and socio-economic backgrounds.

the process of editing, laying out and self publishing a book was challenging, especially to a tight launch date + v limited budget, and alongside other concurrent deadlines, and alongside serious concerns for the health of an immediate family member. in the rush to get the book completed and launched, i sent out a mass rejection email to the 56 people whose work didn’t fit the book. i regretted sending this as a generic email, it’s never nice to send or receive such a thing, especially since many of those receiving the email are close friends. but time was tight. those whose work was not included in the book were not paid for their submissions. those whose work was published were paid.

one person whose work was not included in the book took issue with the editorial group’s decision. the main reason this piece was not included is that it was 7 pages long, and myself and the other folk involved in making the decision felt this number of pages couldn’t be justified because it would mean leaving out multiple other pieces. the publication included artwork by people in detention centres, people who had recently experienced homelessness, visa insecurity, and in various other structural hardships. for every long piece included, multiple shorter pieces would have to be left out, owing to page count and budgetory restraints. i regret that the artwork in question was not included in the book, because it was a strong piece, which i had previously communicated to those who made it. the decision not to include it was made late in the editorial process. i apologised for the decision in a email subsequent to the initial rejection msg, and i am unreservedly apologising again for it now. i feel sad about the difficult decision not to include the piece in the publication. it was a beautifully rendered, deeply personal comic.

understandably, at the time, the editorial decision was an issue for the contributing artist.

and so opposition to the decision, and to the formula rejection email came in the form of numerous phonecalls and emails, which I was slow to respond to, and only responded via email. this was also disrespectful, since the artist was someone i considered a friend.

fast forward to a few days ago, when this same person started making critical comments, many of them justified, on most things i was posting on social media, from facebook to instagram, to private emails. they sent emails asking for me to deposit money to their account, for the time they had taken explaining why it was problematic that I hadn’t included their work in the book or sufficiently communicated why. they also questioned why i was making art about topics that didn’t directly affect my own lived experience. they stated that the fact that i had not communicated properly with a woman of colour, and then subsequently drawn about the lived experience of a fictional woman of colour was unacceptable and gas-lighting and performative of ally-ship. aspects of these critiques, such as suggesting i was making money off the drawing in question, are incorrect. but other critiques about me not communicating sufficiently, properly or respectfully to a woman of colour, are important and valid, and I would like to sincerely apologise for not responding to these critiques at the time.

at the same time as the aforementioned critiques were being posted across my social media pages, it emerged that a neo-nazi group was targeting myself and a number of other people belonging to melbournes left. i was doubly distracted from responding to these critiques on social media. eventually, these daily comments began to include what i consider to be misrepresentations - that i don’t pay people for their artistic labour, for their contributions to publications. at this point, i blocked the individual from instagram, in a stressed-out, thoughtless and reactionary manner. doing this automatically deleted the person’s previous comments, which i didn’t realise would happen.

i have just written privately to the person that this post concerns, but i would also like to publically apologise here also, for blocking them. and for their comments having been subsequently deleted. the comments disappearing was not my intention. but intentions don’t matter - consequences do. and the consequence of me silencing a woman of colour is serious, and i regret it. i also apologise for having not responded to each of the comments on the posts, in real time. i felt unable to, considering what was happening in other parts of my life. this is not intended to excuse my behaviour, but i feel the need to articulate what was going on in other parts of my private life at the time. i was feeling quite anxious about the neo-nazi posts at this stage, so i set my social media presence to private, and discussed with my family the reasons this would be wise for them to perhaps also do, in light of what was happening.

the role i have in activist spaces is one in which i receive a disproportionate amount of kudos and praise for the energy i offer to social movements. it is undeniable that the majority of activism that happens in this country is performed by people who are rendered invisible, marginalised, and are not thanked or acknowledged nearly enough. i need to consider more the privileges my role affords me, the social capital, and disproportionate amounts of gratitude, when compared to those doing the grittier tasks that community organising entails. this year, i plan to undertake more of this kind of behind-the-scenes campaigning, and have a less visible presence.

one last thing. the vast majority of drawings that i do, i receive no payment for. and as for drawing about racism and the border, this is something that i generally do when approached by a group organising around these issues. and just like the other drawings i do to support social movements, i try to only draw for campaigns in which i am actively involved as an activist on the ground. but there are *certainly* infinite limitations as to how much i can understand the struggles of people with oppressions different and far greater than my own. the pic on instagram that depicted a woman of colour yelling at the immigration minister was originally drawn for a refugee organisation (i received no payment for this). i sold prints of this drawing at a zine fair last weekend, in order to raise money for the same organisation. i feel extremely uncomfortable making any money out of such artworks - for example, when the comic i drew about someone working in a detention centre went viral a few years back, i auctioned off the original drawings and donated the money to a refugee-run organisation. i say no to the vast majority of drawing projects that i get approached about that touch on issues of racism and the border and colonialism. i typically try to refer the work on to people who have a lived experience of these violent systems. i am sure that i can do better, and take up less space in these areas. and i am sure that i have enacted power dynamics in my dealings with the artist who contributed to the class anthology, power dynamics that are structured by racial and gendered privilege, by not responding to emails in a timely manner, and for blocking them on instagram rather than engaging with their critiques. for this i apologise.

last year I drew a throwaway cartoon of a little boy standing looking fondly at a framed photo of an old man. his speech bubble said something like “ah yes, that was back when I was old”. It was a sketch done in a cafe, a drawing without any clear meaning behind it - if I had to reduce it, i guess it was meant to be a playful reflection on the cyclical nature of time. the character was a blank-faced young white boy.

I read once that the less meaning and detail you draw on kids faces, the more universal they appear to the audience. And therefore people are more able to relate to them. that’s why in lots of kids books and cartoons, the central character is usually the most boring looking, the most simply drawn.  It’s so people can load themselves on to them without much effort, and feel like they are going through what the character is going through. It’s a kinda cheap trick that i think a lot of cartoonists, writers and cultural producers deploy regularly.

anyway, when my partner saw the drawing of the little kid looking at a photo of himself as an old man, he asked me what the cartoon meant, and as he was trying to guess at the meaning, he asked whether the kids race or gender had anything to do with what I was trying to convey. I responded that no, no, I had represented the kid as a white boy so that people *wouldn’t* think about his race or gender - if I had presented the kid as a black woman for example, i reasoned I thought that the audience might try to work out what the cartoon was saying about race or gender. and that they might miss out on what I was trying to touch on, the vague comment on western notions of time passing.

at that moment, I quietly and without knowing so, put another brick into the wall of white supremacy. because whiteness is so pervasively ‘universal’ in this society, that in this situation, and in the media so often, race and gender become tools to be used when convenient for the white cultural producer. there is such a violence to this.

a kind of inverted, but related event took place with so many individuals and outlets reporting on Tyrone Unsworth’s passing. The vast majority of the media decided that this little boy, who had died by his own hand (and indirectly, the hand of bullies, the hand of heterosupremacy, and without doubt the hand of the on-going project of colonisation), was a universal white figure. the left media, myself included, used his body and his departed spirit to click neatly into a pre-existing campaign attempting to defend the pro-LGBTIQ, anti-bullying Safe Schools program. political campaigns have a great knack of flattening the terrain, and smoothing out the real texture of lived experience. if we mock tony abbott for sloganeering and being reductive then we should probably take a look at ourselves too. mainstream political campaigns too often piggy back on to the lives of the marginalised, utilising them as chess pieces.

at the same time, media workers reap social capital (and actual capital) by reducing and making more visible the struggles that actually take place in far more nebulous terrain, without actually carrying out the meaningful (often messy, usually unwaged) grassroots work of resistance. this work so often falls to people of colour, to women, to femmes. this needs to be corrected.

media workers need to acknowledge the labour of those on the ground more actively. we need to give up chunks of our income to support those embedded in the struggles we earn our living discussing. further than that, we also need to be part of those struggles on the ground. there is no such thing as an impartial journalist or media worker, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. if journalists can write and fight for rupert murdochs interests without raising an eyebrow from peers, then i don’t understand why it can’t be professionally appropriate that we be on the ground fighting for the other side.

following the reporting on Tyrone Unsworth’s passing, numerous Indigenous people carried out the tiring, thankless, unacknowledged, unpaid labour of highlighting Tyrone’s racial background, targeting tweets and facebook messages and writing think pieces and doing work that shouldn’t have to be done by people that shouldn’t have to do it. and every journalist or media worker I spoke to about what had happened remarked upon how awful it was that this had happened, once people realised that the racial aspect of Tyrone’s life had been erased. after some days, a couple of outlets published pieces discussing how disgusting and saddening the erasure of Tyrone’s Aboriginality was, how it was violence laid over the existing violence. these pieces were typically shared much less than the initial ones. the “news cycle” had moved on to the next outrage. the discourse trundled on, and Tyrone’s background was read as peripheral to the centrally relevant point of his sexuality. never mind that these same journalists had made so much of the suburb Tyrone lived in, of his socio-economics, even of his hobbies.

everyone I spoke to in the media, including myself, situated the blame for the outcome in the ‘collective media’. as if it is a mass, amorphous blob, operating outside of human control, with no distinct moving parts. I guess when everyone is to blame, people feel like no one is to blame. but I think it’s the opposite - if no one is to blame, then everyone involved is responsible and complicit.

i didn’t look into Tyrone’s racial background at all when producing my cartoon response to his death. I drew him as a little white boy. i took him, to use him in a pre-existing, cookie cutter political campaign. i drew him and his story in a way that would have been dramatically different had I known he was Aboriginal. but i never bothered to find this out before i put pen to paper. In this way, I was actively part of the enduring project of erasure and colonisation. For this, I apologise. and i promise to try harder in the future.

It wasn’t that the media actively ironed out intersections or overlaps. This wasn’t necessary, because these things didn’t occur to us in the first place. there is so much we don’t see because we don’t do the work to see it. since this happened, i’ve been wondering what else i’m not seeing.

i’ve been thinking about how individual media outlets and workers can better resource and up-skill themselves to find out fundamental, vital facts about stories, without being invasive to families.

I’ve been trying to think about the work I have to do to see queerness as an intersection, and a layer, rather than a homogenous beige clump.

this is not a matter of representation. it’s much more serious - it’s about the on-going project of colonisation, about erasure, and the complicity of so many of us in this project. It’s about trying to see what we don’t bother to see. and being thankful to those that hold us to account (thanks to my three friends for asking for more from me on this, and to one friend in particular for discussing these issues with me at length).

i apologise, and I will try to do better in the future.