'A Story Is Where We Begin': Two Indigenous Poets Face Monsters Of Invasion With Words Of Love And Hope

(MENAFN- The Conversation) I like to read poetry on long flights. I think it's the climbing motion of the plane against the constant roar of the engine that creates a space for words to hum and move. But poetry can connect us to home, even when we are distant, away, sky high.

Mark the Dawn by Jazz Money and Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki are two new collections of poetry by Indigenous authors, who embed, as if in soil, words for cultural understanding, words that echo deeper than the archives.

Review: Mark the Dawn – Jazz Money (University of Queensland Press) & Refugia – Elfie Shiosaki (Magabala)

What I enjoyed most about reading these two collections together is seeing how Money and Shiosaki have their own unique way with words – differing in texture, configuration, patterns and rhymes. Yet both write so sharply about the pressing themes of land acknowledgement and sovereignty. They attack the monsters of colonial invasion and mass incarceration with the power of love and its reverberations of hope.

Alexis Wright has praised Money's Mark the Dawn for its intelligence and effortless movement from one poem to the next. The collection has a message that echoes Wright's novel Carpentaria (2006):“A nation chants but we know your story already.”

Money moves the reader seamlessly through a range of emotions, identifying cultural lessons with every step, angling the shapes of the words on the page to reflect her themes. The poem titled Our Abundance As Though It Was Honey, for example, is spread across the page like honey on toast before the words drip down the page to finish:“how it is carried [...] since the first fires made us”.

Other poems, like Strike the Sparks, begin with stars, igniting the words, which are arranged into the shape of a flame. Money stokes her poetry like a fire and finishes with a flicker:“you say gone, we say forever, as we rise from the smoking earth”.

Similarly, The Balance of Shadow is a poem with parallel lines on either side of the page, which seem to shadow each other. Some of the more unusual shapes in this collection become tiny icons, such as the flowers and breasts formed in the poem Mardi Gras Rainbow Dreaming.

Money's work is distinctive in the way her words and their shapes invite you into a poetic understanding of who and where we are. Acknowledgements of country have become contentious all over the world, criticised as the tokenistic or clichéd displays of non-Indigenous people. In Canada, where I touched down while reading these collections, I met many who were critical of the performative nature of such acknowledgements. Money points out how often whitefellas get acknowledgements of country wrong:

In the section titled Into the Still Air, Money reminds us of the importance of acknowledging elders past, present and emerging. But the poems in this section go beyond a simple acknowledgement. They highlight how poetics can contibute to meaningful approaches to acknowledging Country and traditional custodians.

Money marvels for example“at shadows writ upon those dreams by those who walk here still”. She demonstrates how poetry and prose can work together to create a meaningful connection to the power of Country.“There is a rhythm to resistance,” she writes,“there is a sound to legacy.”

And so, since returning home, I have been reciting Money's poems as part of my own duties to acknowledge Country. I have recited some of them before meetings and workshops, and noticed how people tend to look into the distance a little differently. I am starting to see differently too, like peering from a plane's window and marvelling at how the land looks from a new point of view.

Mark the Dawn finishes with a circular stamp, sealing its close:“It's Always Been Always”.

Elfie Shiosaki is a Noongar and Yawuru poet. Her collection Refugia is a tribute to the continuity of boodja (Country) and the refuge it gives us all.

The book has three sections: Bend, Break, and Bud. Shiosaki uses landscapes and skyscapes as settings for her work, but goes further to include outer space. As her first poem suggests, the collection means to invigorate A Galaxy of Stories.

“A story is where we begin,” Shiosaki reminds us. She also reminds us, like Money, that a story is where we should begin: with an understanding that the lands on which we live and work were never ceded.

Refugia is different to Money's collection, in that it includes images, maps and photographs of documents that undermine the authority of colonial officialdom. It combines its creative effort with rigorous research, including references and a page of endnotes to support its ideas. The only thing the colonial archives could ever represent, Shiosaki suggests, is“that it never had to be this way”.

The shapes of words on the page are played with. Shiosaki underlines for emphasis and crosses out to mark corrections to Australia's Black history. In a paradoxical manoeuvre, she points to the ways in which words on paper can be as meaningless as they are meaningful. For example, she mocks the colonial documents that inscribed laws pertaining to land ownership and the protection of Indigenous people.

Yet Shiosaki also shows how contemporary poetry can undo a historical text simply by evoking feelings of resistance and survival, when she challenges“a piece of paper purported to be nationhood; a story now purported to be history”.

Colonial history has created what we have come to know, in Shiosaki's words, as“uncommon wealth”. It has left many impoverished and incarcerated on their own lands. Shiosaki is critical of Australia's colonial past, as she catches a“train to Kew Gardens” to continue her research into the settlers' empire – research that is making her ears burn with“heat and light”. But she is also hopeful. Before the section titled Break, she writes:

Similarly, before the section titled Bud begins, Shiosaki claims to“sing for regeneration”. This final section cleanses. It proclaims peace and forgiveness, soaking us to the bone with rhyming words, cultivating new truths that“spring from the soil”. The last poem imagines a life that can“rise above the colony; rise into stars”. It evokes peace, not expansion; a sense of family, not empire.

Of course, both of these collections point to the work that is still to be done. Money and Shiosaki both write, for example, about the over-representation of Indigenous people in prison. Shiosaki mentions“police brutality” and“solitary confinement” and how Wadjemup –“the oldest prison in Western Australia” – is“paradise rebuilt as misery in 1838”. She decries Wadjemup as“an embryo for a monster reborn as Banksia Hill Detention Centre”. Money's prose poem Listen Up, Bub decries putting people in prison for“being poor or being sick!”

The penal colony is a monster that can only be slayed with intellectual prowess and poetic sharpness, which both of these writers possess. They show how this work of resistance is embedded in a poetry that looks beyond the present, understanding the notion of it always being always.

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