Literature

commutare

I dance. I fly – dog paddle upwards, a vertical take-off like a helicopter (great for escaping danger), and breaststroke through the sky or glide on updrafts. There is joy in the journey. But back down on earth, leaving the reverie, my physical and attitudinal surroundings are not so conducive to travel. I use a mobility scooter or wheelchair to get around and commuting on public transport from Blacktown to Wynyard Station is closer to a nightmare.

To travel to Sydney’s CBD by train, I load my wheelchair into the back of the car using a hoist. It only takes me about ten minutes to drive to the station, then the search for parking begins. There are notoriously few public car parks near Blacktown Station, let alone disability spaces. At Boys Ave there are 130 spots, and eight of those are for disabled commuters. Say I’m lucky enough to find parking. Then I unload my chair, negotiate holes in the footpath, humps, bumps, and kerbs to get to the station. Wait my turn in front of the lift. The doors open and close. It’s overflowing with impatient commuters. I wait a while before the doors open finally to reveal a space for me. I wait for an attendant to let me through the ticket gate. Wait again for rail staff, who are often stressed and grumpy, to organise the ramp to get me over the gap between the platform and onto the train. Over 6000 commuters pass through the Blacktown station turnstiles on a typical workday during morning peak time, 15,800 people during an average 24-hour day.

In a 2019 9News report, Blacktown residents interviewed said they hardly ever get a seat on the train going to or from work. Standing room only, they’re packed like battery hens on the way to the slaughterhouse. Often the train is too crowded for me to board. When I can get on, I need to manoeuvre my way through the crush of bodies and find a place to hold onto a handrail so my chair doesn’t slide when the train brakes. At Wynyard, there’s another wait. The station attendant needs to put a ramp down and help me off the train. Even if a support worker accompanies me, I’m exhausted by the time I get to work and have a raging headache. My joints and muscles scream in pain.

Generally, I avoid public transport, choosing instead to load my scooter into my car and drive calmly through Blacktown’s asbestos jungle. With lockdown, I rarely travelled to the city and now I’m self-isolating, I work from home as much as I can. Today, however, I need to meet with other creatives in person at the start-up hub where our small arts organisation has a desk. The haunting voice of Karen Chilton reverberates through my car. She narrates the story of Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, the latest book to satisfy my craving for Afrofuturism and Black speculative fiction. Suburban homes flick by, some just starting their gentrification journeys, moving away from the perceived stigma of working-class existence, to maybe one day, achieve the affluent, leafy, suburban bliss of Castle Hill. I glide past Kings Park Industrial Estate, a car and truck rental, and left onto Sunnyholt Road. Turn right, gathering speed, 100 kilometres per hour to merge onto the M7.

Separation جدایی by Gaele Sobott

Colour photograph of a woman standing in a black coat in a forest. Her face is completely covered by her long black hair.

Photo by OVAN on Pexels.com

It seems my mother bore me for grief that grows of separation (from Hafez 352)

When I was a little girl in Iran I loved spinning around until my brain became fuzzy, I’d lose control and sometimes I’d fall. The roses in our garden swirled red, pink and white as I turned, and I’d smell their sweetness.

My husband has gone. There is a space where he used to be. That space loops brittle-boned into my body, across my apartment, out the window into the heavens. I water my plants on the window sill and I feed my canary, who sings yellow in his confinement. Little bird condemned to this boredom until you die. A huge bat hangs camouflaged black in the fig tree next door, across the broken concrete of the driveway. I walk fearful, careful like Mooch, my cat, soft on my toes. The moon, swollen with light, shudders as the bat takes off and I squeal. If I ran my fingers over those wings, they’d feel thin, stretched rubber or maybe silk. Shwoosh, shwoosh, stupid woman, it flies an elegant ellipse of protest high above our rows and rows of apartments to return and hang again black in the fig tree next door. My daughter weaves a life of her own in America with her husband. My grandchildren are far from me.

The evenings are cooling ever so slightly on my sadness as summer gives way to autumn. Lakemba days are shortening and people spend more time inside. Conversations in Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin drift with smoke from a wood fire, and smells of curry leaves and cumin frying. Death and rebirth, good and evil, the goldfish swims in its bowl ready for Norooz.

In Iran, I sat on my father’s lap enclosed like a Russian doll in our house, in the room with carpets, surrounded by the architecture of my father’s body, the warmth and murmured rumblings of his chest. His arms wrapped around me so I was almost in darkness. My father and his friends laughed and talked. The volume of their voices crescendoed and lulled in concentric circles. I peeked out to see my mother swinging a brass censer filled with coals. She seemed entranced by the swinging chain. The coals glowed in their cage. I broke from my father’s arms and ran to her. Pulling on the folds of her long robe, I wanted to feel the motion, the weight of the censer. I wanted to do as my mother did and make the coals breathe red. My brother followed me and my mother allowed us to swing the censer very gently before she took it to the brazier in the middle of the room. My father prepared two of his favourite vafoor. One pipe had a gold rim and paintings of blue birds with long tails on the bulb. It belonged to my grandfather who was growing smaller and smaller, sitting in the quieter shadows of the house, storm clouds under his eyes, and dark thin lips.

My uncle had returned from the edge of the desert where the air is crisp. He returned from Kerman with pistachios and the golden-brown tariaak they called senatori. The men joked about the senators smoking the highest quality opium. Now the ayatollahs have taken over from the senators. My father broke off a small piece of opium and put it in the pipe. My uncle held a burning coal in the tongs.

Grief has made its untidy nest in my apartment, in this body of mine. I try to sleep but the night is restless, the darkness is full of angst. I try to rest sitting on my couch reading but sentences scramble, scratching the paper like scuttling cockroaches. The words scream a cacophony of meaning at me and I feel their rage because I am porous. I have no boundaries.

In the morning, I leave my flat at 7am and walk to the train station. I walk tall, long feet and long fingers, wearing a dark suit. My hair long and black swings in time to my steps. Back and forth I walk every day, past discarded TVs and old mattresses. I walk past piles of clothes and curtains, and couches, broken tables and packaging that recently held a new refrigerator or television. Every day the train sways, stops and starts. People get on and people get off. Some play games on their phones. Some stare glassy-eyed into corners of their lives I cannot see. Belmore backyards flash by, we rattle through the inner west, Redfern platforms, sniffer dogs assiduous, salivating for a bust. I get off at Town Hall, moving at the same pace as everyone else, trotting up the escalator, across George Street, a fast-moving mass of people who seem to know their way, know what they want in life. Lines of square windows and grey concrete stretch to the sky but I rarely lift my head to look. I don’t stop in the city. In the city, I’m a lawyer. My work holds me tight like a corset. Keeps me going.

The lift zooms up to level thirty-two. I greet Helen, the receptionist. “How you doing today?”

She says, “My cat’s sick,”

“Sorry to hear that.” I commiserate.

“Yeah, she’s not eating. Just lies there. If she’s still like that after work, I’ll take her to the vet.”

The phone rings, she puts on head phones and her receptionist voice to answer. She winks at me and I continue to my office. Sexual harassment cases splayed across my desk, on chairs, clusters of papers, book upon book with fawn covers, gold titles on red binding. I click on my inbox. Emails like hordes of insects. I click, answer, click, answer. Read some specialist medical reports. So much reading. Reading consumes my day. Rowena’s complaint with the AHRC, the respondents denied the allegations. All attempts to bring the parties together have failed. Not the best-case scenario for Rowena. The alleged perpetrator relies on entitlement, on his positioning in the hierarchy of power. The offensive sexual jokes, suggestive and lurid remarks, sly rubbing of his cock against her body, always in tight spaces, in the kitchen, at the photocopier, fingers pinching her bottom, prodding. All that disappears with his denial and confident smirk. Rowena’s supporting evidence is weak. She’s depressed, experiencing reactive anxiety. She resigns from the job. Her marriage breaks apart. I’m not sure how she’s going to cope with the pain, the anger, shame, the humiliation of the public process. I’m a lawyer, a professional, but sometimes emotion and passion leak through my lawyer skin onto the desk, across the papers, like dark, golden sap escaping from the inside of a tree. When that happens, I am not useful to my client. When that happens, I want to cry.

On the train back home, the hurt under my breasts and the desire to cry are desperate, they rage against my false calm. The train doors whoosh shut, I climb the stairs, walk, unlock the front door, the cat rubs against my legs. Tip dry food into its bowl. Feed myself. White cheese, walnuts, dates, Persian cucumber, tomatoes, olives, nuts. I sip black tea from a glass and let lumps of sugar dissolve slowly in my mouth, longing for my mother’s sweets.

My mother put rose petals in with the tea leaves. She carried the teapot and glasses clinking on a tray. Her thick hair pinned up in a French roll. On one side of the manghal sat plates of honey crisps with almonds and the pistachios my Uncle brought us as a gift. Dates and figs, and small biscuits kept my father’s blood pressure from dropping too low. I sat on my father’s lap. My tooth ached. He inhaled, and the pipe whistled. He held his breath, his cheeks bulged, he blew smoke across the top of my head. Haalaa bekesh too. I inhaled and the woody perfume was purple or maybe turquoise, the most sensuous bitterness. I was transported away from pain.

Cat footprints mark the dust on my bookshelves like fallen blossoms, Mar Name leans neglected against a Farsi translation of Nietzsche. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus balances on Grammatology. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts lies on the floor alongside classical music CDs I no longer play. I sit on the couch. My fingers habitually exploring the patch that covers a small hole burned by my cigarette into the fabric. Above me hang crooked on the wall, cheap copies from the seventies turning brown. I ran from Iran over twenty years ago, first to Pakistan, then here. I am forever a kharjee spirit, an outsider, an adventurer, maybe a heretic … at day and at night, branded by love, like Hafez, with nightingales of dawn, I cry songs, woes of separation.

Mooch stretches his tabby body across my thigh, heavy, snoring like the man of the house he is. He brings me lizards and mice and small birds. He lays them wet at my feet, sometimes moving, sometimes still.

I am still, here with my cat, and the canary asleep in its cage, and the fish.

The city on the edge of the desert, the ancient city called Kerman, where the air is crisp and very cold at night, is surrounded by fields of poppies but was once surrounded by fields of barley. I would lay on my stomach on our carpet from Kerman, rolling from one end to the other over the pastel shades, the blues and creams, back and forth until my brain was fuzzy. I imagined I was lying in fields of yellow barley ready for harvest, looking up at the sky so very blue. My father sat with his friends drinking tea, eating cakes and sweets. They laughed and they cried. They talked as if to stop talking would show weakness. They talked over the top of each other. Their conversation infinite, uninhibited…

Published 8th November 2019 in Prometheus Dreaming

My freedom is writing. My freedom is my peace of mind. My freedom is building a good relationship – An Interview with Ken Canning

Head shot of Ken Canning. He is wearing glasses, and a long necklace of small, red, gold and black beads (Aboriginal colours). He has a greying mustache and beard, and he is smiling.

Credit: Socialist Alliance

Ken Canning is a Murri activist, writer and poet. His people are from the Kunja Clan of the Bidjara Nation in south west Queensland, Australia. His Bidjara name is Burraga Gutya. Ken has lived in Sydney for over 30 years. He worked as an academic and cultural adviser at the University of Technology Sydney and is currently a support worker at the Judge Rainbow Memorial Fund, where he assists people who have experienced the criminal justice system.

Ken’s poetry has been translated into several languages. His publications include Ngali Ngalga, Breakout Press,1990 and Yimbama, Vagabond Press, 2015. His first major play, 49 Days a Week, was showcased at the Yellamundie National First Peoples Playwriting Festival 2017. He has also written a half-hour film script called Cocky on a Biscuit Tin.

Gaele Sobott: Let’s start with your birth. There’s information on the Internet stating you were born on Bribie Island, Queensland.

Ken Canning: I spent some time on Bribie Island as a kid but I wasn’t born there. I was born in Frankston, Victoria. My mother’s family come from Charleville in Queensland. Dad was stationed in Victoria when Mum was pregnant with me.

GS: Where was your father from?

KC: He was from Toowoomba. My Dad was a whitefella. The family was Irish from County Cork. They were very rich and very powerful. My grandfather’s name was Bob Canning.

GS: Where did you parents meet?

KC: Granddad worked out at Charleville. My father was in the navy and when he got leave, he went out to see his father. That’s where he met my mother. When they decided to marry, the Canning family didn’t want anything to do with us because they were against inter-racial marriage.

My grandfather said, ‘My son can marry who he wants.’

So, the family disowned both my father and Granddad. Any wealth, any land my father and grandfather were entitled to was stripped from them. They were outcasts. Granddad was disappointed with his family. He said they were traitor Irish. They took part in some of the massacres of Aboriginal people. I researched it years later with Dr Carroll Graham at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). They didn’t come here like your average Irishman who didn’t like authority. One of granddad’s uncles even became a policeman.

The reason I was born in Frankston was a bit random because while Mum was pregnant with me, she accidentally trod on a Red-Belly Black snake and got bitten on the foot. An old fella reacted quickly, got a sharp knife, cut her foot open and sucked the poison out. She was lucky, she was only a bit crook but after that she wanted to be with my father so she went and stayed in Frankston. About six months after I was born, we headed to Narrabeen in Sydney and then we took off to Queensland.

GS: So, you may have a bit of Red-belly Black venom in you?

KC: Well I might. I was fascinated by snakes growing up. There were snakes everywhere on Bribie Island. One time I was hiding from my cousins behind a tree, waiting to scare them and a snake crawled across my foot. I froze. I knew if I kept still it would leave me alone and it did. It took off when my cousins came running up the road. I admire snakes but I don’t really want them crawling on me!

I used to stalk kangaroos as a kid. I knew I couldn’t catch them. They were too clever for me. I’d chase goannas too then one evening a goanna turned on me. Jeez, I tell you what, I reckon if it had been an Olympic trial, I would’ve won. I ran home and slammed the door. My brother and I were looking through the front window and it was sitting there waiting for me to come out. It was much bigger than what I’d initially thought. They can give you a nice bite. The funny thing about a goanna bite is that every year to the day the bite mark will come back.

GS: Can you talk a little about your mother’s family?

KC: I don’t know the traditional names but my great, great granny was called Jane Boyd by the whites who invaded the area. I read a police document on her – ‘Jane Boyd, Aboriginal woman, associate of Chinese gardeners. Likes opium, is armed and will shoot at police.’ The Chinese came to the area because they were being persecuted. They lived with our people.

My great, great grandfather walked down from Tenant Creek right into the middle of the wars, the Forty-Year war. He married Jane Boyd. He was given the name Edward Prince. There are still Princes out West but he originally came from the Northern Territory, Carpet Snake Dreaming. My mother’s side are Magpie Dreamers. My great granny looked after me. She used to tell me stories about how her mother would stand up to the police. They were very strong people. Granny got kicked in the hip by a horse out West and the doctors wouldn’t come to see her. The family mended the hip bone as best they could but she had trouble with it all her life. So, a lot of the time she was bedridden. She was addicted to morphine. She passed when I was about fifty-six.

It was confusing growing up because Mum had me when she was young and when I was little, I thought she was my sister and called her Joan. I thought my grandmother was my mother. I used to call her Mum, and I thought my great grandmother was my grandmother. That still sticks in my mind today. Often when I talk about my gran, I’m actually talking about my great grandmother.

GS: Tell me more about the Forty-Year war.

KC: The Forty-Year War was one of the longest wars in Australian history. Not the whole Bidjara people but our clan group, the Kunja clan, fought for forty years. That war went from the 1860s right up to the 1900s when they allegedly defeated our people. Men, women and children were fighting against the British. After that a lot of my great uncles went off with the bushrangers to continue fighting for another twenty years.

My great, great grandmother was carrying a gun around everywhere she went, shooting at police. We were a people who travelled on foot then. We didn’t take to horses until the cattle stations started using us as labour. Some of people rode horses but basically our guerrilla warfare was on foot. We only have oral history records of that war. My cousin, Sam Watson, found some information in the archives in Brisbane. There was a box just sitting there collecting dust and he started reading through some fascinating documents, but the archive staff told him the material wasn’t for public viewing and he should come back. When he went back the whole box was gone.

There is no official acknowledgement that the Kunja clan of the Bidjara people fought for forty years. That’s two generations and no recognition. When you look at our society today, we’re coming up to Anzac Day where people beat their chests and say, ‘My grandfather fought to save this country.’ I don’t have that right. It’s a denial of history. Like the very first boys’ home I was put into, does not exist. It’s been wiped from history.

GS: Where was the boys’ home?

KC: It was in Scarborough, run by the Catholics behind a boarding school for white kids. The building was full of Aboriginal kids who had allegedly committed crimes. They were totally brutalised. There is no record of that place ever existing. The Catholic Church denies it ever existed. It does not exist but I was there. I know other people who were there too. I knew people who committed suicide in there. It’s as though I fabricated eighteen months of my life. Our history is denied.

GS: How old were you when you went to Scarborough?

KC: I was ten, almost eleven. It was just after my great gran died. There were a lot of kids my age there and kids up to sixteen, seventeen-years. The place was run by brothers who were mad brutal rapists. They did some terrible things. They didn’t care what damage they caused. When they tried to take me, I’d jump up on the bed and scream, bite, kick. I was too much trouble for them. But they did bed checks every day so they set me up by putting two cigarettes under my pillow. I was flogged, every single day for the two cigarettes they’d find.

I was christened a Catholic. My parents were Catholic. Then I remembered Granddad talking about a cousin of his, called Archbishop Duhig, the archbishop of Brisbane at that time. I told one of the brothers. They must have checked it out and then there was a big change in attitude towards me.

GS: Why were you put in the boys’ home?

KC: I was living on Bribie Island and there was a shop I wasn’t allowed into because I was Aboriginal. The place was all bush back then. It was beautiful. Not like now. It’s disgusting. All built up. Multi-million dollar homes. I was waiting on the road up from the shop for my cousin. Some white boys came out of the shop. I knew them. They were older than me.

They said, ‘Do you want a bag of lollies Johnny?’

That’s my middle name. Anyway, I said, ‘Yeah, thanks.’

So, I was standing there with the bag of lollies when the shopkeeper came out and accused me of stealing them. He knew I wasn’t allowed in the shop.

I said, “I’m not allowed in the shop. How could I have stolen them?’

He took me to the policeman who put me in the cells. Twice a week a priest came to Bribie from the mainland. He was there too. The shopkeeper, the policeman and the priest made the decision without any consultation with my family, to send me to Scarborough. My family didn’t know where I was. They assumed I’d been taken to Brisbane. Everyone was looking for me in Brisbane. Some of my relatives went to the boys’ home in Scarborough but there were only records for orphans. The people in the office didn’t know who was in the home. Most of us kids were taken there illegally.

When stories started circulating about the place, and blokes in jail started talking about the treatment they’d received at the home, the Catholics closed it down. No record of anything ever happening there.

GS: You came from Frankston in Victoria, stayed for a while in Sydney and then came back to Queensland. Where did you live? Was it Bribie Island?

KC: We came from Sydney back to Charleville.

GS: What are your memories of that time?

KC: I was a funny little kid. I was fair. The old people in the family who lived inland, didn’t have any contact with white people, they’d come and visit, and every time they left, I’d follow them back out to the desert. Those men and women laughed at me and gave me the nick name, Myal. In our region that means an Aboriginal person who doesn’t want anything to do with white ways. The whites changed the meaning to a wild Blackfella. I later heard that all the family were killed by white people.

West Queensland in those days was lawless. It was brutal towards Aboriginal people but we had some good fighters in our family. We had some victories. My uncle Bill Bailey was a big, powerful man, huge. Any time we’d work for the white man, he wouldn’t pay us. It didn’t stop Blackfellas from working to try and make a living. My Uncle didn’t accept it.

He said, ‘I don’t care if I go to jail. You pay me or you’ll be in your grave.’

They paid him. We weren’t allowed to have bank accounts so he saved his money in an old Sunshine Milk tin that he buried in different places. No one ever knew where. Aboriginal people weren’t allowed in Charleville. He’d walk up the main street. Blackfellas weren’t allowed in the pub. He’d go in and demand to be served and they served him. The local police couldn’t get him into the jail. He was too powerful.

He saved enough money to buy a block of land just out of Charleville. We weren’t allowed to own land but they sold him the land. It’s still in the family. He made history. I loved Uncle Bill.

GS: When did you move to Bribie Island?

KC: We were hounded out of West Queensland. My old gran, my mother’s mum, wanted us to go. The government didn’t let blackfellas go to school and because of my complexion, I would have been taken by Welfare. We moved around South-West Queensland for a while then we stayed in Brisbane. We lived at a hotel under the Story Bridge. Unfortunately, by then, Mum had become an alcoholic. I was about five years old and I wandered off and nearly fell into the Brisbane River. The authorities put me in an orphanage. Two years later Dad came out of the navy. Because he was white, he was allowed to take me from the orphanage. He was a violent man.

One time, I was sitting on the beach with my granddad when he was dying of leukemia in the 80s and I asked him, ‘Have you got any regrets?’

The old fella said, ‘Yes, one regret, your father!

I got on well with Granddad. We lived in Redcliff for a while. I was seven or eight when Grandad got me into a Catholic school but they kicked me out because I was disruptive. I stood on the desk and hit people on the head with a ruler so they gave me a warning. Not long after that I got up on the roof of the boys’ toilets, jumped down onto a group of people and got stuck into them. I had a lot of rage by then. After that we moved to Bribie Island.

GS: Where did that rage come from?

KC: The rage came from a whole lot of things. There was a lot of violence in the home and alcoholism had taken my Mum. I found my grandfather on my mother’s side dead at the kitchen table. That shocked me. I was starting to understand the attitudes of white people towards my mother, towards Aboriginal people, racism. The police, and white people in general would call my mother names like whore, slut. Those things affect you as a little kid.

GS: You’ve said you chased kangaroos and goannas, how else did you like to spend your time as a kid?

KC: Yeah, I played in the bush but I’d also take time and go and sit with my Gran. She’d tell me stories about what was happening in her day and her mother’s day. She talk about which family groups were related to other family groups and where they went to when they were hunted out. She told me a whole lot of things. She told me stories about the black servicemen from the States stationed in Charleville during the Second World War. She didn’t like them. Stories of rape and violence towards our women. She experienced it personally.

In our land before white people came we were very much matriarchal. Gran and my old Granny Boyd, they had several husbands. They were open about their views that if a man started playing up, getting silly after he’d done his job, given them kids, they’d show them the door. Our lands were matriarchal. That didn’t mean that men were demeaned or exploited.

Another thing I liked doing was listening to the wireless. I used to listen to radio plays, the news, BBC programs.

GS: So, you were taken to the boys’ home in Scarborough from Bribie Island. How long were you in that home?

KC: I was in there for about one year or so. When I got out, the authorities took me back to Bribie Island and dumped me in the middle of the road outside an abandoned house. I was twelve going on thirteen-years-old. I went around to my old boxing trainer. He told me the family had gone to Brisbane looking for me. He drove me to Brisbane and I asked him to drop me at Musgrave Park. I sat with all the Blackfellas there and people took me in. They looked around and found Mum living at Wilston.

I was only in Brisbane for a little while and the local police grabbed me and took me to Windsor police station. They were screaming at me about a heap of break and enter crimes. Mum came in and tried to set the record straight. They called her every filthy name under the sun and threatened to lock her up. She got Granddad and he demanded to see the charge sheets.

He said, “My grandson was in the boy’s home in Scarborough for most of these.’ The coppers weren’t about to argue with Granddad and they let me go.

After the boys’ home in Scarborough, I made a habit of being alone. I didn’t want any ties for a long time. I got into a lot of trouble in Brisbane and ended up in Westbrook, another boy’s home. I ran away from there and stole a car. Police cars surrounded me down near Roma street and ran me off the road. They were shooting at me, bullets flying everywhere. One went through the door straight into my leg near the knee. I jumped out of the car and collapsed.

They put straight into the men’s prison, Boggo Road, Two Division. That was illegal because I was only sixteen. When Two Division was eventually closed in 1989, the Australasian Post, described it as the most notorious division in Australia. It was a hell hole. They had a young offenders’ yard but they put me in the men’s yard. I came in on crutches. My Uncle Vic was in there. He said, ‘You’ll be right. Settle down.’

Everyone knew Vic. Because I was his nephew, they left me alone. I only did a couple of months and I was let out. I told Mum I was going bush for a while. I had a bit of money because I was working hot so I caught the train to Sydney. Then went to Melbourne, across to Adelaide and on to Perth. I got knocked over there with a mini minor full of stolen property. How stupid was I then? You’d think I would’ve got a bigger truck.

The authorities contacted the Queensland authorities about me. They told them that they’d put me in Boggo Road because the boys’ homes couldn’t handle me. So, Western Australia put me straight into Freemantle adult prison. I was alright there because all the Blackfellas knew me. Again, I wasn’t there long. When I got out, the police put me on the train handcuffed. Just before it pulled out they took the cuffs off and said, ‘If you come back to WA we’ll put a bullet in you.’

None of the passengers would talk to me on the trip across the Nullarbor. It was a very spooky little trip.

I got to Sydney and found out that a member of our family had been shot to death by the police in Melbourne. Cuz and I went mental. We were already working hot but after that we made sure we were armed with sawn-off shot guns coxnd pistols wherever we went.

GS: I’d like to talk about your play 49 Days a Week. I saw the reading at Yellamundie 2017. The story is very powerful, moving, thought-provoking. Could you tell me a bit about the creative development process?

KC: I started writing that play years ago when I was at uni. I wrote a piece for a prisoner radio program. It was stream of consciousness, the thoughts of a bloke walking up and down his cell and I added some sound effects. That was the genesis but I changed it for Yellamundie reading. I set it in the cages at Bogo Road jail not the cells. That was the focus of the story, what the cage does to your mind. I had a lot of bad experiences in Long Bay jail too but I couldn’t set the Yellamundie play in two environments so I just kept it to the Boggo Road cages.

I wore myself down to the ground doing the writing. I was working, arranging the Invasion Day march at the same time and sitting up every night doing re-writes. I really wore myself out and I got ill. That sort of shut everything down. I’ve had a break now and I’m ready to write again.

Yesterday I was at the bus stop and along comes Fred Copperwaite, the director. He told me they are interested in developing the play further. He liked it because his father and his uncle had been in jail. I was scared that audiences wouldn’t like it, that they wouldn’t get it, they wouldn’t get why it had to be so intense. But the reception it got at Yellamundie was really good. The play means a lot to me because my friend was actually executed by the police in 1984. He was thirty-five.

GS: He was of Irish origin?

KC: Yes.

GS: Can you tell me more about him?

KC: Well, he was a professional armed robber. We met when we were kids. He had a great sense of humour. Me and Cuz were up and coming and the older robbers took to us. Our friend was one of the people from that era who got in with the old guard of armed robbers.

GS: 1970s?

KC: Yeah, the late 60s going into the 70s. I started doing stick-ups in Brisbane when I was very young and got mixed up with older fellas. When I escaped, I did jobs in Sydney, then I’d head off to Adelaide to live quietly. That was a little recipe I had. Come back and do some more. I got to know some good people. They were good at their trade. They liked me and Cuz because we were naturals. We started when we were sixteen. We got knocked when we were eighteen but in those couple of years we did some big jobs. When we escaped, people saw exactly how willing and how good we were at the work.

GS: What makes a good armed robber?

KC: I used to talk to my best mates who were armed robbers about this subject. One of them is a whitefella with a long surname. I don’t know if it’s German or what. He was the most infamous escapee we had in this country and the most proficient armed robber we’ve ever seen. The authorities described him as a modern-day Ned Kelly, only better. I liked him. So, we’d spend hours discussing these sorts of things. Once you escape, the authorities always say, ‘He’s armed and dangerous and will shoot at police. Do not approach.’

So, the public gets the idea that you’re a raving lunatic and a killer. The consensus is that we’re low in intellect but my mates were all deep thinkers.

We talked about our early lives and how those experiences influenced what we did for a living. Whatever happened to one man must have been traumatic. He had no memory of anything before he was eight. He couldn’t remember what his parents or aunties or uncles looked like. Not one memory from his childhood. Completely blank. Another came from a poor Irish family. His father refused to assimilate, refused to obey authority. From the start, my friend was targeted because he was the son of a mad Irishman who hated the authorities and liked blackfellas. When he was about seventeen, he moved in with an Aboriginal woman. They had a baby together. He told me he had thought his life was hard but once he started living with a Murri woman, the police were breaking down the door, putting a gun to his head, calling her all sorts of filthy names, even putting guns at the baby’s head. It was like a horror story.

When you have those kinds of experiences, you can go two ways. You can take the anti-social path where you are reckless or the anti-social path where you want to beat them. We were driven by the desire to beat them. We were all thorough planners. We all had a mad survival instinct and a sixth-sense for trouble. Every one of us were experts at counter surveillance. If we were under surveillance, we knew it.

When one mate escaped from Katingal, he was out for eleven years. That’s a phenomenal amount of time to be on the run. He was the smartest of us all. In all aspects of criminality, he was an absolute genius. The other commonality we had was, we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong.

To be a good armed robber you need to be able to plan. A well-thought-out escape route is the most important aspect of the planning. you’ve got to be able to think on your feet. Something might go wrong. Someone in the crowd might try to rush you. It’s best to work by yourself or as a pair. Three people gets too complicated. We were a close circle of friends. We trusted and knew each other. Fitness was another requirement. We all worked-out very hard. Even in jail. Exercise was illegal in Boggo Road but I worked out in my cell all night. Fitness for when I escaped. We didn’t like drugs and alcohol.

GS: Can you briefly describe a typical job?

KC: We re-enacted one in the play. You run through the front door. You’re wearing overalls, gloves and balaclavas. One puts everyone on the ground, the other jumps the bank counter and takes the money. That’s easy to do.

We were the first groups to hit armoured trucks in the seventies. We’d wait for then to come out with the money. Then we’d come from behind, put them on the ground, take their weapons, take the money and get out. You’ve got to do your homework. I’d watch a place for five or six weeks. During the seventies and eighties and into the nineties vans were being done over left, right and centre. The insurance premiums were going through the roof. You can’t do it now. They’ve tightened up now, invested in better security in the banks, back-up people and back-up cars for the vans. Those cassettes they put in the ATMs hold A$200,000. I know that because even after I’ve done my time and retired, I still observe these things. If I see a van pull up I look at the time and note the location. I automatically go ding, ding, ding and start figuring out how to do the job. It’s a habit. I’m not remotely interested in robbing a place but I can’t help observing.

One of the smartest robberies was done by the late Jack Wilson and Don Flanders in the mid-seventies. They ran a postal van off the road, coming from the Sunshine Coast to the Reserve Bank. It was full of old bank notes but still legal tender. They got over a quarter of a million. In those days, it was a lot of money. Jackie Wilson was as smooth as a cucumber. We used to call him Hungry Jack because he’d be sitting on a fortune but he was as tight as they come. He’d open his wallet and moths would fly out. A cunning old bugger. He wouldn’t give away a thing but Donny got knocked and the coppers verballed Jackie.

GS: What does verballed mean?

KC: It’s when an unsigned record of interview was used to convict suspects. I got convicted on unsigned records of interview. I never got convicted on evidence, neither did Cuz, or our mates. Brett Collins was one of my old colleagues. He started up the Prisoners Action Group and they worked hard to get verbals outlawed. You’d say nothing but the coppers would just type up a confession. They’d present it in court saying this man confessed then refused to sign the confession. It was accepted as evidence.

Before I first got verballed, we were in Sydney working, I was only young, and the armed robbery squad got hold of us and told us that if we gave them twenty-five percent of our earnings, we could do what we liked. Our answer was, ‘What earnings?’

They’d say, ‘We know you’re running hot.’

We’d say, ‘The only thing we’ve got going is a hot shower.’

No way we’d work with them. There were people that did work with them and they got free range but we hated them. They also gave up other criminals. Part of the deal was dropping other crooks in. They were dogs, informers. Barking to the coppers. I had so much contempt for people like that. All of us who refused to work with the police, when we got shopped, we were in for a very long time, but at least we had our honour. We chose a certain life and we stuck by what we thought were the rules.

We used to talk about all kinds of things in the cages. When I first tried to read Foucault, I wasn’t used to the language and it didn’t make much sense but once I did get the language, I sat down in the class at UTS and said, ‘You know, this is very ordinary.’

They said, ‘What?’

I told them I was sitting in a cage for years and we used to talk about this stuff. We were uneducated men talking about prison structures. Two Division was a circular design. You could see everybody at once. At any given time, you could be observed.

We didn’t call it the Panopticon but we did talk about how the prison meant you were under constant surveillance and that you ended up surveilling yourself and everyone else. You became your own jailer. We worked that out and we were one step ahead of the system because we deliberately allowed ourselves to fuck up. It was as simple as that. I was considered a very violent inmate. But all my life I have acted intentionally. I was violent intentionally. I don’t deny that sometimes I’d blow up. I’d lose my temper but most of the time it was planned and there was purpose to it. I saw what I was doing as part of the war against the invaders. My mate saw it as the continuing war against the British. We were aware that the surveillance was happening but we were not going to let them control us.

I’ve always felt that defiance, that wilfulness. I think that goes back to my old gran. Granny was strong willed too. Well before the Black Panthers came on the scene, she gave me my first taste of Black Power. It was on Queens Street in Brisbane. She wanted to go to a shop across the road. My cousins told her she had to walk down to the lights to cross.

She said, ‘Why would I want to go all the way down there and back when the place I want to go is just opposite?’

My cousins said, ‘That’s what it’s like in the city Gran,’ and they all ran off to the lights.

I was stuck with my grandmother. So, she just crossed the road there and then with me following behind. A car beeped its horn and she smashed the walking stick straight into the bonnet of the car.

She yelled, ‘I’m walking on my land. You don’t do that!’

It was in the middle of Brisbane where black people were locked up and shot at the drop of a hat. To use a biblical analogy, it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. The traffic stopped. She walked across her walking stick in the air, yelling, ‘I’ll go where I want to go.’

She didn’t speak very good English. I was in a sort of daze. I felt like I was floating a foot off the ground. It was an amazing thing for me after seeing so much oppression, then here was this black woman standing up to a city. She was my hero. The feeling that surged through me at that point was pure strength.

When I was in Sydney’s Long Bay we had some very bad things happen to us. We had an attempted breakout. It backfired and we took over the amenities block. The screws grabbed us, stripped us naked and flogged us. It got that bad some of the screws dropped their batons and went to get the senior to stop the others belting us. We were taken to the cells and dumped naked. The ones who stopped the beating insisted the prison doctor should come. He said we were alright. We weren’t alright. The sweepers could hear our groans. Other prisons knew we were not alright. They threatened to burn the jail down unless an independent doctor came in. There was an inquiry and that independent doctor gave evidence saying the four men he examined nine days after the beatings resembled four lumps of raw meat in a butcher shop. Heaven knows how we survived.

I was in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t move and the only way I could breathe was taking lots of short breaths through my mouth. Later the pain of taking a drink of water was unbearable. One guy was found dead in his cell months later. We got sent back to Queensland and put in the cages. Cuz was put in the intractable section in Parramatta. They had him in a cage for five years. It was a horrific period of time but it taught me a lot.

GS: What did it teach you?

Colour photograph, interior, mid shot of Ken Canning standing in his apartment. Right hand clasped around the back of his head. He wears a striped grey, white and black T-shirt and two necklaces in the colours of the Aboriginal flag.

Credit: John Janson-Moore

KC: I know more about the world by being in there than I probably would if I was out. I know how peoples’ minds work. When you’re in there you’re seeing the most brutal aspects of mankind and you must work out how to survive. How to come out with your sanity intact? I developed some mental health issues but I learnt how to survive. When you get out, it’s worse. We didn’t do medium security or minimum security, it was all maximum. When you get out, you’re a lunatic. How do you survive that? The first few years I was completely off my head. Mad!

GS: When did you get out?

KC: In 1979. My parole was transferred to NSW. I was hallucinating, seeing things, screaming. By 1982 I was starting to calm down.

GS: Did the hallucinating start after you got out?

KC: No, I started hallucinating in jail. When I came out of the cages, I was in the mess hall getting my food, walking with my plate looking at one of the other prisoners and he turned into a creature. That was alarming.

GS: Can you describe the cages?

KC: They built six cages onto the walls in one corner of the yard where it narrowed into a point. Metal bars in front, to the sides and across the top. Small barred, rectangles joining each other. A rough concrete floor and a seat built out of the same iron bars. We’d get escorted down from the cells. We were in the cells at night. In the morning at about seven-thirty, the screws would drop the flap on the cell door, we’d put our hands out to get handcuffed. The screws would not enter the cell unless we were handcuffed and facing the back wall. Four small paces square. Because we were classified as intractables, they had to have a minimum of four prison officers to take one of us out.

GS: What are intractables?

KC: We didn’t accept the prison discipline and kept on escaping. I was classified as an intractable not long after I first went to prison. That classification doesn’t exist anymore. Once your papers were stamped, intractable, they could isolate and brutalise you, put you in the cages for as long as they wanted.

GS: You were saying a minimum of four prison officers were required to take you out of the cell.

KC: Yes, the first thing they did when they entered was smash our head so our face would hit the wall. That was how every day started. Then they’d turn the cell upside down, go away and leave you to clean up the mess. They’d come back in ten minutes and escort the prisoner out of the wing, down a passage way and through the yard. The blokes in the yard were not allowed to talk to us.

Some refused to obey and would say, ‘How you goin’ Bra?’

We’d be carrying our toilet tub. When we got to the cages yard, there were three security doors to go through. The detail would grab the toilet tub and it’d be back outside the cell when we returned. Once in the cages, we’d put our hands out a little square in the door and they take the cuffs off. That was our outside time. They’d take us back about three o’clock. There was a cold shower at the front of the cages but for a while they wouldn’t let me shower. That’s why I’m fanatical about showering now.

GS: What was the worst thing about being in the cells?

KC: No space. As much as we got on together, sometimes we really got on each other nerves, wanting to kill each other. Most blokes were put in the cages for a couple of months, we were in there for years. For extra punishment, we’d be taken to the underground cells.

GS: You kept escaping?

KC: Yes, I liked to escape.

GS: Why did you like it?

KC: It was like doing stick-ups, there was an adrenaline rush and it was defiance. There were cruel, despicable, white people in control in the jail. A hardened, inhuman bunch of people. I was not going to accept their authority over me. I was always in maximum security. Escaping from maximum meant I only got three months on top of my sentence. Medium was twelve months and minimum was eighteen months. Every minute of every day, I’d be planning my escape. I was obsessed.

I talked to a criminologist, Dr Tony Vincent, about this. He believed that my obsession with getting out, stopped me becoming institutionalised mentally. If you go along with the daily routine and the surveillance, your mind becomes part of the system. Bodily I was pretending to go along with it most of the time but not in my mind. It was continual defiance on my part.

My initial sentence was thirty-two years. I’d just turned nineteen and I was given thirty-two years for four armed robberies. That’s unheard of. Every morning I’d come out of my cell and look at my cell card, my name, crime and sentence – thirty-two years. I was going to get out when I was fifty-one. When you’re nineteen, that’s like a death sentence. I appealed and got one of the sentences reduced to eight years so I ended up doing seventeen years, but when I was on appeal, I escaped from the courthouse. I’ve got a photo of me when I was on the run. It’s in a nightclub. I look like an office worker.

The next time I escaped, I faked a broken ankle, dropped my crutches and ran from the hospital. The time after that I turned a big garden sprinkler into a grappling hook, plaited sheets for a rope, jumped out of the yard and over the wall at Boggo Road. I escaped from maximum security three times.

Before that I escaped from police cells, and police cars, and I escaped from boys’ homes. There were a couple of attempted escapes too. One from Long Bay and one in Brisbane. I was working in the bake house in Boggo Road and watching their security when they send the bread out to the hospitals. They were slack. I got the blokes to pack me in the back of the truck with the loafs of bread. But the screws did a random check in between gates and found me. I was laughing. If you’re busted, you’re busted.

Another time, it cost me a couple of grand but I got a little, diamond-tipped, flexible hacksaw smuggled in. I’d almost sawed through the top hinge of my door and was half way through the bottom hinge. I had no idea what I would do once I got out of my cell. Maybe I’d get out of the wing but then what? Hide somewhere until I figured out how to get out of the prison. But the guards came to do their usual check and one of them dragged his baton across the door. I was lying in bed and the door started wobbling. All hell broke loose. This was about two or three in the morning. They left me in the cell and cleared the rest of the wing out, tear-gassed it. Everyone was in the yards and it was cold. Then they came in armed, wearing their gas masks, the whole rigmarole.

I was put in the underground cells for that. They can only keep you underground for four days at a time because it’s brutally inhumane. They unscrew a big metal flap and lift it up then walk you down the stairs. There’s no light and hardly any air. Every day they give you a piece of bread and a jug of water but mix up the time so you are disoriented. Men go mad in those cells after two days and just start talking gibberish. They never came back from that. I knew some of those men. It broke them, I was afraid I might be next.

There was no bed in there just a toilet tub. I didn’t want to lay down because they don’t clean those places. People don’t always get the tub when they go to the toilet. I’d sleep sitting on top of the tub with my head against the wall. It stank and it was pitch black. If they wanted to keep me in longer than the four days, they’d wait until the middle of the day, run down, drag me up into the bright sunlight and order me to stand to attention and salute the Australian flag. I couldn’t. It was impossible. I was so disoriented and couldn’t handle the glare. So, then they picked me up, ran me over to the superintendent’s office, charge me with disobedience and took me for another four days down the hole. One time I was down there for almost twenty days.

GS: You’ve spoken about mental illness. How did you cope?

KC: I say to people, I went mad one hundred times but I came back ninety-nine times.

GS: One bit of madness is still hanging in there. When did you learn to read and write?

KC: Before I was in the cages, a whitefella, called Keith, who was in for fraud, taught me. He was a white-collar criminal but he gave the superintendent lip. One of the blokes who worked in the office told us. So, the super chucked him in our yard, Two Division, where all the ratbags were. The first day he walked in he had his hands behind his back. His hair was slicked down and he had an upper-class accent and he appeared arrogant. Normally, a bloke like that would get slaughtered. It didn’t happen. There was something about the guy and people just left him alone.

One day he sat down and asked, ‘Anybody have trouble reading or writing?

A couple of blackfellas said, ’Yeah.’

He asked, ‘You want to learn?’

It ended up he was a good teacher. He taught Aboriginal prisoners because only white prisoners could go to the education courses. We were in the middle of a campaign to change that. So, this old bloke put the word out that we need equipment. The whitefellas who were going to the courses started knocking stuff off. Bringing back stencils and rulers and pencils. But in max the prisoners are not the only ones with instincts. The screws have instincts too. When something is going on, they know it. They were running around checking the cells then they did a big bust on Keith Edwards’ cell. It was the biggest bust they’d done for a long time. They were upending everything looking for contraband. We laughed because all they found was educational material. He went to solitary for seven days because of that.

It took a lot of years before Aboriginal prisoners were allowed education in prison. I was writing poetry by then and short stories.

The screws came to my cell and said, “Poetry’s considered a hobby and to do a hobby you’ve got to have permission. You don’t have a permission slip. This is an illegal hobby.’

They gathered up all my writing, handcuffed me, took me down to the incinerator and burnt all my work. That hurt far more than the floggings they gave me. I retaliated that night. Some of the poems were in my memory. I had a spoon in the cell and the concrete walls were old and a bit damp and soft, so I engraved a poem on the wall.

GS: Sometime after you were released, you went to UTS. What did you study?

KC: Yes, I went to UTS and studied Communications and then Oral History. Oral history became a battle in the politics of history. I was fighting to do my master’s thesis orally. I wanted to carry on the traditions of oral history in my work. They didn’t recognise oral history as history unless whatever was said, was proven to be true by someone else. After that Social Sciences developed a new master’s degree that allowed students to incorporate their cultural and socio-economic experiences.

GS: You were one of the founding members of Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at UTS. Tell me about that.

KC: Franny Peters-Little, Uncle Norm Newlin and I were the founders. It was called the Aboriginal Education Centre then. We did a lot of other things at UTS. The appointment of Debbie Stoddard as the first overseas students’ officer was because of a campaign we initiated. She became human rights coordinator for the ALTSEAN, the regional human rights group. We campaigned hard for more people from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds to study at UTS as well as Aboriginal students. We were responsible for the first anti-racism policy at UTS. The first policy aimed at hiring Aboriginal staff was drawn up by me and a non-Aboriginal man called Michael Refshauge.

GS: Were you one of the first Aboriginal students to enroll at UTS?

KC: There were other Aboriginal students before us but they didn’t sit it out. I finished in 1987 and I was the first Aboriginal student to graduate. Francis Peters-Little was the second. She was the first Aboriginal woman to graduate. I graduated in 1988 and I pulled out the Aboriginal flag, wrapped myself in it, ran up and gave the black power salute. There was shock horror. Everyone was disgusted in what I did. At the reception. It was like I had spiders all over me. People just kept away. Twenty years later the University has used footage they have of that graduation to celebrate diversity at UTS. I didn’t realise they had filmed it.

GS: You published your first collection of poems in 1990, Ngali Ngalga: Let’s Talk.

KC: Yes, it was published by Breakout Press. The first poem I ever wrote is in that book. I eventually got permission to write and I wrote down the poems I remembered, the ones the screws destroyed, and I wrote other poems. A lot of those poems were rubbish some were so romantic, they were sick but writing was important to me. It was my survival. One bloke told me I had to have rhythm and rhyming schemes and all that and I was doing it but driving myself a bit mad. Then I thought oh bugger this. I was looking for words at the expense of feeling and emotion so I decided to just write what I think. I started writing my own patterns. Long lines then bang, one word. I liked that style. Sometimes it’s a bit disjointed. I like that too. Visually my poems are not square or rectangular.

GS: What is your favourite poem in Ngali Ngalga?

KC: ‘Black Baby’ is my favourite in that collection. ‘Small soft baby, thrust from the womb . . . ‘

GS: Your second collection, Yimbanna, was published by Vagabond Press in 2015.

KC: Yes, Yimbanna means to understand. So, we’ve already talked in the first collection and now it’s time to understand. One of my favourite poems in the collection is ‘We Said.’ It’s about listening and understanding, about relationships. It’s a simple poem but deeper than what I originally thought when I wrote it. If everyone lived by this poem, we’d have world peace. You’ve got to listen to each other.

. . . LISTEN – To what
You said, I said, you said.
We both said instead,
I did, you did, I did – you.
Neither of us did,
Understand –
A word.
A sentence.
A thought.
A feeling.
A rejection.
A misperception
Of
each other.

Yimbama It’s not about blaming anyone. There’s a degree of fault all around. It’s about solving disagreements. You’ve got to sit back and look at each other, listen to each other. All parties need to engage. I’ve learnt to develop that skill of listening and talking with Cheryl, my wife. We have definite commonalities but we don’t always think alike. At times we are opposites. Our politics can be different but we have learnt how to co-exist. We have respect for each other.

I learnt about valuing other people’s opinions from my gran. She was really against putting people down because of their beliefs. She made that very clear to me. Once my cousin, Peter, called someone, I still can’t say the word, a W.O.G, she flogged him.

She said, ‘You don’t like people calling us bad names, you don’t call anybody bad names!’

GS: How would you describe the focus of your writing?

KC: I write about a diverse range of topics. I’m an Aboriginal man in my 60s who has seen a lot of oppression, my personal experiences and the experiences of my people. I write about the horror of these experiences, our strength and our survival, about the love of our culture and I write about our respect for mother earth.

GS: There are poems in Yimbama about mental distress. One is called ‘Psychotic Serenade.’ Why did you write that poem? What was going on in your life?

KC: I was living in Merrylands when I realised I had a serious mental health issue going on. It wasn’t just episodes where I was a bit off. The doctors had diagnosed PTSD, I wasn’t sleeping and I was a bit of a nervous wreck but I hadn’t been diagnosed with anything else. I was sitting on the veranda and I went straight inside and wrote that poem to describe what I was feeling.

Sing – high sing loud
the songs of the silent
musical mayhem,
suicidal symphonies.
Sprinkle sprinkle cyanide star
now I know how disturbed you are.

That’s the last stanza.

Realising I was experiencing some kind of mental distress was one thing but getting something done about it was another thing. I was picked up a lot in the Parramatta area. The police would take me in, give me the knuckle then let me go. It escalated and I got really disorientated.

One time the police took me in and where giving me a hiding in the cells. One copper came in and told them to stop. He realised I need help not a flogging. He had joined the police force in his thirties and worked as a plumber before that so he had a different perspective to the kid who came straight out of Goulburn Police Academy.

I was in hospital for a long time and I went in and out a few times after that. One of those times I was picked up by the police again and sitting in the back of the paddy van, handcuffed and one copper said, ‘You’ll have to wait a while, these other nut-jobs are getting booked in.”

I didn’t like that. That same copper who used to be a plumber heard him and saw my reaction. He intervened and told off the other copper.

The fact that someone who I saw as the enemy was understanding was a big part of my healing. Sometimes it just takes that one person.

I was diagnosed with Schizo-affective Disorder. But if I allow the mental health diagnosis to define who I am, I’m allowing my life experiences of oppression and brutality to define me. I have always had very strong self-awareness. The psychiatrist who treated me was a wonderful woman. She said one of the saving graces was my awareness of my illness and where it came from. She believed I wouldn’t need to be on medication for the rest of my life.

At first the doctors at Rozelle told me I’d never be able to work again. When they let me out, I agreed to come back as an outpatient but made it clear that I fully intended going back into the workforce. I got my job back at UTS. I’m not saying it was easy but I got through it.

GS: You just said, ‘Sometimes it just takes that one person.’ Can you talk a bit more about that?

KC: Every other policeman was giving it to me, but that one policeman understood. In my journey since day one, there have been a lot of strange, undesirable people but I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet some of the most amazing people you’d ever want to know. Like the late Uncle Jimmy Little. In his life time, he was called a Living National Treasure. He was Mr Smooth in his nice suits up on the stage but at home he’d be dressed in old ragged shorts and an old singlet, eating damper and because he couldn’t find a cup big enough to drink his tea. He was a big influence on me. Jimmy wasn’t as calm as everyone thought. He was radical in his way of thinking.

He said to me, ‘If you’re going to take a hard line, don’t take a backward step. Keep to that line. It’s your path.

GS: Do you see yourself as unflinching once you take a stand?

KC: Yes, and at the same time, I’m good at identifying the enemy. The enemy is not the woman next door, not the bloke who lives up the road, the enemy is bad government. The enemy is oppressive government and people who buy into racism like the United Patriots Front and groups like that. I don’t want to focus on the bloke who’s doing his job to earn a wage. I focus on the leadership, the heads of power. Even individual coppers, I’m not going to hate them. I don’t like coppers but I focus on the system that creates and uses them. There are some coppers out there saving people, running into house fires, things like that. I forged my political beliefs and direction in prison. I learnt a hard edge but a rational edge. I also developed a softness for people victimised by the system. In prison, we witnessed people being beaten to death. In my play, Mick hears Ray being beaten to death. I heard a very close friend of mine being beaten to death in the cell next to me. That experience has never left me. In those days when a prisoner was beaten to death, it didn’t require a coronial inquiry. All that was required was a doctor’s signature on the death certificate. Like I said before, the prison doctors were alcoholics who did whatever the jail wanted. The screws told the doctor the prisoner had a heart attack and that’s what the doctor signed. So, I was hardened by those experiences but sometimes I’d sit and cry. The authorities never succeeded in crushing my humanity. But jail does snuff out the humanity of some inmates. That’s sad too.

My saving grace was writing. I was so confused when I got out. Writing saved me.

GS: How do you define freedom?

KC: When they turn that key to let you out of prison, that’s not freedom. Cuz and I found the key to freedom. After we were brutalised and kept in institutions, from a young age, where within those mechanisms you had to be violent to survive, we didn’t continue to be violent. We didn’t go out of our way to hurt anyone. The very fact that I am not a violent person means I am free.

The authorities, the state, the society failed to turn me into a monster. I am a human being. That is freedom. If they turn me into a monster, I belong to them.

When Cuz and I got out, we talked about it a lot.

He said, ‘Now we’re out, we can’t afford to inflict our anger on those around us. I know there are times you feel like just giving it to everyone in the street.’

I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’

He said, ‘Well, we can’t cross that line. If we do, the authorities, the screws, own our minds, our hearts and our souls.’

There are good white people. There are also a lot of white people who have a history of despicable behaviour against our people. For me, freedom is not allowing that to cloud my thinking, not to be pre-judgmental towards all white people. If I say to myself, every problem we have as Aboriginal people in this country has come at the hands of white invasion, so therefore every white person is the enemy, then I’m still in prison. Racism wants us to think that way. But once we think that way, we cannot have conversations. Once we cannot converse, we can’t learn what happened, how it happened, how it continues.

Freedom for me is my old gran telling me, ‘Think what you want.’

My freedom is writing. My freedom is my peace of mind. My freedom is building a good relationship.

Ken Canning was interviewed by Gaele Sobott in Glebe, Sydney, 22 April, 2017

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My freedom is writing. My freedom is my peace of mind. My freedom is building a good relationship – An Interview with Ken Canning by Gaele Sobott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Dignity is essential. It means we are viewed by the other as a human being : an interview with Alice Cherki

Alice Cherki

ALICE CHERKI is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author. Born in Algiers, 1936. She knew Frantz Fanon well, working by his side in Algeria and Tunisia as a psychiatrist, and sharing his political commitment during the war of independence in Algeria.

Alice Cherki has lived in France since 1965. She is co-author of the books, Retour à Lacan (Fayard, 1981) and Les Juifs d’Algérie (Editions du Scribe, 1987), and author of La frontière invisible (Editions des Crépuscules, 2009) Frantz Fanon, portrait (Seuil, 2000) translated into English by Nadia Benabid and published as Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (Cornell University Press, 2006) and Mémoire anachronique (Editions De L’aube, 2016).

Gaele Sobott: Can you talk a little about the history of your family, your place of birth and your childhood?

Alice Cherki: I was born in a family of Jewish Algerians who were in Algeria since the Romans or before the Romans. My parents were born in the small towns of Medea and Ksar Bukhari but they met in Algiers. I was born and I lived in Algiers. I am Algerian, voilà!

Some of my family are Jewish Berbers.

GS: Were there Jewish people in Algeria before the Arabs?

AC: Yes, the majority were there well before. Some came later in 1492 from Spain through Morocco, others from Italy, and then Alsatian Jews, but at that point it was already colonial Algeria. Many of those left again and went elsewhere. But most of the Jews of Algeria had been there for a very, very, very long. Some of them were Berbers who converted to Judaism. I belong to that history.

GS: Did you speak Arabic?

AC: Very little. I’m not very good at languages. I come from the same environment as Derrida. at school, we learnt Latin and Greek.

GS: Did you know Derrida?

AC: I knew Derrida very well. He was eight or nine years older than me and that represents a big difference but yes I knew Derrida well.

Like Hélène Cixous and Derrida, my childhood was marked by the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation which excluded Jews born in Algeria, denied us French nationality, the right to go to school, the right for Jews to work in government administration. This was hugely traumatic for me as a child.

One Christmas, I was 4 or 5 years old, my teacher said, “Tell your mother that after the break you must not come to school anymore.”

When I asked her the reason, the only answer I got was, “It’s because you’re Jewish.”

I didn’t know what that meant. So, I gathered my courage and asked, “What’s Jewish?”

She replied, “It’s you with your big eyes, big mouth and big ears.”

Each of us, as Derrida also relates, was excluded from school, our parents could no longer work.

GS: How has this experience affected your adult life?

AC: It opened my eyes to the injustices of the world in which we live; a world marked by colonial ideology. In Algiers in the 1950s, there was no intersection between Europeans, the Jews and Arabs – the so-called natives. I didn’t experience it at home but we were caught up in all that. I talk about it a little in my book, Mémoire anachronique. Everyone lived in their own sphere. Some of us would meet each other outside these spheres.

During my early years at primary school there was no mixing at all. In Grade 6, there were some girls; Rachida, Malika. For the whole of my secondary schooling I only knew of one Algerian woman student even though my school was not the most snobbish high school in Algiers.

GS: It was the same principle as Apartheid?

AC: The same principle except that it was more camouflaged. Algerians were contained in their own neighbourhoods. Even the bourgeois had their areas. The Algerians passed like shadows in the European neighbourhoods

GS: What area of Algiers did you live in?

AC: I first lived on the border of a working-class suburb, near the boys’ school, known then as Lycée Bugeaud, now it’s called Lycée Abdel Kader. Later, at the age of 17, we moved to Central Boulevard in Hydra. Our house was on a piece of land owned by my uncle – my father’s brother, my father’s sister, and my father. After some years, they managed to build a three-storey house there for the three families.

GS: What did your father do for a living?

AC: My father traded in cereal. He carried out transactions with farmers for the export and import of chickpeas and lentils.

GS: How did your interest in psychiatry come about?

AC: Firstly, it was a struggle for me as a woman to study. After I passed my baccalaureate, even though I was from the middle-class, it was not usual for women to continue their education. Women were expected to marry and so on. I had an older brother and a younger brother and was the only girl. Neither of my parents continued their studies. My father, a brilliant student, was pulled out of school at age 16 by his father. He was the eldest of ten children There were two or three girls before him so he had to work. I believe my mother chose to leave school to get married. When she met my father, she dropped out.

My parents were both very intelligent and relatively progressive. My father spoke Arabic, but they did not have a higher education.

I already had a certain outlook on society and I was more inclined towards literature. I wasn’t a good student and had never received any awards for excellence. I was impertinent and people always told me I would make an excellent actress. With no one to advise me, in those days, if I had decided I wanted to be an actress, it would have been worse than deciding to be a prostitute. Having said that, I did later have the luck to meet many people who became involved in theatre.

So, I found myself first in hypokhâgne and then khâgne. You know what they are?

GS: No.

AC: Preparatory literary classes for the grandes écoles. The equivalent also exists in the scientific field. I was interested in studying philosophy but decided that would mean cutting myself off from the real world. I made up my mind that I wanted to be useful so I chose to study medicine. But very soon I realized medicine didn’t meet my needs. It was all about identifying symptoms and responding with treatments. I remember a teacher saying, “But Mademoiselle, you ask too many questions.”

We never say, “Why” in medicine. Instead we talk about, “How to fix it.”

So, I was part of two cultures; one of interest for human beings and their psyche, and the other a group culture which stemmed from my medical studies.

GS: Were there other women you knew of who were studying medicine then?

AC: There were a few, but they were a definite minority.

There was a saying that summarized the situation quite well. It relates to sitting the intern examination:

If you are white, European and male, you have an 80% chance of sitting the exam. If you are female and European, you have a 60% chance. If you are Jewish and male, you have a 50% chance. If you are female and Jewish, you have a 25% chance. If you are Muslim and male, you have a 10% chance. As for being Muslim and a woman, you are not even mentioned because you just don’t get the opportunity.

Some managed to study medicine or become trainees but none got to sit the intern examination, voilà!

GS: When did you meet Fanon for the first time?

AC: I was part of a youth movement called AJASS (Association of Algerian Youth for Social Action) and Fanon was invited to give a lecture by a friend of mine, Pierre Chaulet, who died recently. It was a lecture on fear and anxiety in 1955. I must have been 19 or 20 at the time and had to leave my parents’ home where I’d been living. Most of the interns at the hospital were French-Algerian and because of my opinions I faced all kinds of problems. My car tyres were punctured, my white doctor’s coat soiled, my files stolen. So, when Fanon found out I wanted to do psychiatry, he told Pierre Chaulet I should come and intern under him at Blida psychiatric hospital.

GS: So you lived at the hospital in Blida?

AC: Yes, as an intern. That’s where I met my husband, Charles Géronimi. He shared my ideas, but having Corsican parents, teachers but Corsicans, they had trouble accepting a little Jew in their family, especially my mother-in-law.

GS: What were your first impressions of Fanon?

AC: My first impressions, at 20, I found everything he had to say very interesting and didn’t think of him as black. He analysed the subjectivity of racism which was very different from the discourse of the time. On the one hand, we had Existentialism and on the other, Marxist materialism which didn’t include questions of subjectivity. It was the first time I’d met someone who was only 10 years older than me but had immense experience, and a developed understanding of these two worlds, of the two ‘ideologies’. He was neither on one side nor the other which met my expectations, answered my questions.

GS: He had practical ideas?

AC: Yes, he was a hands-on kind of man.

GS: That’s to say, the development of his thought was founded not only on the theoretical but also on his lived-experience?

AC: On his experience, yes. And that also pleased me. It was from his lived-experience that he elaborated his ideas. But he also had very advanced psychiatric training.

GS: What were some of the work experiences during your time with Fanon in Blida that influenced your practice of psychiatry?

AC: Everything he brought to psychiatry, especially his critique of the School of Algiers’ theory of primitivism. He also introduced social therapy, institutional psychotherapy.

GS: How do you define institutional psychotherapy?

AC: Institutional psychotherapy, as developed by Tosquelles, took off in France with the support of Oury and Bonnafé. It encourages the residents of psychiatric institutions to share things with their caregivers. Through humanising the functions of these institutions, it allows understanding not only of patient symptoms but also the roots of these symptoms. There are still two or three people in France who are struggling to create places that foster institutional psychotherapy, but it is becoming more and more difficult.

GS: Why is it becoming more difficult?

AC: Because of the prevailing ideology. Now we have DCM 3, DCM 4, DCM 5. It is a performative ideology that absolutely bypasses all subjective aspects of alienation.

GS: Did you have any significant experiences in the hospital setting as a female doctor caring for patients in that historical and social context?

AC: What do you mean by significant experiences?

GS: For example, when you worked at Joinville-Blida Hospital, were there certain events that affected you?

AC: Yes, of course.

GS: What were they?

AC: So many things. For example, I saw women hospitalised after childbirth for postpartum, transitory delirium. Some doctors didn’t understand and sometimes even people in the women’s families said, “It’s the djnoun who came to inhabit her.”

It affected me deeply because I wanted to ascertain their experience of the delivery because it influences their relationship to the newborn baby. It’s a complicated relationship.

GS: Did you have your own children at that time?

AC: No, I had no children at the time. I now have a son who is 40 years old. He studied political science and then he got involved in theatre.

GS: So, he is fortunate?

AC: Well there you have it.

Black and white photograph of Alice Cherki as a young women. She has short, dark hair, is wearing a white, V-neck dress and a necklace, and she is smiling.

GS: As a female doctor, what were your professional relationships like with your colleagues at the hospital?

AC: Amongst us interns at the psychiatric hospital of Blida, I was considered an equal.

I married an intern from the hospital. No, I can’t say I had any problems. On the other hand, before that when I was at the Mustapha Hospital in Algiers, I was very young, I did my hair in a bun and put on big glasses to make myself look older so I’d be left in peace.

GS: Was your husband originally from Blida?

AC: No, he was also from Algiers but he was an intern with Fanon in Blida. They wrote a paper together on Algerian women and the cultural specificity of TATs (Thematic Apperception Tests).

GS: In your book, Fanon, Portrait, you mention a meeting between Fanon and Jeanson. (1)

AC: Yes.

GS: In that meeting Fanon expressed his wish to go beyond certain ideas so that readers can experience aspects of life that they could never know firsthand. You talk about Fanon exploring the sensory dimension of language. Do you think that this approach to writing could enable us to communicate experiences around difference, to understand our differences from an egalitarian point of view – not superior or even inferior?

AC: Yes, I think this type of writing is essential. In my experience, sensory writing starts from perceptions, sensations to try to improve communication with the other, I think it is very, very necessary.

GS: Do you know any writers today who write like that?

AC: I’m not qualified to say. I don’t know today’s writers that well. But Kateb Yacine wrote like that.

GS: Do you see difference as a dialectical space that can trigger creativity and imagination?

AC: Yes, that’s what I call the relationship to the other, the recognition of the outside, the stranger. It is important. I wrote another book called La frontière invisible, in which I insist on the relationship to the other. This allows you to accept the outsider in yourself.

GS: In your book, La frontière invisible, you link psychoanalysis and politics. I understand colonial violence, violence of displacement, violence against the subject in the social context, the context of specific historical and political circumstances, for example, those of Algeria and France. But when I try to analyse this violence from a psychoanalytic point of view, I find it difficult to understand.

AC: It is complicated. But you have sought out strangers?

GS: Always, yes.

AC: Perhaps it’s not by chance.

GS: Perhaps not.

Did you know Fanon outside his work, in his family life? What kind of man was he as husband and father?

AC: Yes, of course I had the opportunity to know Fanon outside his work. I knew his wife well and I know his son very well. As a dedicated husband and father. At the same time, he was a very busy man. But he was very dedicated to his family. When his father left for Africa, Olivier didn’t see him that often only from time to time when Fanon came back from working there. Olivier was only five when his father died.

Fanon loved life. He liked to go out to dinner, go dancing, things like that.

GS: What type of dancing did he like?

AC: All the dances of that time, le slow, the rhumba . . .

GS: Did you like to dance?

AC: It has been a long time since I really danced but yes at the time I loved it.

GS: At friends’ places?

AC: Yes.

GS: What type of music did Fanon like?

AC: He especially loved Caribbean music.

GS: And you?

AC: Back then my tastes were very eclectic. I liked the Arab-Andalusian, Jewish-Andalusian music right through to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and then Jean Ferrat, Barbara, Montand. More and more now I love Musique Concrète.

GS: Tell me more.

AC: When I was a psychoanalyst, I was working very hard. In the evening, when I had finished working and my head was full of words, words, words, I’d play the likes of Kurtág and Blériot. The music is largely based on the sonority of the human body. It defies the normality of melody. It’s best to listen to it alone. There are not many people who love and desire that genre of music. It scares them.

GS: What kind of a sense of humour did Fanon have? What made him laugh?

AC: He had a great sense of humour, Fanon. It was humour that made him laugh.

GS: People who are very involved in revolutionary struggle often dedicate huge amounts of time and energy to the cause, and I suppose that doesn’t allow them to be very good parents.

AC: That’s true, yes. Especially at the time because the people involved in the struggle were very young.

GS: Have you met children whose parents were not only very involved but who were tortured, wounded or killed as part of the struggle?

AC: Yes, children who became orphans.

GS: Regarding the children of revolutionaries, what observations have you made?

AC: It was very variable. For example, Fatma Oussedic, her father was a great militant and she has good memories of her relationship with him. In addition, many families did not only consist of the father and mother, there were, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. They weren’t nuclear families. If we’re talking about orphans this helps a little. But when you see your parents killed before your eyes, that’s not the same thing. As for the children of the surviving revolutionaries following independence, the notion that their fathers are heroes has weighed heavily on many of them.

GS: Would you mind giving me a brief definition of your concept of alienation and the ways it may be experienced in countries marked by colonisation.

AC: That’s a big question. Both the coloniser and countries who achieved their independence, like Algeria, deny in various ways the colonial wars that have taken place. Algeria swept a large part of the past away by claiming the national story begins at the time of Independence. Generations have been taught that they have one history, one language, one origin. This kind of discourse has done a lot of damage. There are many young people who now don’t know who they are.

GS: How does that manifest psychologically?

AC: It varies considerably and is different in Algeria and in France. Here in France these young people are excluded from participating in the inner circle, In Algeria they are divided. There is group of social conformists who represent the youth, and another group of which no one ever speaks but which gnaws away at the heart and soul of the country. Young people are suffering a great deal, even those who are socially successful. Many young people ask, “What was Algeria like before 1962?” Many are Berbers. The heterogeneity of their roots has been hidden from them. It is as if these roots don’t exist but they are longing for what I call multiple identification … not to be cast in a single mould.

In France there are many young people who describe their lives very well and write novels. Some are very interesting, written in the language of the suburbs. For example, Sabri Louatah, Les Sauvages.

GS: What is your definition of dignity, especially the dignity of colonised people, people considered mentally ill or disabled?

AC: Dignity is essential. Dignity means we are viewed by the other as a human being.

GS: In revolutionary situations, when a group of people can no longer withstand massive pressure and extreme violence, they react violently to create a change in the power structure. This changeover is often quick, lasts for a moment, the objective is specific: to get rid of the immediate cause of the violence that oppresses them. Beyond this moment of revolutionary violence, what measures do you think people can use to get rid of the everyday violence that continues?

AC: Firstly, to speak.

GS: To whom?

AC: Speak, tell, write. . . I think there are many forms of expression, of creation. Because we must get by. We must get out of the stupor. The essential thing is to get out of it, including through collective struggle.

GS: What for you is the most urgent task required to change human relations in the future? What needs to be done to update and develop new definitions of power?

AC: We need to do work in many areas if we are going to change human relations and bring about new definitions of power. Each person should focus on their own domain, the place where they live. It’s true, like many people, I feel I am very active and committed. At the same time, I denounce all modes of liberalism and things like that.

GS: How do you define liberalism?

AC: It is being governed by financial capitalism which transforms the subject into an object.

GS: Is it enough to denounce? Sometimes I get the impression that it is useless.

AC: I know it well. Organisations are important. There are organisations, people who are militant. I am fortunate to have a son, and nephews who are politically engaged in their fields. Me, everyone knows my positions, my writings. My son works in theatre. They go to schools, to high schools. I am not against the revolution.

GS: Do you think that as individuals, we are afraid of revolutionary violence, afraid of revolutionary confrontation?

AC: It depends. There are many people who are afraid of violence. In my case, I’m not afraid. Many French people want to stay in their little cocoons. In Europe, the French are very much like that, withdrawn on their plots of land, and yet they made a revolution.

But I believe violence is . . . for example, what happened in 2005 in the housing estates, with Sarkozy insulting everyone. People called them riots but I called them revolts. Those young people were not afraid.

GS: It is temporary, a moment?

AC: Revolution is always like that. It’s a moment. But moments that produce difference. Every revolutionary moment must be seen as the introduction of change.

GS: Even if it takes a long time to get to that point.

AC: Yes, like psychoanalysis.

GS: Why did you choose to become a psychoanalyst?

AC: Because I found it was the best way to understand the psyche and help people. It’s exciting, I love it, yes, I like it very much.

GS: You must undergo psychoanalysis for several years to be a psychoanalyst?

AC: Yes, you do. It’s experience. You see, even you talk to an 80-year-old woman who is a psychoanalyst and it’s fine.

GS: Yes, it’s been good.

AC: I have lots of stories to tell. I am attentive to other human beings.

GS: Ah yes, but not all psychoanalysts are like you.

AC: That’s true.

GS: Did you have any conversations with Fanon about the ‘Jewish question’ or the events that led to the establishment of the State of Israel?

AC: Of course, Algerian Jews, like myself and Jacques Azoulay, worked with Fanon in Blida. Fanon had very close Jewish friends in Tunis. The subject of the establishment of the State of Israel was far from our concerns. Fanon was profoundly atheist. I, too, am an atheist. We were part of the struggle for Algerian independence, there was never any conversation about the existence of God for example. Those questions and discussions were not on our radar.

GS: But religious discourse was there nonetheless with Messali . . .

AC: Oh, yes. Those discussions took place within the independence movement. It was very heterogeneous. There were plenty of different poles of thought, different ideas. For example, Fanon, returning from sub-Saharan Africa, jokingly said to his colleagues, to the revolutionary friends of the mujahidin, that they should follow the example of Islamic Africans, their wives can walk topless. He said that jokingly. I mean the issue of Islam as a fundamental direction was probably underestimated, but religion was not ubiquitous in our workplace. I think, even Messali, he was for independence from France, he was married to a French woman, he wasn’t a religious Iman.

GS: When and why did you leave Algeria? Do you consider yourself a woman in exile?

AC: I did not really leave Algeria. I settled in Paris but with frequent trips to Algeria and back. I’m not in national exile and I think exile of the psyche is the hallmark of any successful human life.

Notes:

1. Alice Cherki refers to a meeting between Fanon and Jeanson in her book, Fanon, portrait (Seuil, 2000), however the English translation, Fanon: A Portrait, (Cornell University Press, 2006) refers to a letter.

Alice Cherki was interviewed by Gaele Sobott in Paris, 26 September 2015 and by email between 18 and 20 November 2016.

Translated from French by Gaele Sobott

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“Dignity is essential. Dignity means we are viewed by the other as a human being”: an interview with Alice Cherki by Gaele Sobott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In Memory of Lauretta Ngcobo 1931-2015

Lauretta Gladys Nozizwe Duyu Ngcobo (née Gwina) was born in the southern-most part of KwaZulu Natal in 1931. She was the first girl in a family of four. Her mother, Rosa Fisekile Cele, had a difficult time with the birth. Lauretta wrote,

On the night of the second day, my grandfather, who knew the white doctor personally, had managed to persuade him to venture into the black reserve, by night, to save the life of his elder daughter and her unborn child. And so he did.¹

Lauretta was born into a family of storytellers, growing up in a rural setting where she valued her exposure to oral literary traditions. Commenting on how poetry informed all occasions she said,

It was performed to honour kings, to welcome newly born babies, and to rock them to their sleep. It is sung at weddings, at funerals and at war. It even heralds peace.²

She recalled her mother relenting in family arguments and reciting poetry at the doorway of the ‘great house’, ‘the maternal family line first, followed by the paternal line’until the grandmother nodded her head and the argument was over.³

Lauretta’s mother would tell her African folk stories. Her great-grandmother narrated episodes of Zulu history. She composed poetry about her painful life as the least-loved wife of her husband’s four wives. She also created poetry for each child in the family including Lauretta who used to cry as a baby. ‘Apparently I had a very sharp voice . . . My poetry imitates the honey bird which is very insistent.’ ⁴

When Lauretta was seven years old her father, Simon Shukwana Gwina, died. Both he and Lauretta’s mother were teachers. Lauretta’s mother became the sole breadwinner in the family. Despite the difficulties, she was determined that all her children would be educated regardless of their gender.

The public openly condemned us, girls, who ‘demanded’ the same privileges as boys. In a family where mother had never made us aware of the preferences, the remarks were not only hurtful, but created a throbbing consciousness of one’s burdensome value.⁵

Lauretta went to primary school in Webbstown and Nokweja. In 1944 she was at a boarding school run by American missionaries in Dumisa and then in 1946 she went to Inanda Seminary. At home, she had gained a knowledge and interest in English literature and history from her mother.

My mother got me interested in her favourite writer, Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. Her stories became my favourites too. From her I learned about Henry the Eighth. I was very fond of Thomas Hardy and his stories of rural England and I liked Charles Dickens.⁶

She enjoyed school but began to sense a ‘silent disapproval of the barefoot life-style and art that was part of my whole way of life’. The ‘borrowed culture of city girls’ was the dominant ethos and she found herself caught in a ‘tug of warring cultures’. She described how she felt a ‘disfigurement of outlook, a mutilation within’, a conflict that ‘persisted even against the most arduous efforts to strike a balance’.⁷

In 1950 Lauretta attended the University of Fort Hare and obtained a BA in Psychology, and Zulu Language and Literature. She also studied for a postgraduate University Education Diploma. Fort Hare had a ‘ratio of thirty-five women students to five hundred men in those days. In some classes the preference given to male students was disarming.’ ⁸

Her first job as a teacher was in Pietermaritzburg in 1954. One year later, she took up a position as a scientific research assistant for the CSIR. In 1957 she married Abednego Ngcobo and in 1960 went back to teaching in Durban. Lauretta always enjoyed writing. She wrote a number of articles and books which she discarded or burned mainly due to her assumption that nobody would be interested in reading anything she had to say, ‘not the men’ and not the ‘white people’. She stated,

I don’t think I know why I write, I just know I must. I scribble a lot that I know will never be read by anyone, for since I was a little girl by conditioning, I never expected anyone to read anything that I wrote, outside my classroom assignments. I feel the need to communicate with myself. It is a duty to myself. Yet, by its very nature, writing is an outgoing channel of communication, no matter how private.⁹

She saw the Bantu Education Act of 1953 as the greatest limitation on Black writing in South Africa.

Cut off from the mainstream of world literature which could otherwise act as a model and an inspiration. I have shared these limitations with all Black South Africans whether male or female.’¹⁰

Lauretta’s husband was imprisoned in 1960 for his political activities in the PAC and the Sharpeville uprising. In 1963 she was forced to leave South Africa.

I learned that there was a plan to have me arrested. It was the month of May. I had to escape and leave my two children with my mother. I decided to leave at once: the next day, at five in the morning, the police burst into my house to get me. I made it by the skin of my teeth.¹¹

She spent the first six years of her exile in Swaziland and Zambia where she worked as a teacher. Her children were later able to join her in Swaziland. The family moved to England in 1969 and Lauretta began teaching in London at Tufnell Park Primary School. She then taught at Lark Hall Infant School where she became Deputy and then acting Head. She also began to write, spending ‘hours pinning my episodes together at the seams. I cannot think of a more time-consuming way to write . . . I had no time limit to my expression and no deadlines to meet.’ ¹²

In 1987, her novel, Cross of Gold, was published and time became very important her. She was invited to talk and write essays on a wide range of subjects,

I had to read a lot more widely. This factual diet does little for my creativity – especially considering how limited time is between my teaching job, my ‘factual’ reading and speechifying and creativity. What I need as a writer, more than anything, is time.¹³

Cross of Gold is told from the perspective of a young, male activist, Mandla. The women characters are silent and isolated. The only active, strong woman, Sindisiwe, dies in the first chapter of the book. She is shot by the South African border police while trying to flee apartheid South Africa into Botswana. Reflecting on the many questions that came from women readers, Lauretta realised that although she was actively occupied with gender issues in her life, ‘it hadn’t occurred to me that the book was not about me, was not about Sindisiwe, it was about a man!’¹⁴ She felt that this was a product of her socialisation and began to think of her construction as a rural, black South African woman growing up with the migrant labour system and the absence of men. ‘I was brought up by women. They were strong, independent and silent . . . it was inescapable that I should turn out very much like them: fertile and rich from within but silent or barren from without.’¹⁵

Lauretta edited a collection of essays, stories and poems, Let It Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain, published in 1987. The book aims to ’embody a largeness and a continuity’ extending beyond conventional race and gender stereotypes.¹⁶ She included a detailed introduction, an essay on her life and writing and an extract from Cross of Gold. In 1990, she published her second novel, And They Didn’t Die. Lauretta said,

I hadn’t written about women successfully, but at the same time I knew all about women. As I had shared so much of their pain, it could be that that was one of the reasons why I could write a different story in And They Didn’t Die.¹⁷

She presents active women characters and portrays the solidarity and strength that binds rural Black South African women. It is through the life of Jezile, a young rural woman, that we are made aware of women’s experiences under apartheid and the migrant labour system. Traditional Zulu power structures, especially that of the mother-in-law, and patriarchy are also problematised in what is a tragic yet tender tale of deep love, human strength and resilience. Her children’s story, Fiki Learns to Like Other People, published in 1993, is based in Southern Africa and aimed primarily at children learning English as a second language.

Lauretta taught Black Women’s Literature on a part-time basis in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of London. She lectured in Britain, the United States, Italy, Holland, Sweden, South Africa, Botswana and in Zimbabwe where she spoke on the problems of women in publishing at the International Book Fair. She published various essays under the name of Nomzamo. Her article, ‘Four Women Writers in Africa’, was published in South African Outlook in 1984. ‘Black African Women Writers’ was published in Cambridge Journal of Education in the same year. She wrote,

In our modern world, when women assert their right to self-determination and self-definition, it has become urgent for the African woman to write, to reverse the long-established opinions and beliefs that are prevalent today. It has become imperative for our schools to approach African women with enlightened curiosity. It is in the classrooms of our changing world that people must learn about the African women from the authentic voices of the African women themselves.¹⁸

In 1985 Kunapipi published ‘The African Woman Writer’, a speech given by Lauretta at the African Writers’ Conference in London in 1984, and an essay entitled ‘My Life and Writing’. ‘The Plight of Exiles’ appeared in African Concord and in 1990 ‘Black, Female, British and Free’ was published in For a Change. For many years Lauretta was president of ATCAL, the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African and Associated Asian Literatures. She said, ‘We sought to persuade the Department of Education and Science through the inspectorate, to introduce into the various syllabi some text books from these rich literature sources.’¹⁹ She was also a founding member of the African women’s organisation, Akina Mama Wa Afrika which produced the journal, African Woman.

Lauretta felt strongly that ‘African writing should draw more from the African traditions of oral culture. I have not done much myself in this way but I feel it ought to be the way my writing goes’.²⁰ She would like to write fictional works based on the lives of some of Southern Africa’s women leaders and spiritualists. After thirty years in exile, she returned to South Africa. She worked in education, and served on the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature until 2008. It was in this year that she was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga by the South African government in recognition of her literary achievements. She edited an anthology of exiled South African women writers, Prodigal Daughters published in 2012. Lauretta Ngcobo died in Johannesburg on the 3rd November 2015. She is one of South Africa’s literary pioneers. A writer who fought tirelessly to give voice to her people, to Africans, to people of the African diaspora, to Black women. She specifically represented the experiences, resistance and power of Black, South African women.

Hamba Kahle Mme Lauretta Ngcobo

Notes

1 ‘My Life and My Writing’. Kunapipi, Special Double Issue Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, 7, 2 &3, 1985, p.83 Lauretta Ngcobo has published two articles entitled ‘My Life and My Writing’. One published in Kunapipi and republished in A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, eds. K. Petersen and A. Rutherford. Oxford: Dangaroo Press. 1986 and another published in Let It Be Told, ed. Lauretta Ngcobo, London: Virago. 1988. The two articles are different.
2 ibid p.84
3 ibid
4 Interview with Lauretta Ngcobo’ by Anissa Talahite, Journal of Gender Studies, 1,3 1992, p.317
5 ‘My Life and My Writing’, Kunapipi, p.85
6 Letter from Lauretta Ngcobo to Gaele Sobott, June, 1993
7 ‘My Life and Writing’, Kunapipi, p.85
8 ibid
9 ‘My Life and Writing’. Let It Be Told. ed. Lauretta Ngcobo. London:Virago, 1988, p.134
10 ibid. p.135
11 Interview with Lauretta Ngcobo by ltala Vivan, August, 1980, Between The Lines II. eds. Eva Hunter and Craig Mackenzie, Grahamstown: NELM, 1993, p.99
12 ‘My Life and Writing’, Let It Be Told, p.139
13 ibid
14 ‘Interview with Lauretta Ngcobo’ by Anissa Talahite, p.317
15 ibid. p.317
16 lntroduction to Let It Be Told, p.l
17 ‘Interview with Lauretta Ngcobo’ by Anissa Talahite, p.318
18 ‘Black African Women Writers’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 14, 3, 1984, p.17
19 Letter, June 1993
20 ibid

Bibliography

Books

Cross of Gold, London: Longman, 1981

Let it Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain, ed. Lauretta Ngcobo, London: Pluto, 1987

And They Didn’t Die, London:Virago, 1990; Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1991; New York:

George Braziller Publishers, 1991

Fiki Learns to Like Other People, London: Macmillan, 1993

Prodigal Daughters, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012

Essays/Articles

‘Four Women Writers in Africa’, South African Outlook, May, 1984, p.16

‘Black African Women Writers’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 14,3 1984, p.17

‘The Plight of Exiles’, African Concord, May, 1987, p.32

‘The African Woman Writer’ and ‘My Life and Writing’, Kunapipi, Special Double Issue

Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, 7, 2 & 3 1985 pp.83-86; A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, eds. Petersen & Rutherford, Oxford: Dangaroo, 1986

‘Impressions and Thoughts on the Options of South African Women’, Kunapipi, Double Issue New Art and Literature From South Africa, 13, 1&2 1991, pp.165-169

Introduction to Like A House On Fire: Contemporary Women’s Writing, Art and Photography, Johannesburg: COSAW, 1994

This is an edited version of an entry written in 1994 for Wozanazo : A Bio-bibliographical Survey of Twentieth-Century Black South African Women Writers (University of Hull)

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In Memory of Lauretta Ngcobo by Gaele Sobott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

THE COURAGE TO COME FORWARD – An Interview with Colin Hambrook

Colin Hambrook was educated at Dartington College of Arts in South West England. Knitting Time, his exhibition of paintings, drawings and poetry about the experience of psychosis is on show at The Hub, East London until 15 November. The work was previously shown at Pallant House, Chichester and the Impact Arts Fair 2013. Colin’s first collection of poetry, 100 Houses was published by DaDaSouth in 2011, followed by Knitting Time (Waterloo Press ISBN 978-1-906742-65-2). He is the founding editor of Disability Arts Online

The interview was conducted by Gaele Sobott on 28th September 2015 at the Barbican Centre in London just before Colin attended the Creative Future Literary Awards at the Free Word Centre in Holborn.

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Drawing by Colin Hambrook. Blue sky with clouds above green hills, a large ball of yellow wool sits just below the hills. Brown knitting needles are stuck in the ball of wool. A thick yellow line runs down the left side of the picture like a river, and green and yellow squiggly lines run parallel to this yellow band. To the right of the picture there is another thick band of yellow intersected by thin meandering green curves that creates what looks like an aerial view of plots of land or small farms. There a two faces, one squashed between the ball of wool and the yellow band on the left and one just below the ball of wool. In the bottom right-hand corner there is a woman wearing a green beret type hat and green coat. She is holding a sheep.

Call of the Ancient by Colin Hambrook

Gaele Sobott: In Australia the visual arts and now dance appear to be surging ahead in terms of developing platforms and exposure for disabled artists. Literature is quite a way behind. In the UK disabled writers and literature seem to be better placed. What are the Creative Future Literature Awards and how is Disability Arts Online involved?
Colin Hambrook: Creative Future is a Brighton-based organisation looking to promote careers of ‘marginalised’ writers and artists. Amongst those they support with their annual Literary Award are a certain number of disabled writers. Disability Arts Online is a partner. We have signed up to help them promote the program, get information out, reach people. In terms of literature in the UK, Survivors’ literature has led the way.
GS: Please explain what Survivors’ Literature is.
CH: The key organisation is called Survivors’ Poetry, founded in 1990 by four poets with direct experience of the mental health system in the UK. In a really short space of time it mushroomed into a huge phenomenon. It was a UK network of groups that all became affiliated, some of them became registered charities or not-for-profit companies in their own right and I would say between ’94 to ‘96 it exploded and was reported on in the media and really picked up on. It was important that the people who ran the organisation and wrote for Survivors’ poetry come from a mental health background. They had experienced mental distress, been through or had an intimate knowledge of the mental health system.
GS: What kind of work were they producing?
CH: In the 90s there was a kind of performance poetry format, going into day centres, resource centres, organisations working with people who had come through the mental health system, and producing workshops and giving people the opportunity to perform. So typically the first half of an event would be open mic encouraging people to get up and perform their writing and the second half would be more experienced performance poets. The organisation still exists with a core force of people in London but it has become less prominent elsewhere in the UK over the last ten years.
GS: Why do you think that has happened?
CH: Survivors’ Poetry’s strength was in its Community Arts ethos, but it has become harder to find funding for grassroots work. It’s hard to keep integrity, supporting individual artists creativity at a grassroots level whilst maintaining support for ‘professional’ artists. Survivors’ Poetry turned to producing a literary output, which has been fairly successful. As part of the Unlimited showcase at London’s Southbank Centre last year, Disability Arts Online and Survivors’ Poetry celebrated the achievement of the organisation with a reading by some of the Survivors’ founding poets in the Saison Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall. The library contains twenty-seven titles under the Survivors’ Press imprint.
GS: Has Disability Arts Online managed to keep its integrity?
CH: Disability Arts Online in the last ten or twelve years has kind of managed. It’s a bit like a dance, you want to keep your core constituency on board and to nurture that talent, but also you’ve got to watch out, keep an eye on the priorities linked to where financial support can be found to ensure funders’ demands are satisfied.
For instance we have a modest contract with Unlimited to report on all of the artists and all of the projects that come out of Unlimited. It’s a fantastic opportunity to spread the word about this important initiative. Much of Unlimited’s aims and values concur with those of Disability Arts Online, working to support the development of art by disabled artists within the UK cultural sector. Disability Art Online’s brief is to interview the artists, review the shows, comment on the work as it progresses, and where possible, to commission copy for other online magazines and press in order to facilitate the reach of Unlimited to new audiences. Unlimited had a fairly substantial presence at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, with several pieces of work in the British Council Edinburgh Showcase. Unlimited is spearheaded by two organisations: Shape and ArtsAdmin and they’ve received support from the British Council in facilitating the artists taking their work outside the UK. In many ways it is a bright, shiny success story.
We have to work hard to ensure our integrity isn’t compromised, which means creating projects that support and create opportunities for our core constituency and looking to remain disabled-led as much as possible, whilst also working with the high-profile initiatives. Without the support of Unlimited many of the artists we work with would never have got the profile they’ve achieved. For example Jess Thom was unknown as a performer before her company Touretteshero received an Unlimited research and development commission for Backstage in Biscuitland. After a year or so of touring she has been commissioned by Channel 4 with a version of the show made for television, Broadcast in Biscuitland.
GS: So does your core constituency consist of disabled artists at grassroots level?
CH: Yes, disabled artists, writers, who are what the Arts Council term as emerging artists. They are people who create because they’ve got to create, not because they’re making a living out of being artists, necessarily.
GS: Is it possible some of these artists could find themselves forever classified as emerging because of the nature of the market and the value system used to categorise their art?
CH: Yes but that’s just the label that the Arts Council puts on it. People are creative because they need to be creative and creativity isn’t a commodity. We have this schism in our society that divides creativity up into commodity and art. It’s nonsense really.
GS: You mentioned that much of the art by disabled performers at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival focused on the body. Can you please talk more about that?
CH: Yes that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Culturally it’s very different from disability arts of possibly ten, certainly fifteen years ago where the focus on impairment was frowned on.
GS: Was that in defence of the Social Model of Disability?
CH: Defending the Social Model but also it was much more then about community and about people raging against the machine, standing up against discrimination, being a collective force. What’s happened is that as the focus for disability arts has moved away and broken up into impairment-focused issues, which I think are important . . .
GS: Why do you think these issues are important?
CH: Because the key problem with what I would call the first wave of disability arts from the mid 80s to the end of the 90s was that it was very much inward-looking and there was a very powerful community of disabled people who were very clear in their aims and making strong art for and by disabled people. Indeed we got the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act 1995). Not the DDA we wanted but we got the DDA. What happened then was that the very clear, concise stand against discrimination got diluted and the Social Model as a source of inspiration and power for people to find a voice kind of hit a brick wall because impairment within the Social Model wasn’t really addressed in a very strong way. So all the slogans like, Nothing About us Without us, the focus on things being disability-led, kind of fell apart when certain disabled leaders, say for example a wheelchair user, didn’t understand all the politics around Deaf issues or blind issues. Having disabled leaders is important but having that broad understanding of access and the issues faced by people with different impairments is more important.
GS: Isn’t it possible to have disabled leaders with a more complex understanding of disability, Deaf experiences, impairment?
CH: Yes that is the ideal, yes.
GS: Why hasn’t that developed or has it?
CH: There’s a choice that happens in either developing the politics or developing the arts. They can go hand in hand and work with each other and they can also work against each other. The emphasis from the funders has been that if you want the money you have got to develop the aesthetic, you’ve got to develop the art. The politics have been sacrificed to a large extent. A big part of that politics is the importance and value of work being disability-led, because at the end of the day, it’s the experience of being disabled by society that motivates us.
GS: With this huge austerity drive and all these cuts do you think there is more of a need now to develop disability political leadership and action?
CH: Yes there is more of a need now than ever. Absolutely.
GS: How do you see that developing given what you have just said?
CH: It needs people with courage to come forward and start demonstrating on the streets again.
GS: Do you see the march to Downing Street on Saturday protesting the changes being made to Access to Work as an example of this?
CH: I’m really angry that the government are cutting Access to Work. In this case the government said they will cap what any one BSL interpreter can earn at $40 000 a year. But who the hell in the arts is earning forty grand a year? Very few I would say. So the demonstrators were protesting the cuts in Access to Work with this cap on how much an individual can earn. There are thousands of disabled people dying because of cuts. The government is playing a game of divide and rule. On the one hand they are saying they want to get all disabled people into work, but on the other they’re denying means to make working an option. There needs to be a clearer focus in standing up to these issues.
GS: So are you saying that political leadership and analysis are lacking?
CH: Yes
GS: When you say there is a need for people with courage to come forward, the courage to do what?
CH: What the hell do we do in this political climate? I got very involved in supporting the 10 000 Cuts and Counting protest. At the end of 2013 we were working with Michael Meacher MP and the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. We met Michael Meacher in his office in Downing Street. He had a mass of files of printouts, of emails and letters of people who had written to him of their plight, their family’s plight, what was happening as a result of austerity, what was happening as a result of cuts in disability benefits. The main focus was that over ten thousand people had died within six weeks of being declared fit for work because their benefits had been cut and they’d been left with no money. Those individuals didn’t necessarily pass away because of the cut in their benefits, but equally, many did. Can you imagine the indignity of being on your deathbed and getting an official letter from the Department of Work and Pensions telling you that you are fit for work? And this has happened to many thousands of individuals and their families. There has been a very dangerous shift in attitude that as an individual living in this society you have to prove that you are financially contributing to it for your existence to be valid. We’ve gone back to the Victorian age within a few short years with the ruling class and their bastard politics. They’ve got every evil connivance of screwing the tax payer and they’ve got the media sewn up so they can infest everyone’s brains that it’s disabled people who have brought austerity upon us, that have brought down the economy. It’s evil!
GS: So do you think it is the responsibility of disabled artists to identify as part of the community and bring the politics into their art in some way?
CH: I personally think it is but then who am I to demand that of an individual? I encourage individuals to get involved in Disability Arts Online who have that ethos. I would say though that generally this time around people are finding it much harder to stand up for their rights.
GS: Why do you think that is?
CH: Well I would include myself in this criticism and say after the DDA was established, the disability movement never really went out of its way to include younger people. So we’ve still got the same old codgers now trying to make a stand like they did twenty or thirty years ago. People are older and frailer.
GS: The older people may no longer have the physical strength but they have knowledge. Do you think younger people are separated from that history, that knowledge of what has gone before them? Are they expected to reinvent the wheel?
CH: Yes and the tendency of Neoliberalism is to encourage people into their own little camps, individualism, losing sight of the larger collective.
GS: Do we need to theorise how to change that and if so how?
CH: It has to happen. I think going back to what we were saying earlier there is a value and an importance in the work that has become the key focus for disability arts – the relaying of stories about the body, stories of people’s experiences of individual impairment, of discrimination.
GS: How does art play a role in changing public perceptions?
CH: Art has a key role to play. You might not call an ITV soap opera, art, but in terms of popular culture, it’s much more wide-reaching than most art. And so for example, Liam Bairstow who trained with Mind the Gap has recently got a lead role in ITV’s Coronation Street. I think that a young actor with learning difficulties being seen on TV is definitely going to change attitudes, make a lot of people think and those changes are really important.
GS: It seems you are saying that change needs to take place on many levels.
CH: That’s where disability arts is at now I think, certainly within the performing arts, and within the visual arts. In the visual arts there is possibly a bit more politics.
GS: Going back to individual courage – someone may have the courage needed to come forward but if others don’t join with that person it could be very demoralising. What is your experience in this regard?
CH: Well yes, for me, we went to all that effort with 10 000 Cuts and Counting and none of the media turned up and it was all forgotten very quickly. No one took any notice. Nobody seems to care that many thousands of disabled people died because of cuts. Nobody thinks that could be me, or that could be a member of my family.
GS: You said the media didn’t pick up on the story. Disability Arts Online plays an important role in providing an alternative media source.
CH: Yes we do provide an alternative media and we keep plugging away.
GS: You started Disability Arts Online in 2002, and in 2004 you set it up as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. So it’s been running for over eleven years. How do you fund the organisation?
CH: We’re constantly working on funding applications for projects. We have a broad vision for how we operate in terms of raising debate about disability arts practice and supporting the work of individuals and organisations across art forms.
We’ve recently received funding from Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts scheme for Viewfinder over the next eighteen months. Viewfinder will see us working in partnership with Wikimedia UK, Sick! Festival, SPILL Festival, Carousel, the New Wolsey Theatre and Goldsmiths Disability Research Centre. It’s very exciting. Wikimedia UK are keen for us to populate Wikipedia with pages dedicated to disabled artists and a history of the movement. The Disability Research Centre at Goldsmiths University is supporting us in running a series of workshops.
We’re producing a video platform and commissioning disabled artists/filmmakers to curate a selection of disability work from the archives of Sick! Festival in Brighton, SPILL Festival in Ipswich/London and Carousel’s Oska Bright Festival. We will produce videos commenting on the importance of the selection in advancing the practice of disabled artists. So, for example Matthew Hellett, who is a learning disabled filmmaker on the Oska Bright committee will be making a film about what makes for good representation; how the committee judge the best films for Oska Bright. We’ve also got another year of core funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which is renowned for funding organisations with a community remit.
GS: Have you come up with ideas for sustaining Disability Arts Online on a more long-term, financial basis? Have you tried financing the group by any means other than government funding or philanthropy?
CH: We’ve tried a few experiments. We recently worked with Stopgap Dance Company. They produced the Independent Fringe platform in Edinburgh. Disability Arts Online produced a crowd-funding platform for one of the younger artists, Rowan James. That was successful. We raised £1500 towards getting him to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. We want to do more of that.
GS: You have described how outside funding can determine the path you take. So if you want to be independent of those demands and priorities in terms of changing the political situation how do you achieve financial independence and sustainability?
CH: Well yes sometimes you feel that the odds are stacked against you. It is a constant struggle. We need time and energy and imagination to come up with strategies. We have a shared knowledge and experience that can be incredibly useful to many industries, so we are also working to find ways to be more sustainable through consultancy and media partnerships.
GS: You have shared your childhood and some challenging personal experiences through your poetry in a way that must be quite confronting but hugely important in terms of supporting people within the Survivors Movement and people who may feel isolated. Would you like to comment on how art can provide a form of community solidarity and empowerment, especially in reference to your latest collection of poetry, Knitting Time?

A drawing of a small boat knitted from yellow wool, sailing on a blue sea with stylised waves against a bright blue sky

Knitting Time by Colin Hambrook

CH: I’d like to think that Knitting Time had value in giving a voice to issues around mental distress. Mostly, psychiatry condemns individuals to the judgement of a medical imperative, which locates mental health problems in the head divorced from the individual’s life experience and circumstances or indeed from any emotional impact located in the body. It treats the individual as having a separate, disconnected body and mind and introduces powerful and potentially harmful drugs to suppress experience deemed as mental health problems. Often, those experiences can be exhilarating and creative even if they can make it harder to function in the ‘real world’. Often mental health ‘issues’ are a matter of an individual having the confidence to be comfortable with who they are.
So in sharing some of my own journey I would hope to break some of the isolation people feel. There is empowerment in hearing others’ stories, others’ expression. There are poets like John Clare and William Blake whose names come up frequently in terms of writers whose core work continues to inspire empowerment within a survivors’ community. There was a poem by Ellen Link that I go back to again and again that inspires my sense of the value of connection; and connection with nature as a healing force in contradistinction to this narrow framework we are meant to fit in with when it comes to being seen as valid, mentally healthy members of society: “In the woods they blast/ your courage to tell you/ you are not a tree, that the wild wind /and the grey skies are not your cousins/ though their atoms be like yours. . .”

For further reading:

Colin Hambrook’s Art and Poetry Blog

Celebrating the Survivors’ Movement

Jess Thom’s Tourettes Hero

10 000 Cuts and Counting 1

10 000 Cuts and Counting 2

10 000 Cuts and Counting 3

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The Courage to Come Forward – an Interview with Colin Hambrook by Gaele Sobott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

IF YOU DIDN’T LAUGH, YOU’D CRY : AN INTERVIEW WITH GAYLE KENNEDY

Black & white portrait of Gayle Kennedy smiling and wearing a hat and a necklace with large beads

Photograph taken by Belinda Mason

Gayle Kennedy is a proud member of the Wongaibon Clan of the Ngiayampaa speaking nation of South West NSW. She is an award-winning writer and has published work in newspapers, magazines, literature journals, and for radio. She was the Indigenous issues writer and researcher for Streetwize comics from 1995-1998. Her book of poetry, Koori Girl Goes Shoppin’, was shortlisted for the David Unaipon Award in 2005 and her prose work, Me, Antman & Fleabag[1] was the winning entry in 2006. She wrote eleven books for the Yarning Strong series. The Series won the 2011 Australian Publishers Association award for Excellence in Educational publishing. Gayle is a disability advocate and has spoken widely in Australia and overseas on disability and the arts.

Gaele Sobott: Can you tell me about your background? Where you were born, where you grew up, a little bit about your family?

Gayle Kennedy: I was born in Ivanhoe NSW and we moved to Hay when I was seven. In between, from the age of two to five, I was in the children’s hospital in Camperdown and then a rehab hospital in Wahroonga, then the Royal Far West in Manly recovering from Polio

My mother and father were both born in Condoblin but Dad’s family is from around Cobar. Mum’s family comes from the Euabalong area. Mum and Dad met when they were seventeen, working out at Wilcania. They’re both eighty-three now and they’ve been married sixty years this year. They had six children, four girls and two boys. One of my brothers was killed in a car accident at the age of eighteen in 1976. Dad worked for what was then the Department of Main Roads in the Central Darling Shire. Mum worked for a long while cleaning in hotels but gave that up about thirty years ago. They’re both retired now. I grew up with their stories. My parents’ story is in the national library. Francis Rush did that. She did an interview with me too about my experiences of polio for the Social History of Polio Oral History Project.[2]

GS: What are some of the memories you have of your childhood?

GK: I have vague memories of being in an iron lung and learning to walk again. My memories are mainly of me going backwards and forwards between home and the Far West. I remember loving rehab. It was the only home I knew at that stage. I was surprised to find out that I wasn’t from there when my parents came to pick me up. The first part of Me Antman & Fleabag where I write about the hospital is pretty much based on that time. The rest of it is fiction.

GS: Talk a little about your school experiences.

GK: When I was at the Far West I went to school there and it was okay. Because of the polio treatment I didn’t start school until I was seven. I went to the Convent school in Hay and the nuns were very good teachers. It was a great place because there was absolute zero tolerance of bullying or racism. Then I did one year at Hay Public School, which was awful. There were a couple of kids that bullied me and the headmaster was very racist and treated me like an idiot. Fortunately the teachers realised I was bright and totally ignored his directions to put me in the lower classes. So I got to work at the level I was used to which was the advanced level.

Then I won a two-year scholarship to go to Queenwood here in Sydney, at Mosman, right on Balmoral Beach. Violet Medway was one of the principals then. They were into providing a high standard of education for girls. No domestic science or any of those subjects that used to be taught to women. I loved English and History. I was a bit of a daydreamer – never really concentrated. I was always off in another world when they tried to tell me stuff. I generally crammed for exams. I was at Queenwood from age seventeen to nineteen. I made great friends there.

GS: Describe your early adulthood. What were you doing in your late teens, early twenties? What were your interests?

GK: After I finished at Queenwood I went to the Commonwealth Employment Service in North Sydney to look for work. That’s what you did in those days. They found me a position at the Australia Council as a clerk, Grade one. I went for an interview and got the job. I had a ball. It was fun meeting lots of fabulous people like Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Gary Foley, Brian Syron, George Miller. They were just starting out in those days.

I was living in Cremorne, sharing a place with four guys. It was great fun. I’d go to the beach, go to the theatre. I liked Shakespeare and Ibsen. Reg Livermore was big then. I loved the Rocky Horror Show. There were a lot of new Australian plays happening. I’d go out to listen to bands. Live music was popular then in the pubs – blues, jazz and rock. We’d listen to bands like The Sports, Mondo Rock, the Divinyls. Cold Chisel was starting out. It’s changed now. People moved to the inner city areas from the North Shore, places like that, and started complaining about noise. Gentrification changed the live music scene and also poker machines took over in the pubs as the main entertainment.

I did my share of partying too. Everybody danced, played records, got stoned, got laid. I had lots of relationships – a couple long term. One of them lasted for ten years and one for about four years. I ended up being bored. I didn’t find them exciting or interesting anymore. They were good men but I never really took to being tangled up with anybody.

GS: Music seems to play a big part in your life.

GK: I’ve always been obsessed with music every since I was little. I like melodic music. If I like a piece of music, I want to know all about it. Who wrote it and why – the whole history. My tastes range over a lot of genres from Joni Mitchell to Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan. I listen to music all the time. It lifts my spirit and takes me to another place. If I’ve got a religion, it’s music.

I can remember singing when I was very young, maybe two, the old country songs like Don’t sell Daddy any more whiskey. Both my parents played and sang socially, at celebrations, weddings, funerals. Mum sings and plays guitar, piano accordion and piano. Dad sings, writes songs, plays guitar and performed around the traps.

GS: Tell me more about your work life and career.

GK: I stayed in the public service for years. I worked for a while with People with Disability and various community centres. From 1995 to 1998 I was a writer and researcher for StreetWize comics. I worked at the Aboriginal Medical Service and the Aboriginal Legal Service doing clerical work, research work, report writing. Then I started at the Attorney General’s Department as a policy officer around Aboriginal justice. I got sick of that and left in 2008. I’ve been a writer ever since.

GS: Why did you get sick of working at the Attorney General’s Department?

GK: Every time something good was happening the government would pull the pin. There was too much double speak, too many weasel words. I didn’t like the attitude of a lot of the young people I was working with who’d grown up not really knowing about hardship or what was really going on with Aboriginal people in the justice system. There’s no fire in their belly. They pay lip service to the struggle that went on but I don’t think they really acknowledge that struggle or give a damn. I just wanted to be out.

GS: How did you start your writing career?

GK: I had a plan before I left the public service. I started entering writing competitions. Irena Dunn initiated the Inner City Life writing competition in the mid 1990s when she was director of the NSW Writers’ Centre. I submitted a poem for that which was highly commended. The following year I won the competition with a prose piece called ‘Life’s Good When Ya Know How’. I liked the piece so much I expanded it into a book and entered it for the 2006 David Unaipon award. I won and everything grew from there.

I was commissioned to write a graphic novel as part of the OUP Yarning Strong series. One by one the other writers who had been commissioned dropped out so I ended up writing those stories. I published eleven books with the series. The illustrator was Ross Carnsew. I’d worked with him before on StreetWize.

GS: How do you find writing to a brief for children?

GK: It was challenging writing for a particular age group but I managed to make the stories interesting. I wrote the kind of books that kids want to read. You just think back to when you were a kid and put yourself in their shoes. I don’t use big words when I write for adults. I like clean, simple, lean writing. So writing for children is not difficult for me. With Yarning Strong I was given a word, family, land, lore, culture. I wrote whatever I liked around the subject.

The books went into the schools. Apparently they are much loved and are still selling very well. They were the overall winner of the 2011 Australian Publishers Association Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing. The series was also awarded Best Student Learning Literacy resource for 2011.

GS: Your work at StreetWize was specifically for low-level literacy readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Do you think there is a need for more of this kind of writing?

GK: Well there is no real organisation doing that kind of publishing anymore. Yes there is a definite need for more. It was a great way of providing for kids and adults with low-level literacy. StreetWize publications were very mobile, very accessible. You’d find their comics in waiting rooms, classrooms, wherever. It relied on government grants and was closed because of lack of money. Howard got in to government. Need I say more?

GS: What was your experience with writers’ festivals and the media directly after winning the David Unaipon award? How were you received as a writer with disability?

GK: I was only invited to three writers festivals – Sydney, Darwin and Brisbane. The festivals didn’t want to have me because it meant paying the extra fare for my personal assistant. The organisers didn’t check that accommodation and venues were wheelchair accessible which made it difficult. There were no radio interviews, no press. The other David Unaipon award winners got a lot more attention. I think that was to do with me being an older writer and one with disability. Writers’ festivals like the young writers.

But Me, Antman & Fleabag is still selling after all these years and now it’s starting to sell overseas. That’s mainly due to social media and word of mouth.

I think writers today are expected to have the kind of face that looks good on magazine covers, to be celebrities, attractive in that way. They have to be highly visible, good with sound bites.

GS: You’ve written about people with disability as being ‘the shadow people’. What do you mean by this?

GK: People with disability are often in the background, in the shadows. Everyone else gets up to talk for us, which I find very frustrating. We’ve got voices!

GS: How does being Aboriginal, Disabled and Woman play out in your life experience?

GK: I’ve never experienced any major problems with being a woman or being Aboriginal. I’m very proud of being Aboriginal. In terms of my writing, I don’t like the way the literary scene ghettoises books. For example, if you walk into a bookstore you’ll find my book lumped into the Indigenous section when it should be in the humour section. Indigenous writing should be categorised as part of the mainstream.

I’ve always done everything I wanted as a woman. Disability is the lowest on the pole in my experience. I think leadership is the key to changing that. Too often it is the hands of people who don’t have disability. I never took much notice of it when I was young. It was later in my life when post-polio kicked in and I realised the physical barriers and obstacles, discrimination, people talking over you or to whoever is accompanying you rather than to you.

I think there is some change happening, more and more people are coming out but they don’t get the opportunities to voice their concerns. They’re not given the stage. People without disability write about people with disability and they’re given the glory and the money. You see that at the writers’ festivals and in the media.

GS: What other changes would you like to see happening in the Australian arts and cultural sector?

GK: I’d like to see a broader and more representative spectrum of writers and actors. I mean Australia is so white. You turn on the television and you’re lucky to see a black face or an Asian face or Arab face. I don’t know whose reality it’s supposed to be. I’m so tired of watching those programs about young, hip and happening people in their shorts doing up a house. Until the public starts demanding more substantial entertainment it’s not going to change. Why would production houses and TV executives spend a couple of million dollars creating a drama or a comedy when all they have to do is put some want-to-be in a house or in a kitchen. Cheap as chips.

We need to get in the door. If I got my foot in that door, I would change what goes on inside!

GS: Iva Polack from the University of Zagreb writes that Me, Antman & Fleabag ‘ . . . is an observational comedy and a dark satire of Aboriginal contemporaneity asking the reader to get into the circle of laughter by simultaneously laughing with, at and back.’[2] What role does humour play in your work?

GK: Humour is very much part of what I write. Even in the most serious sections, I like to have a laugh and to make people laugh out aloud. Humour is very important. Sharing laughter makes you feel good. That’s what it’s meant to do. The old saying goes, if you didn’t laugh you’d cry. Laughter is up there with music in life.

GS: Do you think there is something distinctive about Aboriginal humour?

GK: Yes, Aboriginal humour is pretty much at the expense of other people, taking the piss out of yourself and people around you. It’s often anecdotal and based on love and trust. You’re comfortable enough to laugh with each other. It’s clever. You’ve got to be very quick, nothing gets missed, and it’s very much observational. It’s a humour that engages deeply with what’s going on around us.

GS: What are you working on at the moment?

GK: I’m doing a lot of talks on disability, on writing, whatever pays the bills. I would like to be writing my own book. I want to do a three-part story looking at my life and experiences with polio, intertwined with my parents’ lives.

GS: How have you changed over the last forty years from the time you first lived in Sydney to present day?

GK: I took every advantage of being young, good looking, carefree. Now I don’t need to be going out all the time. I’m happy with my own company. I wasn’t for a long time. I’m glad I made it to sixty. I’m a lot more tolerant of people. I think a lot more deeply about things.

I don’t miss living in Hay. I haven’t been back there for a couple of years but I’ll be there in October for my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. I do miss the people. Sydney is my home, my friends are here and I’m comfortable. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I started out on the north side, Neutral Bay, Cremorne, Manly then moved to Balmain 1977. I’ve been here ever since apart form a two-year stint in Newtown. That was too hip for me.

I write now. I never would have back then. I was too busy going out having fun.

GS: In your keynote speech at the 2014 Scribbler Forum you said, you have not been a political person. It seems to me that you are a very political person determined to bring about change in a number of areas including for artists with disability.

GK: I guess I am but that’s only emerged in the last few years because I realised you can’t effect change by staying silent.

Notes:

[1] Me, Antman & Fleabag,Paperback, 130 pages. Published September 1st 2008 by University of Queensland Press
[2] Gayle Kennedy interviewed by Frances Rush in the Social history of Polio oral history project [sound recording] http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/6184496
[3] Iva Polak, ‘To Laugh, or Not to Laugh – That is the Lesson: Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman & Fleabag’ presented at Australasian Humour Studies Network Annual Conference, hosted by Flinders Institute of Research in the Humanities at the State Library South Australia, 4-6 February 2015

This interview was conducted in Balmain, Sydney, 12^th June 2015

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If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry: An interview with Gayle Kennedy by Gaele Sobott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

CROSSING CHASMS OF MISCONCEPTION: Contemporary short stories from Gaza and Sydney

The Book of Gaza
Edited by Atef Abu Saif
Published by Comma Press 2014
128 pages
ISBN 978-1-905583-64-5
£8.75 plus postage from Comma Press

Stories of Sydney
Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Alice Grundy and David Henley
Published by Seizure and Sweatshop 2014
249 pages
ISBN 978-1-921134-26-5
$19.95 AU Seizure

“Gaza has always had a central place in the literary life of Palestine,” says editor and writer, Atef Abu Saif in his introduction to The Book of Gaza. Important Palestinian literary figures from Gaza extend back to the eighth-century poet, philologist and one of the founders of Islamic jurisprudence, Imam al-Shafii. They include poets like Mu’in Bseiso and Harun Hashim Rasheed both born in the late 1920s, and the novelist and poet, Abdul Karim Sabawi born in 1942. In 1948 the city of Gaza and the surrounding Gaza strip, which has a total area of 360 km², suddenly became home to a large number of Palestinian refugees forced from their houses, villages, towns and cities by an-Nakba. As well as being one of the oldest cities in the world Gaza became one of the most densely populated cities. With Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip in 1967, most writers left and took refuge in countries like Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq. Abdul Karim Sabawi eventually migrated to Australia. Atef Abu Saif describes how:

Despite restrictions on freedom of expression, the art of the short story attained great popularity during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s . . . Through the brevity and symbolism of the short story, Gazan writers found a way to overcome printing and publishing restrictions imposed by Israeli occupation forces.

In the 1980s and 90s Gaza gained a reputation as “the exporter of oranges and short stories.”

The Book of Gaza brings together 10 short stories by ten of Palestine’s modern writers. Abdallah Tayeh, Zaki al ‘Ela and Ghareeb Asqalani represent the pioneers of the short story. They describe the long queues of exhausted Palestinian workers waiting to cross into Israel. They write of curfews, prisoners’ suffering, and heroes like Zaki al ‘Ela’s Abu Jaber, who actively resists Israeli oppression. They also write about the determination and solidarity that exists between Palestinian people. Asqalani’s story in this Anthology, “A White Flower for David”, is complex and dense. It is hard work figuring out the characters and their relationships to each other. The narrators change, perspectives shift. A fraught friendship develops between a Palestinian family, which includes three generations, and Esther who is married to David, a Jewish man. Sahimah, The Palestinian mother and grandmother, finds Esther’s name strange. Esther sits cross-legged on the bed. We see her through Mahmoud’s eyes as he addresses David, ” exposing half of her flesh, nearly making my brother, Abdallah pass out. My mother threw her coat over Esther’s nakedness . . . It was Arab shame and fear, something she hadn’t expected, but you were typically Hebrew in kidding me about it.” Esther leaves the family at the end of the day wearing a madjalawi robe, a gift from Sahimah, and a knitted shawl wrapped around her head.

Cultural differences are part of the tension that underscores the relationship between the two families but far more ominous is the fact that despite the human desire to be kind, understanding, to be friends, they are positioned socially, economically, and in the everyday reality of Gaza, as enemies. The story begins with Mahmoud standing “face to face with death” forced to choose between “two deaths: to kill or see your son killed.” He decides to hurl the rock he is clasping in his hand.

Israeli soldiers are ever-present. As Mahmoud walks late at night he sees soldiers ahead of him chasing some young men. “Kicks, blows and batons rained down; aching bones and suppressed moans. The soldiers hammered them, marked every inch of their bodies, ripped out their very identities . . .” One handsome young man cracks a joke and bursts out laughing until the pain in his jaw becomes too much for him. Mahmoud touches the man’s moist face and curses as the life drains from him. Later, Abdallah is beaten by soldiers as his nephew looks on. He lies on the ground, “a bleeding, crumpled heap . . . his vision clouding over as the sand of the street soaked up his gushing blood. It pooled in a great red patch as the UN truck loomed into view. The soldiers dragged the wounded man into the armoured car and set off . . .” The men sell their souls seeking a day’s work, trying to scrape a living together, martyrs fall, nerves dangle on a thread. The force of anger churns in the breasts of the young men.

Mahmoud, his wife, Haifa, and son, Husam visit Esther and David’s house. Once inside, Mahmoud watches his son looking out the balcony window. His heart pounds as Husam observes a group of soldiers at a bus stop, saying “If only I had a catapult with me . . .”

The writing is tight and nuanced. The atmosphere is claustrophobic. Somehow a very delicate shard of humanity survives amongst the rubble.

The younger generation of writers in the anthology are more introspective. They write about feelings and desire. They engage with and critique their society. Their stories are less hopeful, sometimes despondent. The space surrounding the characters seems even more restricted. Atef Abu Saif’s story, “A Journey in the Opposite Direction” is about two young men and two young women who were friends in their younger days but haven’t seen each other for ten or more years. They meet by chance in the border city of Rafah. The description is rich. Thin shafts of evening sunlight play across the road. Bananas and dates hang “like lost opportunities” in front of the fruit shop at the corner of the square. Travellers are returning from work or from visiting friends and family in Gaza city. Honda and Mercedes taxis line up. People sit on plastic chairs sipping hot anise tea at a small wooden hut that serves as a café. There is just enough room for the owner to squeeze inside to make the hot drinks on a gas stove beside the fridge, or prepare the nargilah pipe. The journey to Rafah from Gaza city is about 40 kilometres. It is the longest stretch of coast and the lengthiest trip any resident of Gaza can make. Ramzi is in Rafah to meet his brother who has been living overseas for twenty years. But it takes a miracle to get in or out of Gaza.

The four young characters chase after the moon, driving from Rafah back towards Gaza in Ramzi’s small blue car. As they approach the bridge over Wadi Gaza the road gets busier until the traffic grinds to a halt. “The water from the valley had spilled over onto the road and the bridge was impassable.” The four of them stand by the car looking at the scene in disbelief like “scarecrows or ships’ masts” sunk in the harbour.

Gaza is not known for its women writers. Palestine does however have a history of women writers and poets. Although she has been largely left out of literary studies, Samira Azzam, born in Akka in 1926 is considered a pioneer in the development of the Arab and Palestinian short story. In 1948 she fled with her family to Lebanon. By the time of her death in 1967 she had published four collections of short stories including Tiny Matters (1954) and The Great Shadow (1956). Sahar Khalifeh is Palestinian writer, born 1942 in Nablus, who has published many novels depicting the life of Palestinian women.[1]

Five of the ten writers in The Book of Gaza, are women – Mona Abu Sharekh, Najlaa Ataallah, Asmaa al Ghul and Nayrouz Qarmout. Their stories are bold, sensuous, and defiant. All explore gender restrictions in their society. Nayrouz Qarmout’s “The Sea Cloak” is about a family’s trip to the beach. Gaza’s coastline is not clean. Everything is scattered about in disarray. The sand is littered with rubbish and tents dot the beach. “This is just the way Gaza is: a young girl yet to learn the art of elegance. A young girl who has not yet developed her own scent and is still, willingly or not, perfumed by all around her.” The protagonist remembers the point where her family no longer considered her a girl. Her father slapped her across the cheek. Her mother dragged her from the room, yelling, “That’s the last time you’re going out on the streets . . . You’re grown-up now, not a little girl. Go and look at yourself in the mirror. Take your sister’s scarf and wrap your hair in it.”

On the beach she is wearing a long black robe and a headscarf. She walks past a group of young men playing cards, children dying their lips with Slush Puppies, a donkey splashing about in the sea, and a stall selling lupin beans. The scent of cardamom-infused coffee wafts from hot coals, an old man recounts tales of Palestine’s history. She walks, surrounded by her memories, into the ocean. She swims further out, feeling “an excited tingle that was almost too much to bear. Arousal grew inside her . . .”

The Book of Gaza is successful in doing what it sets out to do. That is to present us with “glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines.” There are stories of anxiety, oppression, violence and self-reflection, of resilience, despair and hope. By translating these stories into English and creating this anthology, Comma Press offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to read Palestinian literature and understand the everyday experiences of the people of Gaza as they struggle to live with dignity in what many have called the largest prison in the world.

Stories of Sydney is an anthology featuring five writers from Inner Sydney and ten writers from Western Sydney. In the Editor Notes at the back of the book, Michael Mohammed Ahmad explains the editors agreed that since Western Sydney’s population outweighs Inner Sydney’s population, the ratio should be reflected in the publication. Ahmad despairs that Western Sydney is misrepresented. “When you watch a movie or read a book on Western Sydney, it’s usually about ethnic crime – our guns, gangs, drugs and sexual assaults.” The anthology claims to celebrate the diversity that exists in Sydney. If diversity means an assortment or a miscellany of stories then there is definitely a mix of identifiable cultural experiences, storytelling traditions, and other language influences on the English language and writing styles within this anthology. Some stories are stronger than others. While the content of the stories vary, it is by and large situated within the context of the humdrum of everyday life.

The protagonist in Peter Polites’ story “More Handsome than a Monkey” furtively tracks his lover, “a wheat-fed kid” with “overdose green eyes and speckled guns.” He follows him on a train trip, catching the:

6.30 am, XPT Central – Orange…The shiny city turned into the inner west. The inner west became suburbia with a middle class name. Suburbia became the outer west. The outer west. The outer west became large streets, backyards with children’s toys and BBQ patios. It slowly became rural.

Polites’ writing style is almost Neo-noir with terse dialogue and a snappy first-person narrative. The observations are realist and generally gritty. A sexual relationship drives the plot. The milieu is low-level drug dealing involving “getters” and “freshies”. The main character works in a sports club where the carpet is “a multi-colour galaxy. Yellow stars, red crescents and green comets on a cyan background.” He is flawed but not deeply. He’s looking for love. His behaviour is borderline self-destructive. When things go wrong for him he finds a “fat Leb” in a matching tracksuit. Does a blowie in the toilets and is given some crystals. He moves back into the family home. It seems he always has a room there.

“The 25th Paragon of Filial Piety” by Amanda Yeo is a collection of finely wrought, slightly tongue-in-cheek snippets of the family, work and social life of a young woman. The Yuan Dynasty scholar, Guo Jujing wrote exemplars of filial piety towards parents, nearly all about the piety of sons. These were assembled into a book called The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Devotion. Amanda Yeo tells her stories of a daughter’s exemplary conduct, helping her mother prepare kai lan, pouring hot water into an aunty’s mug while the women interrogate her sister about her ang moh boyfriend. In the story “The Curtain Between” Maryam Azam explores the tender beginnings of a relationship between two Muslim students. Tamar Chnorhokian writes about an Armenian-Australian woman who reminisces about her late aunt in “Let Me Look at Your Face”. In “Five Arrivals” Luke Carman’s character is torn away from a conversation with an artist at a party in Concord by a phone call from his cousin growling, “Where the seven fucks have you been dick-nigger?” He gets into his Camry, with its bald tyres and speeds down the highway towards Western Sydney. The road outside his cousin’s house is “streaked with tyre marks from doughies and burnouts leading to stretches of muddied lawn.” PM Newton’s story “Aqua” is superb in its rendering of emotion. The geographical setting encompasses Sydney from Chatswood to Marrickville but focuses on the North Sydney Olympic Swimming Pool with Sydney Harbour Bridge to one side and the leering grin of the Luna park entrance on the other side. It is a story told through the eyes of a daughter, now a mother, of her family’s painful experiences of the war in Vietnam, and the pool’s significance in her life.

In the Editor notes, Alice Grundy and David Henley write:

. . . there remains a divide between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Sydney, between the new-formed establishment and writers who live in Western Sydney, or who speak English as a second language, or whose families are migrants, or from an Indigenous background; or a combination of the above.

So what of the pressing question of diversity? It seems that here, diversity is about cultural minorities or “lives you don’t often get to see, from authors as varied as the city itself” becoming more visible, being heard, accessing the centre. In an article she wrote for The Guardian about racism in Australian theatre, Nakkiah Lui interrogates the use of the word ‘diversity’, claiming that “diversity doesn’t challenge whiteness, it bolsters it, because we are never questioning what is at the centre.” Rather than asking, why is there not enough diversity in the arts, she argues people in positions of power should be asking questions like “Why am I in the position I am in? Why do I think I deserve to be here?” She says:

We need to remember that diversity is the means to an end. Diversity isn’t complexity, and ultimately, what we want is not a diverse country but a complex one. By accepting diversity as an end we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that the playing field is equal.[2]

Rather than critique Stories of Sydney for not including for example, more First Nation writers or writers from African communities or of African heritage, I would ask that publishers and editors look at the processes. When applying for funding for a writing/publishing project, they should think about working to include leaders and decision makers from diverse communities. It is not a matter of ticking boxes, or token last minute inclusions to make a collection of stories diverse. It is an organic and lengthy process of searching for and inviting existing writing groups from different communities to participate, of acting in solidarity to assist the development of new groups, new writers. It is a process of opening up to varied story telling and literary traditions, different uses of language, of seemingly unusual or irregular and sometimes uncomfortable realities. It is also a process of invigorating Australian short fiction through the reinvention of writing aesthetics and reading values. The publishers of Stories of Sydney Seizure and Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, are at least on the right path. The launch of the First Nations Australia Writers’ Network in February, and the Accessible Arts NSW Scribbler Literature Forum held in June this year are also positive moves to achieving this kind of complexity.

The Book of Gaza and Stories of Sydney present us with tales from two very different cities. While generally recognising established short story traditions, both books offer writing that contests dictates of form and style. The stories, especially those from Gaza and Western Sydney, give voice to perspectives that challenge mainstream victim, terrorist, criminal, and superhero stereotypes. Instead of flattening people into one-dimensional images these stories offer the reader a chance to feel and experience the day-to-day life of individuals, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children, lovers, workers, living in Gaza and in Sydney. Much of the writing in these two anthologies is an act of resistance. The writers in Gaza have responded to the latest Israeli onslaught by continuing to write. [3] According to an email from Ra Page, director of Comma Press, “all of the Book of Gaza contributors are writing away like crazy, whilst they have power.” [4]

The writers in both anthologies provide bridges for readers to cross over chasms of misconception, and meet the inhabitants of different communities, neighbourhoods, suburbs, cities and surrounds. This is one way of looking at people we don’t know, to look and actually see, at least partially, the depth and complexity of their humanity.

In reading these stories we also begin to understand our own identities, our privileges and our oppression. We begin to understand our responsibilities as human beings. With Israel’s relentless aerial bombardments, shelling and ground attacks in Gaza over the past two weeks, I believe this understanding is urgent.

1. Sahar Khalifeh’s books include We Are Not Your Slave Girls (1974), Thorns(1975) translated into English by Al-Saqi Books in 1985, Sunflower(1980), Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman (1986), The Door of the Courtyard (1990) and The Inheritance (1997).

2. Nakkiah Lui, “Is Australian Theatre Racist? The Guardian 12 June, 2014

3. Follow Najlaa Ataallah’s blog

4. Sarah Irving, “Gaza’s writers keep writing under the bombs”, Electronic Intifada, 20 July, 2014 (Eighty percent of households in Gaza currently have only up to four hours power per day)

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ENLIGHTENING THE GATEKEEPERS… some thoughts on the Scribbler Literature Forum

One of the more well-known slogans of the disability rights movement is “Nothing About Us Without Us” – the recent closure of ABC’s “Ramp Up” accentuates the fact that there are very few of “US” in the Australian media, literature and writing sector.

For many years, South Australia was the only state to run a program, through the SA Writers’ Centre, for writers with disability. In 2012 Arts Access Victoria and Writers Victoria took up the baton by launching the Write-ability project, supporting Victorian writers with disability to develop their skills and writing careers. At the 2014 Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne, Write-ability proudly showcased six of its emerging writers.

Accessible Arts NSW began the process of addressing the barriers faced by writers with disability in NSW by organising the SCRIBBLER – Literature Forum at the NSW State Library, on 24^th June this year. I was pleased to be invited to convene this event. Writers with disability gathered together with industry professionals to hold critical conversations around what we see as key concerns. Examples of these concerns are leadership opportunities in the sector, inclusion in festivals and on writing platforms, and changing the culture surrounding disability in the arts.

The keynote speaker at the Forum, Writer and Editor, Gayle Kennedy described in detail some of the access barriers she has faced as an award-winning writer who uses a wheelchair. One example she quoted was organisers refusing to pay her carer’s airfare, which meant Gayle was prevented from attending major events:

[As a] David Unaipon Award winner ‑ I did not get to go to any other writers’ festivals. Year in and out every award winner is invited to the festivals. But I didn’t. I didn’t get to go to Melbourne. I didn’t get to go to Adelaide. I didn’t get to go to Perth.

The presenters on the “Writing the Boundaries” panel gave specific examples of the discrimination that effectively nullifies or hinders equal opportunity within their chosen occupation of writing. The experiences are complex and varied. Georgia Cranko, a writer and performing artist talked about privilege and oppression in her life, “…I am often marginalised in situations, but I have been fortunate to be equipped with tools that allow me to push through that oppression and neither be crippled by it nor defined by it. My intellect has always been doubted by strangers.” She feels lucky that she can prove her capability through her academic work and writing, not only to others but also to herself. She related how the physical manifestation of her impairment sometimes offers her privilege in comparison to people whose impairment is invisible but “It also underscores the social issues that I deal with. If employers were willing to hire someone like me, I wouldn’t need to rely on the government for the pension or be terrified that it will be cut…”

Amanda Yeo, a writer from Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, refuses to be defined by her impairment, and does not accept the limiting inspirational, tragic or superpower tropes that are used to characterise people with disability in the media and literature. She has found writing to be an excellent way to explore her identity and learn to be comfortable in her own skin. She said,

I’m not saying we should write about people who find their disability a constant factor or concern, and I’m not saying we should only write about people with disability…I’m not saying we have to write about people with disability all the time; I’m just saying write about people.

In describing our embodied experiences of trying to work within a disabling world, the writers rejected posturing on disability by writers without disability. Historically people with disability have been the objects of research, not the researchers. We have not been seen as writers but have been written about and acted upon. The obvious way to change this is for writers with disability to write about disability themselves.

Gayle Kennedy called for affirmative action in relation to creating disability leadership opportunities, and dedicated disability access and arts funding. Affirmative action is a concept that is shied away from when discussing solutions to disabling experiences of discrimination in the arts. It is possibly the idea of quotas and succession plans that scare organisations. I think there should be a focus in Australia at this time on meaningful employment targets for artists, arts managers, arts organisers and arts workers with disability. I think we should also be focusing on effective leadership succession plans for people with disability in arts organisations, especially arts and disability organisations. But I would also emphasise that affirmative actions include training programs, outreach efforts, and many other positive steps. Jane McCredie, Executive Director of the NSW Writers’ Centre suggested that writing and literature organisations should include an access component in their budgets. I would love to see the creation of a national literary prize for writers with disability. Some publishers are beginning to actively seek out manuscripts by writers with disability. Every small step is a welcome contribution to shifting attitudes, and to creating a critical mass of people with disability in key positions in literature organisations, performing on literature festival platforms, and publishing their work.

To bring about change to the disabling aspects of our industry, I think we also need to develop a more precise understanding of how gatekeepers determine who becomes literate, who learns to write, who gets funded, what the funding criteria are, who publishes, who gets publicised, promoted, invited to read. The gatekeepers are in the media, in schools, community centres and arts organisations. They are publishers, festival directors, book reviewers and event organisers. Gatekeepers may also include parents, carers and community capacity officers. They are the people who decide. They are the people who assist in forming understandings of disability, the value and often the content of our work. They form the dominant norms of the system we live in. Gatekeeping can be subtle or blatant. We hear story after story of young people with disability being told by a parent or a teacher that they can never be a writer. Many publishers are known to prefer promoting an author who fits snugly into the narrow physical realm of normalised beauty. Festival organisers prefer a writer who can travel freely without extra accessibility costs rather than a wheelchair user. By understanding how gatekeeping works we are in a better position to design affirmative actions. In terms of creating leadership that will bring about change it is already clear that writers and arts workers with disability need to access positions of power. These include positions such as publishing editor, publicist, festival director and policy maker. We need to be on the employment interview and funding assessment panel, and the board of arts organisations.

Although I’m not sure how literature as an art form fares, the Australia Council for the Arts is leading the field at the moment in providing dedicated funding for artists with disability and a focus on leadership and disability. The Council sponsored the UK based artist and disability activist, Jo Verrant’s recent talks on the transformational potential of employing disabled people in leadership roles within the cultural sector – not just for those individuals themselves, but for the invigoration of cultural strategy, and for the benefit of all. By including writers with disability we are opening up literature to diverse perspectives, writing that stretches beyond the boundaries of traditional literary form, writing that defies genre, and the way we receive and understand normalised bodies and language. Joanna Agius, a writer and Deaf Arts Officer at AARTS NSW argued the case for writing in AUSLAN and creating AUSLAN books, which brings a whole new dimension to the category of “literature”.

I recognise that discrimination is not always intentional. It can come about through fear and ignorance. In this respect writers with disability are crucial to shifting the culture that surrounds disability in the arts and in society in general. The power of literature lies in its ability to gradually shift perception, consciousness and then reality. To paraphrase the Belgian-Egyptian writer, Khaled Diab, the culture of power can at least be rattled by the power of culture.

There is a lot to be done. Many possibilities emerged from the Forum, including more genre specific discussions, regional forums, writer-with disability-led initiatives, the creation of writing resources for writers with disability, exploration and replication of the S.A. and Victorian mentoring programs, advocate/agents who approach publishers on behalf of writers with complex communication requirements, the development of diversity action plans. Many writers at the Forum commented on Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, Angelo Loukakis’, reference to the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 60s and 70s when “sisters were doing it for themselves”. There is a move amongst writers with disability to create their own writing groups, their own networks and their own performance and publication platforms. While writers with disability would like to find ways of sustaining these initiatives themselves, there is also a desire to agitate for taxpayers’ money to be distributed more justly across the arts.

It is essential for writers with disability, our allies in the sector, Accessible Arts NSW and industry professionals to follow up on the ideas and the momentum created by the Scribbler forum.

Sam Twyford-Moore, the director of the Emerging Writers Festival finished his presentation at the Scribbler Forum with a quote, “Festival directors are gatekeepers, but most enlightened gatekeepers take on the role because they relish opening the gates, not because they like slamming them shut. Most responsible festival directors are acutely aware of accessibility and diversity issues, and are driven by a desire to transcend those limitations, not to cement them.”

For the benefit of literature, the arts and society in general, let us now enlighten the gatekeepers. More importantly let “US” too become enlightened gatekeepers, attuned to the specific manner disability discrimination operates in the industry, and also to the form, content and location of discrimination against writers and arts workers who belong to other sections of society.

Follow @gaelesobott

Links to organisations mentioned in this blog:

Accessible Arts NSW

Arts Access Victoria

Australia Council for the Arts

Australian Society of Authors

Emerging Writers’ Festival

NSW Writers’ Centre

SA Writers’ Centre

Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement

Writers Victoria

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Gaele Sobott

writing, culture, social & economic justice . . .

Literature

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