Cirrus@Austlit

'In 'PAN' 13 John Bradley responded to a rhetorical question put to him by Dinah Norman a-Marrngawi, a mentor of his in the Yanyuwa language and ways of North East Arnhem Land, which I have not been able to forget since: can her Country hear English? For a fully committed animist like myself, this gentle interrogation works away at the craw like a Zen koan: how can we live 'here' - wherever that is - as full ecological citizens, if we cannot do so in communication with the land and sea, forests and mountains and rivers? If this Country cannot hear English, it cannot receive my blessings, it can only sense my thanks mutely at best, and surely it cannot return any sort of grace when I speak my native language. My relationship with non-human kin is mute; or worse, marked by the violence, disdain and assumed mastery that comes with colonizing history.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'This piece of creative prose is the first sequence of a triptych on Italian stories of social and environmental sustainability, recollected through the point of view of my intra-connection with other humans and non-humans. The intention is to represent the entangled chaos of the ecological system that is a human being, where each discursive and material moment of her/his story is the continuation, the end and the beginning of another one. For this purpose, the narration appears like a coiling composition of memories that does not strictly follow chronological order, nor does it claim a definite first-person narrator. The deliberate sense of confusion aims to provoke the feeling that a human life is a woven circularity created by multiple agencies. ‘An Italian Story’ is an affective glance at an evolving practice of environmental humanist investigation as a form of poetical activism. In this subjective dimension, life writing can become a creative autoethnographic action to tell different stories that narrate back this age of ecological disruption.' 

 (Publication abstract)