Tell Them single work   poetry   "When they ask about me,"
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Tell Them
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Poetry Anthology Lucy Dougan (editor), Michelle Cahill (editor), Melbourne : Australian Poetry , 2020-2021 23619416 2020 anthology poetry

    'In ‘they rise’ Jazz Money, a Wiradjuri poet and filmmaker addresses the future of the stolen lands we call Australia as a proud blak woman (Cordite, February 2021). Her voice rises above inferiority, trauma or shame. The poem is defiant, a wry celebration of the same bodies that colonialism makes ambivalent and abject by enabling its ‘superior’, cis-gendered whiteness:

    turns out the future is technicolour blak black brown turns out we’re all welcome here queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings if you been here since the first sunrise or if you come here now just now come here heart open come here hurt from those wars and those sea levels rising

    How do we turn out poetry that shows we are all welcome here? How do we collectively transpose settler privilege and oppressive hierarchies and why does it matter? What is wrong with a received system of naming, making categories and borders, if our hallowed aesthetics are tone deaf and mute to the sound of blak, brown and hybrid bodies breaking, dying, suffering? Listen to the poems here: we are suffering not merely because our tears matter less, or are less visible in the capitalist settler colony, but also because there are families that have been wartorn, assimilated and broken; there are forests that have been denuded, oceans pillaged and polluted, sacred sites mined, vestiges appropriated and rebranded, and all of this touches us multifariously, yet still, our protest is being silenced.' (Lucy Dougan Michelle Cahill Foreword introduction)

    Melbourne : Australian Poetry , 2020-2021
    pg. 139
Last amended 22 Dec 2021 09:25:31
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