On the 196th day of a live-streamed genocide in Palestine, I find that many words have lost their meaning. Words I might have spoken once with seriousness, even reverence. I might once have imagined a word as a portal, humming with futurity. But co-option makes a ghost train out of language. ‘Decolonisation’ is one word that shows up for me now as a cartoon spook. ‘Kinship’ is another.
I am asked, regularly, to speak or write on decolonisation, and all I have to say is: I don’t know what you mean by that. I am asked, regularly, to speak or write about kinship, in its many forms: Indigenous kinship, queer kinship, crip kinship. I have to say: I do not know what you mean by that. I am asked, regularly, to speak or to write. When I am asked to speak and to write, I have to say: I do not know what speaking is. I do not know what writing is. Which is to say: I do not know the purpose of these things, at this time, when the pace of language has become so rapid and its character so disposable. When certain words that once felt alive and wild have become units of speculative capital.
Everyone is decolonising something these days, it seems. My feed is flooded with a stream of polished infographics advertising workshops on decolonising one thing or another. Decolonise your relationships, your diet, your workout. Decolonisation has morphed into a lifestyle brand, it would seem, well on its way to becoming a full-blown Industrial Complex.
The hollowing out of kinship feels somehow more personal and more painful. This one seems to have subbed in where other promises — those of ‘community’, for instance — have proved vacant. Some words, in their attempt to speak to an absence, only concretise it. Who can say ‘community’ in 2024 with a straight face? The betrayals are too numerous and too violent. I wonder how long ‘kinship’ has before we have to find a replacement: another apologetic way of saying: being-with. Perhaps another way of saying: me and my milieu; me and the people who I prefer to be around; me and the people like me, who I will defend and love as long as they remain so.
This is the nature and the fate of language in a world where the price of meaning is fixed. All meanings outgrow the skins we make for them; a poet knows this, so does a storyteller. I feel discomfort in calling myself either of those things, but, nonetheless, these are my primary modalities. The academy will never be a home for me. I find the language of theory too martial, too hungry, too propulsive. The work of shaping and trading ideas has attained a certain density in the landscape of privatised knowledge, and I find it increasingly difficult to discern a compelling argument from a truthful one. So on the 196th day of a genocide, as students and faculty of one of America’s most elite universities are camped out in the quadrangle, I delete Instagram again, light some smoke, and ask how language might soften me today. I am trying to find ways to say less and Sing more.
Sing is a word we capitalise in Aboriginal English: much like Story, its creolised meaning is greater than the sum of its assumed parts. The full breadth of the meaning of either of these words can be grasped through context alone. It is not within my purview or my authority to transfer that meaning beyond the matrix of Cultural usage. But to venture a simplified version: Singing may well be something done to a song. But what is a song? In a vibrational universe there are no artifacts, only beings. In a vibrational universe, everything is Song.
We might Sing a song, but, equally, we might Sing up Country. There are right Songs and wrong ones, Songs that renew and Songs that sicken. Just as a place can be sung, so can a person. Or indeed, a lock of hair. The warning against cutting or grooming one’s hair at night is a Blak prophylactic against the possibility of malignant sorcery. Against the possibility of being Sung with the wrong Song, by those who might not wish us well. A Song, in our vernacular is closer in meaning perhaps to: prayer, curse. Always a both, and. Both, and: the string of syllables and the act of their recitation. Both, and: the blooming and the rot.
When I was growing up, my hair was always cut and tended at home. And no, my Blak mother never cut my hair at night. For all the losses and disruptions occasioned by the coerced, fugitive migrations imposed on my north-western Wiradjuri and Ngemba matrilineage, the retention of certain practices persists, woven into the ordinary fabric of my upbringing, and this is a small wonder to me. My mother grew up in conditions of perpetual flight and evasion, conditions which necessitated concealing many things in plain sight. Blakfullas, like Black folks in America, and all other casualties of empire, hid our treasures in ordinary places. Black gods travelled in the form of Catholic Saints. Black mothers braided maps into their children’s hair.
Koori vernacular English, with its widespread assignations of cultural meanings to coloniser words is one iteration of this domestic stealth-craft, shared by many dispossessed peoples globally. Continuity abides in plain sight. In plain language. In plain gestures. In any and all things that can be carried on or close to the body, or in the space between bodies.
On the 196th day of a genocide I think less and less about decolonisation and more and more about what it means to Sing an ordinary song. What survival means, when that word is relieved of its narrative grandeur and spoken softly and close to the skin. When I am asked to speak or to write, on the 196th day of a genocide, I have to consider this carefully. I have to imagine how my songs, concretised into writing, might serve this purpose.
I look at the news; less than a mile from my house, a man has set himself on fire. The third self-immolation in the US in the course of two months. Last night, twelve people I know were arrested for the fourth time in two months for many of them. Recently, I cancelled a trip home for fear that my US visa, currently up for renewal, may not be granted by a genocidal regime that is closely surveilling and targeting cultural workers who are vocally in support of Palestinian liberation. Four of my friends, all of them writers, have had their work cancelled by Australian, American and European institutions. Conversely, many who have been silent for months can be seen pivoting their branding to align with the critical mass, now that their level of personal risk has been adequately assessed.
On the 196th day of a genocide, every university in Gaza has been bombed. A mass grave has been uncovered on the grounds of what was the Nassar hospital: 327 bodies, many of them mutilated, their organs harvested, their hands tied, and many of them buried alive. Given this context, I am often unsure of what it is to write, or speak, or make art when the words and images are so costly and so worthless all at once.
The despair of this is totalising and often frightening. For most of my life art has kept me alive. The daily challenge of finding a reason to keep doing this shit — any of this shit — has taken on a critical personal urgency. It is a challenge I am not reliably able to meet. So on the 196th day of a genocide, I wash, brush and braid my hair. My hair, which now almost surpasses my waist. My hair which, when stressed, falls out in clumps. My hair which has in the last three years been shocked white at the temples. These new silver streaks notwithstanding, my hair has been the same colour since birth: black as charcoal, black as the arc of a crow’s flight. My hair which has been softened by tea-tree lakes, which I pass daily through smoke with the rest of my body. My hair which is re-asserting its course, staunch coil after years of straightening and other abuse, a phenotypically liminal curl-pattern which America, of all places, has taught me how to properly care for.
‘Care’ is another word that has come to mean nothing. As dead and as dumb, as my mother would say, as a box of hair. The articulation of collective Care as a political praxis emerged from the crucible of Disabled and Indigenous experiential knowledge, and, like too many things, it has been sucked into the cloud and dispersed. Every non-profit in town is spruiking some version of this line now, even as they continue to protect themselves and their 501(c)(3) (charitable) status on this, the 196th day of a genocide.
They talk about world-building too — world-building as an aesthetic operation, a work of visionary grandiosity, somehow separate from the work of keeping people fed and housed. Somehow separate from defending the basic right of living things to be living things. This should come as no surprise, ‘Care’ is a word long deployed by malignant systems. ‘Care’ is what they called the treatment my mother and thousands of other Aboriginal children endured, and continue to endure, under the guardianship of the state and the church. On Turtle Island, where I now live, ‘Care’ is what they called it when they killed the Indian to save the man. Care is what they called it when they lopped off children’s braids. ‘Conservation’ — a ten-dollar name for the same bankrupt concept — is what they still call it, now those braids are held in climate controlled vaults in colonial museums.
I have not spoken to my mother in nearly a decade, and I wonder if she still has my long black braid in a drawer. I cut it, to her dismay, at age fifteen. I did not know she kept it. I did not know she had it in a drawer until many years later when I discovered it while looking for change; a startling appearance I firstly mistook for a snake. An apt connection: the snake as a mother-being beyond all mother-beings, a global loreway spanning every continent. Once, while living on Diamond Python Country, I watched a big snake molt in front of me. Suspended in a low shrub, inches from my face. I live now in a place under the rulership of the double-headed serpent, a story-way connecting many peoples and going by many names, always speaking to the dynamic tension of the above and the below. Every trash can in New York bears the emblem of Mercury, the Caduceus, the logo of the NYC sanitation department, perhaps because Mercury is the only god that can travel to Hades and return unscathed. That lore surfaces by other names throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, East Asia. Following the serpent’s tail returns us to the origin of logos — the serpent is the progenitor of speech.
On the 196th day of a genocide, from where I now live in the belly of a global empire, we can all feel the hellmouth rumbling. We talk, between us, of the ordinary presence of ordinary evil. A week ago, lightning struck the Statue of Liberty. Two days after that, a minor earthquake shook the five boroughs; midmorning, mid-email, the building shook long and hard enough to send the dishes clattering from the drying rack and onto the floor. Not even five minutes later, the exterminator arrived at my door to administer a routine round of roach spray. He came inside and did his job. Neither of us mentioned the quake, but as he left, he said, ‘God bless and protect you,’ while looking me dead in the eye. The day after that, an eclipse, with New York City passing under the Path of Totality. White folks gathered to view the show, as Natives warned them not to.
Navigating transitional epochs invites a resurgence of serpentine logic. Today on the 196th day of a genocide, I can only know one thing clearly: when I am writing, I stop running. The creative work of weaving words anchors me to place. I stop looking for ways to escape: I become still, methodical. My belly flat to the ground, attuned to every tremor. Snakes are unhurried mothers. And on the 196th day of a genocide, I am thinking a lot about Mothers, in their sorrowful, fierce serpentine aspects: the many Black Madonnas who carried their peoples through plagues and pogroms, the scarface West African queens forced to travel with their knives concealed in the folds of the Marian veil, who accept tribute in blood and rum. Mothers as earthquakes, as open mouths: the Gorgon was a mother too. Mothers as shrouds and soaked dressings; a mother as a grave.
So the act of writing, speaking, laying down words is maybe just part of how I tend to things: slowly, consistently, and without fuss. The work of writing, of making any kind of art, yields treasures in its slowness and in its ordinariness. A blank space will choke you when you arrive with an agenda, especially in a moment so alive with urgency and risk: better to arrive as a householder, a gardener, a parent, tending to the work of daily living. All the things that might, I guess, be identified within a Marxist framework as Reproductive Labour: I could say that in maintaining this approach, I am attempting to untether my work from the grasp of capital and its nefarious distortions. I could name this as a tactic, a thesis, a defence.
I could also name it as a Song, or even a prayer. Another word I struggle with. A word I am struggling to reclaim from systems that have degraded its meaning. Of all the Magna Mater’s varied morphologies, Mary is the one I am least likely to praise, burdened as she is with the ashes of empire. But the Virgin of my upbringing — a Virgin of bony knees on a cold chapel floor; a Virgin of obedience — looks nothing like the Virgin as she is reported by the witnesses of Marian apparitions. When she appeared to three children at Fatima, bearing premonitions of a Great War, she arrived in flames, her description closer to that of Ma Kali than the Abrahimic Mary. The oldest scar on my body is on my left palm, in the crease of my middle finger: one night at boarding school, my friend and I were running amok in the chapel, and I put my hand through a window. I bled profusely and we were both nearly expelled. The Left Hand Path calls for voluntary offerings of blood and roses, so in recollection of that sacrament, on the 196th day of a genocide, I recite the Rosary. An ordinary devotion as old as the black silt of the Nile, a Song as old as snakes. An offering of roses, each announced in the name of a mystery; each bead the memory of a flower pronounced in the form of its seed: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. It is a quiet thing to hold a seed. It is the 196th day of a genocide, and maybe the work of world-building is, and should be, entirely quotidian, the same as: watering plants, folding linens, feeding people and animals. The same as brushing the knots gently from a child’s hair: an action performed with tender and ordinary persistence.
This essay was originally commissioned for the book 'Hair Pieces', edited by Melissa Keys and published by Perimeter Editions.
