Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Poems from a Young Indigenous Australia

2014; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 88; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7588/worllitetoda.88.5.0048

1945-8134

Shon Arieh-Lerer, Yvette Holt, Samuel Wagan Watson,

Australian Indigenous Culture and History

48 worldliteraturetoday.org special section Native Lit Poems from a Young Indigenous Australia Shon Arieh-Lerer photo : flickr . com / cameliatwu T he twentieth century was a time of momentous change for indigenous Australia . The traditions, identity, and languages of the continent’s many peoples were assaulted; cultures that existed for millennia in remote desert regions were introduced to European settlers, their technology, and their language. At the same time, many indigenous people were forcibly relocated, children taken from their families and reeducated as white Australians. Indigenous land was appropriated and indigenous languages forbidden. Native Australians were denied citizenship until 1948, and even then many were not given the right to vote until the 1960s. Some of Australia’s most powerful English-language voices sprang from this oppression. There is Lionel Fogarty, whose postsurrealist poems incorporate words and phrases of his native Murri and pidgin English to create a linguistic portrait of the indigenous Australian conscience. There is Oodgeroo Noonuccal, an important activist and the first indigenous Australian woman poet ever to be published, whose often chantlike poetry uses tradition to establish a modern affirmation of her people within Australian society. And we have now the twenty-first-century voices of Yvette Holt and Samuel Wagan Watson. They belong to a new generation of indigenous Australian poets who have inherited the courage to express themselves in English, the language of the dominant culture, from poets like Fogarty and Noonuccal, and have inherited the fraught political and personal histories that have come with this courage. Holt and Watson are keen observers of the indigenous as well as the human condition, often showing us how inextricable the two can be. Their poetry contains fewer rallying cries than that of their twentieth-century predecessors; it is, instead, more individual and more ironic. Theirs is not a cynical irony but rather one that seeks honesty in recognizing the full scope of twenty-first-century life’s contradictions. These new poets channel the voices of their predecessors , of their immediate community, of the commercial media, of the hegemonic oppressor as well as the voices of their own confusion and loss of identity when confronted with these many voices at the same time. September–October 2014 • 49 photo : lyle radford The Crimson Divide Yvette Holt beneath the monkey’s mask you shed the costumed body blood-red lipstick and fine Italian boots searching for potpourri tentacles which have swept the ocean floor time and time again a deputy of habit surrenders to addiction leaving tracks on the vein of time laying in silence on a seabed of nails porcelain ankles entangled in kelp embracing a past, which the tide cannot change and the Mother of Pearl hangs low in the crimson sky mirroring her body against the darker side True Colours Yvette Holt The camera never lies Fantasies awash Flashbulbs click Fingernails break Backyard barbecues Sizzling the vegan chops The film is burning Showing too many lumps and bumps Displaying the narcissist within Quick on top of the roof There is a 35mm inserting the Kodak Everyone’s a comedian Inseminated with desire Photographers on the loose Professional amateurs In pursuit of the drowning sun Memories are fading fast Black and white Capturing white on black Suburban jungle fever Turning old negative prints Into the positive new ones Just say cheese And long live the genes Because nobody ever mentions colour Yvette Holt is a member of the Bidjara and Wakaman Nations of Queensland. A poet, speaker, and activist, she has received the UTS Human Rights Award and the David Unaipon Award (Queensland Premier’s Literary Award). Her poetry collection, Anonymous Premonition, was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2008. 50 worldliteraturetoday.org brunswick st blues Samuel Wagan Watson Brunswick St sits like the continental shelf just below morality rain washes the bad scenes off the street the killers still get the air for free yet upon the working girls the evil shadows linger while the decision-makers bottle the blood and facelift the Valley Voodoojack waits at the end of Brunswick St like some kind of licorice addict; paved bitumen runs straight into his mouth, congested with exhaust fumes and scummed in the beard...