We see this pattern of immediacy – and its echoes and renewals – everywhere in the long history of protest poetry by writers working across traditions and borders: anti-colonial poets of the Negritude movement like Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas and Léopold Senghor; revolutionary Arab poets like Ahmed Fouad Negm, Ahmed Matar, Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish; anti-apartheid writers like Dennis Brutus and Ingrid Jonker; dissidents of the Cultural Revolution like Zhang Zhixin; and of the Pinochet regime like Nicanor Parra and Elvira Hernández; Dalit poet-activist writing against the atrocities committed against their community such as Daya Pawar; poets writing at the intersections of race and gender like May Ayim and Sonia Sanchez, or race, gender and sexuality like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and June Jordan. The list goes on: Adrienne Rich, Ama Ata Aidoo, Christopher Okigbo, Ernesto Cardenal, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kamala Surayya, Langston Hughes, Martin Carter, Nâzim Hikmet, Zbigniew Herbert.
In so-called Australia, too, there is a strong tradition of protest poetry, nowhere more visible than in First Nations poetry. Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s (nee Kath Walker) incredibly successful We Are Going (1964), a collection brimming with dissent and demands for change, was not only the first book of poems published by an Aboriginal poet, but is one of the defining collections of Australian poetry. It includes two of Oodgeroo’s best-known works, the titular ‘We Are Going’ and ‘The Dispossessed’, which each narrate and protest the cruelty that European colonisers inflicted upon Aboriginal people, and opens with ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, a poem protesting white supremacy in Australia and demanding equality in clear, unmistakable terms:
We want hope, not racialism, Brotherhood, not ostracism Black advance, not white ascendance. Make us equals, not dependants
and speaking directly to the white oppressors, demanding redress:
Give us welcome, not aversion, Give us choice, not cold coercion, Status, not discrimination, Human rights, not segregation.
In this way, Oodgeroo can be seen as inaugurating a rich lineage of First Nations writers making – to use Alexis Wright’s phrasing – “a weapon of poetry” to be used against colonisation and assimilation. In this, she stands alongside her generation of First Nations poets who, like her, wrote poetry protesting the genocidal erasure of and violence towards First Nations people, as well as the colonial state’s destruction of Country. Kevin Gilbert’s protest poems include, for example, ‘New True Anthem’ against white Australia’s genocide of Indigenous people and abuse of Country and ‘Shame’, a sharp invective against the inequality that Australian colonialism perpetrates and insists on. Jack Davis’s poems protest these same violences and inequalities, for example, ‘One Hundred and Fifty Years’ against the violence of colonisation and ‘John Pat’ written in protest of Aboriginal deaths in custody and specifically, the murder of sixteen-year-old John Pat by WA police. Across the water, Māori poets like Hone Tuwhare wrote poetry alongside and in support of the Māori Land March. (Coincidentally, Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun, the first book of Māori poetry in English, was published the same year as We Are Going).
From these figures follows a breadth of Indigenous poets who worked with/in protest poetry, many of whom have been involved in activism off the page as well: Alf Taylor, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Anita Heiss, the recently passed Charmaine Papertalk Green, Graeme Dixon, Jeanine Leane, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Lisa Bellear, Lionel Fogarty, Romaine Moreton, Tony Birch, Yvette Holt, and a younger generation of First Nations like Alison Whittaker, Ellen van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen, Jazz Money and Luke Patterson.
Such an extensive list – inexhaustive as it is – might explain Adam Shoemaker’s 1989 claim that, “If there is any ‘school’ of Black Australian poetry, it is one of social protest.” It goes without saying that the breadth of poetry by First Nations people cannot be limited to any single ‘school’. Yet it is also true that many Indigenous poets feel a strong connection between protest and poetry: Fogarty has said that his poetry was “formed by [his] public attendance at protest rallies and community meetings and demonstrations for Black Rights and Land Rights”; van Neerven has explained that they “see poetry as being intrinsically linked to protest” and consider themselves a “literary activist”; Patterson wrote that “literature, especially poetry, has been a powerful mode of protest and community building for First Nations writers” in a review of Jazz Money’s How to Make a Basket; and in her essay ‘Resisting the institution’, Araluen wrote about the important role that poetry plays in Aboriginal activism. It is truer, I think, to say that if there is any ‘school’ of Australian protest poetry, it is one led by First Nations people.
