As a literary tool, blood memory explored through an ‘epistemology of haunting’ (Gordon 2008; Van Wagenan 2004) makes sense to me; a means to understand and theorise that which is silent, hidden or absent, but is nevertheless acutely present and felt. Reckoning with history’s ghosts through a framework of recognition, transformation and action (Gordon 2008) enables profound honouring; a form of restorative justice for local stories to rupture and inform larger narratives of history. It is a means to interrogate what is remembered and what is not known; conjure the forgotten through uncanny recognition and reveal the act of forgetting; and disrupt what Toni Morrison refers to as ‘national amnesia’ (Durrant 2004: 116). The gaps in dominant colonial narratives of history are in fact not silent after all (Gough 2007).
Theorising haunting from our local Indigenous standpoints can challenge and counter problematic representations of the Indigenous ghost in literature; interrogate how spectres of colonialism still haunt our Indigenous subjectivities today; and dismantle colonial systems, processes and fixed imaginings via reckoning with spectres of, and in, the colonial archive. Offering up new narratives of history and storytelling has the potential to shift local and national consciousness toward some kind of justice, through either a reckoning with ghosts (Gordon 2008), a working through history (Durrant 2004), an aesthetics of action (Cariou 2006), or a politics of vision (Cameron 2008). Such a proactive poetics of haunting can expose what Tony Birch (2006) calls Australia’s ‘national secrecy about colonialism’; unveil what Kim Scott (2001) calls ‘Australia’s continuing neurosis’; and keep the wounds open, as Alexis Wright (2002: 19) states, to reverse the prescribed forgetting with a ‘steadfast telling of the truth’. This can also be described as the active work of mourning where the possibility of just futures lies in the ability to live in remembrance and in the wake of history’s injustices (DeShazer 1994; Galeano 1983; Sharpe 2016).
We may be intimate knowers of our own histories, but we have not been in control of the dominant narrative about us. Writing allows us to cultivate sovereignty of the mind and regain the plotline of our lives (Lucashenko 2018; Wright 2002, 2016). I am drawn to particular Indigenous poets, writers and artists who labour creatively with the contested, racialised colonial archive as a dynamic site of potential strength and renewal, who trace the evidence and change its shape and structure with rupturing intent. Their work captures me in particular ways, in unexpected-uncanny moments and at potent places, and they tell me something new and profoundly nostalgic about my own story. In these moments of embodied recognition, invisible spaces are opened-up to write and create into. Such literary-ekphrasis can trigger critical interventions beyond the self, toward resounding and collective reckoning; an archival-poetic inter-textual/mixed-media response where the potency of place, colonial-histories and blood memory collide; where the affective, transformative and honouring dimensions of haunting are made visible.
We need to be creating a present that will inspire a radically different future than the one settler colonialism sets out for us. This means taking on heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and anti-blackness, and actualizing Indigenous alternatives on the ground, not in the future, but in the present.
–Leanne Simpson 2016: 32.
My work is also framed by contemporary Black, queer, postcolonial and Indigenous feminisms that inform decolonial critical-creative praxis; ways to better understand intersecting dynamics of power and oppression, and alternative systems of accountability for race, class and gender-based violence. A resistance-poetics vision of refusal to be silent or silenced is also a strategic means to affect/effect a ‘collective resistance consciousness’ through invitation for readers/audiences to witness poetic sites of resistance as a shared location, but on our terms (DeShazer 1994: 131).
These scholars and creatives engage with, and respond to, the violence of the colonial archive concerning issues of access and transparency; the state’s archivisation processes; and questions of surveillance, representation, agency and truth-telling. These are the voices and stories the world needs to read, see and hear.
… she started waking up those old people that had forgotten. what about this? who remembers that? she recorded and memorised and learned those ways until she carried them in her heart, and into her basket they would go.
–Leanne Simpson 2015: 128.
A basket can hold many things: food, babies, love, trinkets, water, sustenance, bones, burdens, grief and secrets. Like a gathering up of ‘all those shattered pieces’ that have been taken, lost or forgotten, a basket can hold stories for a new remembering (Simpson 2015: 128). My small basket of letters has taken me on quite a journey. It tells me something new every time I engage with it. It has been photographed, filmed and featured in several installations: floating suspended behind glass in a window-box wall-papered with poetry; hung with a washboard with a backdrop of poetry and archival quotes printed on linen sheets and tea-towels; installed as intimate video-work with Whitewash/Brainwash poetry soundscape, and larger-than-life projection on walls through Sovereign Act performances with the Unbound Collective. It has also been used as a teaching tool through object-based learning in university undergraduate and postgraduate topics in the Humanities and Creative Arts, and presented in seminars and symposiums. Most recently, it was passed around the Burra Town Hall at a regional International Women’s Day Breakfast event on Ngadjuri Country, with poet-comrade Ali Cobby Eckermann.
