The second movement, ‘Fragments of Rotting’, explores the entanglement and estrangement of a Blak poet existing in two-worlds: “The absorption of Aboriginal subjectivity into the settler-colonial archive”, “the privileging of academic knowledge”, claims to objectivity and universalism, “all the affirmations of capitalist and colonial narratives of deficit, of damage” (41).

In one of three poems titled ‘Long Future’ (i, ii, iii,) Araluen, writes of being “fractured”, of limping and floating aimlessly through a PhD that had “long since lost shape and purpose” (‘i. Long Future’, 42). Until, accepting that: “Research can also be invasion” (43). Unangax̂ philosopher Eve Tuck reminds her that research can also “fetishise our pain” – can make us believe we are nothing or have no history other than colonial trauma (43). Like Tuck, Araluen’s conviction is also “rooted in […] the long future” – the time after colonisation and “the things that will remain or return that have always been here, and will be here again” (44).

Araluen charts her immersion in and resistance to a nation-state where “you are only legible by your subjugation”, where “something womanshaped to be salvaged by feminism or psychoanalysis or dialectical materialism”, where “[w]hat you are […] is not legible under empire” (‘Terms of Reference’, 33).

But Araluen defies these stories of empire and finds strength and solace in the words,

… still washing in the river in Baryulgil, wandering the hills of Molong, is resting on the banks of the Dyarubbin
or waits in the lonely dark at Dennewan. 

and intergenerational connection – “the thread” of matriarchs:

There are threads of your mother sewed into the quilt she made for your wedding bed, or perhaps they are still
in the aches and calluses of her hands. 

(33)

Women – “woman”, “girl”, “daughter”, “sister”, “mother”, “girlfriend”, “wife”, “whore”, “slut”, “bitch”, “gin”, “lubra” – are the body-politic threading through all three movements as they are “tethered by rationality in a mode of address – a familial, romantic, subordinate, derisive or colonial bearing” (32). The hips, hands, feet, eyes, work, words, wisdom fears, despairs, and hopes of women are the weft and weave of The Rot.

We follow the “wandering girlshaped thing” who “reads of moors and brambles from the bush” (‘ii. hip’, 50) and “scribbles her longings and days in the margins of a book”, “tending this archive” that is not just her life, but the inherited histories of women, of being “both more and less of gender, desire, history” (30).

Through her poems Araluen chronicles and draws on the hauntology of women to resist and refuse colonial deficit and damage as the only definers of Blak and Brown First Nations women. Through sharp, visceral prose she probes the continuance and persistence of the cultural and social past that influences and shapes the present and the future.

Araluen cites Tuck, “Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore,” and defines desire as:

… a refusal of imperial deficit and colonial damage,
as an hauntological mode of inhabiting the archive
with embodied practices to affirm the sovereignty of 
land and spirit. 

(‘On Desire’, 40)

The Rot confronts some of the inherent contradictions of the socio-political context and the demographic that Araluen as a First Nations Millennial poet is immersed and entangled in. Like Mark Fisher’s “lost future” where, “those who can’t remember the past are / condemned to have it sold to them forever.” Fisher’s lost future is a barren socio-cultural landscape that has lost its ability to imagine or create a future that is different or any better than the present (‘Invocations’, 5). It is a 21st century state of stagnation marked by the pervasive belief that there is no alternative to colonialism or capitalism – which destroys the ability to imagine – and where new visions are impeded by nostalgic repeats of past aesthetics and ideologies.

But Araluen looks to the “long future” and asks, “how we shall live alongside our need for justice,” the answer to which, “is communal”. “Part praxis, part hope, the long future is a promise to outlive the colony and to restore what was taken from the world to build it”, through work that, “like that of other mob who walk before and alongside us”, to “wade through the detritus of history” (44).

‘Unfoldings’ is the final movement in the cycle. Here, Araluen offers some of the collection’s most tender and grounding poems, like the stirring ‘Jinda’, which traces the power of connection and belonging to people and place:

Aunty outside the church tells me
she held my sister’s hand while
she wept when the plane crossed Bundjalung
the gum tree of story is as holy
as the other holies 

[…]

… I have my father’s feet
and my mother’s mouth.

Aunty said she would have known me 
anywhere by my sister’s eyes. 

(103)

And the moving tribute to the love and loyalty of a friend, ‘Anecdotes of Despair’: “I call and you answer […] / I can summon all the rage / I can hold, and you will wait and again / you will say yes, and I know” (89).

The Rot confronts the unavoidable complicity we all have in empire and capital but refuses defeatism and paralysis:

ix) Refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance are 
tenors of a liveable life. In action they are compromised,
bloody-handed, in the world and of it. 

(‘Analysis Act Three’, 77)

It is radical in its refusal and resistance, much like Araluen’s father’s response on October 14: “it’s a fucked world, but we’re standing against the tide”, or the revolutionary letter that reminds us that “empire is its own undoing” (‘iii. 256GB of Salvaged Memory’, 61 65).

Through these words Araluen defies the material conditions from which she writes – a nation built on the erasure of bodies like hers and all she loves. She is resolute in her refusal to emulate or be dwarfed by those she despises, or to allow her colonisers, her enemies, to prevent her from connecting with those she loves and is loved by.

Araluen refuses to be defeated by anger and despair. Instead, she offers hope, solidarity and love as a way forward, echoing the words of the late June Jordan, most radical of all for her ultimate refusal to “lose [her] ability and willingness to love”. Araluen writes:

                                                                     you will love each one with 
                    more room for more love
                                                                                     swear it
                                                                                     commit this to your 
                                                              flesh

                                       until love kills you you will love

(‘I Will Love’, 116)

The Rot is an anthem of hope and love against erasure – a genealogy of what it is to love and be loved in colonial Australia.