ZAMI 2020 by SASS Publications

2020

I came from the valley / laughing with blackness / up between the mouth of the mountains I rose / weeping, cold / hampered by the clinging souls of dead men / shaken / with reverberations of wasted minutes / unborn years . . . . . . . . I was the story of a phantom people / I was the hope of lives never lived / I was a thought-product of the emptiness of space / and the space in the empty bread baskets / I was the hand, reaching toward the sun / the burnt crisp that sought relief . . . And on the tree of mourning they hanged me / the lost emotion of an angry people / hanged me, forgetting how long I was / in dying / how deathlessly I stood1 / forgetting how easily / I could rise / again.

(136)

Lorde, Audre (2018) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name A Biomythography. London: Penguin Classics.

2020

First published 2020 by The University of Sydney Funded by The University of Sydney Union and The University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences ©️ Individual Contributors 2020 ©️ The University of Sydney 2020 Every effort has been made to identify and attribute credit for images and quotations used in ZAMI. The editors are grateful to contributors for permission to reproduce their work. ISBN 978-1-74210-483-6 ZAMI The Sydney University Arts Students' BIPOC Journal Reproduction and communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below. Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Email: sup.info@sydney.edu.au Web: sydney.edu.au/sup Cover art by Jocelin Chan Cover design by Amelia Mertha

ZAMI

Dedicated to world-builders: abolitionists, dreamers, spell-casters, & other kin

2020

Acknowledgement of Country ZAMI was organised and edited on unceded Aboriginal land. This land was violently invaded by European colonisers in 1788, establishing so-called ‘Australia’ on a foundation of white supremacy and genocide. As long as ‘Australia’ exists, so does white supremacy. As students and staff of the University of Sydney, we live, work and study on the stolen sovereign land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, who were among the first to suffer and survive the horrors of colonialism. We pay our respects to elders past, present and future and extend our respects to all Aboriginal students and staff at the University. As many of us are settlers on this land ravaged by colonial greed, it is important that we acknowledge that colonialism is not a one-time event; rather, colonialism is perpetuated with each and every day of occupation. First Nations people are disproportionately represented in statistics of poverty, forced child removals, sexual and domestic violence and incarceration. Additionally, since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, we have seen over 400 Indigenous deaths in custody. We, as settlers, are the privileged beneficiaries of the violent occupation of this land and as such, we urge readers to consider their own silence and complicity in the context of the settler-colony, which continues to violate and brutalise First Nations people today. It is our duty to stand up as accomplices to First Nations people, to disrupt colonial peace and continue the fight against colonial violence which has raged on for over 200 years. Storytelling – in forms beyond the written word – has existed on this land for tens of thousands of years. Non-indigenous storytellers in ‘Australia’ must recognise that the way we make and hold our narratives on stolen land can explicitly erase First Nations people and perpetuate Western colonial time. The rational and linear invocation of Time, as many of us understand and live by, is not just human construction but constantly displaces and replaces First Nations people in the name of ‘progress’. Has anyone truly experienced time in their body – days, years, hours – as is prescribed? Are past, present and future tenses always an affective/effective grammar – do we see the violence of applying such logics on stolen land?

To echo the words of the inimitable Audre Lorde, whose autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name lends its name to this journal, there is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. The camaraderie of the oppressed against our oppressors will pave the way to a better, brighter world.

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Editorial

Poetry

Visual Art

6 | Amelia Mertha

14 | where edges meet Tabitha Wilson

20 | Home Altay Hagrebet

21 | Phoenix Sally Chik

28 | Internal Monologue Sophie Zhou

Fiction

27 | The Friar’s Lantern Shania O’Brien

8 | Strap Up Angad Roy

30 | Darling Can’t You Hear Me (S.O.S) Amelia Mertha

46 | Papaya 47 | My Filipina Friends Janina Osinsao

32 | The journey within Naz Sharifi

35 | A Swallow Finding Its Colours Davina Oh

7 | Kiki Amberber

56 | 13th month of sunshine Kiki Amberber 69 | Negative Space Shania O’Brien

Essay

44 | aftermath Sylvia Lee 48 | the makings Karen Leong

63 | Know Me, See Me Nishta Gupta

****** 76 | End Notes 78 | Editorial Team and Contributors

55 | Indigestion Alison Hwang

16 | Screening the cinematic revolution 68 | to vault Kowther Qashou Karen Leong 22 | The nerve of a gay, Asian 73 | âm thầm female Anya Doan V. Nguyen 38 | Sex, violence & transgression: Feminism and necropolitics in the commercial egg industry Charlotte Lim 50 | Reading Invisible Man in Korean Soo Choi

75 | Shoo, pastry! Jocelin Chan

2020

Editorial

Amelia Mertha

In the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, Commander Michael Burnham flings herself through a wormhole, acting as a tug-boat for the U.S.S. Discovery, and its crew, to travel 930 years into the future; severing the Discovery’s bounty of knowledge from the grasp of a violent and rogue artificial intelligence called Control. Everything depends on this sacrifice; survival is the event horizon. It plays out, tearfully and frantically, in full space melodrama. A wonderful teacher of mine recently pointed us in the direction of Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’. That week we were reading Alison Whittaker’s collection Blakwork thinking about the forms and material of labour, and the naming of work and pleasure. In her essay, Lorde writes, ‘If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core – the fountain – of our power... we have given up the future of our worlds’. It has been work like ZAMI that has kept me grounded in a year where I feel like I’ve been flung out into space; restless/reeling/rising. We tell each other every possibility of sanctuary we can think of in love letters, group chats and dream journals. Hope

bursts and births a new moon; I’m pulled into orbit. It has been an honour to bring this edition together alongside some of the brightest storytellers and artists at our university. (I half-joked to Kiki that our special literary baby is a Sagittarius, for which there is much to celebrate). ‘Zami’ is a West Indian/French Creole word for lesbian, based on the French ‘les amis’ or ‘friends’. This edition’s cover, an illustration by the inimitable Jocelin Chan, is based on a black-andwhite photograph by American artist Sage Sohier of a couple – Stephanie and Monica – in Boston, Massachusetts, 1987. It’s a photo I’ve been so fond of for many years, lately realising how it rearticulates Black sexualities and kinship explored in Lorde’s biomythography. The first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 have aired recently; I’ve watched a few whilst editing this journal. In the future – and yes, there is one – Burnham worries about the past, risking insubordination to piece together the events of a mysterious mass explosion. It’s archival, trouble-making and careful work, honouring love and the chaos of time. I hear this, too, in these pages, and beyond. All of us, flung out in space, riding arcs of speeding light home.

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Editorial

Kiki Amberber

I begin to write this in the depths of a sweltering afternoon heat on a Monday in November. Audre Lorde writes about heat as an alive space in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, her autobiography and the namesake of this journal: ‘I began to learn how to lay back and enjoy heat, how not to fight it, to open up my pores and let the heat in and the sweat out.’ The heat pools on my skin and makes me feel strange and tender about things yet to be encountered. I think about naming and the spaces between language. I write ‘perhaps’ in a text message and it auto-corrects to ‘oregano’. Somehow, this makes perfect sense. Chicago artist Tasha’s song ‘New Place’ is full of ‘maybe’s’: ‘Maybe it’s right here, it’s right now / maybe we’re the future we envisioned all that time ago / … / maybe we got galaxies mapped out on all our paths tomorrow …’ This alwaysquestioning cuts gently to my core. Each ‘maybe’, a new world delivered. ZAMI is a love letter and an ‘after’, following and in communion with deep wells of artists and abolitionist dreamers circling in our watery care: Audre, Toni, Angela, my grandmother, & & &. In the art and words that they have left us, time falls apart and can be remade. José Esteban Muñoz writes about ephemera – traces of those things beyond language, that collect, ash-like, between and in bodies. He calls this queer evidence.

The concept of documentation residing in motion brims with a certain kind of shivery possibility. Like all collections of art (read: lives, dreams), ZAMI is an impossibility; we put into words and lines and colours a world that won’t be contained. Still, in attempting to archive and document fragile truths, Somethings glimmer and come alive. Amelia sends me Devyn Springer’s essay ‘Abolitionist Poetics.’ It grapples with the limits and the potential for art to engage in anti-capitalist and anti-racist work. They write, ‘maybe the space where the poem remains unfinished, incapable of completion in technical terms, is the space from which we might draw the most strength. Maybe the imagination remains radical – revolutionary, even – when it is able to breathe, wiggle, be in tension …’ That bright tension is threaded through each work in the following pages. It bubbles green in Sophie Zhou’s ‘Internal Monologue’; swirls in the gothic lilt of Shania O’Brien’s ‘The Friar’s Lantern’; circles between dreams and city movement in Karen Leong’s ‘to vault’ and ‘the makings’; swings sticky-webbed and breathless in Angad Roy’s ‘Strap Up’. What a gift to have so much love and care enfolded within these pages. A moving archive and a new spelling, full of light. As evening comes, the air cools.

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Fiction

Strap Up Angad Roy

How does a spider end up casting a web in a bathroom? There are small gaps in the fly-screen window, sure, little crevices in the corners reserved for cockroaches, slits in the skylight. Do the cockroaches, paragons for insect survival, guide the way? Is there some unspoken chain carried along the endless line of insects that inhabit the thresholds of the house? Summer has just begun. Fans are not yet a necessity, rather a welcome augmentation to the balmy hours before midnight. So, although the heat isn’t a reason, the seasonal transition may be confusing. The days undulate between mornings where one can sit outside in the backyard, shirtless and drinking tea; to the early afternoon’s raw heat roasting the pavement that becomes too hot to touch. The afternoon flushes this out, whispering through the clothes of dog-walkers savouring the exercise-inducing hours of daylight savings, and hand-holding them into the evening when the open windows allow wind and food steam to socialise, and little critters, like the curious spider, to explore new, more comfortable terrain before the transience of the day’s second stage becomes a three-month permanent fixture.

Transitions are rarely smooth processes, and the poor spider casting a web knows it. At summer’s height, the bedroom becomes still – except for the cyclical airwaves that hover around the naked body like an invisible coffin. When summer is only two days young, the room is a strange place as spring

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stubbornly persists. Fans are on, windows are closed. Shirts are off, pants are on. Socks are kept on the windowsill just in case. Bedside water bottles gather dust and are consumed incrementally over days. Water rations for indoor plants are wrongly measured. Winter clothes and summer clothes flung onto the floor by indecision mount on top of each other like ant mounds. At this in-between, particularly late in the evening, one does uncharacteristic things. At 11pm, when the fan is too creaky and too fast and the temperature is not too warm, the shower becomes an appealing prospect. Bathroom lights turn on unexpectedly, and there is a momentary fear of the unknown; similar to the instant before opening a letter with an unusual postage stamp or the telephone static just before the beginning of a hard conversation with a too-invested admirer. Homes arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t robust safe havens. They shift, descend, deteriorate with the earth; giant cracks form like rocky rivers through double-brick walls, brown stains from water leakages pool at once-glistening white corners, water bubbles up because of pipes clogged with crusty toilet paper. A hulking cockroach sits threateningly on the basin. Tiny pellets are scattered in the corner of the shower. Two crickets chatter on the toilet rim. But this is your bathroom. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all part of the transition; pest control in a few days will have these critters lifeless on their backs for you to pick up and manipulate and discard like playdough. Step forward. Nothing can hide in the light. The house is silent outside the steam-filled bathroom. The blister from the 10-hour night shift is healing slowly but it stings a little under the hot water and the rejuvenating skin will become a messy, pussy white â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like porridge. Splinters, swollen fingers and small cuts appreciate the running water. Why work the shift? Ten hours of work in a refrigerated warehouse, unloading pallets stacked with 30kg milk crates onto a conveyor belt, at the end of which four workers jacked up on speed stack them onto trolleys. Four and a half trucks in a night. Thirty-minute break in between. $35 an hour. The noise of the air-conditioning is so loud and overwhelming that after a while, the mind becomes silent. Milk splashes. Crates slam. Pallet jacks groan. The early exuberance of the workers dies with each bottle of milk. Be careful not to realise the time or your muscles might just seize up, and the crate might just topple over. There is the occasional groan, the occasional sigh; these noises are not primal, they are signals of bodily deterioration like rust, peeling paint, broken wheels.

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Finish as the sun is rising. See it through the hermetic seal of the warehouse, through the hole in the wall where the trucks await the milk you packed. Even the sun feels artificial, too bright and too vibrant for the hours spent training the vision to the warehouse lights. Summer could change to autumn, autumn to spring, spring to winter. Is that even the right order? It wouldn’t matter. Let the temperatures and the light and the winds and the flowers invert themselves, cannibalise, vanish, transform; you still wouldn’t know, having spent those days of momentous change locked away in the seal of your repetition. Go home, wash hands. Briefly lie down in bed and deeply stretch the muscles. Movement still feels unfamiliar. Try to sleep now but sleep doesn’t come easily. Stay wide awake for the rest of the day. Thirty-six hours, one-third of which is experienced, not lived, in a trance. Sleep cycles are more robust than houses. Stay awake until 6:30am and wake up at 7am because that’s when the time always comes to rustle from bed. Try to sleep during the afternoon and be kept awake by the unfamiliar temperature between the sheets. Eat, read, walk the dog in the evening. Try to sleep after dinner but it’s too early. The midnight beginning of the shift sits obtrusively in the mind like a deep puddle pooled over the width of a footpath. The warm shower now is soporific. The water runs through your shaved head. Steam doesn’t yet fill the large mirror behind the shower screen and the low lights breathe a complimenting chiaroscuro on your face. It used to be a melancholy experience looking in the mirror; rambunctious hair and parched lips and cheekbones concealed by fast food fat. No time to eat and a little bit of stress and now the shaved head accentuates your features: high cheekbones, a deepset jawline, a nice smile.

Steam circles at the heat light. There it is. A thin web dangles down, a small spider at the end. Was it there before? Past 9:30 is the time for other members to enjoy the bathroom, like plays that are performed on different nights. Attending for a second time is usually unnecessary. You sit in the crowd but you may as well have been backstage. Laugh before everyone else laughs. Slouch when everyone else bites fingernails, clutches hand rests. Stand at the intermission, unaffected and calm. There is some sense of power in this disruption. To wield power silently. To achieve a knowledge of the esoteric, see things before they happen, predict reactions and concurrently maintain your own equanimity.

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Tonight, the power is not there; maybe tomorrow if you decide to return. Cower underneath the safety wall of water. Don’t let your eyes stray. Watch the spider. It’s only small but the web stretches from the abdomen for three-quarters of the height of the bathroom, taller than you will ever be. Avoid spiders once they have fully cast their web but be more inclined to tread when it is forming and the silk is flimsy, malleable. You don’t know why the web swings. Is it the fan? Must be. The fan groans loudly and you sometimes think deeply while it does. Most of the time, the mind is empty; that’s why you play music. In the sensual hands of somnolence, focus on something or slip, fall and almost bang your head into the adjacent toilet, like you did when the excruciating pain of a torn medial collateral ligament was too much to bear. We knew we should have kept a screen for the shower but the affectation was too much to resist when the new bathroom was being designed. Be careful not to slip; you need the shift. The spider swings from side to side. Fog fills the mirror, blurs the body into amorphia. Shudder once, twice when the spider comes close. It’s only small so the fear subsides. Slow your heart rate. The spider stops swinging, or does the fan falter? Is this a way to test whether it needs to be repaired? The bathroom is old. Maybe it needs upheaval. Start with a shower screen. The spider struggles to latch onto the shower wall. Legs scramble and squirm like the flailing arms of perishing heroes in Hollywood adventure movies. How can you help? You can’t. Fear is fine from a distance. It would be paralysing if you went closer. The wall is too slippery. The floor is slippery as well, focus. You can’t afford to hurt yourself now. Especially not over the transient struggles of a squatting spider. You flail and fall, walk in ache, struggle in chronic pain, all in perpetuity. The spider only has to deal with a few hours of damp walls, the claustrophobia of a steamy bathroom. Good, you don’t need to wallow in the struggles of others, other insects. You did that for too long, now look at you. Fawning over your facial definition in a conducive down-light, and in a mirror stained, scratched, smudged. Dare yourself to look at up-close photos from your cousin’s birthday. Or maybe a photo, years ago, of you and your exgirlfriend. Yeah, you won’t. It would be too much to bear. The steam and the light and the false concern for the spider distracts you from the wrinkles, the patchy stubble, the prickly hairs inside your ears, the uncombed eyebrows, the dry snot rounded like cotton buds on top of your nose hair. Oh, and don’t forget the thinning at the top of your head. You thought the shaved head was a good idea until little scalp craters emerged like wild mushrooms through dying buffalo grass. Affectation is anarchy, especially against your body. Congratulations! You didn’t slip. Your feet are stable inside the slippers. God,

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if you ever get to, you should steal hotel slippers. Those feet are foul but they are the reason you can keep going. Close to the sink, under which is the cabinet that has all your grooming materials; some old moisturiser, a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, teeth whitener from two years ago, a comb, nail clipper, an unused skincare set that she had given you on one of your anniversaries. Was that a sign of her dissatisfaction? Were his balls more moisturised than yours? His pores less oily? His hair thicker? The body overheats. It’s not a wise idea to shower with burning water in summer but the late hours of the night are no time for wisdom either. Enjoy the chance to be deranged, disoriented, mindless. It doesn’t happen often. What about the warehouse? Sure, that is mindless but in a crippling sort of way. Mentally, not physically. You are stronger than ever. Look again in the mirror, not at your face. Yuck. Your torso, your arms, your legs are sinewy. Watch them tense as the towel glides, scrubs over the body. That’s the product of a whole life spent working topsy-turvy hours. Turn around, see the crickets still chatting on the toilet seat. They couldn’t care less about your presence.

Where’s the spider? Is the web translucent or was it not there in the first place? Has the lightbulb found a new life, tricked you into believing the spider has vanished? Seriously, where did it go?

Twirl around like the first round of a carousel. Stop at various angles, pick up kids, search for arachnids. Eyes squint.

It’s near the toilet. Facing you, but not moving. Look around. Pick up an old razor head and fling it at the spider. No bullseye but close. Spider doesn’t even flinch. It stays there, immobile. Take a few steps forward. Dead? That would be nice. The bathroom is yours, even after hours. Its legs are moving but it remains in the same spot. Caught in the puddles, suspended 1cm above the ground. You’ve been higher. No one watched over you then. Walk beside the spider and crouch down. Investigate its black body, the thinness of its short

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legs. Should you try and set it free? It’s not your responsibility. It found a way in, it should be able to find a way out. Help that comes from others, always comes with strings attached. What strings would you pull? Maybe it is time for you to start taking control. Treat people like puppets, mould and twist and bend them to your desires for once. Fool, people are different to spiders. Are they? Are they like spiders not suspended in puddles or spiders suspended in puddles? Which one are you? The drone of the fan is overwhelming. The spider must be dead now. Finally, good riddance. The bathroom is no place for things that can’t skate on water, that can’t even prevent themselves from drowning. You’ve been standing naked this whole time. Maybe that’s why the spider died. The view of you. Take one last glance in the mirror. There are your clothes, on the little stool beside the sink. Undershirt first. Hoodie. Sweatshirt. Track pants. One pair of socks. Second pair. Beanie. Take a deep breath. Stretch your arm out, pick it up, adorn the high-vis vest. The spider’s gone. Did it float away or scuttle away? Is there a difference? The paths are the same anyway, if there is a destination. Come back, descend. You think only about that which you will not do, cannot do, are not allowed to do. Do. Do step out. Do turn the lights off. Do put your steel capped boots on. Do get in the car and do drive to the shift. One day you might get there. One day spiders might extract your sympathy.

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Poetry

where edges meet Tabitha Wilson

This is a picture that won’t come together, ill-fitting pieces taped over and falling apart where seams meet There’s a mirror, in the corner, edges jagged and waiting for the taste of blood it’s a feral dog, and it bites without provocation Sometimes, you can forget it exists I remember when the trees had a voice, and my heart sung in harmony I remember when the river told a story, but there is no one left to hear Sometimes, I can pretend Silence has fallen over the valley, and burringiling Garangatch and Mirragan are dead Maybe they’ve found a new home behind glass, breathing formaldehyde that tastes like white lies This is a picture that leaks blood at the seams And when the light hits the sap I wonder why – the tree still looks like a tree – when I don’t look like me And when the river runs red and dry through hills bled white I wonder if my ancestors still recognise me – when I look like you

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Stillness The image is this there’s blood in the sand and blood in the bush, there’s blood in my heart and blood on my skin I know what it’s like to be unmade to make and unmake and do the remaking myself And so I wonder, Whose eyes see from my face?

Yerrabunya / Ngundaba Ngundaba Ngundani

Whose hands reach out for mine, uu dhirrim biidyi

When does the river run dry? When does the blood bleed out –

15 Illustration by Emma Cao

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Essay

Screening the cinematic revolution Kowther Qashou

Cinema has been a potent weapon for revolutionaries in devising counterhegemonic narratives, spreading revolutionary imagery, and imagining what the future might look like in a liberated world. It often serves as counter-propaganda in a world where most film narratives uphold the United States’ (US) hegemony, dominant Western narratives surrounding the Global South, and anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles for liberation. This has come to be known as Third Cinema. Getino and Solanas 1971.

Third Cinema was born during a time where cinema was an entertainment medium that mostly reflected the political and economic interests of the owners of the film industry and was thus seen as a ‘consumer good’. The emergence of Third Cinema pointed to the role that culture played as an imposition of neocolonial ideals and ‘generated values and models dependent from the need of imperial expansion.’ So what, then, does Third Cinema set out to achieve? Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino argue that it recognises ‘the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality

with each people as the starting point.’1 In many ways, revolutionary propaganda sought to inform through disruption as a tool, in this case disrupting popular narratives and thought patterns. A prominent example of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cinema is the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. The film depicts the struggle of the Algerian fight for liberation against French colonialism during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954–1962. It is an example of how counter-hegemonic narratives are constructed. Whilst much of the world was moving towards decolonisation at the time, there is no doubt that violent resistance against colonial forces was disparaged as ‘terrorism’. The irony of this is addressed in a scene where a reporter asks the Algerian resistance fighter Ben M’Hidi whether it is filthy to use women’s baskets to carry explosives to kill people. Ben M’Hidi replies, ‘Doesn’t it seem even filthier to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, wreaking even greater havoc? It would be better if we, too, had planes. Give me the bombers,

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and you can have the baskets.’ Pontecorvo had later said that the film was a ‘hymn ... in homage to the people who must struggle for their independence, not only in Algeria, but everywhere in the third world.’ The depiction of armed struggle against the French had also inspired many anti-imperialist, left-wing militant groups at the time such as the Black Panther Party, Irish Republican Army, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) amongst others. For Palestinians in particular, culture has been a driving force in preserving the collective memories and histories of Palestinians, a way of situating Palestinian identity and peoplehood in a collective conciousness amidst experiences of disposession and exile. Palestinian cinema, in particular, has served an important function in the Palestinian struggle against Israel. More importantly, it has challenged ahistoricism around the Palestinian people and the history surrounding Israel’s creation during the Nakba that permeated Western politics and Zionist ideology. These narratives are still, more or less, present in contemporary Palestinian cinema and culture today continuing to serve a similar purpose as a form of resistance to the Israeli occupation more than seventy years later. Between 1968 and 1982, the

Palestine Film Unit (PFU) was a unit of filmmakers who came together to create films (primarily shorts and documentaries) and was founded by Mustafa Abu Ali, Hani Jawharieh, and Sulafa Jadallah in Jordan under the PLO. These films emerged in the context of the aftermath of the six-day war with Israel as a way of expanding the area of Palestinian resistance through the arts. The aims of Palestinian revolutionary cinema at the time were to document the struggle and intended to justify the Palestinian position, document the truth of people’s everyday reality, mobilise the masses, and transform the Palestinian image from ‘refugee’ to ‘fighter’. This was a powerful era in the history of Palestinian cinema, especially as much of Palestinian civil and cultural life fell apart following the creation of Israel and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland during 1948 resulting in an ‘epoch of silence’ from 1948–1967. With the departure of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Beirut, much of this revolutionary filmmaking came to an end. Nonetheless, footage from these films were archived, and some were later restored. Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the filmmakers under the PLO and founder of the Palestinian Cinema

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Association, They Do Not Exist (1974) is an experimental film that weaves together narratives of Palestinian refugees, their dispossession and their fight for their homeland through footage, clips, and interviews. In the film, we are presented with the stories of the refugees in Nabatiyah refugee camp in Lebanon, including the resistance fighters, which are told in nine parts. The film’s title is in part drawn from a quote by former Israeli leader Golda Meir who infamously once asserted: ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians… They did not exist.’ Statements like this are the sort of historical myths that these films sought to address. They Do Not Exist is ultimately framed with a firm impetus to draw support and empathy for the Palestinian cause by not only humanising the refugees in the camps but by utilising interviews of witness accounts of the Israeli air raids on the camps to draw attention to the destruction and assaults faced by Palestinian refugees, even in exile.

Contemporary Palestinian cinema continues to take on similar themes, despite not being characterised as ‘militant’ by any means. Although many modern films have a strong cultural focus, they are situated against a backdrop of the Israeli military occupation and it is thus difficult to ignore the contexts that drive or influence these films. Some films that immediately jump to mind

are The Time That Remains (2009) and Divine Intervention (2002) by filmmaker Elia Suleiman, surrealist comedies tackling questions of what it means to be Palestinian, and questions of home and exile. The Time That Remains is an autobiographical film that tells the story of Suleiman’s family in Nazareth during the events preceding and following the creation of the Israeli state. We also follow an unnamed character, presumably Suleiman himself, as he returns to Nazareth to care for his mother. Meanwhile, in Divine Intervention, we follow the story of two Palestinian lovers, one from Nazareth and one from the West Bank, separated by a checkpoint. Their story is told through comical scenes interwoven together. Suleiman’s films exist in a ‘third space’, existing in a space between nationalism and creativity through parody, humour, and fantasy. It is clear that the spirit of Third Cinema and revolutionary filmmaking still lives on today. Not only in Palestinian cinema, but also in Latin American cinema, in Asian cinema, and so forth. Even in the Western world, while Hollywood still majorly dominates the film industry, there are filmmakers both in and outside of Hollywood who utilise antiimperialist, anti-colonialist, and anticapitalist themes and imagery in their films. By highlighting the ongoing struggles against colonialism,

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imperialism and so forth, these films point to a need for new and better worlds. This is sometimes done in more explicit ways such as openly calling for revolution or the dismantlement of oppressive systems, while other films take a subtler approach. It is evident, then, just how powerful narratives and aesthetics can be in communicating revolutionary ideas.

References

In Palestinian films, there is often a longing that lingers throughout to return to a pre-1948 Palestine when Israel did not exist, but the struggle for liberation necessitates re-imagining what a new future should look like. In this case, it means building a new Palestine that embodies the democratic and socialist ideals that Palestinian revolutionaries fought for; a Palestine for their descendants and future generations to come in the continued fight for liberation.

Hawa, Kaleen (2020) From Palestine to the World, the Militant Film of the PLO. New York Review of Books, 27 Oct. https://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2020/10/17/from-palestine-tothe-world-the-militant-film-of-theplo/.

Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi (2008). Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Getino, Octavio and Fernando Solanos (1971). Toward a Third Cinema. Cineaste 4(3): 1â&#x20AC;&#x201C;10.

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Poetry

Phoenix Sally Chik

This is it Spit them out Those three words I am born I know four languages English is my second born across the seas now I am an island I’ve come further than my ancestors could have imagined a girl walking in a world of men desiring only freedom There are nine circles of hell and through each of them I have come out a hundred times ninety-nine problems and being queer shouldn’t be one it’s not a crime to love but I grew up, knowing, I am alive an abomination

Home Altay Hagrebet

This is me stepping out In faith In hope In love

I am home

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Essay

The nerve of a gay, Asian female V. Nguyen

I put on my carefully curated costume. My weekend mohawk is flattened into a conservative coif, with enough severity for people to know that I take my job as seriously as my side part and just enough curl and volume to avoid a man’s horror when he realises he has followed me into the women’s bathroom. I swap my fish sauce-stained hoodie and ripped jeans for a tailored black and navy outfit, which, according to colour psychology, signals power, sophistication and calm, and as an added bonus, distracts from my neuroticism. My fresh kicks are traded in for black R.M. Williams boots that give me an extra two inches, elevating my diminutiveness to a height that commands attention and that is supposedly correlated with managerial promotion and higher pay. Black shades on, I switch from fun and flirty Fifth Harmony to a swaggering hip-hop playlist, instilling grandeur and certain triumph – I am unfuckwitable.

Now with Kanye West’s inexplicable confidence, I march into the office, gearing up to give the big bosses a piece of my mind. ******

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When I started working in public service in Canberra, I became aware of being a minority trifecta: gay, Asian, and female. I had a heightened sensitivity to each stereotype, which motivated me to amplify what I believed were the most positive and least offensive parts of myself while downplaying everything else. That work was heavily skewed towards the most visible parts of my identity, the ‘quiet’, ‘docile’, ‘hardworking’ Asian female with ‘no leadership potential’. I was a newly minted graduate whiplashed from swiftly churning tasks, dizzied from rapidly networking with a wide array of people, spent from constantly mining highly technical information to write reports that were returned in red, revealing deficiencies in my skills and knowledge. Consequently, unless it was a team building activity where we shared what sort of kitchen appliance would best describe our personality, I hardly spoke up. Instead, drawing on the Asian principle of respecting and deferring to authority, I focused on listening to everyone with more experience than me, memorising and applying every single detail to my work. I never felt that I knew enough to make a valuable contribution and worked exactly the way I was told by my parents – hard, fast, quietly, and exactly as I was told. I was deeply self-conscious about how my lack of verbal contributions were perceived: Was it that I wasn’t picking it up fast enough? Naturally quiet? Hiding something? Have they already relegated me to Asian worker bee, more of a team player than a leader? Do they even see me? My work identity felt increasingly precarious and it was hard to find the support and validation I needed to recognise my worth, especially in a sector that was wilfully colour-blind. Before Canberra, I resented the times I was asked where I’m really from or commended that I ‘speak English good’. In Canberra, the refusal to ask, acknowledge, or be curious about my culture and how it has shaped me rendered my value in the workplace non-existent. Colour-blindness also meant that promotions were plausibly based on merit with no racial or gender bias. I had my doubts. There was indeed an admirable number of women in management positions. My manager was female, and her manager was female, and so on to the very top of the chain. But the women who shattered the glass ceiling clean were all glaringly white. I looked across other divisions and departments and observed a similarly diminishing rate of people of colour moving up the ranks. Even in the IT division, which had the most culturally diverse and technically proficient workforce, the

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diversity abruptly stopped at middle management. I learned from a colleague that an Asian female IT middle manager was only given the title of manager to acknowledge her many years at the organisation and expertise, and most certainly not because of her leadership skills. I found in this manager a soft-spoken woman who advised our team on technical complexities and strategic options with patience and grace. I wondered exactly which leadership skills she lacked. One day, my manager approached me with an invitation to be part of a small consultation group with the secretary and senior executives to discuss racialised experiences at work. I pounced at the opportunity to be given the microphone, ready to have my silent frustrations turned into solutions. ****** I enter the meeting room with tables set up in an egalitarian square. Attendees choose the seats furthest away from the window, quietly assumed to be the executive side of the square. The attendees are a considered mix of ages, genders, ethnicities and non-executive levels. I spot a middle-aged Asian woman with her hands folded in her lap, looking away from everyone. I hope she defies the stereotype. The secretary and the executives arrive and sit tall at their end of the table, all with approachable smiles. The light from the window gives them a god-like glow. They are the only white people in the room. One of the senior executives is a middle-aged white male in a suit and runs a branch of the female-dominated human resources group. After the welcome and introductions, he launches into the first discussion prompt: tell us about your experience as a culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) employee here.

Two different attendees share stories of growing up in countries impacted by ongoing wars, detailing frequent violence and disruption, their journey to Australia, and their joy in becoming Australian citizens. They express their pride in their positions as public servants, the ability to give back to a country that has given them safety and freedom. I shrink, my experiences pale in millennial pink entitlement and ingratitude. More attendees contribute and not a single person had ever experienced racism in their time at the organisation. The secretary and senior executives nod and smile,

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smug and self-congratulatory. I am unsure if my thoughts are worth upsetting the race narrative taking shape. I don’t raise my hand. I raise my voice. Surprising myself with the fluency of my speech and the clarity of my thought, I point out the lack of cultural diversity in management and its complete absence at the senior executive level as potential evidence of covert racism. The executives nod, but the smiles morph into frowns. I try to qualify the accusation of racism, and appeal to the female executives. ‘I am female, and I am Asian-Australian. That’s a double whammy. The number of women in leadership positions in this organisation show that it has come a long way to challenge the male model of leadership and demonstrate the benefits of female leadership. CALD employees here have capabilities and perspectives that are underappreciated and underused. When will we start challenging the Western model of leadership and see the value in non-Western conceptualisations of leadership?’ The senior executive in HR agrees and acknowledges that his division has been exploring how to increase diversity in management. He even drops the term ‘bamboo ceiling’ and it magically alleviates all my anxieties. Finally, I feel seen and heard. The two of us discuss the cultural obstacles to leadership for CALD employees and reflect on whether the leadership criterion needs to change to reflect Australia’s increasing diversity. Perhaps the recruitment process needs to be refreshed if it disadvantages people who are culturally taught humility and quietude. What if someone like me can deliver effective leadership with culturally imbued capabilities that are currently unrecognised in the criteria? He proposes a basic solution: mentorship and leadership building programs. Measurable, but not the point. Unless the conceptualisation of leadership is expanded, it only serves to perpetuate Western standards and expectations. This effectively tells us that we need to change who we are to be considered ‘leadership material’. Emboldened, I go in with the spiciest comment, ‘What about targets for CALD managers?’

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The secretary finally intervenes, ‘If we have a target for CALD, that means we have to have a target for people with disabilities and a target for people who identify as LGBTIQ. Where do we draw the line?’ Shut down with the slippery slope argument. As one of a handful of female heads of departments, I expected a sympathetic ally from a glass ceiling-smasher. Instead I find myself against an adversary unwilling to recognise the disadvantages that may prevent me from pursuing leadership and conversely unwilling to contend with the advantages whiteness may have granted her. I try to respond with the same eloquence I had with the HR senior executive, but the arguments race piecemeal in my mind and do not reach my voice box in an articulate form. I remain quiet for the rest of the session, hands folded in my lap, looking away from everyone. Like the perfect stereotype. When I return to my cubicle my manager asks about how it went. They listen intently as I rehash my arguments. ‘Look, personally, if you meet the criteria, I will hire you, regardless of your ethnicity, cultural background, gender or sexuality.’ Facing yet another colour-blind, meritocratic manager leaves me mentally and emotionally exhausted. I turn to my computer and continue to play my role, the future self as a reimagined leader leveraging on the strength of my parents’ values and principles now filed away under ‘maybe the next generation’. I still have some identities to play with though. I dust some lint off my tailored blazer. The power lesbian stereotype just may prove to be more fruitful.

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Poetry

The Friar’s Lantern

Shania O’Brien

I see you illuminated by will-o’-wisp yellow, orange, pink In sun-dappled shades Around you stand empty churches and groves of wisteria Painted on the sky of a storm-torn riviera I sit by an alcove, with you above me Your fingers trace constellations absently Across the ink-stained sketch of our little town Stopping on the place we buried the midnight gown All I have left is an open wound A torn formal dress, sleeves ballooned I refuse to look at the earmarked days on my calendar Or the unopened envelope (return to sender) I am good at wanting, but always find myself reeling And you’re as fragile as the paper bird suspended from my ceiling Still the flames of my candles are yet to wane Lighting my hands, marked by a bloodstain I follow the friar’s lantern home To the one road not leading to Rome Now I know the stars always align; But in this case, misery does not bow to time

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Visual Art

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2020

Poetry

Darling Can’t You Hear Me (S.O.S) Amelia Mertha When I was five, I burnt my shin on an engine. The motorcycle belonged to my grandfather. Three times the size of my body. No animal cry left me. Not a single tear. The burning aluminium made a blister I could not hide. Green, numb and pus-filled, it asked for help on my behalf. My parents said ‘look!’ ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ They rubbed ointment, they clicked their tongues. The scar is still there, looks like cut fruit, or a timid creature scuttling along the seafloor. I tell a lot of people about it now (like I am telling you). This is my way of saying I need help with asking for help. Like what I mean I admit, yes it hurts here. Listen: what is the opposite of crying wolf?

Internal Monologue Sophie Zhou

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When I was five I burnt my shin on an engine the motorcycle belonged to my grandfather three times the size of my body no animal cry left me not a tear the burning aluminium made a blister I could not hide green, numb and pus-filled it asked for help my behalf my parents said why didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you say anything they rubbed ointment and clicked their tongue the scar is still there cut fruit or a timid creature scuttling along the seafloor I tell a lot of people about it now like I am telling you this is my way of saying I need help like yes it hurts here listen what is the opposite of crying wolf?

I was

an engine body animal I could not hide my behalf my parents o their along the floor I am you listen the

belonged to my

scar asking crying

cut

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Fiction

The journey within Naz Sharifi A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. – Mahmoud Darwish Diaspora – Definition Constantly moving and separating from one’s homeland while still having a strong cultural and spiritual connection to the land, its people and the heritage. August 2018 ‘Your English is great, as if you were a proper Aussie.’ I simply said, ‘thanks.’ I often wonder about the cost of my proficiency. For years, I tried to cut the roots of my mother tongue (Dari), in order for it to grow more befitting to the colonial lands I reside in. I used to recoil at the thought of mispronunciation and broken sentences. I shortened ethnic names for the sake of convenience, I hid every part of me that was different because for as long as I remember, the most sacred threads of my identity were under persecution by people who never had to shelve themselves away. Systemic oppression often makes you forget who you are. I thought that perhaps if I buried the years of trauma attached to identity erasure, it would be easier to be accepted, to feel like I belonged, to be at ‘home.’

It was the greatest fallacy, to say the least. In the process of rebuilding

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an identity that was palatable to the mundane world of colonisers, I lost every attachment with the roots of peoples and lands that were fertile with strength and resilience. I often forget that no matter how much I try to conform to the status quo, in my language, my clothes and my views, I would always be seen as the ‘other’. Unbeknownst to me, in the process of becoming ‘proper’, I washed up on the shores of cultural disarray, and identity disintegration. I journeyed many lands to be welcomed with warmth of personal and collective security beyond the idea of merely surviving from day to day. I did not realise what I would have to trade in order to feel safe in my own identity. I did not realise the cost of security. July 2019 Child of diaspora. I sat there in front of the university classroom for twenty minutes quietly repeating the word to articulate its correct pronunciation. The word was so foreign to my tongue that it rolled reluctantly, as if inherently torn between the memories of places and people that no longer exist. I marvelled at two points. One, the strangeness of encountering it for the first time; and second, the familiarity with which it fit into my existence. While the former can be looked past on the part of coincidence, the latter falls, as far as I believe, directly upon fate. Diaspora has become another aspect of what is now an ever-expanding categorisation of my identity. Some layers, like my religion, self-claimed; others involuntarily accepted, my accent becoming the subject of conversation and reflection of my journey, and a few naturally enforced. It’s strange that, while some celebrate their identity with vibrant colours, others flee from land to land in hopes of finding the place in between.

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June 2020 – The Cultural Rebirth Many people speak of transformation in many ways. Some do it on the last day of the year vowing for a ‘new year, new me,’ others do it when they’re blown away by midlife existential crises. Mine was mundane; it came not through extravagant events, or a new year – but simply when I forgot which language I dreamed in and thought. It was the constant interweaving of my deteriorated mother tongue clinging to the vowels of the newly adopted languages. It’s disorientating trying to reconcile parts that have disintegrated into mere memories. It takes a rebirth, both culturally and mentally to reconnect to the depths of one’s heritage and history and still experience the ephemerality of our daily lives. For so long, children of diaspora communities struggle with the constant shift of identities between home and the outside world. The constant narratives and rhetoric they try to fit into in order to ‘belong’. Travelling through these lands, children of diaspora often live in fragments. Neither here, nor there. I am from there; I am from here. I am not there; I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part. and I have two languages, I forgot which of them I dream in – Mahmoud Darwish

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Poetry

A Swallow Finding its Colours

Davina Oh

Counting Grains Food Apologies hidden in the sweet grains of Heukmi bap left waiting on the cold marble countertop as the lights shut off for the night. black grains seep into the white dying it an alluring hue of purple almost unnatural impure tainted her hands pick at the bowl unwilling to poison herself why couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it be white rice instead why did they have to add all this stuff

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a bowl of rice

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Prayers to Moon Tradition The flames wilt against the draft As they guard the portrait Sitting on a bed of linen As rows of miyeok-guk, white rice pierced with chopsticks, barley tea fried pollack, mung bean sprouts, seasoned spinach, lotus roots, dried cod yakgwa, yumilgwa jeolpyeon, songpyeon Korean pears, dates, chestnuts, grapefruit, apples stand at attention to protect and make way for the dead the smoke of the

incense swirls

over their bowed

bodies

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Father explains with broken words

Jesa, is for to back Together

– – – – –

We do not know what lies ahead when we pass on but know this – Family is all we have in the end.

– – – – –

제사 time ancestor come home. again.

but her mind finds itself elsewhere

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Essay

Sex, violence & transgression: Feminism and necropolitics in the commercial egg industry Charlotte Lim Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged – Audre Lorde, 1979 Introduction: The vegan ‘extreme’

Lorde 1984, 110-111

In February 2019, I became vegan. I vowed to commit to a diet and lifestyle excluding all animal flesh and animal products (including eggs, dairy, honey and gelatine). This decision led to a paradigm shift: I no longer saw meat as separate from the once-sentient individual whose life was brutally taken to satisfy a human whim for mere ‘taste’. I saw eggs and dairy products as vestiges of animal suffering; cruelty that was justified through a speciesist lens that devalued animal life and autonomy, and justified the systemic exploitation of animal reproductive systems. How did I reach this vegan ‘extreme’? The seed was planted in first-year Gender Studies, taught by Dr Astrida Neimanis. It was during the lecture on intersectionality where I experienced my first moral epiphany: could I call myself a feminist if I ate animals? I had spent my childhood frolicking with chickens in my backyard, yet never made the connection between the pets I adored and the body on my dinner plate. Later, this developed into: could I label myself a feminist if I contributed to the abuse of certain bodies on the grounds of their species? And then: what kind of ‘feminist’ would I be if I continued to uphold structures of oppression and exploitation imposed on animal bodies – especially female bodies – through my consumption of animals and animal products? To rephrase Audre Lorde, what does it mean when the tools of a speciesist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? ‘It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable’.1 Sex and violence are inextricably intertwined with the animal agriculture industry. This essay aims to demonstrate how violence towards chickens, founded on the sex/gender of the animal, is utilised to procure eggs for human consumption. Part I argues that the egg industry wields a form of necropolitical power over animal lives, justified through ideologies of

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capitalism, anthropocentrism and carnism2. Part II engages in dialogue with sanctuary founder Catherine Kelaher and argues that the act of being vegan is a powerful transgression against the necropolitical carnist norm. By bearing witness to animal suffering, I reach the conclusion that the survival of those liberated is an act of protest against the violence of the industry.

Joy 2010

Kim 2015

Nibert 2003, 8

Part I: Taxonomies of power and necropolitics in the poultry industry Capitalism and anthropocentrism are the intertwined ‘taxonomies of power’3 that create and perpetuate necropolitical power structures in poultry and egg industries. These ideological frameworks seek to legitimise an existing or desired social order, and reinforce the hegemonic belief that it is morally permissible to use animal bodies for the sole purpose of human ‘needs’ (consumption) and privilege.4 In egg production, female hens are oppressed, abused and exploited not only due to their species but also because of their biological sex. The industry uses their reproductive abilities, or in other words, the poultry equivalent of a human menstrual cycle (laying) as a means of production and thus, profit. The exploitation of chickens as objectifiable ‘Others’ is justified by capitalism, and the gendered nature of oppression in the egg industry is validated by human exceptionalism – the ‘right’ to use animal bodies and reproductive systems. The oppressive dominant human/nonhuman binary is operationalised to meet capitalistic ends in the egg industry (and animal agriculture more broadly), as animals are transformed conceptually from subjects to objects and treated accordingly.5 Anthropocentrism enables the organisation of human society through a rigid ‘species hierarchy’ in which humans are placed firmly at its apex so that the ‘needs, desires, interests and even whims of human beings shape the kinds of relationships we are likely to have with non-human species’.6 The species hierarchy justifies the normative ideology of carnism – the belief system that exists in strict opposition to veganism. Carnism is informed by the biopolitical belief that some (animal) lives are worth less than others, and therefore those lives should be ‘let go’ so that human dominance (society and industries) can be maintained. Michel Foucault theorised this shift between sovereign power; ‘the right to kill’, or rather, ‘to take life or let live’7, to biopower: a form of power which sought to ‘regularise life, the authority to force living not just to happen but to endure and appear in particular ways’.8 I argue, however, specifically in relation to animal agricultural industries, that necropolitical

Canavan 2017, 34 Cudworth 2008, 34 7 Foucault n.d., 240-241 8 Berlant 2007, 756 5

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power reshapes both sovereignty and biopower: it is the right to create animal life; force it to endure in particular ways and then take that life through slaughter when their productive (profitable) capacities slow.

Kelaher 2020a ibid. 11 Kelaher 2020b 12 Triple J Hack 2016 9

13 14

Capps 2013 Kelaher 2020b

Butler 2004, 52

Kelaher 2020b

Necropolitical power is rife throughout the entire egg industry. Animal life is systematically managed through the dispersion of implicit and explicit violence that seeks to control the outcome of life even before an egg hatches. Battery chickens have been systematically bred and genetically modified to lay 300–360 eggs per year.9 This number is in stark contrast to their ancestors, the red jungle fowl, who lay just 15–30 eggs per year.10 Hens, however, only make up 50% of the chicken population. Their male counterparts, who only days old are sexed, and deemed ‘useless’ (unproductive) by the industry, are either put through a machine that literally grounds them alive or are gassed to death.11 12 Due to the abuse of female reproductive organs, male chickens are categorised as ‘waste’ objects that need to be disposed of in the most efficient way, rather than individual, autonomous subjects with lives that matter to them. Female chicks that are lucky enough to be ‘allowed’ to live are then debeaked: a horrific process involving the severing of a portion of the hen’s beak – the most sensitive part of the animal’s anatomy – with a hot blade and without the aid of anaesthetic or analgesics.13 Chicks often experience difficulties eating and drinking after this mutilation; and suffer from hunger and dehydration.14 Debeaking occurs because seven to ten hens can be crammed into a single battery cage. Without the space to roam and engage their natural instincts of dust-bathing, hunting and wingflapping, hens often attack each other to defend their minimal territory and cause injury with their full beaks. Rather than utilising ‘governmentality’, to regulate and maintain the hen population ‘through politics and departments, through managerial and bureaucratic institutions, through the law,’15 and changing the conditions of the structures in which these birds live, the egg industry has instead pinned fault on the animal’s natural attributes and mutilated their beaks. Forced to live in crammed conditions without the space to stretch their legs or wings, hens are made to lay, intensively, for 18 months, before their egg production slows and a human-induced death at the slaughterhouse awaits.16 Once they reach the slaughterhouse, hens are treated with horrific violence: shackled by their legs and hung upside down as they are stunned before being run through blades that are designed to slit the animal’s throat. The short lives of these animals reflect Lauren Berlant’s definition of ‘slow death’: the ‘physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of…that

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Berlant 2007, 754

Canavan, 2017

Lim 2020a

Lorde 1984, 112 ibid.

population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’.17 I would like to take a moment to briefly refute the arguments put forth by welfarists or advocates of ‘free range’ or ‘ethical’ eggs, who argue that the conditions I described above are not ‘reflective of the whole industry’, despite being standard practice. Welfarism is an ideology which claims to abide by the ‘ethical’ use of animals involved in production. Its purpose is to enable consumers to resist challenging the diminished status of animals who are implicated and often exploited in participation of food industries.18 Welfarism seeks to justify the consumption of eggs, dairy and other animal products as ‘ethical’ as the consumption of these food groups does not directly result from the death/slaughter of an animal. However, while ‘free-range’ eggs, for instance, claim to guarantee adequate room for chickens (one A4-sheet of paper per hen), ‘free range’ only caters to the portion of the animal’s laying life. Male chicks are still ground alive, hens are still debeaked; and whether free range, barn or cage, no hen can escape the fate of slaughter once their egg production begins to wane after 18 months.19 Ultimately, it is the systemic use and abuse of animal reproductive systems that creates and sustains the egg industry. ‘Better conditions’ for laying hens does not subvert, nor does it transgress, the structural make-up of the industry that relies on the exploitation of animal bodies. Part II: Transgressing carnist cages How can humans and animals transgress necropolitical power structures which govern carnist norms? Lorde suggests that ‘Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative.’20 She also argues that it is the difference between women21 and as I argue, the difference between species, that forges a new kind of power: one which can ‘dismantle the master’s house’ – through connectedness. Catherine Kelaher is a feminist, vegan and animal activist as well as the founder and CEO of NSW Hen Rescue, a charity dedicated to the liberation of all animals with a focus on caged hens. Kelaher also became vegan due to her intersectional feminist ethos, and was driven by the injustices inflicted upon animals because of their reproductive organs to run her own animal sanctuary.22 The act of being vegan according to Kelaher is an act of transgression against the carnist norm. It openly defies the necropolitical and capitalist logic that

Lorde 1984, 112 ibid. 22 Lim 2020b 20 21

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Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019

Haraway 2003

has structured the multi-billion dollar animal agriculture industry which relies on the exploitation of animal bodies.23 My body still, occasionally, pines for the taste of egg. I miss it; I ache for the cultural warmth and wrapping of my grandmother’s omelettes, I long for Sunday brunch, of poached eggs atop sourdough. The temptation waxes and wanes, yet my conviction remains. To bear witness to the survivors of the egg industry is what grounds my vegan ethics. Kelaher introduced me to four newly liberated hens – I expected them to have embraced their new lives beyond the cage, sunning, wing-stretching and dust-bathing, as every chicken should. Yet, as we approached the coop, all I saw was sheer terror. Petrified that we would mercilessly toss them in another cage for slaughter, they piled atop one another in the farthest corner, pecking, squawking and scratching to avoid being closest to the humans. It broke something inside me, to see an animal so beaten, to witness the vestiges of their suffering that they had not yet unlearned. They didn’t believe, couldn’t believe, that we wouldn’t hurt them. That they were safe. I remember those hens each time I see a carton of eggs. The last time I visited the NSW Hen Rescue Headquarters, I shared a lunch with Kelaher. Our picnic was visited by the friendliest girl in the flock – Frida – and before long, she had moseyed her way to the table, pecking gently (yet insistently) at my bowl, hinting I share my meal. I conceded defeat, and graciously offered my lunch to her. She munched up all the corn kernels and a generous serving of peas. Despite the revulsion some feel towards sharing food with an animal, this simple gesture underpins the inherent relationality, the sense of connectedness, between species. How is letting a cat share your bed different to sharing food with a chicken? How is a dog’s tongue different to a chicken’s beak? It is these questions that make me challenge the ingrained abjection towards our animal companions; that lay the foundations of my veganism; that remind me that we are all, as Haraway writes, ‘natureculture’.24 Natureculture that deserves to be free of carnist oppression. Conclusion

‘To lead an ethical life is to be feminist, and to be feminist is to be vegan’ is the conclusion I came to when I reckoned with horrific acts of violence inflicted upon ‘farmed’ animals. To view all life, regardless of race, sex/ gender, dis/ability and species as equal, with rights worthy of protection is the foundation of intersectional feminism. The vegan diet (and lifestyle more broadly) and animal activism are acts that defy the necropolitical, carnist norm – and provides a tool in which the master’s house of sexist, speciesist and ableist patriarchy – can finally be dismantled.

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References Berlant, Lauren (2007). Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Critical Inquiry: 33(4), 754–780.

Kelaher, Catherine (2020b). The Truth About Eggs – this is why I don’t buy free range eggs. NSW Hen Rescue, https://www.henrescue. org/humane-eggs---the-truth

Butler, Judith (2004). Indefinite Detention. In Precarious Life, 50–11. London: Verso.

Kim, Claire J. (2015). Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Canavan, Jana (2017). “Happy Cow” Welfarist Ideology and the Swedish “Milk Crisis”: A Crisis of Romanticized Oppression. In D. Nilbert, ed. Animal Oppression and Capitalism, 34–55. Santa Barbara: EBSCOhost.

Lim, Charlotte (2020a). Frida’s Story: Rising from the Asphalt. NSW Hen Rescue, 14 April, https://henrescue.org/2020/04/14/fridasstory-rising-from-the-asphalt/

Capps, Ashley (2013). Debeaking Video Shows Standard Practice on Free Range Egg Farms. https://freefromharm.org/animal-crueltyinvestigation/debeaking-video-showsstandard-practice-on-free-range-egg-farms/

Lim, Charlotte (2020b). What Saving a Chicken Can Tell Us About Feminism And Disability. Tenderly, 26 March, https:// medium.com/tenderlymag/what-saving-achicken-can-tell-us-about-feminism-anddisability-ce8ac89d7310

Cudworth, Erika (2008). ‘Most farmers prefer Blondes’: The Dynamics of Anthroparchy in Animals’ Becoming Meat. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 1(1): 32–45.

Lorde, Audre. (1984). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Sister Outsider, 110–113. Berkeley: Crossing Press.

Foucault, Michel (n.d.). Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Society must be defended : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. https:// reason.kzoo.edu/anso/assets/foucault_ society_must_be_defended__1_.pdf Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Joy, Melanie (2010). Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press.

Nibert, David (2003). Humans and Other Animals: Sociology’s Moral and Intellectual Challenge. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 23(3): 5–25. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2019) Value of Agricultural Commodities Produced, Australia, 2017–18. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 30 April, https://www.abs.gov.au/ AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/7503.0. Triple J Hack (2016) Shredding day-old chicks: how Australia’s egg industry works. Triple J, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 20 July, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/ hack/chickens/7645698.

Kelaher, Catherine (2020a) Casual Conversation With Catherine Kelaher on Feminism, Veganism and Animal Rights Activism. Interview by Charlotte Lim.

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Poetry

aftermath Sylvia Lee

white slippers at her door. (white noise muffling the silence.) she does not speak nor look me in the eye for there is something in the air and it is rotten. she cooks with the remains of the day, sits before the blaze of the television. some days she does not leave her room and her eyes evanesce into tainted digits. (when she does look at me, it is as if to say she canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bear to look at me. when she does speak to me, it is as if to say she wishes I never had.) as children, we must carry unspoken revelations our mothers cannot keep. our bones are stripped bare with the weight of knowing what the truth tastes like. we are told to smile in the cold, to bear the pain for the sake of blood and face. mother, look at me. am i not your daughter? the one you promised to love for all time?

you send me pictures of myself as a child, my cheeks still full with what i could not have known. you stare at the bowl of rice, now cold with what hurts too much to say.

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Photograph provided by the author

Papaya & My Filipina Friends Janina Osinsao

you look at me and you wince. a sudden sickness becomes you. you must be the queen of thorns because it feels like an old friend. whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wrong? yes, you can tell us

anything. you knew all along, didnt you? yet you summon the old hate and recount the names of gods and monsters. i remember how it felt when my breath escaped the birdcage i had swallowed. once, i imagined my mother engulfing me with an embrace. i know, baby.

i know.

when your hands had felt me stir in your belly, did you know that two decades later, you would wish for death and thrust the image of gonggong and waipo in my face, cursing in tongues you did not understand? i think of the woman i love and feel the sun on my face. i used to think lightness meant undressing in the moonlight, my skin giving away my sins. but now i understand it is to submit to a new grief.

2020

Visual Art

ZAMI

2020

Poetry

displacement nature in circular

the makings

Karen Leong

Bamboo

worm half smoking on the step of a hiking trail in casual disarray

The softness Stilts early Hong Kong sectioned off

Jumble of shrubbery that soils city floors post-typhoon there is more to build To be sieved through a life

N O W

outgrown

tumbled & dried

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Bits of me give way threads through the difficult openings making myself small â&#x20AC;&#x201C; other parts like little rocks on nubs of my skin hardens at the touch, I cannot help but think of my own affectedness foolhardy impatience whenever I funnel whatever a recipe calls for through h oles flour white sugar all the same when it mounts in piles and refuses to fall Until met with a grunt parried through with my thumb pressing down making myself wretched adorned in well worn tears I feel It like a siren call to arms the coiled flow of something amiss fish out of water capsize at the next breaking thing The loop hurdle is the

2020

Essay

Reading Invisible Man in Korean Soo Choi

‘In light of recent events, mass shootings and police brutality, it is arguable that even 63 years after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, invisibility remains a defining characteristic of the Black American.’ This was the opening sentence of my extended essay that I wrote in my final year of high school in 2015. I was 17 at the time, and my 4000 word essay on Invisible Man was the culmination of a string of deliberate choices I had made over my school life to distance myself from my Korean heritage.

My childhood relationship to my ethnic background, against the context of my predominantly white school community in New Zealand, was extremely typical – to the point where it is embarrassing to recount. I grew up observing how other East Asian students were often considered by students

and staff to be one homogenous group, devoid of any originality or individuality. On the other hand, I was ashamed of my own illiteracy in what was supposed to be my mother tongue and knew I could never have truly been considered Korean by other Korean students. Of the two options before me, assimilation appeared preferable to attempts to reconcile with what I considered to be the culture of my parents. I readily emphasised that I was not like them, the girls who would eagerly discuss the Korean dramas they were watching, who participated in the traditional fan dance club at school, who were outspoken on social and political issues in their ‘home country’ but knew nothing of the politics of ours. I justified my self-distinction from these peers on the basis that they were small-minded in their worldview; I thought it arrogant

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While the irony is not lost on me that I was attempting to discard my minority status by studying an oppressed minority elsewhere, it felt vastly more comfortable to learn about the experiences of African Americans, shaped by slavery and its legacies, because it felt distant in a way that reckoning with my own internalised selfloathing could not. Then, in August 2015, while I was working on the final parts of my Invisible Man essay, the Ferguson riots broke out. The Black Lives Matter movement had been moving towards centrestage in the public consciousness in preceding months, but it exploded

into relevance with protests following the death of Michael Brown. Studying the works of Toni Morrison, Grace Nichols, and Ralph Ellison took on a new urgency. These were the issues that were being talked about, that mattered in the ‘real world’. This work felt fulfilling and meaningful, important in a way that I could have never said of the study of Korean culture, never discussed in the classroom. My interest in studying African American literature was not disingenuous by any means, and had begun organically, but over time it became a paradoxical vehicle through which I asserted my proximity to whiteness. The study of African American literature felt academically legitimised in a way that the study of my own culture did not. Even in my early years at university, I undertook multiple courses that focused on or taught African American literature – of course caveated by the awareness of how these narratives had been and continue to be erased and

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Illustration by Amelia Mertha

to know nothing beyond this one culture, and that they could never understand the nuance and complexity of what was happening in the world beyond that small peninsula. So, I set my sights elsewhere and began to devote my time to studying what I considered to be more ‘worldly’ issues, focusing in particular on the violent oppression of Black Americans.

American academic world that I desperately wanted to be a part of. While I continued to study African American literature throughout my BA, I also began to foster a desire What I had mistaken purely as to finally attempt to connect with the inherent academic legitimacy my Korean heritage. As I moved of Black literature was far more away from home and became sinister. English departments an adult myself, as many people across the Western world, like experience, my perception of my the institutions that I was passing parents became more complicated. through, are steeped in AngloAs they appeared more as real, American-centric academic dimensional people, with their traditions; perhaps in a twisted way, the teaching of Black literature own flaws and histories, I began in these departments is inevitable, to realise that maintaining any meaningful relationship with them as a result of the inextricably intertwined histories of the African would require not only learning their language, but understanding diaspora and the Anglo-American basis upon which English literature the culture they had come from. Ultimately, this came to a head in is often taught. It is impossible a conflict when I chose to write to deny that white culture is built my thesis on the translation of explicitly upon the oppression of a Korean novel, foregoing the Black peoples â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is maybe in this chance to research and write on cruel and inseparable relationship, the act of reading Things Fall Apart Paul Beattyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Sellout instead. However, even after completing my alongside Heart of Darkness, that thesis, I admitted to my supervisor Black literature appeared to me that I felt ashamed for choosing to as awarded, a limited but still write on Korean literature; it felt significant, legitimacy. And so, to too obvious a choice, too arrogant my young self, studying African and self-centred. As I frantically American literature was, in part, explained this anxiety to her in her a means of entering the Anglosuppressed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but never had the opportunity to study East Asian literature.

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office, she calmly told me that she understood how I felt, but that this was how I had been made to feel. The false binary that I had spent years drawing up in my head between these two areas was, in practice, flawed and unrealistic. The institutions that I had passed through had willingly acquiesced to or actively encouraged a mindset that enforced a zero-sum game mentality between minorities; there was no room for an understanding of diverse histories and narratives. Moreover, my understanding of ‘minority’ cultures was developed to mirror those of a white, colonial perspective where all existed apart and independently of one another. In reality, all cultures and histories are relational, constantly interacting with one another. As an adult, I came to learn of how anti-Black rhetoric was imported into Korean culture significantly during the Korean War as a result of US military presence, and how Black soldiers were consequently often denied sexual services by local prostitutes. On visits to Korea

as a young child, my aunts would remark that I was too tanned from the New Zealand summer, that my skin looked dirtied. Much like how I had thought that my aspirations of studying Black literature legitimised myself in a predominantly white space, my aunts adopted antiBlackness as a means of achieving proximity to the commercialised American whiteness that they grew up with in the aftermath of the war. Even today, the prevalent and frequent cultural appropriation of Black culture in the K-pop industry is another facet of the lateral relation between these two cultural traditions. While I had embraced the study of African American history as a way of moving away from my own culture, this was a false and misguided hope. It was merely under the specific academic worldview that I was subjected to that I could have thought these two cultures to be completely separate from one another.

Shih 2016

Shu-mei Shih, an academic of comparative literature, advocates for the study of literature through the lens of a ‘relational world’.1 In

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Shih’s eyes, the world is entirely relational and we must seek to understand it in its true form; for example, technological innovations moved laterally from one country to another, not just developing linearly through time. Shih’s thesis takes on a renewed relevance in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, during which, for the first time in my memory, I witnessed impassioned calls for non-Black people of colour to also be held accountable for their antiBlackness. As I became gradually aware of the illusory nature of the boundaries I had set between different cultures, so did the world.

The study of Black history in any nation and cultural tradition is necessary for any student – this is not something that I should have to defend. But, we must attempt to break beyond the limits of the traditional Western academic perspectives that only perceive other cultures as in relation with them. It is no longer sustainable to consider the histories and cultures of those that are portrayed as an ‘other’ as if they exist within vacuums, impenetrable from the world around them bar the West.

References Shih, Shu-mei (2016). Theory in a Relational World. Comparative Literature Studies: 53(4), 722–746.

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Poetry

Indigestion

Alison Hwang

all day today i had consumed too much English – fried oily carbohydrates briny salty processed fat toxic exotic alcoholic preserved letters in a can sugar and acid how would you like your alphabet cooked? ‘i’ll have it raw, thank you’ and i think i knew i was over-eating i was eating too fast my stomach was already full but i could not stop stuffing the English into my mouth screw digestion just chew push down the bile i want more English i need more

2020

my mother takes out a needle from her sewing bag she burns the tip of the needle on the stove tying a thin white thread around my thumb, she pricks the sliver of flesh under my fingernail the blood is crimson black then suddenly i feel it all rushing up my body up and up i throw it all out and onto the floor spills out a mixture of letters and characters this language is indiscernible

ZAMI

Fiction

13th month of sunshine Kiki Amberber Before we came here, to the ocean, we were electric-floating on blue light in Sheba Valley. Where the past met the yet to arrive, royal wasteland of our creation. Kings conjured out of binary data sets. Our teeth ached but we kept dancing, on pixels that made our feet bleed. Ran towards that bright bruising. Running to remake the world new and digital. Dredged ourselves bone-dry of information, new wells bubbled up again every time. Oily data lakes spread and absorbed like coconut oil. Rubbed it into the skin and under wrapped hair at night. Didn’t notice needle points behind eyes, organs gasp-choking, approaching oblivion. Sheba Valley first existed in our imaginations, the knife-point end of a dream. Dreamed of blue light pools, horizon between ocean and internet. Could we swim through cyberspace and never fall off the edge? Dreamed hard. Then there it was, glistening like all 13 months of sunshine. There beyond the grasp of time – a city, built up like calcified plaque. Teeth and tongue. Built up like breaking down. Like eroding rocks, gone quietly – softly but all at once. Oceanic chipping. In the golden city on the edge of land & water. Addis Ababa where in the deep purple past blood called itself home. Rushing through veins and across that other island where names were swallowed guiltily and brown skin hard to find. Came here instead at the end of gas and metal, entered a strange silence. Speech flowed viscous, thought we’d stay a while. Here in the stomach-lining promise of something beyond skin. Sheba Valley beckoned honey on tongue, dissolved to metallic-sharp. Drew us in like sleep dusting dry-cheeked crevices of the afternoon, like skin contact, like generations-ancient here, like settle here, forget what you owe and are owed, move beyond the land: 13th month skyward. If not the sky, why not that driftwood-buoyant cyber flotation? If not flight, why not pixel-invisible dissolution, slow-sinking like the muddy ground?

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Thought weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d leave it all behind. In Sheba Valley, the remaking of the body without skin. Engraving of a ceramic plate with no name. Seismic shifts massive and eruptionless. Gasping silence like gasless stars. Not the first digital city but the closest to perfect elimination of touch, to past and future held in a fist and crumpled, close the finger and the thumb, name nothing but the divine present (in our hands our hands). ****** Sheba Valley is beautiful and deadly. Up on the hill looking across the white-glowing buildings, keep leaning until: pitch over the edge, grasping that full-teeth grinning promise all blue all bright. Blood lining the smile like a charmed threat. Arm hair rose in danger and we kept running. Years before, mobile phones were a gateway to freedom, our own terms apart from colonial debt but those silver screens their own metal bars. Now we were starting over. Still something glimmered behind the silver, struck deadly through our blood. Closed our eyes and throats and learned to ignore it. In the beginning were the hands, cool-dry and so sure. When the Valley looked like an open palm we thought it meant safety like ancestors-onancestors, so we gave data like sacrifice like prayer, blood swipe-carded above a door. Holy water oceanic-deep, baptised us with gentle fingers. Thought whispers cyberstalking through the trees were griots moving feather-light. Cicadas after dark, damp on soil. Took the whispers into our bloodstreams. Each shivery vibration, divine affirmation. For a while, fingers on fingers in the cool belly of that virtual mecca were new language in flight. Mapping an untold existence. Giddy like first eyes on eyes in the flush of a cold sun. Real eyes on eyes came later â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ran so fast we circled back around and met ourselves like strangers. Hostile watching of our invention. Tension held in the body in the back in the tendons of arms and legs. Sharp in the heel. Ache on the wrist. Eyes and the neck, prickling. Our own surveillance state. Open like a palm outstretched magnetic. Greedy-welcoming. Hungry-loving.

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In memories there’s still nothing more beautiful than Sheba Valley light. Spinning and spitting, guts of crystals. Crushed on the granite jaw of a small god. Fossilised glow worms slow-rotting after rain, the final screaming surrender. Saw Sheba Valley in a dream. In a horoscope. In a Woolworths. In space. In your (our) eyes; hands; nail of pinky finger. In the past / in the future. In a bead of sweat running horizontal across your (our) back, odyssey of its own relentless motion. In the draining light of that always-setting sun. All sudden flashing when we couldn’t ignore what we’d done any longer. Last orange illumination of a face before the plunge into darkness. Still the end arrived slowly, the gradual loss of failing bodies. Before the heavy silence, first a spine crackling noise. Static undercurrent like exposed rock faces. Then the gaping awful truth. By that time, the water rising had turned from mud to fast shallows. Along with the rising water came the soft earth, flesh no nail; naked shell-less crab. Sheba Valley returning to the same dream it emerged from. Out of the soft wet: blue light shrieking, so bright and hot we forgot to breathe. Deep wells of that bone-sharp blue light, depths to drown the bodies we had already dismissed. Watery graves of an artificial creation. Still enough to hold a debt moving cork-like to the surface. Forgetting the body in the botanic gloom of that soft mud earth. In flaccid central core of wet banks, blue light churned and the water sighed as it grew wary-strong. Rising ghostly, neck-stretch or dip of the head. In the shallows we ignored that mud iridescent, bouncing off skin we didn’t possess. Kept moving blue teeth tensed in blue jaws. Some time ago we had stopped running, some time ago that open palm had clenched. Didn’t see it happen but crushed lungs, and a gothic moon hanging. Woke up gasping so many nights, melted from the heat of that blue light that was almost-salve. Rusting oxygen stream in gold and blue-blue-blue. As the water rose everything became drenched blue-lit bright, cold daytime constant. Reverie broke in waves of midnight heat, choked on blue light in our sleep: filled us up gagging, digital tears streaming. Fell in love with that

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gloomy harsh-light in the twilight breaths of the Valley. Coursed through each cell in our non-bodies. ****** At the edge of the blue light and the sinking earth. Tiny orange crabs at the dark foaming lip of the river, nestled into sharp-horned shell structures and among barren branches. Single green glass-winged fly above. And the birds, loud enough to almost pull time back into their grasp. We sat there in the final days. Sky, beginning to blur over. We accounted for everything but the yearning bite for real water on the face and music in the bones. Felt days running out like so much time, so we finally prayed to those digital gods. Sun came out and we thought they had heard us. Gorging on data poetics, didn’t see our stomachs had bloated, rotting data wasting away. Parasitic. Here at the river, trailing hands over invisible hands. A building (world) collapsing will sometimes shake of its own accord. A star’s last moments are its brightest; and so too for us. Ocean glimmered a different rhythm to that blue light. Sitting at the river, began to be aware of a swelling from beneath. A hand reaching up through brown mud. Tip of the tongue, long-lost memory of a back window and a different continent. Before we came here we lived in many places. Before we came here we didn’t know what home was. A last look out the window reversing into darkness. Saw it again in three dreams, each time the face was turned but still felt pressure on hand, unrelenting, sure. Swim to you like home-here. Reach up through the depths hands hands hands in mine. And out of the muddy river came the hands, wearing silver rings and golden wrinkles. It was almost too late. By then our skin had turned to crystals and the city didn’t recognise us. Sheba Valley’s final betrayal. Echoing under the skin and in the fearful rhythms of the rivers. In the end Sheba Valley broke itself down. Couldn’t outrun all of that water. Crumbled like sand, a final

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gasp, everything became blue-light drenched, data lakes spilling full and free into the ocean rising to greet them. Dream failed and feet drowned will change a city, and so finally everyone decided to believe in time, held tight-fisted moving towards a touch that was a touch. One that felt real on the body. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have anywhere left to go in the end. We left the sharp glass-blue sunshine and went to the ocean. ****** In the ocean there is pain, thrum blue light liquid. Sea groaning too. Some days all the pain crescendos and we thrum together with the water, different vibrations, for aeons. Other days the deep blue gives way to other inhabitants. Kelp and tiny fish, rippling the core tragedy. Summoning new feelings to feel on the skin. Grinding and honest. Sharp and true. Reservoir for a past we can see finally, deep loss cycling within and without. Smooth swirling through the murky cool. Like witness like archive. Mostly we hold each other, feathery webs of data strung out like jewellery, toxins on display. All that pain down on ocean floor like history breathing in / out to death rhythms. Keep crumbling knowledge into crystal-sand leaking blue light. Undulated over the skin-silted ocean, bubbles trapped rising in glass.

Illustration by Amelia Mertha 2020

Behind the sheet of dark water in the place we came at the end, when everything else was underwater. To outrun harm or maybe just push the memories deeper. Cycled back around glowing neon and bright-eyes. & it tasted like wet soil except metallic. & it sounded like History padding slow across the carpet with socks on, turning the door handle with one hand, running the other languorously against the wall, inspecting for dust. & the dust caught in our throats even though we didn’t speak anymore, because we were open-mouthed ready for a prayer or salvation. & it didn’t come but what did was that whisper from the depths. The one terrible and familiar, like before our throats closed up from all that dust we could have made the same noises and maybe that would have been enough to keep all the blue light at bay. In the depths of the ocean there is noise. It’s a different kind of blue that permeates, a grinding and a crushing – sand, both relentless and gentle in journey out of impenetrable rock faces, slow-crumpled by moon-drawn fists of water. In the ocean new categories name themselves like shifting piles of wet earth holding shape. Reconfiguring themselves. Beginning to loosen throats, living in the beyond-language magnetising speech. & where the receptacle of too-much data remains in oceanic currents, what is left is something terrible yet nameable. Gold-thrilled hands disappear into the cool deep; still return to backseat memory. In the deep, past is here communing. In the deep, running can end and feelings still feel.

In dreams, remnants of Sheba Valley rise eerie. Behind eyes in slowtipped exit from sleep. Taste sour on tongue, sharp loss still punctures in moments of lapse. Ocean can’t glow like blue-lit Sheba Valley and the green-eyed promise of a new body, data packed into perfect form. Still, slower beauty glimmers in the half-light under the sea. Something like a promise, real things are coming to feel & see & touch. Something like a reminder, & what has gone before cannot be forgotten or erased. Something like a blessing, you are here you are still here.

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Know Me, See Me Nishta Gupta

2020

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Khanh Tran: I am a first year student at USyd. In reconciling my cis male, gay and Vietnamese identities, I have chosen to immerse myself in queer activist and religious spaces whilst at heart being a consensus-builder. I believe that freedom means more than just removing barriers and that freedom means a meaningful ability to choose. To that end, I strive to broaden support for the communities I have been proud to call â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;homeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in.

2020

Varsha Yajman: Having been involved in the climate movement for the past couple years and having an abundance of time during lockdown, the meaning behind identifying as a person of colour has become clearer to me. I have realised that it is about telling your story, being proud of your culture and heritage, and recognising the importance of BIPOC people and their marginalisation in the fight for justice. Understanding what it means to be a person of colour has helped me gain pride in my heritage and recognise the truly intersectional nature of climate justice.

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Naz Sharifi: Being a woman of colour learning about certain issues through a colonial lens when me and my community have experienced them firsthand is strange. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the disconnect between lived experiences on a personal level, academic work on a structural level, and having to continually shift and challenge the ways we transfer and digest knowledge.

2020

Poetry

to vault

Karen Leong

spring forth my child spring forth from a city abounding les of Babel topsy turvy there is enough , 噪音 here to pass around bleeding into the cracks of pavement still cobbled from when bricks became like legion – one of the many to be stacked; aimed with precision at the face of a pig I am staggering breaths fitful as the world around me crumbles and rebuilds Sails of a junk ruddy red-puffed partially chaffed from half-mast 港 visibly deflating relief doesn’t begin to encompass the wave of something like home ; cresting over underside by the sea with faces like mine I am staggering and the crowd surrounds pause and refuse to give way

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Fiction

Negative Space Shania O'Brien

Illustration by Altay Hagrebet

I’ve never known what to do with my hands. They’re nimble, but often fidgety. When I was sixteen, I used to itch the back of my thumb when I was nervous; causing many an injury and plenty of blood-stained bandaids shoved to the very bottom of my dustbin. My aunt used to do it, too, but I should have mirrored one of her better behaviours. Since then, I’ve attempted hobbies that put them to better use. For example, I started drawing. I was always decent at art but didn’t pay much attention until I had to refrain from accidentally scratching off my skin. When I learned how to sketch, I was told to pay attention to the negative spaces between my lines. How odd, I thought, that something missing could be more important than something present. Ever since, it has been hard not to define my life in the absence of things. My mind is a pinboard of missed connections, lost friends, estranged family; of what-ifs, could-have-beens, should-have-beens. I see a joke tweet going around a lot, the words ‘why does no one talk about depression and anxiety resulting in memory loss more?’ The gag, you see, is that people keep forgetting about it. It was funny, I thought,

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for a while. And then a typo resulted in the triggering of a customised acronym, a goodnight text for a friend I no longer have, and I walked into the bus stop on Eastern Avenue. Logically, I knew I had this person who was my friend, who spent five years being one of the four most important people in my life, and that she was gone now. At that point, I still thought about her, and often, but it was never anything specific. I would see her favourite colour and sigh, or listen to a song she introduced me to and fight the urge to skip it, or just sit on my floor in the grey hoodie she gave me and stare at the place the wall met the carpet. Now, some things come back to me: inside jokes about bows, secret mean nicknames, made-up words, a cup of sugarfruit ice cream split precisely in half. Every time I remembered something, it was a paper cut submerged in saltwater. There was the five-year-old handmade offwhite vase with her name engraved onto the bottom that still sat on my desk, the purple liquid lipstick I never had the chance to return, a pen I borrowed in middle school that still lay at the back of my drawer. There was the last time I saw her: a quick hug goodbye with the promise to meet in three weeks. There was the last time I heard her voice: an overly long Snapchat video of her drunk and explaining her theory of creation.

I’ve always wondered about the instances and people I’ve forgotten. I used to believe the primary reason was that they were irrelevant, that my brain couldn’t bother enough to dedicate space to them anymore. Learning that I have involuntarily repressed memories because they hurt too much, or because they caused stress and anxiety, was something seemingly obvious that never occurred to me. I pretend I do not see, I cover my eyes with my hand and joke every day. I pretend it do not exist. Existence, I have learned, is tied more closely to memory than anticipated. At twelve, I read a book about two people who fall in love and die. ‘I fear oblivion,’ one of them said. I rolled my eyes at the time, but now I wonder about all the things I’ve inadvertently resigned to obscurity. There is so much I am sure I want to say, so much I know that has impacted me greatly that I want to write about. Things that

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fit into this piece of writing like puzzle pieces only slightly frayed at the edges. But maybe these things are lost to me; lost like the hours I spent obsessing over events I had no power over instead of sleeping. Lack of sleep can cause severe memory loss, my psychology teacher once said to me. Despite knowing that, I have not been able to sleep better. Thinking about her is an open wound that refuses to heal. I can put bandaids on it, but I know they too will end up bloodied at the bottom of my dustbin, a new one already being ripped open because neither time nor lack of fidgeting will heal this. Perhaps it would fare better if I stopped rubbing salt in it. But what of the memories I am desperately clinging to, then? What of secret languages and made-up lives and promises? I hurt, and I know it existed. I hurt, and I know the experience of this relationship is still alive. I hurt, and I know the pain is but a conduit for feeling. Sometimes, when I sleep, there is a dream I have in which I love the world. There are patterned yellow tiles, a furry leopard-print exercise ball, and giant windows through which I can see the city. But on days I do not remember dreaming, I wake up with my skin clutched between my fingernails. My grief is a living thing, as real as any of my organs: the only one Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d beg to fail. I worry about the negative spaces in my life, about the wrongs that cannot be undone, about the mistakes that stain me to this day. I worry about my friend, hoping that she mirrors it in some capacity. I worry about what is to come. But I cannot let it haunt me before it happens. Sometimes, I think it is okay; these spaces exist to ensure the lines fit together, to create room for healing, to define what is worth marking in ink and what isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. Maybe I am between lines at this moment in my life, or perhaps I am etching something very permanent that hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yet revealed itself to me.

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And I am afraid: afraid of picking up the jagged shards and piecing them back together, because what if it still doesn’t make sense? What if I spend an indefinite amount of time staring at my hands, staring at pieces that were never meant to be treated like a puzzle in the first place? The worst part, I know, about being a writer is the lack of narrative structure in my life. More often than not, there is no foreshadowing. There is no warning that something will change irrevocably, no guarantee that it will make sense. And I see her on Facebook, or Instagram, and I want to comment ‘that’s pretty lipgloss,’ but I know it is not my place anymore, and I know I sent her an email that never got a response; I know the last time we spoke it was forced. I can make lists and lists of things I know, but they will never mirror the length of everything I thought I knew. There is much difference in drifting apart from a loved one and having someone ripped out of your life with no warning, a bandaid taken off a wound that isn’t done healing. In the first instance, you can say: I knew. I knew you. But in the other, you are left bitter and incomplete; a negative space you can only hope to fill with no certainty.

I lie in my bed, clinging to sleep like a parasite to virgin skin, forcing myself into a world that does not ache. It is so easy, look. We’re holding hands, falling asleep to a show we’ve already watched, look. We’re still, suspended in time, look. We’re on the carpet, stuffing our faces with homemade cheese; we’re painting on the floor; we’re leaning against the balcony with the rising sun haloed above you, look. It’s 1:58 am, and I am not haunted, look. And I’ll take all my love, and I’ll put into this book, this dedication, this poem, look, and I’ll put in a way you’ll understand; in words and scribbles and colours, in cutouts of old magazines and fabric from my clothes. And I loved you, I know, in a way I loved all things: in a cup, half-empty; in a drawing, half-finished; in a letter, half-written.

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Poetry

âm th ầ m 1 Anya Doan Most days I walk a tightrope – teetering between becoming, becoming my mother, becoming my father. I’d wear my father’s office sternness stretched by generations of biking in rubber sandals, cushioned by the way his voice mellows at a cab driver from Vũng Tàu who doesn’t know his way around the city, Thế, cứ đi anh chỉ cho2 When my father really smiles, I catch glimpses of myself – not in his joy – in the crooked bridges of our nose… the wide, flat shape of our nostrils that levitate like the wings of an aeroplane. In Vietnam, it’s said that wide nostrils are a sign of wealth. We remind ourselves of this, laugh, and move on. I want to wear the lavish hope my mother spends when she compares the pandemic to a war: Cô-vi cô-vít chả là gì. Mai dậy là có vắc-xin!3 This is how she charmed herself into birthing three and a half babies. There, I find her arched back, shoulders pulled back, belly

quietly, softly ‘I’ll show you as we go.’ 3 ‘The virus is nothing in comparison. We’ll have a vaccine when we wake up tomorrow!’ 1

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stretched out into the mirror like an insideout hot air balloon, pitying this hunchbacked life she’s lived too well.

In hazed windowpanes, I believe I am choosing something new. Yet I am a cell memorizing, multiplying, submitting spoon fed to me – to every in the desperation of my search for permission.

It’s a running joke in our family now, the wide nostril thing? Once at dinner over the topic of cosmetic surgery, my sister said if she could fix any feature she would sửa cả mặt luôn chứ!4 I guess my father didn’t find this funny – his gaze fixed on the table mat, the one that smells of leftover purple soup.

‘might as well fix [my] whole face!’

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Poetry

Shoo, pastry!

Jocelin Chan

Pafu, your lying promo pics fashioned yourself as a new Beard Papa, cream centre straining against a pastry blanket. I drooled and dreamed of cloudlike choux cream puffs from my tender eastern years. But my teeth tore past flaky insides, smeared with butter grease. Puff pastry had double-crossed me! Where is the chewy choux, the dab of cream that dots the tip of my nose? How dare you, Pafu, you false pastry minx, stand where Beard Papa once stood.

Illustration by Ellie Zheng

2020

End Notes

Our writers and artists give some insights into the stories/inspirations/nuggets of love behind each piece

Sex, violence & transgression: Feminism and necropolitics in the commercial egg industry | Charlotte Lim | p.38 This essay is a testament to the feminism that I embrace and embody with every fibre of my being. The feminism I believe in is defiantly intersectional, founded on a refusal to oppress other beings based on the humanconstructed identity categories of sex/gender, race, species, and dis/ability among others. Intersectional feminism taught me that I could not consider myself feminist if I continued to support the systemised torture and murder of animals for their flesh and secretions. Feminism is what made me vegan. Darling Can’t You Hear Me (S.O.S) | Amelia Mertha | p.30 This was based off of a writing prompt from an online poetry course I did right at the start of quarantine restrictions taught by US poet Shira Erlichman. We had to play around with the absence of certain punctuations and words. The second offering/version of the poem is an entire question in itself which I think is neat. I am better at asking for help and telling people I am struggling but there’s always room for improvement. Also, I remember a friend of my grandparents, an older Indonesian lady, helped tend to the burn ; a cream the same colour as the blister. Sea green. Phoenix | Sally Chik | p.21 The idea for ‘Phoenix’ was born through a fascination with the presence of this mythological symbol in both Western and Sinosopheric cultures. This poem blends common themes attributed to phoenixes in both cultures: rebirth and prosperity. I also wanted to explore the power of being and belonging in contested spaces. Know Me, See Me | Nishta Gupta | p.63 Art, as with most things, has historically been dominated by white cis men. Doing photography is therefore inherently political as a woman of colour, as I begin to dismantle a colonial male gaze. Equally, imagery is vitally important in acknowledging and empowering individuals who exist in front of the camera. I aim to exhibit the stunning power of BIPOC in my practice as they thrive in contemporary Australia. ‘Know Me, See Me’ explores the intersection of race with climate justice, tertiary education as a colonial institution, and LGBT+ identities, delving into the personalities of my friends and photographic subjects.

Reading Invisible Man in Korean | Soo Choi | p.50 For many reasons, the events of 2020 have motivated me to reflect upon how I situate myself culturally, not only relation to my Korean background, but in a network between multiple cultures and histories. This piece explores the relationship (or lack thereof) that I perceived growing up, between my own Korean heritage and Blackness, a dialogue that I hope will become more apparent into the future.

ZAMI

To Vault & The Makings | Karen Leong | p.48 + 68 ‘To Vault’ and ‘The Makings’ are reimaginings of my time spent in Hong Kong over the last six months, and speak to the liminal feeling of being detached and at home, and how they overlap against the greater landscape of the pandemic and political unrest marring the city. Shoo, pastry! | Jocelin Chan | p. 75 ‘Shoo, Pastry!’ is a short series of haikus about being tantalised by a treat that had stirred up some nostalgia in me, only to be disappointed to realise that the marketing had misled me and it was something else completely. The nerve of a gay, Asian female | V. Nguyen | p.22 This is a personal essay reflecting on the insidiousness of Asian female stereotypes in the workplace, and barriers to leadership, real and imagined, internal and external. I wrote this essay to be your surrogate POC work friend who assures you that it is not all in your mind. Indigestion | Alison Hwang | p.55 For immigrants like myself, learning the English language is similar to consuming food – an essential strategy for survival. However, this process also has an irreversible impact on one’s culture. My poem uses the metaphor of ‘Indigestion’ to represent the immigrant’s discomfort and pain in adopting a new language. 13th month of sunshine | Kiki Amberber | p.57 Ethiopia’s national tourism slogan is ‘Thirteen Months of Sunshine’ – a reference to the extra five day-long month of Pagune at the end of the Ethiopian Calendar. I’ve been haunted by the future that seems to glimmer in that phrase for a while now, wondering what it would be like to exist inside a thirteenth, sun-filled month. A new world, perhaps. Screening the cinematic revolution | Kowther Qashou | p.16 ‘Screening the Cinematic Revolution’ explores the role that cinema plays as a weapon of anti-colonial and antiimperialist resistance for revolutionaries through its narratives, imagery, and ideals through the lens of Palestinian cinema. The piece is inspired by a love for Third Cinema and Palestinian cinema and therefore a bit of a tribute to them. The journey within | Naz Sharifi | p.32 ‘The journey within’ is an anecdotal piece reflecting on my life as a child of diaspora on colonial lands. It is significantly inspired by my own experiences of identity fractures, cultural confusion and understanding the nuances of my heritage and history. Home | Altay Hagrebet | p.20 Just a piece kind of encapsulating my general feelings towards the concept of Home. The conventional understanding of it as some sort of stationary place is something I’ve always found hard to grasp, hence the nomad grounding the piece. Among all the other features, most importantly, there is the family portrait – which I think ultimately, being the centrepiece, most adequately captures Home for me.

2020

aftermath | Sylvia Lee | p.44 In the West, we often see the coming out experience as a milestone that signifies an end to the discomfort of constantly effacing one’s queerness. But sometimes it isn’t that simple. ‘aftermath’ captures the weight of the unspoken in a Chinese-Australian family – my family. The poem centres on my experience of coming out to my first-generation immigrant parents during lockdown earlier this year, and my realisation of the heartache that comes with speaking one’s truth. The Friar's Lantern | Shania O'Brien | p.27 The ‘Friar’s Lantern’ was composed because I wanted to write something vaguely otherworldly and haunting, something that felt just out of grasp. It is the first poem I have written in four years, and a lot of the imagery used is born of late-afternoon daydreams. Negative Space | Shania O'Brien | p.69 ‘Negative Space’ is about memory and love, and how one deals with losing a close friendship. It is meant to elicit feelings of nostalgia and longing, and to make the reader realise that much of life is just constantly living through things previously inconceivable. Papaya & My Filipina Friends | Janina Osinsao | p.46 & 47 ‘Papaya’ comments on the colorism that is ever-present within filipino culture, of how being lighter skinned is seen as a trait of beauty. The second image is a tribute to my filipina friends, daughters of immigrant families who I’ve seen become open-minded, independent young women. A Swallow Finding Its Colours | Davina Oh | p.35 This work is written in dedication to those on their journey of accepting their culture and background. It’s a relatively simple journey – to be you. But the simplest things are not always easy. Growing up, it is easy to lose sight of who you are and where you’ve come from, especially when there is a world telling you to be otherwise on both sides – you can be too Asian or not enough. Internal Monologue | Sophie Zhou | p.28 I wanted to capture a recall of memories. There is a strange sense of stillness and silence of being with oneself for too long of a time, something familiar, but also unfamiliar. where edges meet | Tabitha Wilson | p.14 I wrote this piece to express my experiences of disconnection as a light-skinned Aboriginal in modern Australia, engaging with themes of cultural degradation to address feelings of loss and alienation from self and community. I wanted to convey a profound sense of displacement and an undercurrent of violence that still echoes within contemporary Australia. âm thầm | Anya Doan | p.73 Inspired by the growing industry of cosmetic surgery in Asia,

the piece asks if the rejection of oneself is also the rejection of one’s family and heritage.

Strap Up | Angad Roy | p.8 The piece is an insight into the minor affects that emerge in the life of an apathetic shift-worker.

ZAMI

Editors-inchief Kiki Amberber Amelia Mertha

Cover Artist Jocelin Chan

Graphic Design Amelia Mertha

Editorial Collective Misbah Ansari Emma Cao Sally Chik Anya Doan Vivienne Guo Altay Hagrebet Karen Leong Kedar Maddali Kavya Nagpal Shania Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien Kowther Qashou Angela Xu Donnalyn Xu Ellie Zheng

Contributors Kiki Amberber Jocelin Chan Sally Chik Soo Choi Anya Doan Nishta Gupta Altay Hagrebet Alison Hwang Sylvia Lee Karen Leong Charlotte Lim Amelia Mertha V. Nguyen Shania Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien Davina Oh Janina Osinsao Kowther Qashou Angad Roy Naz Sharifi Tabitha Wilson Ellie Zheng Sophie Zhou

SASS Publications Directors 79

Jenna Lorge and Kate Scott

2020

When I moved out of my mother’s house, shaky and determined, I began to fashion some different relationship to this country of our sojourn. I began to seek some more fruitful return that simple bitterness from this place of my mother’s exile, whose streets I came to learn better than my mother had ever learned them. But thanks to what she did know and could teach me, I survived in them better than I could have imagined. I made an adolescent’s wild and powerful commitment to battling in my own full eye, closer to my own strength, which was after all not so very different from my mother’s. And there I found other women who sustained me and from whom I learned other loving. How to cook the foods I had never tasted in my mother’s house. How to drive a stick-shift car. How to loosen up and not be lost. Their shapes join Linda and Grand’Ma Liz and Gran’Aunt Anni in my dreaming, where they dance with swords in their hands, stately forceful steps, to mark the time 80 when they were all warriors.

ZAMI In libation, I wet the ground to my old heads.. (120) Lorde, Audre (2018). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name A Biomythography. London: Penguin Classics.

ISBN: 978-1-74210-483-6