Myriad 2019 by UMSU communications

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY On behalf of the People of Colour Department, I pay respects to the Traditional Custodians on whose land we reside, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay homage to the Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty of this land, has never and will never be ceded. We further pay our respects to all those in community and on Country, who have fought and continue to fight colonialism every day. We pay our deepest respect and send love and strength to those who are out saving the sacred Djap Wurrung birthing trees; to those that are fighting for justice against the white legal system; to those that are mourning the loss of Elders; to those that are marching, to those that are struggling and, to those that are lost. Our battles - as First Nations People and People of Colour - are inherently linked. Together we must continue to dismantle white supremacy, decolonise this land and put our bodies on the line, so that our children will not have to. We ask you, as our allies, as Settlers, and inherent beneficiaries of our suffering, that you begin sacrificing, so that we may continue to heal and stand strong. This publication is a testament to the power of community and whilst we cherish the diversity that the world has to offer, it is of utmost importance that we first restore and maintain the community on whose land we reside. Whilst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still live, breathe and thrive on this Land, our sovereignty cannot be bequeathed or passed on. This always was and always will be, the land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Acknowledgement written by Serena Rae Thompson

CONTENTS CONTENTS Title Letters From Office Bearers

Letters From The Editors

6-7

Design Team About Us

8-9

Meet The Team

Note To Readers

Mythology

Myth And Memory: Uncovering The Genius Of Mythic Traditions by Patrick Mercer

What’s Your Noodle Horoscope? by Jing Xuan Teo and Jing Tong Teo

Reclamation

Reading (Multiracial) Representation: A Book List by Marina Sano Litchfield

Don’t Look Different by Ikumi Cooray Project Of Colour by Po-Han Kung Indian And Independent by Anouksha Singh

41 42 - 43 44

Chipped Away by Trung Le

45 - 46

The Big And Beautiful Baskwa by Michelle Mashuro

47 - 49

States Of Matter: Representation In Its Many Forms by Danushi Rajapakse

50 - 51

The Model Minority Myth And Me by Mark Yin

52 - 53

Stop Butchering My Language, Thanks by Nurul Juhria Binte Kamal

54 - 55

Yellow Fever: An “Epidemic” Closer To Us Than We Think by Lindsay Wong

20 - 21

How Death Brought An Atheist Closer To God (Chapter 2) by Bettule Assi

56 - 59

Letter To The Stars by Jesslyn Swan

22 - 23

Portrait Study #3 by Kaavya Jha

Portrait Study #4 by Kaavya Jha

A Storm As I Remember by Stevie Wappett

Eucalypt by Stevie Wappett

Goddess by Kavya Malhotra

Bananas, Baby by Celine Lau

Bone China by Loo Deyuan

Are You Even Black? by Raiane Oliveria

Portrait Study #1 by Kaavya Jha Daughters Of Colour by Veera Ramayah Portrait Study #2 by Kaavya Jha

How Death Brought An Atheist Closer To God (Chapter 1) by Bettule Assi

13 - 15 16 17 - 18

24 - 25

Period Of Love

The Social Edit by Phoebe Owl

Maybe I Woke Up Today by Loo Deyuan

Page

Who Are You? Third Culture Kid Edition by Susan (Sylvia) Eng

28-29

On Truth, Power And True Power by Chiara Situmorang

30 - 31

Find Me In A Backyard by Amruta Chande

32 - 33

For The Forgotten by Tharidi Walimunige

34 - 36

Hallelujah Junction (1st Movement) by Jing Tong Teo

68 - 69 3

Black I-III by Yakub Ogunsina

This Is Not An Ekphrastic Poem by Cindy Jiang

My People by Yanni Jiang

Legacy

Comfort Women: A Hidden Story by Lindsay Wong

76 - 77

The “Leaky” and “Cold” Female Body by Lu Yuxi

78 - 79

When the Soul Doesn’t Speak

Life After You by Seun Yinka-Kehinde

Sara Young Hemana by Natalia Naa

Seeing Ourselves As The Other by Ashani Lee

The Perils Of New Age Atheism (Chapter 3) by Bettule Assi

84 - 85

The Emergence Of Black Representation by Michelle Mashuro

86 - 87

Refugee Blues by Srishtee Chatteriee

88 - 89

Flight, Fortune And Forgetting by Aravindh Anura

90 - 91

Bà Ngoại by Trent Vu

92 - 95

Ancestry by Jacey Quah

96 - 97

Adelaide by Kavya Malhotra

98 99 - 101

Nanawa-Uh by Theresa Gunarso

102 - 103

The Travelling Mountain by Theresa Gunarso

104 - 107

No Heart Left To Give by Ali Noura

108 - 111

Black On Black by Seun Yinka-Kehinde

112 - 113

A Playlist Of Legacies by Lani Li and Nicole Nguyen Statement Of Intentions 4

72 - 73

Colour Consumed by Beray Uzunbay

Cushion Cover by Thirangie Jayatilake

Letters From The Office Bearers

113 114 - 115

Hi there,

Mark

Thanks for picking us up! If we haven’t met, I’m Mark, and I’m one of the 2019 PoC office bearers at UMSU. If we have met, chances are you’ve probably heard about me and Farah’s work. This year’s sure seen a lot of it. We’ve run heaps of regular collectives so that every student of Colour can find their community on campus. We’ve coordinated two themed weeks (Diversity Week and PoC Mental Health Week) to spark conversations and engage more students on these key issues. We’ve collaborated with other departments and clubs to advocate for intersectionality in all walks of student life. We’ve worked with University faculties in new and exciting ways to fight for a stronger PoC student voice.

farah Dear readers,

Since discovering the People of Colour Department, Myriad has always been my favourite part and has continued to be during my role as Office Bearer. I have to admit, as much as bringing people together through our events (and free food), seeing your connections flourish and providing a safe space has meant the world to me, nothing comes close to seeing 116 pages of glossy (but sustainably sourced) content created by young People of Colour. Myriad was initially created to create space for creatives of colour in student media. Seeing it grow has shown me it’s so much more than that. In my sub-editor bio last year, I wrote about how I’d love to one day see myself represented in unrealistic romcoms. While this still holds true, I also want to see myself, and all of you represented everywhere else. Through the many hours of work that have gone into this magazine, I have read and reread pieces as well as prolongedly stared at artwork and photography provided by you all. This magazine would have been nothing without all of you as well as this beautiful, talented, and inspirational editorial team to whom I am eternally grateful for.

It’s been our pleasure to work with you and represent you, in each of these ways and (we hope) a couple more. And now, in your hands you hold the final piece of the 2019 puzzle. Indeed, Myriad magazine is a culmination of these things; it’s a place to find community, spark conversations, advocate for intersectionality and feel your voice represented. It’s a snapshot of where we have been, where we are, and our hopes and dreams of where we’ll go. We hope this magazine speaks to you and takes you there as well. Thank you for participating in this year’s PoC department - it is you who makes our work so rewarding and special. Thank you for coming to our events, for getting to know Farah and I, for picking up this publication. Thank you. Thank you also to the contributors and in particular the editorial team, who’ve worked so hard on this edition of the magazine. You should be very proud of what you’ve achieved. Lastly, on a personal note, thank you to Yan and Hiruni, without whom I wouldn’t have done all this. Thank you. Mark Yin

To the team, the contributors, and you, reader (this isn’t Jane Eyre, I apologise) thank you for making the third volume of Myriad so special. Love, Farah Khairat

Letters From The Editors

Hi there!

tharidi

It’s Tharidi, and I wanted to start off by saying welcome to Myriad Magazine 2019! I’d like to thank you for picking up the magazine and helping us spread PoC voices as far as the eye can see. A big thank you is also necessary to everyone who has contributed to this year’s publication, and if that happens to also be you, dear reader, well look at you, being all productive while the rest of us barely get through our coursework! Our publication team has been swimming in a sea of support from day one, and we can’t express how much it means to join with you lovely readers in creating a safe and supportive platform for PoC to share their creations and experiences. Myriad has been and continues to be an important publication in my life. It encourages me to connect with my ethnic identity, celebrate being a Person of Colour with others in the community, and give race and culture its deserved place in the spotlight of my creative works. Throughout time, our myths, fables and legends have often gone unsung. This year, Myriad has opened a gate to the past, allowing our contributors to interrogate, challenge, embrace and draw attention to the histories that inform our experiences in this world. Reader, I hope this publication inspires you to weave yourself into the tapestry of time. Make your mark. Share those stories burning within you. And remember, Zeus is cool, but he’s had thousands of years in the limelight. It’s about time our myths and tales took centre stage! Yours sincerely, Tharidi Walimunige

Hey readers,

Nour

First off, I want to seriously thank you for giving me the opportunity to witness your amazing work while curating this baby. I’m in awe of the quality and sheer volume of talent I’ve seen in our inbox. It’s incredible, it’s all you, so thank you. Now I’ll tell you why this magazine is so important to me. I’ve worked in and dealt with multiple big name media companies, that were predominantly white. This shouldn’t surprise you too much, but the fact that this was in an Arab country might. This isn’t to say that I haven’t learnt amazing skills and garnered the experience of a lifetime. Just that it broke my heart to see so many talented creators of colour turned away at reception, to free more seats for white staff representing “progress”. To put it bluntly, it’s deeply embedded bullshit. Myriad represented a platform for creators of colour to finally reclaim the space they should have never been excluded from in the first place. Turn the pages and you’ll see exactly why. The fact of the matter is, we shouldn’t have to climb a wall where our white allies can take the damn elevator. We can do better. Please continue creating. Continue pushing open those doors. But most importantly, continue reclaiming.

I sure as hell would love to see ’skincare regimen for Arab women’ actually written by an Arab woman. Wouldn’t you?

Dear reader,

Sophie

Thank you for taking the time to meet Myriad 2019. Our team has worked to bring together stories, ideas and visions in the hope that this magazine will take you somewhere new. We are in the constant process of inventing futures. Ideas that we read, inherit, celebrate, abandon, critique and imagine are a crucial part of this process. The final chapter of Myriad 2019 asks how we build legacies from the present within reach and the past as it has come to be told. It is an exercise in futurity that depends on the mythscape and acts of reclamation that come before. For those of us whose narratives have been overwritten, misconstrued and erased, it is a radical act to stake claims in the open terrain of legacy. This is the space where we are free to envision ourselves and each other free from colonising and racialising forces. The futures that our contributors are crafting are both independent and interwoven; they are speculative, reflective and transgressive. In this section, you will encounter old and new stories side by side. They are speaking to each other as much as they speak to you, and we hope they inspire conversations that will break beyond what is bound together in these pages. Take what is here and take it further. Regards, Sophie Chauhan

Happy reading, Nour

"ICONIC"

Being part of the Myriad team, putting together all your beautiful submissions and designing this iconic magazine for you has been a pleasure and I hope you enjoy every minute of it.

"AESTHETIC"

DESIGN DESIGN

"I love designing ... like ... really love it. Through the hours upon hours of staring at the screen till my eyes hurt or working till I can hear the the birds at four in the morning - it's painful and I'm tired, but it's so worth it.

Relax, grab a coffee or some tea - while we spill some tea - and enjoy!"

Phoebe Owl

"I used to hate being called a "creative". It always sounded too pretentious, douchey, and a little ambiguous to me. Writers write. Content producers produce content. And designers well… design. But I’ve spent this entire year spilling the tea on the trashy men I’ve came across in my very own column, directed content for a number of enterprises and can proudly say I designed this beautiful magazine called Myriad with many other talented folx. Not to flex but it’s a lot of hard work. So hey, *sips boba* I’m a Creative - got a problem with that? ;)"

TEAM TEAM

SUCH POSERS

A'bidah Zaid Shirbeeni

DESIGN (DREAM) TEAM

ABOUT US 9

The cutest OB's Farah Khairat

The Myriad team is made up of individuals who are passionate about representation, PoC experiences and art. In an environment where it can be incredibly difficult to find anything that properly reflects us (read: aggressively white, painfully inaccurate), we hope that you, the reader, will find yourself reflected in these pages, like Mulan did in the river next to her house. The work in these pages transcend entertainment, but remind us that our experiences are valid, our identities are not monolithic and that there is power in speaking them into existence. This edition of Myriad brings you your noodle horoscope, together with immersive, jaw-dropping short stories, stunningly lyrical poetry, and so much more.

Nour Altoukhi

Sophie Chauhan

Tharidi Wal

Sub-Editors

Michelle Mashuro

An Pham

Ashley Lau Social Media Babes

Dilpreet Kaur Taggar

Jing Xuan Teo

Nurul Juhria Kamal

Designers

Marina Litchfield

note to

Mark Yin

Myriad has yet again had the pleasure of curating a space for PoC writers, storytellers, poets and artists to express themselves and share their work without limitation. This edition of Myriad is something we’re extremely proud of and couldn’t have done without the hours of dedication from our team and the wonderful work of our contributors. Whilst immersing yourself in the pages of this magazine, we hope you feel all the passion and love that we have put into making it.

Editors

MEET the TEAM

readers

We are so stoked for you to feast your eyes on our little magazine baby and we hope that you love this year’s edition as much as we do. In the words of Solange, ‘this shit is for us’. All our love, A'bidah, An, Ashley, Dilpreet, Juhria, Marina, Michelle, Phoebe, and Xuan P.s. Don’t forget to share your favourite pieces on Subtle Asian Traits so that we can finally get 15 seconds of Internet fame!

A'bidah Zaid Shirbeeni

Phoebe Owl

MYTHOLOGY MYTHOLOGY

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MYTH AND MEMORY: UNCOVERING THE GENIUS OF MYTHIC TRADITIONS BY PATRICK MERCER

IG: @lediabetique

n western cultures, mythology is generally regarded as a primitive and archaic lens through which to interpret the world around us; superseded by faith in organised religion, in science, and through modern-day rationalism. The “mythology” of a particular culture is just as likely to be studied when examining antiquity as contemporary anthropology – despite the root Greek mythos translating to story or history, today the word myth is synonymous with fantasy. Western culture’s obsession with the everelusive holy grail of objectivity that discounts the histories, spiritual lore and moral parables of other cultures as mythology; however, any Person of Colour (PoC) who has opened a history book, trawled Facebook comments or read The Herald Sun will know that white people are more than capable of “mythologising” the world around them. From mythology, much can be gleaned about the societies from which the stories are derived – their values, their histories, their cultural contexts and their environments. In Indigenous Australian cultures, mythology isn’t fantasy – in fact, imbedded within the epistemological framework of oral culture that is Indigenous “mythology”, is a complex lexicon of historical, mathematical, ecological, engineering and astronomical information.

Playlist curated by Farah Khairat

Many who have gone through an Australian primary education may recognise the morality fable of Tiddalik, or Jiddelek, a common

Dreaming story from South Eastern Australia. Tiddalik was a great frog with an insatiable thirst – after drinking from the water holes, and then the creeks, and then the rivers, the land was thrown into drought. The other animals decided that to make Tiddalik spit the water out, they should make him laugh; eventually, snake twisted himself into knots and with this comedic gold Tiddalik finally released the water back into the landscape. This story, as well as providing an observation of the behaviour of certain animals and providing etiological meaning for local bodies of water, is in itself a definition of Indigenous economic philosophy – natural resources are for the benefit of all living things, bound in dependence. It is only when the needs of all are considered that society is strongest. This was achieved by an intricate social structure that was rooted in the inherent connections between humankind and nature – people belonged to land hereditarily and had subsequent Landcare responsibilities to that place. This included a moiety kinship system that included mythic heroes such as Bunjil the Eagle and Waa the Crow, who are described in local Victorian Kulin traditions. Within each moiety each person also belongs to one of seven or eight other totems, including emu, snake, goanna, pelican, crow and bat. To what extent is this framework incorrect? Is not all life on this earth descended from a common ancestor, and evolved to their current state? The genius of Indigenous kinship, explained through mythology, allows for a system of agriculture that works with the natural environment, and recognises the capacity of all living things to feel, think, communicate, and suffer. Aboriginal kinship is an integral part of the wider mythological pantheon of stories best described in English as the Dreaming. Dreaming Law thus governs traditional Aboriginal kinship, its relationship to land tenure and ownership to their Country, linked relationally by people, places, animals, plants and artistic expressions.

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Often these stories explain this kinship by presenting mythological characters as simultaneously human, animal and creator spirit, invested in the success of humanity. For example, one Kulin story tells of how Bunjil and Waa gave humanity the technology of fire. Waa, often a trickster character in Kulin stories, stole the secret of fire and guarded it jealously from the people and animals. Eventually Bunjil, the eagle and the other creatures forced Waa to share the fire, and he threw glowing coals from his nest to scrub below, sparking a bushfire which burnt his feathers black. Bunjil’s sidekick, the Kestrel, then swooped down and stole a flaming stick from the blaze – in the wild, kestrels are often seen spreading bushfires in this way to force prey into the open. Mythic traditions connected to specific places created a framework for Koori people to “see” their Country experientially – their world was mapped by Songlines; stories told by the natural environment, weaving a complex web of mythology, lore and law into their observations of the natural world. For Indigenous people, knowledge was experiential and sensory – consequently, oral mythological traditions enabled a knowledge system known as Loci (Latin for “place”), the

association of memory with a location. Loci uses landscape features, ceremonial sites, abstract designs – anything with distinct features where information can be linked to memory, and then reinforced by song, story, dance, art and symbols. Loci is not only linked to physical places – Koori people also use the stars as memory spaces. Constellations of stars often represent features on the landscape. Each star was associated with a landscape feature, such as waterholes and food resources, as well as enabling people to travel long distances for trade and ceremony, forming trade routes throughout the continent. This celestial navigation system was part of a larger astronomical pursuit – one that tentatively studied the heavens as an economic tool of the agricultural industry. Koori people enjoyed a rich and diverse diet likely unparalleled for much of history, working with the regular and dependable phenomena of each season. In the Melbourne region, the Kulin Nations worked on a 6-season cycle that was measured by Bora Stone arrangements, such as the stone henge on my people’s Country, at Wurdi Youang. On a hill near Geelong, formed using about 90 blocks of basalt, Wurdi Youang clearly identifies the equinox, the winter solstice and summer solstice, amongst other celestial activity. Dating back more than 11,000 years, it could be the world’s oldest astronomical observatory.

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Aboriginal Loci knowledge is not only complex and comprehensive, but also incredibly durable, and information can survive tens of thousands of years. The Dja Dja Wurrung have a story dating back 10,000 years, describing how two feuding volcanoes, Tarrengower and Lalgambook, were formed after the elder Tarrengower was challenged by the young Lalgambook. Lalgambook erupted throwing boulders across the land, but in the process blowing a vast crater. Similar stories are told by the Gunditjimara who witnessed the Creator Spirits cause an eruption at Budj Bim some 30,000 years ago. The importance of cultural myths and legends lies not only in our understanding of the past, but also in the future. Over millennia humanity has weathered all manner of storms – most significantly for our future, many instances of regional and global climatic change. Few economic systems have proven so able to weather the pressures of climatic shifts as those developed by Indigenous Australian cultures, the oldest continuing cultures on the planet. This is reflected in oral traditions, which tell of the catastrophic impacts of climate change. Bunurong Elder, Aunty Caroline Briggs tells the story: Many years ago, the land that we now call Melbourne extended right out to the ocean. Port Phillip Bay was then a large flat plain where Bunurong hunted kangaroos and cultivated their yams. “One day there came a time of chaos and crises. The Boonwurrung and the other Kulin nations were in conflict. They argued and fought, they neglected their children... their land.... The animals were killed but not always eaten... fish were caught during their spawning season. As this chaos grew the sea became angry and began to rise until it covered their plain and threatened to flood the whole of their country.”

The rising sea levels were eventually stopped by Bunjil, who made the Kulin nations agree to work together to maintain their responsibilities to the landcare and ecological management of the land. Gathering so of the Kulin Nations from throughout much of Victoria would congregate where the Birrarung (Yarra) meets Narrm (Port Phillip Bay), where today the Victorian Parliament and treasury buildings now sit, and they would resolve conflicts through ceremony, dance, sports and debate. This story is at least 7,000 years old and describes the end of the last Ice Age, however similar, older stories tell of a time when Tasmania was also connected to the mainland. Mythology is much more important to society than mere entertainment - mythology is the intersection between history, culture, science, technology, mathematics and morality, forming complex and comprehensive epistemologies through which to understand the world. Oral cultures, through mythology and the power of loci, are able to pass information from generation to generation, maintaining the integrity of the information for tens of thousands of years. Historically, agrarian societies are poorly disposed to deal with such pressures; dependent on reliable climate conditions and the abundance of surplus, these communities become extremely prone to collapse. Worse still, these agrarian societies existed within wider economic systems of codependence, resulting in “System Collapse” which permeates across nations, cultures and continents – more often than not, system collapse results in “Dark Ages”, in which significant amounts of information are lost. There is a wealth of climate-change survival knowledge gathered by Indigenous people in Australia for the last 120,000 years. Given our current trajectory towards system collapse at the hands of climate change, it is essential that we reconsider our obsession with objectivity, privilege Indigenous knowledges, and reflect deeper on the true meanings of the myths and legends we heard as kids.

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s r e t h ug

PORTRAIT STUDY #1 BY KAAVYA JHA

C O L O U R

BY VEERA RAMAYAH IG: @veera.ramayah

n a procrastination induced conversation with my best friend, Amber, we discussed our various experiences as both daughters and women of colour. From dating taboos to parental induced dress codes, we realized the threads of similarity that tied us together better than any friendship bracelet would. And so, the term “DoC” or “Daughters of Colour” was born. In our discussion, we also unraveled the way we DoCs master the art of being a modern day version of “Two-Face”. Like Harvey Dent, we subconsciously adapt to our surroundings. In all your life and in all “woods” around the world, from Holly to Bolly and everything in between, you’ll never find an actress as good as a DoC. We can adapt instantly to our surroundings and the performances required for the people we’re around deserve nothing short of every academy award and more. Our portfolio of acting credits are brimming with a multitude of different roles. From sanskaari daughter to good role model elder sister, to the ideal granddaughter, the trophy girlfriend to the acceptable ethnic friend, to those friend groups where we can be an unapologetic amalgamation of all of the above. The switch between these roles sometimes happens unconsciously, other times it’s excruciating to go from one to the other. The freedom that comes with being one is so seductive and almost whispers a siren song; calling you back to it, to her, while you squish yourself down into the rigid mold that each role inevitably comes with. More and more I realise that my life, thus far, and maybe forever, consists of a balancing

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act. The need to manage these various roles, dependent on the situation I am in and the other side of the proverbial coin, my true self. Inevitably, after taking up these many roles, you begin to lose sight of yourself. You wake up one morning with a new piercing because the rebellious character wanted to be spontaneous; you cut your hair on a whim because some aunty told you that you look better with long hair; you automatically autopilot to the more conservative wardrobe options when packing for a trip back home. When I am alone and no one is asking me to be one thing or not to be another, who am I? How much of my individual behaviour is dictated by these roles and how much of these is what I want to actually do? When someone close to me tells me, “Oh, thats not like you”, I wonder who exactly they’re referring to. Is it the version of me who will always serve my elders before myself at the dinner table, the silent role I adopt at the temple, or the jokes that are on re-run, each slightly more socially acceptable than before? There are only pockets of time where I truly feel as though I can breathe, and most often, it happens when I’m alone, or with two or three of my closest friends, all of whom are PoC. It's so freeing, to not be stuck between outfit changes backstage, hurriedly fitting myself into the next costume, the next character, as the set changes. But instead of salt rimming the shot glass of freedom, there’s the undeniable taste of guilt. Our families have sacrificed so much for us, supported us along the way and have provided us with so much. To enjoy life without them, or to try and separate some of their influence as you grow up, almost seems like the worst kind of Shakespearean betrayal. It takes its toll. And in a guilt induced hangover, you find yourself back in autopilot mode, subconsciously adopting family values and priorities ahead of your own. You look at yourself in the mirror, but who you are seems to be something that is so far out of reach, no matter how close you get to the glass. These thoughts and musings are typical of every role that a DoC occupies. The growing pains that this comes with is often experienced in isolation. Our communities focus on the obvious, concrete issues that require the most focus; but the nuance is often lost in the cracks. And this is only one part of the plethora of issues that we deal with, at the intersection of gender and race. We are jugglers at heart, ask any DoC and she’ll tell you the neverending list of things she has going on, academia, social, extra-curricular, professional, family, dating, health & wellbeing. Each juggling ball weighs a tonne. And when one ball drops, which they do, from time to time, we are responsible for picking it up and continuing our act, no matter what. I’d love to start auditions for a suitable understudy sometime soon.

? i m a o h w

PORTRAIT STUDY #2 BY KAAVYA JHA

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YELLOW FEVER AN “EPIDEMIC” CLOSER TO US THAN WE THINK BY LINDSAY WONG IG: @flimsyylindsayy

CW: Slurs, racism, fetishisation

Attention to all cute asian girls, anyone want to help fulfil a longtime fantasy of mine? Kind regards, from a man with a bad case of yellow fever.

The allure of Asian women comes from the stereotype that we are all quiet, docile, submissive and passive. Furthermore, the stereotype states that Asian women are “sexually free”, meaning that they are more sexually openminded than Caucasian girls. Perpetuated by the trope of hypersexual Asian women in media, we are thought of as being ‘naturally inclined’ to sexually serve men, whilst white women are ‘too feminist’.’ While there may be truth to every stereotype, times are changing and it is unwise to put a stereotype on half of an entire race.

- white boy, unpublished Unimelb Love letter, May 2019. Asians are seen as the model minority in the

We see the term ‘yellow fever’ pop up constantly within the media. And no, I’m not talking about the fatal disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes. (But it could be just as dangerous) Yellow fever, also known as ‘Asian fetish’, is a term for a myth that East Asian women make better sexual lovers than other women. Some white men have yellow fever so severe that they actively seek out East Asian women to satisfy their sexual desires or enter into a physical relationship with. There is a reason why relationships between caucasian guys and East Asian girls have a bad reputation – it’s because of the tainted history of yellow fever. This ideology dehumanizes women and implies that sexual violence against Asian women is normalise. It reduces individual women to objects purely based on their race and serves as a motivating factor in which men pursue women just because they are of East Asian descent. Yellow fever has its roots in Orientalism, the Western world’s fascination with all things “other”. It can be traced back to the 1200s, when Marco Polo traveled to the East and discovered a whole new world. Fast forward to the 20th century – America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam spawned love stories between American soldiers and local women, much like the ‘white saviour’ trope that we see in the media. The pairing is, for the majority of the time, between caucasian men and East Asian women. Popular media has contributed to an influx of dating sites geared towards men with yellow fever. Data from

Facebook dating apps showed that men have a preference for East Asian women, except Asian men, ironically. Interestingly, white supremacists on the far-right are considered to have yellow fever and it is a nationalist rite of passage to have an East Asian wife.

West – smart, clean, polite and organised. They get good grades and avoid trouble like the plague – they are hard-working, high-achieving and well-behaved. Asians are the “goody-two shoes” that spend the majority of their time studying. However, these stereotypes, as well as the submissive Asian girl stereotype, are seen as ‘socially acceptable’ due to East Asia’s prospering economies. There are not many people challenging this stereotype or speaking out against it – some may not even be aware that

NON-FICTION this stereotype exists. In Hollywood, Asian women are only characterised as sexy geishas, femme fatales or kung fu fighters. We are split into two categories: The ‘Lotus Blossom Baby’ and ‘Dragon Lady’. ‘Lotus Blossom Baby’ refers to the young, docile and soft Asian girl who will do everything you wish. On the other hand, ‘Dragon Lady’ is the fierce and sexy Asian woman. You will probably find one of the two stereotypes in any Hollywood blockbuster that feature an Asian female character. ‘Reverse’ yellow fever also seems to be on the rise as Caucasian girls actively pursue East Asian guys to hook up with or pursue relationships with. This is largely due to the rising popularity of K-pop, especially in the West. Once upon a time, Asian guys were seen as geeky, nerdy, and overall undesirable. Now, their popularity is thriving because K-pop is so big around the world and Asian guys are now considered hot, sexy and desirable. Groups like BTS are selling out stadiums in the US and UK and Caucasian girls want someone who looks like V or Jimin. The glitz and glamour of K-pop, as seen in the aesthetics, fashion and style of the genre, has led white girls to put Asian men on a pedestal. Yellow fever remains predominant in popular culture, finding its way to video games, manga, and anime. Examples include Nicki Minaj’s music

video for ‘Chun Li’, in which the rapper heavily stereotypes Asian culture. Double buns and dancing with chopsticks in hair popped up in the formerly trending #ChunLiChallenge. It even pops up in our very own beloved Unimelb Love Letters (UMLL) on Facebook. UMLL has received a string of submissions about white guys looking for East Asian girls to “cure their yellow fever”. They want a submissive girl that they can show off, splurge all their money on and execute their skills in bed. There are even a few love letters from Asian guys who are looking for white girls with yellow fever. UMLL also receives a multitude of miscellaneous love or hate letters attacking those with yellow fever or questioning why they have it. They have accused Caucasian girls of wanting “the next best thing after Jungkook from BTS” (unpublished Unimelb love letter, April 2019). Girls from other races also wonder why “white boys don’t want [them] like they want yellow girls”. One angry white girl even suggested painting her face yellow so that the “hot” white guys she is crushing on pays attention to her instead of chasing after Asian girls. Yellow fever is evident around us at our own university and unfortunately, it is accompanied with a sense of racism and prejudice in a place where all PoC are allegedly supposed to feel safe. Currently, there is no cure for yellow fever and it will be hard to eradicate. With more and more Asian representation in the media, as well as the popularity of Japanese anime and K-pop girl groups, it is likely that the Asian girl stereotype will continue to be propagated on a grand scale. With its close ties to yellow fever, more cases will probably pop up soon. The whole concept is extremely misogynistic and does not allow for East Asian women to have any form of selfempowerment. Even in interracial relationships in which race really does not play a significant part in a relationship, yellow fever will still be brought up because of its history as being a fetishized concept. For society to move on, this issue needs to be addressed. I would like to extend my thanks to the admins of Unimelb Love Letter, who took the time and effort to compile a Google Sheets featuring letters about yellow fever, published and unpublished. You guys have enhanced this piece and made it better.

NON-FICTION

letter to the stars

by Jesslyn Swan IG: @jesslynsjs

ear Aquarius, I cried when you moved. You were the first friend I cried about. You were different. Funny, a little clueless sometimes, but there are depths to you I’m sure no ordinary thirteen year old could’ve had. You were patient. I could always see that light in your eyes behind those thick frames. You made me feel I was weird and special and liked. You told me when I was wrong, why I was wrong and you rooted for me when I was right. You didn’t judge. You took my side. And you went. Dear Pisces, You judge. Dear Aries, You have a nice smile. Your face looks weird when you don’t smile. I like your tan. I think you use too much hair gel though. I like your hands. I like the innocence of you. You are physical by design, but you were gentle. That drew me to you. But you are a boy and not a man. She sat on your lap. She cried wolf. She gave you the kind of affection meant for the photographs. You shunned me. I realize jocks are jocks. Don’t read too much between the lines. You were the first person to teach me that. Unfortunately you weren’t the last. Dear Taurus, You ruined me. Goodbye. Dear Gemini, Were we ever friends? You’re fun, you’re that kind of girl guys trip over their feet to talk to. The first time I put on makeup was in front of you. The first time I giggled in a changing room with five dresses to try on, it was with you. The

first time I thought of a boy romantically you were egging me on. The first time I tried a cappuccino was at your call. You were more laidback than I was at school. I guess it came naturally to you. I tried to mediate conflict between you and someone else, I ended up getting burned. She left. You left. It was like I never existed. It became awkward to share a birthday cake. I hated my birthday ever since. I tried a couple of times. With books. I ended up looking like an alien. You ignored me. You are a fleeting image. You are the desirable, the young at heart. You cross my mind in the empty spaces in between. I know you’ve never thought of me, not even once. Did I ever have you? No, I suppose I never had. Sometimes I still wish we were. Friends that is. But you left the moment I needed a friend the most. I don’t think I ever told you what happened that year. I lost a scholarship, I lost my innocence, I lost my will to live. To this day I still haven’t found it. I guess if anything was ever there, I had to be imagining it. Dear Cancer, You thought you were my only option. That I’d leeched onto you because I didn’t have a choice. I’ve lost count of the number of times I didn’t let myself choose you. Late nights drafting long messages only to be deleted. Pictures of sunsets that reminded me of you. I never sent them. I knew you wouldn’t respond or it’d be me idealizing you, pressuring you. I wanted to be close to you. I wanted to spend birthdays with you. I wanted to hear you tell me nothing and everything. I wanted to be by your side, instead of just grasping onto the ghost of you.

NON-FICTION

I wanted you to see me like I see you. Here is the problem. I. I. I. I wanted. I’ll take care of it. I will fade. For both our sake’s. I never was a fraction of what you meant to people. I’m sorry for making my… everything outweigh yours. Nothing of me was ever more. You are beloved and kinder than most. You are someone I cannot hold. You are free. I set you free. Dear Leo, Youth doesn’t excuse what you did. Dear Virgo, There are people you encounter in life whose sole purpose is to teach you a lesson. The thing is, had I never met you, I’d be living a considerably different life. You’re a ripple effect, you see? Whether you meant it or not no longer matters. Isn’t it nice to be forgiven? To be unstained? To be content? I thought the easiest way to lose love and respect was cheap shots. It doesn’t work like that apparently. They sympathize, help. They’re happy when you are. You earn every emotion there is to earn. I could have torn myself apart and no one would have looked my way. They see you. They never see me. She loves you. She loves you. There is no still or despite or any connectives or prepositions involved. She loves you. To be near and held dear by someone. I thought I knew how that worked. I didn’t. Not after you. I wish I could forget you. Let me forget you. Dear Libra, I don’t get you. You said you liked me, but you weren’t there for me. You wanted to date, I wanted to be friends. You didn’t want to be friends. You were nice, if a little plucky. Played well with others. You force things sometimes. You forced us. The thing is I might’ve had dated you had you been a good friend to me. You weren’t. You were impatient. We could have been something had you waited. Now I’m glad you didn’t. We were too

different from the beginning. We aren’t friends anymore. But if we were, I’d remind you to not be roped into trends or whatever it is people are calling their vices these days. If you don’t need to collect bad habits, don’t. Some of us are desperate to shed them. Dear Scorpio, You are a woman. You were always a woman in my eyes. You have a warm heart and a beautiful laugh. I trusted you enough to befriend you. Or was it you who befriended me? I don’t think I have a bad memory of you, which astonishes me. The problem is I couldn’t open up to you. Not after her. But I hope you become all you want to be. I know you have that in you. And I hope at the end of it you’ll recognize me. Dear Sagittarius, I was a puzzle to you. Once solved, I was nothing more than an object to be discarded, gaining dust. She was your next puzzle. You don’t tire of her like you did me. She’s still your friend. You are loved. Your friends, your teachers love you. You don’t have it all, I know that. But you had something worthwhile. You had things to live for, which will only grow. It didn’t hurt that you were a looker with a good head on your shoulders. I thought we could have been equals. Or something better. You made me feel so fucking stupid. Stupid party. Stupid dress. Stupid music. Stupid year. Stupid connection. Never read between the lines. Dear Capricorn, We didn’t get along. We do now. I still don’t know how to communicate. I don’t tell you things. But I don’t tell anyone things. I’m still sad a lot. I don’t do it because it’s so old it’s stupid. I’m amazed at the speed with which you consume non-fiction paired with your unwillingness to read fiction. It suits you in a way. Things I know I can learn from you; creativity, adaptability, compassion. Thanks for being the adult whenever I can’t stomach being one. Thank you for trying.

NON-FICTION

How Death Brought An Atheist Closer To God: An Exploration Into The Mental State Of A Grieving Mind BY BETTULE ASSI

CW: Death by cancer, depression, self - harm references

CHAPTER 1

May 13th 2018. I shrouded myself in the scent of frosted berries. The autumn breeze drifted into my room as I dressed myself. It was Mother’s Day. However, as I wore my linen turtleneck and gold earrings, the day felt heavy on my shoulders. In many ways, it was ironic that it was Mother’s Day. My mother’s grief floods through the phone with each call this past year. That morning, she calls me and tells me how she slept next to my Aunty the previous night. She tells me about the groans of pain that were substituted for snores. My Aunty, Amtou, was sick with a rare form of terminal appendix cancer. The disease tore its way through the family the way the guillotine tears its way through gravity. I remember the plead in my mother’s voice to come visit Amtou, my ears unknowing to the severity of the request. I failed to leave my room that morning. It wasn’t until the afternoon sun cast its light through my room, where I got the message from my sister. “How long will it take you to get to Amtou’s? She’s passed.” I felt like I was sinking. Think collapsing lungs. I remember walking into Amtou’s house that afternoon. The faded green staircase leading to her room appeared taller than it used to. I could hear my mother’s wailing. The screech pierced my breath; I thought her lungs would start bleeding. Grief comes in many forms. I never thought it was possible for it to manifest into something so raw, so brutal. My mother was wailing in rhythm. Her voice echoing through the halls of Amtou’s house. When I opened the door to Amtou’s room, it was as though I had stopped breathing. My mother was sitting near Amtou’s body. Her fist pounding on her chest like a battlecry. Her nails ripping at her scalp. Her wails near animalistic. Her breath rugged. Amtou was laying under her, her head facing Mecca. The Quran was playing, its verses ripped through the air. And I just stood at the doorway, rooted in my own fear. My mother screaming,

She asked me to cry for my Aunty. She asked me to take off my earrings and cry for my Aunty. I remember the surreal wave washing over me as I stepped towards to end of the bed. Amtou’s face was exposed, the rest of her body covered in a peach coloured sheet. She was so skinny, her lips parted slightly, and eyes closed. The constellation of freckles faded from her skin. The curves of her cheekbones pulling back her skin. Her thin hair tucked behind her small ears. I forgot the in-between. I tried my hardest not to be stolen by rhetorical moments of weeping. More people arrived, all joining in the same wailing process. I was afraid that Amtou would disappear among all the chaotic grief in the room. As I stood, I realised the detachment I had from everyone else. The detachment I had from everything that was happening in that room. I was unable to bring myself to cry. All I could feel was the damning weight of my heart in my chest and the shortness of my breath. All I was capable of doing was to look upon Amtou’s tiny body and absorb all the anguish in the house. I was frozen. It was as if I were an alien. I was looking in on something so foreign that still, one year later, I cannot quite articulate what I saw or what I felt. All I know is that something in me changed that day, in that room. The seams of my soul seeming as fragile as the seams of the linen I wore. It was as if I had been skinned, meddled with, torn up— my insides stretched, squeezed, twisted, and stitched back up. Something in me was completely off. The wounds from that day still pressing on my chest. The trauma of Mother’s Day 2018 is something I still carry on my shoulders. My bones retract whenever the word 'cancer' is said by anyone. I know too well the vulgarity of death. The despair it is capable of bringing. I have spent so many nights in anger of my own reaction to it; at my own alienation from what I experienced and what I should have experienced. My hate for God grew into an unhealthy obsession, which in my admission, seemed completely contradictory to my then belief of “there is no God”. In my

NON-FICTION frustration, confusion, and grief, I cut myself out of the whole experience. I acted the furthest away from holy than I ever had; my sorrow tore its way through my friendships, education, and happiness. I had anticipated Amtou’s death since the day of diagnosis. She was such a stark and loved figure in my life; existed as a mother, a grandmother, a carer, a teacher, and a friend. This exacerbated my reaction towards her death; I felt completely and entirely alone in my own grief. My behaviour in the months after Amtou died spiralled into a sinister barricade of any emotional contentment or honesty. I had grown a sense of uncontrollable rage towards the smallest of things and confined my despair to my 8 meters squared dorm room. It was only during the semester break, when I returned back home, that I was able to fully accept the reasons for my loneliness. Every night, as rhythmic as my mother’s wailing, regret would creep its way into my bedroom. Regret for not having had seen Amtou the morning of her death. The unforgiving voice that replayed in my head; She wanted to see you, you fucking idiot, she asked for you and you never came and now she’s dead. My skeleton turned into a trellis, where sadness grew and thrived, watered by sleepless nights and destructive actions. The alienation I felt in Amtou’s room the day she died was uncanny. I felt an incomprehensible amount of detachment from a culture I thought I knew. I realised that culture is not just carried in its dress, its food, or its celebratory events, just as religion is not just carried solely in life. I realised that the binding agent between the two is its reaction to death. Culturally, how was I meant to react to Amtou’s passing? Should I have lost myself in a screeching tangent, hitting my chest and joining the rhythmic wailing? Should I have cried in silence? Should I have worn black until a year after? Should I have stopped listening to music for weeks? I suppose I won’t ever know what the correct reaction to such loss will ever be. However, it is true to say that there exists different means in which I should have taken to allow for a more constructive healing, rather than obscure measures to heal from something I did not even understand. Internalised Melancholia: Disconnections from Mourning and the Individualisation of Grief September 2018 I was sitting in the dining hall. It was deep into the second semester of University, around September. I slowly began losing my appetite over the winter months, eating for the sake

of feeling full. I would spend endless hours in the gym sweating. I would work until I felt drained, sweat until I was empty. The physical strain on my body more attractive than any conversation or small talk I could have with anyone. That night in September, I was sitting among a group of people, only one of which I was engaged in conversation with. The conversation was agonising to hold. I wanted nothing more than to just sink into the timber chairs and wooden floorboards. I began playing with the skin surrounding my fingernails. As an anxious child, I would bite and rip bits off of my fingers whenever anything seemed too much. As my friend across from me kept talking, I got increasingly more irritable, picking at my nails. Their words about their unimportant day becoming more and more excruciating to listen to. It was like listening to nails screeching down a chalkboard. I begin chewing my skin around my left thumb. It was salty. I started to peel the skin with my front teeth, twisting and biting it. They kept talking. I could taste blood however I couldn’t stop. I was a marionette. Slave to my own childlike habits. I wrenched the bit of skin back until the tear reached my knuckle. I ripped it off, chewed it, and wrapped the bloody finger with my grey hoodie. I could see my friend putting an absurd amount of effort to not look at my thumb; their eye contact seeming like a chore they did not want to do. They continued talking. I continued chewing. Being in the room with Amtou’s body and unable to participate in the cultural grieving process with all the older women, forced me to individualise my grief; I absorbed it like a sponge. My inability to participate in a communal form of grieving prevented me from being able to ‘throw’ my pain back into that room in the theatrical way that the rest of the women did. Rather, I was under the dangerous notion that I was able to handle the trauma of death alone. It seemed as though I was torn between two worlds. The world that I knew; the western world of ‘dealing’ with death in a closed off, ‘pretty’ way. Where you have a single tear come down in a sterile funeral, with sweet eulogies and sweeter champagne. Where death is something that just happens. And rather than being sad, you celebrate the death as another chapter. The other half of me was stuck in the violent anguish, the animalistic weeping, and the rituals of death. Where death is mourned religiously, immensely, emotionally. I suppose the dichotomy in my identity as a second generation Middle Eastern became most prominent when I experienced the death of a loved one.

Haven’t you realised? You can’t have one without the two?

I was beautiful when I delivered But when menstruating, pain bore all through

Is it the miraculous things it has laboured Observed from afar, a different point of view?

My body, they say, is impure and dreaded So why do I still love it the way I do?

Doors that were already tarnished and stained Couldn’t welcome my body – what a break through

For my body is impure and dreaded When it needed love, love withdrew

the social edit

by phoebe owl

Not a single god offended Not a temple I walked into

POETRY

period of love

POETRY

maybe i woke up today by Loo Deyuan

CW: Violence, suicide

Let me get one thing straight: I’m a Caprisun, I don’t cry – I spring a leak on the inside of my left forearm, drink my mouth bloody as. I replace my coronary arteries with plastic straws; too small and sharp to disguise myself with any other function. I’ve been doing this for years now because addiction runs in the family, my parents used to beat me, etc. I thought about telling you my Paypal but. My therapist thinks I’m strong and my parents think I’m strong which must mean something. Maybe I don’t need the therapist, maybe I wouldn’t want the therapist if I hadn’t been stuffed with PTSD while I was taxidermied – seized and stepped on and wrung out with grief, but therapists are good for everyone. I should be in the hospital having my head caved in with an aluminium baseball bat. I go to therapy.

My last boyfriend that I didn’t have because I’m dead pulled the cotton from my mouth and laughed when I asked him to break my arm. I hate men, I hate them so I won’t write about them knife the nearest man in the face and if that’s you, so be it that’s me too. I should stay in bed but I have a lecture to get to and I’m in love with the way people speak when they only have one language to contend with and they don’t see bats flying in their face and rats in the supermarket. Last month I bought my medication online far be it for me to ask someone for help, y’know? Or you don’t know, maybe the point is that you don’t know any of this, you don’t know that my entire life has been spent with my head in the fridge spooning my brain straight out of its container and eating it, because it’s like that sometimes you put a lobster on a phone and call it Dreaming.

ON TRUTH, when she was becoming a woman, a queen came to her, invisible to everyone

POWER one day her kingdom shook, the waves rolled. She cannot believe it is finally happening. only prayer, so pure and faithful, can be so strong. she rises above the water to see -

who didn't matter. "you will become my general, my goddess it is a man, of course of warriors," she said. it is a man. strong and patient he sits. she sighs. and so she went, pledging loyalty to the Queen, all the while it is time. she approaches, still waiting, waiting smile on her face, resignation for someone to sweep her off her feet, fulfill the prophecy. two decades long she waited. by this time she had come into her own, fulfilled her Destiny.

in her eyes, "marry me,

that immortality is a curse. She is now queen of many kingdoms, of both land and sea and, some say, air, fire. in exchange for her help she asks for only one thing:

BY CHIARA SITUMORANG

"she will marry a king," they said. who are they to say?

him win the war. when he dies, she marries his successor. humans, she thinks, they don't understand

IG: @chiarasitumorang Twitter: @chiarastmrng

she was born into this world a princess, but she was meant to be a queen.

POETRY

that they leave her own people, her home, alone. you have taken so much from me, she thinks. give me this. but deep down she knows: man answers to nobody, not kindness, not pity. and yet, in hope, she gives and gives, and they take and take.

king," she says. "marry me and i will help you win your war." she marries him. she helps

TRUE POWER 31

ind me in a backyard. Sitting, crosslegged, like a yogi. On red, rectangular cobblestones that are warm to the touch. One of those big suburban backyards, contained by old wooden fences on three sides. The grass is dead. Rough yellow and brown. I am spending the summer here. My sixteenth. On this parched, lethargic earth. I could say I’m here because we just moved in and I hardly know anyone. I could say that I’m more of an introvert or that I’m meditating on the state of humanity and the nature of the universe. I could say that I have parents who would kill me if a hair is out of place. I could say so many things. But nobody listens when I talk anyway. So I don’t. Talk. Not much. And it worries people. Take my mum. She hovers. An anxious little thing. She moves all the teacups into the drawer. Then back out onto the kitchen bench. Get me the onion. Open the tomato tin. Cut the carrot. She’s so good at giving orders. And a loud voice too. Sometimes I imagine her with a big head, crown on top. “Off with her head!” She stares at me from the kitchen window periodically. In a checked green apron with bright pink straps and her light blue cotton housedress underneath. She occupies her favourite place in the world. The kitchen. Her eyes burn into me. “Amber,” she says, “A girl your age should be up and about.”

Up and about to me is swimming in the ocean, climbing mountains or being a flâneur in the city, minus the top hat and snobbery. You really couldn’t do any of that here. The suburbs are stuck in a perpetual malaise. Oh please, I’m not half as dramatic as my queen mother. She has planted herself firmly in the mythology of wife and mother. Or does mother come first? I can never tell. “Amber,” she screams, “You’re the reason I have high blood pressure.” I close my eyes and let the sunrays soak into my skin.

“Who was that call from?”

banksias. One step into the wild bush. A touch of the peeling bark on a birch, the sweet amber tears underneath. Bird screeches and cricket croaks in the night. Where the earth is at once both still and spinning. And everything in you – everything you’ve held onto – dissipates. Poof. Just like that. Gone.

“It was my girlfriend from work,” he says. “I have lots of them.”

My dad pumps his chest out, smug. “I drank a big mug of milk every morning,” he says.

“Oh really? Then why don’t get them to cook for you? And do the dishes and wash your clothes and raise your daughter,” she says.

Sometimes I want to laugh out so loud that my stomach hurts.

A phone rings from the dining table next to the kitchen. My dad answers. His voice, soft. He steps out through the glass door into the backyard. My mum’s eyes fix on him as she washes the dishes. She watches. She waits. And pounce.

I press my palm into the scorched cobblestone. There is line of ants next to my pinky finger. I follow it with my eyes. Each ant carries a little stick, a piece of dust, a tiny stone. They slip through the crack in the stone towards the grass, burying into the dirt. It must be cooler down there. My dad grins at me. “Amber,” he says, “A girl your age should be more active.” Active to him is me riding around the suburb, giving out mail. Or mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges. Active to him is me getting a job at McDonalds and making friends with the obnoxious kids who work there. Mind you, I don’t have a problem with our marvellous Maccas. It’s just the idea of putting a smile on my face and taking orders. More orders. At least here I don’t have to smile. Even if my mum hates me for it.

Oh. I do have one new friend in this place. She’s really not like me though. Long hair and long black eyelashes – never forgets the mascara. She tells me of her escapades with the boys at school. How everyone has a crush on the new boy. How I should try to get with him. It’s different for her of course. She blows pink bubbles with her gum. It matches the colour of her cheeks. She gathers her golden locks up into a knot and they watch. She blinks and boys fall dead. “Amber,” she says, “Girls our age need to explore and get lots of experience.” Exploring to her is ditching school and following the gorgeous boys into the skate park. Experience to her is going on a movie date with the first kid who asks you out and munching on popcorn the whole way through because there’s nothing to talk about and you both can’t wait to get out of there. The teenage dream, right.

Active to me is smearing a canvas all over with paint like an artist possessed. Or singing as loud as I can on the edge of a cliff with friends I’ve known in all my lifetimes. If they’re out there.

“My cousin Tony’s coming over from Sydney tonight. If you want you could come over for dinner?” she says, her voice high-pitched, eyebrows raised.

“Amber,” says my dad, “You know what I did back home when I was your age?”

I could tell her I’m not into that sort of thing. Or that all boys are dreadful conversationalists. I could tell her that I’d rather just lie on my bed, under the blanket, getting to know Edward Cullen. You know, the depressed vampire who sparkles in the sun? I could say a lot of things. But who would listen?

Do people intentionally tell the same story over and over again? Isn’t that what makes a myth? “Me and my friends rode our bicycles all over town selling popsicles.” Of course they did. Their town was the size of a football field. Born and raised in one place. Same streets. Same shops. Same people. But home. My eyes prickle. Then what is this place here? This country we’ve lived in for a decade. Where the seagulls squawk for a sea miles away and the ground is filled with tough red clay. Where the cockatoo calls and the bees buzz around the

So I just say, “Not tonight. Maybe another day. Thanks though.” Then I lie in my bed at night, with vampires and werewolves. And I look out into the backyard, waiting for the stars to appear and wonder why I didn’t go.

BY AMRUTA CHANDE

Up and about to her is sweeping the backyard and doing the laundry. Up and about to her is cooking dinner and serving the family and learning all her recipes for when I turn into her. My reign contained within the walls of a gorgeous, grand kitchen which overlooks my big backyard that’s lined with potted plants, a forever fruiting lemon tree and a cloudless blue sky I could just float right up into.

FICTION

FIND ME IN A BACKYARD

FICTION

FICTION time! Come back when you’ve found some new material. Or don’t.” With nothing more than a swish of their skirt, Love flies away. Defeated, she turns to the newlybonded couple to see that they are in animated conversation. Their interest and attraction to each other is so clear, it is no wonder the man forgotten by Love walks away with slumped shoulders. She is frantic to find the words, any words, that could get him back, but knowing that he wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway, she flies off too.

FOR THE FORGOTTEN BY THARIDI WALIMUNIGE

1 Plip…plip…plop! The sound of coins diving into water are the first sensations to filter into her pressured ears. Next is the caress of disturbed water against her cheeks. Finally, her eyelids awaken to a fluid, blue sky, blemished by the glinting stars born from the sun’s grazing. Underwater, her day begins. The humans call it the ‘Fountain of Yearning’. It is a grand structure for a park attraction. Carved marble depicts a woman on her knees, palms together, and head tossed above. Her mouth stretches open in a wail to the gods. Opposite her, a masculine figure twists up the body of the fountain, hand clenched on his chest as if his need overwhelms him. Visitors of the park see these two and toss their dreams in faux-silver form. On the outskirts of her sight, a squealing, pudgy, little boy claps in delight at a successful toss. She sits up, waves crashing into her waist, and is greeted by hearty sunlight and a warmth only fostered by the collective contentment of leisurely humans. As always, it is a marvellous day. Welcoming her first breath of the day, she leaps from the marble structure and soars. Flying around the park grounds, she witnesses the simple joys of human life. Tongues catching ice cream fleeing down wrists. Friendly hands slapping the sweat off youthful backs. It is peaceful. Until it isn’t.

She catches sight of a divine being on a mission. Love – a god most akin to fine china. All soft edges, shiny complexion and decadent attire of white. The royal blue of their irises is filmy, seeing what they want to see and nothing more. Love is

hovering before two humans, a male and female, seated on opposite edges of a bench, a canyon deliberately running between them. Love doesn’t notice a second man nearby, watching the seated male with a shy tenderness. But she does. She races towards the god and catches the tail end of their muttering.

Her home has been pronounced the ‘Den of Gods’. It is only a den in that she and others hole up inside it and store food within its walls. And it is only a home in that they reside there when nowhere else requires their presence. An abandoned shipping container by the docks, its interior is embellished with beanbags, snack piles and welcome friends.

“…I tie it just like so…and voila!” Love finishes connecting the two heart strings emerging from the humans. “You are now, and forevermore, soulmates. You’re welcome!”

“Hey, Alice! Any luck with Love today?”

She is too late. The heart strings, one red and one white, are already pinkening. The two humans are guided by Love’s power to finally notice each other. Their gazes catch, and that is that. There is nothing to question. Love strikes true, every time. It is futile but she speaks up. “Didn’t you see the other man?” she hazards. “Oh, it’s you again. So, this time it’s a man, you say?” Love doesn’t bother to inject any real interest into their words. “Yes! Standing just over there. I swear, he has feelings for the male you just matched.” “Well, these two sitting before you are meant for each other. They will have a grand love story. One for the ages. So, there’s really nothing more to add.” “But that other man is in love! Shouldn’t you look after him as well?” Love’s milky irises never sharpen but for one reason, and that is when they feel offended. Their eyes are steel now. “As I have been forced to remind you many times before, I am the God of Love. And thus, it really is I who has the know-how to bind humans, not some no-name fledgling. Wouldn’t you agree?” “Yes, but you’re only making some people happy and– “ Love turns away and lifts off the ground. “Oh, this conversation exhausts me! And you do it every

At the call of her name, the only memento of her past life along with the ratty hoodie, shorts and boots she wears every day, Alice makes her way to the beanbags congregating around the heater. Rayaan, who voiced the question, hands her a glass bottle of cream soda, the good, yellow kind from the Indian grocer, not the pink acid masquerading in supermarket aisles. Alice slumps into a beanbag beside him and delivers the verdict. “No luck today. Honestly, I’m surprised they haven’t just blasted me out of the park yet. They can do that, right?” “Pretty sure all the major gods can do the blasting thing. Wait no, not just blasting, but smiting. There’s a clear difference. I mean, even the word smite – ugh! it goes so well with their arrogance.” “Yeah, well they haven’t done that, which is good, I guess? It’d be even better if I could get through to them.” “Why do you even bother?” “You know –” “No, yeah, you’ve told me about all the things Love has done, but I just don’t get why you’re so caught up about it. I mean, none of the rest of us get involved with the major gods.” “I have to care. What else is there for me to do? I always go back to that park. And I see Love every day. I see them bind and break hearts at equal pace. Every day. And I feel something, something so strong, for the ones Love ignores. It has to mean something. It has to. Because, I don’t know how else I’m meant to find my purpose.”

A weighty silence follows Alice’s confession. Appearing to have said everything on her mind, Alice focuses on drinking cream soda and leaves it to Rayaan to break the silence. “So you think fighting Love is the way to go in getting your title?” “Yes.” “Damn. Hope I won’t have to face off against a major god to earn my title.” “Well, if you stay in here all day, you won’t have to. Although, I don’t see how you’ll get any title from in here.” “Hey! God of Junk Food and Laziness sounds perfectly legitimate! I’ll show you, just you wait.” “Sure, buddy. Whatever helps you sleep.” Their laughter is drowned out by the creaking of the metal sliding door. The rest of their motley crew of untitled gods walk in just in time to hunker down before the new day begins. Snuggling into the plush embrace of the beanbag, Alice closes her eyes and lets her mind wade in the pool of her memories. These moments don’t need religious cataloguing since they won’t be forgotten, but the promise of a blank slate of a day where new gods must go through the motions, has roused a paranoia in her. The last of the gods settle in their beanbags. All close their eyes in anticipation. The day resets.

2 Plip…plip…plop! The sound of coins diving into water are the first sensations to filter into her pressured ears. Next is the caress of disturbed water against her cheeks. Finally, her eyelids awaken to a fluid, blue sky, blemished by the glinting stars born from the sun’s grazing. Underwater, her day begins. Alice doesn’t care to observe who is tossing coins into the fountain today. She simply rises from the marble structure and floats above the treetops. There is a restless fire crackling in her veins, concentrated at the bridge of her nose and the soles of her feet. It is not unlike the sensation of the tongue’s first contact with baking soda. It doesn’t take long for Alice to spot a god. But it is not Love whom she observes. Rather, it is Success who perches atop a skyscraper looming from the border of the park. The total opposite of Love,

FICTION Success is all sharp lines cutting both his figure and complexion, irises containing slate storms, and outerwear befitting the business moguls he is so fond of. He watches the humans down below barely dodge the street’s many obstacles as they take calls with investors, fly their fingers across tablets, and jerk their hands from hair to lapel to pencil skirt in a bid to present the best possible façade. Alice doesn’t see the point in continuing her observation of the major god, until Success hops off the skyscraper’s top and descends. Gaze fixed with steely determination, he is clearly in pursuit of a mark. At her distance, she cannot see whom he has divinely blessed, but as she has come to learn, the work of the gods has repercussions. And they speak to her. Ping! The bell of a notification pierces through Alice’s focus and draws her attention to a man who has stopped near the ‘Fountain of Yearning’. His face expresses passionately and effortlessly, hope turning to dismay, which becomes frustration, and finally settling on uncertainty. Alice sees him call someone and his words slide into the missing puzzle pieces of her understanding. “Hey Mum…yeah…no…no, I didn’t get the promotion…yeah, I just got the email…what am I gonna do, Mum? It was supposed to fix everything. I thought I’d get it for sure, I mean I’ve been working there the longest, I’ve never missed a day…” The tingling sensation running through Alice’s body is now a smouldering fire licking at her nerves. Success may be Love’s polar opposite in appearance, but he must have taken inspiration from them for his conduct. Picking favourites, dismissing the domino effect of his power, enacting divine intervention for a select few.

Successive blasts of power hit Alice, but her fisted hand remains firm. Love’s attacks leave no bone, tendon or cell untouched. Alice cannot find the strength to speak, scream, or sob. She can only hold tight to the heart string. “Let go or you will regret it!” But Alice won’t let go. The only concession she allows Love is to meet their eyes, but even that is done in an act of defiance, paired with a smirk. This lack of repent is what sets Love off, and they release an even more powerful attack. The wave of energy that slams into Alice is overwhelming. She is blasted away, tumbling to the ground a few feet away before stilling. Now unbothered, the heart strings join successfully with Love’s guidance. And a third teen on the picnic blanket loses hope. Love’s grin would look exaggerated on the Cheshire cat. “Have you learnt your lesson?” They turn to deliver a snide remark frosted in advice but are choked quiet by the sight before them. Alice rises from her knees, titled and empowered. Her worn hoodie is now vibrant, unblemished and draped in gold chains and jewels. Her pastel shorts pop with a sleek shine and her knee-high leather boots scream attitude. Finishing off her divine appearance, Alice sports a gold circlet and a rakish grin. “Oh yes, I’ve learnt my lesson. I finally understand that there’s no use expecting an arrogant, hypocritical god like you to change your ways. No, if I want something done, I’m gonna have to do it myself, aren’t I? Well, challenge accepted.”

What perfect timing then, for Love to appear. Love floats down from the skies and hovers in front of cluster of teenagers sprawled on a classic, red and white checked picnic blanket. The god manoeuvres their fingers into a sequence of positions to beckon forth the heart strings of two of the youths.

“My name is Alice, God of Unrequited Longing. Protector of all who are forgotten by the mighty gods. I will clean up your messes. I will tend to the repercussions of your meddling. I will get in your way. I will not shut up. And since we’ll be seeing each other often from here on out…”

Alice sees her chance.

Alice invades Love’s personal space, standing so close that they are almost touching. She tips her head up, and despite being both smaller and shorter, exudes a power that has Love cowed. Alice delivers the killing blow with a cocky tilt of her head.

She doesn’t even attempt to reason with Love, but instead races straight for the heart strings. Before the two strings can connect, Alice grabs hold of one in a clenched fist. Love is enraged at her audacity and strikes with the speed and precision of a predator. Love’s sharp nails crush Alice’s wrist in a vice and they channel their offensive power towards the young god.

“Let go!” Love roars.

She crosses her arms languidly and rests her weight on one hip. She is the picture of easy confidence. She continues her speech with a surge of command in her voice.

Alice has well and truly had enough.

ARTWORK BY YUFAN (SYLVIA) ENG

“…learn my name.”

e l d no o

WHAT'S YOUR

HOROSCOPE?

Vermicelli Strong RBF Needs 4 coffees to function Owns a pair of noise cancelling headphones Bad with money

Udon Noodles Problematic fave Addicted to boba Loves attention Thinks ginger is a cure-all

Matcha soba noodles Only watches A24 films Hot & cold Wardrobe made up of 80% thrifted clothes Owns a Monstera Deliciosa

Sweet potato noodles Has a 12-step Korean Skincare routine Stubborn AF “The Office is high-brow comedy” Listens to their Spotify Daily Mix

Instant Ramen Strong chaotic good energy Peaked at 16 Only owns three “good” shirts Gives good hugs

Egg noodles Easy-going Go-to friend for everything Fluent in their mother tongue Bad at making decisions

Somen Anxious bean Lives in hoodies only Cannot live without lip balm Fragile but still cute tho

Rice noodles Adaptable Crippling social anxiety Automatically takes shoes off when entering a home Low spice tolerance

WRITTEN BY JING XUAN TEO IG: @jnxd_ ILLUSTRATED BY JING TONG TEO IG: @jngtong

RECLAMATION RECLAMATION RECLAMATION RECLAMATION RECLAMATION RECLAMATION

RECLAMATION Playlist curated by Farah Khairat

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READING (MULTIRACIAL) REPRESENTATION: A BOOK LIST BY MARINA SANO LITCHFIELD

Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman Everything I Never Told You by Character: Japanese/caucasian American; Celeste Ng #OwnVoices* Genre: YA; contemporary CW: suicide, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, anxiety, racism

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan Character: Taiwanese/caucasian American; #OwnVoices Genre: YA; contemporary; magical realism CW: suicide, depression, grief, microagressions

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Character: Xhoso South African/Swiss; #OwnVoices Genre: Memoir/autobiography; non-fiction; humour CW: abuse, racism, violence

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Character: African-American/Caucasian English Genre: Fiction; contemporary CW: racism

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan Character: Senegalese/German Genre: Historical fiction CW: Holocaust, racism, violence

Character: Chinese American/caucasian American Genre: Historical fiction; mystery; contemporary CW: racism, homophobia, sexism, death

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

Character: Aboriginal Australian/white Australian Genre: YA; historical fiction; mystery CW: racism, abuse, violence

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

Character: Ethiopian/caucasian American Genre: YA; contemporary CW: mental illness, depression, suicide, verbal/physical abuse

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz Character: Latino/Mexican-American; #OwnVoices Genre: YA; contemporary/historical; romance CW: some violence and alcohol; mention of hate crime

The Bone People by Keri Hulme Character: Maori/caucasian European; #OwnVoices Genre: Fiction; magical realism CW: child abuse; mental illness; racism; alcoholism

*#OwnVoices is a movement that is used to recommend books which involve character(s) sharing the same marginalised or underrepresented identity as the author. It encourages accurate representation of diverse experiences (race/LGBTQ+/mental health/disability etc.). #OwnVoices presents an advancement towards better representation of all people. In its growth, the movement empowers the voices of those who are commonly alienated and invisible to wider audiences, and counters any arguments against such representation in the ability of these texts to seamlessly merge with the ‘mainstream’.

DON'T LOOK DIFFERENT BY IKUMI COORAY 41

PROJECT OF COLOUR BY PO-HAN KUNG

indian &

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BY TRUNG LE IG: @trnug

INDEPENDENT C H I P P E D BY ANOUKSHA SINGH

y first taste of freedom was when I was six years old. I put on my big girl panties (polka dots!) and flew, by myself, to visit my grandparents. That freedom came with terms and conditions – including an airhostess who knew my dad and a pilot who was his friend – but it also had the perk of my uncle being my private escort, picking me up directly from the plane. Nevertheless, it lasted – at least that's what I thought. If you’re brown and raised in a country where cultural heritage and social gossip are given more importance than following your heart’s desires, you know that independence is a struggle. It’s ironic that I write this piece on the 15th of August, the day when India gained independence from the atrocities of the British empire. The idea of independence is amusing to me. Now aged twenty-three, I’m still trying to grasp what exactly it means. When you’ve been chasing something your whole life and you finally have it, you don't want to let it go. But I never really chased independence. I probably wouldn't have understood what it meant, if I hadn’t come to Melbourne to study. Is it that I pay my own bills and wash my own clothes? Or that I now have to voluntarily make my bed, because no one’s going to ask me to? I didn’t know how to be independent. When I was a kid, my parents rarely discussed their finances with me. I didn't know how much my dad earned or what my mum was investing in. When I grew up, that didn't really change. My parents would give me a warning glance to serve as my cue to leave their discussion alone. So, when I finally grew a pair and told my parents about moving across the continent to study, initially they were hesitant – by which I mean that there was drama. Tears were shed over how there would be no one singing classic songs late at night nor would the house have music constantly blasting through its walls, but the theatrics eventually came to an end.

IG: @anoukshasingh | knocksha.wordpress.com

the delights of caffeine along Chapel Street. Little did I know, I would soon blend in with Melbournians to make the latter a part of my daily routine. My second day had me exploring campus which was, to my delight, buzzing with activity and fueled my indecision as I countless opportunities. Throughout my first semester, I tried ‘adulting’ as much as I could, but I was still attached to home. It wasn't until May 2018, my second year at Uni that I found the real independence that I thought I was searching for. Hired as a fundraiser, I went from exploring the streets of Prahran to working on them, pleading with residents to show compassion for struggling women in Africa, who were fighting against inequality and a right to education. Sometimes it worked, but other times I was responded to with profanities. What remained important throughout this however, was the fact that while I wasn't exactly chasing independence, I became accustomed to it. My first trip home was nearly ten months after I landed in Melbourne. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could have my own opinions. There was value in my advice to my parents on issues being discussed, and I could help them with decisions that pertained to the family. My independence may not be the most conventional – I’m still a doting daughter, and I still consult my parents every time I make new life decisions. What changed is my behaviour towards them, my understanding of their decisions, how I stand up for my opinions now, and most of all, the level of confidence that accompanied all of this.

Liberation comes at a cost, and for me and where I come from, that cost is that gaining your voice comes with limitations. It’s an opportunity to express yourself more than before, but less than what you want to. It’s the feeling of being able to make your own decisions, but still keeping in mind the choices of your parents. It doesn't mean that I can now suddenly talk to my parents about all of my problems or discuss at length my plans with my boyfriend. Being Indian and Moving to Melbourne was probably the single being independent are two different things, but most difficult decision of my life. It wasn’t when combined, they form a new meaning for influenced by my parents, any pesky relatives or the youth in India. peer-pressure. It was all me, and I am so damn proud.

t’s a truth universally acknowledged that I absolutely love fries. All chips are great but the hot cut variety takes the potato cake. Crisp, fluffy and stuffed with emotional comfort. Being a formerly overweight child means you’ll always have a soft, flabby spot for deep fried food and sometimes feel awkward taking your shirt off for sex. Growing up with Vietnamese immigrant parents means that unhealthy takeaway food is a rare, exotic treat from authentic home cooking. It is typically reserved for celebrating good grades or before a Hep B vaccination.

That’s why every time I go to a fast food place I find sanctuary in these golden sticks. Whenever I go through a breakup or see myself in the Topshop changing room mirror, fries save me. When I started seeing Matt however, I felt comfortable sharing something so close to my heart. We would always go to a popular fried chicken chain – let’s call it – and get fries to share. Their rapid expansion meant there was never not a romantic restaurant too far away,

Because we were often frequenting Tom’z for fries, I started noticing this recurring trend in the way our food was being served. They always placed the fries in front of Matt instead of me. The first couple of times I didn’t pay too much attention because my mouth was moving faster than my mind. But it was happening so frequently that it got hard to ignore.

My minority spider senses started tingling. Matt was caucasian and I wasn’t. When you’re an East Asian person dating a white dude everything suddenly becomes much more politicised. A lot of conversations revolves around the white person having yellow fever or the Asian being self hating. This dangerously plays into the orientalist trope of a white man having a “submissive” Asian partner. With all of this in mind, I couldn’t help but question the reasoning behind who got the fries at the table. Based on being queer and Asian, did they assume the natural power dynamic of this relationship? With me being said Asian? Minority groups have a history of being associated with certain roles as a way of homogenizing and ‘othering’ us. Nine times out of ten I ordered and paid to quickly establish my dominance as an executive decision maker in this relationship and overcompensate for the gendered racial stereotyping. Even then it wasn’t enough to snag the chippies. The implication is that you yourself cannot be your own person without heteronormative rules dictating whether you can or cannot have fries. There isn’t a blank canvas where you can develop an identity through behaviour. Your personality, aggression and social power has already been predetermined. I brought it up with Matt and how they already had an idea of my need of fries before we could even ask for aioli. He understood why the

My first dose of independence was on my second day here, when I decided to explore the city alone. I visited artsy Prahran lanes and explored

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THE BIG frustration but didn’t think too much of the situation (fry privilege). I started questioning if this was real or just in my carb heavy head. It was happening so frequently and consistently that I decided to collect the data. Across ten weeks, 80 per cent of the time. I’m assuming the outlier was from the wait staff clocking me as someone fat. I still couldn’t believe the racially charged results. A small part of me was disappointed in the world and how it could let this form of subtle prejudice trickle into something so innocent. The other part of me wanted to take this whole debacle to A Current Affair and have my face pixelated and voice modulated as I blow the whistle on big french fries. Once I had tasted the forbidden fruit of racial awareness, going to Tom’z was a different experience. Unconscious bias is definitely a thing and now it was being served next to my chicken. Luckily, my best friend had worked at a similar fast food chain restaurant for years. I asked him one night after getting a late night drive thru meal and talking about our feelings. He said that typically he either didn’t care, or just placed the fries to whomever was the closest. It makes sense that a person making minimum wage serving hundreds of customers hot and oily food wouldn’t give a thought to my ethnicity and punish me accordingly. Eating all that fried potato can sometimes fry your two rational brain cells as well. Matt and I aren’t together anymore (for non-chip related reasons) so there isn’t any foreseeable opportunity to do any further investigating. My best friend is also ethnic, so it does have a probable effect on the way they interpret identity politics and treat people so. At this point in time there are far too many uncontrollable variables to draw a conclusive finding. When you have a lot of minority points going on you question both how the world treats you as well as how you interpret the world. Am I being overly critical or am I not being critical enough? Do I want fries or do I need to address a larger emotional issue in my life? Do I want garlic aioli or gravy dip? It can be a lot on your plate. When I go back to Tom’z now, the chips just go straight to me. I give an embarrassingly desperate smile and try to be extra friendly to the 16 year old white girl serving me so she has a good day. The flavour is the same but they leave a different taste in your mouth. Going through life as a queer Person of Colour is already so exhausting. Sometimes it can chip away at you. But you see things through a yellow tinted lens and that can make life interesting, beautiful and something you can laugh at with your best friend at two am in a drive thru when life gets tough. Sometimes you just need to sit back and enjoy the fries right in front of you.

& beautiful BASKWA INTERVIEW BY MICHELLE MASHURO IG: @michellemashuro Twitter: @m_mash5

I had the opportunity to interview Melbourne based artist Baskwa, where we explore his artistic expression and the importance of diversity in the arts. - Michelle Mashuro On a cool and vibrant night, young art enthusiast and creative Baskwa celebrates his first art show in the heart of Footscray’s cultural centre, Good Old Days Studio. Titled ‘More Love’, this work exudes excellence, colour and mindfulness. We step into the cosy space surrounded by friends, family and guests here to take in the new Melbourne artist. Baskwa found himself tangled into this space as a result of four am painting, hustling to work and coming home to touch brush to canvas, only to do it all over again the next day. As I greet my friend, I ask that we speak outside so I can get further insight as to what inspired him to pursue the visual medium of neo-expressionist, abstract and pop-art movement. ‘More Love’ is the debut solo exhibition by Zimbabwean-Australian visual artist, Baskwa. This exhibition falls exactly a decade after his move to Australia. His artwork is predominantly hand painted acrylic on canvases, drawing inspiration from his African heritage, as well as neo-expressionist, abstract and pop-art movements. Baskwa views colours as communicative language and utilises this in his art through muted expressions. Love is the one unifying thread throughout his experiences, and this exhibition highlights his desire to continuously seek and spread more of it.

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We stand in the grass, flooded with noise. His demeanour is calm but excitement streams from his face. Michelle: So, tell me how you’re feeling right now, what’s going through your mind? Baskwa: Today has been weird, today actually marks ten years since I landed in Australia. So I’m not really thinking I’m just feeling love. Feeling really humbled. M: Tell me a bit about your art? What does it means? B: For me with my art, if I had to explain or label it. I’d call it neo-expressionist, but really also inspired by pop-art. The way I view it, I view colours as a communicative language. So, I think you can translate so much information through colour, beyond our standard human language which is so limited. (As we delve into conversation, Baskwa is continually interrupted by friends who greet him and show appreciation for the art) B: One thing I really wanted to get from art, because I can paint realistically, I can do that, but I hate doing that. I hate the process I hate it. I feel like if you’ve got a medium such as art, for me I’m not cussing out anyone like I love looking at realistic work. But for me if I’ve got a medium such as art why would I reflect reality. M: Tell me more about the colours and tones… B: So, I really like, I don’t use skin tones, one piece which is for Muhammed Ali because I can’t do my G like that bro. With colour I try to express emotion and symbolism, it might not just be an emotion, for example I’ve got a piece called Tenda (meaning to give thanks). For all the African women, for my grandma, my aunts, my sisters, my cousins and just general African women that I’ve ever met. I used to colour green for that because green for me is such a nourishing colour for me, its life giving.

A lot of my art is also inspired by feminine energy, I went to an all-boys Catholic, private school. It was very masculine energy; I was very isolated. I just always felt so comfortable when I was around my female relatives. M:There was that space for you to be yourself and just be you. B: I love my male relatives but I don’t feel as comfortable to be who I am. I’m just trying to be, man. M: I think that’s definitely a conversation worth having in black communities with males, there’s an expectation to what you have to be. It is restricting. I definitely see that in your art, would you say that there is some artist in particular that have inspired you? B: Absolutely, so my artist name is Baskwa and that is because Jean-Michel Basquiat is my favourite artist of all time. I‘ve got his crown tatted on me right there [he shows me], and that’s because I’ve been into art for a long time but for so long I’ve never seen people like me in it. The first time I saw Basquiat I was like WOW. I only discovered Basquiat 8 years ago, 2011, one of my friends sent me a video for his documentary. I was like ‘bruv this don is just out here!’ And the parallels between our lives were there as well; his dad was an accountant, my dad was an accountant, his dad wanted him to be an accountant he didn’t want to, same [he laughs]. Just the fact that he actually made it, and he made it in the 70s through Brooklyn, Bronx.

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terms of seeing how art can give us freedom and how we express freedom. You’re getting into this artist scene in Melbourne, why do you think this is important. B: Why I think this is important because it’s what art did for me. I studied art only till I was fourteen, I dropped it so I could do history. One of the biggest regrets I ever made. For so long I was like I can draw, I can paint, but I don’t know if people wanna see that. I choose to get back into it as therapy, I was struggling to meditate and I knew I needed that. You can do whatever you want on a blank canvas. M: Going away from this event, what’s next for you? B: Next moves very different, I’m not carrying on from

You can find more of Baskwa’s art via his socials below. IG: @baskwa Twitter: @baskwa

Jean-Michel Basquiat, his work shows everything I’ve ever looked for in art, the dichotomies in it, the messaging he’s trying to do, the freedom of it. But I don’t necessarily make art like him, you’ll see it’s very different. My number two artist Andy Warhol, he really inspires most of the colours and how I see colours. M: Going back to what you mentioned about freedom, that really resonated with me in

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STAT ES OF M AT T ER : REPRESENTATION IN ITS MANY FORMS

Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, melting into the nuance of hyphenated identities. Representation encapsulates both the intricacies and breadth of our unique identities and the more universal human condition. It serves as a springboard for possibility, helping us mould and abolish the parameters under which we operate. Proving to be fundamental in the construction of our own reality. Minorities will continue to be burdened by asymmetric underrepresentation within the media landscape, misrepresented by antiquated archetypes. Simply put, we cannot become what we cannot see. This impinges on our ability to work hard and dream big. Fair and balanced representation nurtures the delicate selfconfidence so fervently necessitated by our aspirations; a luxury once only available to those subscribing to Eurocentric ideals. The exhilarating evolution of the media landscape has given rise to transgenerational changes. Compliance is no longer the only viable option. Instead minorities can afford to be audaciously aspirational and entitled to equality. The power of storytelling has propelled this movement into full speed. The full prowess of expression is embodied so meticulously by Minhaj’s Netflix comedy special, Homecoming King. Through his narratives, Minhaj imparts the obscurities of his experiences, demystifying our differences and in turn disarming the invisible divides amongst us.

"Hasan you have to be brave" Pulsating throughout Minhaj’s narrative is the overwhelming sense of friction and dissonance that, in itself, is emblematic of the immigrant struggle. There is no map to guide us between the distant motherland and our new hometown. Yet his recount of such encumbrances diverts from a vengeful attack on the obstacles he has faced, but rather chooses to impart an almost medicinal sense of empathy towards this prejudice. The silent brutality of these biases is given a human face, as he holds up a blaring mirror of introspection. Minhaj reminisces on his childhood, narrating the labouring contest for acceptance. He cannot gain "acceptance from Cody, Corey and Cole", whose perceptions are confined by generational bigotry and limited by the lack of exposure of other socio-cultural dimensions. A somewhat fleeting and juvenile high school prom emboldens a harsh reality this incessant misrepresentation within the Eurocentric landscape has sustained a subtly lethal campaign of fear-mongering against vulnerable minorities. As Minhaj recites the experience of being left without a date for his high school prom, he vividly paints a portrait of palpable disappointment and sour rejection. He was driven to isolation, forced to hold his head higher, compensating for the generational closed-mindedness of a select few. Our hearts sink to the beat of this betrayal, yet his own words encapsulate it best"it’s hard seeing people saying they love

but they are afraid of you at the same time." It’s saddening how prejudice, at its most potent can be extremely reductive. Such biases are like heavy stagnant stones, holding back the perpetrators just as much as it does the victims. Here, it is the power of perspective that helps Minhaj move on, allowing him to extend a sense of understanding to those looking away. He understands that this prejudice represents a survivalist mentality, driven by vicious social, political and economic predation. It is desperation that sustains such fervent discords and acknowledging this can help disarm such discrimination. Only acceptance and compassion can overcome hostility - as love is intrinsically stronger than fear. But if only it were that simple. We must inspect the nuance in both activism and injustice.

need for validation – yet, we cannot be reprimanded for wanting to gratify those that we care about, but it shouldn't be the foundation of all our choices. We relish in labels as they give us direction and definition, but these are the same labels that emphasise the outward perception of our being. What will people think? Log kya kahenge– Minhaj weaves in phrases from his mother tongue, showing us that even during the show he is grappling and coming to terms with the conflicting facets of his identity. He questions his own boldness yet ultimately decides that we have to "claim this shit on our own terms". If we measure our successes and failures against the expectations of others, we not only set ourselves up for disappointment, but we lose the intangible subjectivity and the emotional connections that forge our unique perspective.

How do we draw the line between compliance and compassion? In our loud protests do we silence those whose are the most vulnerable? Log kya kahenge The ‘hyphenated identity’ captures the precarious complexity of self-perception. We all experience an internal pursuit for authenticity, amidst the transience and integration of cultures. Yet, how does one know who they truly are? How does one navigate the conflicting expectations enforced by both family and peers, without being immobilized by the weight of their beliefs? These struggles may be symptomatic of our innate

BY DANUSHI RAJAPAKSE IG: @dan.sushi

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THE MODEL MINORITY MYTH (RE)CL AIMING AND ME DIFFERENCE

BY MARK YIN 尹立诚 IG: @myin.rbc

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been Chinese. It’s the country I was born in, the language I speak, and the culture I’ve grown up around, even as an Australian. It’s the identity I’ve always inhabited without question. At the same time however, it’s a country with frustratingly imperialistic tendencies, a language that is increasingly desirable in the West, and a culture that emphasises—nay, prides itself—on academic and economic attainment no matter the cost or circumstance. And so, it’s an identity that I’ve grown to have a rather complex relationship with. At five: I struggle to pronounce the word ‘cereal’ and make friends with a Korean student over our shared difficulty with the English language. At ten: schoolmates sneak glances at my tests in the classroom while complaining about the smell of my food and making slant-eye gestures at me in the playground. At fifteen: I start worrying about coming out to my parents in Mandarin. At twenty: a Dean’s List student holding down two jobs in the streets; consistently assumed to be more submissive than I actually am in the sheets. And who knows what lies ahead. For now, all I can say for certain is that racism exists in many forms. Sexual racism, for example, is a thing, and it can affect people in a range of ways. On the one hand, East Asian men tend to be perceived as less masculine and therefore less sexually desirable, while Black men are hypersexualised and objectified—and these forms of racism are particularly prevalent in queer communities. Speaking of which, intersectional racism is also a thing. That said, it’s important to recognise that as far as racial minorities go, Chinese people—East Asians in general, perhaps—do have it easier. We’re seldom the targets of state violence, for starters, and our economic outcomes have all but caught up to white people—by some accounts, we’ve even overtaken them on measures such as median income. We also benefit from the privileges of being settlers on stolen land, of being comparatively light-skinned and having so many more favourable stereotypes than unfavourable ones. On top of that, we can also be terribly guilty of racist and colourist prejudices ourselves, and arguably our biggest ongoing struggle is nothing more than a lack of media representation that is already being overcome as we speak. Basically, East Asians have it almost as easy as white people. Can’t complain, right?

You might jump to answer no, of course—we don’t experience racism in its worst forms (and, I will reiterate, can be guilty of it ourselves), and if anything, society likes us, right? They think we’re intelligent, studious, hard-working, and generally inoffensive. And yet part of me still bristles when I recall my first few years studying at an Australian primary school. To put it bluntly, racism, in any form, is still racism. White supremacy, in any form, is still white supremacy. And yes, even if we don’t experience it in the same way as other racial minorities, we’re allowed to—and should—speak out against it. I’d perhaps even argue that most harmful of all is this idea that we’re some sort of ‘model minority’ that doesn’t experience and is therefore not allowed to complain about racism. Firstly, even within our community, the model minority myth creates a disproportionate amount of pressure to assimilate and perform whiteness. East Asian children for instance are shoehorned into socioeconomically stable career paths, sometimes against their will or ability. This can then translate to East Asian adults silencing or censoring themselves in the face of racism, so that they can maintain their positions in the workplace. The model minority myth thus fundamentally overlooks how many of us still face huge cultural and linguistic barriers throughout our lifetimes compared to white people. The flipside to this is that when East Asians are academically or financially successful, it’s written off as being inherent to our race. Not only does this erase the individual nature of those achievements, but it perpetuates more harmful stereotypes about other racial groups, and creates a systematically deceptive racial hierarchy that pits People of Colour against one another. The model minority myth has created this idea that East Asians are too close to whiteness and not enough of a minority to speak out against racism. In reality, our invisibility only perpetuates white supremacy. Which is why I sat down to write this. It can be really weird and uncomfortable for us to talk about racism knowing that we don’t face it at its worst, but at the same time it’d be deleterious for us to never talk about it at all. Dear white people: I’m Chinese, and I’m a Person of Colour. There are forms of racism that I do experience, and that I have a responsibility to speak out against. Dear East Asians: we can recognise our relative privilege while still fighting racism. Please fight racism. Dear other People of Colour: white supremacy is our enemy. Let us fight with you.

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STOP BUTCHERING MY LANGUAGE, thanks BY NURUL JUHRIA BINTE KAMAL IG/Twitter: @nrljhr

There has always been an intense rivalry between Singaporeans and Malaysians on what belongs to us and them. We’ve been arguing over who has the rights to our Chicken Rice, Nasi Lemak, Laksa, Roti Kirai, Water Agreement etc. However, I’m positive we can set aside our rivalry to come together and agree that non-Malay speakers should learn how to spell and pronounce Malay words right or don’t use them at all. No, you can’t use “oh it’s Singlish (Singaporean-English) lah”. No, it’s not. Its lifted from the Malay language and butchered beyond comprehension. Case in point: the Singapore National Anthem. It is fully written and sung in Malay. We are required to sing it every single school day for a minimum of a decade. Builds a sense of nationalism and patriotism, I guess. And yet, somehow, non-Malay speakers successfully manage to butcher most of the words. It’s embarrassing to say the least - given that we’ve been taught how to pronounce every word from a very young age. The anthem has a beautiful meaning behind it and you don’t respect it enough to give a rat’s ass attempt at singing it right. When i was growing up, most of my friends were non-Malays and in an attempt to maintain my friendships with them, I always turned a blind eye on their mistakes. “Oh, haha its not their tongue, It’s fine. they’ll get it right one day,” I thought. They never did. I don't think they have gotten it right till this day. Friends continued mispronouncing words because they think its cool, but here’s the reality of things - its not cool, neither is it funny. It makes you look dumb and after awhile, disrespectful. I’m done turning a blind eye and I'm ready to call you out on your mistakes. The Malay language is a beautiful language. It is poetic and it has phrases that the English language could only ever imagine to match up to. I’m proud of my mother tongue, even if it took lots of unlearning the internalised racial biases I grew up with. To note that today, the language has been watered down to a slang is a slap to my face and the people of my race. Enough with the erasure. Our history has already been whitewashed, we have been removed from the books and our food has been gentrified. Even the original jawi version of our language has been latinised because of colonisation. You don’t get to dilute our language any further. Enough.

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Misspelled Words

Correct Spelling Meaning

Agar-agar Balek Blanja(h) Gosong Goondu Jelat / gelat Kana / kanna / kenna/ ganna Kachau/ kachiau / kajiao Lugi Machiam / macham Peechah/picha Ponten/ pomteng/ pontem Samman / samen Scarli / skali /scarly / scully Sumpah/ sompa/sampa Tarhan Tiam Tombalek/ tombalik/ tumbalek

Agak-agak Balik Belanja Kosong Gundu Jelak Kena Kacau Rugi Macam Pecah Ponteng Saman Sekali Sumpah Tahan Diam Terbalik

An estimation Return/go back To spend on someone/ treat Empty / zero Idiot Sick and tired of something (usually food) Hit / incurred To disturb Loss Similar to / like Break Play truant Summons All of a sudden I swear Resist Quiet Upside-down/ flipped

However, it is interesting that those who can’t pronounce our everyday language excel, and I mean excel, in the swearing department. Of all the things you choose to pronounce and spell accurately (sometimes) are our curse words. But hey nonetheless, here’s a list of phrases and their translations so now you guys understand what you're actually saying.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Pukimak kau – your mom’s vagina Pergi mampos – go and die Bodoh pe kau – you’re so stupid Perangai kau macam lahanat – you have such a shitty behaviour Eh betina – you bitch Pala buto (original: kepala butoh) – dickhead Kepala otak kau – you idiot Isap konek (original: hisap konek) – suck dick Kurang ajar – no manners

So, the next time you want to speak or write a Malay word, tolonglah tulis dan sebut perkataanperkataan ini semua dengan betul. Buat malu je.

Tolong lah, tolong belajar bagaimana untuk menyebut perkataan-perkataan melayu. Hormat sikit bahasa ibundaku. Let’s take a step back and start easy with the simple and everyday words. I understand that the Malay language is a difficult tongue even though it is so similar to English. Di bawah sini adalah senarai perkataan-perkataan yang kamu semua sering merosakkan.

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How Death Brought An Atheist Closer To God: An Exploration Into The Mental State Of A Grieving Mind BY BETTULE ASSI CW: Death by cancer, depression, self-harm references

CHAPTER 2 December 2018. It wasn’t until I visited Lebanon, and my mother’s village Shihin during the Australian Summer 2018/2019, when I was able to come to terms with what happened on Mother’s Day. My time staying in this Southern Lebanese village allowed me to reconnect with aspects of my heritage that I was not originally aware of. In many ways, I was reconnected with my roots. Inhaling the inviting scent of gardenia, walking the same cobbled road my mother and Amtou did at my age, and immersing myself with the elders. It made me aware that I was missing a feeling of belonging to something. I was able to re-immerse myself in what it meant to be Lebanese. It allowed me to realise the extent of the disconnect I was experiencing during Amtou’s death; the disconnect I had from the Islamic verses that were to be recited, the clothes that had to be worn, the ceremonies that had to be done. The prospect of going to Lebanon over the summer only appeared as a measure of escaping Australia and my friends here. I did not want to spend my summer with sunshine or warm beaches or long days; I had to escape the happiness surrounding everyone and be alone.

Amtou was buried next to her brother. The grave site sat on a slight hill on my grandparents property in Shihin. The three graves reside in a small shed made from concrete, with rusted silver metal making a flimsy door. The path to get to the site was made of loosely placed stones and dirt. The rain had broken through some of the roof, leaving debris and water on Amtou’s gravestone. Her grave was different to what I thought it would look like. It was dark. Black and gold. I couldn’t understand the Arabic writing on her grave stone. When I first noticed the debris that had fallen on her grave, I went to the kitchen and got a damp cloth. I cleaned and scrubbed the months worth of dust from her. I did this everyday. Religiously, I would wake up every morning, and before breakfast I would make my way to the shed. Each day the trip longer than the previous. I would wish that each day I would walk in and find it empty. Or find it demolished. Or find it covered in leaves and vines and trees. The air in the room was always damp, full of moisture and dust. It would be hard to breathe, with every breath I would feel my lungs collapse further into my chest. My ribcage begging me to go outside. But I would sit there. For hours. Cleaning the grave stone and crying. Angered at my own inability to understand the words illuminating her grave. My grandmother would come, hold my shoulder and try to pull me away. She would repeat over and over,

Every morning we had the same confrontation. One day, my Aunty Rima asked me to come

NON-FICTION with her back to her house. She lived in Tyre, a small city near the village. That morning, she drove down the unstable cliff side. The road was made of cobblestones that had never been cemented in place. Rima lived on the coast. Every morning at Rima's house, I would walk to the balcony and inhale the sea mist. When Rima drove me back to Shihin, before I properly greeted everyone, I walked outside and across the dusty path and through the rusted doors. Amtou’s gravesite was filled with debris from the storm that had passed two nights prior. Two large puddles covered the gold, distorting the writing. I could feel my wrath coming. My knees were weak. My nails digging into the closed palm of my hands. I confronted my grandparents. I confronted them for not having been there when Amtou died. I confronted them for not having known her need for cleanliness. I confronted them for not having cared that she died. My grandfather has poor hearing. I don’t think he heard but his eyes remained sad for the rest of my visit. Another storm rolled in that night. The house near freezing temperature. I wrapped myself in several blankets and locked myself in the room furthest from the living room. I kept staring at the curtains across the room. It’s stitching looked old. The colours were faded. A layer of dust covering its surface, suffocating the air. I wondered whether Amtou would have been proud of me for trying to carry on her pragmatic legacy of cleanliness and order. I wondered if she would have thought I was losing part of myself in doing so.

* Darian Leader’s ‘The New Black’ (Leader 2009) unravels the complexities of Western cultures’ experience of death and loss. The psychoanalytical perspective is that Western cultures force a conscious expectation that one should individualise grief and loss. Public grief is not normal. If you are experiencing an episode of depression or melancholia, it should be contained within a therapist’s room, or within your own house (Leader 2009). If the loss is seen as an event in a certain point of time, then it can simply be discarded in that moment. However, for those who experience grave

loss, it becomes part of their identity. It gets sewn into the fabric of their existence and self. Amtou’s death changed me. Rather than it being an event, it has become a continuity in my life, never quite absent from my mind. The visceral process I went through on my path to acceptance can be encapsulated in one lost word: mourning. I was mourning the loss of my aunty. Western mourning has the tendency of internalisation (Leader 2009). I was alone and expected to pick my life back up, one jagged piece at a time. There was no sense of community or understanding around my mourning. A means in of communal mourning can be reflected with the practice of death rituals (Rappaport 1999). Death rituals work as a way to bring physical form to your grief; a release of the strenuous feeling of internalisation. It allows your grief to be shared among others; a physical reflection that you are not alone. Members of society who experience a sense of alienation take other measures to achieve this very mechanism; physical self-harm such as cutting or eating disorders, or even the cutting of ones hair after a stressful period are all examples of bringing an element of physicality to ones unseen emotions (Leader 2009). This physicality works as a form of internal validation that externalises what you feel into observable parameters (Leader 2009). As such, ritualistic practices create an effective outlet for grief and mourning. Unlike the other mechanistic forms stated above, the ritualisation of death is communal, not individual, yet can have an element of personalisation brought to it (Rappaport 1999). The extent of the personalisation is contingent on many factors, such as your relationship with the deceased., My intrinsic need to conform to a strange conduct of emotionless normality ate its way at my ability to feel belonging. It wasn’t until I experienced the flourishing energy of Shihin when I was able to understand; there is no shame in the admission of your own anger towards your inability to comfortably express your internalised emotions. Though I am sceptical of denouncing the integrity of knowledge surrounding depression, I am equally sceptical of its application in Western nations. The label of depression would have fallen too easily on me last year. The

NON-FICTION explanation reduced to a chemical imbalance in my amygdala. However, the roots of my despair did not appear to me in a therapist room. Rather, it was when I was able to unveil my anguish bit by bit until the prospect of cultural, religious, and internal alienation was staring at me directly in the face. I knew, growing up, that Middle Eastern culture differs from Western norms. I knew it from the way we dress, the way we eat, the way we speak to elders, the way we celebrate a wedding. However, I never knew how mourning and death rituals were some of the most divergent elements of culture. This became clear to me when I read the comments on a video that showed a Palestinian woman grieving the loss of her son. Common words used to explain her display of grief were ‘primitive’, ‘animalistic’, ‘dramatic’, ‘theatrical’. Her grief was undermined, looked down upon and shrunken to a mere ‘dramatic’ display of mourning. It is the height of Orientalism to claim that raw emotion is somehow primitive. The structures surrounding what can be given the label of ‘proper’ resides in the hands of those who seemingly have validated power. Thus, the language surrounding mourning is contingent on whether the mourning is recognised as being proper or rational. All the structural elements within society that conditioned me to compartmentalise my grief and feel shame at public displays of depression seeped into my feelings, and I endured a significant disconnect from myself internally. I felt the need to let myself go into a ‘dramatic’ sequence of grief. I felt as if the whole world was burning around me, and yet people carried on as if it wasn’t. It was frustrating. I resonated heavily with the 'dramatic' or 'theatrical' display of emotion shown by the Palestinian woman. My grief felt dramatic. It felt worthy of an audience. However, being constantly surrounded by those who have no connection or knowledge of different cultural or religious means of mourning, I simply contained the urge within. I had one foot in two vastly different worlds. The Historic and Cultural Significance of Death Rituals in the Middle East. Particular death and mourning rituals are commonly found within Middle Eastern

cultures, many tied to Islamic beliefs. They are communal, prominent, and loud. There is no shame in tears in the same way that there is no shying from the sadness that death brings. It is omnipresent; the loss of someone close to you is carried for the rest of your life. The names of the dead survive through generations; I know how every member of my mother’s immediate family died since the time of her great, great grandparents. Though at first the prospect seems overbearing and unnecessary, it can unfold enlightenment. While I was in Shihin, a 93-year-old man passed away. He had been sick for 20 years, my whole lifetime. My family did not particularly care for him as he was not that known or prominent in my family’s lives. Hence, at his funeral, it was to my serious surprise that my aunty Rima reacted similarly to how I imagine she reacted to Amtou’s death. Rima was participating in the wailing that the women of the man’s family were undergoing. I could feel genuine pain in her cries and grief in her voice as she recited the Quran. The same practices which engulfed me in May came back, with the chest-pounding, hair ripping, loud and dramatic displays of anguish. When we left the funeral, I asked Rima why she participated in the way she did, considering the man was no more than a sickly acquaintance. She told me, “Bettule, I did not cry for him though I was sad for his family. I cried for Neemat (Amtou).” It made sense. I realised the importance of what was actually occurring underneath the dramatic displays of sadness. People who attend the funerals of mere acquaintances allow themselves to be part of the grief and use it as an avenue of cathartic release of their ownloss. They use it to remember passed loved ones and can share their remembrance with a group of equally saddened people. The memories of old loved ones can resurface and be mourned again. This was pivotal in my upbringing. I cry when I hear stories of my mother’s uncle, though he died when she was 14, simply because I feel the loss his of presence in the family; his memory is continuously mourned.

NON-FICTION a sense of order and togetherness. At the hour of one’s death, you lie them down so their head points in the direction of Mecca. This is the same direction that Muslims face when they say Salah (prayer). The moment that the spirit is seen to have fled, the mouth of the deceased is closed for clarity, and their two large toes are brought together and tied. [3] The Quran should be recited at all hours to help the spirit find its way to paradise. The Quran also provides comfort to the loved ones of the deceased, as the words of sadness ensure the prospect of afterlife and peace. Reminiscing on the Quran played by Amtou’s body at the time of her death, it was almost as if the verses were sung for her, and only her. Like with Amtou, the body is then cleansed by male or female washers, and then shrouded with essence and perfumes. [3] Family members can attend the washing and be part of the process. I was present, though in another room, when they prepared Amtou’s body for burial. My mother was active in the washing, an honour she will always wear. The deceased is not sent to a mortician and no makeup is applied. They are true to how they looked at the hour of their death. The deceased is washed by an educated member of the community that the family personally knows and trusts. The body is then wrapped in white cloth and laid to rest. [3] The colour white is prominent. It was the colour of the van that took Amtou’s body away. It was the colour that she was buried in; it is the colour all Muslims are buried in. [3] It is said to be the colour of Paradise. During this process, the house of the family of the deceased is open at most hours of the day, with continuous recital of the Quran. The seventh and 40th day after the death are significant and ceremonious: a large gathering of friends and family gather to listen to the Quran and remember the deceased. A year after, the same ceremony occurs.

References: [1] Leader D. The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression. London: Penguin Books; 2009. [2] Rappaport R. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press; 1999. [3] Hanna S. Death and Dying in the Middle East. Deity & Death. 1978;:33-60. [4] Starkey J. Death, paradise and the Arabian Nights. Mortality. 2009;14(3):286-302. [5] Shtulman A, Lindeman M. Attributes of God: Conceptual Foundations of a Foundational Belief. Cognitive Science. 2015;40(3):635-670. [6] Gellner E. Reason and culture. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell; 1994. [7] Ziebertz, Hans George & Ven, J.A van der. The human Image of God. Leiden: Brill. 2001 [8] Gordon-Smith, Eleanor. Stop Being Reasonable. New South Wales: New South Publishing. 2019

There are fixed rituals which occur in Islam and in Middle Eastern cultures. Though they seem arbitrary and odd, they serve to provide

PORTRAIT STUDY #3 BY KAAVYA JHA

PORTRAIT STUDY #4 BY KAAVYA JHA

POETRY

A STORM AS I REMEMBER

EUCALYPT

BY STEVIE WAPPETT

Mum and I sit on the balcony thick metallic clouds trap heat. Swollen bellies of water uncomfortable, impatient ready to deliver life. Black cockatoos sing their warning red bellies perfect circles against grey skies and green bush. Mum says they interpret the weather six waylards she sees six days of rain there will be. The waylards veer left over the gums heading for the mountains draped in grey woolly blankets. Blunt knife cuts the sky trees shake like animals with each word of thunder. A grumble above, coughing clouds the smell of rain Mum and I stick out our arms.

i. Deep in the valley roaming leaf matter attached to paper hands wave in the wind the heat blue vapour collecting dust extinguished in strings of mandarin glowing on the crest of the hill.

ii. Doped up koala caught between branches sticky claws scratch sinew from paperbark leaf oh so close snatched without heed chromium crumpled in fists squished into mouth an ongoing cycle.

iii. Paper weight thumbtack on a concrete slab amongst the debris an enduring battle between human and waste lone standing naturally angling fingered twigs brush the tippy top of a rusted roof tickle the back of a confused magpie.

POETRY

bananas, baby! BY CELINE LAU 劉倩宜 CW: Racial Slurs

Apples and oranges, they’ve had their fun! Make way now for bananas – for here they come! You can slice them, dice them, put them in a smoothie. Hear me when I say, Yellow is in! Yellow is groovy! See them on our screens, see them in our baskets, see bananas idolised and Placed in gilded caskets! Ah, can you feel it? Banana-fever in the air? How funny minds change with little fanfare. We used to make fun of how they tasted and looked, Resembling the spine of some poor…sook. Critics and detractors, they were persistent! Yet, their common refrains were, oh! Inconsistent. Fragrant or putrid? A boon or blight? Tell me, were they too yellow or too white? Whatever it was, make up your mind! Regardless of appearance, I think you’ll find, all along, bananas have been wholesome and sweet. Good for your health! And a pleasure to eat! So raise your glasses to bananas! Listen to them chink! Three cheers! Wine and beer! Ho! We’re tickled pink! Ah! A life without bananas would bring us great strife! Variety is, after all, the spice of life. Yet despite the excitement, here’s one last word of warning. It would not do to engage in excessive fruit fawning. While bananas are indeed hearty and nutritious, an over-obsession would be just simply pernicious! Now don’t get me wrong! Bananas do deserve their hype! But a preference based on likeness? What absolute tripe! There’s more to bananas than the colour of their skin. So, if that’s all that attracts you, then jump off your bandwagon and straight into a bin! At the end of the day, the banana is naught but a fruit. The fulfilment of your fantasies? It’s a poor substitute. Respect their rightful eminence and heed my two cents! Love the banana for what it is, not what it represents!

GODDESS BY KAVYA MALHOTRA

POETRY

BONE China BY LOO DEYUAN

I wake from my dream in which someone wants me; has held me briefly close like a thrift shop vase with unseen cracks to tear at the fingers. This is an epoch of sleep; is not a vantage point, I wait with my head pillowed on your doorstep to perch brief and listless. With flowers in my arms, each stalk driven hard into the marrow let me in, let me be spectator to your marriage and children in my reflection your face in the morning. Falling - body from a balcony heavy with flesh - I, too, am congealing, between the brief attempts at slumber. In the glaze between sleep and wakefulness with a tremble and cry, the body is born again.

POETRY

ARE YOU EVEN BLACK? BY RAIANE OLIVERIA What are You? I am merely just a person quite as human as you.  I am COLOURED woman strong and proud. I refuse to apologize if that bothers you  My ethnicity should not define me and neither should my race. Though you objectify me the moment you lay eyes upon my face. I will not be your token and preach all my pain  My life is not full of struggle as you perceive it to be. I am rather privileged with strength you will soon come to see. My ethnicity should not define me and neither should my race. Though I am gratified to inherit and be able to embrace it. My curves. Curls. My melanin. My rhythm and my pace. ‘Are you black or are you white?’ What a bold question you ask as if white is even a choice when you are anything but. I am brown and I am proud indígena, pardo, negra. My curves. Curls. My melanin. My rhythm and my pace.  My ancestors came from struggle, slavery, oppression and pain I inherited their strength. Standing on their shoulders I will become something great, with this privilege I have earnt I will make change. My curves. Curls. My melanin. My rhythm and my pace will forever be mine and not yours to objectify.

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION (1ST MOVEMENT) BY JING TONG TEO

POETRY

BLACK I-III BY YAKUB OGUNSINA IG: @yakub.the.human IG: @views.from.the.human

Black I Step inside a mall and all eyes on me, I feel the seething gaze of a security guard itching for some action. But I don’t burn in the sun, so am I not lucky? Turn on the T.V. the government spreading hate about me once again. But my hair is bouncy, so am I not lucky? Pick up a newspaper and there I am, Extra! Extra! Read all about me! But I have such good rhythm so am I not lucky? Black II Have you heard of Our Lord and saviour? Jesus Christ The white man Accept him as your Lord and saviour, And you will surely make heaven! Black III I’m Black. Black is what I’ve been told — all I know, is to be black. Everything I am, my identity embedded into my skin, I will not conform — I am more than just a shade of skin.

POETRY

THIS IS NOT AN EKPHRASTIC POEM (AND THE TERRACOTTA WARRIORS ARE NOT WORKS OF ART) BY CINDY JIANG IG: @wholegrain.toast

Also published in Right Now!

You were woken in the night packaged airtight so that we couldn’t hear you suffocating The swords taken from your hands your empty fists left clawing for the coloniser’s throat finding nothing I see myself in your mirror We were both loaned to a place that doesn’t really want us This hair, this clothing, these measurements hundreds of thousands of us reduced to “earthenware” To them we are vessels not bodies To them we are artefacts not history To them we are stories not lives

FICTION

MY PEOPLE BY YANNI JIANG

CW: Suicide

This was written on Jaggera and Turrbal Country and concerns a gathering that took place on Turrbal Country. my people, a gastronomic oddity consumed like creatures of the orient. that braised duck was delicious the crispy pork too but roast lamb and white bread still reign emperors of the dining table. we are concubines, serving ethnographic interest i am demanded to explain ‘my people’ do all of you look the same? are there differences? she means to say she can’t tell, (or doesn’t care to know) i, a child of diaspora, am made to recount centuries of history of a motherland i’ve set foot on three times i am reluctant to extract the pain and trauma from my mother and father tales of woe fall on hungry ears, hungry mouths animated by the sticky sweet scent of braised duck and Do tell us about your dying mother and penniless childhood Oh, and don’t forget, reassure us about the tragedy of Mao’s China is all that you are i’m sorry your father jumped

my nephew receives a toy tank his little occi-oriental fingers in command Well look here It’s just like Tiananmen Square who are we to you that you cast us as idioms as people only capable of good cheap grub and red trauma when you say Melbourne has gone downhill (well, Naarm/Birrarranga still stands) and look away to say, well, certain elements i wonder if twenty years ago you said the same about my parents only white bodies on Blak land can do no wrong our yellow feet patter in circles

Look out for her other works in The Melbourne Arts Journal 72

COLOUR CONSUMED BY BERAY UZUNBAY

Playlist curated by Farah Khairat

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COMFORT WOMEN: A Hidden History by Lindsay Wong IG: @flimsyylindsayy

CW: Strong sexual themes, sexual violence, racism

or nine months, Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipina woman, was forced to live as a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers. At a garrison everyday, Henson was made to have sex with around 12 soldiers with no rest. This was a shared reality for countless other young women abducted by the Japanese Army. During World War II, many women suffered in silence due to their roles as comfort women. The dark history of comfort women only emerged in the late 20th century as women in Asia gained courage to finally speak up about the abuse they faced. With their testimonies, they shed light on this controversial issue that is still relevant today. Between 1932 and 1945, at least 200,000 young girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese army to become ‘comfort women’. In countries under Japanese occupation, they were abducted from their homes or lured away by empty promises of employment and education opportunities. In reality, they were made sex slaves for the Japanese military. Others were forcibly taken from classrooms or off the streets. Comfort women could also be purchased, as if they weren’t even human.

Although comfort women hailed from many different countries of which the Japanese had occupied during the war, the majority came from Korea and China, Japan’s neighbours in East Asia. Other countries that comfort women came from include (but are not limited to) the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, Indonesia and even the Netherlands.

Being underneath Japanese occupation crippled the economy for countries such as Taiwan and Korea. This often led families to become desperate and sell their daughters to the Japanese. Price depended on their appearance and age. If you were older or deemed not as “attractive” as other comfort women, you would have a lower price tag. Once taken, these young girls and women would be kept at military “comfort” stations, a euphemism for brothels, where they would be at the beck and call of Japanese soldiers. The establishment of the comfort women system was under the guise that it would help keep men in place, and follow orders. The cruel reality was that it was purely a sadistic source of entertainment for the soldiers. Officials created the system of exploiting women to prevent revolts from soldiers who were unsatisfied with their lifestyle. Therefore, they provided them with a multitude of different girls to choose from. There was even racial discrimination within this twisted system – Korean women were sent to lower ranks while Dutch women were sent to officers.

NON-FICTION reparations of around $9 million USD, but South Korea wanted a stronger apology. Since then, the hostility between the neighboring countries has only been worsened by this controversial issue, among other disagreements. Nevertheless, many memorials for comfort women have been established around the world as their legacy lives on. Statues of comfort women have been erected on territories associated with Japan. Since 1992, the Wednesday demonstrations have been held outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul every week by surviving comfort women, women’s organisations, religious groups, and other individuals. The House of Sharing was also established that same year as a nursing home for comfort women.

been paying more attention to comfort women instead of leaving them silenced, which has raised awareness on how much civilian PoC women suffered during World War II. As more comfort women reveal their harrowing experiences, the lack of responsibility and apology from the Japanese government grows more disturbing. On how she has dealt with her past and her hope for the future, Maria Rosa Henson remarked “Telling my story has made it easier for me to be reconciled with the past. But I am still hoping to see justice done before I die.” History, no matter how dark, shouldn’t be ignored.

In the 21st century, several documentaries and films have shed light on comfort women which has also opened the eyes of the public. People have

“Female ammunition” is what comfort women were known as, because they were “used and abused”, as Japanese Army doctor Aso Tetsuo remarked. Women were brutally raped multiple times a day, left to the mercy of soldiers. Many were left infertile and even died. To this day, those that are alive still suffer from an unbearable emotional trauma that has caused them to be mentally scarred for life, even finding it difficult to interact with their own husbands at times. The terrible memories from the war that are hard to repress have affected some comfort women’s relationships with men in general. A report by the United Nations, estimates that only 10% of comfort women were able to survive the hardship they faced during the war. Despite the emergence of comfort women speaking out in recent decades, Japan has yet to present a formal apology to the comfort women for the crimes of the Japanese Army. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was confronted with the issue, he commented on it, but many argue that it is not a formal apology. He merely stated that he acknowledged that comfort women had suffered trauma at the hands of the Japanese imperial army. The past few decades have seen people in front of Japanese embassies in multiple countries protesting and demanding a formal apology. In 2015, Japan compensated South Korea with

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lesser heat, turns the residue into menstruation and breast milk. According to this, there exists no seed of women because they are only able to give birth to a child in the way of offering original substance. However, males provide animated liveliness and can take the power of women’s functional reproduction and delivery.

THE "LEAKY AND "COLD" FEMALE BODY CW: Sexual references and suicide

Concepts and practices of medicine in Ancient Rome were influenced by ideas of femininity in the culture. It was argued by scholars that ancient Roman medicine could link to the concept of the female incomplete body that was “leaky” and “cold”. First, Roman sexual medicine was influenced by the idea that females are “incomplete”. Second, human milk therapy was prevalent in the medical profession. The female leaky body The medical practice related to women in Rome could probably be explained by some of the theory of femininity in society. To begin with, there existed the notion of the leaky female body in Roman culture. Carson has pointed out the “leak” of women in his article, which supposes the idea that females are porous. It is believed that women, unlike men, who are bounded or one, are unbounded or multiple for several reasons. The flesh of the female is considered to be more permeable than that of the male - a claim which was supported by women’s diseases at first. In theory, there is a significant distinction between three ‘holes’ of importance in the human body. The anus and the mouth are able to become closed in a voluntary way, but the vagina remains open in the body. The idea of women’s leaky bodies is demonstrated by menstrual flow and the discharge of lochia and sexual lubricant from the vagina. The concept ‘I flow’ is a principle in female sexual physiology in the classical world, and the female leaky image has resonance all through the literary works of the Greek tradition. The myth of putting water into a sieve by the murdered husbands of Danaids was

eternally believed as a punishment in that period. It was also used in Gorgias by Plato who argued that the female soul is like the weak and porous female body. Thus, there were many attempts to lock the feminine body or the assumption that the body was ‘sealed’, which resulted from the point of view discussed above. In history, a number of medical recipes aimed at tightening and drying up the female vagina in the texts of the Papyri Graecae Magicae were good indication of the ideal to seal the vagina. This idea is associated with the physical characteristics of virginity, and there were thus recipes to make the vagina dry again in medicine. The female cold body In addition, female medical practice in Ancient Rome may reveal the belief that women are “cold”. The Presocratics had already said that the heat of the body differentiated males from females. Empedocles argued that the male was hotter than the female in nature (fr. A81, B65, B67). It was considered that there was more blood in the female body and the menstrual flow led to the discharge of heat. Therefore, the female lives with some sort of weakness or inability. Women were considered as a form of incomplete men, with the female body being deformed and mutilated just like that of the eunuch. Aristotle said that the ‘mutilation’ of the female could be viewed as a type of malformation which was needed in order for the extension of human life. He proposed the theory of reproduction in his writing to explain the incompleteness of women. The male body, with greater heat, turns the nutrition’s residue into foamy and white sperm filled with air. The female body, with

The incomplete female body Sexual medicine in Rome was associated with gynaecology in many aspects. A large amount of works on gynaecology in Greco-Roman culture focus on the woman’s womb, called hystera, and centre on female fertility as an essential distinction between males and females in medicine. It is asserted by Hippocrates that with respect to “the diseases of women”, the woman’s womb causes all of them. The writers of the Hippocratic corpus considered that the female “leaky” body was made up of softer flesh compared to the male body. For instance, the woman’s breast serves as nourishment with human milk. This kind of “leak” of women resulted from the monthly discharge of blood in their body throught the female menstrual period. The idea of the leaky woman’s body is related to the porosity of females with menstrual flow, the use of vaginal lubricant and release from different kinds of diseases. If a Roman would like to have a son, thrusting rapidly is suggested in sexual activity at the end of the female menstrual period. However, if a Roman wants to have a daughter, the person should use less vigour and have less spontaneity to some extent; the testicles should be tied up on the right side and sexual activity needs to be arranged in the middle of the menstrual period . Menstruation was considered as a good agent used to purify that was actually similar to nosebleed. It was believed that the absence of menstruation would lead to various psychological or physical issues. In particular, virgins were vulnerable to infection, explaining the fact that they tended to jump into a well or hang themselves to commit suicide. In nature, the distinctions maintained the inarguable point of view that males were superior to females both physically and mentally. Breast milk as a therapeutic substance The superiority of human breast milk was supported by many medical sources for the medicinal treatment of different diseases. In the Roman context, human breast milk was suggested as a potent cure for disease in both males and females. In the first century C.E., it

was pointed out that human milk could be used for the treatment of inflammation of the ears and the eyes in the text of Celsus’ De Medicina. Breast milk was also recognised as one ingredient of the pessary put in a woman’s vagina as a means of menstrual bleeding. Human milk was a drug for ailments of the eyes, ears and bowels, pains, breast lumps, sickness, poisoning by toad venom, face spots, the pain of the uterus, the affliction of the lung, and as a cure for blood circulation. Also, it was effective especially just after the woman had given birth to a son or two male twins and restrain herself from drinking wine and eating particularly spicy food. In conclusion, Roman women were related to the Roman medical practice in several different ways. Firstly, the notion of women’s incompleteness is associated with the use of sexual medicine in Roman culture. Secondly, human breast milk was frequently used as a curative substance in Roman society. These types of female medical practice, to some extent, reveal the ideas about the female “leaky” and “cold” body and the theory of femininity in history. References: Ancient Sources Celsus, De Medicina, trans. W.G. Spencer, Harvard University press, Cambridge, 1935-1938. Hippocrates, Places in Man, trans. P. Potter, Loeb Classical Library, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1995. Hippocrates, Glands, trans. P. Potter, Loeb Classical Library, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1995. Hippocrates, Diseases of Women, trans. W.H.S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1959. Hippocrates, On Superfoetation, trans. J.N. Mattock & M.C. Lyons, W.Heffer & Sons Ltd, Cambridge, 1968. Plato, Gorgias, tran. W. Hamilton, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2004. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. J.F. Healy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991. Modern Sources Carson, A. (1990): “Putting her in her place: Women, dirt, and desire”, in D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin eds, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Greek World, Princeton, NJ, 135–169. Chrystal, P. (2015): In Bed with the Romans, Amberley Publishing Limited, Stroud. Laskaris, J. (2008): “Nursing Mothers in Greek and Roman Medicine”, American Journal of Archaeology, 112, 459–464. Mulder, T. (2017): “Adult Breastfeeding in Ancient Rome”, Illinois Classical Studies, 42, 227–243, available JSTOR, accessed 15 September 2017. Parker, H. (2012): “Women and Medicine”, in S. L. James and S. Dillon eds, A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, 107–124, Oxford and Malden, WileyBlackwell.

BY LU YUXI 陆雨希

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

LIFE AFTER YOU BY SEUN YINKA-KEHINDE

WHEN THE SOUL DOESN’T SPEAK by @serious_meerkat (IG and Twitter)

CW: Racism and xenophobia

he yearned for the day all this came to an end. She was tired. She felt an exhaustion she could not explain.

Sometimes she forgot to breathe. Prompted by panicked thumps of her heart, relief came in a long draw of air, followed by a heavy sigh. Dully, her heartbeat pulsed in her throat, encasing the multitude of thoughts tumbling from her brain. Its beat so thick, and so heavy, the air struggled through. Sometimes even her body became tired of breathing. She felt an exhaustion she could not explain. Cold and damp, it found a home within her bones. It followed her every step, and mimicked her every breath. Where she wondered, it preyed, until she could no longer see the point. Where she prayed, she mistakenly summoned its spirit, where she loved, it threatened. In her younger years she had spent the cool summer mornings enjoying long lie-ins, thick sci-fi fantasy books, issues of Total Girl and video games. Her father chastised her for disliking mornings and her Aunty Jo told her “it’s good for the soul to be outside,”. Sometimes she gathered enough energy to join the other children outside to chase the ice cream van or call over a friend to spin a few rounds on the clothes line. But half a paddle pop later, she was already feeling exhausted. She’d head home and withdraw to her charted space in a bedroom she shared with her two siblings and Aunty Jo.

or that she was on her moon cycle. Or it was that emo thing the kids were doing. Or maybe she was just cold-hearted. But really, she was just tired. Tired of explaining why her English was “so good” or why her hair grew the way it did. Tired of hearing her feet were like elephant skin, dark on the top, light on the inside. Tired of explaining 5th grade geography to adults. Tired of reconciling the dissonance that her foreignness made her both a subject of fascination and pride. The mental fortitude needed to navigate the careless of strangers, was lacking for this 12-year-old mind. Where her path collided with their curiosities, all they saw was one thing. What they wanted to see. Now they had a chance to clarify, confirm or re-live their own understanding of the world. None of the questions asked needed her to answer with her soul. But at 12 she had no words to explain this. She yearned for the day all this came to an end. Her soul, free to speak, begins to murmur, whisper, until it begins to shout. A day the exhaustion at her core has come to an end, and all she can feel is her mother’s warm lips on her forehead. Held in that sure embrace, exhaustion from her bones absolved, and her body light with warmth. The only sound the thump, pause, thump, pause, of the heart beneath. She can’t say where this falls in her mix of memories and desires; whether it’s the beginning or the end.

When she retreated, they said she had the melancholy. Or maybe it was growing pains,

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S E E I N G OURSELVES as the

other

CW: Racism, colourism, skin whitening

n last year’s edition of Myriad magazine, I wrote about the endless impacts of Othering on People of Colour. The alienation of another, Othering can be deliberate or unintentional, conscious or subconscious. In the piece, I reflected exclusively on the Othering that was imposed upon me by white actors. However, after writing this initial piece I felt there was also a need to shine a light on the Othering that we, as People of Colour, perpetuate ourselves. The learnt and socialised Othering that lingers in our subconscious.

The act of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others is not new, W.E.B DuBois1 eloquently articulated his thoughts on the subject when he wrote, “…the world yields him no selfconsciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world”. For People of Colour, this double consciousness is evident through the internalisation of colourism. Colourism is defined as the “prejudice involving the preferential treatment of people with light skin”2. It is an undying remnant of colonialism, an apparatus designed to ultimately inflict structured harm on communities of colour. Writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o once avowed that “imperialism leaves a mark on the mind and conditions us from childhood”3. Indeed, People of Colour are such excellent students of colourism, we espouse it willingly using skin colour as a yardstick against one another. As a child, there were countless ways I was coached that darker skin was a deficiency and that lighter skin and euro-centric features were the epitome of beauty. From elders telling children of colour to stay out of the sun because "you’ll get dark" to the numerous ads for lucrative Fair and Lovely skin whitening products that implored dark-skinned people to aspire to be whiter. Through this perpetual exposure, People of Colour are conditioned at a young age to know that whiter is better.

SARA YOUNG-HEMANA (MODEL) BY NATALIA NAA

In the same vein, Women of Colour are far more likely to feel that they need to adhere to

BY ASHANI LEE

Twitter: @ashani_marie

colonial standards of beauty. Since childhood I have had naturally curly, frizzy hair. Wearing my hair naturally, I was constantly reminded that my hair looked "unkept", "wild" and made me "look like Hagrid". Consequently, since the age of 16 I have straightened my hair every day because it made me feel "presentable". I straighten my hair even though I’m conscious that I’m fulfilling a euro-centric ideal of beauty, I continue to struggle to unlearn years of colourism that taught me that straight hair made me more appealing to a cultured society. Last year I attended an event on white fragility presented by white author Robin D’Angelo. In her presentation, D’angelo profoundly acknowledged that "People of Colour understand what it means to be Chite more so than I do". This one statement resonated with me above all else because it not only goes to the heart of seeing ourselves as the Other but it simultaneously highlights how People of Colour are conditioned to view and value "the privilege that comes with an approximation to whiteness"4 Whilst I have no cure-all solution to emancipate People of Colour from the effects of hundreds of years of colonial oppression, I believe that our first step forward is to work on consciously uncoupling ourselves from the perpetual generational cycle of colourism. We must decolonise our minds first, so as to no longer view ourselves as the other and no longer see our value in relation to whiteness. Footnote: 1. DuBois, W. (2019). Civil Rights and Black Identity. [online] Theatlantic.com. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideastour/civil-rights/dubois-excerpt.html. 2. Phoenix, A. (2019). Colourism – how shade bias perpetuates prejudice against people with dark skin. [online] The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/ colourism-how-shade-bias-perpetuates-prejudice-againstpeople-with-dark-skin-97149. 3. Thiongʼo, N. (2011). Decolonising the mind. London: J. Currey. 4. DuBois, Ibid.

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THE PERILS OF NEW AGE ATHEISM: How Western Attitudes Towards Reason and Rationality Feed into Alienation BY BETTULE ASSI

CW: Death by cancer, depression, self-harm

CHAPTER 3

I suppose, throughout my entire life, I had a childish relationship with God. As a child and coming into my teenage years, I had a sort of merchant relationship with God. It was; I will abide to certain rules, and God will reward me in Paradise. This stark, poisonous sense of credulity is common among devout Muslims, and among all those who follow an Abrahamic monotheistic God. It was everywhere within the religion. Even in Salah, Muslims recite:

“All praises and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, the most Gracious, the most Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship, from You alone we seek help. Guide us along the straight path - the path of those whom You favoured, not of those who earned Your anger or went astray.” This relationship devoured all sense and understanding from the world around me and my interactions with it, both on a social and spiritual level. I believed that the dead either go to heaven or hell and lived my whole life in anxious fear of Judgement Day. I remember being eight years old and throwing bread on the group in a temper tantrum. As a response, my mother told me, “Bettule, do not upset God or He will come and strangle you in your sleep.” That night, and many other nights after, I imagined a blue genie image of God, with a cloud for legs, blue skin, and an angry face, come down from Heaven and strangle me. I would often think to myself; how does God have hands? Upon reflection, I began to come to terms with the childishness of this belief. I conceptualised God into a giver and a taker; something transactional, something that was easy to comprehend. As I grew older, I became captivated by New-Age Atheism. The discovery of figures such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens gave me an explanation as to my inability to comprehend the conceptualisation with God I had known to believe; it doesn’t exist. My relationship with God transformed from one that was childish, into one that was just stupid. Not only was it a complete denial of the existence of God, but it manifested into a hatred. It was a dogmatic "If you believe in God, you are idiotic. Those who do not believe in God are ultimately

logically and emotionally superior". I fell for the idea that God cannot exist and does not exist, disallowing any room for genuine protest or challenge. The dissidence that exists between the two belief systems I bought into is uncanny; the dogma of each evident when both ideologies are unveiled. The main issue that I have with the Abrahamic religions is how they conceptualise God. God is seen as an all-powerful being, only with human tendencie. [5] God is anthropomorphised into a holy merchant. We understand God as having human traits such as desire, purpose, anger, hate, and love. These work to create narratives of what God wants from you. However, this is built on a strange assumption that God wants something from humans, or that God is capable of want. Why would God want Amtou, a caring person, to develop a cancer which ripped its way through her tiny body within a year of its discovery? Why did God not answer my family’s desperate prayer to save her? It is absurd to paint an image of God which resembles a human. It reduces God from a creator to a rulemaker. As we conceptualise and understand God to be an all-powerful being with human thoughts, we force our consciousness on God. [7] Hence, these human-like interactions can occur within the dynamic relationship between a religious person and God. The anthropomorphism makes your relationship with God superficial, based on fabrications of desires and needs. [7] In some instances, the manifestation of such an abstraction of the existence of God facilitates the notion of control and restriction. [5] This was one of the main reasons that I initially felt alienated from the religion I grew up in; I found it hard to have faith in a God that did not really seem like a God. I could not bring myself to believe in a God who would damn me to hell. Or a God who was capable of hate, and Tsunamis, and wrath. I found it even harder to believe in a benevolent God who subjected innocent people to gruesome suffering. While I was entranced by New-Age Atheism, I became aware of a concerning societal trend surrounding ‘facts and logic’. I am concerned about logic and reason as it is used in current societal discourse. Most would agree that everyone is capable of logic and reason within our own domain. [6] It is not a label that only “intellectuals” can relate to. Reason is turning into an impersonal standard that we are held to; we cannot self-identity with reason, however, are expected to achieve it in all discourse. I am told

NON-FICTION to be reasonable about Amtou’s death; to not get too emotional or caught up in the event. In terms of emotion, there is an idea that emotion and reason are mutually exclusive; if you are emotional you are being unreasonable. Not only is this incorrect, as our rationale is driven by our emotion [6], but this way of thinking heavily affected how I approached Amtou’s death. I was being unreasonable in my emotions. The idea of declaring unreason begs the question of who has the power and the means to declare what is or is not reasonable. When logic becomes a label that only certain people get identified with, then the normativity of logic is taken away. However, logic exists only within the parameters of human consciousness. [6] It does not exist in the material world; you cannot observe it, touch it, perform empirical research on it. ‘Facts and logic’ has become an internet catchphrase in determining which view will or will not be considered with validity or rationality. ‘Facts and logic’ is used as a tool which discards emotive language within discussions concerning religion, politics, current affairs, and even philosophy. [8] The use of ‘facts and logic’ seeps into discussions of reason; rationality and emotion have become mutually exclusive. Why does it not seem logical or reasonable to rip your hair out and hit your chest when crying for the dead? Is it as certain reactions to death do not fit within fabricated parameters, restricted by what is viewed as rational or irrational? There is no existing material way to claim that an emotional reaction is inherently unreasonable or not. [8] The act of placing ‘logic’ on some views and not others begins to become contingent on external factors such as gender, race, culture, and religion, and used a discriminatory measure of excluding views and emotions from important discussions. These polarising trends—both the rise of NewAge Atheist thought which justifies its ideas as impenetrable under the umbrella of ‘facts, logic, and science’, as well as the dogmatic claims of human experience made by religious fundamentalists—tore their ways through me. It was alienating. On the one hand I was told a strict doctrine upon which I was expected to base my entire relationship with God, facilitated by my Lebanese-Muslim community I grew up with. On the other hand, atheist figures I was looking up to were preaching that subjective emotions were invalid or irrational and discouraged among discussions surrounding theocracy and faith. This fostered the further internalisation of my emotions, which I then carried with me into the death of my aunty. Death became something that happened, and the over-reaction to it facilitated irrational thought and behaviour. Thus, I undermined my own emotions and packaged them into a simple "there is something wrong with me," rather than accepting the validity of my internal sentiment towards death. I do believe that my dichotomous relationships with God as a child and as a young adult tore me in two; I had an internal conflict of what I convinced myself I should feel and what I actually felt.

there is nothing. I do not believe that all of this is meaningless. The cosmic horror of accepting that life has no meaning is an idea I do not think anyone can really come to terms with. As such, I find it hard to identify as an atheist, whilst also believing that Amtou’s soul is still living on somehow. It is seemingly connected. Our relationship with death as a society, our relationship with God as a society, our relationship with our own trauma as a society. I do not aim to answer how or why they are connected. Rather, there are a few things that I know. I know that on Mother’s Day, 2018, I went through one of the most traumatic moments I have ever experienced. I was alienated from everyone else involved, and unable to participate in certain death rituals that exists within a culture and religion I thought I understood. I know that I individualised my grief. I held onto my trauma so tight, that it was in me everywhere I went. I know that I fell into an episode of depressive melancholia. I know that I could not grapple with my childish relationships with God, with my old devout self fighting, my then, atheist self. I know that this caused to me detach from my emotions and from those around me. I know that this eroded my mental state into an indifferent being floating through life. Most importantly, I know that once I faced my trauma for what it was, a mixture of alienation, disconnection, and confusion, I was finally able to heal. When I drive down South Road and into Amtou’s estate, the grass is still cut clean. The cars are parked in uniform. The sprinklers are still on. The leaves turn and fall and grow. The smell of Amtou’s house is still strong. I can still hear her voice laughing, singing, speaking. I still know the shape of the bridge of her nose and I still know how it felt to hug her. She has not entirely left. But the plants she had cared for in her garden are growing without her tending. The songs she used to sing are still sung by others. Life has continued. I sit in her living room. It is Mother’s Day 2019. Everyone in the room is almost too afraid to breathe. I look at my mother. She has a layer of tears covering her eyes. Her smile compensating for her lack of conversation. I am wearing earrings. They hang heavy on my earlobes. I go to the bathroom. It smells like it has been freshly cleaned, with the scent of lemon potent in the air. I look in the mirror. My cheekbones are more prominent than they were last year. I take off my earrings.

Reconciliation Present I do not believe in heaven or hell. Much like I do not believe in reincarnation, or other common ‘Afterlife’ theories. However, I suppose that it does not matter whether I do or not. As I do not believe that

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THE EMERGENCE OF BLACK REPRESENTATION: The Dreaded Disney Princess by Michelle Mashuro IG: @michellemashuro Twitter: @m_mash5

Being a "blerd" means being stuck in the intersection of blackness and nerdiness. You’re often not allowed to enjoy both because, when you take on one, you are forced to question how you belong to the other. Say you like anime, someone will say, “Avatar the Last Airbender doesn’t count”. If you say that you like horror, someone else will ask you to name all the original Friday the 13th cinematic releases. They do this just to prove a non-existent point about how this isn’t for people like you. When you’re stuck in the confines of an existence that is continually critiqued, you develop a shell of insecurity and self-doubt that manifest in a belief that you are lesser. Your blackness is lesser than others and your nerdiness is not as valid. Growing up while having your identity pushed aside and made to feel redundant creates a longing for representation. Any amount that you can get. Regardless of accuracy or positive portrayal. It doesn’t even have to be a multi-dimensional character with attributes that extend past mere tokenism. You will just be happy that someone on-screen LOOKS LIKE YOU. Or at least, the people you know. It’s a cinematic nod that approves people like you enjoy these things because there are people like you in it. Representation in mass entertainment media isn’t a new discussion but it is one worth having until we feel accurately represented. It isn’t a dialogue of being overly politically correct and stuffing PC nonsense into our faces everywhere we look, it’s deeper than that. It’s erasure and racism blanketed by factless ideas like "movies with female leads don’t sell and minorities are less favoured". This conversation is worth having because it speaks to tell media organisations that they have to do better and be better. I remember being in middle school, which was predominantly white, and having conversations about our favourite musicians, shows and all the things that now spark nostalgia. I remember being asked what my favourite show was, and my response would always be That's So Raven, The Proud Family and My Wife and Kids. My friends would always be clueless to those shows. Their favourites were Lizzie McGuire and iCarly—shows I knew but couldn’t identify with. So, I watched their shows and we talked about them, then I watched mine, but we never talked about them. My friends couldn’t understand why I liked those shows or found them funny. At the time I didn’t have the vocabulary to fully express what they meant to me, why I felt at ease when I watched. I could only say, "well, I like it because it has Black people", which is itself a valid reason. But, now that I’m older, I

NON-FICTION understand why those shows meant so much to me. Those shows allowed me to see myself on screen. I saw characters that resembled people in my life. I saw cultural similarities and complexities that I hadn’t fully begun to understand the importance of. We can argue the importance of representation, allblack cast and crew within woke liberal circles. But, as we all know, these discussions need to take place elsewhere. The idea of representation and profiting off nerd culture has been co-opted by big companies. Take, for example, Marvel Cinematic Universe rolling out Phase 4 and 5 movies, a large portion now led by women, Black and People of Colour (PoC), which has people asking, why they are only deciding to do this now? Media companies now know films with black or PoC leads makes money, they know how much we crave to see our people on screen and what it means for us, they know we’ll pay to watch it because our people deserve their coins. This shift is evidence of how the landscape is evolving. It’s evolving because mediocre efforts of representation are no longer tolerated. Recently, Disney, our problematic favourite, decided to cast a black Ariel with dreads. The multi-talented Halle Baily, will play the iconic red-haired mermaid. The Little Mermaid is the story of a fourteen-year-old mermaid who gives up her voice and her family to be with a significantly older man. In the Hans Christian Anderson version, it is said that she will feel a stabbing pain when she attempts to sing and the pain of knives whenever she walks on those beautiful legs of hers. Oh yes, and The Little Mermaid is white in both the original story and the animated version. The story takes place in the Caribbean Sea in the fictional city of Atlantis, so race plays no significant part in the storytelling of The Little Mermaid. Meaning that her skin colour can be changed without any repercussions to the narrative. Yet, there is commotion surrounding the casting of Ariel, whether it’s mere tokenism to profit of the Black dollar or valid acts of representation. But young Black girls and boys will stare longingly onto the silver screen, seeing a character that looks like them. They get to experience what their white counterparts have felt all along. This isn’t just the story of Ariel, it’s the story of Black Starfire in Titans, Black MJ in Spider-Man and Black Iris West Allen in The Flash. I’ve scrolled through Twitter long enough with people attempting to come up with counter-arguments like "what if we made Tiana from The Princess and the Frog white?", I could come up with several reasons as to how that doesn’t fit the cultural narrative of a young Black woman struggling to run a small business and face cultural adversity in 1920s New Orleans. Instead, I’ll just say that whiteness as a

concept, and not just a group of people, have had their chance of writing the Black narrative and continue to do so. Whiteness has suppressed our blackness by reducing us to stereotypes that affect us in the real world not just as tropes on screen. Whiteness has used blackface to limit our existence to just a few features. Though stereotyping and blackface may seem like events of the past they still continue to happen. Until our blackness is not limited to the box which whiteness put us in, no, you cannot make Tiana white. The long overdue conversations about representation invite, and accept, Black people into fandoms that we have long been forced to watch from the sidelines. In addition, we can create our own fandoms, having the freedom and space to do so. It’s our opportunity to be weird, to be alternative and to be our own definition of Black. I personally love my blackness, my nerdiness and being a blerd, but it took me a long time to get there. It took time to realise that one does not invalidate the other. This type of self-love is only achieved if we continue to have a conversation about why seeing all different types of Black people on screen, in books, in plays in all forms of media is so important. Especially in the Black diaspora. Representation isn’t just Black Hermione fan art; it’s putting that into practice. It’s holding media to account and calling them out when they’re doing a bad job. It’s calling out racist commentary of Black casting in popular culture. Western entertainment industries have done a magnificent job from profiting off the Black dollar and tokenising our existence in their art. Now we’re simply redefining Hollywood’s perception of us by going centre stage. From one blerd to another, in the words of Solange, “this shit is for us”.

"THIS SHIT IS FOR US" 87

REFUGEE BLUES NON-FICTION

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BY SRISHTEE CHATTERJEE

@brownavocatto

“Go to Pakistan.”

Try criticising the Indian Government, and somebody (mostly upper-caste, straight men) will sit behind their devices and try to send you to Pakistan. The Partition of India (1947), in the wake of India’s freedom from about 200 years of British Rule, divided the erstwhile British India into two independent dominions of India and Pakistan - East and West. The Partition divided the two states of Punjab and Bengal, based on district wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. East Pakistan and West Pakistan were separated by 700 kilometres, and was supposed to be Muslim majority. Riots broke out, and people in Bengal and Punjab were slaughtered, forced to convert their religions, or leave. The Partition of India displaced 14 million people overnight, and 2 million people were killed in their homes. In 1947, my maternal grandfather, whom I lovingly called Dabhai, was 11 years old. He was fast asleep in his bed in Gaila, East Pakistan (Bangladesh after the Liberation War of 1971) when Jawaharlal Nehru delivered his “Tryst With Destiny” speech in the wee hours of the 15th of August, our Independence Day. It was an ambitious speech, asking Indians to wake up to freedom after a long, hard fight of blood, sweat and tears. Outside his house, Hindus were being held at gunpoint and forced to convert to Islam. Keeping the mosquito nets intact, the rice barrels unturned and the stove lit, as if it were any other morning, my grandfather’s mother thrust their keys in the hands of the servants, and held her family close. They were determined to keep each other safe, their family and their faith. Miles away, in Kolkata, which had remained in “Hindu India”, Muslim mothers clutched their children closer, because they were being forcefed pork or killed.

Dabhai and his family, like millions of other

people, walked on foot, travelled in bullock carts, crossed the Ganges crammed into the deck of a lone ship, took trains, scrambling to fit into anything they could find. Resources were running out, and people were scared to go look for more, because there might not have been a family to come back to. The warm August air was thick with the sounds of screaming, and sporadic gunshots that silenced them. Dabhai had a great knack for history, so I know all of this like it is my story. In 2011, 64 years after the Partition, my parents and I decided to go find his home. Dabhai was too frail to travel, in his words, “physically.” Emotionally, I presumed. I had a map in my hands, scribbled in red by his shaking hands. He had recalled it perfectly. A small bridge led into a village, which began at a bajaar abuzz with Sunday activity, with screaming voices negotiating the price of fish, just like in Kolkata. A cluster of houses were marked on the map, the scrawny lines blinking in the resemblance of a home. We walked around, spoke to a couple of people, and very soon, we found out that the family of the servants my great-grandmother had given the keys to, still lived there. They insisted we have lunch. “You’ve come this far for a home, please don’t go without food,” they said, with utmost welcome in their eyes for people they had never met before. While lunch was cooking, we were shown around by helpful people. Some of the walls around us were over 800 years old, the history of my family glistening in the algae growing on the dilapidating walls. There was a pond opposite to the pond, connecting to a small rivulet. There were boats around, with oars in them, almost readied for an escape. I immediately had a vision of a family of seven, desperately rowing away to never come home. The kitchen smells of rice, daal, and fried fish- the exact combination of smells in every Bengali household.

They were hospitable, and they told us it was our home, but I could sense the uneasiness in their feet because of the fear that we would claim what was once ours, and that their homes would be taken away. They gave us contacts of some of our family who had stayed on that soil, who lived in Dhaka, the capital city. We would contact them later. My mother told them that this was their home and no one would steal it from them. I could see in her eyes that she knew how empty her reassurance had sounded.

That is when it hit me. They didn’t read in the news that 14 million people had been displaced. It wasn’t a statistic to them. These were real people who lost their friends and family and never knew what became of them. Entire families were wiped out, and sometimes, one terribly unfortunate person was left behind. To these people, it was a mortal fear of being forced out of your house, and asked to pick between life and faith at gunpoint. It is slowly running out of food supplies, but choosing starvation over having your throat slit, as if that is a choice. We were taking photographs when I had an idea. I took a little bottle and collected some soil, carefully excluding grass. The Airports Authority decrees that life cannot cross national boundaries, and I remember smiling at the heart-breaking irony of it all. We took one last look, and left a land where people spoke Bangla and liked fish, just like me. The Census of India, 1951, was independent India’s first census. It accounted for a 13% increase in population, with around seven million people moving from India to both Pakistans, and around seven million moving the other way around. However, this went beyond officials fitting humans into boxes. The fourteen million people were not uprooted and replaced into the spaces they had vacated. There was no space for any of them, and their lives and deaths were unaccounted for until 4 years after the Partition. Every person in that classified lot of Hindus and Muslims, were real people who bore the brunt of authority’s fundamental manifestation in classifying people into boxes.

They were parents and children, grandparents and siblings, and lovers, who were separated by a single line, dotted and crossed on a map that kept them from each other until they died. When I went back home, I showed Dabhai the pictures I had taken. He looked at me in awe, wide-eyed like a child. That’s when I handed him the container of soil. He held it, his hands shaking and veins popping out and make blueblack rivulets down his wrinkled skin, much like the river he had used to flee his home. He cried. Years of “men don’t cry” forgotten, he cried, and right until the day he died, he held the soil and its memories, very close to his heart. His motherland was India, right from the day he was born, and he loved India in every sports match and flag hoisting, despite being stripped off his home at ten. People say I get “triggered” every time social media trolls threaten to send me to Pakistan because I don’t agree to something the government did. I do, I guess. It’s probably because I know how easy it is to sit behind your devices and strip someone of their homes. I have seen Dabhai feel like he was borrowing space in his own home, like he was never quite home, anywhere in the world. I don’t live at home anymore. 6000 miles away from home, when I see turmoil on Indian soil, I always worry about whether I will go back to the home I left behind. It’s the first thing my mom taught me about Bangla. In my mothertongue, you never say, “I’m leaving”. You always say “I’ll be back.” This story is a tribute to my grandfather, a man who was stripped off his home at ten, but who built his family and home on a different soil. I mortgaged his land to come here, and he passed away after I moved. I wasn’t at his funeral, so this is me telling his story, the one that matters the most NOW.

NON-FICTION Thirrukurral, Chapter 12, 111th Kural:

“That equity which consists in acting with equal regard to each of the divisions of people (enemies, strangers, and friends) is part of dharma [duty/justice]”. The memories of sorrow and injustice still prick the hearts of those Sri Lankan Tamils who had once fled their homeland for safer shores. 2019 marked a decade since the end of a brutal war, dubbed by many as a genocide. The Tamil Diaspora have tried to make these deep, unforgettable grievances heard from their new homes in the affluent nations of Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the U.K and many more. My parents were refugees who landed in Australia at the end of the last century, and their stories of oppression, trauma and flight are no exception to the collective Tamil experience. Although I, a first generation Australian, have never felt the terror of the mobs’ shout at the beginnings of a racial pogrom, nor the fear of settling in a foreign land, the existence of these narratives founded my current position of extraordinary, relative privilege as a university student in Melbourne.

It’s self-evident: I am in a situation of material fortune, through the pure fortune of the facts of my parents’ flight. And this flight was itself part of a legacy of a conflict which did not touch a hair on my unborn head. When I was younger, my mother would tell me about these personal stories of fortune, injustice and flight during our long car rides to and from school. And, it was my imagination of these narratives, and my inextricably close relation to them, that had so profound an impact on how I view justice and my own philanthropic obligations. It’s a cruel history that shadows me and many others. I often think about the hypothetical situation of what would have happened had my parents fled without me. Imagine if I, as a baby, had been born in a hospital in up-country Sri Lanka and just before my parents were about to whisk me off and leave for Australia, I was accidentally swapped with a very similar looking baby behind closed hospital doors. It’s from reflection on my purely contingent advantage that I know I am no different to my 20-year-old counterpart making ends meet in a Sri Lankan village. They could have been in my place, or even better, had fortune favoured them. What I have is undeserved, and so it’s unfairly

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advantageous – that’s the definition of privilege. A shift in material circumstances is an experience that has been shared by many of my PoC friends, but it is only when they honestly reflect on their unique experiences that they gain the advantages of the diversity of their experience. Now, compare this line of thinking that follows from the legacy of diverse backgrounds to the Australian culture I grew up in, where all of one’s money is considered rightfully theirs because it has been deserved by the self-made individual. As such, charity has the unsavoury connotation of lacking discretion, as in ‘we need not give to charity, but if we do we should be highly praised since we have given what is rightfully ours to people who do not deserve it and have no claim to it.’ There is something quite patronising about this distorted form of philanthropy, and perhaps it rests on those assumptions of inflated dessert. These people may continue: "all charity is good charity and how effective a charity is need not matter in one’s calculations because, in the end, the donors were never required to give. It was out of the kindness of their hearts that they would give away what is rightfully theirs." This thought process might be slightly more consistent for someone who has

grown up under this individualistic ideology, and for someone who has not experienced those previously mentioned thoughts of contingency which are embedded in the refugee experience. It’s an easy line of thought to go from contingency to privilege, but the implications are so demanding that it’d be easier to rest on the laurels of Western individualism. For example, on recognition of contingency, it seems that the most natural position to take is one of great humility and doubt about your achievements and gains. Just as one should doubt the deservingness of a large inheritance, so should we to lots of other material benefits in our lives. In doing so we recognize a powerful obligation towards mobilizing our large privilege for philanthropy and practising effective altruism when we do so. In short, we should give a lot more and to the most effective causes. Contingency also requires us to be impartial with how we give. Just as I do not deserve my position, so don’t children suffering and dying of malaria, schistosomiasis, diarrhoea or malnutrition in SubSaharan Africa. Suffering is suffering, irrespective of the unlucky bodies it chooses to inhabit. Importantly, I am not permitted, merely because I

e n u t r

FLIGHT,

o f FORGETTING AND

BY ARAVINDH ANURA

have a connection with my 20-year old Sri Lankan counterpart, to give to a Sri Lankan charity that is relatively more ineffective than one in Sub-Saharan Africa – to do so would be to deny the contingency of my privilege and make a claim of personal ownership and deservingness on my wealth. But I may add another demand of this mindset; to rectify a deeply neglected injustice which an impartial judge would rightly scorn at – speciesism: the prejudice which precludes equal consideration for non-human animals and permits their mass suffering. I cannot reconcile my commitment to racial equality on grounds of justice without acknowledging and fighting against another prejudice that arises from a common mentality and reaps unfathomable suffering. If you fight for one, you need to fight for the other. This is for two big reasons: firstly, all these -isms arise from a common source of wrongness - the denial of an equality of interests between beings who are different in arbitrary ways like race, sex or species. Secondly, these prejudices overlap and intersect in ways which mutually reinforce systems of oppression. Therefore, if you want to destabilize one, you ought to destabilize the other. On this point, Carol Adams famously analysed how patriarchy and the exploitation of animals reinforce each other to the extent that she claimed that vegetarianism/ veganism is a part of feminism. To fight against racism merely because my family was personally harmed by it while failing to call out speciesism would require the same arbitrariness and lack of impartiality that a racist employs in their flawed conception of justice. Part of being impartially just is to detach oneself from personal injustices and fight against them all in proportion to the suffering they inflict. This is perhaps why the Thirrukurral advocates against the consumption of animal flesh in later Kurals. So, as strange and roundabout as it sounds, the legacy of the Sri Lankan conflict, for me, has been its own self-erasure as a source of personal injustice. This is because, on reflection, it has extended my vision of the demands of justice and the obligations of giving far beyond the small margins of Sri Lanka. To do the most good possible for those suffering wherever they may be, and to those suffering, whatever they may be (namely, non-human animals): this mantra, which emerged from the legacy of my culture, found fellowship in the values of Effective Altruism.

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Bà Ngoại I

recently moved into the house my paternal grandparents lived in before they passed away. Walking around, I sometimes think about them. At first, this came as momentary nudge of fear that I’d have a ghost encounter. Now, after a few months, this has become a nagging guilt. I wish I knew more about them. I mean, I’ve heard a handful of stories from my dad, but constantly at the back of my mind is this feeling of regret that I didn’t appreciate them more when they were around. When I was thinking about what I wanted to write, my first instinct was to draw from my personal experience. Some kind of wry commentary piece about my life garnished with a few jokes here and there to take the edge off. But as I thought about it more and more, I realised I was being a bit selfish. I’ve been so lucky to be able to share my stories, so I wanted to take this opportunity to shine the spotlight on someone else—someone who hasn’t had a platform to share their story. An unspoken hero of sorts. My bà ngoại (maternal grandmother) is one of the most important people in my life. Obviously from a genealogical standpoint, I wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t birthed my mum. But I’ve also learnt so much from her: how to embrace my Vietnamese heritage; how to cherish what I have; and how to cook the best Bánh Xèo outside of Saigon (my grandma has banned me from referring to it as “H* C** M**h City”). She and my grandfather sacrificed a lot to pave the way for the life I have now. Born on August 8, 1949, Hằng Trần grew up in a village about seventeen kilometres outside of the city of Châu Đốc in An Giang, a province in the south of Vietnam near the Cambodian border. She is the third of eight siblings, and her parents made a living by selling food from a cart in the city. One of her proudest achievements was following through with her education and graduating from secondary school. Although she never got the chance to go to

university, she landed herself an admin job with the provincial government. I’d pay to see my grandma as The Bachelorette. Apparently she was quite the hot commodity, and knocked back a whole slew of men vying for her affection. Because she was living away from home to work in the city, her parents wanted her to find a husband so they wouldn’t have to worry about her. With the Vietnam War going on at that time, my 20-year-old grandma decided to marry my grandfather, a village acquaintance who worked for the army, to ease their concerns. Apparently he finessed his way into marrying her with the help of a wingman, his sister and a matchmaker—squad goals if I ever saw it. They got hitched a few months later in 1970. If my grandma were a princess in a Disney movie, that would’ve been her happy ending. But sometimes, life doesn’t work out that way. With the war raging on, everything was far from being peachy. She told me that sometimes, she had to hide underground or under her desk at work when bombs exploded. This happened so many times that she lost count. A lot of her friends were killed. She didn’t comment any further. In 1975, communism took a hold over the war-torn nation. Having worked for the former government and the South Vietnam army, my grandparents were persecuted and thrown in jail to prevent them from contacting allies in Cambodia. After being incarcerated a number of times, they were forced to adopt the new way of life, living off of food stamps and rations as most of the food produced in South Vietnam was taken up to the north. Anything of value — money, cars, gold — was also taken by the government, and travelling around Vietnam was strictly controlled. My grandparents paid over a kilo in gold to someone with a boat who offered to help them escape the

BY TRENT VU

IG/Twitter: @trent_vu

country on January 9, 1978, leaving behind all their family and friends. My grandma held her four young daughters tight in her arms as they took to the open ocean on an eighteen-metre long boat carrying 185 people.

died on Bidong Island, mostly from diarrhoea. My grandma was terrified that her children would follow, fearing that their underdeveloped stomachs couldn’t handle the sickness and bacteria that spread around the camp.

And off they sailed.

After six months on the island, my grandparents were interviewed and accepted by American and Australian immigration. They got the call from Australia first, so they went with that; they just needed to get off the island as soon as they could. Flying into Australia during a cold winter on June 15 1980, with only the thin clothes on their backs, they started their new life here.

She still remembers the stench of vomit from people whose stomachs couldn’t handle being on the sea. She still remembers the panic she felt as the boat almost sank when the motor broke. And she still remembers the relief when they were rescued by a patrolling Malaysian ship responding to their SOS. After receiving basic relief — water, food, medicine, and milk for babies and the elderly — their journey continued, because they were not yet allowed to enter Malaysian territory. After half a day, they arrived at a small island in the Straits of Malacca. The men created some shelter to protect everyone from the elements, and that would suffice for the meantime. Their biggest issue was the pirates that wandered the area, robbing and murdering the Vietnamese boat people for their money and valuables. My grandma told me that she although was scared, she had the wits to pretend she didn’t have anything worth stealing, and only gave them food and clothing she didn’t need; she hid her American money, diamonds and gold under her clothes. A day after that, US officials became aware of their location and negotiated for a ship from Malaysia to be sent to rescue them. The family was taken to Bidong Island, an overcrowded Malaysian refugee camp. The island, with an area of only one square kilometre, held around 40,000 refugees. The Malaysians only offered the boat people green beans and garlic, so my grandma had to part with a diamond ring to trade for some rice and fish in order to feed her children something more substantial. Although medical aid was provided by the French, hundreds

For the first month, the government paid for them to live in a motel with three meals a day, and supported them with about $200 a week. My grandma told me she went to Highpoint Shopping Centre and spent some of their first welfare payment on a few metres of fabric to send back to Vietnam with letters telling her family she had arrived safely in Australia. She also reminisces going to secondhand markets on the weekend to buy clothes, and boxes of grapes and apples, which put smiles on her children’s faces. She soon became acquainted with Sister Lorraine from St Peter’s Catholic Church in Bentleigh East, who came to the motel to help my grandma’s four young girls with the motive of converting the family to Catholicism. Although she’s a Buddhist, my grandma appreciated her support anyway, not refusing the money, food and clothing the nun offered. Sister Lorraine also helped my grandparents find jobs — my grandpa at an orange juice company, while my grandma worked at Repco — and a share house to stay in. Once they earned enough money, my grandparents bought the house in Clarinda they live in now. Chasing their own Australian dream, they also bought a milk bar and my grandma operated it

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for about five years. (My mum tells me all the time about how her and her younger sister would get up early for the milk delivery, while my oldest and youngest aunties were lazy and didn’t help out at all. (As you can tell, she doesn’t harbour any kind of deep resentment at all.) After this first business venture, my grandparents started importing clothes from Asia to sell to shops here; they eventually stopped when Chinese merchants started selling their wares at a much cheaper price. At this point, about twenty years ago, my aging grandparents — no longer needing to support their daughters, who had all graduated from university and embarked on their respective life paths — applied to receive payments from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and have been living comfortably ever since. Now that she’s retired, my grandma spends her time listening to Vietnamese news, buying things from Sunday markets and hoarding them, jetsetting around the globe and hanging out with her buddies from the RSL. Her circumstance meant that she never got to experience these things in her youth, so I’m so happy she gets to carpe diem the heck out of life now. One of the most selfless people I know, she also dedicates a lot of her time and effort to helping people, whether it’s offering family friends and distant relatives a place to stay as they find their footing on terra firma, or giving clothes to new migrants from Vietnam who can’t afford them. My grandma also loves throwing a dinner party every now and then, and always lets my sister and I know when she’s cooking up some of her signature bánh xèo. My bà ngoại is always here for me when I need her— if I need advice, a place to stay, or the latest intel on the next local warehouse sale. I’m so honoured to be able to share her story and one of her delicious Vietnamese recipes with you all.

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Bánh Xèo This is my grandma’s recipe for Bánh Xèo, a Vietnamese savoury crepe filled with meat, seafood and veggies, and served with Nước Chấm. It’s a labour of love, but totally worth it. Prep Time: 1 hour Cooking Time: 20 minutes Serves: Crowd Ingredients • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

250g rice flour 750ml - 1L water 200ml can of coconut milk (refrigerated overnight) ½ tsp salt 1 tbsp turmeric 3 spring onions (green part only, sliced) 200ml beer ½ cup split mung beans 1 pork belly strip (boiled, then sliced) 250g prawns (shell and entrails removed, butterflied) 500g bean sprouts 1 brown onion (thinly sliced) 1 cucumber (sliced) Mint Lettuce

Chicken Filling • • • • • •

400g chicken mince ½ brown onion (finely chopped) 1 tbsp fish sauce 1 tsp salt 1 tsp sugar ½ tsp pepper

Pickled Vegetables • • • • • •

½ daikon (shredded) 1 carrot (shredded) 1/3 cup salt Vinegar 4 tbsp sugar ½ tsp salt

Nước Chấm • • • • • •

½ cup water ½ cup fish sauce ½ cup sugar ½ cup vinegar 4 chili peppers (sliced) 3 cloves garlic (finely chopped)

To Prepare the Batter 1. Scoop the coconut cream from the top of the can of coconut milk. You can discard the liquid or reserve it. 2. Add the rice flour, coconut milk cream, salt and 750ml water into a large mixing bowl. Whisk gently to combine. 3. Add turmeric, beer and spring onion. You may need to add more water to create a loose batter. 4. Allow to sit for 30-60 mins. To Prepare the Mung Beans 5. Add split mung beans into a saucepan. Add 1 cup of water and bring to the boil. Cook and continue slowly adding more water until mung beans are soft. Cover with cling wrap and set aside. To Prepare the Nước Chấm 6. In a bowl, add shredded daikon and carrot. Cover with salt and mix through. Allow to

sit for 15 mins. Squeeze out liquid and rinse under water. 7. Add daikon and carrot into a bowl. Pour in enough vinegar to submerge the vegetables. Add in sugar and salt, and stir to dissolve. Allow to sit for 20 mins. 8. Combine Nước Chấm ingredients in a bowl. Stir to dissolve sugar, then add pickled daikon and carrot. Stir through, cover with cling wrap and set aside. To Make the Chicken Filling 9. In a pan, heat 1 tbsp oil over medium-high heat. Add chicken mince and stir fry for 1 min. 10. Add onion and stir fry until chicken mince is cooked and onion has softened. Stir through fish sauce, salt, sugar and pepper. Set aside. To Cook the Bánh Xèo 11. Heat a seasoned wok or non-stick pan over high heat. 12. If using a wok, heat until smoking, then add 2 tbsp oil and rotate wok to coat sides with oil. If using a non-stick pan, use 1 tsp oil. 13. Stir batter and add approx. 1 cup of mixture into the wok or pan. Quickly tilt the wok or pan and move in a circular motion to allow the batter to coat the surface. 14. Scatter a few prawns over the pancake, followed by some pork belly slices, 1-2 tbsp chicken mince, 1-2 tbsp mung bean, onion and bean sprouts. 15. Once edges have become golden brown and pull away from the side of the wok/pan, carefully fold in half using a spatula and your hands. 16. Slide onto a plate and serve immediately with Nước Chấm, cucumber, mint and lettuce. 17. Repeat with remaining ingredients until finished.

POETRY

POETRY III. we consume the bitterness infused deep within our blood

darkened by worldly suffering we heave under morose skies

it stains the scrubbed linen, the damp cloth we hang to dry

we are silent yet in motion cracked skin submerged under cold water

Grandfather blinks slowly speaks softly, his voice marred by a history of silence

as the mildew of once greener leaves its presence in the crevice of human bone our skin flakes away, wilting prunes under our dead teeth. I.

ANCESTRY

he watches as his home is stolen away and says nothing. untold, cold water, forget. we never speak of it again. IV.

we learn to nurture pain to cherish routine

it remains a reflex of mine

cleaving the land open, bare hands conquering raw earth the roots of our family etched into these fields dust tattooed upon our knees, we kneeled as our children came upon us, a waning mirage

I forget the myth, the dream of a dream to exist with the stagnant II. unhinged doors detached, we watch our neighbours fall we are hollowed out voiceless, we clasp onto each other endlessly folding inward the wind washes you away barefoot bullet-ridden

BY JACEY QUAH

that cold water the same numbed flesh I labour in washing leaves doused in pesticide Grandmother wrings my palms, kneading my bones painfully I remain pliable, remember pain as an expression of love she mourns my cracked knuckles, the bloodied scars we share but is it not my destiny? I am but a revival of fate â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A sepulchre of memory as her rough hands chafe mine, I examine the gaping slits beneath her eyes I quietly mourn the cold of her flesh

CREATIVE

POETRY

CUSHION COVER A cushion has a cover, stripes made by hands that held their first grandchild, with buttons fallen and replaced that blended into maroon lungis with silver brooches and silvering hair. A cushion has a cover, scented with blessings and incense burnt as an offering to the Buddha, a recorder of prayers for safety, for luck, for well lived lives to come. A cushion has a cover, patterned with childprints that threw it around for joy and broke a clock in the middle of a pillow fight, and black and white fur when feeble hands stroked canine ears waiting to be scratched. A cushion has a cover, soaked in advice from a mother to a daughter and dismissals between generations. A cushion has a cover, stitched from thread hidden inside a grandmother’s cookie box, guided kneaded through a needle with a grandchild’s eye, from an old sewing machine that creaks when pedaled, passed down from a great grandmother. A cushion has a cover, powdered by a widow’s neck and glitter from a child’s ballet costume, and brushed by soft kafkas against braided hair falling below the shoulders. A cushion has a cover, splashed with drops of voices no longer spoken and conversations past forgotten, on which a baby once laid, rocked to sleep by her singing grandmother. By Thirangie Jayatilake

adelaide “Oi, wanker- Macca’s run?” Sahil spared a quick glance at the text that lit up his phone and decided there was nothing less he’d like right now than soggy nuggets. The watermelon-flavoured gum he’d been chewing on since midday was glued against the flatbed of his tongue to the point where it wasn’t watermelon-flavoured anymore; it tasted muddy and moist – like a saltless, flavourless ocean. Sahil frowned. When he tried to spit it out, there was no gum, and his spit tasted metallic and cold. Why’d you park in Windy Point, idiot, he asked his distorted reflection in the rear-view mirror. He could see all of Adelaide – the little houses all set in parallel lines as though constructed by a slightly obsessive-compulsive toddler with monochromatic Lego pieces, the rolling green hills finally devoid of symmetry, all framed by a greying, unforgiving ocean. “You think you’re having a shittier day than me?” Sahil asked the ocean. The ocean did not respond. The car reeked of cigarette smoke and chemical distress. Was it blood? No, sewage – the Coke cans and Ginling Chinese takeaway plastic you fish from the shores of Glenelg beach. Amma was not going to be happy. Well, Sahil shrugged, that makes two of us, Amma. Her bindi had been crooked this morning. Sahil wanted to point it out while they were arguing – two equally hot-headed and tempestuous waves crashing against each other in a sea. “You missing school now!” “It was two days! It’s not a big deal.” “Not a big deal? You’re so –” “I told you I want to do hairdressing. I don’t want to work as an actuary, for God’s sake. Both you and Appa need to get that idea out of your head, don’t you understand? No, no you don’t, because you only care –” The unfiltered morning sunlight glistened

off Amma’s bangles as she raised her arm to strike him. Sahil didn’t even bother cowering – she hadn’t hit him since he was ten. “You think we moved to this country for ourselves?” Amma wrung her hands wryly. If Sahil was a bit more perceptive he would have been able to see the fire in her veins. Amma always wore her cold femininity like pearls around her neck – she’d pinch her son’s cheeks and called him her jaan but the linger of her touch on his skin would be a ghost for Sahil, whispering in his ear you make her so sad, so disappointed, you’re not a good son. You’re not a good son. “Beta, if Appa hears you skipped school to go to a hairdressing course, you know what he’d do?” “I could be working –” “You’re 17 years old, jaan,” Amma said softly, but there was bite to her words. “You don’t need a job- you need to focus on school.” Sahil’s fingernails were digging into his palms and forming little moon-shaped crescents – little souvenirs of his crumbling relationship with his mother. He regarded the saltwater seeping through his skin instead of blood. Tap, tap. Sahil studied the blond teenager who’d just rapped at his window with an apologetic grin. He tried to roll his window only halfway but his stupid Subaru was no more than a rebellious teenager, vowing to do otherwise than what was asked. If Amma hated him half as much as he hated this Subaru, Sahil could understand why she called him no son of hers. She definitely regretted saying that to him, but her stiff upper lip had revealed otherwise. The guy flashed him a perfect customerservice grin. “Hey, mate! Can I ask a favour, if it’s not too much?” Sahil, already knowing it would be too much, shot him a tight-lipped white people smile.

CREATIVE “Sure?” Pretty Boy ran his fingers through his sandy hair, revealing a receding hairline. He looked like every economics major from Adelaide Uni who used the word ‘feminazi’. “You see that girl over there?” His finger shot in a direction Sahil didn’t care to follow. “We started talking last week and I think tonight’s the, you know, night…?” Sahil swore he tried to follow what Captain America was saying but it just sounded like glug glug glug after a point. Was it boredom making him nauseated and light-headed?

escaped his throat, a crow’s dying rattle. Sahil’s eyes felt weary like they had the first time he stepped out of an airplane into the unfamiliar, piercing Delhi air. “You’re not used to the pollution,” Amma had ruffled his hair. “It hurts to open my eyes!” Ten-year-old Sahil had complained. It was like that now, except a thousand times worse. Sahil was a determined prick, though. Swallowing the agony and immense pressure crushing his skull one discomforted hitch at a time, he opened his pained eyes.

His new friend flashed him a perfect set of blinding white teeth “So, will you help a brother out?” “Wait, so you want me to drive off so you guys can bang it out in this very public tourist spot? Even though I got here first?” Sahil said. His brain seemed to have betrayed him. He barely heard a thing that was said to him and yet the facts had arranged themselves in his head, though not quite right. Like when he and Amma would do puzzles together and he’d break pieces trying to fit them together even though they were wrong. “I mean, it works, right?” he’d joke. Amma’s English was quite limited at that point, but she knew how to say, “Don’t be stupid.”

Something was so very wrong.

“Well?”

Sahil was driving now, and Led Zeppelin were playing.

Sahil’s mouth jumped into action before his brain did. “Uh, sure, man.” Sahil barely registered the exhilarated response he received. When he retaliated the boy’s high five, his palms felt wet. He regarded his pruned fingers – Amma called them ‘artist’s fingers’. His friends preferred ‘Slenderman’s fingers’. How sweaty are your palms, you fuckin’ weirdo? Sahil thought. Sahil’s bones were starting to feel heavy – countless kilograms of calcium weighing him down. He felt like no more than a pile of dusty old bones – not old with age yet aged – as he tried to swallow all the tension seeping into his skin. He did not make it through the breath. He didn’t have smoker’s lungs yet – he was halfway there, though – but a strangled gasp

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Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide. Why was everything simultaneously painted blue and bleached colourless? The buildings seemed to have sprouted legs like a Star Wars extra. As much as little Sahil would have loved that, teenage Sahil wasn’t impressed. The greying darkness of the open sea looked raging and unforgiving and Sahil wondered why Adelaide beaches were plastered on every postcard of the state. This sea was the water of Cocytus throwing a temper tantrum. The ocean was bleeding itself onto the unsuspecting city. Drive, drive, drive, drive.

CREATIVE is escaping his brain like honey slipping out of a bottle, slow enough that he longed for it to finish and yet fast enough that he felt melancholic at the thought of an end. At first, he is determined not to open his mouth – that means letting the lake take him.

I really am a shit son – memories were spilling out of his body like heavily edited video footage. He remembers Amma’s “Sahil? Be home before dark, beta!” when he’d stormed out. There should be tears now, but the lake doesn’t need any more water.

When Sahil bites his tongue, it tastes of swimming pool water.

Sahil was a decent swimmer but the Subaru was crushing whatever life the ripping waters had left in him.

The torn metal of his Subaru and the Stygian waters are crushing his wiry frame into an even tinier, wirier frame, as he thinks of Amma. He shouldn’t have brushed past her warm, bangled hand when she tried to make up with him. He should have mapped her face, his beautiful mother’s familiar face, with her crooked bindi, for longer. Instead, his mind betrays him by showing him events bleached colourless and inaccurate by hallucinations. This isn’t nitrogen narcosis; it was death inviting him for a Macca’s run. He tries to remember what he’d been thinking about when he lost control of the car. Was it nuggets? School? Amma?

In that second, Sahil prayed for the first time in years. Did he even go to Windy Point? Did he really do a 110 on a dirt road on the banks of a murky lake and skid into its unwelcoming waters? Did he really tell Amma he hated being her son? He only knew the latter wasn’t true. Amma called him jaan. Life. Sahil waits to die.

by Kavya Malhotra IG: @prettyjosten

Amma. I need to warn, Amma, he thought. He was now coursing through the hills, swearing musically and rhythmically, with adverbs his Lit teacher would be proud of, casting care and precision into the pronunciation of every eloquent sentence, usually ending with fuck! Fuck. For Australian summertime, the lake is cold. Sahil doesn’t know how long he’s been submerged for, but he feels his mind slipping away. He and his Subaru, a companion he could definitely blame, have been pressed against the flatbed of Lake Playford long enough for him to realise he’s dying. Everything has slowed down and each thought and memory

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NANAWA- UH BY THERESA GUNARSO IG: @theresagunarso theresagunarso.wixsite.com/portfolio Youtube: MIN_TEE

CREATIVE Excerpt from ‘Speak like a Local from Gorontalo’ (Original title: 'Bicara Seperti Orang Lokal Gorontalo’) Dictated by Jauw HolianguHo Transcribed by Meidy HolianguHo-Gunarso Compiled by Meidy HolianguHo-Gunarso Edited by Meidy HolianguHo-Gunarso Translated by Theresa Gunarso Now that we’ve discussed the word Milu1, we will move on to the next word. The word is NANAWA-UH which is a very versatile word. It is an exclamation that you can use when you’re surprised, frustrated, angry, etc. For you English speakers, this word is a handy replacement for fucg, shir, and damb2. Here are 5 sentences3 to show the usage of nanawa-uh.

---------- Forwarded message ---------

EXAMPLE 1: Nanawa-uh. Kita badodu! (Nanawa-uh. I have the hiccups!)

To: Agatha Williams <agatha.williams@geemail.com> From: Theresa Gunarso <theearthisabananasplit@geemail.com> Subject: Excerpt DRAFT

EXAMPLE 2: Nanawa-uh! Ngana bukan lagi liburan ka Singapura? Xiexie datang ini hari. (Nanawa-uh! Aren’t you supposed to be on holiday in Singapore? Thank you for coming today.)

Hi Agatha. Thank you so much for getting my grandpa’s book into your parents’ magazine. He’s so excited about it. He really needed the win, especially after grandma passed away. This is a draft, so you can see how his book is like. I’m gonna edit it further, but it may take a while. I emailed him the progress and I’m waiting for his feedback first. He doesn’t know how to access his emails, but my cousin is flying to Gorontalo soon, so she should be able to help him. Tbh, I don’t get why he has an email if he doesn’t know how to use it, but he’s trying to keep up with technology, so you gotta give him that. I also sent him a physical letter just in case. Whichever he replies to first, I will let you know. Btw, thank you so much! Theresa. ---------- Attached File <excerpt_DRAFT_DRAFT1.docx> ---------

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EXAMPLE 2: Nanawa-uh. Kothae taruh kita pe obat di atas lamari. Bagaimana kita pe ambil tanpa nyandak jatuh? (Nanawa-uh. Kothae4 put my medications on top of the cupboard. How am I supposed to take it without falling over?) EXAMPLE 3: Nanawa-uh. Shira5, ngoni pe motor sungguh baribut. Diam joh! (Nanawa-uh. Shira, your motorcycle is so noisy. Shut it up!) EXAMPLE 4: Nanawa-uh. Akulan6 [Dia] pe abab sungguh bobou. Ade, ngoni jangan berani bilang siapa-siapa kita ngomong bagitu. (Nanawa-uh. [His] breath really smells. Ade7, don’t you dare tell anyone I said that.) EXAMPLE 5: Nanawa-uh joh! (Nanawa-uh!) 1. Milu means corn. 2. Profanities removed for discretion. 3. Original Indonesian sentences are retained to help the reader understand nanawa-uh in context of the original language. 4. My grandfather is referring to his second son and my uncle. I don’t know what the word translates to directly in English. It’s not the word ‘uncle’ because why would my grandpa call his son ‘uncle’, you know? It’s not an affectionate nickname like ‘kiddo’ or ‘sonny’ either. It’s more like... imagine having a word that you can use to directly call/refer to your second son specifically. Imagine, hypothetically, in this world, the word meaning ‘second son’ is ‘san’––so son = first son, san = second son. It’s like that! Actually, I don’t even know. Maybe Kothae is my uncle’s name. Wait, no… his name is Andy. 5. Shira is my grandpa’s employee. Well, more like my grandpa’s personal caretaker. He also runs this stand in front of my grandpa’s house where he sells cigarettes and gasoline. Psst, he mixes water into the gasoline, so he has more supplies. HAHAHAHAHA. BUT our family don’t condone this behaviour, just saying. Oh, and Shira’s 70. 6. Name removed so the person won’t be offended (though it’s true his breath smells. Don’t get me wrong, the dude is very nice). The name is replaced with the word ‘dia’ which means they, he, or she 7. I don’t know if he’s referring to me (he calls me ade which means little sibling) or if he’s referring to his employee named Ade (aka Shira’s son).

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understand why everyone would think I was going postal. After all, I lost my crew to a group of Space Pirates then went off the grid with no warning. But I assure you, I am still sound of mind. My ship’s fuel was not enough to make the jumps, so I couldn’t return to Earth like the Superiors ordered me to. And with my supplies running out, I had to make a pit stop on an unregistered planet. Unfortunately for me, I arrived in the middle of an intra-planetary conflict. I hadn’t realised this at first because

T H E

CREATIVE

The Alpha Sector housed the planet’s engineers. Whenever the Mountain travelled there, Alphas would mine the Mountain for resources to build weapons. The Alphas also created a scanner that can detect and shoot down any hostilities entering the planet’s atmosphere. I managed to bypass it because my ship’s weapons were destroyed. Betas are more scientific than Alphas. They are the scholars. They would send their best scientists to study the Mountain whenever it landed on their Sector. Despite their extensive research, the Mountain remained an enigma —

The blazes calmed, yet the Guardian still encouraged us to pray until morning.

Then, the rumble came again. As it turned out, the previous rumble didn’t come from the robot. The source of the rumbles was the Beta’s transport. It hauled a speaker-like machine and moved swiftly considering its weight. In no time, Betas positioned the speaker at the space between Alpha and Omega.

When the sun rose, we went outside. Debris littered the front yard. The carcass of the robot laid motionless. Meanwhile, the Beta’s machine was crushed like a bug stepped on. I gagged as I saw bones and innards scattered on the ground. However, nobody cared about that because the most miraculous thing had happened.

And we felt harsh tremors.

T R A V E L L I N G

of my broken universal translator. Fortunately, a Young Alien saw my ship and brought me to her home and her family who welcomed me. It was only after we fixed my translator that I understood what was going on. The Planet was fighting for a mountain. The Travelling Mountain, as they called it, would travel every week (or an equivalent of a week –– their planet doesn’t rotate until 4 days of our measurement), randomly stopping on different Sectors of the planet. These Sectors are: Alpha, Beta, and Omega. Because of the Mountain’s constant movement, the Sectors could never claim ownership of it. They agreed whichever Sector the Mountain stopped at, the citizens could use it as they wished. However, for two months, the Mountain remained at the intersection between the Sectors (I have provided a visual aid below), sparking a debate over who could use it.

this only drove the Betas more. Meanwhile, the Omega Sector, which was where the Young Alien and her family lived, simply needed the Mountain to shield them from direct exposure of the sun. The spiritual Omegas believed that the Mountain was an ethereal creature that moved when no one was looking. The Omegas worshipped the Mountain (and you are right to assume the Betas would scoff at this). The Sector Leaders met constantly to negotiate, but no agreement could be reached. Recently, the Alpha Leader stormed out from one of the meetings. Everybody was preparing for the inevitable, which was why –– when I arrived –– the doors to the Young Alien’s home had been propped up with boards and extra locks. ––– We were jolted out of sleep when there was a sudden rumble. At the window, from the distance we saw a gargantuan humanoid robot emerging from the Alpha Sector and arriving between Beta and Omega. The robot propped its hands up and pressed them against the Mountain and began… pushing. The Mountain didn’t move.

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The robot used the boosters on its arms for extra power. Still… no movement.

There was a Mountain at the Omega Sector.

M O U N T A I N

The family and I fell backwards; our furniture moved inches from their original place; a pot plant nearly fell on top of a child.

And the Alpha Sector.

Once more, the ground trembled violently and we all fell again, interrupting the Guardian’s attempt to clean the broken pot. She managed to push the shards away from the children though she cut herself. She clutched her hand where green viscous substance oozed out of her palm (which I came to realise was her blood). I attended to her while a child intelligently deduced that the Betas were trying to move the Mountain towards their Sector using artificial tectonic movement.

Just like that, the Planet’s conflict was resolved. The alien family rejoiced. That day, they all took time off to bring offerings up the Mountain.

By the third earthquake, the Mountain stayed immovable, but the Alpha’s robot lost its balance and crashed. It had difficulty getting up, like a cockroach on its back. As a last-ditch effort, the robot launched its rocket boosters to the side of the Mountain to push it towards Alpha. The Mountain was still firmly grounded and the Sectors were not giving up. We all huddled under a table out of fear of another tremor. As one of the children started crying, the Omega Sector’s news broadcast ordered a collective prayer circle. We began praying for the Sector aloud to shut out the loud noises. Eventually, the commotion stopped after a loud explosion. Despite the closed window, we felt the heat of the inferno.

And the Beta Sector.

––– I was waiting for the Guardian’s Engineer friend when the news came. The Betas had destroyed their Mountain. In an attempt to make their Mountain bigger and taller, the Betas conducted an experiment which failed miserably. The Mountain deflated and perished into a sand dune. One afternoon, the wind blew too hard and the sand scattered across the Sector. That was not all. The Engineer arrived much later than our regular schedule. (I would have gone to Alpha myself, but the Guardian said I shouldn’t be seen because I’m an ‘alien’.) The Engineer apologised profusely for his tardiness and added that the Alpha’s Mountain was growing ‘sicker’. He suspected that the Alphas might be over-mining the Mountain

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CREATIVE without any intentions of slowing down. Though we resumed my ship’s repairs, I could feel his mind wandering. –––

Concerns escalated when the two Mountains (or what remained of them) merged back. The large Mountain sat at the intersection again. It no longer looked majestic. It looked (dare I say) rather pathetic. One side was even hollow.

I was sweeping the house when the Alphas and Betas came over to the Omega Sector with their giant transports and machineries. The transports gathered at the foot of the Mountain where the Omega’s Leader had been standing. Many crowded the area to see what was happening. A commotion broke out as the transports made their way up the Mountain.

The strange occurrences didn’t stop there.

Apparently, the Omega’s Mountain will be mined by the Alphas and the Betas for a hefty price.

… and these locusts attacked him before scattering across the Sectors.

B Y While the Alphas made money from selling weapons and the Betas from their scientific discoveries and education, the Omegas had nothing valuable to sustain their lives. The Sector was mostly a place where people go when they are abandoned or lost or rejected. With the increase of people coming into the Sector, the Leader had to make the deal. About seventy percent of the Omegas agreed and despite resistance from the rest, the leader remained firm in her decision. Omegas could no longer do their ritual practices. It was too loud and ritual sites were disassembled to make way for machineries and mining areas. The Omega’s Mountain was deteriorating into an awful shell it once was. ––– The Planet called it the Darkness. A sunrise was due days ago which was because the Betas confirmed the Planet still rotated around the sun. Due to this, the Alphas and the Betas paused their activities and returned to their respective Sectors.

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A calm night was interrupted by a loud buzzing. We peered out the window and saw the Beta’s sand collecting, condensing, and transforming into a hoard of locusts. There was an alien walking home from work...

T H E R E S A Everybody immediately shut their doors and windows, but the locusts targeted the cracks of the houses. A child in our house screamed and pointed to the gap between the door and the floor. A single locust crept through it. Then, the rest of its hoard followed. The locusts continued pouring in and backed us up against the walls. Another child panicked and bolted for the door. The locusts swirled around his head, forming a cocoon. He struggled against them and stopped. He dropped to the ground with pale skin and white lips. The Young Alien screamed. The Guardian turned to me. She fought her voice’s shakiness and repeatedly asked me what to do, hoping my military experience would help. I was stunned at first before realising my ship’s doors have airtight seals. I scooped some children and the Guardian did the same thing. We ran to the backyard with

CREATIVE the locusts trailing behind us. By some miracle we managed to enter the ship with only a handful of locusts that we could kill with our bare hands. This infestation continued for days and I was thankful I had stocked the ship with food and drinks during my repairs. The locust attack ceased when they suddenly fell to the ground. Though we were all relieved, we remained cautious as the sun still hadn’t risen. The Guardian and I went back to the house to salvage any food that the locusts hadn’t touched. As I was busy packing the food into a bag, the Guardian nervously pointed towards a locust.

grew foggy. I didn’t even register the Guardian unbuckling my seatbelt and dragging me out as the ship’s engine caught on fire. The humanoid burned alongside the ship, its wail overpowering the ringing. With little strength I brought a hand to cover my ear. My head hit the ground again when the Guardian’s feet gave away. I felt something trickling down my nose. The Guardian begged the children to move away from the cliff. At first, I didn’t understand why. Then, the Mountain shook. A child pointed towards the top. I turned and saw it melting into green liquid that created a rapid stream towards the ground. The screams

G U N A R S O It grew and morphed into an 8-foot humanoid. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threw it. The knife went straight to its heart. The humanoid plucked the object out, unfazed by the hole created by the knife. It threw the knife towards the Guardian. I pulled her out of the way, yet the knife still grazed her right arm. The Guardian claimed she was fine and together we ran towards the ship before the other locusts could transform into more humanoids. We managed to get there safely before an army of humanoids charged our ship. In the heat of the moment, I turned on the ignition of the ship. During the time it took for the engine to warm up, the humanoids piled on the ship. The engine finally roared to life, and we took off from the area. We shook off a couple humanoids, but a persistent one clung to one of the ship’s pipes. I maneuvered the ship to shake the humanoid off. In the process, we crashed into the Mountain. The inertia caused me to bang my head into the dashboard. A loud ringing broke out in my ear and my vision

mixed with the humanoid’s wails and the ringing burned my ears. I couldn’t do it anymore. My mind was wandering and it was telling me to let go… The Guardian snapped her fingers in my face. She told me we needed to move. That was when I saw the Guardian’s knife injury. We were too late as we were swept away by the current. However, our current deviated; instead of swerving downwards, we swerved to the right. The miracle brought us to firm and dry land. One of the children was choking and the Guardian was frantically patting her back to ease her pain. I felt helpless as I couldn’t move my body. The Young Alien helped me sit up. Before I could manage a small thank you, I was taken aback by the sight. I felt sick –– not because of the ringing, or the nausea that suddenly overwhelmed me, or the taste of iron trickling into my mouth. It was because we had a clear view of blood drowning the Sectors.

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CREATIVE The Seas sit beside me and ask, “Why do you feel lost?”

NO HEART LEFT TO GIVE BY ALI NOURA The sun has set, and yet, I see not the moon nor the stars.

Blind, nothing to see and no motivation to move, I still hear the screams and feel the blood at my feet. What are we fighting for? What have we achieved? What can we do? Screams.

I thought there was purpose, I thought there was meaning. I am no longer sure. Blood.

I remain in the void for I struggle to find a reason to return to the light. Screams.

They say words. They think those words mean something. Their words mean nothing. Blood.

I no longer know whose voices to heed, which tragedy to be stirred by or what cause to strive for. There is a gash in my chest. I seek out my heart, but I find it not. Screams.

I can no longer tell whose screams are louder, mine or theirs. Blood.

I can no longer tell whose blood is on me, mine or theirs. _____________________________________

I still cannot see, but I think it is best I move.

I move in one direction and fall over a collapsed tree, so I choose another direction.

I move in one direction and cut myself on broken glass, so I choose another direction.

I move in one direction and I am come upon, beaten until my body can no longer take the hits. I wake, I sigh, I stand.

My feet finally find a dirt path made smooth by walking. I follow it.

The screams fade away, replaced by birds singing. The blood seeps away, replaced by soft grass.

The path begins to incline, and I begin to see towering trees around me, illuminated by tall torches which have appeared along the path.

The torches guide me to a clearing atop a bare hill, a bonfire illuminating the faces of the strangers sitting around it. They each have scars on their chests. They turn to me with gentle smiles and beckons me to sit. I guess I should. They ask, “What is your story?”

_____________________________________

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“I feel torn between countless pathways. I know that each of us can only do so much, we cannot lead the charge on every fight, but how I can stay silent when so much is wrong? I feel powerless.”

They turn to me, “My dear, everything is connected..Think not that one action here,” opening one hand, “does not affect another action there,” opening the other hand in which lies a seed.

“Take this seed. It requires someone to plant it, nurture it, and care for it so that it may bear fruit which will feed others, to then, provide more seeds for more trees. It requires someone to protect it from harm so that it may survive, but also, that others may understand why the tree is important to us.” “But you are the Seas, why do you care so much about trees?”

“Exactly my point,” they reply with a laugh. “I am like a sailor; my heart lies with the sea. If I do not care for the sea, the rivers will be polluted, poisoning the life which dwells in the water, the creatures which drink from that water and the trees which are nurtured with that water. A sailor need not be a farmer to appreciate how the earth affects the water,” raising one open palm, “nor a farmer a sailor to appreciate how the seas affect the earth,” placing the other palm on top of the other. There is a momentary pause.

Laughing with the kindest of voices, “You are so worried, my dear, that your actions have no impact that you fail to see just how much impact they have. Do not let the paradox of choice keep you frozen. Choose a path and the fruits of your labours will flow to others, even if you cannot see it!” _____________________________________

The Mountains sit beside me and ask, “Why do you feel responsible?”

“I feel that I am sometimes the only one can see what others do not. Where others seek to speak, I seek to listen, to notice, to understand, but they do not! They do not seek to listen, do not seek to notice, do not seek to understand, and what does this breed? It breeds nothing but misunderstanding, hate and conflict, and into this conflict I am drawn for the very fact that I listen and thus do others seek me to mediate their squabbles With a calm and slow yet, booming voice, the Mountains whisper, “My dear, not every burden is yours to bear. Others might seek your guidance because of your wisdom, but even the imparting of wisdom takes a toll. You may not notice it but it will chip away at you up until the moment you collapse from the exhaustion of attempting to prevent the skies from caving in on everyone around you. It is not fair on yourself nor necessary for you to become involved in every quarrel; others must learn from their own challenges and mistakes as you must too.” “But how can I do nothing when they are in pain?”

“You must realise that despite your pure intentions for others, there will be those who do not seek your help or even if they ask and receive it, value it not, and take advantage of you. These people are such,” the Mountains raise a closed fist and open it, sand flowing swiftly through their fingers. “Those who despite your aide will not value your words enough to care about you. And just like sand, you must let them go for the energy you provide them is not worth the costs on your spirit”. There is a momentary pause.

“Do not be disparaged by this, my dear”. Raising their other closed fist, they reveal a rough, muddied stone. “There will be those who are also damaged, struggling and in pain just like you who, when you love them, counsel them and support them, will never fall through your hands. Rather, through your hands, they will become stronger and more beautiful through your wisdom,” the rough, muddied stone now smooth and clean in the Mountains hand. “And it is they who will do the same for you”. _____________________________________

The Sun sits beside me and asks, “Why do you feel guilty?”

“I feel selfish when I attempt to place my own desires and feelings above those of others because I have simply done it for so long. I strove so hard for the sake of others, for the joy of others, for the love of others that I never learned how to love myself.I never learned to embrace the feelings whirling within me, never learned how to bring them out into the light. In my mind, to bring them out, to refute and criticise and rage, to no longer be that person who was perpetually selfless, was to invite those I loved the most to cast me out, to finally call out me out as an imposter, to judge and execute me. I am so terrified of sitting with my own thoughts and emotions that I seek means of hiding them. I masked it so well that not only could others not see them, but, as it turns out, neither could I.”

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With a voice that fills you with warmth just to hear it, the Sun speaks: “My dear, you are so terrified of voicing your anger, your sorrow and your desires because you perceive them to be shameful, perceive that they will hurt others, perceive that they make you selfish. You have believed the lie that your sentiments are second to the sentiments of others, and you thought that made you a better, stronger person but it only makes you weaker. They are the truths which rest within you and to repress them is to harm both yourself and those who you love”. “But how can being selfless harm others?”

“It harms others because you are hiding necessary truths from them to spare their feelings, when in fact they need to hear your words of anger to know they have erred so that they may apologise, they need to hear your words of sorrow to know you are hurt so that they may counsel, and they need to hear your words of desire to know your love so that they may love you back. Without these honest words, those you love will never learn neither more about themselves nor more about you. Thus, learning to identify, validate and express your own sentiments makes you more capable to help those you love.”

They raise one hand to reveal a heap of thorns. “This is how you have treated your feelings. They caused you pain to touch them and, in your fear, you threw them away,” throwing the thorns into the wind, “because you thought that would spare everyone that pain”. The Sun raises their other hand to reveal rose petals which the wind also snatches away. “But in your fear, you threw away the flower as well because as you grew scared of pain, you also grew scared of joy, and this robbed both you and others of your beauty.” “Your pain and your love, your anger and your kindness, your fears and your desires, these are all part of who you are, and to be your best self means embracing pain and joy alike with acceptance and not judgement. Only then, can you truly help others.”

In the Sun’s hand, spotted with tiny cuts, rests a perfect rose carefully cleaned of thorns which they now place in my hands. “Perhaps taking the time to be selfish enough to embrace your own feelings is the only path to true selflessness.” _____________________________________

_____________________________________ I awake on the dirt.

I rise to find the hilltop empty, the strangers gone, the flames snuffed. I look up and it remains night, but I now see stars weaving the sky.

I look down to my chest where my heart should be to see a fresh scar, the gentle heat of fire emanating from it and warmth pulsing through my veins. I begin walking down the dirt path whence I came. _____________________________________ Screams.

I descend the hill.

The trees which guarded the path are now toppled, but I see people planting new seedlings. I help plant a fruit tree and move on. Blood.

I reach the bottom of the hill.

The bonfire which has been our witness begins to flare in excitement.

The walls which protected a city are now destroyed, but I see people laying new foundations

The Fire surrounds me.

Screams.

The Fire bellows, “And so, once more, you have begun to embrace yourself,”

I help raise a wall of smooth stone and move on.

“What is the truth?”

I walk through the devastated city.

“There are things we can control and things we cannot. The strongest power we control are our perceptions; perception is everything. We begin with the objective reality but our falls into despair always begin with our perceptions, and yet, our perceptions are always within our control. It is perception which fills us with shame, selfloathing and anxiety when we take events and turn them against ourselves. Harnessed, any hardship, grievance or annoyance can be turned into ease, humour and opportunity. Hardship is inevitable; to choose a useful perception is a choice.” The Fire holds me.

“What is the truth?” “Hardship is inevitable, and so too, is how we choose to overcome them. We can either take the hardship as an opportunity to seek solutions or as an opportunity to complain more. The best solutions are those which have become habits, so instinctive that when hardship arises, we automatically utilise them. This requires discovering what suits us and what does not suit us. In the beginning, this process is the most difficult because we are trying to find strategies for breathing whilst we are drowning; continuous practice, persistence and perseverance is what we need. Despite the pain, once we find strategies that work and continuously hone and repeat them, they will become ingrained within us, always ready at a moment’s notice when the next hardship arrives. And arrive it will.” The Fire embraces me. “What is the truth?”

“We are born, and we shall die. If death awaits us, why then, should we cower from hardship, even a seemingly impossible one? In facing a hardship, we succeed, fail, or die. If we succeed, we can celebrate and prepare for the next hardship, remembering we will die. If we fail, we have not died so we can persist and find a new path, remembering we will die. And if we die, we have only met the fate that was always waiting for us. Embracing this truth, deep within that comical meaninglessness, what difference does any obstacle make? Rather than terrify us, numb us, or destroy us, the inevitability of death can invigorate us, reminding us in every moment to strive higher, smile bigger, push harder, laugh louder, preserve longer and love deeper. Not fearing death, not being conscious of death is weakness not strength. Death is not the enemy of Life but what gives Life meaning”.

The gardens which vitalised the streets are now scorched, but I see people sowing new seeds. I help scatter flower seeds and move on. Blood.

I exit the city which grow anew.

Turning to look back, I still hear screams, and I still feel blood.

But before I leave, I spot folks laughing together by the riverside as they take a break from rebuilding. I pause. I smile. I move on.

_____________________________________ I arrive at a new hill.

I find the strangers with the scars on their chests waiting for me, smiling.

We ascend the new hill, planting new torches along the path as we do to guide those to come. The hilltop is empty save the Fire which awaits us. We sit and wait.

A figure ascends the hill and approaches, a gash at their chest where their heart should be. We look at them, smiling, beckons them to sit, and they do.

“What is your story?”

_____________________________________

The Fire consumes me.

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A PLAYLIST OF LEGACIES By Lani Li and Nicole Nguyen Need songs to empower the badass POC inside of you? Need lyrics that describe the anguish and frustration you feel at this unfair world or just to chill it out? Look no further, as we have the perfect playlist for you!! Although we do admit this list is a bit more South-east Asian centric (probably due to our backgrounds), we hope that you enjoy our selection and are able to find new artists to stalk!! COUGH I mean support. Our song list includes amazing artists such as Awkwafina, Electric Fields, Odette, Yaeji, and Mitski for your listening pleasures. ________________________________________________ Nicole and Lani are 3rd year biomed students who enjoy procrastinating together with their mutual passion for music (more often than they should). Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re always on the look out for relatable lyrics to drive them through their hectic lives.

PHOTO FROM BLACK ON BLACK SERIES BY SEUN YINKA-KEHINDE 112

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INTENTIONS 1. Pg. 16, 19, 60, 61 Portrait study #1, #2, #3, & #4 Kaavya Jha @kaavya.j a. Like many teens, I loved drawing people and portraits based on photos that I found were pretty on Tumblr. When I painstakingly completed a painting, I would show my mum who would frequently ask, "Why are all your paintings of people who are white?" At the time, clueless young me would respond with an "I don't know, these are just the photos I'm drawn to as an artist." Only now, as a more mature person (but still beginner artist!), I've come to realise that younger-me viewed white, facial features as the epitome of beauty. Now, I'm really enjoying taking my time to embrace beauty from all around the world in my paintings. b. Watercolour on paper. 2. Pg. 27 The Social Edit by Phoebe Owl @phoebeowl @ou.phoebe a. The images aim to comment on the impact and interaction between social media, mass consumerism and reality on an individual’s image and outward appearance. b. Digital Collage 3. Pg. 37 Who Are You: Third Culture Kid Edition @salmonrisotto a. As a third-culture kid, the idea of assimilation has been ingrained in me since I was young. I constantly question my cultural identity, where I belong, and the different mannerisms I adopt whenever I return to the places I call 'home'. 4. Pg. 41 Don’t Look Different #2 by Ikumi Cooray @ikumitron a. I made this piece in response to media representation of Women of Colour, particularly in marketing and advertising. In the few instances where Women of Colour are actually present in ad campaigns, it’s often in an exhibitionist way that prioritises profit and the brand’s image (we are pro-diversity!) rather than actually including women of colour as the norm. I drew over and cut and pasted text from existing print magazine ads, but you can still see the photo of a white person underneath. I did this to try and make a point about the media’s lacklustre attempts at diversity. 5. Pg. 42-43 Project of Colour by Po-Han Kung @tk.tezza a. Project of Colour is a portrait series that celebrates and highlights the multifaceted identities of individuals who identify as Persons of Colour (PoC). In response to the scarcity and misrepresentation of PoC identities in popular media and social spheres, the series seeks to reclaim and amplify PoC narratives. Adopting a naturalistic style, the portraits challenge the tokenisation and politicisation of PoC communities. Each portrait captures a moment of genuine expression in which personal stories were shared and heard. These honest moments call into question the ways through which PoC are reduced to their marginalised status, while inviting the audience to examine their preconceptions of PoC representation. Audio recordings echo with the portraits, reconstructing a stereoscopic portrayal of what it means to be a Person of Colour for the participants. Project of Colour celebrates the existence, resistance, and persistence of individuals who identify as PoC. It represents the complexity of PoC identities and reflects individual accounts of conflicts and harmony. Po-Han Kung is a psychology/criminology student at The University of Melbourne.

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Project of Colour is his first artistic endeavour that attempts to combine his passion for photography and interest in social justice issues. 6. Pg. 64 Goddess / by Kavya Malhotra @prettyjosten a. After years of colonization, many South Asian girls still try to distance themselves from their cultural roots. I used to be one of these girls. My inspiration was the reclamation of heritage by Indian youth, especially girls who are slowly learning to embrace their traditional jewelry and dress in a process of self-love and pride for their country. I painted this for my Year 12 final piece last year and have had a number of Desi girls come up to me and tell me how inspired they felt by it, which made me feel like I'd done my job. b. Oil on canvas 7. Pg. 68-69 Hallelujah Junction (1st movement) by Jing Tong Teo @jngtong a. Here are some photos my sister (Teo Jing Yi) took on our recent trip to Gocek, Turkey. This short series centres my sister and her girlfriend, and is a representation of their freedom to love and be queer. They live in Turkey which generally rejects homosexuality. Similarly, Singapore still criminalises homosexual acts and has yet to legalise gay marriage. Through these photos, they are reclaiming their right to love. Their queerness that has been rejected by the countries that they live and grew up in. 8. Pg. 74 Colour Consumed by Beray Uzunbay @berays_art a. Colour Consumed seeks to highlight two factors: A) The hurt and pain that Women of Colour experience as a result of white supremacism and sexism, and B) the powerful colours that signify the strength of Women of Colour and how they do not give up. 9. Pg. 81 Life After You by Seun Yinka-Kehinde @syk.media a. We live in a world where we continuously leave our footprint, digitally and physically. The isolated road in Hiroshima demonstrates that after our death, after we've moved on to our various forms of afterlife, the world will continue. Traffic lights will continue to turn green. Even with no cars on the road or dogs being walked, the planet will still be here. So whatever demons you're struggling with, please know it will not be the end of the world. 10. Pg. 82 Sara Young-Hemana (Model) by Natalia Naa @natalianaa @ sarayounghemana a. A little back-story about the shoot: I found that Jam and Cream is closing down right the night before its last business day (Nanna Sue said she wanted to spend more time with her family and some other personal reasons). I still don't understand why but at that time, I felt an urge to just reach out and ask them if I could take photos there since it's such a cute and cosy place. They replied back, saying that we were good to go and shoot during their opening hours. So at 10pm (yes, in the PM), I managed to find a model to come with me and shoot at Jam and Cream. The lastminute arrangement was nerve-wracking and outside of my comfort zone but it turned out GREAT. 11. Pg. 112-113 Black on Black by Seun Seun Yinka-Kehinde @syk.media a. These photos were taken on a trip to Japan in 2019. They represent the different emotions based on the time and space we find ourselves in: love, laughter, isolation and protection. Just like the four elements of the world, one does not work without the other.

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On behalf of the People of Colour Department, I pay respects to the Traditional Custodians on whose land we reside, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Acknowledgement written by Serena Rae Thompson

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