Seeds

there are always seeds that thread us
and carried on the wind set us apart
does the wind come from the origin
of the mother or the father
will my origins be blown away
or remain in distance if I leave
will the wind stand breathless
shall I remain to die broken from home

This is the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha woman who was born on Kaurna land then tricked away from her family.

All my life, I have felt like an outsider with regards to language – in a land for the elite, the white, educated, middle-to-upper classes. Academic writing, a lot of nonfiction, even some investigative journalism, can feel impenetrable. Like a language for only a few – a kind of pervasive elitism that persists, articulated in convoluted “in-knowledge” that outsiders like me, born of immigrants and without higher education, cannot access.

This often holds true for poetry, too. There have been many tomes dedicated to dead white men who are making millions as skeletons, while living women of colour toil over groundbreaking, heart-shattering work that moves in ways so visceral it is hard to remember to breathe whilst reading.

And yet still in this country, poetry that is so enamoured of its own cleverness, and poets dazzled by their own adroitness get lauded by the establishment.

So while I am tempted to discuss the essays of Arundhati Roy, who taught me that I could speak out with truth as my firearm; though I was tempted to talk of the ongoing impact Silvia Federici and her book Caliban and the Witch had on me – a book that made the whole history of the subjugation and oppression of women so easy to understand, so enraging and heartbreaking – I decided instead to focus on one of my favourite and one of Australia’s greatest living poets: Ali Cobby Eckermann.

Nonfiction is a huge pool, and as far as I’m concerned, poetry is part of its waters. Poetry is a liquid truth – certainly to the author, but also for the reader who swims in it, often upstream. It is nonfiction insomuch as it is autobiographical – a glimpse into the writer’s consciousness, access for a fleeting second into their mind. It is documentation of the inseparable personal and political.

Poetry has the potential to pierce through the intellectual and aim straight for the heart. It can move people in ways other crafts can’t. So it is with Ali Cobby Eckermann’s work.

Dip

My mother is playing hide and seek
between my memory and my dreams
she hides amongst the Language Speakers
I catch glimpses of her laughing
no longer foetal I must arise
no longer prone she has arisen
I see a foot dip daintily
In a rivulet of fresh rain
Is it hers or is it mine?

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a survivor of the stolen generations as her mother was before her. Both stolen women, their stories and histories are mirrors of the worst kind. Yet Ali talks about her two mothers being equal, both being integral to her. In an interview with the ABC she said:

[My birth mother] was the first person that I saw that mirrored my face and I remember the profoundness of finally finding someone that looked like me. Because that’s what family is – we were a reflection of each other ...

My adopted mum, who I have always known, and have all the childhood memories with ... she is as integral in my life, I think, in the way that I view the world. They can only be equal, my two mothers.”

Though Eckermann searched for her birth mother from the time she was 18, it wasn’t until her 33rd year that she was able to find her – and discovered Audrey Cobby, more widely known as Audrey Kinnear, was a fierce and respected activist who still carried inconceivable guilt.

The Letter

Dear Mother
The mission is good.
The food is good.
I am good.
rips the page from the typewriter
scrunches the page till it bleeds
kicks it under the wardrobe
inserts a fresh page
tentatively with finger
poised and types
Mummy
Where are you?

Ali grew up with her Lutheran adoptive parents but ran away at 17 and unwittingly headed to the birthplace of her mother, at Ooldea on the Nullabor Plains, living there for two years without any idea that this was where her kin were from. I love this part of her story – that she is poetry herself, writing with her body what she eventually put to page.

Ngingali (ning-ali)

my mother is a granite boulder
I can no longer climb nor walk
around
her weight is a constant reminder
of myself
I sit in her shadow
gulls nestle in her eyes
their shadows her epitaph
I carry
a pebble of her in my pocket

It is Eckermann’s continuing and consistent language of forgiveness and compassion in the face of such unimaginable trauma that truly inspires me; how she can remain fierce and grounded in all her truths and still speak and write with great humanity.

When she signed my copy of her book, Inside My Mother, which contains all of these poems, she wrote: “To Candy Royalle, the language of loss is the victory”. Even though we have spent a little bit of time together, I’ve never had the courage to ask her exactly what she meant by that.

I took it to mean that we who know suffering, we who have witnessed the oppression of our people and fought for some form of acknowledgment or justice; we who have found the words to use, who continue to rally and push and create and demand and share and speak unapologetically about all the injustices; we who share stories in the hopes of rehumanising the dehumanised; we are truly the victors. This is the point of poetry for me. Poetry not in love with itself; instead, poetry in love with the telling of true history.

I do not for a second presume to understand the suffering of the stolen generation. I can never. Though we know how it sounds, read about it, talk about it, though we have witnessed a prime minister apologise for it, we can only gather information on an intellectual level and know the damage, the very wrongness of such a program of enforced assimilation based on good intentions – part of the greatest crime this nation has ever committed. We can only intellectualise the damage of white-washing, the decimation of culture, of language and oral storytelling, the flagrancy of a history written by white oppressors. But we who are not Aboriginal can never, ever, truly understand what that trauma feels like. We can empathise and act as allies but we can not ever fathom the sense of absolute devastation and loss.

Poetry can bring us closer than any article, any report, any list of dehumanising statistics where the continued reduction of humans to numbers is a massive injustice. It can bring us closer to a visceral and emotional understanding of that suffering. Maybe, through the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann, our empathy and compassion can be turned into action. Currently, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families is happening at a rate greater than at any other time in history. Right now, history is repeating itself and that “Sorry” on our behalf echoes hollow.

Reading Ali’s poetry, we understand intrinsically and viscerally that the removal of children from their people should not be happening, that it is a crisis of massive proportions. Once our hearts have been cracked wide open; once we’ve bypassed the intellectual, which can be influenced by excuses and false justifications, misinformation and prejudice; once that poetry takes a hold of every cell and particle and atom that makes us up, perhaps we will be propelled to engage and ask the first people of this nation – how can we help stop this? Tell us what to do.

Poetry can induce full body chills, involuntary tears, awe. There is a real intimacy, a connection between writer and reader that culminates in an experience unlike any other literary or even creative medium available to us. So for me, it is the greatest form of nonfiction imaginable. Maybe I’m biased, but I’ll leave you with the words of Ali Cobby Eckermann and you can make up your own mind.

Kulila

Sit down sorry camp
might be one week might
be long long time
tell every little story
when the people was alive
tell every little story more
don’t forget ‘em story
night time tell ‘em to the kids
keep every story live
don’t change ‘em story
tell ‘em straight out story
only one way story
all around ‘em story
every place we been
every place killing place
sit down here real quiet way
you can hear ‘em crying
all them massacre mobs
sit down here real quiet
you can feel ‘em dying
all them massacre mobs
hearts can’t make it up
when you feel the story
you know it’s true
tell every little story
when the people was alive
tell every little story more
might be one week now
might be long long time
sit down sorry camp

• This is an edited version of a speech given by Candy Royalle at the Stella prize longlist announcement in Sydney on 7 February

• Ali Cobby Eckermann’s most recent poetry collection, Inside My Mother, is published by Giramondo