Poetry led me to peace in this queer, Indigenous body

The writings were messy, chaotic, and trite, and yet, the more I wrote, the more the complexity didn’t feel so frightening.

It was the presence of colony that made it hard for me to feel, it was in unlearning colony that I was finding myself. Source: Anna Kucera

Story spreads outwards and inwards. I am constantly learning the ways that I find myself through story.

I have always been enchanted by the power of books. When I was little living out in the wide green bush of Gundungarra Country I would walk about with hardcover texts carefully selected from my mother’s bookshelf in the hope of giving everyone (the birds, the wallabies, the flowers) an impression that I was worldly. The truth is I didn’t learn to read until I was about eight. Despite my best intentions and desires, I simply couldn’t make the letters on the page arrange themselves into good sense. When I was in grade one my mother, an avid reader, sent me to school with a different book of poetry every week. Canon classic Europeans and settlers from North America. Those of romance and sublime, poets wandering about the garden in flowered robes. I don’t recall the teacher opening a page of any of those books, but I do remember the precious weight of those slim collections tucked into my backpack every Monday, a portal to some vast beauty.

Once I finally managed to pry open the door to literary freedom, I was insatiable, escaping further and further from myself into the promise of the worlds of words.

Yet the further I tripped and tipped into my education the more I felt displaced, both within the books and in the world surrounding me. I felt lonely in the reality of what it meant to be a poor, young, queer Indigenous person in a cruel society. Those books which had once offered so much promise didn’t feel like my rural Australian reality, and so I felt insecure about all the things true within myself. I was lonely with yearning to exist in worlds that never quite fit.

Jazz Money. Source: Kate Geraghty

I started writing poetry as an adolescent to figure out the mess within myself. Though of course at the time I didn’t realise it was a mess. It was the page that revealed all that fear within me. I was sitting on the bus in Queens, New York (about 16,200 km from my Wiradjuri homelands along the Murrumbidgee river, about 16,750 km from my mother in regional Victoria) and felt like a character in a story I was reading backwards. I was 23 and married to a beautiful man who I hadn’t seen in months, and felt strangely awful, like I was simultaneously shrinking and expanding. I desperately loved New York City and feeling myself global and grand, yet I yearned for my river home in a way that ached. I felt my queer body protesting against the confines of a young hopeful hetero marriage in a way I couldn’t comprehend until I was far from rural Australia. And so to make sense of these things I threw myself against the page, to see what would be revealed. The writings were messy, chaotic, and trite, and yet, the more I wrote, the more the complexity didn’t feel so frightening. The more I wrote, the more I found myself.

I desperately loved New York City and feeling myself global and grand, yet I yearned for my river home in a way that ached.

I had understood story wrong. I thought we told it to entertain, I now know we tell story to make the world whole. Truth exists in complexity. Poetry led me to finding some peace within this queer, Indigenous body living in a colonised capitalist state. Poetry was the place where I could present the messiness, the confusion, the fear without restriction or judgement. Back then, I had no intention to be published, I simply wanted a safe place of my own making. And the page, to my surprise, offered that.

Sitting on that Q59 bus there a million miles from home, I didn’t understand the depth of community, of lineage. I was ignorant to the ways that protest and word and song and story have been home to so many Indigenous peoples. All that education I had gathered across school had shown me so little of what I needed to proceed. That poetry has long been a form that First Nations people have gravitated to. Story and form is embedded in Country and in all the ways we know it. It was the presence of colony that made it hard for me to feel, it was in unlearning colony that I was finding myself.

All that education I had gathered across school had shown me so little of what I needed to proceed. That poetry has long been a form that First Nations people have gravitated to.

My life has been bound to poetry and story in ways I am only beginning to untangle. It is a privilege to use words to find truth within and beyond myself. To this I owe the storytellers of my family, to that song that runs the whole way back.

How to Make a Basket, Jazz Money. Source: Supplied

Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning debut poetry collection 'how to make a basket' is out now.