Corey Wakeling interviews Natalie Harkin
Natalie Harkin is a poet and multimedia artist for whom text and creative arts are enmeshed in a practice concerned with decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty. Although I remember having been enormously impressed by her contributions to Peter Minter-edited online chapbook with Cordite Poetry Review from 2013, Proteaceae, my first real introduction to her practice was with the publication of Dirty Words by Cordite Books in 2015. The arrival of that book in the poetry community, I remember, was like an earthquake.
Whoever I corresponded with in the weeks after the book’s publication, the name ‘Natalie Harkin,’ ‘Harkin,’ ‘NATALIE HARKIN’ kept appearing. I bought Dirty Words soon after, and remember being struck by the poet’s diverse technical range and the harrowing depth with which she revives and transforms the colonial archive.
Not long following this, I was in the poet’s very company at the Active Aesthetics conference in Berkeley, April 2016, where both of us were delegates and readers. Peter Minter was mid-conversation with a group, I approached, and found myself introduced to the expressive and effervescent poet. We’d return to speak to each other throughout the conference, and I found Harkin’s mind to be as philosophical, probing, but also as disarmingly honest, as her poetry had suggested of its writer.
Thanks to Rabbit, I got to yarn again with this friend, colleague, and fellow poet. Here are some fruits of that exchange.
—March 2017
‘All is not lost or hopeless when there is poetry.’
Natalie Harkin, Rabbit 21.
It is not lost on me that the name of this journal tugs against the current issue’s dedication to Indigenous poetries—the rabbit is a pest, an interloper, on Australian soil; a signifier of colonisation. I grew up with rabbits all around: big white bunnies with brown spots that were our pets, dragging the hutch across the lawn to mow another patch of grass; wild rabbits in the paddocks that had to be controlled; Nanna’s rabbit stew; Nanna saying KFC was actually rabbit meat; rabbits in the headlights with myxo-eyes; a hind leg and two kidneys deposited by a fox beneath the car. When I was born, my sister gifted me her toy rabbit, and he is still a constant companion.
As we grow, we develop an awareness of heritage, history, context. We learn to question what we have been taught, what may have been left out. When I was in high school, the history of Australia was taught through a sweeping and warped lens; Indigenous genocide and dispossession was a subject brushed over on the way to studying the harsh conditions endured by settler colonies. Literature classes were white-washed; Indigenous writers unquestioningly avoided. I knew more about rabbits than I did about the traditional peoples on whose land those rabbits flourished.
Poetry helped to correct my vision. As I developed a love for poetry, my awareness and appreciation of Australian Indigenous literatures advanced alongside, and part of this was due to the powerful and educating influence of poetry communities. Tony Birch, at one time my university tutor, introduced me to the work of poets such as Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty; poetry friends and colleagues educated me on fierce women writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Ali Cobby Eckermann.
More recently, festivals and poetry events have enabled me to connect with indomitable poets Ellen Van Neerven, Natalie Harkin, and Alison Whittaker. ‘Indigenous poetry’ is irreducible; yet, as the poems in this issue demonstrate, indigenous writers are frequently seeking to test and push the boundaries of language and the line in writing place, voice and history.
I am grateful to the hard work of Alison Whittaker in editing the poetry for this issue and in bringing together such a rich confluence of tal- ented indigenous voices—both established and emerging—from around the globe. It is equally wonderful to celebrate indigenous art and writing through the reviews, interviews, essay and artwork.
This Rabbit wishes to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which it is published; to acknowledge all traditional owners globally who have suffered the effects of colonisation, who persevere, rally together, find voice in beautiful art; to welcome indigenous voices to contribute to many Rabbit issues to come.
This interview originally appeared in Rabbit 21: Indigenous.
Corey Wakeling: Natalie, one of the notable innovations of your debut collection, Dirty Words (2015), is the conceptual footnoting of the work. Like some mesh or net, each poem refers to other poems conceptually linked to them, braiding interlinkages across the larger book in a kind of cross-referential way. This begins from page one. For me, at least, this draws the reading experience across the critical thematics of contemporary Indigenous politics you cite in the book, and politics in general, in a very compelling way. ‘Apology’—a powerful way to inaugurate the collection—is footnoted with the note ‘see: Land Rights; Wilderness; Zero Tolerance,’ for example. ‘Apology’ examines Australian hypocrisy, particularly regarding uranium mining and its attempt at a charitable response to the aftermath of the 3/11 nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan. Yet, from the outset, we know that the poem invokes the larger hypocrisy of parliamentary and cultural responses to Aboriginal dispossession. The footnotes for me usher in this conceptual negotiation both of history and the contemporary, in other words. What was your motivation for this innovative footnoting method?
Natalie Harkin: The method is 100% inspired by a poem I love called (Auto)biography of Mad by Qwo-Li Driskill—a Cherokee Two-Spirit/Queer writer and activist who is also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee and Osage ascent. I carry Qwo-Li’s book Walking With Ghosts with me whenever I travel—one of my nourishment touchstones—but I first read this (Auto)biography of Mad in the anthology Sovereign Erotics—A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda and Lisa Tatonetti. The poem’s structure mirrors a ‘subject index’ of key words like you’d find in an academic text book, subtly revealing intersecting atrocities of colonialism with layers of racialised violence and traumas that we know often lead to contemporary manifestations of pain and chronic psychological disorders.
As this index-poem unfolds, it reveals shocking facts, such as golf courses being developed on Indian cemeteries, or eugenics and forced sterilisations in Indian institutions and asylums, or the subject of Memory: body, historical, lack of, (see also Abuse), post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma physical, trauma sexual. Despite its gut-wrenching bleakness, it is a strong and sovereign poem that cleverly reveals the violent intent driving the ongoing project of colonialism and its intergenerational post-traumatic effects. Being rather enamoured with Qwo-Li’s work, my manuscript was originally called Dirty Words: an A-Z Index of Colonialism—I read excerpts from a very early draft on a panel with my poet-goddess sisters Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ellen van Neerven at an Adelaide Spirit Festival, and the manuscript grew from there, from one long ‘index-like’ poem to something quite different.
CW: ‘Index-like’ reminds me of archives, because archives themselves feature in your practice also. Bureaucratic systems of information collection, record, data, taxonomy—none of these systems of knowledge suggest, on the surface, access to the kinds of violence and trauma you describe earlier. Yet anyone who knows your work will be aware of the creative resuscitation of particular archives central to it, and just how powerful such archival work becomes.
Your installation work, Archive-Fever-Paradox [2], part of the Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts—decolonising methodologies of the lived and spoken show at Fontanelle Gallery in Adelaide in 2014, bears the subtitle or epigram ‘my blood it pumps // where hearts / have / stopped.’ Many viewers and readers will come to understand your unique approach to genealogy and archive when they experience these works—the invocation of ‘blood-memory,’ if you like, as you put it in the preface to Dirty Words.
But, the more difficult question you raise here, I think, regards why ‘blood-memory’ or ‘archive fever’ might be a paradox. Would you elaborate on why such a project involves an engagement with paradox?
NH: These colonial archive repositories can be violent spaces, finding family members you know and love, even through other people’s memories, and who are defined, categorised and represented in dehumanising ways—you have to really prepare yourself for the coloniser’s madness. I’ve become an archive geek, and these records I use I both love and hate. I’m obsessed with them, yet I find them repugnant, and the ‘archive fever’ to which Derrida refers in his book by the same title, is indeed a feverish immersion and emersion. It’s hard to transform out from the archive box that closes in on itself as I search for something familiar in these strange and distant records, like clues in a colonial crime scene that tell me something else about my own story, or our collective national history.
So, the paradox. These archives represent a history of preservation so painstakingly and deliberately consigned and maintained, but they also represent a history of great loss for all that is discarded and deemed abject, marginal, inferior and irrelevant to the past, present, or to the future. The silences scream, and this is where our voices and agency can be found, or in, as Waanyi artist Judie Watson states, those overlooked gaps, cracks, and in- between silences are often the most revealing. I write and create so my kids and grandkids will find our strong voices and reflections of themselves on the future archive, not those colonial interpretations that have defined and objectified us as ‘other,’ in powerful and damaging ways.
The very act of creating the ‘archive’ as a repository of future memory exposes so much about how colonial power manifests—these spaces are just as much about silence and forgetting, and the suppression and oppression of lives and histories. These archives are considered by the hegemonic norm to be true and whole and normal, but this is just a colonial fantasy—an imagined truth determined by institutions like museums, Mission Superintendents, and the Aborigines Protection Board. Ironically, we now turn to these archives to expose the fantasy, and what Toni Morrison refers to as ‘national amnesia,’ and to demonstrate how such ‘silence and forgetting’ manifests into the future. Archives clearly are subjective productions with histories of their own, and like Ann Stoler argues, we need to shift from thinking about the ‘archive-as- source’ to ‘archive-as-subject.’ So we’re now flipping the gaze to critique and disrupt these spaces from our unique Indigenous standpoints—to recover the forgotten, to reveal the act of forgetting. We access and enter what Rosanne Kennedy calls ‘the perverse archive,’ where the pursuit to know and understand our own history often ‘perversely’ leads to records preserved by those very institutions and agencies that perpetuated past oppressive acts.
CW: Now that must be a difficult paradox to accept. It must feel even more ‘perverse’ for you to make such a paradox the concern of your artistic practice. How do you feel about the Kennedy idea regarding the archive and negotiating your own repugnance?
NH: Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian artist, curator, writer and poet, identifies the archive as a site of lost origins where memory is dispossessed, while at the same time being a site for hopeful and just futures where ‘acts of remembering and regeneration occur.’ This is where it’s at for many Indigenous writers and artists using archival material, particularly Aboriginal family records, in their work (Judy Watson, Vernon Ah Kee, Yhonnie Scarce and Julie Gough immediately come to mind).
I’m interested in the potential to transform these violent records by creating something else with them, be it a poem or a literally transforming them through the act of weaving archives—by turning these brutal representations of my family into objects of beauty, but still with disrupting intents. For example, I wove a basket from my Nanna and Great-Grandmother’s letters found in the State’s Aboriginal records, and it was like our finger tips were touching—a beautiful way to honour these strong women who indeed loved each other, yet Nanna was represented as ‘Destitute’ and ‘Neglected’ to legally justify her removal from her family. They entered into quite an intense postal dialogue with the State, to remain connected with each other, and I wanted to liberate these letters from these dark spaces and transform them— my way of honouring their agency as strong Aboriginal women despite being controlled under the Aborigines Protection Act, but also to acknowledge their pain.
CW: That’s what’s singular about your practice, I think. Not satisfied with gestures of acknowledgement and remembrance alone, it sounds as if your archival immersions and emersions dually concern contemporary illumination and change, what you call ‘want[ing] to liberate these letters from these dark spaces and transform them.’
That transformation leads me to a question about media. One Indigenous Australian contemporary multimedia artist that you mentioned earlier, Vernon Ah Kee, like you happens to specialise in text installation. A figure like Ah Kee has contributed to some of the best contemporary expressions countervailing white supremacy in this country. I think about what Ah Kee’s work does in reply to the question of the date of Australia Day, for example. All that recent acrimony about debating the date gets such a fabulous retort with that work, ‘australia / driveit / likeyou / stoleit,’ a work that can appear on a gallery wall and on an activist’s t-shirt. Your epigram, ‘archive / fever / paradox // my blood it pumps // where hearts / have / stopped’ functions similarly, I think, that is, virally as well as feelingly. This expression, this paradox, is at once lyrical and philosophically labyrinthine, and retains all that power when quoted.
So, my question regards the place of text in your broader practice. Appreciating you as a poet most of all, my question is: what place does text have in your multimedia practice?
NH: This epigram makes reference to what has become a recognisable trope in Native American literature, ‘blood-memory,’ first coined by Kiowa-Comanche Native American author Scott Momaday in the 1960s, and it makes absolute sense to me—a blend of oral history, individual and communal memory, archival research, and literary imagination. This locally and culturally situated writing is one way to respond and make sense of lives lived through landscapes of deep colonialism. A way of tracing our stories back to where we’ve come from, through literary, genealogical storytelling. I can hear the voices of my family and ancestors in these records, and feel them beside me as I sift through my roots and legacies, and for my children, who were fed from the blood of my grandmother’s womb—we will always know and remember them, with every heart beat.
For as long as I remember I’ve had a (now not so) secret desire to graffiti decolonising messages of love on fence-lines along train tracks, or massive walls where there’s a lot of foot traffic, to fix the passing eye and counter some of the mainstream media bile about Aboriginal people. I’ve been a ‘closet poet’ for as long as I can remember, and have been lucky to collaborate with three other Aboriginal women I deeply admire and respect in the Unbound Collective—Ali Gumillya Baker, Simone Ulalka Tur, and Faye Rosas Blanch. We’ve each brought our unique voices and critical-creative research practice together through a series of text-video-object experimental ‘Sovereign Acts,’ in galleries and public spaces, and with lots of laughter and tears and sovereign woman solidarity—a collaboration of ideas through poetry, film, performance art, song and video projection, and with clear intent to transform and decolonise. So instead of graffiti art along train tracks, I get to project poetry with my Unbound sisters.
CW: So, your installation work in terms of act and intent is basically very similar to activist graffiti in public places. A desire to make ‘decolonising messages’ public and impactful. This is very cool. Given the spatial adventurousness of your work in terms of place, scale, and audience, may I ask you what drew you to the page in the case of Dirty Words, a collection of poems on paper in a book?
NH: The experimental play with words only began in 2011 after exhibiting my basket of letters and poetry in an exhibition curated by Ali Gumillya Baker from the Unbound Collective. It’s exciting to see your own words in print, and then transform from the page to something or somewhere else—be it in film, or printed on linen sheets, or tea-towels, or bus-shelter posters, or spoken out loud, or wall-papered, or illuminated via hand-held projectors onto sandstone walls of institutions like the SA Museum. I particularly loved the act of walking with hand-held projectors with the Unbound Collective, silently projecting our words, films and images on buildings that resonate in critical ways—for our words to permeate exactly where we wanted so the old sandstone/limestone walls of these institutions of power could soak up our sovereign voices, repatriating agency and love to our ancestors captured within the very institutions we were projecting upon.
CW: So then, projection as a rewriting, a rewriting that is site-specific in terms of counter-narrative and referent.
NH: Yes, absolutely. The very act of projecting words left an imprint in those sandstone walls that will forever be there. We also installed our ‘sovereign love poems’ in a series of ten bus shelters around the Adelaide CBD and suburbs—a lot can happen at a bus stop, including a poetic reminder that you’re standing on Kaurna land!
CW: Common elements of parataxis and disjunction in your writing evoke the processes of untangling and recomposition, which you’ve shown to be ways that your poetry revives and transforms history and the archive. In this way, although often about histories involving communities, concepts, and circumstances scaled much larger than the individual subject, your writing solicits a profoundly subjective experience. Do you have intended destinations for your readers when you draw them through the ‘archive / fever / paradox’ of this journey in Dirty Words? Is an intensely affective, subjective experience part of your intention?
NH: This is an interesting question, as my poetry is mostly personal purging of intense feelings, often from being affected by uncannily familiar works of others that tell me something about myself, or something about our collective colonial history. If my poetry resonates with others beyond my own head, it’s an unanticipated bonus that lifts my spirits—especially in these deeply disturbing political times. I’m interested in exploring the potency of place, and the affective influence of other people’s work on my own practice, particularly other Indigenous artists and writers, and to then let my own words fly and see where they might land, with possibilities for new interpretations and iterations—new imaginings—from others. I’m also interested in ‘affect’ as a necessary strategic literary and creative arts intervention—to curate words beautifully and gently, to draw people in with a rupturing intent to shift something in the audience/reader. I guess the intended destination for readers, then, is to bear witness and be moved—to not be passive but feel, connect and act for social, environment, political change.
All is not lost or hopeless when there is poetry.