by Deborah Marcus
Australian Indigenous Poet and Storyteller Jazz Money has had their children’s book Bila: A River Cycle pulled by University of Queensland Press due to its illustrator Matt Chun’s previously-published essay refusing to mourn the Jewish casualties—which included ten-year-old Matilda—at the Bondi beach shooting in Sydney last December. See reports from the BBC and The Guardian.
A bird cannot be a stone.
Our heart cannot be bone.
Our heart must not
be bone.
A damp towel against my head
in the morning while I drape my body
forwards from the toilet
shakes me back into the dream:
I am on rocks. I need to get home.
There are three ships, progressively smaller,
like a babushka series. I need all of them.
I drag the smaller one from the waters first.
The second one follows, large enough to withstand
calm waters and one person only.
I lay the ships on the deck. I am now on the third
ship which is the one I wanted the most.
I didn’t see how I caught it, or how it appeared.
All I know is I have what I need now.
Yet I do not feel settled, and I scour to collect
All the tiny remnants on the ground.
There are metal clasps and tiny fishhooks.
I put them all in a small bowl.
They seem mysterious, worthless and precious.
The ship is attached to a stream of algae and muck
and my perspective zooms out so I am able to hold
it underwater, and carefully with some nail scissors
I cut the debris that cascades like aquatic hair
filled with small creatures and fish, that are large
enough to be food or help, but may be rotten.
I see that the shape corresponds with Sarah Schwartz’
foggy, algae-outlined eyebrow. I trim her eyebrow too.
In the morning, I trim my own eyebrows with the
backwards-glint of dream remembrance in the mirror.
I spend the day accumulating poetic courage
eating Agedashi tofu, glimpsing at the red
leaves and lamenting distances
how five thousand copies of a child’s book
has been printed and promptly pulped
because the illustrator refused to mourn
a Jewish child shot within a sea of Zionists.
Chun states his words were carefully curated
with the help of anti-Zionist Jewish comrades
but not once in his article outlining the reasons
the antisemitic massacre of Jewish people
at Bondi beach, was not in fact, antisemitic,
did he mention Matilda.
At this point, there are no sides left for me
to reside on.
We are in the same river together, you see
You and I
We poison the soil together in our silencing
Our hearts breaking in multiple directions
by the dialectical paradoxes lodged within colonialism
and so they become numb
and so they became numb
I refuse to become numb
I refuse this
I refuse
the same way I refuse the destruction of literature
the same way I refuse the censorship of Indigenous storytellers
writing heartfelt literature for children about the links
between resistance and Country.
I refuse to witness this silencing of another
Aboriginal voice.
At the heart
of all comrades
should ALWAYS be children.
Why else are we fighting?
To be on the right side of history?
For freedom?
For justice?
How can we claim to be fighting for any of this
if we can find a way to make the murder of any child
less
to make it a subsumable statistic
a side comment
within a broader fight
and not the focal point of our writing
our essays
our books
our complaints
our hearts
our resistance?
I condemn Chun’s erasure of Matilda’s humble roots
the same way I condemn the erasure of Palestinian roots
by Chabad and Zionist establishments.
I refuse Chun’s refusal to mourn a ten year old Jewish girl
his refusal to even mention her name
amidst his hypocritical academic silencing of her death
amidst a sea of fishhook reason
I refuse Chun’s silencing
because Matilda was not a neoliberal fascist oppressor.
Matilda was not a white Zionist Jewish-supremacist.
She was a child.
Just like each and every Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian
child is a child
and not an antisemitic Islamic-state terrorist.
The ability and willingness to minimise the murder of
a single child
in the name of the creation, protection
or destruction of a nation
is where the seed of evil is planted.
The destruction of five thousand children’s books
painted by the painstaking hand of a dedicated artist
and narrated by an Aboriginal storyteller
a powerful yellamundie
is also where the seed of evil
is sown.
What will we do amidst
the fruit of this orchard
we have planted
screaming
in silence
