Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 47 Seeking Asylum—Holding Patterns: The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize Bill Boyd (ed.) Southern Cross University Ballina Region for Refugees hendboyd2477@gmail.com Emma Doolan (ed.) Southern Cross University Emma.Doolan@scu.edu.au Ruth Henderson (ed.) Ballina Region for Refugees hendboyd2477@gmail.com Copyright© 2021 Bill Boyd, Emma Doolan, and Ruth Henderson. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our Creative Commons Licence. Abstract. Poetry provides valuable and insightful ways to explore and record social and political experiences and engagements. The plight of refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia is well known. Community groups such as the Ballina Region for Refugees provide support to refugees and asylum seekers both in Australia and offshore. To help raise awareness and validate the experience of refugees and asylum seekers, the Ballina Region for Refugees runs an annual Poetry Prize. The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize theme was Seeking Asylum—Holding Patterns. This article presents the winning and highly commended poems, along with poems by refugee and asylum seeker poets. Poems from both insider witnesses – refugees and asylum seekers – and outsider witnesses – poets who seek to express an empathy with the plight of refugees and asylum seekers – have contributed to this collection. From haunting statements of human dissolution that should strike fear into anyone’s heart, through glimpses of hope, the poems explore the trails of asylum seeking and the dysfunctionality of the aftermath. Keywords: refugee; asylum seeker; poetry; social advocacy; writing for social justice; poetry as social activism; insider witness Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 48 The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. Plato A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. Salman Rushdie In early 2020, the Australian refugee support group Ballina Region for Refugees (BR4R) invited submissions to its 2020 Seeking Asylum—Holding Patterns Poetry Prize. The Poetry Prize is a collaboration between the Ballina Region for Refugees group and Southern Cross University. The prize celebrates the positive contributions refugees make to our communities, and it acknowledges the circumstances that forced them flee their homelands and request refuge in Australia. The prize was open to writers around Australia, including refugees and asylum seekers detained in Australian detention centres and hotel ‘prisons’. This year’s competition theme was Seeking Asylum—Holding Patterns. Poets were invited to submit poems of up to fifty lines that considered the variety of roles holding patterns occupy in refugee and asylum seeker experiences. The invitation provided the following provocation: Planes circle, unable to land. Queues stretch past the horizon. Waiting periods extend beyond memory. Names slide from one form to the next. A backlog of unanswered questions, a hallway that never ends, a compound that never closes. The holding pattern can be approached from a broad variety of perspectives, and contributors may consider the ways in which holding patterns signify delay, disruption and discouragement, bureaucratic complexity, the stasis of legal and financial processes, systematic and institutional structures that obstruct or delay action—but also holding onto, being folded into, patterns of family, friendship, community, and culture. In inviting Australians of all backgrounds to engage creatively with the concept of seeking asylum, the prize encourages the community to connect empathetically and imaginatively with the realities inhabited by refugees and asylum seekers. This is not to say the prize gives licence for writers to appropriate the lived experience of refugees and asylum seekers. Rather, it seeks to draw on poetry’s ability to connect us to one another, to foster empathy and understanding, and to inspire changei. Creative expression, including poetry, provides a means to critiqueAustralia’s current inhumane policies and stance with regard to asylum seekersii to a global audience and citizenry. In this sense, the publication of these poems may be seen as an enabling act in a very positive and powerful sense. Furthermore, the collection of poems presented here also continues an emerging tradition in which borders between the notion of a professional poet and a poet who writes out of the pressure of an historical moment are being questioned and broken downiii. Unsettling the dominant paradigm of authority and authorship in an important process in re-setting social understandings of refugees and asylum seekers. Behrouz Boochani’s recent book, No friend but the mountains, highlights the power of such re-author(is)ing of writingiv. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 49 Some of the poems presented in this collection draw, in part, on the tradition of the poetry of witnessv. This is poetry of poets whose lives were shaped “by unsurmountable forces, thrown off course, even – at worst – destroyed … [who composed poems] at an extreme of human endurance, on the brink of breakdown or death”vi. They bear witness to historical events and the impacts of these events. Importantly, they bear witness to events for which ordinary language is inadequate in articulating a full reaction, a task to which some would argue poetry is particularly suited, in “its ability to accommodate the sublime, the ineffable, that of which we cannot speak”vii. Other poems in this collection also, however, draw on outsider perspectives, those of poets who have not necessarily or directly experienced asylum seeking or being a refugee, yet who seek ways to empathise with refugees and asylum seekers. Likewise, poetry offers a suitable language. While the concept of empathy is problematic in contemporary poetryviii, it appears to provide a powerful medium for building social connections in times of stressix. As one study of post-9/11 outsider witness poetry suggests, “third-party witnesses, like poets, [have the potential to] provide new understandings of historical responsibility and national identity in the [national] imagination”x. They seek, as do others, possibilities to create space to listen to the stories being told and, in doing so, assist in exploring social identity, and through co- constructing new realities and promote healingxi. And yet, despite the personal perspective of the witness, is there more to the poetry? Does it have an ability to mould the course of events? The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted, “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize … but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”xii His comments, must be taken in context; he is described as having written under a state of siege. As Almog Beharxiii notes, “perhaps Mahmoud Darwish sought to break the siege with his poetry and believed in poetry’s power to stand up to armies and to reality. Yet he admitted, more than once, that poetry was defeated by reality.” Nevertheless, we can take Darwish’s potent comments as a challenge for poets and poetry readers alike, a challenge to persist on a journey of change. While it may, therefore, be argued that the poetry in this collection may not change the past of suppression and dehumanisation of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia, the fact of this very publication articulates a belief that such a collection of poems can change something. The highly personal and experiential nature of the poems, whether by refugees and asylum seekers or by others, supports Darwish’s presumption that poetry can change the writers of these poems. However, in a nation that persists in a draconian approach to refugee and asylum seeker policies and treatmentxiv, there is an urgent need to effect change beyond the poet – at least, amongst ourselves as readers and amongst our communities. There is a need to, for example, lend our voices to welcoming and supporting refugees and asylum seekers in the hopes that, eventually, we can change the course of events, and that Australia can become a more humane nation. We can gain strength from other fields of social justice action. If such an aspiration had little validity, the growth of poetry in, for example, the school education of social justice would be viewed as futile; there are many examples where this is not considered to be soxv.This collection supports such optimism. Turning to the poetry presented in this collection, it is satisfying to note the extent to which the Seeking Asylum poetry prize’s aims were achieved. Encouraging and supporting refugee Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 50 and asylum seeker voices resulted in strong submissions from both writers identifying as refugees or asylum seekers, and from others. Our third-place winner, Yasaman Bagheri, oscillates between painful hope and excoriating anger in her poem Empty Envelope, as she reflects on the experience of children born under the shadow of Australia’s border policies, policies that declare that “We will make sure / You will never have a home”. Jalal Mahamede’s haunting Dear Gardener, in looking into the depths of his being, laments his loss of being and connection, concluding with an indictment of the condition we allow our refugees and asylum seekers to reach: “Now I stayed with the dark forest, where are you? I call you from the depths of my being, Oh Lord, I am losing my mind”. “Nothing is in place anymore”, he continues in his second poem, “You try to talk to me, my ears do not hear …”. His accompanying art speaks to the dissolution of being expressed so eloquently in his poems. Kazem Kazemi’s The Monday So Gloomy Without You reiterates the loneliness and the loss: “In your absence, I leave the world”. What a state to find one’s self in! And yet Kazemi seems to find a glimmer of hope, closing on, “I wish you’d been here to close my eyes / They’ll be opened, because of my waiting for you”. He continues in his second poem, Freedom, to place his lack of freedom up front, in terms all readers must surely be able to understand, and all readers must surely fear. Our fear should be amplified by Kazemi’s simple question: “Will I see freedom again?”. Kazemi, however, still hangs onto the possibility of release, of sorts: “It is too hard with my heart / full of emotions and love / I must go somewhere else / where I can be a stranger again”. Farhad Bandesh’s poem, also titled Freedom, likewise takes us to dark places, the corners of our dark shadows where the refugee is thrown, dark places where“ my body is in tatters … the delicacy of my soul and body is no more …”. The real fear – a fear we should all acknowledge – is the fear of never seeing light again, and of our souls being forever black. From the outside, Victoria King wonders, “Is this me?”, in her first-place winning poem Can I Hold a Village?. “What’s it like?”, muses second-place winner Genevieve Barr in Disappeared. Both poems enter imaginatively into the experience of the asylum seeker, the repeated questions in each marking the poets ’progress towards an understanding that is ultimately partial and elusive. The questions remain unanswered, but an avenue has been opened, a hand extended. In her second poem, Holding pattern: a sestina, Victoria King continues her imagining by seeking to imagine the journey of promises, given and broken, faced by refugees. These are broken promises that result in incarceration “ –But I am here. Still. And time / Is marked each day by the strike and whisper / Of a rock against a whitewashed wall that never / Ceases to be temporary. …” The fundamental insult to any person: “For never shall this place be home”. The dispossession continues: Kate Cantrell’s Map-Scrapping reminds us of other holding patterns, of how events create forgetting. “A Dutch man went continent hunting,” Kate tells us, “and they still left us off the map in 1982 … It’s a national embarrassment we said when Baz forgot Tasmania.” How easy is it to forget? Kim Lateef provides something of an answer Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 51 in her poem Loose Thread: “my mother pulls at a loose silver thread / and i want to scream / at how quickly / thread / unravels”. A timely reminder, indeed. Ion Corcos, in his poem Handkerchief, draws on Abdurrahim Buza’s The Refugees (1957) to paint a deceptively simple picture of the refugee. Drawing images upon image, perhaps metaphor upon metaphor, Ion reminds us of the humanity of each and every individual refugee. He reminds us, however, of the incremental tearing away of that humanity during the flight: “… He wears no shoes, limps, / his pants torn at the knees. … No lentil soup, no potatoes tonight. … The road is long; they will not sleep.” Are the wolves who, in the final line, howl on the mountain slopes mere wild animals …? Otto De Pele’s poem Azadî – Kurdish for freedom – reflects on a refugee artist’s success, “His art hung in local galleries as an expression of ambition for freedom”, tempered by the years and cycles of detention. “There are other worlds we may wish for our very own self” the poet states, closing on the words of a refugee who has given the poet permission to name him, Harhad: “Stolen from me, years of life, how easily we break each other”. There is a lesson for us all: no matter what freedom we eventually obtain, the past of pain, the pain of the past, remains. Helen Gearing breathes life into the almost comical dysfunctionality of displaced lives in her poem, Gentle dystopia. The details and coping are important: “Widowed, we share a house riddled with unlabeled teas, pickled limes / and a friendship that reads like a marriage palimpsest … we are hungry / and ridiculous side by side / in white-pimpled pyjamas”. The past will never be silent. Fadi Jan’s three bird poems, Finch, Dove, and Sparrow, draw on the fragility of life. Life, we are reminded, is so easily dismantled and disrupted. Seduced into the gentle world of small birds – are we not all just small birds? – readily and instantly destroyed, we are gently shocked into the realization that nothing will ever be the same again. Rebecca Sargeant’s Sovereign Borderlands, the final poem in this collection, brings us back to the human reality of power and sovereignty, of dispossession and detention. This is what Fadi Jan’s birds experience, had they been people such as you and me, but “hands tied”, ready to run, until, in closing, “from the terror of having to look / into light-coloured eyes / and see all the ayes in favour / and all the I’s left to drown / in the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea”. Below are presented the three winning entries in the 2020 Seeking Asylum—Holding Patterns poetry prize, followed by a shortlist of entries by poets from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, and finally a selection of highly commended entries. The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize winning entries “Can I hold a village? “ Victoria King First Place Can one person hold a village? Bear the message of lineage? Can one person hold a people, a country, a faith, a race, Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 52 A way of seeing, of being? A legacy? Is this me? Could I be that container, floating on waters Captured and caught and still holding that message, As a mother to my daughter? That message whose nuance is so rich and so deep, so pungently technicolour- sweet And then agonisingly elusive and fleet But there, like a handprint Indescribably perfect. For yes, that message lies in me, swells through me In the deep, blood-heavy thud in me, Swelling and abating, flood-like Washing, enveloping, leaving me wanting Gasping, for I am unable not to hold this message And tend it, and send it In the milk of my breast With the heft of my chest Along the glide of my breath Through the slick of my sweat Imbued in my smiles, my tears, my cries, denials My lullabies to my child. Can one person whisper the wilds Of the shushing trees that push and ease The bulge of their girth through rock-layered earth? Can they breathe the plumes of blue sky crags and silver streams Of smoke curls leaving evening fires? Can one person perspire The honey-rich sweetness of dates hanging uneaten? Or hum the buzzing burr of flies Snatching at dust-filled eyes That are deep and brimming with love. Am I enough? My mother held all this in me For me As did her mother, and her mother, and her mother … And so on forever. Our heredity, our legacy. But now, how can I find a way? A castaway, no longer there Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 53 Encumbered, deracinated, gasping for air Grasping For the clutch of home, for the certainty of knowing. I am suffocating, alienated, carved in two by the currents that rage in me, Claw at me. And yet their power enables me. And so determinedly, I make my plea: My child, let me try. “Disappeared” Genevieve Ross Barr Second Place Day breaks, out of tune, and morning finds its way, half-heartedly to its well-worn pedestal. Stale air, and the sheets are stained again with the boredom of insistence of existence. A howling routine. A calendar is checked, (always full of hope that it will tell me something more). Is it yesterday? Tomorrow? Or today? I position myself, straight-backed upon the waiting room chair and waste away the beginning of another, other day. There’s a lethargy in here. Harsh words scrape at the door. An afternoon hides behind household chores. I have seen the undead blinking, as I sit giggling at the in-joke written long ago today. What’s it like to have never been? To turn a corner, never seen. To turn another … Where was I? And now I’m not. What’s it like to be in between? A time … a place … My defining moment. What’s it like to have disappeared? Or worse; thrown out with the trash and pissed on by the cat. What’s it like to have disappeared? Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 54 An empty space. A weeping sore. A crashing bore. A deaf ear turned. A history burned. A future scorned. A lethargy born. What’s it like to be in between? Is it like a tiresome day? Is it like a routine way? And not soon enough, evening arrives and extinguishes any hope of an unexpected tomorrow. “Empty Envelope” Yasaman Bagheri Third Place Falling off the sinking boat With our hands held against the waves, We kept the pattern to rescue Every second’s worth and stretched to a lifetime. Inside the cloud of spilled gasoline and blood When hope was sinking down Hands reached to rescue. Our disappeared boat was given a name, (U)niform (L)ima (A)lpha. As if water had washed our names away; Instead, numbers had appeared From one to a hundred and two. We were (re)named and handed an envelope – A message of hope. Time worked differently in there: We watched it, counted it; They got paid for it; We suffered it, lost it; Inside the reports never read. We were kids born between policies. The Border Force man spoke to us of laws. Laws denied us, detained us. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 55 Laws always designed against us. When he sent out his men and they had our throats in their hands, I thought about how “Boat” came before “People” And “Border” before “Force”. This was the message of hope: We opened it, an empty envelope, Full of unwritten words: “We will make sure you will never have a home.” Every year we are less human More popular election-winning lies. You can rise from the ocean With blood-coloured wings Sharks will let you pass – unharmed. But you will drown in prison camps. Close your eyes this time, Let me build you a boat From my two hands, A boat that will set you free From these prison camps. You will sail to no “Shore” “Off” of our hearts; The road you’ll travel from seeking refuge to finding home, Will not end behind a maximum-security fence; Home will not be a place in the palm of your hands Where you hold the tally mark of years – (Un)lived in prison camps. The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize poems by refugee or asylum seeker writers “Dear Gardener” Jalal Mahamede Dear Gardener I look into the depths of my being Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 56 My whole body is shaking. The roots have turned into trees, and the trees have blossomed But why do flowers turn black? The branches whisper the song of sorrow in my brain And they show me their hatred like this It’s as if their place is narrow ... My body no longer has place for these roots and foliage I remember one day there was a gardener pruning these leaves The gardener also migrates Of course he was right Now I stayed with the dark forest, where are you? I call you from the depths of my being, Oh Lord, I am losing my mind, I know you won’t come again … I fell Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 57 “Nothing is in place anymore “ Jalal Mahamede Nothing is in place anymore; No more eyes or mouth can be washed The brain it sits in the side pocket, the hands spray poison into the brain Waiting and tiredness are long-standing habits The mouth has nothing to say The looks have no meaning anymore … Do you think like that??? Eating the blood of liver has been our daily business for a long time the tearful eye hid in the mouth But … The day will come, when you come to me, complain about the pain in your eyes That day is too late, I know and you do not know I spent my life in vain and it was wrong But look in the old box, the writing is left in there for you, Enjoy the taste and the feel of those words. You try to talk to me, my ears do not hear, nothing is in place … “The Monday So Gloomy Without You” Kazem Kazemi In your absence I leave the world My hands want to convey Customs of lovers and beloved Poured water from behind me Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 58 My tears weeping In the absence of you I wish you’d been here to clear the tears And given me the power The ease with which to go The trees take me ahead To the door with the frame of black And waiting till I go Without you In your absence I can't be touched by the elegance of rain It slaps me brutally It has my sentence in its hands I am condemned to not see you again My darling, the pink flowers are here within the colour I visualize your lips They are crying for me In your absence Ah what’s a gloomy Monday Far from you In your absence To leave the world without closed eyes To tell the truth to you My darling I always wanted you I wish you’d been here to close my eyes They’ll be opened, because of my waiting for you “Freedom” Kazem Kazemi Will I see freedom again? My wings have become disabled in the cage of waiting. The vision of my eyes can’t see from behind the grid fences anymore. Hope and love are dying in my body I have become a stranger to myself. Yes, it is me. I was condemned Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 59 to say hello to people who were born without our heart. It is too hard with my heart full of emotions and love I must go somewhere else where I can be a stranger again. Will I see freedom again? “Freedom” Farhad Bandesh My soul once provided Only tranquillity And it would not make my body impatient. Now my soul’s tenderness for my body Has been forgotten. My body is in tatters. My soul follows To notify you: “I am talking about Freedom! You throw me into the corners of your dark shadows. You put me into the very depths of exile. The delicacy of my soul and body is no more In this endless shadow. If this continues any longer I will not see any more light And my soul will be forever Black.” The 2020 Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize highly commended poems “Holding pattern: a sestina” Victoria King He promised me the shelter of long, golden Sunsets dripping with the mellifluence of time And the comfort and warmth of blood. My eyes flickered, ignoring the whisper, Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 60 The embrace and insistence of home That churned within as I nodded assent, never Thinking how wrong he might be, never Daring to believe how his treacle-golden Tones, flowing through my home Might seep through the cracks of time Leaving me with just that crashing whisper Of doubt. And so it was, with blood Rising in my cheeks, that my blood Money was negotiated. Never Once did I falter as the paper whisper Of notes of effort, the golden Legacy of my parents ’lifetime Folded in his palms and sauntered from my home. It’s taken me a long way from home That money, a tectonic shift in my blood A fissure in my existence, in distance and time Here, in this centre in the centre of a red earth never-never This land of blue faultless sky casts its searing golden Eye over me and its wind carries a whisper Of gritty resentment, to which I respond in a whisper That I am crushed now with longing for home For the cries of the village, the golden Dust motes in the still air, the blood Of goats, the curds, the flies, the familiar never- Ending solidity of easy time. But I am here. Still. And time Is marked each day by the strike and whisper Of a rock against a whitewashed wall that never Ceases to be temporary. Where is home? So far now, surging momentarily like blood In shuttered memories, ghastly and golden. This place, this time may hold me in its golden Shadow, but the whisper of my blood Screams defiance. For never shall this place be home. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 61 “Map-Scrapping” Kate Cantrell Behold the island! Once the beating heart of history, now clotted and compressed by the Roaring Forties. I’m talking about Eddy’s lighthouse where ghost ships sail recklessly. A Dutch man went continent hunting and they still left us off the map in 1982. Across the Bass, imperial wounds bestowed in the playground that dangerous and sub-divided land where a boy moored himself to me and tugging hard broke my arm in two places. The funny bone is a joke I don’t understand. Sant wrote close to the continent who wouldn’t make a fuss? There have been wars for less. In the nineties the Queen had a mastectomy the stitches would not go quietly and had to be extracted with a plier eight weeks later. The Queen was unimpressed. You see it was the nineties, the worst decade by far. Later Arnott’s produced a biscuit that paid homage to Ponting. At Christmas we read a book on Kindle How to be Invisible by J.J. Luna. We fought about moving south to Brisbane. This was before Nam Le wrote The Boat and Hanson said without irony we’re in danger of being swamped. It’s a national embarrassment we said when Baz forgot Tasmania. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 62 On Friday at 5pm our three-year-old had a fit in the line at Centrelink. With a fat lip, she asked the doctor glumly where’s my lollypop? He laughed and tickled her ribs while she looked for something to do to him. “Loose Thread” Kim Lateef brown-wrinkled hands against bright blue taffeta silver-threaded patterns glint and the magpie watches us my engagement dress before The War … before you became a Refugee? my mother winces as if still in disbelief yet i am a child of Refugees and i cannot wince even if, my only inheritance are fragments, ghosts and a silver-threaded blue dress my only regret is drinking amniotic fluid and swallowing my mother’s nightmare of loose threads unravelling from ancestral carpets. * my mother pulls at a loose silver thread and i want to scream at how quickly thread unravels. the magpie swoops and i whisper into my mother’s ear: refugee is the most beautiful word in the English language. “Handkerchief” Ion Corcos After Abdurrahim Buza’s The Refugees He carries a red bag with all their belongings, holds his wife’s hand tight; Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 63 she walks with a stick, her grey hair hard like the barren land she has left. He wears no shoes, limps, his pants torn at the knees. They press against the wind, her white handkerchief flapping; their grandson looks behind. No lentil soup, no potatoes tonight. The gallery chose a gilded frame, but their night to Greece is dark. The boy is too young to know where they are going, why they left their home, why his parents have been missing for three days after men came to their door. The road is long; they will not sleep. Wolves howl on the mountain slopes. “Azadî” Otto De Pele I know a man who painted wrote songs and poetry behind bars of hope it’s been nearly seven years (or more) of brush strokes and removed strings that time haunts most although I wouldn’t really know such things I’ve lived for 26 years in a foreign land ancestors in wedlock from bread and wine on a ship of crime to a massacred milestone of a society. His art hung in local galleries as an expression of ambition for freedom that some here could not even fathom to inhabit in patterns misused and confused in brief fragments of comfortable complacency. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 64 A cycle can last so long that its own reprieve attempts to belong although time is a story it doesn’t mean justice isn’t unnecessarily handled differently. There are other worlds we may wish for our very own self or words to describe – standing next to invisible chains. The pain of being moved to a new waiting room blue lights and black crows out hotel windows detention centres attention not mentioned couldn’t tell you anything politician. Farhad sang: “Stolen from me, years of life, how easily we break each other.” Glossary: Azadî means freedom in Kurdish. Farhad is the first name of an asylum seeker who has given me permission to mention him. “Gentle dystopia” Helen Gearing Widowed, we share a house riddled with unlabeled teas, pickled limes and a friendship that reads like a marriage palimpsest. Over time our outlines seep, unheimlich heffalump our shared self-portrait. Milne, you remind me, arrived late while you sampled English and offshore hospitality. Now, you pretend your English is deteriorating and foist errands you don’t care for onto me. My Farsi, meanwhile, has outgrown its sapling aspirations. When I dream, aspirated Zhs and Hzs form a staccato kaleidoscope of orange groves, fuchsia and a family garden pregnant with fruit ordained for export. I turn the dial, passing you cabbage leaves and lanolin. You laugh as I nurse your newborn – his surprise at my areola, pale and strange as fish lips. Our voices pulp a score of prayers, filtered from the detritus of priestly egos. Spiritual sisters, our tomes unfurl in cascading canons while we agree the Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 65 god of individuality is a fraud. At other times I bad-burn the tahdig, you neglect a tissue and we are hungry and ridiculous side by side in white-pimpled pyjamas. “Finch” Fadi Jan I gather twigs and leaves and build over a street pole egress from the east side. Now the sun burns off the crop-seeds sunflower and safflower are neglected from the country insects are no longer optional. I lay three pale eggs one spins off and sizzles against the asphalt street-path a black bird swings down and steals the eggshells grief runs like ash over a puddle of membrane. Two blue eggs sit under a green-fade plumage and a crimson wrench-beak In the past plains, we cheep playfully his brown Crown grey nape my lively tail. Shells crack at sun-down two heads pop out bare, with little grey hairs on their bodies a fresh rosy wingspan bills wide open they cry (in gesture alone). Hung up the street pole, nestlings rest between hay, grass and cotton scruff laughter stalks us from a distance an off-white blur glides over a kookaburra eye-striped, we are pushed out we take our pullus and drift back to the past plains repose in a rock patch between debris and dry grass. Two finches learn to fly Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 66 dust storms coil over and through another white blur seeps through the flurry its shadow breaks evenly something falls from its tail grazes through a lone cloud a whistle trails its terrene draw amid the tender silence that ran before. “Dove” Fadi Jan Soft coos a formation of doves pierces the atmosphere wings cut through thick fog the sun braces behind them envelops the earth in a shadow chatter or turbulence or flutter the trailblazer flatters herself mid-way spreads her wings two-fold layers of feathers flap in the rage of wind a white dove bleeds through the masking-clouds exposed now, she is small and slender and delicate looking closer, her wings are lined white-lined wings on a grey-white dove suddenly the white clouds stain grey shadows multiply she is a mourning bird she is cooing the melody of a siren call her delicate wings are metal plates white lines are cannon drives she is the permanent silhouette in the grey-blue our people are the filtrate the masses that didn’t swallow in the dust storm Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 67 she swoops down for bone fragments and snail shells drinks from our water wells and lifts up again “Sparrow” Fadi Jan It’s the middle of the night and my tree glows aflame, my nest blazes: dancing flames father has too little a reaction time I leap with wings I don’t know how to fly. my voice box became the black box of a plane that broke down in the middle of the ocean. Chirrs turn-leaves and float away I leap and land onto another bird’s nest – sounds are familiar. I sit quietly, watching the inferno and my parents ’bodies – masticate and desecrate. Silence is the sound of cries in our inside voices. Now, waiting and wailing, black birds surrounding, squawking and yakking. They investigate. Crank open my beak digging deeper; they search for the black box of a bird that fell from the atmosphere. I, am a broken plane my black box sank into the ocean; broke against a patch of rocks; turned into a gust-storm – ravens circle over the nest-trees; crows rip at me. I wake up in a cage of passerines and mute songbirds Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 68 “Sovereign Borderlands” Rebecca Sargeant hands tied recedes into recidivism of pounding waves fare-thee deep in an empty wishing-well being demands clean hands a sentence constructed in local lore language of love thy neighbour hoodwinked by repetition of the problem with the pounding press on pavement poured on massacre site unseen in the eye of the beholder of the legislative body bag of ill-fitting clothes numbered with a price to pay for running a way to protect our children from the terror of having to look into light-coloured eyes and see all the ayes in favour and all the I’s left to drown in the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea Background and context Ballina Region for Refugees ’vision is to welcome, respect, and support refugees and people seeking asylum. The group’s goal is to promote the acceptance and integration of refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia by thinking globally and acting locally. Ballina Region for Refugees is a community-based and volunteer-managed organisation in regional New South Wales. It is dedicated to supporting and advocating for refugees and asylum seekers, and especially supporting settlement in the rural shire of Ballina in northeastern New South Wales. Ballina Region for Refugees volunteers organise rallies, vigils, and talks to raise awareness. The group also fundraises to provide financial and https://br4r.org.au/ https://br4r.org.au/ https://br4r.org.au/ Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 69 material assistance for refugees and asylum seekers in on-shore and off-shore detention and in the community. Ballina Region for Refugees has recently joined the nationwide Community Refugee Sponsorship Initiative. As one of over twenty regional refugee support groups nationwide, the group will support refugees to settle in regional Australia. This support will include assisting with housing, employment, education, access to social services, and social integration. The Ballina Region for Refugees poetry competition commenced in 2018, when BR4R supporter Christine Ahern offered $1,000 for a poetry competition to broaden awareness about refugee issues. The first competition was launched during Refugee Week in 2019, with the broad theme of Seeking Asylum. BR4R received tremendous support from Dr Emma Doolan of Southern Cross University’s School of Arts and Social Sciences. Emma located judges for the competition (Saba Vasefi, Manal Younus, and Ella Jeffery), created the terms and conditions, and negotiated for the winning and shortlisted poems to be published in the academic journal Social Alternatives and the creative arts journal Verity La. Late in 2019, a long-time supporter of Ballina Region for Refugees, Louise Griffith, passed away. Her family and friends donated to BR4R in lieu of flowers. This legacy has meant that the competition can continue for a number of years. The competition is run in memory of Louise. For this year’s competition, prizes were awarded to first, second, and third place winners, and the judges were also asked to provide a shortlist as well as a list of highly commended poems from poets who identified as being from refugee or asylum seeker backgrounds. It is important that poets be allowed to self-identify as being from refugee or asylum-seeking backgrounds or to abstain from doing so; some may object to the labelling as part of the dehumanizing processes they have endured, and indeed some entrants refused or took a creative approach to answering this portion of the entry form. The three winning entrants shared in a prize pool worth AUD $600, with the first prize winner also receiving a one-year subscription to The Saturday Paper, and their poems are published in this issue of Coolabah, along with a number of highly commended entries from writers who self-identified as having refugee or asylum seeker backgrounds: Jalal Mahamede’s Dear Gardener and Nothing is in Place Anymore (accompanied by original artworks by the author), Kazem Kazemi’s The Monday So Gloomy Without You and Freedom, and Farhad Bandesh’s work, also entitled Freedom. Also published here are highly commended poems by Victoria King, Kate Cantrell, Kim Lateef, Ion Corcos, Otto De Pele, Helen Gearing, Fadi Jan, and Rebecca Sargeant. In addition to this publication in Coolabah, the poems appear on the Ballina Region for Refugee website and newsletter. It is highly appropriate that this work is published by Coolabah. As the official journal of the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at Barcelona University, Coolabah publishes original material about Australia and its place in the world, with a focus on critical engagement with contemporary issues. There can be no more critical contemporary issue than the plight and fate of refugees and migrants globally. Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 70 Acknowledgements For the 2020 competition, Ballina Region for Refugees has again been supported by Dr Doolan and Southern Cross University, and two of the previous years’ judges – Saba Vasefi and Ella Jeffery – have returned, along with Samah Sabawi. The authors also acknowledge two anonymous reviewers of an early version of this article, and thank them for their valuable comments and suggestions. Saba Vasefi is multi-award-winning writer, journalist, academic, poet and documentary filmmaker. She researches her Doctor of Philosophy on exilic feminist cinema studies and teaches at Macquarie University. She writes for The Guardian on the rhetoric of displacement and reports on the narratives of refugees incarcerated in Australia’s detention regime. Her journalistic works have appeared on the BBC, SBS, BuzzFeed, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Saba was twice a judge for the prestigious Sedigheh Dolatabadi Book Prize for the Best Book on Women’s Literature and Issues, as well as for the Ballina Region for Refugees (BR4R) Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize. The New South Wales Parliament House recognised Saba’s success in directing the Diaspora Symposium—Social Justice Award, and commended her ongoing contribution to women’s rights and social justice. Saba’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals including Wasafiri Magazine of International Contemporary Writing in the UK, Australian Poetry Journal, Transnational Literature, and Anthology Solid Air: Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word. She has been awarded the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Medal in Art and Culture; an Honorary Brave Rising Star Award for her courageous writing on the gendered impacts of seeking asylum; the Commonwealth Scholarship, and The National Council of Women Award for her academic research. Ella Jeffery is an award-winning poet. She is a recipient of the 2019 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems, Meanjin and Griffith Review. She co-edits Stilts, a digital poetry journal, and holds a PhD from Queensland University of Technology, where she currently teaches creative writing. Dead Bolt is her first book, and won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems in 2019. She lives in Brisbane. Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian multi-award-winning playwright, author and poet, who believes art can be a ‘beautiful resistance ’against injustice, racism and oppression. Her plays include Cries from the Land (2003), Three Wishes (2008), Tales of a City by the Sea (2014) and Them (2019). Sabawi’s essays and op-eds have appeared in many international newspapers. She is a frequent guest and co-presenter on 774 ABC Melbourne’s Jon Faine’s Conversation Hour, where she has appeared alongside Israeli writer Ari Shavit, BBC News New York and UN Correspondent Nick Bryant, actress Miriam Margolyes and others. Sabawi is a policy advisor to the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka, and a member of the board of directors of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations. She participated in various public forums on peace building, women in conflict areas, the Palestinian right of return, as well as various presentations for interfaith groups. In 2016, Novum Publishing released I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso. The anthology featured “deeply personal and deeply political expressions of three gifted Palestinian poets in exile”. The book received the Middle East Monitor’s 2016 Palestine Book Award. https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/tTrZC4QOz6fl1zkBsODhje?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/231IC5QPR7f6GMNZfO9k1y?domain=buzzfeed.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8iznC71Rp9tZkz7AtNv4ef?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8iznC71Rp9tZkz7AtNv4ef?domain=protect-au.mimecast.com Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 71 Prof. Bill Boyd is a Member of the Emeritus Faculty at Southern Cross University. His scholarly interests range widely across the geographical, social, cultural and education disciplines. He is a Visiting Professor of the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at Barcelona University. Dr Emma Doolan lectures in the School of Arts & Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Her research explores Gothic representations of place, particularly in writing about Australia’s hinterland regions. Her practice-led doctoral thesis was completed at Queensland University of Technology in 2017. Ruth Henderson is the current President of Ballina Region for Refugees. Ruth has been a Social Worker for over forty years. Endnotes i Earley, S.M., & DeJoy, N. (2020). Image-ning the emotive power of the poetic word: Multi-layered, multi-faceted images as pathways for understanding our singular and collective lives. International Journal of the Image, 11(3), 77-93. ii Zarzosa, H.L. (2020). Immigration detention through time. Initiatives, 25 February 2020. Rego, N., & Gottardo, C. (2020). Australia: Australia’s border and its discontents.pp. 299- 338 in Alberto Ares Mateos, S. J., Mauricio García, Durán, S. J., Cecilia Estrada Villaseñor, & Juan Iglesias Martínez (Eds) (2020). Migratory Flows at the Borders of Our World, 299. Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana: Bogota. iii See for example, Rivera, T. (2013). You Have to Be What You're Talking About: Youth poets, amateur counter-conduct, and parrhesiastic value in the amateur youth poetry slam. Performance Research, 18(2), 114-123, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.807175; this is an excellent account of the role of urban youth poetry and its emergence as a vibrant account of the potential of the amateur poet capture the essence of connection and feeling in contemporary social landscapes in ways that a professional poet may find irrelevant and inexpressible. iv Boochani, B. (2018). No friend but the mountains: Writing from Manus prison. Picador Australia. v Forché, C., & Wu, D. (Eds.). (2014). Poetry of witness: The tradition in English, 1500- 2001. WW Norton & Company. vi Forché & Wu, op cit., p.1. vii Forché & Wu, op cit., p.3. viii Veprinska, A. (2020). Empathy in Contemporary Poetry After Crisis. Springer International Publishing. ix See, for example, the role of poetry in narrative therapy: Freedman, J., & Combs, G. (2020). Narrative therapy, poetics and poetry: Revisiting a workshop. International Journal of Narrative Therapy & Community Work, 2020(2), 54-57. x Moran, M. (2020). Rummaging through the ashes: 9/11 American poetry and the transcultural counterwitness. European journal of American studies,15(2), 18pp. DOI: 10.4000/ejas.16018 Coolabah, Nr 29, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 72 xi e.g Kreller, C. (2020). Bridging cultural divides with the power of poetry: an educator’s reflection. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 48(1), 78-88. xii Mahmoud Darwish interview with Nathalie Handal, October 21st 2006, Tribes, https://www.tribes.org/web/2006/10/22/mahmoud-darwish-palestines-poet-of-exile xiii Behar, A. (2011). Mahmoud Darwish: Poetry’s state of siege. Journal of Levantine Studies, 1(1), 189-199. The quote is from page 189. xiv Zarzosa (2020) and Rego & Gottardo (2020), op cit. xv e.g. Camangian, P. (2008). Untempered Tongues: Teaching performance poetry for social justice. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 7(2), 35-55. Stovall, D. (2006). Urban poetics: Poetry, social justice and critical pedagogy in education. The Urban Review, 38(1), 63-80. Sánchez, R.M. (2007). Music and poetry as social justice texts in the secondary classroom. Theory & Research in Social Education, 35(4), 646-666, DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2007.10473354