I got back from the Queensland Poetry Festival last week with a bunch of poetry books and also COVID, so it’s been both a beautiful and wretched aftermath—I’ve been sick in mind and body, thanks to the virus and the stress and guilt of having passed it to my wife and baby, but I’ve also been in bed for the most part, reading, which is my favourite thing to do.
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen me post poems from the various titles I’ve been reading, like Sonnets for Albert by Anthony Joseph, Full-Metal Indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead, Dress Rehearsals by Madison Godfrey, The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, C+nto and Othered Poems by Joelle Taylor, and Best Barbarian and King Me by Roger Reeves, all of which I recommend.
I want to talk a bit now about one of the books I haven’t posted about yet—Apostles of Anarchy by Sandra Renew.
If you’re not familiar with Renew, she’s an elder Lesbian activist and poet from far north Queensland with a number of books you can and should read. I came to her work relatively late, two years ago, reading It’s the Sugar, sugar, which I quite liked. I was on a panel with her at the festival last week where she told the story behind the title of her new book, which comes from the Townsville Daily Bulletin in 1978 hysterically labelling her and her fellow protestors ‘Apostles of Anarchy’; they were marching against government overreach, for the right to march itself.
In 1977, the QLD Premier banned political protests, in response to a growing wave of anti-mining demonstrations. I say hysterical because, as Sandra noted, there were only 11 of them protesting in the small town. They were all arrested, this small huddle of people, and this incident clearly marked Sandra deeply; in her work she links the alienation of being an outsider due to your body, your sexuality, with the alienation of public defiance, of disrupting daily norms. In contrast to the huge crowds I’m used to, I find the vulnerability of those eleven people, their open resistance—nowhere to hide in such small numbers—deeply moving.
In simple, spare poems that largely eschew the lyric mode for a plainer public address that spits into the eye of the archive, Renew undresses the past to reveal the ugly present. All of the issues she raises are still pertinent now. Only four years ago the Queensland government passed harsh anti-protest laws that the UN called “disproportionate”, which can land protestors in prison for two years, for the use of “lock-out devices”—an attempt to stop people from effectively disrupting the production of a mine, for example, by chaining themselves to the gates or trucks, etc. In NSW, protestors face similarly absurd prison times, as in the now infamous case of Deanna Coco who last year was sentenced to 15 months in prison (later overturned) for obstructing traffic in Sydney for 30 mins as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest.
In the former case, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk justified her crackdown by claiming protestors were “booby-trapping” their devices to harm or obstruct first responders, but when questioned on the evidence for this serious claim, offered none. In the latter case, police also claimed that the Extinction Rebellion demonstration had obstructed an ambulance. This was a lie. Here’s Coco in Al Jazeera only a month ago:
“[New South Wales police] went to quite a lot of detail to stress this ambulance had been blocked. It wasn’t just in the fact sheet that there may have been an ambulance. There was a whole sentence describing this ambulance that had lights and sirens on. It was a huge aggravating factor in not just my sentencing, but my intense bail conditions.”
It’s seriously disturbing that we have a Labor Premier and the police both making unsubstantiated claims about protestors in order to prosecute them, and enforce unjust laws designed to protect not the public but the corporations exploiting us. Reading this book, I felt the hairs on my body standing on end as the headlines of the day, the extreme political rhetoric, and media hysteria in service of the state, so eerily mirrored our present. It’s easy to be self-centred in thinking of the current moment as unique or even as a regressive backslide when, really, if viewed from the margins, what we are experiencing is part of a long trend of State violence in service of capital and white supremacist patriarchy.
“Some words can separate you from your body.” This one line sums up my life. As a bisexual Arab Muslim man from Western Sydney, subjected to police harassment, racial profiling, and the negative authority of language wielded by public figures to incite hatred of my body, my faith, my cultures and communities, I have had a very different life to Sandra, but there is plenty in common too, not least this psychological estrangement that occurs when you find yourself the target of the State—openly designated as targetable, disposable, undesirable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this book in part because so much of the anti-LGBTQIA±± rhetoric around trans people today is shown in its homophobic infancy here. None of this knowledge is new to me, to be clear. It is in fact very much part of the discourse in my queer and progressive network, but discourse in many ways is dead, a beaten and tortured thing—or else, that is the feeling we have when we know ourselves to be engaged in such—where poetry is alive, a field of knives, each with your name on it, each singing as it pricks another bead of blood from you, and so it proved to be again with this book.
Only a week ago, a young high schooler wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald to defend himself as a gay school captain because the Presbyterian Church declared that gay and sexually active students would no longer be allowed to qualify as such, a move which reflects how openly homophobia moves in our public sphere again, on the back of renewed evangelical attacks on women, and on queer and trans people. The centre of these attacks is very much the school ground, what is taught versus what is not, and the long debunked idea of social contagion—eg. to make people aware of queerness was to make them queer (you know, like how learning about bugs makes one a bug).
Christian evangelicals reignited this burning cross through the power of ingrained white supremacism (and a decades-long war of attrition on the funding of public education) by turning this remarkably stupid idea to racism and arguing that teaching children about systemic racism was making them racist. I’m referring to the “CRT” furore of the past few years, which has lead now to book bans across the United States, the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Floria, and even the defunding of public libraries there. This is a sidebar purely because I think it’s important to highlight that the renewed hatred of trans and queer people in the public, through schools, was made permissible first by white people once again asserting their power over black and brown people. With the success of the Klanned Karenhood movement, they turned back to social contagion’s original target: queer people.
In light of the Presbyterian Church’s move, and subsequent viral articles, I was asked by the SMH to provide a short video and 250 words speaking to my younger self, for a sort of #itgetsbetter campaign, and that’s partly why I’m writing this out. (I haven’t said yes, first because I’m sick with Covid, and second because there was no offer of payment, although who knows, that might change…). Which is to say, I’m not sure I have much that is positive to contribute, confronted as I am again by the long trend of violence against us. Except this, the true reminder provided by Sandra’s work, which is that while the trend of violence and alienation is relentless so too is our resistance to it, our continued survival.
After our panel, I went up to Sandra and asked her to sign my copy of her book. “That’s beyond the call, really, you didn’t have to do that,” she said, as though I bought it because we shared a mic for an hour, and not because I admired her work, and wanted to read more of it. I said, “I’m not sure what you mean, I really liked It’s the Sugar, sugar, and I’m looking forward to this,” and reader, I mean it when I tell you she was genuinely shocked. “Oh you’re serious,” she said. It broke my heart, to be honest. She deserves so much more. She deserves to be read, and for her queer history, our queer present, to be known and loved for what it is—the sheer determination to be free, the undying commitment to care for each other, to build community in the face of, and in spite of, every burning cross and book in our ash-strewn world.
Go buy her book, would you? Or request it at your library, if you’re short on dosh.
PS. Forgive the Amazon link, her publisher’s website is down.
Salaam,
Omar