Amal Basri

Resistance Rising

deep down
below

below twenty meters from the surface
boat sinking
around her
children mothers
mouths open fighting
filling with water convulsing
bodies lifeless
zombies white and floating

bubbles rising
mouth shut arms wide
like an octopus squibbing
up
kicking
up up up
arms at the water jabbing
towards the surface rising
bubbles of resistance up up up

eyes open burning
filled with salt and petrol
kicking legs
up towards the surface
though the boat its innards spilling
up past bodies and seaweed spinning
up through schools of fish
towards the living

in the dance
in the last dance
of suffocation
her body kicks
a final resistance
up
through the water
to the surface
popping
a bubble breaking
she is breathing
having risen
to see 353 bodies bobbing

Amal Basri her survival her death
rupturing our thinking
brining together people
to enact new methods
better ways of building
communities
and imagining worlds
beyond borders
beyond boundaries

Details about the SIEV X disaster downloaded from sievx.com:

18 October 2001 A small, unnamed 19.5 X 4 metre wooden fishing boat that would later be dubbed SIEVX (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel X) departs Bandar Lampung with approximately 421 passengers. This dilapidated, unseaworthy boat would have been overcrowded with 150 aboard, let alone 400. (Later, survivors would report that many were forced aboard at gunpoint by Indonesian police who supervised the loading.) Some hours into the voyage the boat stops near an island in the Sunda Strait and 23 Mandaean passengers disembark into another boat, the Rukun Agung, due to fears that the horrendously overcrowded vessel will sink. The Rukun Agung breaks down and the captain Mr Udin contacts his employer, Mr Wedi for assistance. The Mandaeans are landed at Lempasing beach and later interviewed by Indonesian police before making their way back to Cisarua.

19 October 2001 3pm: The boat goes down in international waters, inside the Australian aerial border protection surveillance zone. Approximately 146 children, 142 women and 65 men perish.

People's Performance Project: Our Manifesto

people together imagining other ways can bring worlds into being


The People's Performance Project is a grass-roots resistance movement bringing people together in the spirit of community - making private space public, dissolving borders and boundaries, building alliances and friendships by sharing art and experiences.

Inspired by their involvement in the feminist, queer and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, Joan Nestle and Dianne Otto took one look at their backyard and at the newspaper headlines of the day and launched a manifesto:

“We will use our homes and collective resources to share the work of artists, in many different fields, from many different times of life, to renew lost hope. Current governments in the Western World assume the dreams and skills of the 1960s have been buried under the demands of a free market economy and a right wing agenda that sneers at difference; PPP with its backyard and open-to-all performances will prove them wrong!”

Having met Joan and Di through the 2006 Melbourne Midsumma Festival, Amelia Walker, Taylor Kendal and Pippa Kirwan together with Joan and Di launched the 1st PPP in the couple’s Brunswick backyard. Some 60 people came together to share one night of music and spoken word. A zine was put together of the artists' work and some $400 dollars was raised and donated to local film project “Hope” which told the story of SIEV X survivor Amal Basry.

There has since been a second PPP organized by PJ, Silvana and the Donald Street Crew, in their Brunswick backyard, featuring circus performers, spoken word, dancing, slide shows and fire twirling. A 3rd PPP was held on Nov 11th in the East Kew backyard of Pippa Kirwan, Petie Sefranski and Matt Nelson addressing the themes of ‘community, inclusion and bubbles’. Planning and preparations for a PPP at Melbourne’s 2007 Midsumma Festival are also underway - artists are being called to participate.

Enquiries: Pippa Kirwan callmesquare@hotmail.com.au

Joan Nestle cellonest@yahoo.com

* The PPP belongs to everyone. It is essentially people 'putting on a show' in their backyards, inviting friends, friends-of-friends and then some to share experiences and build a stronger community.

new job as RCH Education Advisor

new job - bug eyes black rimmed thought I'd post some garbled ga-ga

So much to take in! Desk already messed coffee mug markings research papers scribbled writings folders computer parts bits and pieces phone off the hook .. under the desk: three pairs of shoes my mind the runners I walked in today fancy shoes of yesterday..who will win the election over the weekend? my job might change.. ie the education blue print currently positions education 'as the number one priority'... will that be the case next week?

As I read through the research findings about childhood development, education and disability I think about the gap between theory and practice. That deep inhale as we step out in the morning - there's the thinking behind the stepping out and then there's the stepping out, but that deep breath in where does that fit? Brain is melt down. My experience as a teacher and an education worker in community literacy and health environments reading reading policies ideologies actions mish mash disorder.

Some responses to 'Only Connect'

from an ETANSW member to Eva Gold:

"I would also like to add my thanks and appreciation for the ETA conference and also for the excellent text Only Connect I am up to Chapter 11 and I am overwhelmed at the brilliant collection of the contemporary voices, engagement with current issues, and motivational and inspiring discussion. Thanks to Brenton Doeke, Mark Howie. and Wayne Sawyer. I think it should be on every English teacher's bookshelf along side Reviewing English and English Studies.


Dear Brenton, Wayne and Mark

..my sincere thanks for Only connect…, it is a timely and wonderful addition to the Interface series..Only Connect presents lucid, compelling ideas that I look forward to using in the coming months. For once, I feel as though AATE are on the front foot, with Only Connect a compelling driving force and call to arms for English education. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Karren Philp
Professional Development Officer
English Teachers Association WA

Also article by Kevin Childs: If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Only Connect

I have a chapter (11) in Only Connect: English teaching, schooling, and community, edited by Brenton Doecke, Mark Howie and Wayne Sawyer, Wakefield Press/AATE Interface Series.

"At a time when popular media are promoting a view of schooling as ‘drilling and skilling’, this book argues the role schools should play in producing a literate, imaginative, and critically engaged citizenry. Writing out of diverse locations and settings, the authors emphasise the importance of schooling as a common enterprise where teachers and students, schools and communities can participate in a socially productive dialogue."

One of our editors and VATE Advocacy Committee members (of which I am also a member) Brenton recently emailed: "I have just received my copy of English in Australia which contains a rather diffuse but positive review of 'only connect' by Rob Pope. Several advoc people (most notably Pippa Kirwan and Natalie Bellis) get special mention.

http://www.aate.org.au/media/releases06/smartening.html

“The Red Shoes.”

All those girls
who wore the red shoes,
each boarded a train that would not stop.
Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop.
They all danced like trout on the hook.
They were played with.

Anne Sexton

red shoes

I stand in the ring
In the dead city
And tie on the red shoes..
They are not mine
They are my mother’s.
Her mother’s before.
Handed down like an heirloom
But hidden like shameful letters.
The house and the street where they belong
Are hidden and all the women, too,
Are hidden….

by Anne Sexton

gumboots and slippers

I wrote this so long ago about Amelia

it's a first draft:

she dances eloquently
in silk slippers
in gumboots
i stomp stupidly
but there are all these thoughts
prompted by silk slippers
that i don't mind being uncomfortable
and it's not that kind of quick breath
sucked in air but rather a long
long inhaling understanding
rising sense of fog
but not fog more like seaspray
maybe we could go to the beach sometime
somewhere rocky and wind
speak to the sea goddess
be slapped by her wild cold
salt in eyes

Impression of newage house party

On Sunday I went to some kind of house party musical act - amazaing, beautiful, hypnotic.. held in an old shoe factory become run down warehouse appartment put on by Chay-Ya and the crew from Guns for St Sebastian

with stripy socks jumpers warn as leg warmers talk of conservation sustainability playing the saw with violin strings VICA student with a crystal ball rapping harps double base poetry under a sleeping bag lying beside Amelia performance poet drinking beer with a headache and a hangover watching Rochelle sketch with her eyes taking in short brown hair mullet like tails slipped my hands under the sleeping bag head on a cushion at one with the carpet everyone doing something and when the ball boy responded to the music with his little self caught in the crystal into which he gazed as though mesmerised looking into at himself also looked like an eye to me which was also looking out at him at the rest of us watching i was transfixed tears welling because it was a night where i felt like i belonged. and that i could slip into the carpet or get up and read but either way it didn't matter my way of being was part of their way of being

your eyes

you're horizontal

ticking out tumbling

crowding my space

your blue eye implants

looking at everything

rapping around the folds

of my delineated lifestyle

your tongue tilting backwards

over this untidy space

you are more in my room than i am

what's this dance we're doing

your burial of me

deep in the earth surrounded

by your little clues

that betray

the fact that you live here

and i have dropped into the wallpaper

glued over by blue eyes tying

up pieces

of me

slipped into oblivion under

your better seeing self

(a tribute to The Banger Sisters - a great script)

honeycomb commander

get on your knees and massage me little dog little thing pet of mine because i have long golden locks you could eat like honeycomb

Bibliography of Self

biology must be a composition
bibliography a mysterious chronology
of dates
evaluated evolution
discussed and lineated
separated and constructed
made and remade
for order and sense
this is me i announce
i announce i announce
at any one moment as though
it were true

to dos

horizontidy
things to do within the next three weeks:

spring clean massive throw out of undesirables

- clean my room
- finish this term's teaching
- retreat to my parent's farm
- write the bulk of my MA
- start applying for jobs
- find new volunteering gig
- write and rehearse for fringe fest
- sort out finances
- send card and book to Christos
- visit Joan
- expand understanding of indigenous issues
- draft next uni assignment

negotiations

leaves burnt
doors slammed
no time for coffee

fake smile
lips curled
tight jeans surly

Critical Consciousness

choice is illusory to the degree it represents the expectations of others

p6 Freire Education for Critical Consciousness Continuum: London, 1974.

Anxiety: red heels clicking on chequered marble

I associate this one with red high heels clicking on chequered marble. It's not so much a voice but a clicking thumping fear. Heart beat suffocation. Clang clang clang of the prison warden coming to smash my face in. As a kid I’d lie awake with my ears pressed into the pillow listening to my heartbeat. I didn't know it was my heart. It sounded to me like an impressive woman walking stalking determinedly down an endless corridor. I got to thinking they were red high heels she was wearing. Something about danger, power, sex and blood. I got to thinking it was the prison warden wearing those red high heels. She had signed out at the end of her shift, everyone thought she'd gone. She could do anything she wanted. I got to thinking as I lay there listening to the quickening click to the thump thump thump of her red high heels, that when she reached the end of the long corridor she was going to take off her shoes and... but I could never get beyond that point because I was always too focused on breathing, trying to suck in air, dizzily swallowing oxygen, remembering how to breathe. Eyes blurring while my head shrieked in pain probably because she'd reached me with her red high heels.

Bubbles

silky exterior
glossy brackets
encasing pockets of air
the sky's breath
wet rainbow surrounded

bubbles like balloons
floating on breezes
plumping atmospheres
with promise possibility
popping like kisses
in summer's sigh searing

Another Day in the Shire with Bilbo Baggins

You're late!

A small one chirps as Granddeaf ambles towards them carefully balancing books, handouts, marking, forgotten pencil cases, a confiscated plastic hand and a mug of cold coffee.

Shove it Bilbo Baggins!

Jack Spry angles an elbow at Bilbo’s ribs as the stampede lurches through the door.

A teacher is never late Mr Baggins, nor is he early, but arrives precisely when he means to.

Putting down his bundle, Granddeaf watches the hobbits scratching, poking, prodding, picking, pinching, eating, tilting back in chairs, risking life and limb in their efforts to prepare for today's learning.

Folding his arms now in frustration, Granddeaf waits for the hobbits to settle. It takes them quite some time but eventually it is only the Brothers Grimm who are giggling and farting, waving their arms about to shoo away the smell. Finally they notice everyone’s eyes upon them and exclaim simultaneously

It was him!

each pointing at the other with identical grins and wide-eyed innocence

Be quiet!

Granddeaf roars his wizard's finger pointing at Merry and Pippin whose grotty toes are poking through socks, their feet propped on the desk. Granddeaf chants a spell, something like

Who is volunteering to clean the yard at lunchtime?

Magically, their toes slip from the table into mud-splattered shoes. Granddeaf’s hobbits transform into hard working conscientious, clean and clever elfins. They are now wide awake, not yawning, taking notes in full sentences on the carefully ruled pages of the books they've remembered to bring. Smiling happily, Granddeaf can’t help exclaiming

What pleasure I experience shaping young minds into useful citizens of the shire, how they enjoy my lessons and learn so eagerly from my wisdom.

Ouch

that ache smallness. there was a girl and out of a girl came a bigness a bigger girl. then we were watching hopefully. wanting.

1st PPP a Student's Response

After the PPP in April one of the callmesquare students delivered a speech to her peers:

I was lucky enough to attend a gathering recently that was called the PPP. Short for the People’s Performance Project. The aim of the gathering was for new writers to read and act out their works, musicians to play their music, and for people to get out and meet new people.

There was a very diverse range of people there including gay couples, lesbian couples, hetero couples, interracial couples and a man named Christian with cerebral pausy. The age ranged from 13 years of age to the oldest being the 67 year old left wing feminist lesbian named Joan.

After we had all had the opportunity to perform our works, Christian then gave a short speech. Although it took him some time to get to the speakers spot and some of what he said was hard to understand, it hit me that it was not what he was saying that was important, the point was that, in this group of 70 people, he had actually been given the opportunity to speak. People had stopped to intently listen to what he was trying to say.

This group of people were getting to know each other, looking past each others’ differences and just being people together.

You’ve all heard debates and speeches where one side will say “but it’s unnatural” and the opposition will say “but we’re all one people” but things like that only skim the surface of the issue.

You can’t force a person to change their mind. All we can do is set an example and educate. The way to combat the problems of discrimination and hate is to give people the opportunity to go out and meet this people that are different to them and to then realise that we’re not so different after all.