Reflection on 'The Colour of Connection'

I don’t consider myself to be a poet. I love writing and regularly pen short blogs or short non-fiction stories for children. I collect quotes and ideas, and enjoy jotting down notes from observations in life. Sometimes, when the mood strikes, I mash the words together and see what emerges, sometimes a song, sometimes a poem, sometimes a vignette of life. Sometimes, I’m pleased, but mostly I tuck it away again deep into my bookshelf of notebooks, left to be forgotten. The writing mood usually strikes when I’m experiencing deep emotions: the passing of kin, a fresh social injustice, a worrying workplace situation, a fresh wave of love for my children. Emotion fuels my writing.

So, when Ani kindly invited me to participate in collaborative poetry writing with Charmaine, my first emotion was one of nervous apprehension, “I’m not a poet!” I whispered to myself. My next emotion was one of courage, “Maybe I can see what it’s about.”

At our first meeting, Charmaine and I learnt a bit about each other. Charmaine is a Yamaji woman living all the way in Western Australia, by the Indian Ocean. I am an Erromangan woman in Vanuatu in the south west Pacific Ocean. As we planned our poetry collaboration across life space and time zones, Charmaine kindly became my mentor in call-and-response poetry.

Poetry as documentation of lived experience is powerful. It is a valuable marker of human experience at a moment in time. As Charmaine and I embarked on our joint writing journey, the emerging words reflect our experiences at the time.

I found wonder in connection with this strong Aboriginal woman from so far away, “we share the same sky, the same constellations” – a cosmological connection across space and time. Reading each poetic response from Charmaine brought shared reflections, about mirrored “tightenings in the rhythm of daily life” and a matched turning to country, to sea, to nature, to ancestry, to find space “to catch my breath and breathe / Breathe / Breathe” . This deepened my sense of connection and sisterhood, not only with Charmaine but also with other indigenous women undergoing similar journeys of “Walking in many worlds.”

As Charmaine and I wrote, we were taking our own personal journeys that are reflected in the poem that emerged. I “journeyed into my ancestors’ world / And found our old world buried / Within a new container.” Charmaine’s journey “across this big / Big island from one coast to / The other of rugged coastline” found welcome space with the Old People of the country and reaffirmed the importance of careful walking “We have been taught to recognise the footprints leading / The wrong way and not to journey far from our Ancestors.” These journeys are “Journeys of resistance, renewal and survival forward.”

My wonderment and deep appreciation for this new connection with Charmaine helped me recognise there is a journey we all still share, to recognise that “colonisers are not / Only in the past” and that “this / Teaches us many lessons everyday.” Writing during the polarising, misinformation-fuelled debate around the Voice Referendum in Australia, I personally found it enriching to reflect on the solidarity of connection, across oceans and land. While neither of us have visited our homes in Western Australia or Vanuatu, through our poetry collaboration, we found the colours of connections and shared experiences fertile for finding spaces to start, and now continue, yarning.