When I released my debut book Another Day in the Colony it took me a while to adjust to the white applause for the supposed sophisticated articulation of our oppression while on various festival stages over the past year or so.
The writers’ festival circuit isn’t my usual stage. I’m not in the business of selling books to make a living. I wrote a book to make sense of the violence of this world and the work of trying to make a living, of raising a family in this place.
This place, that is ours.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a writer, as opposed to those orators that move us as a people, those who’ve shaped our movement, in such profound moments in our history.
Instead, writing is my weapon of choice.
But when I wrote that book, I remember a certain Black man and seasoned performer at such festivals leaned over to me moments before a national television appearance to condescendingly ask “So Chelsea this is your first book?”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. To put me in my supposed place.
I didn’t realise, despite having been an academic for decades, that I wasn’t considered a writer until I had published a book for white consumption.
The saving grace is the occasional writers’ festivals where I get to be considered an actual writer, as a thinker. Not just about race, but to be seen as capable of thinking about the world, much like white authors of fiction and poetry are able to. I enjoy the freedom of being able to speak on running, humour, the craft of writing and you know, just being human.
But alas, it didn’t matter what the topic, or the curator, or wherever I appeared, or the joy that I found. There was always that one white person who would ask, “So what’s your thoughts on the voice?”
At first, I hated that question, because I’m not a constitutional lawyer and I felt I was not qualified to answer. I had been told by a Black lawyer, who has since blocked me on Twitter, that I didn’t know enough about constitutional law to have an informed opinion.
And then after some appearances I still hated that question, because I remember a senior Black academic at a writers’ festival berating me and any other Blackfullas who dared express scepticism, for not having viewed the Boyer Lectures.
“You haven’t done the readings,” the Black experts insisted. As though the Blackfullas pushing trolleys, the admin officer, the truck driver or the single Black parent trying to survive the violence of the state at every turn were to blame for holding our people back, for not having done their homework.
Those who have expressed doubt about the cultural authority of the yes campaign and the emancipatory claims being made have all been accused of being on the same ledger of the “real racists”, ironically by those aligned with mining companies.
There is a very real demonisation of Blackfullas who dare answer the question of yes with a no, as though it is we who are betraying our people – as if we are the ones blowing up sacred sites.
At this moment, it is Blackfullas being routinely punished, in their personal and professional lives, for daring to speak freely about a referendum that will supposedly change our lives forever. It is literally the livelihoods of Blackfullas being threatened in private spheres, in the course of responding to those demands to express our views publicly.
This is the danger right now.
A danger we do not deserve.
A danger we did not ask for.
A danger we did not bring upon ourselves.
I remember Murri academic Dr Lilla Watson insisting that we are not the protagonists as Indigenous peoples in a settler colonial state.
Yet here we are: Blackfullas are being forced into refusing to declare a position, to sit on the fence, to stay silent on the voice, or concede to voting yes to avoid the backlash. Because it just isn’t safe, not just “culturally” but literally.
American social reformer Frederick Douglass’ seminal speech, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress” speaks to the dangers of a philosophy of reform, divorced from struggle.
He states: “Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
The yes campaign, in its strategy, reveals the very real dangers associated with enshrining a voice to parliament. To enshrine a voice that in this moment is silencing and domesticating the diverse voices of sovereign Black nations across this continent offers more concern than it does hope for the future.
I am not accepting the lie that it’s now or never, or that a seat at their table is the best that’s on offer. I’m not entertaining that what the political left offers is better than the overt racism of the right.
What the Black reformers have forgotten is that Indigenous sovereignty, of the unceded kind, can never be reduced to a matter of settler-colonial affiliations of left or right.
It’s the settlers, to the left and to the right who remain on the same ledger when it comes to undermining Indigenous sovereignty.
If those yes vote evangelists are as committed as they say they are to us having a voice, then Blackfullas should be able to express what we think, we feel and know – with or without the readings, law degrees, children’s books or whatever.
Blackfullas should be able to speak of the limitations of the proposed voice without being cast as intellectually incapable, mentally ill, politically disloyal, professionally inept, deceptive, treacherous and a threat to be contained, complained about, blamed or blocked.
But this is the gaslighting and the sorry satire of settler colonialism. Those who claim to support us having a voice are the ones most threatened by the varying voices of Blackfullas in this moment. Even in their knowing that our voice, in terms of our vote, doesn’t count for shit.
Settlers meanwhile roam free with their outlandish claims to benevolence or destruction on either side of the campaign. It is not they who are perpetually required to declare and defend their voting intentions at writers’ festivals or wherever else, nor are they being summoned to the principal’s office as a result of such utterances.
While the nation muses over whether to vote yes or no to an Indigenous voice to parliament with no actual power, we are witnessing how power actually operates on the lives and livelihoods of Blackfullas in this place right now.
Another day in the colony indeed.
Professor Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Mununjali and South Sea Island woman and academic at the Queensland University of Technology. This article was originally published on IndigenousX and has been edited for length
