Araluen posits that to pay attention is to live in a constant state of fury and feel your heart burn indefinitely. Yet, if we are to resist desensitisation, we must allow ourselves to “be rescued / by the frailest of hopes,” and ask “How far could you carry / the heaviest thing you love? / Is that going to be far enough?”

When I called Evelyn for our interview, she was in the process of resigning from the University of Queensland Press, who had published The Rot. Soon after we parted ways, news broke that she had terminated all future projects and contracts with UQP following the pulping of Wiradjuri poet’s, Jazz Money’s, children’s book Bila, a river cycle. In the following weeks, at least 17 authors followed suit. 

Evelyn Araluen is a change agent. Equally bold, The Rot is prepared to be the best, worst person at every party. In our interview, Araluen roots this imperative for change in expansive solidarities, engaged scholarship, and radical love.

I would love for you to introduce, in your own words, who you are and who you come from.  

My name is Evelyn. I'm Goorie and Koori on my dad's side. We are from Bundjalung, which is in Northern New South Wales. And then my mom's side is from Molong, which is north in the Wiradjuri Nation. I grew up in Western Sydney in the Dharug community and the broader Blak Aboriginal community, which is an enormous privilege to me. I’m very much made up of mobs from so many different nations, and I’m shaped and guided by a strong Blak, cultural and political history as well. I live and work now in Wurundjeri Country down in Naarm. 

What’s something that readers might not realise about you and The Rot? 

I am pretty absurd about vibe curation. I’m in my office right now, so I’ve got fun things like Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine. I've got a vintage guidebook of native mammals with cute little illustrations. 

In my day job, I'm an editor and a teacher who has really strange, funny encounters with students. I have illustrations that my students have done of me when I lead poetry workshops. They drew me in the bath, drinking wine, listening to Mitski, because that's actually how I wrote The Rot. I’d tried to do a poetry workshop where I explained my creative process to my students and said, “Listen, this is what I do, but obviously it's very difficult to teach that.” So a student decided to draw it for me. Hilariously, the student also gave me top surgery, because they explained that they thought it would be weird to draw me naked with boobs in the bath.  

How old are your students? 

They’re first-year university students, so for the most part, they are 19-year-old babies which is very sweet. I've taught a lot of different ages, but I really like teaching young people.  

What were you like at 19 years old?

Strange. I was fairly precocious, academically. At 19, I was in my second year at uni. I was really into growing my social justice interests and continuing to cultivate some, frankly, nerdy literary fandom culture interests. I spent most of my time on Tumblr. I had the same haircut. I ironically was in the depths of neurodivergency with no capacity for self-censorship. I just enjoyed shamelessly pursuing my own special interests in the arts, with zero coherence or purpose or function.

I think I was probably still planning to develop an epic multi-book fantasy novel about faeries decolonising the British Isles. I had it in my head like, “What if the faeries were the Indigenous people of England, the sovereign custodians of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. What if they took it back off these colonising people?” I was weirdly fascinated with attempting to build up this cross-cultural lexicon of myths, legends, folklore and such. I could have either become a real Game of Thrones person, which I never did go down that route, or like a witch. Didn't do that either. 

Maybe a folklorist one day? 

Maybe. I've got a different relationship to all that stuff now. One of the most frequent questions that I get from random strangers is whether I can personally give them permission to write about Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, because apparently, I'm the representative of all Aboriginal cultures and stories. I see that weird fascination in so many people now, and it makes me uncomfortable because I was really into Greco-Roman mythology. It’s made me re-evaluate. I’m still quietly interested. I'm just not working on my fantasy trilogy anymore.

I feel like that transition is a marker of growing up. Realising our nostalgia was once branded and now boycotted. I wonder if a part of getting older is reckoning with the deeper complicities of the things you used to, and still in some ways, love.

I resonate with that. It was interesting to develop The Rot because I looked at a lot of my own digital archive. I was very interested in how stories and experiences survive on the internet. 

We have this idea that nothing ever disappears from there, but in the age of techno-lords and techno-fascism, that's not true. We are under constant censorship and surveillance, and physical media is the only way that we can keep our stories. 

I was going back on my own human archive—Tumblr, blogging websites, LiveJournal—and essentially reconstructing my own teenage girl self. Understanding her as this very external thing, rather than a coherent self that has moved through history. Because of all the microplastics in my memory, it’s also very patchy. 

Yes, we’re salvaging memory in an age of digital archiving. We’re buying subscriptions to store memories on drives and SharePoint, or saving posts on Instagram as receipts of livestreamed genocide. That’s why I found the sequence, “256GB OF SALVAGED MEMORY” so thought-provoking. How did you arrive at the final structure and arrangement of that sequence? How do the poems speak to each other?

Initially, it was a huge body of disparate pieces that I started weaving together under this unifying logic of the hard drive. I had literally carried around a 256-gigabyte hard drive that contained the bulk of my creative output. Photos. Stories I'd written. Things that I read. So the sequence has a very legitimate, historic phenomenon. 

You also quote Michael Ondaatje in your epigraph: “Anyone with pain.”

Yes. That quote comes from a poem called “Elimination Dance.” It’s an index poem where every line, technically speaking, is, “if you identify with this phrase, you have to leave the stage.” I've always adored that poem as a way of thinking about this gradual process of calling out the things that can't live in the world, or that can't be allowed to be in the world. 

[The first section] also references Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, which is this really fucked up document of all the strange ways in which girls are perceived by society and by history.

The second section (ii) indexes and moves through images that I think have stayed with me as aesthetic compulsions. As all young girls are, I was very much entangled in quite damaging aesthetic interests and compulsions. A lot of disordered eating stuff. A lot of very badly processed trauma. 

Then the third section (iii) thinks about all the pieces of history in the digital archive that the genocide, the Israeli lobby, wants us to forget. All of these touchstone truths and histories that the machine of Empire wants to eliminate. 

That was something I wanted to write down and create: the physical media of the book, because I don't know how long those memories will be online. While I can make copies of them, they’re still impermanent, or they might end up hollowed out again later with another technocratic collapse. 

I agree. Digital archiving technology is often marketed to us with the promise of preservation, permanence, or storage without degradation. I also like how you're bringing attention to things we are algorithmically positioned to forget.

I'm seeing now how the word “salvaged,” that which is rescued from destruction, comes into play here. In writing this sequence, was the act of salvaging fruitful? Did you know, before writing, what exactly you were trying to salvage?

For me, it was a form of exposure therapy in the sense that I was very determined not to look away. When I really started working on this collection, I'd reached a point where I was starting to lose confidence in the idea that, through solidarity, protests, organising, boycotting, and divestment, we in Australia could shape what was happening in Palestine.

I remember reading notes that I made ten days into the genocide going, “How have we possibly come to ten days of this?” and being unable to fathom the scale of violence that had been unfolding with really explicit witness. I was documenting from very early on to ensure my own comprehension and understanding. I was worried about being told that it was all too complicated and that I didn't understand. That's why I was constantly trying to keep a focused eye on Palestine.

When it became clear, about a year in, that I was writing a book of poetry, the process was about making sure there wasn't anything I was unwilling to look upon, by virtue of wanting to protect my own mental health. I was like, “No, I don't get to protect or prioritise my mental health in a genocide.” That work of salvage is more about solidifying a political commitment to not allowing myself to become passive. 

And to extend upon that, the ability to opt out or look away is, in itself, asking us to reckon with our own privilege. 

Absolutely. We don’t get to look away. 

You’ve said that The Rot is “steeped in rage,” and that it arose from being heckled by Zionists at the Adelaide Writers' Festival. In your Notes on Citations, you mentioned that almost all the poems were composed following October 7th 2023, and that you write to “witness Palestinian resistance” against Israel’s genocidal regime in Gaza and the West Bank. How has your understanding of settler-colonialism, both here and overseas, deepened since then and since writing Dropbear?

Something I was curious about when I was going through the self-archive of my young-adult self was tracing back when I first started talking about Palestine on social media. When was I sharing articles about Palestine? When was I learning about the history of settler-colonialism and the entanglements of this colony with other colonies around the world? 

And that was interesting to me to try to see if I could pin down a moment when I knew that Israel was an oppressive ethnostate and a settler colony. My position on Palestine and Israel goes back well before this book, before Dropbear, but I love how you framed it as a “deepening” of that understanding. Because I was already actively thinking about empire, imperialism and settler-colonialism, what it was to me was a confirmation. It was a confirmation that everything that we always knew about settler-colonialism, empire, and the end-stage of capitalism was always true, which is its own horror because we've had agency to change these systems for so much longer than we've ever taken accountability or responsibility for. We haven't taken that initiative. We haven't disrupted these systems. 

I remember reading Edward Said, the incredible Palestinian writer, in high school and learning about Palestine, exile, and displacement. That was so educational for understanding what has happened and continues to happen here. For me, his approach to language and representation [reveals] the power of literature to shape political opinion, ideology, and morality. I remember October 7th, although I think it was the 8th for us. Those of us who understood these systems already knew that October 7th was going to be the license that Israel was waiting for to launch a full-scale genocidal attack. From that moment on, if I could write anything, it could only ever be shaped by that truth and by that reality.

In the same way that I don't think you can write a poem about place without thinking about climate change, now you can't write a poem about humanity without thinking about Palestine. 

I see how, as an artist, you mobilise those learnings from Said. You’ve pledged to donate part of your royalties and prize money from The Rot to aid families in Gaza. Your work, not only as a poet, but as a researcher, editor, educator, makes me think of Bassel al-Araj’s call for “the engaged intellectual” who is willing to confront oppression. 

Yeah. The illusion of neoliberalism is the idea that we can navigate or survive capitalism by accruing independent wealth to protect ourselves from its harms. But actually, we need to be thinking about how we share and distribute the resources we have access to, which are meant for the community and everyone's well-being. How can I justify spending whatever money I make from my writing on buying nice things when the people who drove me to write and made me think about writing are being exterminated en masse? 

How would you articulate the role of the writer in so-called Australia today?

There’s a line from Spencer Krug’s song, “How We Have to Live,” that I quote in “iii. hip”: “it’s how we have to live versus living with ourselves.” It’s the question of what can we live with? How can we shape our lives to live with the ethics of our circumstances with as much dignity and integrity as possible? Confirming one's politics into a material attempt to intervene, as much as one can. I'm not suggesting that people place themselves in situations of economic vulnerability, because that's no longer committed, sustainable advocacy. That's saviorism. I'm not particularly interested in being very performative about it, but I do want to be consistent and ensure that I make financial decisions and commitments that put the resources I've got in the hands of people who need them more. It's how I live. It's how I can make life livable in circumstances that I don't think are very well designed to support life.

That's an admirable and necessary act of resistance against what we're entangled in, which is an economy of genocide. 

You also dedicated this book to “My girls, and the world you will make.” A poem like “Girl Work!” means a lot to me because I see my older sister in it, who went straight from high school to working in corporate. You recycle language like “Girly,” “girly pop,” “babe,” “girlboss”, “coolgirl,” “cleangirl”, and so on. I’m curious about your attitude towards these capitalist colloquialisms. How did you balance the charm and humour of this slang with the fact that they’re symptoms of female commodification? Were you working with or against these representations?

I think they're intentionally designed to create an idea of relationality, but it’s so shallow and false and hollow. These are terms of endearment that are being commodified and deployed to make us feel closer together. When you feel close, you feel warm and happy, and you don't feel vulnerable, and you don't feel like you're being extracted. The market is profiting off that vulnerability. On the one hand, my hope is that this psychopathic repetition of these terms of commodified endearment are about demonstrating the illegitimacy of that language. But on the other hand, this is genuinely the reality of the contradictions that we all politically navigate. 

My little sister is the funniest, smartest, craziest person I know, and she's a full-blown communist. But she also works in a corporate government job. She’s really smart and sassy and is always throwing out these cutthroat statements about the political frailty of her coworkers or her neighbour. And she lives within this series of contradictions, as I think we all do, where she's deeply, ethically committed to trying to ensure justice and equality for all. But she'd rather revenge than righteousness. She’s not interested in the performance of her politics. She's just interested in number one, surviving and looking after her family, and number two, refusing to be subject to anybody else's autonomy. While she lives and works under capitalism, she’s very insistent that she lives and directs her own life. And so that baby sister is, in many ways, the spectre haunting this book. I think of her unrelenting integrity, navigating through all that political complexity, and it guides me to still hold as much compassion as I can. Even though yes, we are all complicit in capitalism, we are all in many ways, debilitated by it.

You’ve spoken about the “radical urgency of love” as something you want to take seriously. In your Acknowledgements for The Rot, you said, “Being a daughter, sister, Aunty, cousin means I will never abandon the task of building a better world.” Did this pledge arise explicitly and intentionally in the collection’s final poem, “I Will Love?” 

I was worried about the responsibility for this whole project because I was concerned that it was so focused on despair and grief. There is something very immobilising about the intensity of that. So even if I hadn't wanted to write that poem, I would've had to because I was concerned about public safety, care, and the ethics and responsibility of the audience. I tried to think very practically about how I could articulate any sense of hope, especially because there were moments when I didn't have it myself. 

I’m curious as to how “will” functions in this poem, in regard to tense and futurity. What kind of future are you advocating for, in which The Rot will be a relic?

I remember writing [“I Will Love”] at a time when I did not believe in that poem. Writing it was like a prayer to myself. It was a manifestation attempt. It was an attempt to solidify, organise, and steer my politics and ethics towards care. I had made decisions before even working on this book by virtue of the exhaustion and fatigue of navigating really damaged people in my life. Colleagues. Comrades. You are always encountering people with so much trauma that it really fractures their own agency and their own capacity to be good and responsible in the world. 

I was very much focused on trying to find a way of enduring that responsibly and committed myself to be like, “no, I'm gonna love them harder and see if that makes them too uncomfortable to keep treating me badly. Or see if that makes them feel safe, knowing I'm not going to betray them. I'm not gonna hurt them. I'm not gonna undermine them. I will show them through actions and through care that we can come to an understanding.” Astonishingly, it worked. It was a strange experience: when people treat you badly, you treat them kindly.

But no sooner than I had started to think about that commitment did it get tested by the most vicious circumstances of, “how the fuck do you build an understanding of a coalition in the world when there are people who don't believe that Palestinians deserve to exist? When there are people who don't believe that Aboriginal people deserve the right to political or legal representation?” Even further, it’s also about people on the left who I couldn't come to meaningful collaboration. A lot of wreckers and destructive people who were really undermining our movements and attempts to build coalitions. Particularly, people who say, “Here is the puritanical benchmark of good advocacy and if you can't reach this, then you are evil.” This logic of casting people out if they make mistakes or if they haven't yet fully educated themselves on a particular issue or history. 

In a time of deep resentment and unwillingness to commit myself to humanity, I've definitely gone through stages where I'm like, “Maybe apocalypse is good. Maybe that's a good thing for us.” The poem absolutely was my attempt to channel people like June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Bell Hooks. All these predominantly Black women and this legacy of radical, political love, radical commitment to humanity, to human kindness and to the necessity of building together. Specifically, I was thinking about June Jordan's “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” She speaks in past tense here: 

“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR.”

I loved the ungrammatical insistence. I loved the emphasis on the speech act. I love this framing of “in all of this that I've done, I kept saying I loved you.” That was so powerful and addictive to me.

So yeah, [“I Will Love”] had to be the poem that closed the collection.

There were a lot of moments in which I didn't believe in the poem itself, but I was saying it because I think that when you say things aloud, it helps you bring them into the world. 

Definitely. I notice that the poem fractures without necessarily trying to soothe. I see an apocalypse without an automatic strive to fix things. Across the whole collection, there are fragments that don’t pursue any obligation for coherence. A lot of slashes too. Does that poetic commitment to holding and unfolding it all come back to the level of craft? 

I think so. It’s funny, I'm never super confident about what drives me to do the more spatialized, lineated poems. I wrote “FOR POWER FOR PRAYER FOR PROMISE FOR PEACE” from Dropbear with those slashes, and I wrote it furiously in two minutes. I was looking at an update on the murder of George Floyd by the police. Technically, in Australia, we call it a death in custody because it was a police intervention that was attempting to turn into an arrest. It was such a visceral moment. “I Can't Breathe” was so emblematic of the Black Lives Matter reality and the violent reality of deaths in custody in the US, which is obviously so resonant with the insanely high rates of over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples and the killing of Indigenous peoples in custody. I wrote [the poem] frantically and angrily and in a style that is half rally-cry and half prayer. I like mixing those two poetic languages because they're both different forms of holy, reverent, incantation-style language. They’re sacred forms for me. 

And the slashes, sometimes I do that to signify something's missing because it can't be in the poem. Sometimes I do it because I want the poem to feel broken. Incomplete. Sometimes I do it because I want there to be a visual language, that there is more that I can't contain. It’s marking. There is a mark of all of this, but I don't have words for this right now. In Dropbear, there are some spaces in the page for [“FOR POWER FOR PRAYER FOR PROMISE FOR PEACE”]. In the copy I read, I scribbled all over that poem and rewrote it for Palestine. Over the years, I’ve had young people bring me their copies of Dropbear to sign, and they've scribbled all over it. And I scribble over books all of the time. 

All of my books have messy notes all over them. When I put those slashes there, sometimes in a strange way, I'm like, “Okay, write here. Write what you would want here. Look, I've made all this space for you that you can put things in and put your own words in it.” And it'll be like a conversation. It’s a dumb little thing that I do for no entertainment but my own. But I think the space is there in a way that I would be very honoured if people viewed it as an invitation. That’s a really lovely way of framing it. God, you ask great questions.

I appreciate that, thank you. I also appreciate that invitation to write on the book, because I always feel like a book is such a precious thing. 

Evelyn, there is so much deserved praise for The Rot. That praise is birdsong to me, expressed more eloquently and lyrically than I could articulate. But I will say thank you. As a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, a beneficiary of colonial settlement, a sister, a consumer, a poet, a university student financially entangled in genocide—as all these things and more, The Rot has been instrumental in awakening me, emotionally and intellectually, from multiple systems that profit from keeping me numbed.

That is the nicest thing you could say to anybody. That's incredibly sweet. If there's any achievement in the book, it’s encouraging people not to be passive about their thinking and at least be conscious. 

Thank you for giving me so much of your time. I hope you’ll find some reprieve amidst today’s drama. You’ll get your bath in maybe? 

Oh, no. We'll see. I think there's about to be some articles coming out tonight. 

Well, you've got the backing of a whole writing community behind you. I hope you know that.

Yes. I'm fine. It’s Jazz Money. Having her book be pulped is just so gut-wrenching to me. But we'll rally. We'll rise. We'll organise. As writers do. 

It was lovely to speak to you. Thank you so much for your really, really beautiful questions. 

Sincerely, thank you, Evelyn. I hope you make your train! 

Catch Evelyn Araluen at the Sydney Writers Festival on Thursday the 21st of May. She will feature in Poetics of Resistance at 5pm and Rhythm of Truth Poetry Gala at 8pm.