Writing NSW
Eileen Chong on beauty and truth: a poetics of resistance
Alternating between snippets of poems by others and deeply personal memories and thoughts, Eileen Chong paints a landscape of individual life somehow surviving enmeshed in larger, oppressive networks.
'I am tired of running. My earliest memory is that of being carried while my mother ran, the world blurring by. What do we run from? Stones cut our feet so deeply that the roads we walk are all stained with blood. My mother shows me a scan, and points to a dark shadow where a hole has opened up in her left ventricular chamber. Perhaps it was always there. Her heart keeps on beating. Whole forests are watered by our sweat, by our tears.'
Writing About, For and Within Communities
It seems I have been writing about my community all my adult life, firstly as a teacher working with children in schools and community art centres and, more recently, as a visual artist and poet. Most of my writing springs from my great interest in and concern for our past stories. Our cultural history has survived dispossession: ties to Country continue to sustain Aboriginal people today and, as a poet, I feel impelled to write to this power.