I find it ironic that I just spent the day in a series of talks and presentations about suicide, when as recent as one month ago, I was fantasising about this very act.

The day's sessions felt quite removed from the experience of despair and fatigue that I have recently gone through. There was nothing of the cadaver-bound longings to escape.

This did not arise for me, as the group of NSW Health professionals discussed their experiences of clients/patients/people 'suiciding' at their workplace.

I think if one tries to be sensitive, you can come to notice the general energy of an enclosed space. As soon as one person began to recount how they had a patient kill themselves on one of their first shifts as a graduate nurse, the air became heavy as steel and guilt glued us together in a cloudy sombreness.

Guilt is insidious
like dead skin on scalp
the more you scratch
the more it spreads

Until you are marked
by white spores
and you are certain
that everyone knows

But really it's just you
scratching away
obsessed
at
being rid
of it

A memorable moment for me today was when the notion of 'attention-seeking-behaviour' was raised repeatedly. The presenter then asked us point-blank: 'Whoever is not manipulative, raise your hand.'

Not a soul. Not a soul. And I chuckled.

''Manipulative' has negative connotations but it does not mean that we don't all do things to have our way', he continued.

In the past three months or so, I can recall at least three occassions when I've disclosed my fantasising of suicide to my partner, more as a way of crying out: 'HELP ME!!!' than as an expression of potent desire to kill myself.

That said, when the painful incidents of the first half of the year were more fresh, like an unbearably cold slap of water on my body, leaving me burning with the cold... I really did want to die.

At my worst moment, following an attempt at dry-wretching the grief out into a toilet bowl, my body seized up and became like neglected clay, whereas my mind simply left. It walked out and left me: a gray hunk of clay, drying to the elements in the absence of mindful fingers to mold and move me.

My partner had to help me into bed, where I lay, paralysed.

The first thought which announced itself clearly was: 'I want to die. I am so tired. I want to die.'

A day later, I began my Social Work placement in Mental Health.

le 15 fevrier 09

Ties

It’s incredible how I feel this connection
grow
inside me
between me and this land

I can actually feel it extending
like an umbilical chord
Inching its way out of me
Not to be removed

Because I give birth to it
the same way
one gave birth to me



I migrated to Australia at the age of thirteen, to the sleepy city of Perth. As a teenager, having come from an Indonesia gripped by the excitement of a recent youth-led political revolution, Western Australia did nothing but breed the restlessness inside of me.

I experienced a brief stint in France, which was the haven I had designated in order to run away from Australia. On my last day there, as I watched the sun rise over a derelict Bordeaux, I had my first venture towards understanding the saying: 'Peace comes from within', as my father had once told me in a failed attempt to curtail the restlessness.

In 2004, I returned to Sydney and now find myself unexpectedly re-imagining my connection to place.

Crooning ladies

Crooning ladies
of the night
keep me company
in my solitude

Amidst unfinished projects
commitments made in haste
crooning ladies
comfort me

Worries over
impending treachery
kept at bay
as crooning ladies
do what they do best

Crooning ladies
send me letters
write me poems
express-post
to my heart

‘You are loved’
‘Don’t you worry, hun’
‘You are loved’

Crooning ladies
cradle me
Crooning ladies
comfort me

le 28 mars 09, 08:33 pm

Listening to my dragons

There is a dragon of jealousy
that will not recognize reasoning

It whispers things in my ear
about tongues in places where
I don’t want them to be
It convinces me that dicks
have gone into cunts
and if I’d known
I would have put a brutal
end to all these slip slaps

Illegal in my head

Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know

There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning

She is the mother of all intuition
She is the one that nudges my fingers
towards that palette of paint

She is the one that pushes my voice
out from beneath
rags of shame
dust off the microphone
and place herself at my feet
as I speak

There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning

People!
There is no need to shy away from your anger!
I see some of my friends,
give them a glimpse of the dragon-
fire in my belly

And just like that-
they dispense me some advice:
‘You’ll feel much better once you’ve accepted things’
‘Why you so angry all the time?’
‘Just let it go, just let it be’

And the dragon roooaaarrrsss!

I am angry,
because I left my country
in the wake of racism
that killed,
ignorance
that tossed women
who-look-like-me
dead and violated on the streets

I am angry
because I came to this country
and got slurs on the streets
been called a dog
been accused of taking someone else’s job-
when I was (and still am)
obviously
unemployed

I am angry
because it often SUCKS
to be a woman
when you speak your mind,
all kinds of men get defensive
all kinds of men-
my own brother
my own father
suddenly
hollering up and down
about how you’re intimidating them,
you’re oppressing them,
cos you speak your mind

Let me tell you something,
BOYS
There is a difference
between the discomfort
of having
your fucked up ideas of
women, gender, and the world
challenged-

and
the pain
of
actually
being victimized
actually
being marginalized
actually
being underrepresented

So the dragon speaks.

There is a dragon of jealousy
that will not recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning

Which dragon are you?

Rani P Lukita 13th March 09

I mean to perform this one live, I'd appreciate some feedback on how it reads on the page.

Trans-generational, Trans-racial Ruminations

I am coming to the end of the autobiography of Langston Hughes, a Negro poet and writer born in 1902, who was a pivotal artist of the Harlem Renaissance. His memoire, 'I wonder as I wander', takes us from the Caribbean, to the racially divided American South, to the USSR, to the remotest parts of central Asia (remote- depending on where one considers the center of one's world, of course!), back to the calmer waters of San Francisco by way of Japan and China, then on to Spain in the midst of Franco's fascist advancement upon the land.

There have been many passages throughout this memoir that have left me stunned or moved in a most organic way. There I would be- sitting in Cafe Ellas in the inner suburbs of Sydney- more than 70 years since Hughes' travels came to pass, and yet, somehow, his observations on the absurdity or inspirational quality of human behaviour, would grind me to a standstill.

On Theater and War

Langston Hughes writes of some of the Spanish artists of the 1930s, who were continuing to resist the fascist onslaught upon their land:

'Miguel Prieto had established a satirical puppet theater, La Tarumba, touring the trenches right up to the front lines. But most male members of the Alianza were soldiers and so able to work at art only when in Madrid on leave.'

I compare this to the realities facing many artists that I have come to meet, even briefly, since I have come to live in Sydney in 2004. Let's be frank, most of them are middle-class white students, who when desperate have been known to call on their parents for emergency funds.

That said, I am not about to belittle the efforts that many of them go through to (barely) sustain a diet whilst working to realise their most recent artistic vision. One of them, a friend that I came to know whilst training at PACT Youth Theater in Erskineville, has been on meagre Centrelink(1) unemployment benefits for nearly one year and yet always finds the time, energy and commitment to involve themselves in various theater projects. I would guess that these artistic endeavours sustain him much more effectively than the Centrelink benefits do.

To each, their own sacrifices. To each, their own privileges.



GLOSS-ARY! (1) Australian welfare benefits, obtainable only after deciphering complex bureaucracies and usually barely enough to live on anyway!

Please stay tuned for more ruminations on Langston Hughes, what African-American literature means to a young Chinese-Indonesian woman residing in Sydney... and more!