around the kitchen table with Sara M. Saleh & Teila Watson aka Ancestress
Where I come from, when we’re settling down for a good conversation, we often say we’re going to pull out our knitting: “saquemos el tejido!”. This comment can often indicate that hot goss is involved, or tea will be spilled, as the younguns say. I’ve often wondered about the parallels between this knitting reference with its promise of rich conversation, and the concept of having a yarn. From an outsider’s perspective, the latter has a more cultural, spiritual and connected meaning. And that’s just what this conversation with Teila Watson, aka Ancestress, and Sara M. Saleh is like. It takes on its own rhythm, has a life of its own. My questions lay in a closed notepad, forgotten. Our discussion on creativity, advocacy and artistry ebbs and flows like water. And like water it runs its own course and finds a way, like streams running through the soil. I’m not trying to be poetic – it’s really the best way I can describe this encounter I was privileged enough to be a part of.
Sara M. Saleh (L) and Teila Watson (R). Source: supplied
CREATIVITY AND VULNERABILITY
Teila settles down and gets comfortable. Sara wraps herself in a blanket. We talk about this and that, like old friends seeing each other for the first time in a long time but for some reason, we start off with introductions.
Teila: I'm a Birra Gubba Wiri and Gangulu multidimensional artist. I just released my first official single [One by One] but I've been making music for 16 years, or something like that. I love writing. I sing and rap and make poetry. I'm very creative. I finally got to put a single out and it's been a hard journey - I wrote the song 8 years ago.
I've been working with 2 aunties on the album: one is my father’s sister, Aunty Lilla Watson, and the other is Aunty Mary Graham. Aunty Mary is not actually related to us, but she's been part of our family through relationality. The project is about responding to climate change, racism; in short, all the problems that are birthed by colonialism as it functions and continues. The album is really about how we respond to that in a way that is grounded in our own sovereignty, as opposed to a way that's reactive to what they forced upon us. We are much more than what they've made of us. To come from that perspective - of ‘this is our worldview’- [has] been a really special process.
Teila tells us that after writing the songs she would sit down with her Aunties, who would read over them, make suggestions or prompt questions and discuss certain words or lines to refine them and their meaning.
Teila: It’s been a really lovely way to refine my knowledge about these things and about Murri standpoint. I started doing processes like this when my dad was alive. [Before he passed away] I’d had a lot of my pride knocked out of me, my cup was no longer full… I spent a lot of time with my dad, and it allowed me to really learn a lot; [things] that I had been learning the whole time, but this [time together] allowed me to see it. And to know it, and to feel it, and to learn it through experience, as opposed to hearing it and repeating it. So, while I was doing that learning, I started that process of writing and creating art about what I was learning and showing it to my dad, who had been teaching me.
Teila would go over her work with her dad and they’d discuss it, rework it, rethink it. Now that he’s passed away, she’s recreated this process with her Aunties. It’s a beautiful process, I say, that requires a level of trust and openness I really admire. Teila argues that she’s not always like this – sometimes it’s necessary for her to remove herself from her writing, detach herself and focus on the broader societal issues over the personal perspectives. As an example, she mentions an article she wrote: ‘Are Aboriginal people in a violent and abusive relationship with the occupation of “Australia”?’
Sara: I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, on different levels. We obviously have defensive mechanisms: ways to cope, but also ways to be defensive. It’s inherently about survival, especially when it's against power. You're talking about being in an abusive relationship against institutional violence. State violence that never goes away; [it’s present] every second of your being, of your existence. It's very hard to exist in a way that feels fully safe and fully healed when we're constantly battling this.
And I can relate to what you were saying about your process. I'm the product of a series of ‘communal generosities’ because I feel like the poems and the pieces that I write, even to an extent, the learnings, my values, [are] partly due to the people around me, my teachers, my mentors, people that I'm influenced by, the women in my life. It might not necessarily be as systematic as how you were going through the editing with your dad but, certainly, it informs the subject matter.
We move on to talk about vulnerability within the creative process. Earlier, we had discussed the levels of openness we’re comfortable with when sharing our work, the trust we place in others to review and feed back to us their impressions. Sara tells us about a time recently, when a friend approached her with the idea that because she was a poet, she was always “supposed to be” vulnerable.
Sara: I am authentic to myself and true to myself, but to be vulnerable in relationships, that is a hard thing for me to do. To always stand in my truth, and power, and honour that, is hard because [of my need to protect myself]. Precisely because I'm a poet is that I feel like in my poems is where I can be my most truthful, my most vulnerable. My most self. In that way, the poem exists as an entity outside of me. After that, it's separate, so it's still a shield. It's my most honest, but it's also still a shield where I don't actually have to be vulnerable anywhere else.
Teila: I can be vulnerable, because then I disassociate with it, and it doesn't belong to me anymore. That's how I feel about like a lot of my work as well because I've written work that is so intensely personal.
Sara: [Speaking about when people ask her to explain the meaning of her writing] For me these works are meant to be shared, at least shared in my community and within the audiences that I intend. Or simply exist. But I don't want to impose my interpretation, even though it's mine or it's coming from me. I would rather they sit with it and have their own journey with that poem. It's an interaction, a two-way conversation. However they see it, that's what I want for them. I don't want to cull their views and tell them ‘this is what I meant’, because that's the beauty of poetry.
I love that I get to, as a craft, play with language and get a message across. But sometimes it's not just one message, it's many messages. It's many purposes; I also speak to different audiences too. It's layered. It’s why, for example, I don't translate my work. I used to, but not anymore, and that's deliberate. I don't necessarily explain things; the poem does the work. Therefore, it's a place where I can be most honest and most vulnerable. Do I really want to relive that with someone asking me, ‘What did you mean?’
Teila: It’s like ‘I love how you’ve sown up this wound. Can we just undo it now?’
photo: liza moscatelli
“I don’t exist as a reaction to the coloniser or in opposition to the white gaze. I’m not “an other”, I don’t apply that white gaze to myself. I am complex and boring and mundane and gentle and fierce and all the things. And healing.”
SOLIDARITY, COMMUNITY AND MENTAL HEALTH
Given the natural flow of this lively conversation, Teila reminds us that Sara hasn’t properly had space to introduce herself, so she asks her to do so. Sara tells us she still shies away from speaking about herself, even though in recent times there’s been many occasions for her to do so. Sara is at the forefront of the Free Palestine movement here and has been a vocal advocate and organiser. She talks about how unsustainable it is to “hang your hopes” on one or two people. “It’s scary, because humans are fallible, we make mistakes” She tells us how she wishes people were focused on the moral imperative to Free Palestine, not because someone tells you it’s important but because it’s the right thing to do.
Sara: I wear multiple hijabs. Let's put it that way, joke out of the way. Thank you for the laugh, I appreciate it.
My parents are Egyptian, Lebanese and Palestinian and I grew up between here Australia, on stolen land, moved to the Middle East and then came back. My parents, as migrants, came here for all the typical reasons of wanting a better life and wanting to escape the civil war and political issues that they had going on. My mum’s family was first dispossessed from Palestine and went to Lebanon. Then the civil war happened, and they were exiled again to Egypt. That's where she met my dad; they got married and came here.
I’m a migrant settler in so called ‘Australia’ and, I think, part of reconciling my identity is realising that we’re children of dispossession, as Palestinians, who are here, complicit in dispossession. It’s something that I take really seriously as a responsibility and try to bring to the work that I do, into all spaces, with my community, educating and raising awareness on that front. I'm a poet, a writer and author and I work as a campaigner on Palestine. I'm finishing my law degree. My real legal ‘passion’ is around the prison industrial complex and linking that to the incarceration and detention of marginalized populations.
The area that I've been most outspoken on, aside from Palestine, is refugee rights in Australia. But [also] understanding that the treatment of refugees, of Muslims (through Islamophobia), all of that is rooted in Australia's history dispossession and ongoing genocide. They're all linked. So when people want to fight for refugee rights, they need to understand those deep-seated links and that you cannot dismantle Islamophobia or fight any type of racism on this country without realising its origins. And that it’s something that's still going on and that we're all complicit in. We all have a role and however that looks like, we follow First Nations’ lead.
It's made me want to do more around building Blak-Palestinian solidarity through different spaces: elevating young people, raising awareness, building our communities so that we're grounded in the interconnectedness of our struggles for self-determination. Whether here, in Palestine or across stolen lands around the world. We need to keep doing what we can and [finding] how we can best support First Nations’ fight here, understanding that our freedoms are linked: your freedom is my freedom and there is no liberation for Palestine without First Nations liberation and justice here. [I want] to do it in a way that is sustainable and ethical and that holds us accountable even though, as I said, it's quite scary putting yourself out there on the line as an individual. [I have] my own trauma, my own baggage and my own learning and growth to contend with as well. It can be quite an unforgiving space, but also a really nourishing and healing and inspiring space.
“The treatment of refugees, of Muslims (through Islamophobia), all of that is rooted in Australia’s history dispossession and ongoing genocide.”
Teila tells us how solidarity and protest have had a really big presence in her upbringing. She was raised in solidarity with Palestine, and as part of the Black Power and Land Rights movements. There was no space for racism in her family and treating others differently was always called out.
Teila: That’s a real Murri worldview thing because we had so many countries. My dad used to say - you know old mate Darwin said “survival of the fittest” - my dad used to say “survival of the most congenial, of the most diplomatic”. Because if evolution was to happen, we have to have fresh blood in the gene pool, and we can't do that if we're fighting with our neighbours all time. There's 300 different countries in this continent; the fact that our borders never changed shows that we value respect and congeniality and reciprocity and good relationships.
From these words on congeniality, solidarity and the interconnectedness of our freedoms, we move on to talk about the work that both Teila and Sara do and how they manage their mental health. I ask them, speaking particularly about moments like the present, when issues that are ongoing (like climate change, Deaths in Custody or the apartheid in Palestine) have intensified.
Teila: First of all, I just want to acknowledge, I don't think a lot of it is necessarily worse or better. I think it's different now because we have the internet. People are talking about things openly and we can have those discussions. People are being made aware of things. [Will Smith] said racism hasn't gotten worse, it's gotten filmed…
There are multiple levels and layers to this conversation. There's being a blackfella, being a woman. For me, I’ve got kids: I can't give up. I care for old people; I care for my kids.
The problem with racism, with systemic failures to marginalised and racialised people, with systemic abuse of power - from the education system to health system etc - when all of those things turn in on each other and you’ve got some trauma, there's no actual way for it to be resolved. You literally are in a world that will be hostile without being healing.
I think a lot of people are making major contributions through active advocacy and work. I think it's amazing and I think it's important, but I also think that a lot of a lot of people have failed to understand that we are in a war that is not only physical. It is not only about the way that they have brutalised our people, racialised, victimised, or criminalised us. But we are in a war that is about the way that they have indoctrinated us and indoctrinated the way that we think about ourselves and the way that we think about others.
And so, there is so much work that we need to do internally for us to be with ourselves. If we can't see ourselves from the perspective of our ancestors, if we can't see Country from the perspective of our ancestors, then we can't see it from the perspective of our children and their children and their children. Because life is a is a sacred continuum in many ways. I think that the thing we need to understand is who we are, despite the colonisers.
Also, a lot of people have glorified being a warrior. We were never warriors. We became warriors when they brought war to our continent. Pemulway, Jandamarra: they were beautiful, deadly people. They deserve all the praise. But at the end of the day, they weren't fighting because they wanted to be renowned warriors. They were fighting because they loved their families. They loved their countries and they valued their relationships with their people in their country.
Sara: Glorifying warriors, glorifying busy, glorifying trauma and wounds. That's so true, sis. So true.
I agree that there's systemic things that we deal with; systemic and structural oppressions that have impacted our families for generations. We know intergenerational trauma exists; we know that racism makes people sick. But beyond that, I never really quite understood how harrowing [it was for] my mum, for example, escaping bombs being dropped on her in Lebanon, in Beirut, when she was just a young girl. How a moment like that literally stays with you. And regardless of how you cope, whether you block it out or you do remember it detail by detail, just that kind of state violence that both my parents were subject to, that has a life-long impact. It literally filters into everything. I think about Arab males in particular, the way they are portrayed, similar to how Bla(c)k men would be, particularly in the US, being hyper-sexualized and hyper-criminalised and hyper-aggressive, painted as criminals here in Australia - Arab men; Blak men in Australia are made invisible.
And so, when our parents and our families don't heal, what does that look like and then how does that shape families and family relationships and beings. I've spent a great deal of my life trying to name it, understand it, maybe at best, be aware that it exists and then make sure that I'm breaking these cycles. Through having really great support, going to therapy, naming it, surrounding myself with People of Colour who understand that, and particularly people from my community. It centres me, and it makes me feel like we're actually changing things. We're breaking cycles so that the future can be better for our communities.
On an individual level, you asked me, about the fight [the Israeli apartheid and genocide in Palestine]; the last couple of months especially, it has been quite intensified. It never stopped, but it's definitely escalated and the whole world had its eyes on that. The way that I operated, in order to do what I was doing and [am] still doing, is to disassociate. I'm not saying that that's healthy, I'm just saying that that's what had to happen. I have to disassociate and create a barrier so that I can keep fighting the way that I was fighting and doing, and not just being reactive but being proactive in creating and trying to build around this. Because the people on the front lines, they're the ones that are bearing the brunt, they are paying the highest price.
The way that we saw it, is that we can afford to be strategic, we can afford to take a step back. Grieve and process in the future. I know that it's coming, but right now they need for us to be strategic because they can't afford to be and so that's where we put our energies towards. Being able to sustain each other, for me, was really important. We planned on how we would support each other. We were holding space and inspired by those on the front lines, by our family in Palestine. In order to sustain this, if for nothing else, we needed to look after ourselves and [understand] that rest isn't a luxury; taking small moments of joy, like celebrating Eid, even though we didn't really feel like much of a celebration.
I think, ultimately, the colonisers rely on diminishing us in every way. They want to make us feel like we're alone; making us feel small, making us feel alone, isolated and that's why I refuse to let them steal our love and our ability to love. They've already stolen enough. They already steal time away from my family, time away from things that I could be doing for myself or my creative processes. So to be able to love and feel joy despite all that, in spite of all that, is something that's important.
Also recognising that we're not, as sis said, a reaction. I don't exist as a reaction to the coloniser or in opposition to the white gaze. I'm not other, “an other”, and I don't apply that white gaze to myself and how I live. I am complex and boring and mundane and gentle and fierce and all the things. And healing. And I exist within my community, and my collective, and with others who I find these connections with, including you two.
“It is not only the way they brutalised our people, racialised, victimised, or criminalised us. (…) [it’s] about the way they have indoctrinated us and the way we think about ourselves and others.”
COLONIALISM, GOVERNANCE AND FUTURE
Teila: So true, what you say about the colonisers trying to make us feel like we're alone. And that's part of the reason I named, in the essay I wrote [about being in an abusive relationship with “Australia”]. The colony is an abuser.
Sara: It gaslights you.
Teila: January 26. It's an abuser. It's a narcissistic, psychopathic, abuser. That's what Australia really is. It's not a place. It's a state, the colonial state apparatus.
Sara: Can I ask on that - I completely agree- but I wonder… there’s this Audre Lorde quote that says you have to be able to love a love so big that it sets even your oppressor free. And it’s so poignant to me in thinking about what a future for Palestinians looks like. What does that mean for us? How do I become so generous? And it doesn't mean that justice and accountability don't happen, but so generous a love, so big, that it doesn't just set us free, it sets our oppressor free. It's so much harder said than done.
Teila: It is if you make it so. The thing is that, like we've been talking about, there’s layers. Layers of thinking and layers of understanding humanity.
A lot of my work has been about the interrogation of colonialism - and this is one of the things from my father, that he wrote in his PhD in creative writing. It was all about the way that colonialism came from people within the colonial context and the colonial mainstream. They never acknowledge the history before slavery. But of course, there was a history before slavery. If each person has been able to develop the ability to be autonomous and make our own decisions, then surely that was developed because we were using it. So, that quote to me, that's about governance. It's a beautiful quote but it doesn’t have to be [about] love. Love is an emotion, and my Aunty always teaches me that love can change in the blink of an eye.
Sara: Love is a state of being, I would argue.
Teila: But see, that's because we interpret love. Love is like water, and we can push it and we can put it into a bottle, and it'll take the shape of the bottle. We put it into a bullet and it’ll take the shape of a bullet.
Sara: And deadly like a bullet, yeah?
Teila: Exactly, we can kill with it and we can create life with it. But at the end of the day it's water. It can always go somewhere and do something. It can always dry up, but the thing with love is that it's not knowing. Love is different to knowing.
I wrote this one piece, “White Australia has a black future, if it has any at all” and that talks to the governance [issue]. If White Australia wants a future, they need to be able to see us and to they need to allow us to run this country in a Blak way, because colonialism is killing humanity and it's killing the earth. And if we continue on this colonial rat wheel, pushing humanity into the ground [figuratively, the ground, Teila clarifies – the ground is sacred and it makes us grow] we're not going to have a future.
That's also the reason that my name is Ancestress. This is the knowledge my father passed down to me. He was studying global warming - no one talked about climate change back then, they all talked about global warming – and no one really talked about that then, either. But he did, and so he was teaching me about it, and I started writing these songs and poems.
I’ve been doing music for years now, but at that point in my life, I wasn't doing nothing with nothing. I would show him the stuff and I said to him, I want to come up with a name so that if I want to perform, I can use a different name. My dad comes out one day and he says, “what about Ancestress?” I was so taken aback, because [I thought] that’s bold, but I can't claim to be a spirit from the past. “No”, he said, “you're not claiming to be someone from the past. You want to be an ancestress. Because you've been making work about climate change, global warming. You’ve been making work about wanting a future for generations and you can't be an ancestor or ancestress if we can't have babies and they have babies and they have babies…” So that's been the purpose of my work. And the thing is, if my babies are going to breathe clean air and drink clean water, then it means that the colonisers’ babies have to, also.
The name makes perfect sense and aligns so well with the work that Ancestress has been doing for over a decade. And it ties back to our earlier conversation about generosity with our oppressors.
Teila: Humans are capable of so many different things and racism is just a big tool to hide humanness. If you look at it, every time racism has been used systemically, it has been to justify the taking away of people, of their humanness and their rights to human rights and their rights to their country. It is a dehumanization. It’s one of the only reasons that colonialism works at all. But if someone can take humanness away, someone can bring it back, right?
If we continue on this path, of taking away people’s humanness, we’ll begin to devolve, Teila warns.
“If White Australia wants a future, they need to be able to see us and to they need to allow us to run this country in a Blak way, because colonialism is killing humanity and it’s killing the earth.”
Teila: That's the kind of thinking, surely, that must be employed by a Prime Minister that says let those babies stay on that island and get sick for no reason. That's the kind of thinking: it’s not fully human.
Sara: We don’t play by the same rules, that's the thing. We tell ourselves that in fighting the monsters, we won't become the monsters but at the end of the day it takes a lot to fight in a way that preserves their humanity and their dignity. Because that's true to who you are and how you've been taught and raised.
You said white ‘Australia’ has a black history and it has a Blak future, because Blak is a way of life, just like whiteness is inherently linked to colonialism, to eroding humanity, to dehumanizing, to turning us into objects, on this conveyor belt of production that is to be exploited and serving those with power.
Teila reflects back to an article she wrote a while back – ‘Is democracy obsolete in so-called Australia?’
Teila: It was about how faith is connected to the way that people govern. I talked about Christianity and how much it was linked to slavery and how it's created this democracy and everyone thinks democracy is amazing because it's not quite slavery, but it's just a reach away.
Sara: It’s intersectional colonialism.
Teila: Thank you. That's what it is – intersectional colonialism. And I wrote about that, and I wrote about how it is with Murris and the land. Everyone’s got different Creators, but my creator is Mundagatta, the Rainbow Serpent. My Creator lives within the waterways. I know that my Creator’s real because life comes from water and the land. So [I don’t have to take] a leap of faith to believe in some heaven that I can't see. I know that I drink water and it gives me life.
So, when we look at our governance systems, instead of having a leap of faith and believing in someone else to represent us and make our decisions for us, [I have the knowledge that] I'm at the table and I'm a part of this process. We have consensus and we have autonomy and we have independent thinking. But we also have congeniality, and reciprocity and relationality, so [our governance] is an entirely different thing. 🔥
