A CHILD CANNOT BE A NEOLIBERAL FASCIST

by Deborah Marcus

 

 

 

 

Australian Indigenous Poet and Storyteller Jazz Money has had their children’s book Bila: A River Cycle pulled by University of Queensland Press due to its illustrator Matt Chun’s previously-published essay refusing to mourn the Jewish casualties—which included ten-year-old Matilda—at the Bondi beach shooting in Sydney last December. See reports from the BBC and The Guardian.

 

A bird cannot be a stone.

Our heart cannot be bone.

Our heart must not 

be bone.

 

A damp towel against my head 

in the morning while I drape my body

forwards from the toilet

shakes me back into the dream:

 

I am on rocks. I need to get home.

There are three ships, progressively smaller,

like a babushka series. I need all of them.

I drag the smaller one from the waters first.

The second one follows, large enough to withstand

calm waters and one person only.

 

I lay the ships on the deck. I am now on the third

ship which is the one I wanted the most. 

I didn’t see how I caught it, or how it appeared.

All I know is I have what I need now.

Yet I do not feel settled, and I scour to collect

All the tiny remnants on the ground. 

There are metal clasps and tiny fishhooks.

I put them all in a small bowl. 

They seem mysterious, worthless and precious.

 

The ship is attached to a stream of algae and muck

and my perspective zooms out so I am able to hold

it underwater, and carefully with some nail scissors

I cut the debris that cascades like aquatic hair

filled with small creatures and fish, that are large

enough to be food or help, but may be rotten.

 

I see that the shape corresponds with Sarah Schwartz’

foggy, algae-outlined eyebrow. I trim her eyebrow too.

 

In the morning, I trim my own eyebrows with the

backwards-glint of dream remembrance in the mirror.

 

I spend the day accumulating poetic courage

eating Agedashi tofu, glimpsing at the red 

leaves and lamenting distances

 

how five thousand copies of a child’s book

has been printed and promptly pulped

because the illustrator refused to mourn

a Jewish child shot within a sea of Zionists.

 

Chun states his words were carefully curated 

with the help of anti-Zionist Jewish comrades

but not once in his article outlining the reasons

the antisemitic massacre of Jewish people 

at Bondi beach, was not in fact, antisemitic,

did he mention Matilda. 

 

At this point, there are no sides left for me 

to reside on. 

 

We are in the same river together, you see

You and I

We poison the soil together in our silencing

 

Our hearts breaking in multiple directions

by the dialectical paradoxes lodged within colonialism

and so they become numb

and so they became numb

 

I refuse to become numb

I refuse this

I refuse

 

the same way I refuse the destruction of literature

the same way I refuse the censorship of Indigenous storytellers

writing heartfelt literature for children about the links

between resistance and Country.

 

I refuse to witness this silencing of another

Aboriginal voice.

 

At the heart

of all comrades

should ALWAYS be children.

 

Why else are we fighting?

To be on the right side of history?

For freedom?

For justice?

 

How can we claim to be fighting for any of this

if we can find a way to make the murder of any child

less

to make it a subsumable statistic 

a side comment

within a broader fight

and not the focal point of our writing 

our essays

our books

our complaints

our hearts

our resistance?

 

I condemn Chun’s erasure of Matilda’s humble roots

the same way I condemn the erasure of Palestinian roots

by Chabad and Zionist establishments.

I refuse Chun’s refusal to mourn a ten year old Jewish girl

his refusal to even mention her name 

amidst his hypocritical academic silencing of her death

amidst a sea of fishhook reason

 

I refuse Chun’s silencing 

because Matilda was not a neoliberal fascist oppressor.

 

Matilda was not a white Zionist Jewish-supremacist.

She was a child.

 

Just like each and every Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian

child is a child

and not an antisemitic Islamic-state terrorist. 

The ability and willingness to minimise the murder of

a single child

in the name of the creation, protection 

or destruction of a nation

is where the seed of evil is planted.

 

The destruction of five thousand children’s books

painted by the painstaking hand of a dedicated artist

and narrated by an Aboriginal storyteller

a powerful yellamundie

is also where the seed of evil

is sown.

 

What will we do amidst 

the fruit of this orchard

we have planted

screaming

in silence

together? 

 

 

Note “It is entirely consistent, and deeply humane, to stand with Jewish people killed and terrorised by racist violence and to have stood, and continue to stand, with Palestinians killed by racist violence. Our grief does not shrink when it is shared and our safety does not grow when it is built on someone else’s disposability,” said Sarah Schwartz at the interfaith and intercommunity vigil of The Jewish Council, an organization that supports Palestinian freedom and justice and opposes antisemitism and racism, to mourn the victims of the Bondi massacre. 

Deborah Marcus is a poet, multidisciplinary artist and educator from unceded Darramuragal land in Australia. She is obsessed with truth and trees, potentially synonymously. Her Honours thesis exploring the relationship between fractal geometry and poetic language won UNSW’s first University Medal for Creative Writing in 2022. In 2023, she published her debut collection of poetry titled An Organ of Chaos. 

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