AustLit

'Sara Ahmed analyses the construction of the national ideal, conceiving of nationhood as a formation dependent on the stickiness of an ideal-image informed by complex individual and collective physic processes. In this article, I focus on the Narungga poet, artist, and scholar Natalie Harkin’s debut collection of poems, Dirty Words, through the lens of Ahmed’s work on the socialisation of affect to argue that Harkin’s poetics stage an intervention on national numbness (a consequence, in part, of Australia’s traumatic establishment as a penal colony) and Australia’s Anglo-centric national ideal. I examine Harkin’s challenge to those who continue to fly the traumatising, colonising flag and her witnessing to transgenerational trauma in the post-invasion context, showing how her testimony confronts the denial and division entrenched in the national ideal, past and present. Harkin’s mediation contributes to a burgeoning First Nations poetics in Australia that demands recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ experience and knowledge, and calls for justice, accountability, reflection, and response from non-Indigenous Australians.'  (Publication abstract)