Confessions of Depressed Mad-woman

I am in the shower, curled up on the floor. The hot water splatters down the sides of my neck and down my back. I am quivering, shaking, and exhausted, despite the fact that it's 9pm and I've spent the whole day sleeping. The salty tears roll down my face.

The memories are coming back. The years of insults, bullying, endless dreams of a future that would actually mean something. The beginning of all of this: the on-going battle just to live. And more than anything, the loneliness. The deep, haunting loneliness that bellows out from the deepest part of my soul.

It's no dog barking. There is no fucking black dog.

It's a creature of thick black tar that insipidly crawls in my body. All is heavy. All is disgusting. I want to tear my insides out, rip away at my flesh and push the thick darkness out.

Five years of this. Five years of my life have gone on a battle I don't want to fight. How much longer? All my ambition, my drive, my excitement and enthusiasm about the future has been washed away.

And the anger is building up. All that frustration, that feeling of being treated like an idiot by everyone. Around me, people are building up a life. I still feel like a teenager: angst, rebellious, desperate to escape from a world that has bound me to its expectations of propriety.

I want to belong somewhere. I want to feel like someone actually wants me. I don't want to be a burden anymore. My heart is tearing at itself apart, desperate to find the Nishma who used to believe in a better world.

A relapse of letters

Perhaps it is time to restart writing. Perhaps it is time to let the words slip down the crevices of your mind, from technological transactions through to neurological influxes. But my mind is caught, reluctantly clutching onto this part of a mindspace that is hollow, empty & void. They do not form. They want to gesticulate, perform, express without meaning or structure. The slip away from my fingers as I reach out, desperate to clutch onto them, and anything... Anything at all. Where do we start thinking? Where do the words form? I feel unable to enanciate, and yet I could - in the deepest, darkest part of my soul. And I am so close to it again. Rules, regulations, behavioural codes - what do all of these mean? Nothing. The words are stuck in my throat. I'm hurtful, or the hurted? I know not anymore.

Hollow

All alone.
Nothing beside me.
Silence, except for the sounds of passing traffic.

The land of forgotten voices...

Browsing the internet, as one does, in hushed voices and hidden in dark corridors with the weight of countless heavy tomes behind you, I stumble across the delights of Postcolonial Web. Though absurdly interesting, with its expansive definitions of postcolonialism and its seemingly in-depth connection between various different postcolonial authors, the category on Australia was surprsing. To my horror, as I turned upon its page and scurried down its contents, I noticed that leaping out of the page was not the tales of those truly colonised but the whispers of a members who continue to colonise Australia (and New Zealand) today; a broken link to aboriginal authors was all that remains of these true Australians - ignored are even those who have won the Miles Franklin award!

I guess the only way I can interpret this lack of recognition is to argue that for Aboriginal people, there is no postcolonial state, but that they are very much in the clutches of colonialism today.

We said 'Sorry' so we start all over again...

What was the point of reconciliation when the Australian government continues to practice Paternalism? Apparently reconstructing Aboriginal households in a western model of pure, hygienic, squared and roofed housing is going to solve all their problems. Perhaps later the government will force a regimental system of education that will make every Aboriginal person like vegemite (and numbers and Western literature and history) upon every Aboriginal child. Oh wait, I forgot - they already do that!

The government's veni, vidi, vici approach is disgustingly reminiscent of brute colonialism. What right have Kevin Rudd and Jenny Macklin to say anything about Aboriginal people? What gives them the right to take over (without permission from the local Aboriginal council) camps around Alice Springs and instead, spend AUS$100 million to rebuild Aboriginal homes (into houses) in a way that threatens Aboriginal culture and practice? Yes, the living conditions for Aboriginal people are are shite, but there are reasons for such strong opposition to the government proposal.

By indoctrinating Aboriginal people with western rules and regulations on how to live and conduct their lives, their situation will only worsen. The government has little understanding of how Aboriginal culture functions and how their ailments may be alleviated. It is not their decision to live in such horrific conditions, but the result of constantly being treated like vermin.

If Rudd really thinks such plans will reduce sex abuse, alcoholism and poverty, then he is living in a imperialism dream-world. Such plans can only further feelings of destitution, incompetence and powerlessness which are at the root of the current differences in living standards between the Aboriginal and the 'Other'.

Equality is the only solution. It comes from autonomy and the freedom and opportunity to make your own decisions. It comes from political support from not oppression. Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but self-determinism gives a power to live.

Aboriginal People don't need us to take care of them. Respect their decisions and recognise their equality in intelligence and knowledge and 'Other' Australians may find a solution to not only the Aboriginal condition but their own.