Samia Goudie is a Queer Bundjalung woman currently living on Ngunnawal country. She has published widely both as an academic working in health and the arts, and as a film and digital story maker. Samia is a member of Canberra based UsMob writers and FNAWN, First Nations Australian writers network. She has received an AFC mentor award for a short award winning film US Deadly mob and has had four documentaries screened and toured at festivals. Her various digital story projects are available on line and archived with the state library Old and FNQ’S Indigenous knowledge centres. Samia received a Fulbright fellowship in 2006 based around research in creative practices using digital story telling as a method to archive oral stories using new media and as a curative healing practice in First Nations communities dealing with intergenerational trauma. She has had multi media/word/installations and exhibitions of visual art and poetry at various locations including the Wollongong gallery, M16 gallery Canberra, ‘Territories’ at Laboratory of Arts and Media (LAM/LETA) University of Paris. Her multimedia/artwork has been is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Samia has been publishing poetry and short stories more frequently over the last several years and has works published in the Southerly, IWP Iowa press, Wakefield press, Norton and Norton, 3CCmedia journal, Aiatsis Press, Too Deadly: Our Voice, Our way Our business (Us Mob Writers anthology), Giant Steps (2019) and What We Carry (2020), Recent Work Press and Routledge press. More recently she was highly commended for her submission to the Varuna First Nations Fellowship which gives access and support to Varuna’s residential writing space in the Blue Mountains. She has also won support and runner up with the Boundless Indigenous Writers Mentorships, supported by the NSW Writers centre and Text publishers, which matched her with Melissa Lucashenko as a mentor for her current work in progress, which is a novel.
Box
Won’t fit in The box
Hard edge
Cold steel
Sharp
Refuse, Resist
Don’t fit, won’t fit, can’t fit
Tried
Believe me I tried
Even the box rejected me
There must be something wrong
I contorted, twisted
My shape, my voice
My hair, my hands,
You even tried to alter my soul
I was never enough
Can’t fit
sit still
Move back
sit down
shut up
Refuse, Resist
Even when you medicate me,
debate about me,
label me,
Nah,
Aint nothing wrong
with my voice, my hands, MY shape
My gender, my colour
who I am
I am large and round
have limbs bound with the roots of trees
I can touch the sky
Inhabit stars
Why would I give any of that up?
To fit in your box
It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
Now walking amongst us in full sunlight
Unavoidable
My friend, tells me,
In her community nearly all the Elders lie dead.
There is fear haunting us in shadows
All those Stories gone
All the language lost
Who will teach the young?
Was it like this
When the tall ships sailed in?Fear grips my broken heart
And now like the last cruel blow
her 11-year-old niece
HAS
It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
She attends funerals everyday
They drive hours to stand in long lines
hoping today they can get a Vaccine
Instead of body bags
She asks for prayers
Please pray for us
She always ends her posts,
Miigwech
It’s raining here
I’m so far across the southern sky
Across the wide ocean
a dark afternoon
clouds brooding
Banksia’s dancing
oblivious
These days
On a good day
I spend time outside under open sky
Seeking solace where none seems possible
There is fear haunting us in shadows
I choose to turn towards the sun
Miigwech
NOTES
Miigwech means loosely, thank you, in Anishinaabemowin also known as Ojibwa. However, it has also a tone that conveys respect and request, recognition and integrity. Gratitude.