Hey Ma by Nayuka Gorrie

Read this letter from Nayuka Gorrie, responding to her mother’s letter ‘Dear Daughts’.

Hey Ma 

I still wish I could meet Nanny. I feel lucky that I have still have memories of her, Christmas at the mish, memories on her death bed. And then there are stories from other people too, Meriki tells me how they’d have cups of tea with her growing up at Bung Yarnda, other aunties tell me she taught them how to weave. I wish I’d learnt how to weave from her. Our culture is so special in that way, her legacy lives on those precious items weaved by others, and the legacy of her Elders lives on through them too. I think though, my favourite stories of all are the ones I grew up with about her, the ones you told me. Like that time you were sitting in class and saw her outside in the school grounds chasing a teacher with a boondi because they’d been racist to Aunty Bella. Or the story of her sitting in the gutter in the middle of a road trip because Granddad didn’t get her the right pastry from the servo (presumably because they didn’t have the one she wanted). As they say in modern parlance, slay queen. These stories were sort of told in a – you come from wild black women sort of way, but the older I get the more I hold on to this sense of wild. It feels like an act of refusal. 

That story you mention, of her being a child and nursing her loved ones as they die feels oddly familiar these days. I’m sitting in front of my laptop having just come home from yet another Free Palestine rally. I saw the twins with their Dad. They’ve been to so many of these rallies, they’ve memorised chants and routinely sing out Free, Free Palestine. I have a book they ask me to read before bed called Olive Harvest in Palestine which is a book about two young girls helping harvest olives at the start of the season. I am simultaneously so proud to be raising children who love to go to rallies, who care deeply about others, but I am also sad they live in a world where they must resist. One of the speakers mentioned that it had been eight months already since the first rally down those city streets. As I have said elsewhere, these are streets well-worn from Black rallies. Something that has struck me in the many images and video footage that has emerged from Gaza, has been the children rendered orphans and carers. This image of an eight-year-old Nanny is now so much more crystallised because I have seen what children caring for their kin under such hostile times looks like. 

We’ve been tasked to consider justice and it is a strange time to be considering this. We are living globally under incredibly unjust times, it is literally crazy making. A child somewhere as I write this, as this is read out is stolen by the state here in these borders called Australia. A child elsewhere is under rubble, or has been blown up by Israel. I saw the other day that ten children a day lose their legs in Gaza. What is justice? Publications make the case for legally killing children, universities try to ban rally cries for freedom. Justice feels like a farce. International institutions established after World War II designed to give the West the appearance of justice, fail in these times. Meanwhile justice systems in our own borders fail. As I write this Kumanjayi Walker’s inquest moves along, Heather Calgaret’s inquest rolls along, and the Yoorook Commission this week heard about the failure of St Vincent Hospital in the untimely death of Makaylie Reynolds, a young blackfulla I spent some time with. 

Sometimes it feels like things are changing, I look at the twin’s life and how in so many ways they have it easier that I did, you did, your Dad did, Nanny did, and how much more shielded they are from colonial violence they are but this shield is not absolute. It is dependent on a lucky combination of circumstance. Circumstance could shift, taking with it that shield.

“I don’t know if things will change. But I do know the only thing between us and whatever else could be is resistance. No one is coming to save us, no one has ever been coming to save us. It is resistance that preserves our humanity. ”

We are all we have and we owe our being here to resistance. In the absence of real justice, resistance is all we have. So I want to yarn to Nanny about all her resistances, those hours stolen when she ran away from Parkville to Fitzroy, chasing that racist teacher with a weapon, any other time she went off her head. Nanny was right all along.