I constructed this fictocritical essay with a particular formatting structure that supports the poetry and assertions of the piece. It would be ideal to download it and view it with its intended formatting.
I have included the first section below as I was able to retain the formatting for this excerpt and the formatting is a key part of the writing.
REJECTING
Imagining a World where People get Informed and Possibly Take Some Time on Country Before they Start Making Demands of Women or What’s a 48 year old they/them white Australian daughter of migrants like me to do
In this essay I will explore how Joy Harjo queers poetry by not only decentring heterosexuality but by decentring human erotics with other humans exclusively. Instead, Harjo’s (1983) Remember is a sermon for human connection, intimacy and sensual immersion. This becomes a force of decolonisation1, placing the human in a web of interconnected sensory experiences across time and space.
Harjo’s poetry disrupts the anthropocene with its human-centricity and possibly shifts us towards a symbiocene2 ethos (Albrecht, 2019; Prescott & Logan, 2017). Similarly, this essay seeks to dismantle critical analysis as superior, placing poetry at the front of the discussion, Remember by Harjo and Cousins, my own poem. Through subservient3 footnotes, the conversation around this topic includes academic review, personal experience, queer theory, feminism and womanly4
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976) approaches to poetry analysis. This exploration feels incomplete, scattered and possibly incorrect. I am happy to leave the reader in a state of unresolved discomfort as the topic and discussion overall has left me. In the spirit of Bayo Akomolafe (2025), I prefer to “let the ambiguity speak.”
Endnotes
- While “colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality have mapped onto contemporary postcolonial conceptions of gender and sexuality and continue to impact on the experiences of LGBT
persons” (Westman, 2023. p. 3) I also experience constraints on my gender expression and sexuality in our culture as a cis-gender, heterosexual, white person.
- “the anthropocene is generally recognized to be an era in which human activity has grossly disturbed the natural environment” (Prescott & Logan, 2017. p.3)
- Ironic
- By this I mean, I include my own self in the writing. I include the bodily experiences of my life and my entire emotional self. As Cixous espouses, “By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” (Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976. p. 880).
