Interview of Evelyn Araluen by Haylee Hackenberg
I had high expectations of Evelyn Araluen’s latest poetry collection. Dropbear, Evelyn’s debut collection, was widely celebrated and awarded the prestigious Stella Prize. The Rot obliterated any expectations I had. Sliding effortlessly between poetry and prose, Evelyn’s beautiful words are delivered like a punch in the gut to girls and for girls. The work seems to understand itself as not only an expression, but as an intervention: a naming of the violence, the contradictions and the hope that shape our lives. Darkly funny at times and deeply grounded in community, Evelyn speaks directly to the reader, reminding us to take a breath and not surrender completely to the rot. I spoke to Evelyn about The Rot, the challenge of a second book and how to keep going.
Congratulations on the release of The Rot. It is a truly moving collection. One of the things that really struck me was the unapologetic flipping between the poetry and prose. It’s quite astonishing – the way you’re able to do so without it being jarring. As far as your process goes, do you take a structured approach to it?
The concept for this book, I suppose, had been sort of brewing a little bit, but I so sincerely had not planned on writing another book of poetry after I finished Dropbear. I kind of ended the period of the Stella Prize promotion of the book, and I had intentionally ended that because I’d sort of reached this point of having been talking about Dropbear for so long, I was really over talking about myself and thinking about my own work. So, I didn’t write poetry, for I don’t even know how long, and didn’t start thinking about writing in a meaningful way until, I think, it was March 2024. I was at the Adelaide Writers Festival, and I had a few new poems that I’d written that were very much influenced by taking a more serious engagement with Marxism and with socialist theory and socialist poetics. I’d read Marx, and I’d read a lot of writing about Indigenous perspectives on socialism and resistance organising, and I had essentially come to a place where I wasn’t convinced that theory was overly useful for action and resistance work when it comes to Indigenous struggles. The theory that I’d been reading didn’t feel like it resonated with my cultural and political priorities, but meeting poets and engaging with poets who were more explicitly involved in a Marxist practice had started me on this very, very slow process of working on what became The Rot. I read some work from The Rot, or what became The Rot on stage, and it had a really positive response from the audience, but at that same festival, I also got heckled by people for talking about Palestine. People walked out and it was just simultaneously really affirming experience that writing new work had a different kind of an audience than I had previously, or rather that the audience were responding to me talking about, you know, the horrors and injustice of the world and they were resonating with it, but then at the same time, the volatility was so there and present and active. This was at the same time that Overland was still in the midst of a lot of criticism and a lot of campaigns to defund us, so it began in a really volatile place. I didn’t properly get to start working on it in a meaningful way until the following year because I was working and teaching. I was struggling as well to start writing while being a witness to the horrific escalating genocide in Gaza and sitting and consuming content around that.
I was obsessively, for such a long period, just constantly on my phone and constantly, just constantly witnessing what was happening in a pretty unhealthy way. And so, when I finally started writing in a committed manner and actually focusing on giving myself time, a lot of it was just about organising scraps of poetry and reflections that I’d just been building this big kind of index of in my phone. And so, it went from, like, everything feeling a bit vague and impossible to imagine what the final version of all of that would be.
And then I just researched and read obsessively, while working a 9-5. I’d read on the train. I’d read at lunch. I’d come home, and then I would write or edit until I went to bed. The only way I knew to calm myself down in that whole period was to do a lot of that work in the bath. So, throughout that whole period, I ped my phone in the bath so many times. I wrote this, honestly, the bulk of this book was written in a period of about three months after I got home from work in the bath. It has perhaps caused some irreparable damage to my mental health and also has produced some serious mould issues in my shitty rental bathroom.
Dropbear was such a resounding success. Did that affect your approach to writing The Rot?
I felt like I didn’t know how to write poetry anymore. Some people meant well, but who would say things to me very kindly, trying to encourage me to decompress some of my stress and angst by saying things like, ‘Oh, you know, don’t worry, you’re never going to be able to follow up on something that had this success of Dropbear, so just take that pressure off.’ And I was like, well, I’m not trying to recreate that. But like, thanks.
So it was everybody’s instinct to tell me essentially, to lower my expectations of how the work would go. Crucially, I had never expected Dropbear to be as popular as it was. Australian poetry really is such a limited and niche space that it would be ridiculous to have expected that, because the Stella Prize just produced this level of engagement that is so unconventional for this form that I wasn’t prepared for. No one was prepared for it.
So I don’t need to stress about whether people will like it as much as Dropbear. But it was hard as well in the sense that when I finished Dropbear, I actually really felt like I’d finished it. And I was really confident that I’d gotten it to the best possible place that I could and that the final product matched with my intentions. In this book, I wanted more time; if somebody hadn’t physically stopped me, I think I would have kept editing forever. I feel that it’s more ambitious and more meaningful work, and I have a clearer sense of how I want certain audiences to engage with it. Whereas with Dropbear, I was so open to just putting a weird little book out just as a statement of my perception of not having to defend it.
I’m quietly anticipating that there’ll be reviews and things for people saying, it’s not as good as Dropbear and she’s done the predictable thing or whatever. I simultaneously kind of actually don’t care about that, with this artificial intensity that comes from putting a book out where your nervous system is like, oh, of course, I care about these things. My brain doesn’t. Yet, I feel like I’m being hunted for sport. It’s, it’s a strange, it’s a strange thing to do to oneself. I’m not sure I recommend it.
I’m a big blurb reader and was quite taken by Sara M Saleh’s, which said The Rot is not a book to be read, but to be reckoned with. I feel like that’s such an accurate experience of reading this collection. It made me think about the role of literature as resistance and, with more distractions than ever, how do we get people to engage with books that challenge them?
That’s kind of the eternal question. One of the most annoying answers is that you can’t really fundamentally get people to engage unless they have to be willing to come to the plate with this form of, with these kinds of forms of work. I had the very strange, and I think unique experience in that I knew that I did have an audience of people who had read Dropbear. So when you’re in this position, and this is more of an activist logic than a literary logic, but when you’re in the position of having an audience, having essentially a guaranteed audience, and you have the opportunity to say something to them that might help shift them into agency or shift them into a more critical sense of self-reflection. In the case of what I was trying to activate in that readership, it was a clearer sense of their own agency and their own necessity of intervening however they can in this social, political, cultural, economic order that’s predicated on the annihilation of some communities to privilege and support entire systems of extractive industries and weapons industries, the military industrial complex. And thinking about trying to go back to my own feelings when I was beginning to grow a political consciousness as a teenage girl, and I spent a lot of time looking at my own kind of digital archives. I’m a part of a village of people who help look after some young girls, and they ask me these questions all of the time that I can’t answer, or that I struggle to answer, that reveal how they see the world, which is that people are inherently good, and that people will do good things. I tried to think about, to step aside from the pressure of following up a book that unexpectedly had a much bigger audience than I was prepared for, and go, okay, but what’s the responsibility that I now hold to that audience, and to think about how I might be able to support them activating their agency and their anger and turning their frustration and alienation into something productive.
So, in a really clear and visceral way for me, the book is about replicating this sort of process, moving from disenchantment and despair into something proactive, and just a sense that they can advocate, they have a right to be angry, they have a right to be furious and vocal about the world that they’re inheriting, and the work to resist that is not going to be pleasant, but we need to, as much as possible, normalise what it will take, and create art that affirms the necessity of that activity, that centres the new ways of understanding the world that need to just be a part of our normal rhetoric and our day-to-day understanding of our environments.
I still value escapism, for sure, but, like, politically, ethically, I don’t think I could ever write escapist work, and I certainly think that doing anything other than trying to think about my agency to activate my audience would be a complete betrayal to the insane privilege that I hold by having that audience, and it’s a privilege that’s denied to a lot of different communities around the world, but most saliently, for my purposes here, it’s a privilege that’s denied to 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, to women and girls globally, but especially thinking about women and girls in the societies and communities that are being extracted from by global capitalism and by the global weapons industrial military complex.
In creating The Rot, and then also in the capacity of all of your work at Overland, I know you’ve been targeted by several hate groups, including the infamously awful Zionist group chat. How do you keep going in the face of it all?
I think it’s the same energy that somehow everybody keeps on finding, even though we don’t know where we’re getting it from. But when you look at the struggles globally, what Palestinians are up against, struggling against Israel and their resistance and resilience there, it kind of pales in comparison. I do take a lot of strength from that experience of seeing outside of one’s own positionality and realising that other people are feeling and experiencing this disaffection and dissociative despair and exhaustion as well. I feel like I gain some strength from that being normalised and acknowledged.
I’m very lucky to be surrounded by a lot of really wonderful comrades and just people in, whether it’s in the writing community, whether it’s in the activist and organising spaces that I’m a part of, whether it’s through Overland or the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, which is another space that I’ve been trying to put a lot of energy into. I’ve been able to condition myself into certain forms of work and labour as being restorative for the main problem that I face, which is just collapsing into despair. So I can’t, I can’t pause, or when I pause and take an opportunity to decompress, that’s when I become like the worst version of myself, you know, a version that’s just spiralling into anxiety and paranoia.
Caring for others, though, even though you’re extending energy, it’s actually restorative. I am lucky and privileged to be able to be involved in care relationships with others. That and with all the research that I was doing for this book, things just really get put into perspective so quickly.
The TLDR of all of that is that it’s not necessarily the best kind of moral character that I’m drawing from. It’s more just an understanding of my own instincts and a preemptive attempt to try to work against them and take advantage of the opportunities that I’ve got than it is a fully theorised and thought-through political strategy. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I really have to affirm that. I wake up and there’s something to do. And then I go to bed thinking, okay, there’s something else I got to do tomorrow.
