Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
A blog shared between poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan: vegan, anarchist, pacifist and feminist.
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
The Genocide in Gaza Must Stop Now!
Sunday, July 27, 2025
Poem in Support of Those Who Refuse Conscription
Conscientious Objection
Praise to those who refuse conscription.
Praise to ‘draft dodgers’ and objectors to war.
May the only thing they are ever induced to burn
be their draft cards. Let them stand against
the vast sways of their deluded societies
which crave and justify war as if it’s the answer
to their crisis, crises, situations, conditions.
Praise to the ones who stand against the claims
of ‘no alternative’, ‘responsibility to your country’,
and other epithets of manipulation and destruction.
Praise to the conscience that understands killing
leads to more killing and that military ‘camaraderie’
is the ultimate ganging up, bullying behaviour.
Praise to those who know cowardice is operating
in armies is facilitating starvation and the deaths
of children. To refuse conscription, to refuse to fight,
is not cowardice, and ‘bravery’ is not even a word
with an adequate range or an adequate history
to apply to such resolution, inner strength, morality.
John Kinsella
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
The Mass-murder of Starving People in Gaza
Blue Light: Wealth and Power as Murder
To highlight an individual case
of starvation or to discuss the dozens,
hundreds, thousands killed trying
to reach food supplies in choke-
points overlooked by soldiers
who are impartial as nationalistic poets
is to metastasise metaphors
or fall into similes that never
wear down because of their brutal
effectiveness and disposability.
When we are dealing with the statistics
of war-induced famine — starvation
as a lure to wipe out an opposition —
we shift from one death to many
as readily as AI takes over morality.
And scrolling down to reports
of those who would vandalise trees
to defend their million-dollar views
having completely lost sight
of the avalanche of cause into effect
is ensuring that personal lines of supply
have been kept open even when
the ground has been flattened
and trees completely removed
from the blue-light picture.
John Kinsella
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Review of Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki
I had been writing on the nature of ‘invasion’ in a military sense when I came to read Elfie Shiosaki’s remarkable new book of poetry, Refugia. Her scholarly archival reading of the nature of ‘invasion’ with regard to the military enterprise that was the ‘settling’ of the Swan River Colony is a remarkable and insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion. And this melds ‘in the stars’ with a profound utterance from self and country that stretches and breaks any idea of the colonial lyric into something much more powerful, much more traced out of country.
With an intense sensitivity to her ancestors’ presence and with a deep spiritual connection to country, Shiosaki considers the colonial impact of the Beeliar hydrology, habitat, spiritual and material architecture of Noongar custodianship in the context of colonial-settler-military overlays and attempts at erasure. In tracing early Noongar protest and attempts at a just agreement regarding this invasion, Shiosaki projects and injects Noongar knowledges (and where they make connection with more northern Yamaji knowledges as well) with the immensity of the cosmos, bringing the stars, black holes and water ways (and the ocean) into a contact that is both generative and cataclysmic.
The reflections and inflections through the experience of the poet in trying to address and commune with wetlands and water pulses around patterns of short and long lines, and staggered-line dynamics on the open form of the page. We journey with the body and spirit of the poet trying to find redress, to find answers from country itself, across ‘bend’, ‘break’, bud, the three sections of the work. Three non-colonial and anti-colonial ‘tellings’.
There is a desire, almost a compulsion, for an end to the grieving of the invasion but there is no real possibility of this as long as that colonial invasiveness continues. Wadjemup, sacred island site of a colonial prison for Aboriginal people is spoken to with fires on the beach just as marches along Riverside Drive in Perth (Boorloo) under the eyes of armed police (of course) connect the statistically staggering reality of Aboriginal people, especially youth, in colonial jails now. Deaths in custody connects with the first months and years of the Swan River Colony.
Spreading an Aboriginal flag in Temple Underground in London is an affirming and contesting moment, but no one really notices. The crowds move on around. This is a cosmological occurrence as well, and actions are witnessed and implicated in the stars: ‘the Whadjuk/ and Captain James Stirling/ those born under the Milky Way/ and those born under St George’s cross, a red rose and the Three Lions’(‘On the Edge’). Captain Stirling (massacre leader) whose presence is murderous, corrosive and entrenched still.
The statement that ‘our understanding was never friendly’ (‘Misunderstanding’) frees the ongoing colonial manipulation of invitation and welcome arising (at least in part) out of certain first-contact accounts that are at the core of a settler sense of justification and reconciliation. If friendship was offered (out of the temporary impression or belief that the invaders were Noongar ancestral spirits returning over the sea) it was under a different set of terms of engagement. There was no friendship in the act of military invasion. In the pivotal poem ‘On the Edge’ we read:
on the edge
and this gives lie to any conceivable ‘legitimacy’ to just and equitable co-existence by the colony with Noongar people. It simply becomes an act of invasion, a process of ongoing theft.
The incredible gift of this book with its search for justice, restitution and redress is that it suggests a healing might come when the colonial invasion mentality is stopped. This cannot be stopped not by exclusion, but by change in the way settler culture addresses its past and also the grief of Aboriginal people in deep and complex ways. In the poem ‘Grandfather’, an ancestor of Shiosaki indicated in a ‘snippet of conversation’ with that colonial ethno-manipulator, Daisy Bates, says that ‘There has never been an attempt to annex neighbouring tribal territory’ by Noongar peoples. Invasion mentality is colonial mentality.
There is a thesis to be written on this book, but in the immediate term it should be read by anyone interested in true paths to justice. And from such works and invitations to response by other Noongar writers, we might understand that the ‘ancient root systems’ will bring the red eucalypt flowers and the Rio Tinto Tower will eventually give way to Noongar people being ‘reunited// in an historic reckoning’ (‘Refugia’). Noongar people will: ‘rise from the ashes// rise above the colony// rise into stars’ (‘Noongar Rising’).
Monday, July 14, 2025
Review of my French historical novel, The War Within Me, plus a video link below
By Tracy
The first few reviews of my new novel, The War Within Me, have started to appear.
I'm especially grateful for this recent one in InDaily by Heidi Maier, whom I don't know but who has many positive things to say about this story based on the life of Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre and Huguenot leader during the French civil wars or Wars of Religion.
'With its fluid, engaging, richly conjured prose and storylines and character studies that are so obviously underpinned by exemplary research, The War Within Me lives up to the immense promise of The Queen’s Apprenticeship, with Ryan ultimately creating a fully-realised portrait of Jeanne d’Albret that wholly convinces in its first-person narration and evocation of the age in which she lived, making the reader feel they close the book better “knowing” Princess Jeanne.
This is a work of literary historical fiction, to be sure, but it is assuredly informed by the twin disciplines of history and biography, and both make Ryan’s story infinitely richer and more multifaceted.'
The reviewer has evidently enjoyed Book 1 of the trilogy. But the novels also work as standalones — you don't have to read them in order, though there's the odd little bonus or textual (vegan!) "Easter egg" if you do...
You can also watch a multilingual presentation of and reading from this novel.
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
Video interview on Yellow Shelf — The War Within Me and the Queens of Navarre trilogy
You don't have to have read Book 1 in the trilogy, because each book also works as a standalone. But if you're interested in Book 1, it's still out there too.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Against Fascism, War and the Lie of 'Peace through Strength'
Fascism as Commodity
‘Peace through strength’ =
‘make a deal for peace’ =
profit margins
of a strong peace
of(f) the map
re-mapping
peace for strong men
peace-brokers
& breakers,
for endgame cartographers
for terraformers
for laws unto selves
for holy justified sentences
for death sentences
for warrior-hero complexes
& reconditioned
existentialism
for ordnance dumped
on ordnance surveys
(private satellite images
& military contracts)
regime change to change regimes
to regime change in the grammar
of greatness
& each bird, reptile, insect
killed in the earth-burst...
& humans,
yes,
there are humans
killed too, existential afterthoughts
of savings
vs. costs. [= = = = = = = = = = = =]
John Kinsella