THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE - Sydney Writers Festival 2026

The poetics of resistance: Evelyn Araluen, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Nikita Gill and Sara M. Saleh

This was a thrilling, bracing session: four brilliant writers discussing poetry as perhaps the most potent of all art forms for resistance, activism, protest, change. I scribbled notes frantically and here are some fragments of this conversation.

Irish-Indian poet, playwright, writer and illustrator Nikita Gill, author of verse novel Hekate, writes about women and war. Her grandfather survived Partition. She asked, Who does the cleanup? Women do. We normalise the violence against women and children - doubly so in war. Poets are emotional historians of humanity. Take the most dismissed person and write from their perspective.

Myths and speculative fiction allow you to do things with poetry that realism can’t do. Hekate is a refugee goddess. We’re so much closer to being refugees than billionaires.

Maxine Beneba Clarke , an Australian poet and writer of Afro-Caribbean descent and author of over 16 books, answered the question about the power of poetry and myth by telling a story about high school and her boyfriend’s mother. After she blitzed her exams, doing better than said boyfriend, his mother said to her, Don’t get too blinded by ambition, boys don’t like ambition, successful girls. Maxine tried to write about this experience literally for 20 years. Only when she wrote about it in her poem ‘Icarus’ (about a girl who flies too close to the sun and relishes her moment of glory, in her 2021 collection How Decent Folk Behave), did she finally nail the story. Readers totally got it.

Goorie and Koori poet, writer, editor, academic Evelyn Araluen said she learned textual resistance from Edward Said who learnt about it from Franz Fanon.

‘Throwing grains of sand at the machine of capitalism,’ said the moderator Sara M. Saleh, a writer, poet and novelist of Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage,

Evelyn: people move from knowing to action via emotion. Poetry is good at activating emotional reactions - possible the best of all art forms.

Maxine: Beautiful in itself is political.

Nikita: Every poem is political.

Asked about the state of publishing, Evelyn said she was exploring small scale publishing initiatives and storytelling that’s restorative for ourselves, our communities and our lands. We don’t make paper in this country. In the aftermath of her walking away from her publisher, the University of Queensland Press, in solidarity with Jazz Money, a fellow Aboriginal storyteller, as a result of UQP’s decision to pulp Bila, A River Cycle, a children’s picture book by Jazz Money, illustrated by Matt Chun, ‘without due process, communication, respect or consideration’.

Maxine: We’re in a society that responds to short forms like poetry.

Nikita: The work of Audre Lorde made me feel normal as a queer girls who loved girls. I’m bisexual.

Asked by Sara M. Saleh whether they were morning or nighttime writers they all said: night-time.

Words are nocturnal, said Nikita.