And they will understand that what you might have been looking for was not another suburb, or even just an exit sign, but open skies. And that the impulse to run is the same as the impulse to run a clipping razor across your scalp: it’s an impulse for freedom. We shed hair in a bid to shed skin.
Throughout it all, Jock and I have remained steadfast. When in recent years, I have been ill, it is Jock who has been by my side, squeezing my hand as I get wheeled into operating theatres, laughing at my incoherent rambles when I come out of the druggy hazes and hallucinations afterwards, guarding my bedside to make sure it is free of drama and crowds, bringing me shampoo and food supplies, making sure there is someone to walk my dog. Her pragmatism and humour keep me sane. My brother recently called her an angel.
She remains a glorious creature — and has been with Josie for twenty-five years. I am so proud; a relationship like theirs is rare, and golden. They married in Washington — before it was legal to marry in Australia — Jock beautiful in a red dress, leopard-print shoes and neatly combed blonde hair. We have dinner every Tuesday and speak most days. The second I heard Australians had voted a thunderous ‘yes’ to the question of whether same sex couples could marry, I called her and we both cried.
Chapter 15
Burning Bright: Candy Royalle
WHY IS IT THAT some people can live alongside us for decades, in schools, office cubicles, houses, apartments, but barely leave a trace, while others, whom we know only briefly, alter us indelibly? You know the kind: they pass like cyclones flashing light: thunderous, brief, unstopping, while scorching marks on our lives.
This was my experience with Australian writer and performer Candy Royalle, who died in 2018. She was only thirty-seven. We’d only met a few weeks earlier, but we immediately sparked and spoke for hours about poems, unheard voices, the beauty of community, the way words can spool from trauma, cancer and an insistence on love. We spun dreams around a national poetry competition for women, one that I wanted her to judge. I instantly loved her spirit; it was luminous, generous, fierce and sharp. When I heard she had died, it felt like a meteor had ripped through my gut.
Only two weeks beforehand, she had performed on stage with her band The Freed Radicals at the Red Rattler in Marrickville. On the night, I was unsure whether to go. It was cold and rainy, it was an hour’s drive across town, I needed to find a babysitter and all of my friends were busy or lazy. Then I reread her emaiclass="underline" ‘It would mean a lot to me if you came.’ So I did. And to my surprise, within five minutes of creeping in to perch on a stool in the middle of the theatre, tears were rolling off my chin. She spoke of love, and lust, and hurt, and injustice and suffering and art, as well as the betrayal of her body. It was like watching a flame; she blazed.
Candy had been having treatment for her third bout of ovarian cancer and had to sit for half of the performance — when she was not dancing — and she told us of the rage, anguish and vulnerability of being ill. I had been cut open like her, too, and we had spoken about the scars that spanned our torsos. ‘How could you love me,’ she cried that night on stage, ‘with a scar like this?’, then bit her lip and turned to dance. I realised with a jolt that I had wondered exactly the same thing.
In one poem, ‘Birthing the Sky, Birthing the Sea’, Candy spoke of yearning to live:
She doesn’t want to live forever
Just long enough to be able to love a little harder
To become a little smarter
To heal the world just enough that
evolving hearts have a platform from which to start.
The room roared with love; she was buoyed by it for days.
Though I barely knew her, I had found a poet whose words were like jump leads on my life. Candy taught me that even the briefest of encounters matter and that we should cherish them; that the voices from the margins are crucial; and that poetry matters, intensely.
When we talk about poetry, we too often think of men who lived long ago in far-off lands, or about the wars of generations past. We don’t think of a thirty-seven-year-old woman dancing to a tune of her suffering and daring us — in the very last breath of what we did not know would be her final performance — to call it art. Candy, born Cindy Malouf, wrote about being a ‘bold, queer Arabic woman’ who struggled with a sense of not belonging — until she found the big, devoted, disparate, creative tribe that is mourning her now. This tribe, she said, lives in the ‘Borderlands’. As Candy wrote, ‘We utilise things like art and activism to create a place of belonging within the margins and can revel in what it means to be an outsider who belongs.’
Their work very rarely airs in the mainstream media, but so many poets today, especially those from diverse communities, whether Indigenous, migrant, Muslim, queer or other, are marked by contagion and passion, obvious in the spoken word events that have sprouted like toadstools in recent years. Their storytelling unravels truths.
In May, Candy wrote to me about the ways she had witnessed poetry change lives, ‘as a tangible, actual thing’. At one school workshop, she said, held over several days,
a young Islander girl’s family was going through a really hard time . . . It got so bad, she ended up in a shelter for a few nights, but she made sure she was at that workshop every day . . . A few months later she wrote to me to tell me that meeting me, getting to write, engaging with poetry, had literally saved her life. That she had been at risk of self-harming and if we hadn’t been working with her during that time, she doesn’t know what she would have done.
During her last five years working with young Aboriginals in Nowra, she said,
many have expressed that poetry has been the thing that saved them. I have witnessed them live through the suicides of many people they love (often teenagers as well), police harassment, physical abuse and other traumatic experiences, but day in and day out they attend the workshops and mentoring sessions because it helps them give voice to their lived experiences.
I think this is the most powerful thing about poetry. Everyone has a voice, and yet not all those voices have an avenue or a platform. Poetry is a tool to give those voices power, a place to channel trauma (and joy), a platform [from which] to be heard in a world that is often deaf to marginalised voices — those voices we actually need to hear most from.
She said it was ‘no accident’ that 90 per cent of those who came to her adult classes were women who’d experienced great trauma. ‘The very act of writing and sharing is one of catharsis. It’s important to remember the sharing part too — poetry made for the page tends to stay there. Work written to be shared helps us rehumanise the dehumanised — whether it’s our own stories we share, or the stories of others.’
What a beautiful woman.
‘She doesn’t want to live forever’, Candy chanted when she last stood on stage, frailer than we knew, in a tiny red theatre being hammered by rain. ‘She just wants the world to know she was a hurricane and not a zephyr.’
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH CANDY stamped my life. It was a fragment of time, but it was enough to jolt my spirit; it was a naptha-flash of lightning, an insight, a connection, as misused and banal as that word now is. We had both been torn in two, resected and stitched together again — we were ‘almost mythical now’, as she said. We both loved words, and wanted to amplify the quiet, unheard voices. It was a pure kind of bond, one that people who feel like, or are, outsiders, tend to appreciate and treasure most acutely. To find each other, we just have to be open to finding others, and also, I think, to art and creativity and poetry, to be able to build, and cross, those slender bridges of community, and of hope.