spoken 20/6 as part of EWF18
I am of the Nira’ Baluk, a people who lived in a place where fire and water will walk the exact same paths at different times.
I was born at the time the fires run their course. I was born into what they called a drought.
When I came back to this city ten years ago, I saw water everywhere. In the middle of this drought, people watered their lawns and their pathways straight from the tap and complained about having to use a minuteglass in their showers. The woman that might have been my wife leaves the tap running when she brushes her teeth, any tap over any sink in her house. I thought then that we were lucky to have such fresh, clean water. No smell. No taste. Not like tank water that flows through old, rusting pipes. Not like bore water.
Do you remember the taste of bore water? When it is ripped from the ground, piped up past the remains of centuries of living and dying and living again, you can never boil that taste out. There are filters, and filters, and filters, but these filters break. And fail. And cost more and more, clean land and clean water, a cost that eventually someone will not meet and what then? Then you drink bore water, or you die. This water keeps you sick, makes you sicker, but you drink this water or you die. Even a river that will break its banks over and over is cleaner than any underground well in a drought. Cleaner than that well when the drought ends. Do you understand?
The woman that then might have been my mother-in-law told me how she planned to catch floodwaters before they landed, catch them and clean them and bottle them and ship them out to drier months in drier places, catch and clean and pipe and bottle and ship and sell this water. She called it benevolence. People are dying for want of this water, she said. So I asked her why she had to put a price on this water that people die for, and she said, we are not a charity. Well. There it is, then. People are not dying for want of water. They are dying for want of basic human decency. They are dying because we – like something shiftless and much older than we pretend to be – we are overtaken by the drive to collect and keep whatever we can lay hands on, far beyond what we could ever need. We build walls to protect our hoard, then fences to protect these walls, and we spend so much time protecting these walls that what’s held inside is so long rotten.
What, then, are we protecting? This world has been built around a hierarchy where those with nothing must prove their personal right to live, while those with everything are born into the right to make these decisions that feel objective.
This cannot continue. Even if it were nobody I knew and nobody you knew whose skin cracks and bleeds, whose bones break and whose hearts fail like it is this mythical luck that has failed them instead of systematised violence, each level more sanitised until we do not recognise this as violence. We do not recognise what we do as violent any more, when people are still living and dying on the edge of our choices. Do you understand?
I am of the Nira’ Baluk, a people dispossessed in 1839 by colonists with guns and god. The Nira’ Baluk were remembered as a people who gave as good as we got. When they gave us guns, we shot at them. When they gave us their words, we cursed them with ours. But when they gave us their god, they took none of our responsibility.
We did not poison our waters. We did not have that choice. In that respect, we are lucky.
Do you understand?