Help us raise funds for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation
Each month a different Subbed In author is choosing an organisation or cause to support with donations from sales of their book.
Throughout February 2020 Subbed In is donating $10 from every sale of HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) by Jason Gray to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Only 36% of Indigenous Year 5 students in very remote areas are at or above national minimum reading standards, compared to 96% for non-Indigenous students in major cities. ILF makes a difference to the lives of Indigenous families by not only gifting thousands of new culturally appropriate books—with a focus on early literacy and first language—but also by running programs to inspire the communities to tell and publish their own stories.
HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) is experimental poetry about growing up bi-cultural; a neo-Coolie meditation, exorcism of racial bigotry and satire of fear-mongering, from a decolonial Mauritian-Australian perspective.
Mauritian culture is too often known in the West for the dodo: an extinct, flightless bird who inhabited the island and died out during European colonisation. It is time to move forward and ensure our robust yet marginalised culture houses and projects all the diverse individual voices within it.
Suburban mainstream yachts grow, giant
weeds in driveways, outlaw
gutter trophies, never seem to
Like! Find water?
But: I am Black enough to hold
the Whiteness in me
on me and @-me, account without counting
a graceless film-fade into seething light
hide colour, enlighten or die
settling, whiny-rewind VHS scores
(At Aussie, we’ll save you!)
Jason Gray is a Mauritian-Australian writer who has lived mainly in North-West and South-West Sydney, and writes towards and about youth, being Xennial/Millennial, bi-cultural and a Person of Colour, pop culture and forms of media, toxic/White patriarchal and restorative/progressive masculinity, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, displacement, suburbia, home and staying kind in this late (anti-)capitalist hellscape. Twitter @jasongray85