Nadia Johansen is a Gungarri writer and poet living in Meanjin/Brisbane who was awarded second place in the . She is a second-year creative writing student at QUT and has her sights set on becoming a novelist. Read Nadia's prizewinning entry :
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Schism
Congratulations on your entry. How did you come to enter the competition?
I had this piece that I wrote for the uni, my lecturer encouraged me to get it published. I sat on it for a few months and really wasn’t sure where to put it. Then I saw that the SBS competition was being judged by Melissa Lucashenko, who is my favourite author at the moment. I love Too Much Lip, and that was what made me think it was the place to submit for. I love Ben Law as well.
What did you hope to explore in your memoir, 'Schism'?
For me, [the piece] was exploring how there can be little moments that are traumatic for Indigenous people within the education system. This education system is set up so long ago by the colonisers at the time, so quite often there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the Indigenous people within it. They are working quite hard to change that but [we're] just not there yet. I’ve had all these little moments — in academic language we call it ‘symbolic violence’.
The way you revealed these moments of symbolic violence is both subtle and incredibly powerful, taking the reader right there with you. Can you tell us a bit about the story’s background?
I was at a lecture about Indigenous people that wasn’t too great — it was traumatic in itself. And then I got a call that night that a young girl from back home had passed away. The next day I went into that class, and a person in my class was talking about how Aboriginal people shouldn’t represent themselves if they have light skin.
So it was just this kind of ‘bang bang bang’ of traumatic things all unrolled within 24 hours, which isn’t an uncommon thing for an Indigenous person to go through. I wanted to make that explicit to non-Indigenous people: [the fact] that we’re actually carrying around all this extra stuff. And that what we come into a classroom or into a workplace with might be a lot more than they realise.
Nadia (R) participating in a smoking ceremony performed by Alan Martin at the Mitchell Yumba. Source: Supplied
Your memoir is laced with these haunting, beautiful scenes of your face being painted.
Yes, so I wanted to make the link between being painted up for ceremony, or painted up for battle; and an Indigenous woman having to paint her face every morning to go into work, or go into school. It’s that same kind of putting on the war paints, get yourself ready and face the wider world.
Do you come from a family of storytellers?
I think that all Aboriginal people do. It’s quite common for us as kids, or even now, to sit around and listen to my mum and aunt tell stories about people from back home: who got up to this, and who’s been jumping the back fence. So there’s a lot of those kinds of stories about who we are, and where we come from. And then there are stories that are more about place, and our home, and our creation spirits as well.
How long have you been writing for?
Probably since I was a young child. But I’ve been seriously writing only in the last 18 months.
Who are some of your literary influences?
Melissa Lucashenko is quite big. Ellen van Neerven, and Alison Whittaker — I mentioned her in the story. I’m in love with her poetry as well. But I guess I also have a wider, weirder range of influences of people like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
What specifically about Melissa Lucashenko’s stories resonates with you?
When I was reading Too Much Lip, in the opening scene of the story, when [the main character] Kerry was speaking to the crows, it made me think, “Oh, I can actually write about things like this? I can actually write the way me and my family see the world, in the way that we interact with the natural world?” That I can write about it and be quite explicit about it — [is something] I hadn’t really realise I could do before that.
How important is it to hear from voices from a diverse background?
Part of the reason we read is to experience things that we could never experience otherwise. To understand things that we couldn’t possibly have understood. If you were just reading books, fiction or poetry about people that looked, spoke and behaved like you, it wouldn’t be enriching. You wouldn’t learn very much from it.
Reading is a way of travelling the world without ever leaving your bedroom. So why not really travel and experience as much as you possibly can?
