James Stanwix: Reading this piece, I noticed how little separation there was between the language used to reference the presumably human poetic persona and that used in reference to the more than human. 

In what other ways do you find yourself able to invite the natural world to share authorship in your ecopoetry?

Nandi Chinna: I think I have been very lucky in my life to have been taken out into the bush from when I was baby. 

My father was a rugged bushman, and we spent a lot of time as kids camping rough, sleeping out on the ground under the stars, with the bush as our playground. 

From a very early age I felt that the plants, animals and birds were like family, an extension of our little group. 

Rivers were places of sustenance and playfulness, connection. 

So I have always had this feeling in my body, and in my unconscious, that humans were not the only family I had. 

Every camp spot becomes a home, and all of the more than human beings that live there are relatable. 

This is a feeling I have always had. 

However, it is taken some time, and a lot of listening and learning from First Nations friends and mentors, for me to be able to fully commit to sharing that authorship in my poetry. 

In other words to ‘unlearn’ the individualistic and ego driven culture that I was brought up in. 

If I am writing about a particular place, I have come to realise that of course they share authorship with me, because they are gifting me the experiences of the poems and speaking in their different languages, which I try to translate through my experience of them.

Hannah Reynolds: I really liked the image of names being sown into the ground: “how else will we grow our garden/except with our names…?” 

There is something of a burial happening here, but also a regeneration: “the sprouted seeds of our tears,” “… make of last year’s crop a new growth”. 

I’m wondering how this cyclical imagery relates to your use of the “our” pronoun; is it significant that transformation isn’t confined to the purely personal, to the first personal singular, but is instead extended outwards to a potentially unbounded amount of other speakers/listeners?

NC: This poem was inspired by lines from another poem by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, a brilliant Palestinian poet and novelist, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younes, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. 

The translator is Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. 

She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.

When I read her poem, ‘Not Just Passing’, it really moved me and I was struck by the lines, ‘to those who are trembling/one day a garden sprouted from our names/all of you come in.’

Of course it triggered a lot of grief and sadness about the terrible attacks on Gaza, and it also made me think about the colonisation of Australia, and about the impact of the imposition of war on lands where families’ names, their blood and their bones are in the ground and the water for thousands of generations. 

Where land is known and loved, and people are born from it and die back into it. 

And how that growing seeds from family names, and from family tears is a kind of renewal. 

The people will never not be a part of their homelands. 

No matter how hard warring invaders attempt to wipe them out. 

And you see this in Australia in all the different Aboriginal countries where people still live and sing the names and the attributes of those countries. 

I use the pronoun ‘our’, because we are all from the same tribe originally, we are humans and as humans we grieve for each other’s misfortunes, as well as the misfortunes of the more than human species that inhabit our home places. 

‘Our’, ‘We’, is way of expressing humanity as all of us. 

We are all responsible as a collective race to care for each other and for the earth that we inhabit. 

In the final stanza of my poem, the making of compost from the blood of plants, and the invitation, ‘all of you come in’, echoes the incredible courage and generosity shared by Hiba Abu Nada, even as her own home is bombed, and she was killed not long after this poem was written. 

It also echoes a similar courage and generosity that I see in first Nations Australians, still welcoming, still open to sharing. 

Making compost, sewing seeds from our tears, represents an anecdote to despair. 

From the blood and soil, from all of our tears together, from all of our human names, we can try for love, we can try for growth, and we can try for hope.

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HEM: In coversation with Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon