Chelsea Watago - No Room at the Inn & Another Day in the Colony

@readingfeminism21 spent February with the work of Chelsea Watego, a Mununjali Yugambeh, South Sea Islander woman and Professor of Indigenous Health. Specifically, we spent time with Watego’s 2021 book Another Day In the Colony, her article in the Sunday Paper called For the Love of Blackfullas, and her guest lecture at the University of Adelaide, No Room at the Inn, presented for the Fay Gale Centre’s annual lecture and hosted by the Academy of Social Sciences Australia.

At the heart of Watego’s work is a fierce and loving dedication to the project of decolonisation, sovereignty, and survival in a place of ongoing colonial violence, silence, and refusal. She asks an important question: How can First Nations peoples survive in socalled Australia, a place where endemic and systemic racism decides the terms of land, knowledge, politics, engagement, health, and living?

Watego’s guest lecture, one she describes as a collection of ‘musings on race in this place,’ imagines the ‘Inn’ as the spaces in which the presence and participation of Aboriginal people are structurally and institutionally blocked; spaces like politics, media, and most importantly and specifically in Watego’s work, academia. She boldly encounters the insidious ways that First Nations people are excluded from academia, exploring how conceptualisations of the Academy as a site of ‘neutral’, ‘apolitical’ intellectual life and knowledge making is constructed by and for white subjects, and thus violently excludes Indigenous voices and knowledges while simultaneously telling racist stories under the guise of objective Truth: ‘At University I learnt many interesting and surprising facts about the Aborigines – facts which bore a striking resemblance to the fictions I had heard about the Aborigines from teachers, strangers and friends in the outer suburbs where I grew up. The only difference was, at University they were articulated in a far more sophisticated way. Here, these claims were not stereotypes and prejudices, these claims were dressed up as knowledge and truth – objective and scientific.’

The university is no longer a place to find validation. Watego speaks of the university becoming merely ‘the place where I go to work, but not where I measure my success.’ In letting go, Watego doesn’t resolve with ignorance, because letting go of the Academy is more of a way to build endurance against the ways the institution fails and disappoints people in marginalised groups. The university has not done much to recognise the reality of being racialised in a white institution: ‘It is the everydayness of race in being part of the air that we breathe that means it is routinely suffocating, particularly for the racialised as Black and Indigenous in a colonial-settler society.’

Another Day in the Colony is a book about the silences, refusals, and violence of White settlers and their institutions. It is about the effects of ongoing violence and displacement bound to these institutions and their norms. This includes the racist discursive production of Indigenous peoples in the health sciences, to the murderous racism of the police and criminal justice, to the racist distributions of material space (in cities, in offices, in universities), to the racism that all First Nations people experience daily from literature to the media to ‘everyday’ life encounters. It is a book about the ways that Colonisers actively and violently decide the terms of health, knowledge, criminality, law, and living. More than any of these things, this is a book about Black survival, Black

Words by Reading Feminism Chelsea Watego - No Room at the Inn & Another Day in the Colony.

living, ‘the emancipatory possibility of not giving a fuck’, and the profound recognition that ‘when we ask different questions it is amazing what different stories get told’.

Watego dedicates a chapter of her book to the philosophy of ‘fuck hope.’ Giving up on hope may give a false facade of surrender, but it takes one to let go of their pre-existing beliefs on what hope should be to realise what hope is from Watego’s perspective. Hope is complacency. Hope is the false pretence that one day ‘the colonisers will come to their humanity.’ As Watego exposes hope, she gives us faith, for being able to let go of hope is to liberate oneself from living on the terms of others, and to finally start constructing a belief on the terms of oneself and oneself alone. Giving up hope is, therefore, full of joy, peace, justice, and sovereignty.

Her situating of critical race theory within the self is critical and foundational to all her writing; she spoke of critical race theory as - ‘a place of death, but too of love and of life.’ There are so many ways to interpret the lace of life and death and love in Watego’s works, but it can begin with a simple understanding: the histories of Indigenous survival and critical race theorising are histories of violence, pain, genocide, death. These histories are also histories of love, resistance, survival, of the joy found in community and thick relationality. The overlapping inseparability of death, love, life makes possible a particular kind of ethics, a particular kind of living, and a specific way of relating. As Watego writes this ontology of Blackness she writes to First Nations people, specifically. Colonisers and non-Indigenous peoples will not and cannot know this joy, the joy Watego finds in ‘moments of Black radical self-care and love and insistence’, the joy that emerges from and in the ‘embodied sovereignty of Blackfullas as it is exercised every day in the colony.’

We talked about her citational practice in our meeting this month - we were struck by how powerful this practice is. Watego brings

Black voices, bodies, knowledges from across time and space to tell stories of violence, racism, resistance, and survival. Watego communes with her ancestors, her father, her grandparents, her Country, her siblings, her

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mentors and colleagues, her children, Black writers, Black artists, Indigenous academics and critics, Black and women of colour feminists. Another Day in the Colony is explosively alive and the people she writes and cites are explosively alive.

We also found Watego’s focus on strategies over solutions radical as an approach that lessens the fatigue and sense of futility in the face of such consuming issues. We especially loved that she presents telling stories as the way to formulate these strategies. Quite a lot of feminist theory — possibly because the distinction between strategies over solutions is not one we have discussed — is focussed on the conceptual without any accompanying understanding of how to enact the conceptual in the ‘everyday’. This can be demoralising, so the idea of ‘organised public fight’ that forces some accountability really captured our interest.

Watego refuses to tell a story of Aboriginality located in a complete and settled past or in hopeful futures. Instead she tells stories of vitally alive presents. It is a totally embodied, grounded work, ‘this book is a think-out-loud story’, not written for settlers and colonisers, not written for the white gaze, but written for Indigenous peoples:

‘In attending to the needs of Blackfullas, I am speaking of our literary needs. I’m speaking of the texts that must find their way into the hands and bookshelves of Blackfullas - those texts that are bought and borrowed, dogeared, strained and worn because their words were returned to, required and rendered most useful in the living - Black living to be exact … Black writing must be of and for Black living — a living that exists beyond that of problems and solutions, and most certainly beyond hope.’