I want to say that the glint in the gazelle’s eye is not from light being cast upon it, but a sign of life being emitted. I want the fickle strings that thread the muscles of our worldly logic, of our physics and the rules of the cosmos, to pull too taut and snap. I want the craftsman’s hand to be divine, for divinity itself to be granted simply and easily. So that something like this, taken from trees and sand and made to look nothing like its components, can be more than perpetually still and forever singular.

The gazelle—or Witness (2025), or Shahid—in the dimly lit gallery had looked at me first. It caught me, stopped me in my tracks while not obstructing my path at all. A polite interruption. I thought it was an antelope. I thought of my father, of his village—that something that looked like this pretty thing would wade in the tall grass there. I thought of the houses and grandma and how old she’s getting. I tried to see myself there, amongst it all. I could not. 

You’re a long way from home.

I whispered to it under my breath. Or maybe I didn’t say it aloud at all, maybe I just thought it—felt it. I beelined for Witness, but in my approach that flighty, flash of lightning, that sense of quickness—of life—that I gauged when it first entered my side view, collapsed. It was suddenly helplessly constrained to the parameters of its own carving.

I stepped away until it again looked like it was capable of breathing. I searched the walls for its corresponding statement. I was looking for a dog collar, kind of. A tag that named it in its entirety rather than breaking it down to its essentials. I did not want to see it butchered and stripped.

Witness is its official name—this wooden carving of a Palestine mountain gazelle. But the name Shahid was also mentioned in its description. The Arabic word means both observer and martyr. I was consumed by how well matched these meanings were, despite seeming distinctly different at first.

But every moment I live proves that the line between martyr and observer is hair-strand thin. There is an inherent suffering in really noticing, in choosing to notice. Every observer, by daring to look and see, is maiming themselves with the truth.

A guided tour through the gallery serves as proof of this. Yhonnie Scarce’s N0000, N2359, N2351, N2402 (2014) cut at me so suddenly that tears welled up in my eyes. I spent ten minutes suppressing them. Often, in class settings and at parties, being Indigenous can feel like being that kid in primary school who always gets nosebleeds. Your very pulse is a spectacle. And when you are a spectacle, you are also discourse. Your condition is dissected in the privacy of someone else’s thoughts, or in conversations you can overhear, and ones you cannot:

‘What made them have a nosebleed?’

Why were they crying?

‘Was it really that triggering?’

Was it really that triggering?

‘Is this genetic?’

Did this happen to her family?

Scarce’s artwork made me think of my mum as a little girl, seeing our bones—or models of them—strung up in museums. I thought of myself, smaller, always half-listening to her and her stories. I chewed on death then, and at the gallery. I felt tender, as if I had been scrubbed body and soul with a stainless-steel scourer.

My tenderness, this rawness, invisible but vital—even a vein of it projected onto Witness feels like an incursion. The only life I have ever known is worn and tattered and mine. I cannot in good conscience impose it on Shahid. The martyr can move if it wants to.

*

I want to say that I walk around and think of nothing but the world wisping through me with its winds and its droplets and its rocks in my shoe. I want to say that my eyes are only for looking forward, that I didn’t sit perched on a cliff in the north of Trouwunna, staring at a wallaby wondering what it saw back, what the extent of its seeing was, what the function of its seeing was.

The act of seeing is a privilege, one that isn’t simply granted by the presence of eyes on your face. We do not see equally. I was cursed with a non-expiring curiosity about absolutely everything and everyone. An itch to figure it all out. I think I can achieve this by looking but I know I can’t. Looking isn’t a simple function. Looking is political. And on an unblinking Black face in a predominantly white everywhere, it can attract trouble.

In grade two, maths wasn’t coming easy to me. When the class split up into groups based on their skill, all my mathematically inclined friends were put in a different group situated not so far from me. So, when the teacher asked me a question I was completely uninterested in, my eyes flicked over to my friends.

‘Don’t roll your eyes,’ my teacher said with a curtness that had me flinching back into the moment, confused.

‘I wasn’t—’

She brushed me off. I was guilty.

‘Look at her eye, she’s giving us the evil eye,’ a boy said to his mate a year later, sitting across from me, our names parallel on our desks, glossy with lamination. I said nothing back. I wouldn’t have called it an evil eye though, more so a look of despair scrunched with disgust. But I did want them to see it—my distaste.

Apparently, we were seated together so I could influence them, make them better behaved. I would be less bitter about it now, if I had been properly financially compensated for my labour.

‘She’s always got that fucking look on her face,’ another boy said six years after that. He is walking down the hall with vigour, his friends quiet beside him, allowing his rant to bounce off the walls of the near empty hall. All because I didn’t move out of his way when students started crowding out of the classrooms after the bell rang.

‘Fucking bitch’ he said. I had never spoken to him before.

I never really felt that anyone besides my family looked at me and saw a child. All my sister’s friends thought I was older than her, even when I was twelve and she was sixteen. Every receptionist assumed I could sign whatever document without my parents’ involvement. Every doctor thought they were doing me a justice by saying they were going to talk to me like I was an adult. No white adult in a position of authority during my childhood had the sense to treat me like I was young and in need of protection.

‘Is there a video you know or would like to find to show the class?’ my grade six teacher asked me quietly after I got three boys in trouble for saying the N-word. I never found a video. A perfect three-minute summary on YouTube explaining why racism is bad eluded me. The three boys were forced to write me apology letters during lunch. They were poorly written, repetitive and insincere. I threw them out a few years later, during a brief stint in my adolescence where I wanted to let things go and be as mature as everyone thought—shake off the youth nobody saw.

‘These are beautiful, aren’t they?’ the woman at the Myer’s checkout said as I laid a bedding set designed by an Aboriginal artist down on the counter. My hair is braided, blonde and pink, and my sister is next to me. I don’t remember what she looked like in that moment. I do remember that it was my first day in Melbourne. We got off the plane, checked out my apartment and strolled into the shrill, amorphous beast that was the city.

‘Get me off this island, I need to get back to Melbourne,’ said a white woman with pink hair, drowned in layers of fashionably tattered black clothing, shuffling through Launceston Airport with me just behind her.

‘The vibe is off,’ I think she said, claiming a spiritual ickiness that she would be free of in Melbourne.

Visions of flannel, pink-tinged white skin and blunnies flood my brain. These quintessential looks, my own family, the people I’ve lost, my maternal line dissipating into shell, ochre and sand. Peppermint gums in our wake.

‘If you test the earth you’ll find our DNA,’ my mum said, eyes off the TV for a moment.

‘Daughters of the soil—it's what we are,’ she said to my father. He nodded, his question answered. Another one spilled from him, the follow up to the follow up. Where I try to figure out through looking, he tries to figure it out by asking.

I am pissed the entire plane ride. Filled with a rage that I’ve always had. That's always in my gums, on the brink of rupturing like a second set of wisdom teeth.

‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all the time,’ said James Baldwin a long time ago. I didn’t hear this from him; I heard the quote interpolated in the Netflix show Dear White People. I get most of my knowledge second-hand.

The Myer’s lady says something that implies my sister and I are foreign, new here. We sense this at the same time, like a bad smell in the air. We glance at each other briefly, lips twisted.

‘We’re Indigenous,’ I assert, or my sister does, with a summery white voice both of us have perfected either through working in retail or just being alive.

‘Uluru—I was just there. Alice Springs is beautiful.’

‘We’re from Tasmania, Indigenous too,’ my sister says.

At some point, I felt that maybe we were burdening this white woman with too complex a positionality. Blak, notably brown skin—not from Alice Springs but from Tasmania of all places. It was all too frilly, too froofy, not something easily googleable or seen on SBS. We didn’t bring up that we were also Nigerian and that our tribe—is it general (white) knowledge that Nigeria is comprised of tribes—makes up less than one per cent of the population of Nigeria.

My sister’s name is Nandi Freda-Faith.

‘You’ve got a civil rights name,’ I say to my sister on multiple occasions. She laughs every time, almost.

‘No, like, that's the name of a somebody, of somebody who does something.’ Her laughter rings out, she doesn’t know I’m not joking. Mum is there, more lines on her face than usual.

‘Zarah Grace, really?’ I direct at Mum.

‘It could’ve been Grace.’ Her eyes are on her phone or computer screen. Busy. Busy. Busy.

‘It was meant to be Zahara,’ I say, like it was information I conceived. But she was the one who told me. Has told me, multiple times. Her story elongating, blooming, then shrinking, finding new points of wilt, defying the same temporality that’s making me older.

‘Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn’t,’ she says of this story, when I ask her to tell me it again. She’s driving home, we are lands apart, connected only by the ether between her car and my phone.

‘Yes, your father messed up the birth certificate, I was out of it.’ She huffs, however long before the call, when the story was there.

‘She had a voice like running water,’ my mother says of the woman whose name never became mine.

‘Names are repeated frequently in our family ... a Samuel always needs a Samuel,’ she says on a separate occasion. Sometimes her stories are spun from thin air.

‘Woretemoteyenner,’ I learnt to say at eight or nine.

‘Mannalargenna.’

I didn’t get the spelling down first try. The letters are a colonial imposition anyway. Like barbed wire wrapped around starlight.

But what about what lies in-between?

‘Dolly, Charlotte, Dalrymple, Vera, Clara, Lorraine, Jennifer, Zarah.’

‘Briggs, Gower, Anderson, James, Houston, Houston, Yakubu’

‘Dolly, Charlotte, Dalrymple ... Vera, Clara ... Lorraine—’

And again and again and everlasting. Unseen and imperceptible, unless you’re invited to perceive—to know.

*

I am made of stories—from stories. From everything before and the combined essentials that will break apart and rot into their original forms when I don’t need to be as I am now. I have never stepped foot on my father’s homeland, but I hear the earth is hard there, that the air is thin and the river waters are rough and cruel enough to swipe people and never let them go. That the lands are unfenced enough that my grandfather, decades back, wandered through and farmed all over the place. That the Sahara sands blow through, painting the world a red-like ochre, so my father says—but my mother disagrees. Their respective lenses, their lateral eyes painting the same world with different colours. Mine, trying to colour in anything at all—trying to map it all out in the first place.

Does it feel like Melbourne debris at all? When the wind picks up? Or is the sand a much cleaner feeling?

During the summer, asleep in my bed in my limbo apartment in Melbourne—half-home, half-temporary shelter—I had a dream that I was frozen and sinking. Sinking through the floor beside my desk, which is beside my bed, which is across from my kitchen, which is next to my desk. It was a slow process, and it felt like I was falling into something far more sinister than the fifth floor. My body was rigid—I was in-body and out-of-body, witnessing so many different frames and angles of myself like a poorly chopped together student film. I felt something unseeable, worse yet—something I really didn’t want to see. Everywhere I looked, it was behind me.

When I awoke, I prayed.

I used to be Christian. My parents never came to church with us—the kids—unless there was some event on. Still, my mother dressed my sister and me up in the same Sunday best that had every kid in Sunday school asking us if we were twins, despite our age and height gap and completely different faces. I went there to watercolour and pray. I loved to paint, and I loved to ask for things without fear of rejection.

But when I prayed after this dream, I was praying to disperse, not attract. The prayer didn’t contain a cognisant thought—just fear and desperation. I prayed to God and Ancestors.

I remember I tried to look at Jesus once, sometime before or after church. I had on fuchsia-pink wedges with orange flowers all over, I think.

‘Where is Jesus?’ I asked my sister, or the room, I’m not sure if others were there. We were in the basement. We might’ve been watching VeggieTales.

‘Everywhere,’ she said passively.

‘So, he’s like, out the window,’ I said.

‘Yeah, everywhere,’ I think she replied.

I looked out the window. Was it grey skies that day? The weather had to be good enough for me to wear wedges. Jesus wasn’t there until I put him there.

I superimposed an image of him over the setting. White, bearded—like the Jesus I saw in a frame in the house of a family of Black Mormons. This Jesus was not of Bethlehem. Was not a carpenter’s son, not Mary’s child—not brown like the Palestinian climate would have made him. This Jesus, he did not move while I open eyed prayed at him. He did not move at all.

When I stopped imagining him there, I was left with my empty backyard and the reflection of the room transparently etched in the window glass, a true ghost.

I want to say that I chose to look beyond the room, to the skies, that I remember what the birds sounded like, if there were any, but I don’t think I did. I think I trapped myself in my own gaze, beginning a years-long standstill sprinkled with stops and starts, often within one day. It's a performance where I am star and audience. A journey where I am gazelle, car and the headlight beams between. An exhibition where I am Witness and witness. It takes place in any reflective surface I can find. I think I’ve been stuck drowning in my own reflection for years. Holding myself there, waiting to run. Trying to see everything I’m not and everything I am, with my eyes and theirs. The result is always inconclusive. I check again. I can’t move.