Mindy Gill
Mindy Gill’s poems have most recently appeared in Griffith Review and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Her criticism has been published in Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Meanjin. She is an Australian Book Review Rising Star.
All essays by Mindy Gill
Long After You Have Left This World
History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.