Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and in today's program we're delighted to be catching up again with Arantza Garcia. Arantza is a spoken word poet, sociology student and Peruvian-Australian member of the Latin American community and Adelaide. In 2023 she was the runner-up in the Summer competition Run by Spoken Word SA. Last week we brought you some highlights from an interview that we did in April 2023 with Aransa by way of introducing this week's conversation.
Arantza, welcome back to the program. You came to Australia when you were two years old and we spoke last year about how your connection to the indigenous as well as Spanish-speaking cultures in Peru is reflected strongly in your poetry which speaks with clarity and courage about questions of identity and about the impact of colonisation on identity culture and language. You read to us poems that speak of the courage it takes to face down the challenges of other people's perceptions and expectations and choose who you want to be. We spoke about how it was your mother who introduced you to poetry and we listened to you read the beautiful poem Mum's Accent in which you talk with pride and love about your mother's voice.
We also explored how your experiences of performing your poetry have influenced the way you write and we talked about how supportive the spoken word poetry community is here in South Australia. So let's start with one of the poems that you've written since we last spoke with you just over a year ago.
Speaker 3 02:13
So my first poem of today will be called Heels.
The first time I put on heels, I was 11 and they were four inches. I did not start easy. Latina women do not start easy. None of those kitten heels for babies, two inches for little girls, I wanted to be a woman. Like those chicas, I saw an empty V, I wanted to strut, to clear pathways, wanted nails that clicked, winged eyeliner that cut cheekbones in a mouth that spoke only in red underlines. And above all else, I wanted heels that announced my presence in every room I stepped into. Like I was a king, arriving on my red bottom stallion. I wanted to be able to stab people with my feet, puncture skin with a high enough kick, wanted to be four inches taller than any boy in my year seven class. Let them tell me I couldn't play handball with their short asses. I was gonna run before I could walk, scream before I could talk, hunt before I could stalk, believe me when I say I don't need training wheels, just give me a steep enough mountain and it send me flying.
In the midst of my self-hype-up session, wobbling around the living room with my new red pumps, looking like a really bad stop motion renderer of a drunk person, my mother, whose heels I was actually using in the first place, walks up from behind me and pokes me hard in the centre of my back. Her finger as stiff as the tip of a metal bullet, I freeze beneath it, like it were a tranquilizer shot. And in that moment, I think, I think that my mother is about to scold me, about to tell me I look stupid for trying to look like her, tell me to stop pretending to be grown up, maybe, maybe she'll even tell me I look like a puta or a street walker, too much of a kid to know what message I'm putting out into the world to put them back into her closet. To stop playing hand-ball with year seven boys, not even think about looking at them, them being the heels and the boys. To go back to my light -up sketchers and leave the big guns for the battlefields I have yet to enter, I think, I think for a moment she will tell me to take them off.
Her bullet finger moves down to my lower back and she pokes me again, like I'm a toy she's trying to find the button on, and she finds it, and my spine straightens up on instinct. She simply says, Aranza, you need to step heel to toe instead of toe to heel. She proceeds to show me how to straighten my spine, how to walk without the fear of falling, how to handle the power now emanating from my sore feet, and when I master the four inches, she walks to her closet, hands me a pair with six, and orders me to go again.
Speaker 2 05:04
One of the things that I love about your poetry is the strength and beauty of your relationship with your mother and how important that is to you. I mentioned before that your poetry deals with questions of identity and that comes through very strongly when we previously met about your mother's accent when she speaks English but the love that her accent conveys to you and that poems another lesson or series of lessons really because walking straight is one of them but also that sense of understanding your place in the world. Do you comment?
Speaker 3 05:40
100% on that? Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, a lot has changed in how I write my poetry since last year, but one of the things that have stayed very consistent is my mother as a character in my stories. She is often not only the muse for them, but also my teacher or carer, someone who can bring me comfort. I use her a lot in my poetry, and this is one of those cases. This to me, like, something I like to do in my poetry is take a small moment or a metaphor in my life and then bring it out into something bigger, which you picked up on. And for me, this specific metaphor was something of how she teaches me to be a woman in that moment. And I think it's a case for a lot of specific immigrant mothers is having to teach their child how to be grown up at a much younger age than most.
We have to deal with a lot from a very young age. So in that moment, although it was just heels, it was like she was teaching me how to not only do something that is very popular in our culture, which is walking in heels, but also how to stand up straighter, how to walk more confidently, how to be more confident, how to actually, you know, almost like take life, yeah, just be more confident, basically. And it's these, and that wasn't the only instance, you know, throughout my entire childhood, she taught me how to be the woman I am today. And that specific moment was just something that really stuck out to me.
Speaker 2 07:03
You've said before that your poetry has changed over the last year and I remember conversation that we had at the Youth Poetry Showcase in March where you said the same, what are some of the ways in which your poetry has changed since we last spoke?
Speaker 3 07:20
I think I've definitely become a better poet. My older poems, although they had the same heart to them that they have now, they used to be much longer and more sort of rambling. I found, often at times, after I performed it once, I didn't want to perform it again because it felt awkward and stumbling and I think over the past year, I've gotten a lot better at editing my poetry, at creating a better structure. I've also done a lot more writing, like short story writing, and I think that's also impacted my poetry as well. Oftentimes, in my poems, you can see a clear beginning, setup, climax, and then bring it back down again. You can see a very clear narrative structure, which is definitely something I didn't really have before. I feel like before, it was very much sort of stream of consciousness, which can work sometimes, but I think just for the messages and purpose of my poetry, which is often trying to detail a very specific purpose, I think what I have now and what I do now definitely works a lot better.
Also, I think now I just have a much better formula in how I write my poetry. What my process is now is that I have a notes app and just a list of a bunch of lines or ideas or even just quotes that I've heard that I've really liked. Whenever I need to make a new poem, I just grab one out and I have a certain way of just structuring it, editing it, and creating a poem out of that. It's nice to have finally found, like I said, a bit of a formula on how do I do my poetry. It's made things a lot easier for me as well.
Speaker 2 08:59
I mentioned before the Youth Poetry Showcase that was held at the start of Youth Week and co-hosted by Spoken Word SA and the Adelaide City Council's Adelaide City Library. That's one event where you've spoken at. Have there been a number of events where you've performed your poetry over the past year?
Speaker 3 09:18
Yes, there definitely has. I've had a very busy past year. There's quite a few open mics in Adelaide, and I've been able to feature out a few of them, including mixed bag poetry, that was my first ever feature, and then I've also done one at Social Hearts Club, and my most recent feature was one at Folk& Words. All those events, super beautiful, and I was very grateful to be a part of them. I've also been able to feature out a few festivals, like the Johnna Festival last year, the Feast Festival, and a couple of charity events, like Art for Aid, that we did last year as well, which was for mental health, I believe, and also Poetry of the Purpose, which we did as a Palestinian aid event.
And then I've also done a few more competitions, as you're aware, when you first interviewed me. That was on the back of me performing at the Summer Slam in 2023, and then at the end of that year, I was also able to be a finalist in the State Slam, which I'm hoping to do again this year. And then my most recent event actually, probably one of the most special ones for me, I was able to perform as part of the Joyous Swords team at the Art Gallery of South Australia in response to their current exhibition called Inner Sanctum, so that was a really beautiful event as well.
Speaker 2 10:41
Wow, so I want to speak with you later on about your own work as an artist, but that must have been a lovely connection, your passions for poetry and for visual arts coming together in that event.
Speaker 3 10:54
Yeah, it definitely was. I think that's probably why it was such a special performance for me. It was not only because the lineup was great and I was able to perform with a few of my friends, but also being able to perform at the Art Gallery, which was a place that I went to quite a bit as a young kid and actually being able to perform for them. It was really beautiful. Also, because a lot of the poetry events, you see the same crowds, the same people, and for this specific event, a lot of friends came and saw our performances, but we also had a much larger group of people who probably have never seen spoken poetry before, so it was a really beautiful moment to be able to introduce them to this form of art that I think at least is still a bit underground today. So yeah, it was definitely a beautiful experience.
Speaker 2 11:41
It sounds brilliant and I remember last year we spoke about how performing your poetry influenced the way you write so you've done a lot more performances and when we met last year you were quite new as a poet, I remember you saying, so how have the performances influenced your writing?
Speaker 3 12:04
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why I was a very strong poet at the beginning of my journey was because I had a very clear idea of how this type of performance art is, as it says, still a performance and being able to engage my listeners that way. And that's something that I think I've only tried to focus even more on nowadays. Sort of what I said earlier with the idea of my poems now having a bit more of a narrative structure, not only is that because I find it an easier way to write, but it's also with the purpose of being able to more easily bring the listeners in and lead them through a story, my performance of my poems, like that's definitely at the very forefront of them.
I've started very recently, finally publishing my poems on an Instagram account, but I was always very nervous of that because I feel like my poetry is better listened to as opposed to read because there's a lot of maybe sort of unnecessary lines that whose only purpose is to lead the listener through it a bit better. Also, I'm still very much focused on my rhythm. Whenever I write a poem, I have to say it out loud a few times and in that performance out loud, that is when I find my biggest mistakes and that is when I do my biggest edits. When it comes to just reading them in my head, it's like a completely different poem to me. So yeah, my performance is still very much at the forefront of my poetry, I'd say.
Speaker 2 13:29
And I remember in speaking with another spoken word poet on this program talking about how sometimes as a listener I capture more by having heard the poem and I think that wouldn't have had the same impact if I'd read it words on a page and I'm certainly not putting down the notion of reading words on a page but there is that other dimension that comes with the performance of actually hearing the poetry and as you said the rhythm is really important in that context.
Speaker 3 14:00
I mean, that has to do with sort of the purpose or the reason why you're writing poetry in the first place. Like, the reason why I became so interested in spoken poetry specifically as opposed to just literary poetry was because of the topics that I wanted to discuss and I wanted to share were often a bit more political or a little bit more emotional. And for me, being able to hear someone with their own voice, like sort of share that experience in that story can be so much more powerful and impactful as opposed to just you reading it on a page. So it's, yeah.
I always say as well that I'm a big theatre kid at heart, even though I've had no experience in theatre. I can't sing, I can't dance, and I can barely act. So this was sort of my almost like opportunity to be on a stage and with a microphone and try to sort of express my emotion that way.
Speaker 2 14:54
Yeah, I definitely agree. Or at the Youth Poetry Showcase how the emotion that you convey in your poems does have an impact on your audience.
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation programme Emerging Writers. Our guest today is spoken word poet, Aransa Garcia. Aransa, could I ask you to perform for us now another of your poems?
Speaker 3 15:33
So this is the poem that I performed at the state final last year, and it is called Spiders.
1. Microaggression means a statement that holds unintentional racism. Like the painful pincers of a harmless spider, sure, it won't kill you, but wow, does it hurt?
2. My teacher mispronounces my name for the eighth time. When I correct her, she sighs heavily, takes my name, a gift my parents gave to me, and twists it into a burden, says, can I just give you a nickname? And so, in a single sentence, she erases my mother's handwriting and renames me with her white mouth.
3. When I tell my friend Becky about the way this new nickname has already formed pimples under my skin that I cannot pop, she says, don't be crazy. It's just a nickname.
4. Microaggression becomes my first bully. As children test-run their parents' racism, as I fend off their innocent questions about Dora, and Mexican food, and the validity of my parents' immigration.
5. My mother says Mija, you'll only find spiders if you're looking for them. Which is to say, don't look for problems that aren't there, I don't know how to tell her that no matter how much I ignore these spiders' bodies, they have found a graveyard in the pit of my stomach.
6. I swallowed another spider last night.
7. I don't know how many more I can hold in my body.
8. Today, I introduce myself with my nickname, and I've never hated it more.
9. I realise I'm tired.
10. I finally decide not to let microaggression be the reason the name my mother gave me dies at the mouth of a racist bitch, so...
11. Hello. My name is Aranza. Say it, and say it properly.
Speaker 2 17:25
It's very beautiful, it's very moving, and you do have a beautiful name. There's so much in that poem, and we spoke before about emotions, it's far more. You're talking with us and in performing the poetry too, you're really engaging the listener to just pause and reflect that acts of racism aren't just the really in -your -face obvious ones where somebody holds an insult, but it's actually the way people question your identity by asking you not to use your name, by asking you not to worry about something rather than flipping that around and saying, well, hang on, I get to use my name, why doesn't Arantza get to use her name?
So it's all the hidden impacts or the less visible to the people who don't stop and think perhaps impacts that you're talking about, and especially like in your stardom where you do engage us in thinking, you're actually holding up a mirror of reality and showing that to us through the way that you describe the impact of your experiences. And I think spoken word poetry has that power to allow us to get right inside someone's heart and inside their head. It's very honest, but as we said when we spoke before, it takes a lot of courage to put your corazón en la mano, put your heart in your hand, and share your innermost feelings.
Speaker 3 19:06
Yeah, I was really nervous about performing that specific poem at the state final because it was kind of risky almost. The audiences for those types of sort of bigger events tend to be, you know, mostly Australian and I was up there, one of the few people of colour on that stage and kind of being like, hey guys, you've probably done this at some point, don't do it. And considering the audience were my judges, I was really nervous about it. I kind of thought afterwards, oh was that a mistake? Should I have done a nicer poem or maybe another poem about my mother to really tug at those heartstrings? But at the end of the day, I think that I'm glad I did that. I'm glad that I had that stage for two minutes because that's how long it is and I decided to take those two minutes. It felt almost like it was bigger than the competition.
So yeah, that is one of my favourite poems. That's why I decided to perform it then. It's something quite close to my heart and my name is something that I've always kind of struggled with. I do have a nickname called Ari. A lot of my friends call me Ari and stuff and I no longer have the discomfort that I used to have when I was younger for it. I identify with it a lot now, but still when I'm at like uni or in my classes and things like that, I like to introduce myself as Aronso first, let them struggle a little bit, trying to pronounce it, and then afterwards, once we've gotten closer, I can be like, you can call me Ari though. That's fine. So yeah, that's a very, very special poem for me.
Speaker 2 20:43
It's like the first poem that you performed for us today heals, you're actually inviting us to step inside your shoes and for two minutes live your experience, see your experience through your eyes and it's so important in listening to people's stories that we're able to put ours to one side and enter into other people's stories and experiences and really understand where they're coming from because we do all have very different experiences of the same things.
Speaker 3 21:17
Yeah, 100%. I mean, one of the most beautiful, like, comments that I get after my poetry is people I'm coming up to me, especially people of color coming up to be like, I've really related to this line, or I've really related to this experience. Like, that is what I want, is I wanted to be able to share these moments that we often don't think about too much, or kind of just let sort of go under the radar, but we don't realize how much it's actually impacted who we are as people.
Speaker 3 21:42
So for example, the first one was just this very small moment of my mom teaching me how to use heels, and the second one was this very small moment of a teacher asking to use a nickname, but how these are kind of kind of like the ripple effect, and they create much bigger parts of our identity. And being able to share these experiences and have people not only relate, but even if they don't relate, kind of still have sympathy for it, or feel like they can relate, even if they haven't experienced it themselves. That's one of the...
Speazker 2 22:13
We talked before about how you can get so much more out of listening to a poem being performed and when we met just over a year ago we also spoke about the traditions of the country of your birth of Peru and of course in indigenous cultures in Peru as in other parts of the world they're very strong oral cultures so stories are told they're not written down so how much do you think coming from a country with a strong oral tradition to another country that also has a strong oral tradition of course 60 ,000 years or more of storytelling how much do you think that your awareness of oral traditions has influenced the way you think about preparing your poems?
Speaker 3 23:05
Well, it's really interesting because when I first began spoken poetry, I didn't really think much of it, and then after going to a few open mics or a few events, obviously a lot of these, a lot of the hosts start off by giving, you know, the usual acknowledgement of countries and something that a lot of them say because of spoken poetry event is that they acknowledge the fact that we aren't the first storytellers. There have been, you know, centuries of storytellers before us and we are not only extremely privileged to be able to speak on these lands, but speak these stories and experiences and continue that Arward tradition.
And it was like the first time I heard it, it almost made me want to cry, and I had that realisation, as you said, that I am just, you know, one more storyteller in this land that has been able to hold so many more. And yet in Peru as well, and in most sort of indigenous cultures, there is that Arward tradition and it's something that is very special to me now at least. I'd like to one day start performing in Spanish maybe, a bit nerve -wracking because my Spanish isn't as good as my English is, but I'd like to think that one day I'll be able to perform in Peru to my family and actually be able to let them know what I want to say in Spanish would be fantastic.
Speaker 2 24:16
Thank you so much, Arantza. It's really lovely to catch up with you again and I know that you've got more poems for us to perform, so let's pick up this conversation next week. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Spoken Word Poet Arantza Garcia.
This program is produced in our Adelaide studios and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio, Va Radio on Digital, online at varadio .org and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
And we end this week's program with a beautiful song by the Peruvian singer Susanna Baca. It's titled Poema or Poem.
Speaker 4 25:17 (sings)
para ti tengo impresa una sonrisa en papel japon
Speaker 5 25:39
¿Qué haces crecer?
Speaker 6 25:44
la hierba de los prados
Speaker 7 25:51
Mujer, mapa de música
Speaker 5 25:59
Claro de río, fiesta de fruto
Speaker 4 26:10
Para ti, tengo impresa, una sonrisa en papel Japón.
Speaker 7 26:23
Mirame
Speaker 5 26:24
¿Qué haces crecer?
Speaker 6 26:31
la hierba de los prados
Speaker 7 26:40
மாப்பதின்
Speaker 6 26:44
Claro derrobo
Speaker 5 26:48
Fiesta de fútbol
Speaker 4 26:57
Que bese tu voz, que canta en todas las ramas de la mañana Que canta en todas las ramas de la mañana Que canta en todas las ramas de la mañana
Speaker 1 28:19
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