Skip to main content

Why Write?

Why write? 

People aren’t cut out for reading. They’re incapable of joining the dots, except for the few destined for the madhouse. It’s tedious. Everyone’s talking politics, they call it. Sounds more like gossip to me. It’s crowding out articulate voices with animal noises and photoshopped faces.

You can’t teach about genocide via a movie. Movies are exterior. Suffering is interior. You can’t do justice to a genocide by focusing on the perpetrators and leaving the victims silent. Then you are perpetuating it. JoJo Rabbit is a tragically mistaken work. It provides little but a sympathetic Nazi and anti-Semitic ear worm taunts. I once wrote a poem using the n-word. Born from a life experience where it was embedded and recollected in the poem. I spent years editing and footnoting all trying to make it work, until finally I realized it was inherently flawed. I guess Hollywood rewards people who put entertainment and their artistic egos above morality. Most famous artists are unwise. Except about building their careers.

Perhaps because their audience is unwise. A lie can never become a truth. No matter how hard you work on it. It’s tedious writing this. I’ve sworn off writing about genocide. I think the survivors who said no art would ever do justice to the holocaust were right. But the genie is out of the bottle and the holocaust becomes mere aesthetics. It’s tedious having to remind people about this. My heart’s not in it. I’ve broken my mind too many times banging on the same wall. Do I really have to break it again? I promised myself not again.

But, I don’t know, I guess I think that as a privileged person I have a responsibility to defend victims. And so do you. So why are you silent?

 

©Malachi Doyle 2022. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“I didn’t know!”

  “I didn’t know!”   Don’t get me wrong In a Two Party preferred system  I have no choice but to give preferences to Labor The Coalition are scum But Jacinta Allen, Victorian Premier Claimed in a Truth Telling Commission that she never knew about massacres Of Indigenous people in the state She’d never looked up The history of her country The history of the state she leads She’s Premier! She leads a department that ‘manages Indigenous affairs’ We are currently in the process of negotiating a Treaty What did she think happened to all the Aboriginal people?! They went up to live up the Magic Faraway Tree? “No one told me!” No one ever told me either I fuckin researched It was really easy Took 10 minutes There’s this new thing called the Internet & you search stuff up Like History A subject no longer taught in many schools past year 7 I deduced a lot from observing the place & how allergic we are of looking at ourselves ...
2 comments
Read more

In a very unorthodox way

  In a very unorthodox way # (For Max Sometimes) In a very unorthodox way, I’m an Irish Catholic. Of course, in terms of Belfast politics that MEANS something. & while that maybe true – in Australia, for different reasons, as Fr Bob Maguire put it – when Mary first saw Jesus walking out of the tomb on day 3 of his death, she exclaimed “JESUS!!!” – the first time his name was used as a swear word. In that way of an irreverent joke, REVERENTIAL & ORTHODOX are not my way to the Sacred/Love*. For me – I’m not really into Theology – as Max Sometimes quoting me, quoting my mate Richard, quoting Bob Marley, quoting Rasta elders, said today “who feels it knows it.” & I believe that if I am to write my Mass/Symphony of Hope/Love, I must include at least one blasphemous hymn, else the vision depicted be simplistic, like George Handel’s Messiah. The Hope/Love represented or perhaps alluded to (if you prefer) must include genuine despair, dejection, transgression else it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Though it made me a poet

Though it made me a poet   This is a superior microwave to the last if  everything has to be a competition I guess it does! In the Kafkaesque vortex Where one is trying merely to ask a question Instead one is sold something I’m monastic or have acute anxiety Anxiety is pretty cute Like a decapitated bleeding brain Covered in snails turned carnivore By the wrack & ruin of a child’s innocence The fist in the sister’s face The knife in the wall Did I imagine the latter, dream it or see it? Who threw it? Must have been the bowie Still life goes on So I went to school the next morning & got my mouth taped up For being a chatterbox Such is the life of a privileged 5 year old It made me a poet     Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2025.  
Post a Comment
Read more