Writing Against Erasure: Language Failure, Counter- Memory, and the Insurgent Voice in Jazz Money’s Poetic Practice

Abstract

The act of writing poetry has long served as a powerful medium of resistance, offering marginalized voices a space to articulate identity, memory, and dissent. From the Hungryalists of Bengal post independence to the Beatniks in the United States of America, poetry has not merely been a medium of pleasure and a medium of self-expression, but a format that has been used to cry the cries of dissent, often bringing forth a wave of change, a call for revolution and resistance, if not so radical at the very least it has often been successful in holding the grounds of resistance. In the contemporary context, Jazz Money’s poetry emerges as a vital site of such resistance, where personal, political, and collective struggles converge. As a Wiradjuri poet, artist, and activist, Money confronts the enduring legacies of colonial violence, systemic erasure of Indigenous languages, and the marginalization of queer and feminist subjectivities. Her debut poetry collection, how to make a basket (2021), alongside individual poems such as if I write a poem, reflects
an urgent confrontation with biopolitical control, structural capitalism, and intergenerational trauma. Money’s poetry is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a radical, ethical practice of survival and resistance. Money writes not only for herself but for generations whose languages and stories have been systematically stolen. In doing so, her poetry becomes a mode of reclaiming agency, bearing witness, and envisioning future possibility amid ongoing structural violence.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199392021.2025.64-70