Patrick Gunasekera is a writer, visual artist, photographer, theatre maker, performance artist and a zealous advocate within conversations around race, colonialism, disability and queerness. Last month in the Propel Office, Patrick sat down with Yoshika over tea and cronuts to discuss the different facets of his identity that informs his work, Australia’s history of white colonialism and how it permeates into the arts industry, and how he can keep going as strong as he is to advocate for himself and his community.

Patrick Gunasekera. Photo credit: Yoshika Kon.

Let’s start with who you are, you’ve been involved with Propel for a while now and the community knows you and your work, but in your own words who are you and what do you do?

Who I am is constantly changing. I grew up with a migrant mother and a white dad who didn’t earn a lot of money in suburban Mandurah. It was an interesting childhood and I guess that’s where my roots are. Throughout my childhood, I always saw myself as quite different, and I never really fit in. There weren’t a lot of brown children, and the only person I looked like was my brother. I think from that, I have a lot of experiences in exclusion, bullying and confusion that didn’t make sense to me until the last few years where I started to individuate as an adult and grew a more political consciousness, particularly around being a person of colour.

I remember when I was 17, I discovered the political roots of the term person of colour and started using it to inform and describe myself and my politics, and in line with that history, I use it in a way that is in solidarity with and prioritises the liberation of Indigenous peoples and Black people. That informs a lot of what I do.

I think it’s important to speak to that history because I’ve recently realised that all of the hard work I’ve been doing over the past couple of years in being an artist has started to pay off and I’ve started to not only be recognised, but given platforms and opportunities to have my voice heard. I’m hyper aware of what a huge privilege it is to speak at the levels I am speaking at now. With the mics and platforms I’ve been given now, it’s been a lot to process how whilst now I might have the money to once in a while eat at a fancy restaurant, I will always be the person who makes fun of rich people with my mum.

Whenever I have a mic, I will always contextualise everything I say: the truth that we live in a colonial settler nation state, how Indigenous people are way more disempowered than I am and we live in a country that has always defined itself through racism, xenophobia and genocide.

I am a writer, a visual artist, a photographer, a theatre maker, a performance artist and I am very vocally and zealously a part of disrupting what those industries in Perth look like. This city has never come to terms with its history and its reality. I’d say that it continues to put out this façade of whiteness and privilege, which is only a very small fraction of what this country looks like.

What are your thoughts on people of colour in the arts industry?

People of colour don’t necessarily have the means of production in this situation. We are workers, but we don’t have control over the ways we work. A huge part of that is that art is a huge part of culture and society, which does a lot to contribute to how people of colour are seen and thus treated. A lot of the laws, attitudes and beliefs about people of colour, have been supported with a plethora of literature, media, journalism and all these different points of views, which has given energy to racism and xenophobia. In the arts, that controls a lot of the ways that we are seen and thus treated. So, for me, a lot of what I do in the arts is around what I call self-definition, which is something I have taken from the writing of Tania Cañas. She talks about how “diversity in the arts” isn’t just about ticking boxes and putting brown bodies on stage, it’s also about us having control and agency to define ourselves in the ways we want to and tell our stories how we want, not for white people, but for our own reasons.

Racism is a weapon, really. The reason why racism exists is to disempower people of colour and Indigenous people. Because if we are disempowered and internalising racist messages around us about being subordinate, uncivilised and unworthy, we will not have the power within ourselves to resist white supremacy and colonialisation. It’s a tool used so that white people can gain power.

White colonialism and white supremacy has not just used violence, massacre and sexual violence to achieve the level of supremacy that whiteness has today, it also uses psychological warfare. If the arts did give us the agency we once had, with our own communities, the arts would look completely different. We would be on equal footing with white people, in fact if we listened to this land and how it was born and how it lives and operates and its fundamental energy, we would live in a matriarchal society – which is even more threatening to white men, and I think until Australia as a whole comes to understand what it means to decolonise and what that looks like, and actually believes in the value and goodness of that, Australia will not have change. We will always have this kind of one step forward two steps back.

Someone I really look up to and learn a lot from is Janelle Monáe, she has a song called Q.U.E.E.N with a lyric that goes like “Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal”, and I think that speaks to the current atmosphere in the arts.

I think everything you’ve mentioned, achieving equal footing and decolonisation is unfortunately going to take a long time because things like internalised racism and white colonialism is inherently ingrained within our society.

Yeah, I think of course it will take a long time for places like the Sydney Opera House to decolonise, but we have to remember that all oppressed communities have an incredible determination and rich histories of resistances, and within that there is art and sovereignty. You only have to look so far as companies like Yirra Yaakin, who are very clever in empowering not only their own communities through their work, but actually reshaping what it means to make work in Perth.

You describe yourself as a queercrip, I’ve never heard of that term before, can you explain to us what is means and how it applies to you?

Queercrip is a compound word comprised of queer and crip. I’ll explain crip first. Like person of colour, crip is a political term used within the disability community, particularly amongst disability activists, as a term that is colloquial, empowering and endearing. It’s a term to describe ourselves, other disabled people and parts of our culture like crip humour and crip fashion. It is a reclaimed slur. It is a term that can be used by all disabled people.

For me, being disabled is a political identity. A lot of us have been excluded in conversations about the language used when we talk about disabled people, and this is because of the dehumanisation, othering and infantilizing of disabled people.

There are a lot of government organisations and support services that use language like “person with disability”, I hate being called a “person with disability”. The reason why people use that term is because there is this campaign that government sectors want to do where they’re like “We have to remind people that disabled people are people first, followed by their disability second.” And I’m like, why should my illness, my neurotype be so othered that people have to be reminded that I’m a human when they’re talking to me? For me, I use the term disabled and I also like using that term because I ascribe to the social model of disability which means I don’t consider myself disabled by diagnosis or by a certain body or brain I have - I consider my brain and body to be perfectly fine - it is actually the society I live in where the disability occurs. When I can’t study a theatre course because they are all full time and you have to be on your feet the whole day or when I can’t get a job easily because I find certain types of environments and repetitive tasks tiring and difficult, that is where I’m disabled, not when I’m at home by myself where I can lie down for 30 minutes after grocery shopping. That shouldn’t be considered a bad thing, that’s just something that my body needs. Queercrip is used by queer disabled people, it’s a term we use to talk about the compounded experience of being both queer and disabled.

What about the queer part of queercrip? What does your queer identity look like in context to disability and race?

Whenever I talk about my queer identity, it only makes sense within the context of also talking about race and disability because I have never felt at home in the queer community that I’ve known in Perth because it is so white.

White queer people and non-disabled queer people have so much visibility. They can easily comprehend and have the language to talk about their experiences, whereas I don’t, and I am trying to find that language as an adult. I came out when I was 14, but for a very long time I didn’t feel completely at home with the queer people I knew at school or places where I had queer peers around me. One of the problems I face as an artist is people calling me a queer artist outside of the context of my race and disability, and I have been uncomfortable with that. Sometimes it has been used to distract people from the work I make about racism in the arts that has nothing to do with queerness. Sometimes I might be wearing makeup or high heels in those performances but that’s not because I’m a queer character, that’s just my costume. Some people may have queer interpretations of that, but that work wasn’t about queerness, it was about racism. So, when people call me a queer artist, it’s erasing that.

White people have the privilege of talking about queerness and not talk about anything else, whereas I don’t. I don’t have that privilege. I’m really adamant about talking about my queerness in other things. I don’t have a lot of people with whom my queer identity makes sense with, but I have some friends who are queer people of faith like myself or who are queer and disabled. Until the queer community as a whole, particularly young queer people can actually care about people of colour, people of faith, disabled people who are part of that community, until then, I don’t think I can fully identify as queer on its own because that experience on its own doesn’t speak to who I am. Whenever I talk about myself, I always use queercrip or QTIPoC which stands for queer/transgender/intersex person of colour.

You’re very passionate about raising platforms for yourself and for other people like you. A lot of people get beaten down by the general negative atmosphere of society, but how do you – going as strong as you are – keep fighting back saying I need to be seen, heard, and these people need to be seen, they have voices that need to be heard? What drives you to do that?

I’ve asked this question to other people, but no one’s ever asked me before. Sometimes there are artists of colour, usually younger, around me that tell me that they wish they could be less polite. They wish they could do what I’m doing. I want to make it clear that who I am today as a person, that kind of courage I’m showing did not happen overnight.

Around late 2017, I started to work in theatre and decided to make work about race and so in 2018, I entered the theatre community and learned very quickly that when you talk about racism as a person of colour, there will always be consequences. At that time, I didn’t have the tools or knowledge to understand that and had very little support as to how to deal with that. There were serval points in 2018 where I actually started experiencing the worst kind of racism in my life and that really shattered me. I grew up with certain types of traumas and do have a history of mental health challenges which took a lot of work to recover from during my teenage years. I can consider myself recovered now but back in 2018 I started experiencing panic attacks and suicidal ideation for the first time in many years, the only thing I could do was step away for some time. So, in 2019 I started working on an art exhibition with all Asian artists, I attended an incredible workshop at Arts House in Melbourne which was exclusively for queer artists of colour. I surrounded myself with people who I could critically engage with, people who would not break me down or criticise or punish me for using my voice and saying the things I wanted to say. I wouldn’t be an artist today if it wasn’t for the people of colour who told me that the work I was doing was important, and who would talk to me after a show, give me hug and tell me how much my work meant to them. I think that’s my favourite part about being an artist, having an empowering effect on lives. That’s really why I do it. I mean, I love it, it brings me joy, but I also care so much about my community and where we come from, and that is something I always want to be returning to and enriching through my work.

I’d say today, there are a number of things that keep me driven and also healthy as an artist. One of them is to listen to myself and being able to have an honest conversation with myself about things that are going on in my work that are stressing me out. I make sure my life isn’t centred around my art. I have a lot of loved ones in my life who I actively take time to talk to, nourish and be nourished by. I am very critical of the pressures of capitalism that is put on us to be productive all the time, and I am very critical of how that infiltrates into the arts and so, I ensure that the work I am doing is always nourishing me and not getting to a place where I’m feeling so stressed that I don’t care about what I’m doing.

I’m also doing a whole bunch of things with my life, I have a whole bunch of different passions. I’m also a lived experience speaker where I go to schools and youth organisations and talk about things like domestic violence and intersectionality which is really fulfilling to me and also helps pay for my groceries. I think a big part of being someone who has to be so powerful all the time is actually being able to look after yourself because it can be a very tiring and taxing experience.

I also get a lot of strength from making decisions about the kinds of situations where I find myself disempowered. I made a big decision at the start of this year to cut down on my consumption of white media and the kind of things where I’m not represented or where I am represented but in a very one dimensional or stereotypical way that I find hurtful. I’ve been listening to a lot more music by Black women and I’ve been looking at theatre mostly by people of colour. I’ve been reading a lot more books by brown women and Black poets, and I think that’s where I also get my strength, seeing all these people doing the work I’m doing.

And also, just staying humble and spending time with my mum. Being able to separate who you are as a person to the headway you’re making in the arts. I'm also a very reflective person in a way that I like to think deeply and critically every day. Something I've been thinking about frequently over the past year is patriarchy and what my role in the world is as someone who makes my way through the world as a man. That role is to make a world that is free from violence and free from trauma.

My life is made up of working, resting and living. I need to be doing these things and it’s important to have a balance and boundaries between those three. Sometimes I do get very overwhelmed and forlorn about this country, but at the same time I need to open my eyes and see how much beauty, strength and goodness there is, especially in young people taking on the challenges we are faced with today, and actually not just doing stuff about it but actually thriving in their own ways.

I might just finish by taking a line from a poem I wrote where it talks about how God to me means goodness rather than power and the line goes “Through goodness comes dance,/ stirring pliancy into bones/who have forgotten how to hold the earth/away from the breath of conquer.”

To keep up with Patrick, check out his website which will be up by the end of April. His photography and interviewing project Dandelion Tea, which explores the ways men need to transform male identity for a future that is caring, sustainable and free from violence, will also be available to follow online soon.

INTERVIEW BY: YOSHIKA KON

INTERVIEW: Patrick Gunasekera