Artist Atong Atem: ‘Black women saved my life, I would say’

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Atong Atem. The Ethiopian-born, Melbourne-based South Sudanese Australian artist and photographer, 31, is the inaugural recipient of the $80,000 Art Gallery of NSW La Prairie Art Award.

Atong Atem: “Growing up, I sort of learnt to embody a physical sense of stillness in order to make other people feel safe.”Credit: Nic Walker

RELIGION

You attended Hillsong Church as a teenager. Do you still have a relationship with the church? No, I don’t. It’s not that I’m not a believer in God, I’ve just found it difficult to combine my politics in the human realm with politics outside the human realm. So my relationship to church – and to God – is still being formulated.

Tell me about the challenge of squaring those two things. This is something a lot of other people have reckoned with: the deeply colonial nature of the modern-day church and how much that has influenced the state. We have laws in regards to, say, marriage – what is and is not allowed – that come from western Christianity. And I have so many issues with the state at large. I have decolonial politics. I have anti-racist politics. Like my parents, I have politics informed by Marxism. It doesn’t make sense for me to say, “Okay, well, in day-to-day life I am constantly unpacking things I’ve been taught historically”, but then not allow them to exist in terms of how I formulate my idea of God and of being saved.

Do you have rituals? My rituals are mostly a way of dealing with my own mental health. I have rituals to make me feel calm and to remind myself that the intense and immense love that I feel for others is something that I also deserve.

“That really seeped into me. How dare I bully his friends … oh my god, it’s me! I’m the friend!”

How do you do that? It’s a really daggy thing, but a friend of mine – Benjamin Fraser, a musician I love with a passion – when we were younger, whenever I’d say anything negative about myself, he’d look at me and say, “Don’t say that about my friend!” That really seeped into me. How dare I bully his friends … oh my god, it’s me! I’m the friend!

MONEY

You are South Sudanese, you were born in Ethiopia, and you spent your first few years in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. Your family came to Australia in 1997 when you were six. What was money like for you growing up? We grew up with not very much of it at all. Five kids, and my mum was predominantly the only parent around because of visa issues. So there was a lot of scrimping and saving, and I’m sure Mum was doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. We sort of accepted that a lot of things just weren’t for us. All the cool kids in school had the Roxy backpack and the Billabong pencil case; mine was from Best & Less. It was just a thing that I accepted. So my relationship to money now feels fickle, like it’s not forever.

At the same time, I imagine others would look at your career and think, “Atong is living the dream.” Absolutely! I’m that person who looks at herself daily and is, like, “Bitch, you made it.” It’s wild that I don’t have to burn myself on coffee at cafes on the corner working as a waitress with very clumsy hands. I’m further and further away from the reality that I used to have, but my brain hasn’t caught up. So I’m still stuck in the headspace of Atong Atem who worked at three different cafes and was on Centrelink, calling them up and having to cry every week, being like, “Please don’t cut me off.” But I don’t have the number memorised for Centrelink any more. I’ve been very lucky and grateful to have a lot of privilege in the last little while. I suppose I have a fear of, like, getting comfortable in it, ’cause I still feel like the rug’s going to be pulled out underneath me.

BODIES

You grew up in Wyoming on the NSW Central Coast. How did you feel about your body growing up? I was deeply aware of my body growing up. I was always kind of “on”, and I sort of learnt to embody a physical sense of stillness in order to make other people feel safe. I was afraid to make movements that could be interpreted as shocking, scary or terrifying because I had internalised this idea that my body was inherently shocking, scary and terrifying. It was so different to the bodies around me. I learnt that it wasn’t just about being Black: it was about being a dark-skinned Black woman with particular features.

It sounds exhausting. I was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t an inherent part of my body: it was my surroundings. But I was stuck and couldn’t do anything about it. So I was really acutely aware of everything; I just didn’t have the language for it.

“I was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t an inherent part of my body: it was my surroundings.”

How do you feel about your body now? I feel hot, sexy, beautiful, stunning, cool, brave.

What changed? I read. I was exposed to Black women writers who had the language, the words and the experience. I came across Octavia E. Butler; I remember seeing a photo of her in an article about the great science-fiction writers. They were mostly old white men with beards, then, all of a sudden, this tall Black woman. I became obsessed with her work and her way of thinking. I’d internalised this idea that you could only talk about struggle as a Black person in a predominantly white space, whereas Butler was like, “I’m talking about the world at large. I’m talking about the body. I’m talking about gender and social politics. I’m talking about the future. And in doing all of this, I’m holding up a mirror to society.” It was so bloody profound. And she also wasn’t afraid to have tentacled aliens having intimate experiences with humans. It was like, “Are you allowed to do that? White people are watching!” So yeah, Black women saved my life, I would say.

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