Jason Gray is the tri-racial Mauritian-Australian author of HAUNT (THE KOOLIE), Subbed In (2019), who lives on unceded Wongal land, and was the winner (2012) and judge (2018-2019) of ZineWest WORD. He has published and read widely, including Seasons (2025), Overland (2023), Avant Gaga at Sappho’s (2023 and 2019), Liminal Mag‘s Collisions (2020), ZineWest (2018, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2009), Griffith Review (2017), and Seizure (2014). He was the recipient of a West Words Varuna Fellowship (2018), and longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize (2023). Twitter: @jasongray85 Instagram: @connectionrevolution
‘Handball’ is such a visceral poem. It engages forcefully with race and power dynamics while deftly evoking the schoolyard game as the narrative ducks and weaves. How deliberately did you set out to structure the poem like the game, or did it emerge naturally like that? And did balancing the content and the structure present any challenges in the writing process?
This poem was formed quite organically in the writing and editing process—luckily, it wasn’t a ‘trouble poem’ or anything like that.
The idea emerged from a visceral reaction to Terri Ann Quan Sing’s Liminal Magazine interview (#177) with Ouyang Yu—this interview is my full circle moment, I suppose—where Yu had the guts, so to speak, to talk and write about shit in his work.[1] When Yu said bowel movements are connected to the mind (brain–gut connection, anyone? Bueller?) and hence writing—you need BMs lest you and your writing become shitty—my mind went to something potent which I hadn’t yet released or committed to poetry or prose. It recalled some bullying I received in primary school during a handball game, which we played most days along with soccer, and while our lunchtime sporting pastimes sometimes became quite heated, the games usually proceeded without such drama. This time, however, involved a literal shit fight. So, I recalled the handball game, the fight, the catalyst(s) of the conflict within the game, and my feelings about the quite shocking racial violence. The details emerged and allowed me to paint the picture and just write my guts out (sorry).
I am quite numb by now—I just turned 40—to writing ‘hard and clear about what hurts’[2] (not Hemingway!) and writing ‘the truest sentence that you know’[3] to expose the emotion rather than explain it. Hopefully—usually—expelling pain decreases it (the trick is to swim, not drown, in memories). The second part is similar to what James Baldwin said about writing ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’, which I refer to in these days of decolonisation (Hemingway was a scoundrel).[4] These challenges always emerge in my practice and did so as I worked on the prose poetry of ‘Handball’.
The structure emerged quite naturally from the non-essentialism I employ to complexify the narrative—going against the prose writers I grew up reading and following the ‘Coolitude’ poetics of Mauritian author, Khal Torabully, that resonated later in life—and the fervour of not letting the bully win, which I learned as a child, with good advice from family and friends.[5] My father, for instance, talked with me about his bullying experience, though he was white, so it was not racism. My Mauritian-born mother, who was not as forthcoming during my childhood due to trauma, experienced bullying that was both solely based on race and a mix of race- and gender-based violence, and more. I was lucky that at least some of my scars were able to heal enough to survive—though I still need reading and writing to galvanise that process.
James Baldwin said: ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.’[6] This connectivity and community of bullied and oppressed people are a big driving force of my work.
In this poem, I also initially allowed my mind to flow and wander (and wonder) and include memories as they came up organically (e.g. the lunch order and the illicit game, ‘brandings’). This unlocked more relevant memories that fit in with the bullying of the main tale (e.g. having my head slammed against the toilet block wall and bespectacled face beaten with a schoolbag). I hoped this fragmentary style would hammer home the trauma of being bullied and experiencing racism or any bigotry, and also the realism of the piece.
The poem tells multiple different stories but remains very cohesive. How did you weigh these different stories in the writing process, including determining how much space they should take up and how and where they should break into/through the other stories?
As a younger writer, I tried to pack a lot into the narrative prose I was working on back then and pare back from there. I called it ‘Exploding Pandora’s Box’—trying to paint as much of the whole thing as possible until wordplay and narrative burst forth, and honing and editing from there. I’m not sure I’d quite recommend that—it was probably the exuberance and brink(hu)manship of youth—but as I said above, I allowed the memories to flood into the poem organically. The colour of the dog shit being a ‘greenish sludge’, when it is usually brown, allowed a childlike connection to the memory of lunch orders in brown paper sandwich bags—a much more pleasant memory, of having takeaway lunch at school rather than a regimented packed lunch.
But one piece of advice I come back to these days is from Aimé Césaire in a letter to Maurice Thorez (1956): ‘I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal’. My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.’[7]
Any balance of narrative weight that I achieved in ‘Handball’ comes from an interplay of particular versus universal, as Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land was an immense latter-day influence on me and my work.
And the drive to not let your oppressor(s) weigh you down—that had an inverse effect on the poem: the main narrative was the most affecting, but other memories, as I said above, deserved space as well, as long as they suited the poem.
In that way, the poem formed as naturally as a deep and meaningful session with a friend, and could be honed from there for tone, pacing and impact (my main editor, Alison J. Barton, was instrumental in helping me build these elements). A couple of darlings were killed in the editing process!
Your poetry here and elsewhere demonstrates keen observational skills, an eye for the tiny details that conjure complex scenes, characters and concepts. When you’re out and about, moving through the world, do you find yourself thinking ‘that belongs in a poem’ and intentionally writing it down or remembering it, or do such details organically return to you later when you sit down to write?
I do keep potent tales from everyday life, like the assassination of the Bobcat operator in my suburb—which both saddened me (picturing the person’s family, whom we weren’t connected to personally) and frightened the hell out of me as a child—in the back of my mind as a writer. These stories may then emerge organically, as they did in ‘Handball’, through employing the stream-of-consciousness I honed as a prose writer until 2017 (though I wrote the occasional poem too).
The discipline of writing down the everyday and especially having the courage to write (often badly), especially at university as a teenager and into my twenties, kept me observing and helped me develop a decent practice. Like a lot of writers, I find it hard to ‘switch off’—and do find titbits in ordinary, everyday living that are interesting and pertinent enough to belong in writing. A lot of work comes from memory too, of course. I find that accepting ordinariness in life fuels the process as well—even famous writers (I am certainly not one of those!) are just human beings and have to, ultimately, connect to human beings in their life and community before they find readers.
As I became a prose writer at uni after being just another sad teenage poet, characterisation is key to my work. It allows me to ‘taste life twice’ as Anaïs Nin said—enjoying the quirkiness and personality of someone I like and peppering their voice or characteristics into a poem or story, or enduring the racist bullying of The Whiteboy in ‘Handball’ and having to reclaim the lost moments and (sometimes intrusive) thoughts and memories that come from trauma.[8]
Big books and concepts like ‘Coolitude’ and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire—of a subjugated/oppressed people reclaiming their space and time and writing truth to power—came much later. Unfortunately, my university time was a period of whitewashing (see probably outdated Hemingway stuff above)—I didn’t even study much so-called Postcolonialism when I had the chance.
I would give the experience of schoolyard bullying back to my oppressors if I could, and that’s where writing comes in, to soothe—and race and culture have to feature. If you don’t recognise my race or culture, or its right to coexist with you, chances are we can’t share our collective humanity—like a handball game in a playground, let alone the friendship that ideally should result from such activities.
Robert Jones Jr (@sonofbaldwin) said (2015): ‘We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.’[9] I think being pegged with dogshit probably denies someone’s humanity, right?
Toni Morrison said: ‘The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.’[10]
While I may have spent a lot of time on my bully in writing this poem and dealing with the trauma he passed onto me, the oppressor was/is a child, a schoolyard bully—in the poem, their aim is to ostracise, to degrade, to humiliate, to beat you. They aim to distract in order to win—win the game, win over the handball crowd, and become better than you. You can’t let them—no matter how long it takes. Your humanity may depend on it.
With poetry, as I’ve said, I often aim to complexify, to make strange, with a non-essentialist strategy. But sometimes strategic essentialism is necessary to bring people together in understanding or culture. It is what serves the particular poem that matters.
[1] Yu, Ouyang. “Interview #177 — Ouyang Yu.” Liminal, interview by Terri Ann Quan Sing, 31 May 2021, www.liminalmag.com/interviews/ouyang-yu.
[2] quoteresearch. “Quote Origin: Write Hard and Clear about What Hurts.” Quote Investigator, 24 June 2025, quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/24/hard-clear/#:~:text=Hemingway%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CWrite%20hard%20and,or%20laugh%2C%20but%20not%20die.
[3] Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. Scribner Classics, 1996.
[4] Baldwin, James. “James Baldwin, the Art of Fiction No. 78.” The Paris Review, interview by Jordan Elgrably, 1984, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin.
[5] Carter, Marina, and Khal Torabully. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. Anthem, 2002.
[6] Baldwin, James. “James Baldwin Recalls His Childhood.” The New York Times, p. 11, www.nytimes.com/1964/05/31/archives/tv-and-press-wed-by-computers.html.
[7] Césaire, Aimé. “Letter to Maurice Thorez.” Social Text, vol. 28, no. 2, 2010, pp. 145–52, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2009-072.
[8] Nin, Anaïs. Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 5 1947-1955. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1975.
[9] Jones, Jr., Robert. Sonofbaldwin.com, 2023, www.sonofbaldwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/TW-150808-670×525-1.jpg.
[10] Morrison, Toni, et al. Black Studies Center Public Dialogue, Part 2. Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers, 5 1975, archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/11309.
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