Fitzroy Writers Festival - Leah Manaema Avene: The Body, a Library

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Silence. Performance (1986), she writes of the trouble of the written word once it is no longer understood as an event — “like mistaking a wristwatch for the rotation of the planet.” Words, she suggests, can never fully capture the motion of life; they point, gesture, echo, but they are not the event itself.

It is in the body, in breath, gesture, song, and movement, that stories continue to live. On these lands, stories have been held and shared since time immemorial — carried not only through language, but through kinship and care. The body itself becomes a library, rotating its own histories, keeping time with what has been passed down, what has been interrupted, and what continues to unfold.

Leah Manaema Avene's opening address will draw from their book FIELDWORK, which is designed to be shared orally. Thinking beyond the written word, they explore the body as a site of knowledge, resistance, and remembrance. Moving between personal narrative, collective history, and embodied storytelling, this event asks us to consider: How do we honour the knowledge our bodies hold? How do we strengthen oral ways of knowing? How might expanding our ideas of time transform the way we know and remember? And how can we learn together, in relation to others, while resisting imposed systems of knowledge?