It’s aliiiive!

The first issue of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project is done and out in the world now. It features some wonderful poetry that mixes English with Spanish, Finnish, Tagalog, Russian/Bengali, Chinese, Hindu/Urdu, Dutch, Indonesian, and more.

Editing it was challenging but that is par for the course with multilingual poetry. In the end, I think I ended up with just the right number of poems. The collection is small, but strong, and each poem is a whole world unto itself.

Now to cook up the call for submissions for the next issue!

The 2018 West Writers Forum is happening at the end of the month at the Footscray Community Arts Centre and I'm running a panel on multilingual writing. My guests will be Maria Tumarkin, Zhi Yi Cham, and Saaro Umar - all fabulous writers and speakers of many languages. I'm super excited to be able to talk to them and to bring the idea and practice of multilingual poetry to a live audience.

The panel will run from 12-12:50 on Saturday July 28. There are lots of other superb events scheduled for that weekend, so make sure you check out the Forum 2018 Program and come along!

Last month I decided to take the plunge and set up the Australian Multilingual Writing Project.

This will be a publication that showcases multilingual writing in Australia. At the moment, I want to focus on only poetry, but in coming editions I will open it up to other forms of writing as well.

The current call for submissions is open till midnight on Friday 17August 2018, and I hope to get the first edition out a month after that. I have a budget (!) and can pay a tiny sum to contributors. Hopefully I'll be able to scrounge up some more over time and up that rate to something more substantial. Needless to say, in the grand tradition of independent publishing, I'm not being paid at all for the time being, but I hope to change that too in the future.

For the moment though, I have been checking my submissions with great delight and I'm already excited about the first issue.

In February I joined the wonderful West Writers Group, which operates out of the Footscray Community Arts Centre. The WWG is great community of diverse writers based in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. We meet every fortnight to discuss our writing practice, what we've been reading, and to share and receive feedback on our works in progress.

I have been doing a lot of narrating lately. So far this year I have narrated

• 'The Sixes, the Wisdom and the Wasp', by EJ Delaney for Escape Pod
• 'Canary's Refuge', by Wendy Nikel for Artemis Rising 4 over at Cast of Wonders
• 'Propagating Poenies' by Suzan Palumbo also for Artemis Rising 4 at PodCastle
• 'When Shadow Confronts Sun', by Farah Naz Rishi for PodCastle

In April, an article I wrote about the capstone subject I teach at the University of Melbourne, Encounters with Writing, was published in NiTro (Non Traditional Research Outcomes) 13: The Impact of the Tertiary Arts.

In June, a poem of mine called 'Handi' (photo below) was published in Pencilled In Issue 3: Food.  I was also interviewed for a piece in there by Sonia Nair about how not being able to consume certain foods interacts and interferes with our notion of our Asian-ness. You should get a copy. It's got a lot of good stuff in it.

And that's it for now. There's a lot planned for the rest of the year though, so stay tuned.

• Binti and Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. 
• Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman
• The Herring Lass  by Michelle Cahill
• Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
• An Accident of Stars and A Tyrrany of Queens by Foz Meadows
• Battle Hill Bolero by Daniel Jose Older
• Some Tests by Wayne Macauley
• The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• Common People by Tony Birch
• Marriage by Susan Ferrier
• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• Provenance by Ann Leckie
• The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
• Australia Day by Melanie Cheng
• How It Happened by Shazaf Fatima Haider
• Frogkisser by Garth Nix
• The Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone

I've been working on this poem since 2012, when I went to an exhibition of Persian literature at the State Library of Victoria called Love and Devotion. I've grown up hearing snippets of Farsi poetry from my maternal grandmother who was a lecturer in Urdu Literature for many years and is from a Farsi-speaking family herself. My grandfather, for his part, had a beautiful singing voice and so long as his Parkinson's allowed, would sing ghazals of an evening. Poetry, and particularly Farsi poetry from which Urdu poetry emerged, was a constant presence in the house when I was little, specially when the family gathered for meals. Imagine then the weirdness of seeing this intimate, personal thing displayed as a curiosity in Australia, thousands of miles away from its origins. 

I can't speak Farsi myself, but when I was a child my grandmother would often recite a couplet to me and then ask me to work out what it meant based on what little Urdu I knew at the time. Because Urdu - specially the 'good' Urdu you're taught in school - takes its nouns from Farsi, I could usually work out what the subject of the couplet was and perhaps even the sentiment being expressed. (But because Urdu is an Indian language, which means that the grammar works like that of other North Indian languages and not like that of Farsi, I couldn't - and can't - tell what is actually happening in the poem.) It was a game I enjoyed and one that has helped me focus on the connections between languages rather than the differences. 

My Grandmother's Language has gone through many different iterations and edits since my first encounter with the verse that opens it, but it has always had that title. One version of it was shortlisted for the June Shenfield Poetry Award last year, and another served as the dummy poem I gave to my poetry students to practice workshopping earlier this year. - I'm quite happy with the version that eventually got published, but there's no telling how much more I'm going to tinker with it.

Here's the poem as it appeared in Peril.

I sang a bit of Peera Ho, a Punjabi Sufi song that I've loved since I first heard it around 20 years ago, and then I segued into a multilingual poem in English, Urdu and French about identity and language. 

I especially love poetry memes because they're such a great example of just how much fun you can have with poetry and poetic convention, as well as how wonderfully flexible language is. People delighting in linguistic play on the internet is one of my favourite things, so the week we did the sonnet, I decided to help explain iambic metre by using a meme I'd been seeing a lot of at the time.  

The meme in question is called 'bredlik' (among other things) and, like most memes these days, started on Reddit and found a home on Tumblr. Each poem is in iambic dimeter and consists of a six-line stanza followed by a two-line punchline, which reminds me a little of a Shakespearean volta. The phonetic spelling is in line with the animal-speak that the internet is so fond of (see LOL-speak or LOLCat speak, doggo, birb, and many, many more.). I find the effect both oddly musical and very amusing because of the often innovative alternative spellings people come up with to fit the meme. 

Anyway, I was compiling all the instances of it I had found, as well as the discussions about its form and structure that I'd come across (as one does on a Sunday afternoon) and Ameel suggested turning it into a PowerPoint presentation. So we did.  I'm quite happy with what we came up with so I've uploaded it here. If nothing else, it's proof that rhyming iambic verse is alive and well out there in the digital world. 

If you've not come across this meme before, I hope you enjoy this little foray into the delightful silliness of internet poetry. 

Eid is Another Country

A thick-plaited little girl, sequined top a-glitter, steps
through the doors,
her orange-patterned hand safe in her father’s large,
brown grasp.
She giggles, her glass bangles bright and clinking as she
is jostled, sending
ripples through her cheap silk lehenga, blocked gold
embroidery holding
the hem still as the tram moves, a bright spot in the
darkness.

I worry that she is cold.

The rainy grey of Melbourne is no place for Eid.
She should be ruining her fancy clothes with water
fights, chasing cousins up trees and being
rewarded with food, money, presents and her elders’
blessing pats on the head
for how much she’s grown this year.

They must only see her in pictures now.

Or maybe one or two of them are here battling
the cold as they cook kheer and seviyan.
If they know to look for vermicelli.
If they can use this thin milk, this watery sugar
to recall home
and family.

The girl’s accent carries no memory.

She was born here perhaps or brought
so young she doesn’t remember
the smell of sweet milk thickening with heat
blanketing the city, the town, the country
the moment the moon is spotted
and the Chand Raat cry goes up.

Maybe she’s never heard the sirens, never seen the stalls
they summon
bristling with bangles in more colours than you can
imagine,
mehndi-wallas with their wood stamps and strange citrus
dye that
makes your palms sting but looks pretty under the hasty
filaments,
qatlamma and jalebi stands that materialise from the mist,
oil already
boiling, next to sugar cane juicers and their smell of
ginger, the crush of
people with one night to get tomorrow’s Eid just right.

She knows nothing of that frenzy, her speech slow and
nasal
As she tells her father her clothes are itchy.

Tremble is the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor's International Poetry Prize anthology for 2016 and my poem, 'The Compliment' is in it. The anthology contains the prizewinning poem, the runner-up, the shortlist and the longlist. It's a beautiful volume and the poetry in it is pretty amazing. I'm going to be coming back to it a lot, I think.

It's available in print and for free download on the University of Canberra's website. 

And this is my poem.

The Compliment

'Where are you from?'
There is bloodlust in that question.
I swing my net and offer up
the shortest possible answer
but it's never quite the right kind
of exotic.
And so the hunt begins.
A sharpness
between the eyebrows
a showing of teeth
then the demand to know
my blood and body.
Personhood is not
enough.
No,
only skin satisfies
the lust for such trophies,
this collector's desire to stake, 
splay, stuff, and own the objects
of fascination
poisoned wings spread
on pins, unmoving
dead things
displayed on walls
to be called
beautiful.

I also read Charlotte Ashley's 'La Heron' in August and Setsu Uzume's 'For Honor, For Waste' back in April, both of which were quite a lot of fun to read.

It's been fun connecting with the authors of each story and hearing what they have to say about how I've interpreted their work. It's quite a responsibility, but it's also a lot of fun to interact with these stories in a way that I don't often get to do with prose. And in the confines of my own space, with no one watching, I find I slip into the voices of the different characters without much self-consciousness. 

I've also learnt a bit about recording and editing audio so now I'm thinking of different ways I can use those skills to produce my own work. One of these years, I may even get something up and running!

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Pictures of my first recording studio/blanket fort, built for Setsu Uzume's 'For Honor, For Waste'.

I quoted several of Gloria Anzaldúa's essays in my reading tonight. Here is the text with the readings listed below that in the order in which they appeared. 

In 1987 Gloria Anzaldúa wrote an essay titled: ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’, after which this evening is named, Gloria says:

‘Wild tongues can’t be tamed; they can only be cut out.’

 Anzaldúa speaks of how being multilingual in a monolingual, monocultural, straight white world means that those of us who are aware of our multiplicity – the minoritised, the disenfranchised, the exoticised – are required to perform daily acts of mutilation on ourselves to simply exist. She talks of the silences that this forces upon us. She talks of the toll that twisting and silencing herself has taken on her spirit, on her humanity. And she resists.

Instead she says ‘I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.’ 

In ‘Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers’, written in 1980 Anzaldúa says:

‘I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To show that I can and that I will write, never mind their admonitions to the contrary. And I will write about the unmentionables, never mind the outraged gasp of the censor and the audience. Finally, I write because I’m scared of writing but I’m more scared of not writing.’ 

‘It is not on paper that you create but in your innards, in the gut and out of living tissue …’

‘I say, mujer mágica, empty yourself. Shock yourself into new ways of perceiving the world, shock your readers into the same.

Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don’t let the pen banish you from yourself. Don’t let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don’t let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper.’ 

Hybridity is one of Anzaldúa’s main concerns. Herself a descendant of Indigenous Americans as well as Spanish and White invaders, she constantly interrogates the notion of a single identity.  In ‘La Prieta’, written in 1981, she says:

‘I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds. Gloria the facilitator, Gloria the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. “Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say they members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender, to women,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label.’ 

This question of allegiances, of belonging, of finding ‘her’ people is repeated in her later writings as well and is a theme that many of us –  including third culture kids like me, who were only starting to be talked about when she was writing – continue to identify with today.

In ‘Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island’, first published in 1990, Anzaldúa writes:

‘Do they only want those parts of us that they can live with, that are similar to theirs, not different from them? The issue of differences continues to come up over and over again. Are we asked to sit at the table, or be invited to bed, because we bring some color to and look good behind the sheets?

‘When I am asked to leave parts of myself out of the room, out of the kitchen out of the bed, these people are not getting a whole person. They are only getting a little piece of me.  …we need all of us together…and all of us needs all the different aspects and pieces of ourselves to be present and totally engaged in order to survive…’

In ‘To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana’, from 1991, Anzaldúa continues to challenge the question of allegiance to a single identity:

‘“Lesbian” doesn’t name anything in my homeland,' she says.

‘Queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all “queers” of all races, ethnicities and classes are shoved under. At times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders. But even when we seek shelter under it we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences…I must constantly assert my differences…I must stress: The difference is in my relationship to my culture; white culture may allow its lesbians to leave – mine doesn’t.’ 

For me, 1993’s ‘Border Arte’ strikes a more hopeful note by framing the hybrid identity as a source of creativity. Anzaldúa refuses to be categorised and labelled, and talks instead of embracing border-dwelling.

‘…The dominant culture shapes the ethnic artist’s identity if she does not scream loud enough and fight long enough to name herself. Until we live in a society where all people are more or less equal and no labels are necessary, we need them to resist the pressure to assimilate.’

‘The multi-subjectivity and split-subjectivity of border artists creating various counter-arts will continue, but with a parallel movement… where a refusal to be split will be a given.’ 

‘The border,’ she says, ‘is the locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion and explosion and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage...Border art deals with shifting identities, border crossings, and hybridism.’ 

‘I was born and live in that in-between space, nepantla, the borderlands.’ 

Essays quoted:

'How to Tame a Wild Tongue' 1987

'Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers' 1980

'La Prieta' 1981

'Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island' 1990

'To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, escritora y chicana' 1991

'Border Arte' 1993

These essays can be found in Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa and The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader edited by AnaLouise Keating.

"Wild tongues cannot be tamed; they can only be cut out." 
                                                                                         -Gloria Anzaldúa

Tonight I will be reading from and responding to Gloria Anzaldúa's work at Wild Tongue, a reading of intersectional feminist literature and a zine launch. The event is hosted by the Loving Feminist Literature collective and will be held at Hares and Hyenas on Johnston Street in Fitzroy.

There are 14 readers in all, some of whom have also contributed to the Wild Tongue zine being launched about halfway through the show. Because of the numbers and because we want the event to move at a decent clip, we're all going to be doing short 5-minute readings. Having seen what everyone else is reading, it promises to be a very edifying, challenging and fun evening.

I'll be putting my reading up online after I perform it so that you can see what I've quoted and chase up the books and essays yourself if you are so inclined. 

Tickets are available at the Fringe link above and also at the door but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Start time is 8pm sharp.

There had already been a bit of buzz about it on Twitter and I'd been looking forward to meeting up with the few friends I knew were attending, but I was unprepared for the sheer volume of friendly faces and conversations I encountered. I ran into people who had attended my panel at the West Writers Forum earlier this year, former students, twitter friends, guest lecturers, and friends-of-friends, and was introduced to their friends as well. I live-tweeted a lot of the event and in the process ended up connecting with other participants who were doing the same. I even found myself going up to people and commenting on (great) things that they had said, which I rarely do because, extrovert or not, I can be quite shy. But something about being in a space where I didn't have to perform a particular kind of identity for the majority present made that kind of movement and connection easy.

The wonderful Eleanor Jackson was the MC and kept us on track during the panels, which were really half panel, half audience questions. The warmth and inclusiveness with which she kicked off the event set the tone for the rest of the day. 

The first speakers, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Jax Jacki Brown spoke about advocacy and activism as part of their writing practice, and the role that identity plays in writing and publication. There were questions raised about having to 'perform' a particular identity for the sake of publication or particular publishers which continued into the next session on pitching, which featured Robert Watkins from Hachette Australia, Aviva Tuffield from Black Inc, and literary agent Jacinta di Mase. 

After a windswept lunch we continued to a panel about best practice with Fiona Tuomy, Lian Low, Jane Harrison and Lefa Singleton Norton. Each participant spoke about the demands and requirements of organising events and ensuring representation and accessibility for often marginalised and minoritised groups. The discussion of disability and the minimal effort put into access was discussed at length and it was pointed out that even in that 'inclusive' space, many people had had to remove themselves because the format presented serious difficulties. Just prior to the panel, a participant tweeted about being shaken after having encountered an instance of transphobia. Although the participant were able to get support from the organisers, it's still disgusting that such an incident happened in the first place. 

Some of this was discussed during the open forum, when the audience was asked to comment on the day's proceedings and make suggestions for improvements. Overall there seemed to be a feeling that events like this one were useful because of how isolating it often is to be the only non-white, nonbinary, non-male, non-straight person in the room. To be with a cohort with whom we could share multiple intersecting parts of our identities was a relief. There was a discussion of the use of the word 'women' when what was meant was more broadly 'not men', and the possibility of using 'women and nonbinary' as an identifier was floated, which several of the people I spoke to seemed to think would work. 

If there was anything I could change, it would have been the use of the word 'diverse'. While discussing us as a group, the word was perfectly appropriate. We were indeed a diverse group. However I, personally, am not diverse. I am a single individual. Arguably, my background and experience may be diverse, but I am still their unique product. One. Not many. 

The reason using 'diverse' to speak about an individual bothers me so much is that, used like this, 'diverse' is basically a stand-in for 'not white'. When a panelist says 'I myself am not from a diverse background,' what they're saying is 'I'm white'. My question is, why not go ahead and say that? Or, better yet, why don't they try to understand that they are part of the diversity of humanity and announce themselves as 'Anglo' or 'Anglo-Celtic' or whatever they are? By limiting diversity to not-whiteness, they fall into the same old trap of Othering that the notion of diversity was supposed to combat. It reflects the laziness of the status quo, the swapping out of now inconveniently racist language for more 'appropriate' buzzwords without putting any actual thought into why these words are being used in the first place. 

Although this was brought up here and there, the discussion didn't gain much traction, but I expect that if this event is repeated - and similar discussions certainly will be - that it might get some airtime. 

Other than that, it was hard to tear myself away from the event even after it was over. I met many wonderful people and, in order to keep some of the momentum going, I've created the DiverseWomenWritersAus list on Twitter. I've started to populate it, but people who fit the bill are welcome to add themselves to it.

Overall it was a wonderful event and I'm glad I spent my Saturday meeting, listening to, connecting with, and learning from such a great group of people.

On Tuesday, September 13, I was part of a panel at the Wheeler Centre called Wilder Beasts: The Global Scary and Supernatural. We had a great turnout, specially considering the horrible weather and you can listen to the whole discussion at the link above. 

Hosted by Serpil Senelmis, I shared the stage with Sami Shah, comedian and author of Fireboy - a YA novel about a half-Djinn half-human boy living in Karachi.

The session was a lot of fun, with Sami and me sharing stories about the Djinn - beings made of smokeless fire who live on earth but in a different dimension and so are invisible to humans - as well as many other supernatural creatures from cultures outside the West. Being Turkish, Serpil had her own stories of the Djinn to share, which really rounded out the discussion.

I took my Sri Lankan 'good luck devils' on stage with me. Thanks to the power of Twitter, I had learnt only hours before the show that they're called Yakka Munuu and are household guardians - a little like gargoyles. Fitting then that they've accompanied me on every one of my moves. They're also the only thing I have from Sri Lanka, where I was born, so they have a lot of sentimental value. 

From there we moved on to other South Asian and wider Asian beings. Even though we're both from Pakistan, Sami and I had slightly different accounts of what Churdails actually are - a variation which goes the show the age and range of these stories. We also talked about the Pontianak - a being that has a very similar story to the Churdail - and the Sri Lankan Mohini. 

The audience was great and we had some really interesting comments and questions at the end. I'm sure we could have gone on for much longer than the hour we had, so it's a good thing the Wheeler Centre team kept us on track. 

Thanks to the Wheeler Centre for thinking of this panel and inviting me to be on it. It was a great experience, nightmares and all!

I'm participating in a panel about translation at the Footscray Community Arts Centre's West Writers Forum: Our Stories this Saturday, July 30 from 1 - 2 pm. The panel is called 'Lost or Found in Translation?' and we'll be talking, among other things, about whether translation can create the kind of fluid cultural exchange and understanding that the progressive side of society seeks, or whether any such ease is necessarily illusory. 

My awesome co-panelists, all writers and translators who live across languages, are Sanaz Fotouhi,  Lily Yulianti Farid, and Josiane Behmoiras. Mridula Nath Chakraborty, the Deputy Director of the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University, will be hosting. 

There are plenty of fantastic panels as well. I'm particularly looking forward to the one immediately before mine, '#DangerAsians' hosted by Hoa Pham(whose book, The Other Shore is brilliant), and 'What is Australian Writing III?', hosted by Khalid Warsame, but there's lots else, from dance to art installations to spoken word events and workshops about aspects of art production. It's going to be intense!

This year I wrote a novel. I shouldn't really put that in the past tense because what I have at the moment is a first draft that I spent about five months putting together in between tutoring, lecturing, teaching and generally functioning as an adult. I wrote it at home, at friends' houses, on trams, at work, in the tutors' room, in cafes - pretty much anywhere I had my computer and at least 15 minutes to spare. I'm glad I can work like that and I did get it all done, but I knew I needed to work on Draft 2 in a less scattered way.

Fortunately, I won one of the Wheeler Centre's Hot Desk Fellowships which means I get a dedicated workspace, wifi, and an environment humming with industry. I'm just getting settled in and I can't tell you how great it is to have a desk, specially one that is a decent size and clutter-free (for now). It's as exciting as opening a fresh notebook - the possibilities are endless.

Today I'm just getting set up, but from tomorrow onwards, Draft the Second can begin.

And who knows, I might even come up with a title!