Trigger warning: reference to childhood sexual abuse in the context of witness and healing.
In high summer, when our days swim with light, and heat, it can be hard to remember midwinter. In the same way as adults, sometimes we often feel unreachably far from who we were as very small children. With the publication this July, of an essay that I wrote for Magma Poetry back in January, about my first two year old memories, I have been able to set these two sets of opposites side by side. My brief for the magazine, edited by Isabelle Baafi, Ilya Kaminsky and Lisa Kelly, was to explore solitude. I chose to document a three night writing retreat, staying in a seafront hotel in Worthing, more or less opposite the Normandy beaches below my French grandmother’s house that I visited every childhood summer from when I was two.
Worthing, West Sussex.
The essay grew from observations I made and photographs I took on the winter beach, responding to Worthing’s marine landscapes, and tides. I wanted to open myself to the acts of looking, and noticing, that are the foundation of a very young child’s self. Through them, we begin to build their relationship with the world, and form a sense of who we are and where we fit.
My creative intention was always to share the photos and diary entries through this blog when the Magma essay was published, to give readers access to the raw materials I was working with. My journey from London started out looking bleak. I passed through heavy fog on the South Downs, and then came out in the the aftermath of heavy rain along the coast. No sooner had I left my bags in the hotel room, however, than the huge sky began to clear. Straight away, I felt new and old energies entering me. Seeing the sand ripples left by the tide, early days rose up again. I was fifty-seven, wrapped up against the end of a midwinter afternoon in scarf and gloves, a thick winter coat and rubber boots. But I was also a two-year-old barefoot child dressed only in her swimsuit and rubber sandals. Together, through our shared consciousness, we registered the thrill of small waves breaking and frilling around our ankles, of wading through streaming seaweed, jumping over water channels streaming down the beach.
As I walked back down the beach towards the hotel, the sunset made the shallow tide pools to flame with colour – as if they were singing back the sky’s song. Climbing the stairs to my room, it seemed as if the natural world had opened itself to me in my time of need, and longing.
I stayed working and reading until high tide, just before midnight, then headed out to a world flooded with moonlight:
Nearly high tide no 1: January 19, midnight. The nearly full moon is looking down on the beach out of its single white eye, silvering the black waves. It feels as if the water is breathing. Clear blue sky. Intense cold. Frost coming. Wet shingle sparkling.
Hurrying down onto the beach the next morning, I used the low, vertical light to capture the mussels growing on the iron legs of the pier, the worm casts rising like twirling castles out of the sand casting tiny triangular shadows, before the water covered them. After an hour of walking and thinking alone, and swimming in memories, I climbed up the shingle to the Marine Gardens Cafe.
Surrounded by friends meeting, and couples enjoying breakfasts, admiring a lady cutting up a sausage on her plate, for two alert terriers beside her on the bench seat, made me feel I was in the presence of other lives. I began to write my way back in time. On my way back to the hotel room, the tide was rising, and I sat on the shingle to document it.
Thursday 20 High Tide
Sitting by the sea with my eyes closed, I hear the tide clink through the shingle. A long slow rattling pull back, then the landing thrashing of a wave crest and its rush upwards through the stones. The water dropping, the breath landing. The slow rattling pull back of exhalation. I try to sound-time my body to this in-out movement. Drawing the world in. Letting it out. Hearing the water rattle the shingle and gather its energy to rise up a little further.
I open my eyes to see the swelling that pushes the wave up closer to me each time and the swirl of the foam. As if the sea is heaving itself towards me, sliding up the beach in liquid movement. Further out the sun makes a triangular glitter path. Warm enough for the first time this year to feel it on my skin. I face myself into its energy. Say enter me. Enter me life force.
Close up the lace frill of breaking water. Curling over, massing in whale rises. Heaving and roiling. Covering the beach in wet kisses.
When I went into the hotel after the high tide I dropped back into writing. Three or four pages flowed, and the essay opened. Then it was time for the cafe on the Lido, with its checked plastic tablecloths, and view of the sea through the storm grills. By now, people were enjoying a mid-afternoon slice of cake. After, I walked out along the pier over the water, adding a vertical line to the horizontals I had traced up and down the seafront. The sun was behind the pier, and the wind was cold, but the light was golden.
Afternoon on Beach 20 January spoken into phone:
Four o’clock. The tide is sliding down the beach with barely a ripple. Out to sea, a huge flock of seagulls have landed. They’re just sitting on the water. Little white flecks. Shimmers catching the setting sun. The sun is gold and heavy, dropping down past the end of the pier. The water is gunmetal, turquoise, grey, aquamarine. The colours keep shifting. It will be minus 3 tonight and the cold is in the air already, biting my fingers through the gloves, making everyone wrap up. The low sun is catching pebbles, catching the shingle, catching the wooden groynes that stop the beach shifting. Layers of golden colour striping the beach and two women wading into the still water. Further out the wind turbines rise up like white exclamations marks. The sky is moody grey over Brighton. Golden to the west. The two swimmers have dipped down into the water. They are keeping their heads high, swimming out with confidence. The seagulls are turning golder as the sun drops lower. The wind turbines are glowing. The sun is catching them. The wooden groynes are golden stripes across the brown shingle. A child is balancing on one. His father is photographing him, holding this cold January moment when the sun is still high enough to see by at 4pm, when the pier is balancing on its metal stilts and the sun’s path is golden beyond it. When the rim of the sky is apricot fading to gunmetal.
On the way back to the hotel, my ears ached from the cold, but my head felt exploded by colour. Walking into the Marine Office to buy a tide timetable, I was shown a small tank of beach finds. Purple-green snake haired anemones tangled their tendrils in the artificial current. A cuttle fish rose out of the sand on the floor and shot out its tentacles for food. Weed billowed. I knew I wanted to create ‘Chalk’ as a space where people could experience a microcosm of my childhood through their senses as well as their minds.
On Friday morning the sand was shining again as the sun rose above the long low tide pools. Sitting in the Marine Gardens cafe, for toast and coffee, after walking the morning beach, I fell deeply into writing a darker memory, which I describe in the Magma essay. On my way back, I found two lumps of chalk on the beach and carried them up to my hotel room to put on the windowsill. They are cold to the touch, heavy, punctured by holes, the work of many events. I have taken them back to London.
Friday 21 high tide.
Yesterday I was on the beach recording the tide at sea level. Today I am in my fourth floor room. The water is aquamarine today – a clear pale green blue – and moving more friskily than yesterday. Seagulls surround a man as he takes his shoes and t-shirt off ready to swim He makes a star shape before entering the water. The waves are creaming and breaking up the shingle – full of energy. The man is waiting with his arms up then dives down at 1.13 into the high tide and swims parallel to the shore. The cold waves are lapping and caressing the beach and he is swimming strongly where I swam last summer. After a clear morning the sky has clouded over but there is a low gold on the horizon which is gilding the moving water. Pale blue, green, gold running up the land, agitated with movement all the way out to the horizon after yesterday’s stillness. Seagulls flying strongly at level with my window. After a grey two months there is gold everywhere as if to remind me that life is always present. The swimmer is swimming strongly down the coast. The waves are curling and breaking into discreet white froth, not wild ragged storm waves but their elegant midwinter companions doing the work of bringing the water up onto the beach and letting the sand flats shine out in Normandy. The swimmer is coming back doing a brisk crawl. He duck-dives down, immersing himself fully, doing somersaults, playing like a child in the freezing water before wading out. There is an immersion in vastness that art also requires – a surrender to something huger and not without risk, that can infuse you with a larger energy. Pulling on loose trousers and a t-shirt, he seems intensely alive going across the beach at speed to dry and warm up. The waves are less frothy now they are being called back to France, the work of travel moving the other way.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, after writing all day about my father, and reaching back deep into golden places with him which I thought I had lost, I woke very cold after dreaming that my mother had come for my two year old self and taken me from my grandmother’s house. Afterwards, when I tried to go back to that house, its door had been broken in and all the cupboards had been ransacked. The bathroom streaked with red. This is something I write about in more detail in the essay.
I got up on Saturday morning to a grey sky. My head was still heavy with tears with my eyes swollen – as if I had been crying in my sleep. These were tears which had taken more than half a century to be allowed to form. My time alone by the winter seaside had allowed me to go far back into my childhood and find a very difficult memory, which I write more about in the Magma essay.
I packed up my bag, and settled my bill, knowing that a part of my two year old self, who had been exiled from my conscious mind for decades, at last had her place again within me. The memory the dream gave me back was hard to receive, but I could have asked for no greater gift. As the year has turned from winter, through spring, into summer, this very small girl has continued to travel with me. I am more whole for her presence.
If anything in this blog has been difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to look for help, or you could speak with your doctor.
If you would like to buy the Solitude issue of Magma it’s available here.
I will be reading from the Magma essay ‘Solitude as translucence’ live and online in Cardiff at 11.30 on Saturday 30 July at the Seren Books Cardiff Poetry Festival. Tickets for the event are £3.00 online or £5.00 live or you can buy a Festival Pass for all the readings over the three days from 29 to 31 July for £5.00 online or £90.00 live.
Back in March, when spring was only beginning in the UK, Dr Pragya Suman asked me if I would contribute a short essay and three poems to Arc Magazine. I chose to explore what working experimentally can bring to those of us whose work responds to complex materials, and was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce ‘her door is missing’, ‘and now came the ashes’, and ‘tessellation’ to evidence what I was saying in practice. Pragya and I also explored the topic further in a mini interview. The beginning of the essay is quoted below, and you will be able to read it in full, along with the other powerful material featured in Arc’s spring 22 issue if you follow the link at the end of the excerpt or here:
alice hiller in Arc Magazine: When I was growing up during the 1970s, England experienced intensely cold winters. Walking through the graveyard of the parish church with my mother, I would sometimes find small birds lying curled in the snow. Seeking shelter within yew bushes, they had frozen to death overnight, then fallen from their perches. Although I could not articulate why at the time, the hunched shapes of their still, undefended bodies resonated with me.
During those same years of unlocking the church, polishing its brasses, singing hymns on Sundays beside my mother, I was also being subjected to penetrative sexual abuse by her. We had moved together to Wiltshire from Brussels when my father died, the year I turned eight. In the English countryside, surrounded by darkness and silence, my mother took me into her bed. I was not able to tell anyone what came to pass between us for two decades beyond the physical abuse ceasing.
Writing bird of winter in my fifties, which gives creative witness to this crime, also on behalf of the millions who are subjected to childhood sexual abuse around the world, I knew the poems needed to exist in relation to the white spaces around them. I wanted them to communicate at a somatic and an instinctive level, through the shapes they made on the page, as the birds’ hunched outlines in the snow connected with me to suggest my own body when I was word-less. I wanted the freedoms of more experimental poetry to open pathways to healing.
Working visually as well as texually in bird of winter, I invite the reader’s conscious and subconscious selves to collaborate dynamically in the work of ‘reading’, conferring upon them an agency that the abuse denied me. Through this they become discoverers, rather than recipients of this complex material, and participate in the collection’s journey into meaning and resolution. They can also calibrate their depth of engagement, as I hope these three featured poems reflect.
If you would like to keep reading, please follow the link below.
Trigger warning: non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse.
This has not been an easy blog to put together. I have written, and redrafted its plain sentences, bare as winter branches, but like winter branches, holding within them the promise of spring. For those of you who are thinking of reading further, I should warn you that I write honestly about the challenge of living with a complex history, and the fact that resolution can seem hard to find. But I work my way through these hard places, to arrive at a point of hopefulness, which you will hopefully also reach if you stay with me and with these words.
In life, as in art, we’re encouraged to think in terms of beginnings, middles and endings. Progression and resolution give structure to stories. When an artwork responds to trauma, the requirements change. Anyone who has experienced, or observed the impacts of traumatic events, knows that they continue to resonate and replay themselves for many years. To generate a truthful creative transaction between a traumatic subject matter, and the work into which it is translated, calls for forms of expression which can suggest recurrences and hauntings. Through this act of creative witness, we may begin to change their power and reposition our relationships to them.
Living beyond, and making art that responds to, my own experience of childhood sexual abuse, amongst other subjects, I face this challenge myself. As the light dims towards the end of November, and the days grow shorter and darker, child ghosts walk again for me. They remember and re-live my father’s death in hospital when I was eight, in 1972. These ghost-selves also re-experience the beginning of the penetrative sexual abuse to which I was subjected, very shortly after, when my mother, who was my abuser, and I moved from Brussels to Wiltshire.
Impacting both my physical and mental health, these hauntings can lead me to feel as if I am sinking down through waves of old sadness. Like heavy black sump oil, they seep into my thoughts and bodily movements. When things get really bad, they can make it hard to move – or even think. Because this has happened every November and December since I was a teenager, over the years, I’ve developed resources to keep myself going. I work beside my SAD light. I try to be kinder to myself and organise my working life so that I am not too pressured. I meditate, swim and walk my dog Ithaca, noticing the natural world around us. I connect with people who love me.
But all these strategies only ever mitigate the after-effects of the dreams which rise up at night. In my sleep, I become again a scared, hurt child, taken back to a place between life and death by my mother. This was the case – very brutally – in November and December of 2021, as it had been in 2020, and all the years before that.
None of us likes to speak of what we perceive as our vulnerabilities, for fear people will think less of us, or feel we are ‘seeking attention’ in some way. But in 2020, working on bird of winter‘s final manuscript alone with my dog Ithaca in lockdown, I decided to make an artwork that could enact being haunted by a traumatic past, and reaching beyond this towards a form of resolution. At the time, I was following an online workshop with Nina Mingya Powles around multiple language heritages with the Poetry School, which my fellow Forwards Shortlistee, Cynthia Miller, was also part of. I was also experiencing difficult dreams. They shaped what I wrote.
What emerged is called ‘je suis son petit chat il est mon papa 1972/ I am his little cat he is my daddy 2020’. It’s a multi-form piece which exists simultaneously as a conventional poem, a visual work, a sound experience and a performance. It was published this January 22 in bath magg no 8, as you’ll be able to see and hear by following this link.
When I performed it at bath magg’s online launch, I began by saying a few words about the poem. The response I received made me feel there would be a value in expanding them into this blog, however inelegantly. Opening up the deliberately smudgy, troubled layers of the poem up in this way also gives me the opportunity to separate the two overlaid texts, and look at each one in isolation. In the final print they are blurred across each other to play out how traumatic stories repeat and recur, as you’ll have seen from the fragment above, and the link to the full work at bath magg.
‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ begins in French and English, the two languages of my childhood. They refract and translate each other, but the work also makes complete sense in either language. In the first two lines, I’m waking up from a nightmare in 2020, aged fifty-six. I’m also myself in bed, aged eight, in 1972, as my father lies dying in intensive care. From there it is back to 1972 and my eight year old self returning home to our flat:
Underlay text of ‘je suis son petit chat’
Describing my life before my father died as if it was still simultaneously present, including my grandmother taking me to the hospital, and my father sending me drawings home, the narrative enacts how, in dissolving the boundaries of time, these dark hauntings also open opportunities for healing, by re-accessing a fuller range of memory. Next in the underlay text comes the nightmare at the heart of the poem, which invaded my sleep in the early hours of 22 November, replaying the sexual abuse to which I was subjected as a child by my mother. As the poem reports, the terror of the dream induced vomiting and diarrhoea in my fifty-something year old self:
Tough though it was to experience in reality, this act of voiding is also a release, which opens up ‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ to new energies – whereby the recurrence of the trauma becomes an opportunity to reset my relationship to the original events. Resetting happens through a short poem in both French and then English, which is overlaid on the looping narrative beneath it in larger font and bolder text, as the extract at the top of the blog shows.
Within its overlaid phrases, my adult self summarises the impacts of my childhood sexual abuse, including how it continues to haunt me. Speaking directly to my abuser, I refuse the silence which she imposed on me throughout my childhood and adolescence, and for long years beyond that. This frees the underlying narrative to begin to move towards the light of a different ending, where the recurrences of physical voiding can finally come to a stop:
The account of the nightmare, and falling “down a black tunnel” is repeated below the overlaid text, as when in nursery rhymes like ‘Oranges and lemons’, or ‘Frère Jacques’ in French, the verses come round again. Following the earlier shift, the act of voiding is once again purgative, letting go of some of the blackness and shame held inside me, and allowing gentler and more nurturing memories of my loving engagement with my father to continue to surface in the segment which follows:
Like many others with my history, for long years the trauma of the penetrative abuse in childhood separated me from being able to feel my own feelings, or know my own wants. Here, they begin to return to the child who lives within and alongside the adult. She can say once again “I want my daddy” and by expressing this longing re-form a more authentic connection with herself. My grandmother’s phrase translated means “let her through, let her through, she’s his daughter”. She was trying to get me allowed into the intensive care unit, but the phrase also acts out the way I am asking for my child self to be allowed back through, to speak and know herself, and how she was once loved.
‘Je suis son petit chat/I am his little cat’ ends in a place of quietness, with the possibility of integrating my separated selves more fully. Translating the “petit chat” nickname my father gave me into the English “little cat”, and laying it down on the page, the poem performs an act of witness to the co-presence of my child and adult selves. It also documents how, by reconnecting more fully with child-alice, adult-alice is able to begin to make a new relationship what made us who we now:
Walking in Shotover County Park near Oxford in the last days of 2021, after some very tough weeks, I saw trees and misty light that reminded me of Wiltshire, and felt unkind old ghosts crowd around me. But breath by breath, I drew the damp, cold air of the present into my body, and with it new energy. With each out-breath, I tried to let what I no longer needed pass from me. As I did this, the pearlescence of the fields and clouds became a wilderness of beauty, and the black branches of the trees uplifted themselves into acts of elemental resistance. With my dog Ithaca scenting the damp leaves, and pulling us forwards, and the landscape saying that life would return, I felt how this difficult annual recurrence was also a gateway to transformation – that each year I must find the way through.
If you need support after reading this blog, https://www.mind.org.uk/ has valuable links and helplines.
Further exploration: four books and StAnza Festival
I often set a creative prompt after exploring one of my own poems for people to explore in their own practice. In this case the subject material is too dangerous. Instead, for anyone wanting to work creatively with complex materials, or look at other examples of this practice, I would recommend four books which open pathways to new understandings, and new creative forms of expression, from the breakages and fractures of trauma. I would also recommend the other brilliant poems in bath magg no 8, many which respond to complex subject matters – and make from them acts of beauty and reclamation.
In terms of books, Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin creates provisional, shifting structures to hold the lives and reposition the representations of Irish women whose lives were appropriated by the Irish State and Church. Documenting how the State invaded every corner of life in Romania under Romania, under Ceausescu and the Romanian Communist Party, for Buried Gods Metal Prophets Maria Stadnicka and Antonia Glűcksman assemble a living memorial that incorporates diary entries, photos, erasures, quotes from statutes, and building plans, as well as more conventional ‘poems’. In Things I have Forgotten Before Tanatsei Gambura speaks through radical formal innovation of what it can mean to have grown up as a “Black Girl” in Zimbabwe during the 1980s – and how losing a country can form you as much as having one. Sasha Dugdale’s extraordinary collection Deformationsexplores trauma and PTSD, through fragments composed around Homer’s Odyssey. A separate long sequence responds to the sculptor Eric Gill’s work and life, within the framework of his recorded sexual abuse of his daughters. Sasha and I spoke about our work in Volume 48 of PN Review. Sasha has a hugely impactful new poem in bath magg 8 which you can read here.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I will be appearing at the StAnza festival on 12 March both live and online with many other brilliant poets in St Andrews. You can find more details here. Prices start from £3.00. Booking opens on 21 January. For people not able to travel to Scotland, many of the events are online and very reasonably priced. As well as performing, I’m going to be sure to pack out my schedule with hearing other poets and it’s a great way to check in with a huge range of voices and perspectives.
Letting new light in to set your creative compass: photo alice hiller
How can we resource our work in lean times? Where does inspiration come from when travel and and a wide range of live experiences are significantly curtailed, whether for financial, health or other restrictions? My steadfast belief is that we hold our own deepest and richest reserves within ourselves, accumulated through our lived experiences and interactions with the world at multiple levels. When more expansive possibilities are denied to us, to keep working, and generating new material, we therefore need to find ways to tune into this, both by nurturing ourselves, and also by finding new sources of ‘strangeness’ and intellectual and creative adventures to act as stimuli.
Working with my fellow poet and cherished friend, Julie Irigaray, I set out to devise a solstice workshop, performance and conversation for the Voicing Our Silences collective that I founded. We wanted to deliver both these aims – of self-nurture and adventure. Core to the process were the two prompts we developed, which were designed to complement each other. Mine is a two-part process for setting your creative compass, which begins with a gentle breathing exercise, to clear your creative space, and then builds up your individual compass on the page – through a five stage guided prompt, which I lead participants through. There’s then a follow-up to be completed two or more days later. People who did it on the night we recorded the event have said how valuable they found it to be. This compass process can be used for a specific piece of work such as a poem or prose work you are developing, or would like to start. It works equally well for people looking to explore a new project, or simply to check in with themselves. Julie’s explores ways to expand your work dynamically through different forms of research and I found it gave me a breakthrough into a poem which had been hovering half-realised since the summer, so I warmly recommend trying it for yourself.
Frame for Setting Your Creative Compass to draw in central third of A4 page.
In addition to these prompts, we both performed two short sets of poems, and spoke to each other between them about how they came into being, going deep with where we resourced our work – whether from online resources including YouTube, books, museum catalogues, or other starting points. My poems came from my collection, bird of winter, and Julie’s from her pamphlet, Whalers, Witches and Gauchos. Because we were recording in the run up to the winter solstice, we structured our sets to rise from darkness into light, and both kept lit candles burning beside us as symbols of inspiration and resilience. The aim was also to share how although our poems appear to journey huge distances through time and space on the page, much of this travel is in fact realised without ever leaving home, whether we’re writing about Pompeii and Herculaneum in my case, or in Julie’s about the Basque heritage she explores in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, which she published this year with Nine Pens.
pistil by alice hiller from bird of winter
Julie also asked me about my practice of working with my childhood and adolescent medical notes, which have been crucial to my collection bird of winter, as with the poem ‘pistil’, given above. The poem is named for the female reproductive parts of the flower. It juxtaposes a quote from my medical notes when I was two, with a direct memory, which reflects how the grooming to which my abuser was subjecting me was already impacting my behaviour, and a photo I recall of myself at that age which my grandmother loved. I was very glad to have the opportunity speak about both the risk, and benefit, of working with documentary evidence such as medical notes if you have a complex history, as I do, arising from my experience of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, and finding my way towards healing beyond this.
As you will be able to hear if you check in with the video, I said how valuable, and painful it was in equal measure, to have factual corroboration of events that lived inside my memory. I explained how I had felt very apprehensive about engaging with my medical notes, for what I might find there, but was very grateful to see that events which my abuser had tried to deny, were in fact recorded in sober black and white. I also told Julie that reading these same notes had in fact provided a core source of motivation for my ongoing activism around changing awareness with regard to childhood sexual abuse. Driving this was how harshly the medical profession had judged my troubled teenage behaviours once the abuse had stopped. I wanted people to understand this adolescent acting out of harm done differently and more compassionately. In the questions which followed, Chaucer Cameron raised the query about notes being redacted, that is having sections blanked out, which has been her experience.
alice hiller Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21
Normally, when I record a Voicing Our Silences performance and workshop, I pause the recording at the prompt stops, and cut the audience participation, to keep the event around an hour. This time, however, we wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone who was joining us, and give the feeling of how the Voicing our Silences collective operates as a place of mutual creative nurture and adventure. Given that it’s a longer watch, I’ve therefore noted the minute timings of the different elements within the YouTube video, (which is captioned for accessibility), for ease of location. While they are managed safely, and there are no explicit references, this video includes discussion of grooming and childhood sexual abuse. If you need support with anything raised the Mind website is very helpful.
Please note, you will need a piece of paper and something to write with for each prompt.
0.00 alice hiller introduces 4.00 Julie Irigaray set 1: ‘The Basque Whaler’, ‘Six War Letters’, ‘Kreig’ 12.00 alice hiller set 1 ‘bains de mer’, ‘pistil’, ‘three small shrines’, ‘in the vineyard’, ‘circular’, ‘joujou’, ‘libation’ 21.20 Julie & alice discussion 1 including use of medical notes in poems 39.32alice hiller prompt : setting your creative compass 1.00 audience feedback. 1.05.50 julie irigaray set 2 : ‘Red Card’, ‘Divine Seraphine’, ‘Via Domitia’ 1.12.30 alice hiller set 2 : ‘the holly tree’, ‘vesuvius’, ‘benediction’, ‘o goddess isis’ 1.20 Julie & alice discussion 1.35 Julie Irigaray prompt turbocharging your creative explorations final questions from Voicing Our Silences collective
Julie’s poems include references to her Basque heritage, which is at the heart of her debut Whalers, Witches and Gauchos,published by Nine Pens earlier in 2021. In the spirit of expanding our horizons, Julie was kind enough to answer a few questions about Basque culture and history, which you can read below.
Photo of the Pyrenees in the Basque region of France by Julie Irigaray.
AH: Whalers, Witches and Gauchos opens with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson about Basque fishing in the Atlantic. From what he said, Basque sailors and whalers were clearly active off Newfoundland and further south from the 1400s onwards. Could you (briefly) tell us something of the history of Basque involvement in whaling? It is partly the subject of the poem ‘The Basque Whaler’, which you perform on the video, but it clearly has deep roots.
JI: The Basques started hunting whales in the 11th century because whales were used to create a wide range of products: candles, soap, cosmetics, to fuel lamps. In the early modern period, Basque whalers spent between six and nine months per year fishing cod and hunting whales near the coasts of Canada and Iceland, in dreary living conditions.
AH: I know the Basque territory is currently ‘divided’ between France and Spain, and there has been political and other forms of activism, including formerly armed conflict, to reclaim and redefine this cultural, geographical and linguistic identity. Would you be able to outline this for us?
JI: The Basque Country is divided between seven provinces: four of them are in Spain, three in France. It has never been a unified country because it was always split up between the kingdoms of France, Navarre and Spain. The Basque language is not related to any other existing language, so some academics theorised the Basques were part of the first wave of human migration in Europe. The pronunciation and dialects of Basque are different from one province to another, although a unified Basque has been created by scholars. The armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization ETA emerged in the Spanish Basque Country in the late 1950s, mainly as a reaction to Franco’s dictatorship. But they kept on carrying out terrorist attacks well after Franco’s death, especially in the 1980s. I think it was particularly difficult to be young in the Basque Country at that time. But this is my parents’ story, not mine. I’ll probably write about it one day after doing more research. When I went on holiday to England fifteen years ago, there were still some people telling me “Oh! You come from the terrorists’ place!”
AH: Am I right in thinking that both your parents’ families are of Basque heritage? Your surname, Irigaray, has a sound which stands outside what I know of both French and Spanish, and I know the final poem ‘Exte’, in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos addresses this? Note – you can read ‘Exte’ at the end of this interview.
JI: You’re absolutely right – and that’s why nobody outside the Basque Country apart from you knows how to pronounce my name! Three of my grandparents are Basque, and the final one comes from les Landes, which is still in the south-west of France. My maternal grandmother comes from the coast and a different province from my father’s family, so there are differences of pronunciation and vocabulary between their Basque. My paternal grandparents used to speak Basque to each other or with their neighbours, and my father has a good grasp of it as well.
AH: One of the ideas that our Voicing Our Silences collective works with is how our difficult histories and experiences can be creatively fruitful, because asking us to find new forms of language to respond to them. ‘Krieg’ in an incredibly vivid, and subtle poem, imagining two former combatants from World War I meeting high in a Basque mountain pass, and reaching a form of understanding which hinges on the title word, which only the German officer understands initially. Could you say something about this poem and the idea of how poetry can open spaces for things we might not otherwise be able to say and also comprehend?
JI: I always knew I was going to write about this family anecdote one day, but I wanted to avoid certain pitfalls, like making it too overly emotional, or depicting my French great-grandfather as the good guy and the German soldier as the villain. These two men cannot communicate because they do not speak the same language, but also because they were conditioned to think of themselves as enemies for seventy years, and fought against each other during World War I. The memory of World War II in occupied countries like France is still sensitive since so many unspeakable things happened. My family did not suffer more than average, but a variety of things happened to them which are difficult to talk about or even taboo, like a great-aunt who fell in love with a German soldier, or a great-grandfather sent to Czechoslovakia to work as forced labour for the German war effort – which was seen as treason by some. During lockdown, I have written a few poems about World War II from the point of view of several family members. I hate black and white pictures of a character, or moralistic views, so what I try to achieve with my poems is a sense of balance. I want to give a voice to both sides of the story without judging, as I did in ‘Krieg’.
AH: ‘Their Common language’ addresses your great-grandparents’ migration to Argentina, and subsequent return to France. Could you say something about the Basque relationship to South America and how that came about?
JI: On my father’s side of the family, several great-grandparents emigrated to Argentina with their parents or siblings because they came from a rural area with little prospects. As I explain in ‘Etxe’, in the Basque tradition, the eldest child (either girl or boy) inherited the family house while the other siblings were left with nothing. One of my great-grandfathers who emigrated to Argentina had thirteen siblings: three sisters ended up nuns, one brother a missionary in Madagascar. Back then, there were not many opportunities to earn a living apart from entering the Church or emigrating to America… In the late nineteenth-century, many Basques moved to Uruguay or Argentina to work as gauchos, others chose the USA to become shepherds in Nevada, California or Florida. The great-grandmother from “Their Common Language” worked in an hotel in Buenos Aires, like the great-grand-uncle who inspired the poem ‘Amerikanoa’. Some of them stayed in Argentina, but many Basques have a sense of nostalgia and preferred moving back to the Basque Country after a few years.
AH: A number of your other poems also lean into this Basque restlessness, and sense of not-belonging to any single place, which I know you and I both share for different reasons, as do millions of people around the world, who have left their places of birth to migrate for economic, political or other reasons. Would you like to say something about this experience of becoming un-rooted, but also of carrying your roots with you?
JI: Since I was a teenager, I dreamed of living abroad. Either for my studies or for professional reasons, I moved back and forth between the Basque Country, Paris, Ireland, Britain and Italy seven times in seven years, which had its toll on my mental and physical health. When I moved back to the UK for my first job, I felt terribly homesick, and for the first time. I started a series of Basque poems that made up the greater part of Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, probably because I felt completely unrooted. I found it more difficult than the first time I lived in England to study to fit in. I think it was because I had lived in so many countries, and picked up some bits of each of their cultures, that I didn’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m still processing this. My poems interrogate cultural differences because it is a subject that I constantly think of.
AH: I know you have been back in the Basque region of France during the lockdown, able to travel both to the Atlantic and the Pyrenees, when free of restrictions. How has it impacted your work being back in these landscapes?
JI: Unfortunately, few good poems came out of my lockdown writing, precisely because of the anxiety generated by the closing of all borders. The border between France and Spain remained shut for almost four months, and I have spent a day in Spain since Christmas 2019 because things are still not back to normal. Even during World War II or under Francoism, the border could be crossed, albeit illegally. I wrote a poem about a friend being in lockdown in San Sebastian (where the lockdown was extremely restrictive) and my panic at the idea that I could not see him for months because the border was shut. I wanted to capture this claustrophobic feeling. It’s difficult to explain this to people who live on an island, but sharing a border with another country is for us a natural right and a source of enrichment. I have also written a poem from the point of view of the border, and all the historical events it witnessed through millennia. But in the end, I did not write much about the Basque Country. I write better about a place when I see it from a distance, ideally when I live in another country. I wrote almost all my Basque poems while living in the UK, and during lockdown I wrote many poems about Italy because I felt extremely upset about not being allowed to travel back there.
AH: Some of your newest poems are following your interest in military history, addressed in a number of the poems in WWG, including the ways in which countries who have denied citizens their rights nonetheless require them to die in their wars. This was the the case for many soldiers brought in from Britain’s colonised countries during the first and second world wars, as Sathnam Sanghera has explored in Empireland. It was also the case for Basque citizens resident in France. Could you say something about these poems, and the new ones which are forthcoming?
JI: I was looking for books on this subject, so thank you for recommending Sanghera’s! I would like to address the subject of the soldiers who fought for the French and British colonies one day as they were completely written out of history, but I need to find the right approach. I normally write a lot about women, but these days I am interested in the values conveyed by the army, especially with regard to masculinity. France is still a very militarised country. With the rise of the right and the French presidential elections taking place in five months’ time, some politicians have suggested the return of the military service for both men and women, and I don’t see it in a good light. There was also the bicentenary of Napoléon’s death this year, and I’m not fond of the idea of promoting the legacy of a man who invaded and subjected a whole continent and killed around three million European soldiers (and God knows how many civilians) for his campaigns. I am writing a couple of poems about these themes and the toxic myths surrounding masculinity. My poem ‘Six War Letters’ tells the story of an underaged young man who is enrolled in World War I in spite of all and stops idealising war as a way to prove his manhood. One English teacher told me she’d taught this poem to her boys-only class and that one pupil said it made him reconsider masculinity. I couldn’t be prouder! I also recently talked to my parents about my father’s and uncle’s experiences of military service or hazing when they entered their engineering school, and I found these testimonies deeply disturbing. As someone who was bullied in school, I can imagine the psychological impact of hazing in elite schools and universities, and I am outraged by the mechanisms used by the bullies to make their victims believe this is perfectly normal, and even desirable.
AH: Finally, I know you are also working on a PhD about Sylvia Plath and her relationship with England and Europe at Huddersfield. What does 2022 hold for you Julie Irigaray, in so much as it is possible for any of us to answer this question?
JI: A lot of travelling, I hope! If Covid does not come on the way, I should attend several conferences in France and the UK. I am co-organising an online conference on Sylvia Plath (https://bit.ly/3yHGIW0) on 11th and 12th March 2022, and I will be a volunteer for The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival that should take place in Hebden Bridge at the end of October. I also need to write a couple of academic articles, so 2022 will be more PhD-oriented. But I will try to assemble a poetry collection as I have enough poems that satisfy me to create one now.
from Whalers, Witches and Gauchos by Julie Irigaray.
If you would like to read more of Julie Irigaray’s work please visit her brilliant website.
On Saturday 6 November, I was asked to read and speak at an event on Poetry and Trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh 2021 with brilliant, radical poets Chaucer Cameron, Day Mattar and Tessay Foley, introduced by poet and academic Patricia Debney. We have in common a background of having been subjected to predation and sexual abuse, in childhood or afterwards. Our shared experience, and the fact that we have all made artworks which begin in this harsh place, set the stakes very high in terms of creating an event which could speak collectively to people with similar experience in their own histories. The link to the podcast follows further down.
Sixty-five people tuned in to join us mid-afternoon. I don’t think anyone who was there will ever forget what was said and read. Both Chaucer and Day touched on their experiences of sex work or prostitution. Chaucer’s pamphlet In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is part memoir/part fiction. It explores the impact of sex work on body, mind and spirit – through the voices of characters speaking to and with each other, while also questioning what it takes to leave this profession. Speaking of one of the female characters, who in real life was murdered, Chaucer said : “In my version she has her own voice, she sings her own song…and this is what it looks like.” The same could be true of her performance of those extraordinary poems on 6 November.
With real poignancy, and an ability to enter a child’s perspective, Day’s debut Springing from the Pews, with Broken Sleep Books, documents a six year old boy being groomed and then abused. Interweaving confessions, journal entries, and multiple voices into a verse play, the poems follow this little boy into adult life, asking how we may live with, and beyond, this very difficult legacy. He explained “I struggled for a long time to write these poems… I had multiple voices in my head…responding each as loud as each other… contradictory, loving, manipulative.” The results are astonishing.
Tessa Foley’s poems live in rooms where shadows rise up from the corners, even when the lights are on, and follow people down the streets at high noon. Drawing both on family history, and her own experience of volunteering for three years at Portsmouth Rape and Abuse Counselling Centre, the poems of What Sort of Bird Are You? witness the greatest difficulties, but also document moving beyond them into a more hopeful and resilient spaces, engendered in part through acts of mutual solidarity and community. Her line “Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing” could speak for us all.
My own text is given in full below, exploring the idea of trauma as a wound, and how we may heal beyond it. I chose poems relating to water, to honour Aldeburgh’s seaside setting. To hear Chaucer’s, Day’s and Tessa’s voices testifying to experiences which I felt in my own body and spirit, had my heart rushing before I ever got to my own set. I was hugely honoured to perform with them. Inevitably, I needed to rebalance myself afterwards. Walking by the Thames later that afternoon, allowing the present world back into me as dusk deepened, I saw a footbridge lit up over the dark water. Watching it, I felt as if I had been given a visual representation of how we had, through our works, lit safe passages over places where we had once known great suffering.
As the set was an hour long, and very intense, I decided to record the audio of my poems and words separately as well – for people who wanted a shorter listen, or who might be hesitant around exposing themselves to the longer experience of the full set. The performance and comments from the audience set twitter alight for hours and days afterwards. My individual recording is 15 minutes long. I have put the linking text I wrote below it as a guide to what to expect.
To give a flavour of my approach, the words I wrote to link the poems are reproduced below in italics, interspersed by the poem titles. ‘phare d’ailly’ is reproduced as a sample of my work, because it has appeared in PN Review, along with a description of discovering ancient Herculaneum by Scipio Maffei. You can hear all the poems in full on the recording. If you face hearing challenges please contact me through the blog and I can send you a full text of words and poems.
If you would like to buy bird of winter, it’s available here.
alice hiller words and water poems on healing beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh:
As many of you know, trauma means wound in ancient Greek. My own collection, bird of winter, is partly about the childhood wound of being groomed and sexually abused by my mother. But it’s also about healing, and opening our wings into wider, freer skies. I’ll alternate poems which explore my difficult early years with others honouring experiences that helped me reclaim life. Celebrating Aldeburgh, many of the poems include water. First up is ‘bains de mer’ or ‘sea swimming’, remembering my beloved French bonne maman or grandmother.
bains de mer [performed]
Bonne maman represented a space of safety and unconditional love. Because my mother was my abuser, danger remained omnipresent. Normandie is the backdrop to a photo taken by my father in ‘pistil’. Named for the female reproductive parts of a flower, the poem combines words from my childhood medical notes with direct memories.
pistil [performed]
In addition to my medical notes, bird of winter is framed by Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both were harbour towns, but water is not a place of refuge or safety in the abuse poems. ‘let none of this enter you’ is spoken to my four or five year old self – with extra lines by Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which shapes bird of winter.
let none of this enter you [performed]
Even though he worked long hours, my diplomat father had been my protector. Once he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when I was six, power shifted. I was eight when he died and my mother and I moved from Brussels, to England. I saw my father as the lighthouse whose beams lit my bedroom in Normandie.
phare d’ailly
papa the tide at vasterival was going out when you were carried from our flat as I slept
your jaw swung open like a latchless door
the sea is now 1km from the site of pompeii
The penetrative abuse began in England. My erasure ‘and now came the ashes’ is from Pliny the Younger’s account of Vesuvius :
and now came the ashes [performed]
Traumatic events such as rape fracture our consciousness. Scipio Maffei’s 1747 account of excavating Herculaneum offered a way of suggesting the injuries arising from raping a child, along with the difficulties of voicing this. The reader gets to puzzle out the imagery. They can determine how far to engage.
proceeding blindly through tunnels and through narrow passages much will be broken much will be destroyed nor will it ever be possible to see the noble buildings in their entirety
Scipio Maffei 1747
Even in very difficult times, the memory of my father, and my bonne maman’s love, gave my spirit a space of nurture. This is critical for all of us who are subjected to wounding experiences. ‘Rue de l’aurore’ was my grandmother’s address in Brussels. It means street of the dawn.
rue de l’aurore [performed]
I escaped the physical element of the abuse when I was thirteen by stopping eating. I was admitted to hospital – but this was 1977. Eating disorders were not recognised as a possible indicators of childhood sexual abuse. I wasn’t asked about, or able to speak directly of, what my mother had done. The psychiatrist who saw me understood something terrible had happened. Writing ‘tesselation’, I instinctively sited myself between worlds, like water becoming vapour.
tessellation [performed]
My mother ended all contact with this psychiatrist when I was released from hospital. I was left very vulnerable. With time, I reconnected with life and love again and began to reclaim my body. My final poem moves between capture and release, remembering when I was seventeen.
becoming your channel of pearl [performed]
I dedicate it to all of us who turn our faces to the light, no matter what darkness we have come through [end of set].
The Festival brought together a rainbow of poets from Andrew McMillan, Sean Hewitt, Kim Moore, Victoria Kenneflick, Dom Bury, Colette Bryce, Rachel Long, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Momtaza Mehri and Sarah Westcott, to name but a few. The podcasts will be up on the Poetry in Aldeburgh website over the next days. I really recommend checking in with them.
If you live in or near London, I’ll be performing live for Outspoken at the Southbank with Nick Mahona and Wayne Holloway-Smith on Thursday 25 November at 7.45 pm. I’ll be sharing poems about the bumpy teenage years that follow grooming and childhood sexual abuse, but also how these are the freedom trail that leads to reclamation and healing.
Like miniature tornados rising up off the page, poems move energy. Working with words and sounds, they carry their readers, or listeners, into spaces which are new to us – hopefully without inflicting damage. By involving us imaginatively, and creatively, they open our consciousnesses to transformative alchemies. Or that’s the aim. For those of us who work with difficult materials, the reader or listener can of course decide how far ‘in’ they want to go, and how much of the created world they allow to come alive. When a poem has an element of catharsis, they can also choose if they want to become part of the shift this precipitates.
Naples seen from above, with Vesuvius
To explore how this poem/tornado process might take place, my second bird of winter podcast rides the energy flow of ‘sea level’, which came together on a winter trip to Naples. Specifically, I engage with how the poem imagines worlds to generate forward and upward movement. In this case, it’s from a place of suppression and denial towards a place of comprehension and healing, and from underground darkness up towards the light of day. If you’d like to listen to this as a podcast, with an optional prompt at the end for your own art-making, the link is here: https://youtu.be/pJLPHD5A2sE
If you’d prefer to check it out, developed for the page as an essay, please keep reading. The photographs are ones I took in Naples. As a word of warning – this episode mentions sexual abuse briefly, in the context of the weight of silencing that can arise from this crime, and its potential for continued resonance in our adult lives. I also explore how we can move beyond its heavy legacy towards reclamation. While I’ll be tracking the energy flow through the individual lines of ‘sea level’, to hear the poem from start to finish please follow this link to my recording:
For ‘sea level’s tornado to lift off, it needed both darkness and light. Real tornadoes require warm humid air, and cold dry air, to create the rotating updraft that leads to the formation of the funnel cloud. In this case, I wanted readers to feel the oppressiveness of the silence and denial that abusers, including my own, force onto children. These weights are carried by many of us whose experiences have been denied or dismissed. Having encountered them within the physical landscape of the poem, we can enter into the relief that arises when they are released, collectively, into an act of witness and reclamation.
Back in December 2018, the day before I wrote the first draft of ‘sea level’, (when I still had no idea it was coming to me), I’d visited the palatial Archaeological Museum, in the grimy heart of Naples. The city’s soundtrack is a symphony of car horns but the tight street grid in the old town dates back to Roman times. Extraordinary finds, from statues, to frescoes, to objects from daily life including a charred cradle, were excavated from the volcanic rock that covered the ancient city of Herculaneum. Key items are displayed in room after room, alongside equally dazzling, moving, and mundane, treasures from the neighbouring city of Pompeii. They make you feel as if time is melting and you no longer know quite where you stand.
Wall painting of young woman from Archaeological Museum
While Pompeii was covered with ash that was relatively easy to shift when Vesuvius erupted, four metres of molten volcanic materials settled into solid rock over ancient Herculaneum. To rediscover the city, the original excavators had to tunnel down, partly below the modern town of Ercolano, at great personal risk from poisonous gases and cave-ins, beginning during the eighteenth century. Reading about them, and seeing old illustrations in my guide book, called to mind my own painful, stumbling, sometimes dangerous and destabilising, process of excavating my childhood memories. I embarked on this in my thirties, during the 1990s, with the support of a skilled psychotherapist.
Those same childhood memories were moving in the shadowed corners of my thoughts as I walked around the museum, trying to take in as much as possible, and then explored the tiny shops and tight backstreets of Naples while dusk came and people started to congregate in bars and cafes after work. While most people think of December in terms of holidays and celebrations, for me it marks the anniversary of when the penetrative sexual abuse began during my childhood, in 1972. I was eight and a half. With my abuser, who was my mother, I’d just moved to a small village in Wiltshire following the death of my diplomat father. Even decades later, whenever I can, I go abroad briefly at that time of year, to reset the light in England, which can intensify the return of flashbacks and nightmares.
Eighteenth century anonymous illustration of visiting the excavations at Herculaneum
Despite the Southern Italian location, the night after I visited the Archaeological Museum, I woke in the early hours from a dream of being held down in the darkness, as had happened when I was a child. Lying in the dark hotel room, cold and scared, the feeling the dream left me with, after a day of imagining the still largely buried ancient city of Herculaneum, and then walking Naples’ shadowy, narrow twisting back streets, somehow led to the phrase “there will always be the city/ beneath this city charted by no one” dictating itself. This became the first two lines of ‘sea level’. I was thinking of Herculaneum. I was also articulating my own underground memories, nestled beneath the surface of my daily life, but swimming up to its surface again in the crack in time that the December anniversary had opened.
Jotting the words down, on a bedside scrap of paper, but also opening myself to the energy I could feel rising up, I next heard “where column of stone tears/ cling to the ceilings.” As a child, I could neither cry, nor cry out, in bed beside my abuser. When you visit underground cave systems, the stalactites and stalagmites can seem like frozen ghosts, caught momentarily in the electric lights of the present. I knew these stone columns were my own emotions, unarticulated and unacknowledged, until my thirties – when I first started to thaw and allow myself to re-experience them with professional support. Brittle and dangerous until that point, they had hung within me like unwieldy stone daggers, triggering panic attacks and flashbacks, as is the case for many peoples who have experienced trauma. But the image was by no means exclusively sad. Stalactites are also objects of great beauty. Crystalline structures, created from dripping water, they sparkle when illuminated, and make visible the accretions of time.
Seeing the lines on the hotel notepad, I felt again that tornado of energy rising within them, driving the narrative forwards. What came to me next was an image that called back the lost inhabitants of my imagined underground city “whose people were once/ lost or vaporised/ their houses and temples/ buried and forgotten”. This of course happened historically to the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum – whose lives we now know in considerable detail thanks to the works of recovery undertaken by archeologists, and scholars. Within the carbonised cradle, the feather-light residue of a baby testified to his or her former presence. In Pompeii, archeologists pour plaster into voids left in the ash where bodies decomposed, to cast out the shapes of the people who fell trying to escape Vesuvius.
Figures cast from hollows left in the ash at Pompeii photo Wikipedia
By the end of 2018, when I visited Naples, I had begun to share the poems which were my own creative acts of recovery. I was also being mentored by Pascale Petit under the Jerwood Arvon scheme. Through the responses I was receiving from her and other people, I knew that by writing about my childhood, the spell of denial thrown over my own life was being undone. This also happens when other denied and buried histories – including those of enslavement, persecution, and genocide – are recovered and documented.
Carried forward by so many powerful examples, scribbling in bad handwriting by the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains, I felt myself caught up into the process of collective reclamation and voicing. This was the journey of the poem, from darkness to light, from silence to noise. As it took hold of me, with the Bay of Naples moving as a wash of liquid blackness beyond the town, I heard “let these people who are my people/ enter your lives again”. What had been denied and pushed down was rising up now in a way that made me think of a different set of tunnels altogether.
Oritigia, showing temple columns in the wall of the church.
These were the tunnels under the Sicilian town of Ortigia, that I had previously visited with Pen, the younger of my two adult sons. The town has existed since classical times, and its main church is made from a former Greek temple, whose columns are still visible within the walls. Ortigia’s deep network of tunnels were used over the centuries for rituals, burials and shelter, including from bombing during the second world war. They formed places of safety, as we discovered during a guided tour. Going underground in the town square, the musty, twisting passages emerge from darkness into the light of day at sea level, where the white gold rock of the island meets the turquoise waves. It was this memory which informed the next lines – “and hope will shaft passages/ up through the bedrock”. The photograph I chose for the YouTube podcast was taken on that holiday. Being with my own son, by the iridescent waters of the Mediterranean, was in my mind as the last lines of the poem came to me, as you will be able to hear again.
alice hiller emerging from the tunnels in Ortigia, photo by Pendragon Stuart.
‘sea level’ moves from suppression and denial, into life and community, ending “until we swim free/ within the breathing harbour of morning”. The double sound meaning of its final word – morning – holds within it an echo of the sorrow and loss which is also part of the process of the poem. It gives the journey into the light an element of circularity, echoing the circling of energy which is also integral to the formation of a tornado. Those of us who have known difficult times will recognise how this circling can be manifested in the return of memories and anniversaries of the sort which kicked off the poem for me. While such a legacy is not easy to carry, I understand that it forms the foundation of who I am as a person, and as an artist, and has become one of the deep energy sources that fuel my work and my political consciousness.
Sunrise over the harbour in Naples
If anything in this blog has been difficult, the Mind website has valuable links.
If you would like to read more about bird of winter please go to the page in this blog, where I explain its background, or follow this link to Pavilion Poetry’s website: http://bit.ly/birdhiller.
If you would like to try out putting your own journey poem or artwork together, the following prompt may give you a few ideas.
The first stage of putting your own journey poem or artwork together will be to think of an experience, feeling or memory which will be your starting point. It doesn’t have to be taken from your own life, but it should be something that you can potentially travel beyond to a new place, physically, emotionally, geographically or conceptually. This is what will give your work its forward motion and form its primary energy source.
In my case, the journey was from my child to my adult self, from a crime taking place to its anniversary many decades later, and from an individual, silenced position, to a collective act of witness. Be careful if your explorations start to feel upsetting for any reason, and plan beforehand how to stay emotionally safe. You might want to have a friend you can connect with, or a helpline you can call, or another form of support.
The next stage is to select your recording materials. You might want to write on a sheet of paper or in a notebook, or type into a new document on your computer, or speak into your phone using a voice memo app. All are equally good. Once you’re ready, set a timer for five minutes, and then write, or speak freely, and without censuring yourself, about the starting point of your experience. What you’re looking to capture is the emotional mood and colour of the subject, rather than any formal description. Rough jottings, phrases, and images are great.
Naples from the island of Capri
The next step will be to repeat this writing or recording process for another five minutes, envisaging and describing the place where the journey travels to. You could do this straight after, or you might want to leave it until another day, week, or even month. Sometimes poems and artworks come quickly, but other times they reveal themselves to us more slowly and gradually. When you’ve got the two sets of material, combine them into a single document, so you can see how they sit together.
Beyond this, or alongside the process, you want to start thinking about a physical terrain across which the emotional journey of your poem or artwork can realise itself. In my case, it was the double set of tunnels in Herculaneum and Ortigia, which became a single joined underground landscape. They could be landscapes you know personally, or ones you have experienced either online or via film or television or books. They could be from the past, or the present.
The sea off Ortigia in Sicily.
Once you have identified your landscape, or landscapes, you want to generate some words around them. If they are nearby, maybe visit them with your phone to speak into, or paper to write on. Otherwise, spend some time just looking at them online or in books. As you’re engaging with the landscapes, notice the feelings and ideas that come up, and again jot down phrases and images. Do it as a timed session if that’s feasible and helpful. As before, be careful if this starts to feel upsetting for any reason, and plan beforehand how to stay emotionally safe.
Land travelling into water
The final step will be to bring together your two sets of words and images – about the experience, and the landscape – in a way that makes the journey of your poem or artwork travel forward through time and across geography to its place of arrival.
Good creating – and thank you for reading. Please sign up to the blog if you would like to be notified of other bird of winter podcasts and materials, and writing and interviews more generally on the topic of working creatively and transformatively with difficult materials.
Traveller, writer, theatre-maker, and freestyler, Arji Manuelpillai is a poet whose work has always derived energy and resonance from its live components. While Mutton Rolls, his debut pamphlet from Out-Spoken, was launched online from his living room in lockdown, this in no way diminished audience numbers, or the warmth of their appreciation. Mutton Rolls’ poems find their subjects in UK raves and garage forecourt shops, but also on Sri Lankan beaches and in the aftermath of bombings and tsunamis. Like strobe lights flashing moments of visibility, they illuminate growing up in Britain with the double consciousness that derives from knowing your parents and family once lived somewhere else, and explore what it means not always to be made to feel welcome. Witty, joyous, and irreverent, the poems we talk about do not hesitate to call out the unacceptable. They can spin in a second to catch your heart – and hold it in a net of words that makes it beat differently when let go again.
AH: I’d like to start by asking you about your experience of the last few months Arji. You launched Mutton Rolls within the full UK lockdown. You also ran free poetry workshops with special guests on zoom which attracted huge attendances during the months when we were largely unable to meet in the physical world. How has this been for you?
AM: Such a pleasure to be here with you Alice and thanks so much for taking the time to chat to me. It has been a whirlwind few months. With so much of our collective futures turned upside down, I’ve found it difficult to manage my own expectations and keep the positivity up. However, in another way I have lived my whole life as a freelancer and with that sort of lifestyle comes an ability to adapt to the challenges with innovation and creativity. I can think of nothing worse than being furloughed at home being unable to work on new projects. So I was thankful for the opportunity to start Arji’s Poetry Jam, to continue with workshops with young people, help create a Refugee Week education resource for Kazzum Arts, and to plan and deliver a great release party for the pamphlet. It has been interesting as I feel like the online thing has provided people with greater accessibility in many ways. It creates a global playing field with fans for the workshops appearing in NZ, Finland, Canada and New York. It also made me feel like anything is possible with a little creativity. Right now, I’m spending a whole lot of time on Zoom but I’m really missing the real life groups, the community and the love of people connecting and creating together. I’m praying for the future, that we will return and still create wonderful work someday.
AH: I understand that. I feel the same way. It’s really fantastic that you have been able to continue to reach out and deliver to so many different groups against all the odds. People who want to find out more about these projects can check out the links on www.arji.org. Coming back to the current situation, you tweeted your uncle was one of the first doctors to die from COVID 19. The poem ‘after being called a paki’ confronts the racism which your father and his generation were met with on arrival in the UK. I wondered what it’s been like to publish a pamphlet which calls out UK racism past and present, and then have the #BlackLivesMatter movement rise up so powerfully here and round the world, speaking to and with so many of your themes?
AM: It has been so interesting to see how people respond to the poems about race. I’ve been surprised by some animosity towards poems like ‘white people’ and thenI’ve had some really heartfelt messages from other South Asian people who connect with the work. I hadn’t really realised how important it was to speak to my community and capture those feelings until it was actually out there. This was highlighted by a good friend of mine who doesn’t ‘do poems’, (those are the people I really love to reach). He told me how he had never found the words to say how he felt growing up as a British Asian but now suddenly the book had captured them. I felt moved by that. As the BLM thing started to rise I was fully engrossed, angry, unsurprised, pretty much like most of the minority communities – but as it moved forward I started to unpack some of the racism within the South Asian community. I think we have to remember that the racism that black people feel in this country is unique to this country and the people within it. Black people deserve this space for discussion and the recognition of the racism they face and it is up to us all to face that head on and bring sustainable change. That’s not to say the South Asian experience isn’t important or valid. It is just accepting that the grouping together of races doesn’t help any of us. I am fortunate to have worked with inspiring black men and women and will continue to fight for change and equality. I believe that this is a movement of hope and change is possible if we are willing to keep trying.
AH: I absolutely agree with you, and I think your work is unquestionably part of that larger movement, and has been for many years. Calling into question the stability and integrity of contemporary identities, and the pressures to which people can be subjected, your opening poem, ‘credit card’, begins “someone pretended to be me/ filled my details out online”. The intercepted card is imagined/described as being used to facilitate an impeccably ‘middle class’ spending spree which includes “crème fraiche” for leek and potato soup, and ends up funding a seat at a shared table in a café “on the white side of Peckham” where the thief is supposed to have:
had a tea and carrot cake read the paper, lent back in their seat
so their hands fell to their sides and the lady to the right casual as breathing pulled her handbag close
The only skin tone that is mentioned is “white”, but the “casual as breathing” action of the woman has the effect of putting the “someone” under suspicion for no reason that can be deduced from their tea drinking, paper reading or carrot cake eating. Would you be able to say something about the relationship between the speaking “me” and the observed “someone” in ‘credit card’, and why you chose to open Mutton Rolls with this poem?
AM: This poem is one of those poems that fell out of my head on a long walk. Someone actually did fraud my debit card and went to Morrisons and spent a small amount of money on groceries. I couldn’t get this idea out of my head, that someone was just hungry, no drugs, no alcohol, just hungry. All of those preconceived prejudice I had were thrown away. Almost in the same week I was in a theatre show, it was a play set in South Africa. In the middle of the piece I sat back in my seat and the lady beside me suddenly reached to her side, grabbed her bag and put it in her lap in the most awkward position. I sat there for 2 hours wanting to ask her why she had done that but I didn’t have the guts and it probably would have seemed over-the-top. As with many of my poems, it is the coming together of two contrasting ideas that gives birth to a real ‘charged’ feeling. So, let’s go back to the debit card thief. I started imagining a whole world for this thief, I created short vignettes of them all round town and the question kept coming up as to why they might have stolen the card. I was moving towards the ‘someone’ wanting to feel like they were part of the elitist class, like they could dine in the places the middle class dine but at the bottom of all that, they never truly belong. I combined that idea with the concept that no matter how well the thief works, he can never shake his class away. Hence the lady pulling her bag in at the end. I love that poem as it is all about wanting to belong and that’s the reason I put it at the opening of the pamphlet.
AH: Wanting to belong gets imagined in a different way in ‘brown boys in Kavos.’ The poem begins among a “tulip-topped spliffs” and “the backwash of cheap vodka” at “4am in a balmy Greek heat.” A hymn to the hedonism of “rumbling dance floors”, its heroes are “four brown corduroy-coloured boys” who are “failing to get laid/ in the ‘getting laid’ capital of Greece.” Their charms are coming off worse to “sweaty charisma and beautiful blackness” on the one hand, and “glitter soaked torsos/ all fearless and normal and slavemastery.” Against this temporarily disheartening outcome, their salvation, and reclamation of themselves comes in their solidarity, as the sun calls into life a new day:
brown boys think themselves ugly
but not yet ugly because they are brown the sun is reaching over the rooftops brown boys light cigs and laugh an orgasm is caught in the breeze
I wondered if the idea of working collectively, and in concert with others, resonated with you, as part of a creative and transformative process?
AM: Everyone who knows me knows that I believe creativity is best enjoyed together. The camaraderie, the sharing of ideas, the spontaneity, I believe it is at the centre of a healthy mind and spirit. I have spent most of the last 15 years in participation arts because I truly believe making art together is integral to a happy society. In other parts of the world participatory arts is just art, by which I mean, everything is focussed around making art together. This is really true when we think about poetry.Poetry communities are integral to the scene, taking a poem to a group and sharing process is everything. Without it I really feel I would not be half the poet I am. This is one of the reasons why I feel there needs to be more mentorships for minority groups to encourage collaboration and connection. It is these communities that will nurture and grow Britain’s best new poems. Many publishers at the moment are asking for BAME poets to come forward but we need ‘quality’ – and to make ‘quality’ poets you need quality mentoring spread over long periods of time.
If you are interested in finding yourself a group perhaps start at The Poetry School where regular bursaries are available. Alternative options are Malika’s Kitchen and Covent Garden Stanza (run of course by you Alice). These are free groups but you will probably be asked to send samples. Loneliness is affecting us all at the moment so don’t sit in silence, connect with others and use art as a vehicle for transformation.
AH: Again, I can only agree. The Poetry Society co-ordinates Stanza groups up and down the UK, with further groups available in a few other countries, or with online membership. I’ll put details at the end of the interview. I know that the support of our stanza group really helped me personally during a very difficult few weeks in lockdown, It’s also been a fantastic place for me to try out new work in a safe place. Going back to Mutton Rolls, while ‘brown boys’ has a sunrise ending, ‘half catholic’ strikes a more sombre note. The first person speaker reveals himself to be a man who, while attracted to women, also responds to men with desire. As a woman who is drawn to both women, and men, this is a duality which I recognise. Reflecting how Catholicism can become a force which risks alienating people from themselves, the speaker remembers how:
at fifteen I touch a man in a way that makes me wish God didn’t exist
throw up behind a Ford Fiesta brush my teeth till the toothbrush snaps
“in Lourdes years later” he promises “not to want/ a man again” and prays for this to happen. Returning to the motif of theft, also present within ‘credit card’, the poem ends:
after the tsunami I watch a man
pickpocket a corpse quietly as though hiding it from the sky
The pickpocketing is presumably a matter of economic necessity, in order to ensure survival. I wondered if you could say something about why you chose to set those two narratives consecutively, and whether the reader was being asked to think about the historic thefts and appropriations of colonialism, and their enduring impacts through time?
AM: This poem is the coming together of a series of moments in my life. All of them are strung together through a feeling of humiliation and shame, a sense of not belonging and being unable to conform to a system that didn’t necessarily fit me both religiously, ideologically and spiritually. Landing in Sri Lanka during the Tsunami was one of the most pivotal moments of my life. It came at a time when I was turning to activism and God, observing the situation unravel was painful. I was amazed by the level of blind faith that many of the victims had, even after they had often lost their family, friends and livelihoods. Their faith gave them strength, it was something I envied but also something I ridiculed. This for me, connected the two parts of my upbringing. One side of me is always in awe of my heritage as a Sri Lankan Tamil, half Catholic and half Hindu. With that side comes all of the myths and stories and the rich cultural history of tradition and ritual. But the other British side was often disillusioned, faithless and sceptical of it all. That dichotomy is at the centre of the poem and a great deal of my work. I dabbled with the ending for a long, long time. Finally I came to this idea of a man stealing money while only caring about God watching. It seemed to connect to the British impact in Sri Lanka, it shows the power of capitalism and it also illustrates shame and it also connected with the desperation to survive.
AH: That’s an incredibly rich explanation Arji. It really captures how poems can hold multiplicities without forcing a single or simple resolution. Belinda Zhawi talked to me earlier in this series about the impacts of colonialism in Zimbabwe which was similarly powerful. There is an ongoing, and fruitful, tension in your work between narrating your experiences as a person, not least in several powerful break-up poems, and as a person of colour. Many writers are responding to this, not least the poet Cathy Park Hong in her study Minor Feelings, whose work speaks to many of us. ‘nominated for a BAME prize’ tackles this complexity head on, beginning “it’s always in capitals/ like someone is shouting it.” The speaker states “I feel almost unBAME// in my M&S shirt and trousers”, and seems to position the BAME branding as something which risks diminishing and ghettoising artists, and over-simplifying complex, nuanced narratives. Is that a fair reading?
AM: I think that is an extremely astute reading. I feel like BAME as a title has a truckload of problems associated with it. It boxes us all together, which dilutes the differentiation of culture between countries and religious groups. It gives people the perception that we are ‘all the same’ when in actual fact the continent of Asia is as diverse as you can get and Sri Lanka is a place made up of so many different minority groups. I totally sympathise with those that have tried to champion the representation of minorities in the arts but BAME is starting to feel a little dated. On top of this I’ve seen the term become quite divisive within the arts sector. Artists like me get a role or new project but it feels rather shadowed by the idea that ‘I only got it because I’m brown’. Often other artists may think me not deserving of the opportunity and that hurts. By segmenting us off, and doing call outs and competitions just for specific groups, it ends up feeling like we are in some way not applicable to the same rules of quality as our white counterparts. This is the opposite of what we as a society are trying to achieve. The funding and grant system in this country is creating divisions amongst artists, from those that do or don’t get funded, to those that can or can’t write an application form. Sometimes it feels like we spend so much of our time divided instead of innovating together.
I’m not sure what the answers are, but I believe the start is to have a universally clearer understanding of the differentiation between countries, cultures and traditions. When we begin to accept our own ignorance we will begin to move into a space where we are ready to grow and learn. This space is a position of true power.
AH: Undoubtedly your work is helping this transformation. The back cover of Mutton Rolls says you , like the speaker of ‘nominated for a BAME prize’, were “shortlisted for the Burning Eye BAME Pamphlet Prize 2018.” I wondered if I could ask you here something about the first person “I” of your poems? Do you see it as primarily specific, that is linking the work with you, Arji Manuelpillai, as a series of statements of witness? Or is it more a ‘first personal universal’, so that the I becomes a portal through which the reader can look with a greater degree of empathy and understanding? Or both?
AM: You are the first person to call this out. Yes, much as I love and respect Burning Eye, they did inspire that poem. After I was shortlisted I found it interesting how I didn’t tell my parents it was a BAME prize. I was almost embarrassed by it. So I create vehicles for the personal messages to travel through. I do feel like the work is reflective of where I was at during that time. I wanted it to be like a calling card for my style and voice. The voice is very much me, the situations (though not always completely true) are very much like me and I’m proud of that. I hope that they will provide a greater understanding and empathy from the reader but I also feel they are fragments of myself and not designed to lead or coax the reader into any set reaction. I think in the newer work I am creating I am more interested in the ‘I’ taking a back seat, perhaps even disappearing and allowing the reader space to walk around, wander and discover. I hope that doesn’t sound too over-the-top. I feel like my new work is going to discuss life in a whole new nuanced way and I’m super excited about it.
AH: I really look forward to those poems Arji. Many of your Mutton Rolls poems explore the emotional lives of men. ‘Cecilia says we’re all fucked up’ is an unpunctuated prose poem that explores the conversations between a psychotherapist and her client. There is a surface play of humour and irony, riffing on the neutral décor and demeanour of the therapist. This anodyne professional setting elicits the revelation “my friend died when I was 24 I never got to say goodbye.” After the apparently desultory meandering leading up to this, however, the closing lines have all the impact of being dropped down through a trap door
I was busy being strong that’s why abstract paintings work so well she’s leaning back must be time wipe the tears away like face paint how long before I’m wandering drunk down the Old Kent Road not knowing how I got there
Could you say something about the poem’s ending, and what it means to you to find forms through which to speak of things which can’t easily be said, but are powerful forces within our lives?
AM: This poem was a real turning point to me. The Cecilia in the poem is actually Cecilia Knapp and the poem came out of a need to connect many opposing internal dialogues with the running dialogue with a therapist. After I finished it I took it to a feedback session and I literally wasn’t sure whether it was good or really rubbish. I think the poem began to unpack a need I have to move towards reflecting the way the mind moves without the need for set narrative. My favourite poets are doing this currently, the work of poets like Jericho Brown, Chen Chen and Morgan Parker have led the way in this, but poets like Wayne Holloway Smith and Emily Berry have paved the way in England too. I feel that this poem was the start of that hunger and movement. The final lines took a lot to muster, the balance was integral and it was discussed over many a cup of tea with Hannah Lowe, who helped me learn about the soft step off. She always says ‘go in hard and get off lightly’ (or something like that). Finding this form and flipping the camera upside down allows us to capture the intricacies of this complex world that we live in. During this answer I’ve name-dropped a bit. I am doing this because it is important to remember that these poems are the product of many discussions, feedback sessions and books by other poets.
AH: You mentioned Wayne Holloway-Smith in the roll call. I know you’ve taken workshops with him. Wayne is concerned to investigate and call out how the complexities of masculinities are represented, and to challenge cultural and class stereotyping. To what extent do you feel your work is in conversation with his poems?
AM: Wow, I never thought of it like that. I’d be honoured for people to even consider them in connection with Wayne’s work. He has been a real inspiration to me. His work unpicks so much about being a man and growing up but it also deals with emotions in an incomplete and broken linear. The real admiration I have for Wayne is his attitude to poetry itself. His mindset is settled around feeling, process and freedom, not necessarily making sense or clarity of narrative. He isn’t bothered whether things look or sound like a poem, he is just about how it makes an audience squeal or turn in their seat. He has taught me to be the sort of poet that doesn’t give a f-ck, to innovate, challenge preconception and industry notions of acceptance, to dig into process, to grow, discover, play with it all and take nothing for granted. Everything we read in the Monday night class we question, poke fun at, pick apart, no one is on a pedestal, everything isn’t about what’s happening but what is ‘working’. Some people say ‘oh it doesn’t seem much like a poem’ and that really doesn’t bother us, I want to make people think and Wayne has taught me that. Thematically, any connections between our work is simply because I have spent too many Monday nights in his group.
AH: I’m sure Wayne will be happy to read that. Your wonderful poem ‘regret’ was placed in last year’s Oxford Poetry Prize. It offers a vignette of “my mum chatting in Tamil to the boy at the petrol station counter.” Snatches of their conversation are represented in Tamil, and the mum is shown as being completely at ease and lost in this moment:
she is Aunty, he is Thamby and the queue behind us can wait
The speaker, however, is excluded, catching only snatches of the conversation, “plucking subtitles from their eyebrows”. Yet it is from this sense of not-fitting that the poem’s voice and consciousness grow. I wondered if you would like to say something about the creative potential of dislocation and exclusion as a generative force for you as an artist, in this poem and more generally?
AM: I feel like not belonging drives the majority of my work. We spend most our years growing up hoping to fit into the system only to realise our uniqueness is what makes us special. In my workshops with young people I’m always encouraging people to think about their exclusion as a force of creativity. Ask yourself, what makes you unique, different and amazing. This poem is a very truthful representation of my mother and I in a petrol station. My Mum is an amazing conversationalist. Whenever we go anywhere she is talking to the cashier or catching up with someone in the queue. In England, India or Sri Lanka she’s always speaking to people and often I wish so much I could join in. I mastered the English language but perhaps in doing so sacrificed my Tamil heritage. This poem isn’t just about language though, it is also about the love I have for my Mum.
AH: Another important woman in your life has been the poet Hannah Lowe, who was your mentor on the Jerwood Arvon Scheme, and who, like so many of us, works from a place of cultural multiplicities. I was massively helped by having Pascale Petit as my mentor on the same scheme. Could you say something about your experience of being mentored by Hannah?
AM: Getting the Jerwood Arvon mentorship was probably one of the biggest achievements of my writing life. It provided me (and you too) with a community of artists, a space to create and a mentor who really believed in me. Hannah has been completely instrumental to my growth as a poet and artist. Her work transcends cultures and backgrounds, her control of narrative is second to none and her ability to mentor is truly masterful. Hannah is always focussed on clarity of image, constantly pushing me to make even the abstract hold true conceit and is always encouraging me to take the reader by the hand and lead them from line to line. This has been so influential to me. When I’m lost, I often see her on my shoulder asking ‘I don’t really get this bit’ or it’s not really clear enough’. She is also a poet who believes in accessibility of the work, so she pushed me to make sure the poems reached the readership I wanted to reach instead of tumbling into abstraction. In many ways Hannah and Wayne sit on opposite ends of a poetry spectrum. This was a wonderful thing to experience, it allowed me to see how poetry could pull and shift in different directions, it allowed me to ride a very thin line between being abstract and being very clear and it also showed me that finally my own choices had to be made. As Hannah once said to me ‘just be confident with what you’re trying to do’. Hannah’s passionate, down to earth, giving nature is something that I will always be thankful for.
AH: ‘after the Sri Lankan bombing that kills 360 (after the 20 year more than killed significantly more)’ uses the powers of miniaturisation deployed by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem ‘Brazil, January 1 1502’, and by Rachael Allen in her poem ‘Banshee’ – to name but two other poets of the tiny. Elizabeth Bishop is describing the rapist-conquistadors who are “hard as nails/ tiny as nails, and glinting, in creaking armour.” Rachael Allen (interviewed last year in this series) is reanimating the murder of a woman whose aggressor works “like a small model forester/ axing up plastic logs.”
Your poem begins “after the news my skin feels darker”, and uses responses to the bombing in the Grand Cinnamon Hotel as a prism to make more visible the complexities of only being “Sri Lankan / at weddings and funerals or for inquisitive white people”. The poem ends by distilling its contradictions into three singing lines:
from here (on the toilet) it’s all just a cluster of tiny red faces wailing in a language I don’t understand in a country I can’t oh look! that’s where Mama and Appa first met
I wanted to ask you to what extent the miniaturised space of the poem – which takes huge subjects and telescopes them down – creates a measure of safety for dealing with difficult or otherwise unmanageable materials?
AM: I think you’re really onto something there. I’m really interested in pulling big political constructs into my poems and sometimes that can be a very daunting thing. Finding methods to do this is tricky. I’ve found that keeping the subject of the poem down-to-earth and ‘local’ allows the overriding message to have its own open plain. In this poem it all centres around the speaker watching a video online yet the focus is bigger. All political problems have a microscopic impact on our lives, that means taking a subject like war and persecution and asking yourself where does that sit on a local level. This can be a very fruitful task and I feel it allows you an ability to not seem ‘over-the-top’ or ‘self-righteous’ which is always the problem of political poetry. I want to take risks and over the last year since the pamphlet has been released I have been researching political poets. Most of them from USA. Tracy K Smith creates letters charting the journey of black slaves from varying people in history. Patricia Smith tells the story through accounts from victims and family members of violence. These poets are a real inspiration to me, they take the human, local situations and show how they are the repercussions of larger political problems. I believe poetry needs to reflect our politics and begin to unpack some of the complexities of our political system. Often these systems seem too much to deal with, too complicated and too daunting but it is important we find ways to do it, it’s important we do not turn away, but instead create vehicles to promote discussion.
AH: I can relate to that, albeit in a slightly different field. As you know, in my current work I am trying to use my own direct experiences of being abused as a child to give witness to, and change awareness around, the global crime of the grooming and sexual abuse of children, and look at its aftermath for vulnerable teenagers. To make the poems, I have to find or open myself to imageries and forms that can hold the materials so they become accessible to, and safe for, the reader, notwithstanding their potentially very difficult subject matters.
More generally, poetry is about control, but it’s also about the reverse – abandoning and opening yourself to let complex things enact a form of authentic aesthetic identity in language. Could you say something about how, when, and where your poems come into being, and your process of working with them to their published forms? I know you also freestyle, where improvisation and being able to trust yourself and go with the energy, is a key?
AM: I am a true believer in play as a means to creation. I believe that being playful will allow us to open ourselves up and throw away the inner voice obsessed with judging our success. Freestyling is the epitome of this. A rapper freestyling is a magical, spontaneous force of creativity. For me, I freestyle best when I am relaxed, when the audience lack judgement, I can move into a space where my brain seems to work outside of itself, where I don’t think of the words, the words just fall together like bubbles pulling together in a bath.This feeling is as much about the people around me as it is about my presence in the moment. I believe that workshops and feedback groups should adopt this way of thinking. The workshops should initially focus on connecting people, creating a relaxed and free space full of love, while allowing people to express and discover themselves in a wholly present way. After this, the poems will simply flow naturally. I chase the feeling of freestyle when I am creating poems. I’m always looking for experiences that bring the playful from me, that pull me out of my usual surroundings and throw me into a space where I must be fully present. I’m all about the process, the feeling of building a poem like a house, and living in it, taking risks and pushing it to see how far it can go. In terms of practise, I try to wake up each day and put something into being. Anything, just accepting whatever comes out can be really rubbish or be the start of something really good. Recently I have read more as this has been a weakness for me.
AH: I wanted to ask about your brilliant final poem, ‘because it’s in the Lonely Planet top five places to visit’. The poem intercuts a couple telling the speaker about how the husband proposed “as the sun / licked the sea red and birds punched shrapnel in the sky”, on the sand outside their beach hut, with the speaker’s account (thought, not spoken within the live conversation) of the island’s recent bloody history, to which they appear oblivious or indifferent :
will you – I used to march to make change but since then I march just to sleep at night that country changed me she says the bars the sea-views biryani kothu roti plus the people are so generous they don’t hassle like Indians they’d drop a bomb wait five minutes drop another to kill the rescue party they spent the whole evening staring out to sea she says it’s their paradise they made a pact to go back there every ten years to that bar in that country where bombs rained into no fire zones where bodies are hidden sixty to a hole it’s hard to put into words he says as their fingers weave together it’s somewhere we could call our second home the soldiers were spread across Tamil land few tried for war crimes I don’t know why you don’t move back there
In your opening poem, ‘credit card’, identity is precarious, deniable, steal-able. Here the only two points at which the speaker uses the “I” pronoun come around his attempt to assert a contradictory narrative, as quoted above. The reader is given the sense of a narrative about Sri Lanka which is being repeatedly drowned out by the denials of history and blithe rewritings of the tourist industry. The final phrase first person phrase, spoken by one of the members of the couple, – “I don’t know why you don’t move back there” – is moreover one used by people challenging migrations globally. Would you be able to say something about this poem and its ending?
AM: The poem was originally built in a train in India. Remember when I talked about the local situation being used to talk about global issues? In this poem the local situation is a Californian couple. Yes, they did indeed speak in detail about how they loved Sri Lanka. I actually spent a little while explaining my mixed feelings about the place but it didn’t seem to faze them. The recent groom said ‘well you could say that about a lot of places’ and that message stuck with me. I wanted the poem to capture this conversation in a new way with multiple perspectives. To create a range of conversations happening simultaneously. That is the spoken words, the internal dialogue, as well as the dialogue to the reader. There is a line that I really battled with ‘I used to march to make change…’ that line is a clinical line for me as it is the speaker’s internal dialogue, it comes from a different place. The ending has gone through many different stages, it used to have more of a back and forth but I found that pulling it back left the reader on more of an edge and let the poem live on after the poem was finished. This is a real life situation for a lot of second generation migrants. There is conflict between our own feelings and those that go there, there is a conflict between the politics of oppressors and the politics of our supposed mother land. I attempted to capture this conflict in the use of this cut and splice form.
AH : It really works for me, Arji. Can I end by asking where to next? What are your plans for 2020, and beyond?
AM: I’ve been really productive since lockdown from writing to workshopping and I’m looking forward to an August break in Wales. I’m also about to become writer in residence for a pub in Dorset where I will be writing a series of poems in conjunction with local patrons of the pub. I’m also currently commissioned by Stockton Council to write 40 poems for isolated people across the North East so I’ve been writing poems and ringing people up out the blue to share them. I love that so much.
In terms of poetry I want to be pushing my process and work as far as it can go. I feel like I’m only just reaching my stride and I have a whole lot left to give. I am really excited about the new work I’m writing connected to race and hate crime. I’m messing with the ‘i’, writing from a range of perspectives and most importantly, still enjoying it. It’s a risky, deep vat of possibilities so at the exciting part of the process. I want to be more political in my poems and create work for those without a voice. I want to push the boundaries of what we can say and how we say it with regards to race, it’s a dicey game but also very exciting. There’s a lot to keep an eye out for, you can follow me at @theleano, or Arji Manuelpillai on insta or you can join the mailing list at www.arji.org. Thank you so much for having me on here Alice, you are an inspiration to so many of us poets.
AH: Thank you so much for such an amazing set of answers Arji. As always with these interviews around the idea of ‘saying the difficult thing’, I feel I have gained so much by being given an insight into to the workings behind your poems. I’m really excited for your new work and so happy to have had the chance to share the poems in Mutton Rolls with our readers.
If you want to find out more about joining a Poetry Society Stanza workshop group to develop your poems and connect with other poets details are here at the Poetry Society’s website.
For details of Arji’s ongoing creative adventures, including films he’s made, and performance collaborations, sign up to his mailing list at www.arji.org .
To check in with Arji’s Pickle Jar podcast, where he checks in with poets making and chatting, click here.
Troy Cabida is the first poet I have had the privilege of interviewing about ‘saying the difficult thing’ in their work during lockdown, and the second librarian poet in this spot, following on from Karen Smith last year. Troy tuned into poetry while still at school (further details below) and has shared with us a live recording of his poem ‘In Conversation with Past Troy’ to a backing track by Gabriel Jones of Bump Kin, from which the title quote is taken. If you want to carry Troy’s live voice in your ears alongside our conversation about War Dove, Troy’s debut with Bad Betty Press, published on 2 May 2020, click on the link here now.
Like Romalyn Ante, who also spoke with me, Tagalog was Troy’s first language. Romalyn and Troy both choose to write in English at present. Troy is originally from Las Piñas City, Metro Manila, but is currently based close to me in southwest London, which makes us both neighbours of the magnificent Brompton Cemetery. Built as a Victorian burial ground, with flamboyant avenues of tombs, it has over time also become an impromptu nature reserve, and was a legendary queer hang-out in the 1970s and early 1980s before HIV/AIDS took hold, which works for us both as out bi-queer poets. Had social distancing not been in force, we would might well have hung out in its café for the interview.
Widely published in Bukambibig, harana, TAYO Literary, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Macmillan, Troy was a member of two legendary London co-operatives, the Barbican Young Poets, and Roundhouse Poetry Collective, which previously nurtured Belinda Zhawi and Dean Atta, amongst other distinguished poets. Belinda’s and Dean’s interviews also feature in this series and tutor and poet Rachel Long’s is also available.
While he has not neglected his own career, Troy has also been generous to other emerging and established talents, editing The Murmur House and Síblíni Journal as senior editor and Issues 3-7 of the Thought Notebook by Thought Collection Publishing.He is also editor for 30 Days Dry by Chicago poet-playwright Robert Eric Shoemaker. A notable and powerful live performer, as a producer, Troy’s projects include London open mic night Poetry and Shaah, his debut headline show Overture: An Evening with Troy Cabida, Poems for Boys, a night that gives space for male-identifying poets to talk about their relationships with masculinity and Liwayway, an open mic nightand art collective bringing together UK-based Filipinx creatives spearheaded by Jessica Manuelfor British-Filipinx poets, singers and rappers.
Rachel Long
As a fellow poet who, like Troy, identifies as bi and queer, and also carries two languages in my psychic toolkit, not to mention a whole load of supplementary musical and other inspirations, it was really powerful for me to hear what Troy had to say about his own experiences of realising these doubled aspects of his identity, and negotiating them relative to his private, public and creative selves. I was also really drawn to hearing how the extraordinary poems in War Dove, his debut pamphlet just launched with Bad Betty, found their voices and forms, within the context of both London, and the wider world, including through some targeted “binge-watching’ of the series Sorry For Your Loss,and how the poems fuse the multiple languages and registers through which Troy speaks to us all.
AH: Can you tell me about your path into poems Troy? When and why did you start writing and performing?
TC: I was introduced to poetry back in 2010, through a blue GCSE English anthology everyone in my generation will probably remember with utmost emotion. We studied Derek Walcott, John Agard, Carol Ann Duffy and I remember specifically a worksheet highlighting poetry techniques like the simile and the enjambment and how they work within a poem. I experimented writing when I got home that same day and fell in love. I started submitting my poems for publication after I left sixth form, around 2013,and started doing working as an editor for several journals and manuscripts to get myself acquainted with how poetry works as a collaboration rather than something purely solitary. It’s great because turns out, there were people that liked my work and accepted them into their publications, many of which I highly regard.My first experience performing was at the open mic night BoxedIn back in 2016. I remember my performance was so stiff, but I just knew where to go from there to become a better reader, and I owe that confidence to the hosts Sean Mahoney, Amina Jama and Yomi Ṣode, who have and continue to curate a night that listens to poets but also challenges them to be better. I initially found performing to be daunting because I didn’t know how to place myself within it but then found it fun and a way to get an immediate response for your poems. An audience can be a very good sounding board.
AH: Were there any poets, songwriters or other creative figures who made this seem more possible? I know you have been part of the Barbican Poets and Roundhouse collective.
Pascale Petit reading from her forthcoming collection ‘Tiger Girl’ at the Free Word Centre
TC: I’m lucky to call the Barbican Young Poets and Roundhouse Poetry Collective strong support systems in this crazy poetry scene. Being a member of both programmes taught me about community and knowing how to work and give parts of yourself to create a tight unit. I have to shout out Jacob Sam-La Rose, Rachel Long, Bridget Minamore and Cecilia Knapp, who are all amazing. I get a dopamine rush every time they say something nice about my work. In terms of poets, I really admire Joseph Legaspi, Pascale Petit, Richard Scott, Amina Jama, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Helen Bowell, Andrew McMillan, R.A. Villanueva, Romalyn Ante, Kayo Chingonyi, Terrance Hayes and Chen Chen. I always find myself going back to their work. Then musicians like Karylle, (((O))), Curtismith, Janelle Monáe, Bamboo, The Corrs, She’s Only Sixteen and Yolanda Moon. I’m a huge fan of BTS. “Interlude: Calico” is written after their song “Serendipity”.
I binged on a Facebook Watch series called “Sorry For Your Loss” starring Elizabeth Olsen when I was drafting the poems, and I loved and studied the show so much that it ended up being a huge influence on the overall manuscript. Its execution of someone’s emotional journey from a major event, in this case the death of the lead’s husband, was handled with both logic and heart that I was inspired to follow that route with this pamphlet.
AH: Your epigraph is in Tagalog, from a song by the indie folk Filipino band Ben&Ben, whose debut was out in May 2019. What made you choose this as the launch pad for your work?
TC: Thank you for catching that! It’s from their song “Lucena”, which I first heard around October 2019, around the time I was going through the manuscript by myself before Amy began working on it. Through that time, I couldn’t help but feel an emotional distance between myself and the poems as majority of them were written in 2017 and 2018 and studying them from that perspective dawned to me how different I am now from the person who wrote those poems. I chose “Lucena” because it sings about the joy in letting go, in hitting the ground running after a long time of hurt, which I felt would work as the epigraph as it reflects where I was emotionally at the time of the pamphlet’s release.
AH: As a dual language speaker, I don’t translate or italicise the French words I use in my work because I want to reflect the way that my mind doesn’t give primacy to
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
any single language.L. Kiew, who I have also interviewed for this series, follows the same approach. What was your thinking around this decision for the epigraph?
TC: I chose “Lucena” because it does so many things at the same time. I have this fantasy in my mind that when people read the lyrics, they’ll get curious and check the song out and then get a feel of its message and sound, which is anthem-like, like feet stamping and voices cheering. Starting the pamphlet in Tagalog is my way of letting the reader know that although the poems are in English, it’s still a second language to me, and that my relationship with Tagalog heavily informs my relationship with English. I often call English my “work language” and that I get tired of speaking it after 11pm. True story. Also, R.A. Villanueva was once asked how his readers will understand his work if he doesn’t translate his Tagalog into English and he answered with a picture of Chewbacca. Now, I may not be the most prolific of Star Wars fans, but I share the exact sentiment.
AH: The title of the opening poem, ‘Ladlad’ is glossed as “From Tagalog – unfolded; spreading out on a surface; to expose;” .To the English ear, it reads initially as a twinned or dual male identity, like a doubled lad. The poem refracts a shifting expression of identities:
you stretching
out of yourself, your wrists bending
at the sides of a box struggling to contain you,
translates to you falling from somewhere high,
reminder that you are unpolished quartz,
your sense of a man cracked for wanting man
as if to say:
you deserve all that is twisting your heart,
all that is crushing your torso.
It has an almost biblical feel – as if a new definition of masculinity, in a different shape to what has gone before, is being formed through and claimed in words, albeit not without great struggle, reflected in the stone imageries. Was that process in your mind while you were writing?
TC: I was speaking to my dad about a friend who had come out publicly which I admired. We were speaking about it purely in Tagalog and it took me a second after we finished to realise that the word we used for “coming out” can be interpreted as derogatory. When taken out of the LGBTQ+ context, “ladlad” means to spread an item so it is entirely visible, or to force the truth out of someone. To constantly use this word to describe that process made me feel uncomfortable, and then realising how it can even parallel with how Filipino culture perceives being gay: an immoral truth that can’t help but be a truth, but something others have the freedom to punish you for. ‘Ladlad’ chews and squeezes the juice out of that word, uncovering any silenced or repressed emotions and associations that it passes down to people. In the context of the pamphlet, it being the first poem takes the reader straight into the psyche of the narrator, who is in the middle of this ocean of confusion and isolation that they have grown to believe that they deserve.
AH: That’s a really moving explanation Troy. Thank you. Mary Jean Chan, Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Jay G. Ying are other poets who are currently making work that explores the negative impacts of societal hostility on the queer identity. They
Bridget Minamore
also claim the idea of the queer self as a place of cultural regeneration and onward transmission of new and different possibilities. Is that a project that also speaks to you?
TC: I believe it’s really important for artists to create work that is true to themselves, as well as it is important to consume art made by those who live those experiences.Too many times I’ve read poems about the queer experience written by straight poets as a prompt for them to experiment with and it doesn’t sit well with me. I used to have this idea that I shouldn’t be writing about my experiences of being bisexual because, for some reason, I didn’t think they’d fit the mould of what can pass as bisexual narrative. But then you try to ignore that thought and hope that someone reads your work and feel a little less alone.
AH: Speaking from my own experience, I know that bisexual self can be a scary one to claim, not least because you fear hostility and negative judgements from all quarters! I was terrified, joining Mary Jean Chan’s Queer Studio online course with the Poetry School, in case I would be rejected by more ‘purely queer’ poets. But in fact the space was intensely freeing and supportive, and gave me an audience for whom I could write first drafts of poems about a relationship I had with a girl my own age when we were both teenagers – which was a seminal and reclamatory experience for me after I experienced same sex abuse in childhood.
Turning back to your work Troy, the poem ‘Hawk and dove’ continues a work of re-forming. It fuses poetry and martial arts, remembering “when I tried to punch you/ with a hand boxed like a rock/ only to see it crack open on impact.” Where there could have been harm, there is instead transformation and co-existence – “Fist bouncing from chest/ feather meeting concrete”. Do you envisage language as having the capacity to operate in this fluid, shifting way?
TC: I think poetry can break rules that other forms of language can’t. Poetry is often an artform where you can do that and then the craft reverts to freshness rather that disrespecting it. Jacob would always teach us to know the rules of a specific form, and then he’ll encourage us to break it apart if it serves the poem. I imagined “Hawk and dove” to be about the playing of foils and how opposites can melt into one another. For me, it’s a nostalgic look into a relationship between polar opposites: where the first stanza focuses on a dominant and physical figure, the second stanza is about the more pensive counterpart. Having both stanzas hold six lines each, to me, meant that they were still standing on equal grounds even though they were different. In a normal situation, the “fist bouncing from chest” would have resulted in pain and then a cue to retreat, but in this instance, this clash becomes a gateway into a deeper relationship, where you can see “flickers of your eyes from mine to the ground”, and then the two personalities mix and learn from one another.
AH: ‘The Afters of After’ is a coming out poem, which called to mind Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s voice, albeit that the outcome is very different. Here the kitchen is homely – “moist from steam and cigarette smoke and white wine” – and the parents appear to be understanding:
They refer to a friend’s son, whose name was meant for me. Paul.
Remember him? He works in Malta now. He’s bisexual too!
As the bisexual mum of a queer son, I had my own experience of this, when he came out to me in his teens, only for me to come out back to him. It was a very emotional but very beautiful experience for us both, that continues to inform our adult relationship. It seems to me that this is a very important exchange to record for other young LGBTQ+ people – to give them hope and confidence about revealing themselves to their families. Was this part of your intention within the poem?
TC: That’s such a beautiful anecdote that you’ve shared. Thank you for sharing that, Alice. When I was editing “War Dove”, I knew that I would be dealing with personal themes, and thankfully I’ve been able to add in experiences of levity into my poems because while there has been negative aspects to my process of coming out, there has been lighter stories that I can share, which I think should be celebrated. Coming out is an experience that has facets of both good and bad, and poetry has the ability to narrate all of that. One of the stanzas in “Makeup and heels and Reece King” came about because the first thing my friend Idil asked me upon finding out I’m bisexual, was my opinion on this model named Reece King. It was in an escalator in Debenhams.
In terms of my parents, I’m also so thankful that they’ve been supportive. It wasn’t always the case with them growing up, but it’s definitely something that’s changed. The moment I captured in my poem is my parents grasping the fact that their son has finally come out, after years of holding his breath, and they’re getting used to the idea that they finally can talk about this thing in front of them and the first story they manage to bring to the table is how their high school friend’s son is also bisexual, which I found so awkward then but really funny looking back now. From then on, our relationship has relaxed, my parents have spoken more and more, and I’ve felt comfortable working on becoming more open with them.
However, I understand that coming out to family, or anyone for that matter, is a concept that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and I totally see my privilege in having an accepting inner circle. Coming out or voicing out this aspect of your identity should be done whenever you are most emotionally ready. Do it for yourself and do it in service of your growth and healing.
AH: Poems including ‘Buddy’, ‘Bonds’ and ‘Interlude: Calico’ give witness to the complexity of inhabiting a queer identity in a predominantly heterosexual world, and also to the sense of alienation and separation which can sometimes arise even when seeking to form queer relationships or simply enjoy more casual connections. In ‘Bonds’ the speaker uses the disjunct of a stanza break to state “Man, I have a feeling // we’re not watching the same thing.” Was this an area that you felt drawn to exploring?
TC: I once heard someone say that poems about sex shouldn’t just talk about sex as it can become one dimensional, and I took that in, when drafting ‘Buddy’. I wanted it to be about the defence mechanisms we’re not aware of creating, due to loneliness. Oftentimes toxic relationships are born out of the desire to shut out parts of ourselves that we don’t want to deal with. Sometimes those kinds of relationships exacerbate those exact parts and when they come out, it’s in ways that they shouldn’t, which causes more damage. ‘Bonds’ is a poem that I took the longest to edit because of the ending, where the poem jumps from the narrator to the subject, the person that the voice is sitting next to. It’s about dynamics in a relationship can develop because of unrequited love and an inability to heal past that. Where “Buddy” uses couplets to indicate two people’s close connection, the subjects in “Bonds” have a barrier that keeps them from fully connecting, which I wanted to highlight through the three-line stanzas. The sudden shift is abrupt and uncomfortable because that’s another voice altogether and it’s a wakeup call back into reality, one that’s hard to accept because it’s not the reality that you want to be in.
Romalyn Ante reading ‘Names’ at the Poetry London autumn launch at Kings Place.
AH: Romalyn Ante writes in her poems of the sense of unreality which can arise from her Filipino heritage and identity being portrayed in crassly simplified terms by the European and American media. The opening stanza of ‘Examples of Confusion’ suggests the danger of becoming party to a news and entertainment media which marginalises and diminishes non-white experiences:
You can laugh through floods and earthquakes and dictators
but your heart cracks easy for emotions? You’re losing colour.
The action cuts between the speaker and his friend in a UK Costa, a vignette of family life in Manila, and a close up of the American actor Timothée Chalamet, when the camera is “romancing yet another scrunched up white boy forehead.” Chalamet made his name in Call Me by Your Name, but could be one of many young white male pin ups. Would you like to say something about this poem?
TC: Oftentimes, being Filipino means carrying a certain pressure to uphold a stereotype that we’re the happiest culture in the world, something that American media has perpetuated for so long. And to criticise that means I’m ungrateful for having what has been called a “positive stereotype”. It’s ridiculous because the conversation about mental health issues has been deeply vilified and buried in taboo, leaving many people confused and in need of a professional, which should be a solution as logical as seeing a doctor for a physical illness.
‘Examples of Confusion’ tackles my unrest about this situation of growing up in a culture that teaches us that it’s better to sweep things under a rug and weather the storm with a smile than admit that we’re actually struggling, which denies us human substance and depth. It’s really dangerous because it does get to the point where Filipinos grow up thinking we don’t even get mental health problems, that things like anxiety and depression are just for white people, which is far from the truth. The stanza about Timothée Chalamet’s performance came about because I had reached a point where I was able to feel more heard through art produced by non-Filipinos, which bothered me because I know I can’t say that that story is truly mine to compare with. It’s funny becausedigging deep, deep into Filipino art and media outside of the mainstream circuit that encourages these stereotypes rather than challenging them, I managed to find like-minded artists who make work that I can 100% empathise with. And the biggest criticism they get is that they’re too radical or that they’re too ungrateful to appreciate what we already have.
AH: ‘War Dove’, the title poem, draws many of your pamphlet’s themes together:
I’ve come to know the kind of tender
that packs muscle, that doesn’t cower
even to my own desires.
In front of the face that profits from my labour
but doesn’t know how to give back,
the doves around me fought to remain.
You express a form of reclamation enacted in the teeth of harsh treatment and continuing adversity – “the understanding of the apology, / the need for it to be verbalised and accepted/ to release the victim of their past”. What was in your mind when you were writing and revising this?
TC: Whenever I read this poem out to an audience, I always mention how much of this poem isn’t trying to solve the problem against violence or toxic masculinity, but it’s rather thinking through those things and wondering what it can do internally to stop becoming a part of the problem, if such an act can ever be truly done. The first stanza is after “Trevor” by Ocean Vuong, where he says that “tenderness depends on how little the world touches you”. I agreed with that for a long time until I started to realise that when you’re put in a situation where you can retaliate after being wronged, it’s actually perfectly okay to ignore the voices that push you to fight back and just remain still.Practicing compassion after being punched in the face. The idea that the world can beat you up and your response to that is to accept and find strength in the tender state that you’re left in makes as much sense to me as Ocean Vuong’s line does. And then tenderness becomes a strength, which defies the idea that the two can’t be synonymous with one another. The third stanza was very fun to write because it was my attempt in understanding the concept of forgiveness, an action that hasn’t been truly perfected yet, in my opinion. It puts something so emotionally driven in a logical perspective because it’s looking for something that can’t be found through that emotional route. I grew up in a community where forgiveness is a hazy and mystical thing that you must experience and to give it concreteness, reasoning for its validity and actual steps to follow is somehow taboo and disrespectful, which I find so interesting.
AH: As someone who was subject to sustained sexual abuse by a family member in childhood, forgivenesss and compassion are things about which I have thought often – though without yet fully reaching resolution, I must admit. I really value the subtlety and rigour of your thought in this respect Troy, particularly because I try to follow a daily Buddhist meditation practice which can generate a freedom to renegotiate my relationship with my past, without surrendering agency. Your idea of how we can allow tenderness to become strength is very powerful and beautiful.
I’d like to close our page conversation by asking how it feels to launch your debut in lockdown? Will you be doing some live events to share the work when it becomes possible for venues to open again?
TC: So I’m launching the pamphlet online on Bad Betty Press’ Instagram Live and I’m sharing it with an amazing poet named Gabriel Akamọ with his own debut pamphlet called At The Speed of Dark. We joked about how our pamphlets will make poetry history by being one of the publications released during the lockdown. I was having a conversation with another poet friend about how the lockdown has affected the poetry scene and he said that despite not being together physically, the support between us have only gone stronger and have adapted to the tides. Moving our launch into the digital space is still as exciting as it would be on a venue because it means more people can watch alongside our community, watching at the comfort of their own homes. I’ve been contacting nights for a possible feature slot with them at the start of the year so I hope we can get those off the ground when it’s safe to do so. I’m a co-producer for an open mic night called Poetry and Shaah with Neimo Askar, Fahima Hersi, Abdullahi Mohammed, Ayaan Abdullahi and Idil Abdullahi and when we’re all able to resume our normal shows, we’ll only go upwards from there. I’m asking them for a feature spot to help promote the pamphlet, so fingers crossed they say yes!
AH: Thank you very much for talking to me so generously, and so insightfully, Troy Cabida. We’re launching this interview after your launch, the thinking being that readers would already have joined you, Gabriel Akamọ, and your brilliant support acts, in the live event, the facebook link for which is here. I’m also placing links to the publications and live videos we’ve discussed below this for our readers to follow, and most importantly, the buy button link to Bad Betty so they can get themselves their own copy of War Dove through the mail, and bring it along for you to sign when performances are able to take place in shared physical spaces again.
Identifiable in any gathering by her scarlet hair, L. Kiew is not a poet who seeks to conform. Her pamphlet, The Unquiet, was published by the prestigious independent publisher, Offord Road Books, earlier in 2019. A Chinese-Malaysian living in London, and working as an accountant, she is someone whose work I have loved for a number of years – for its originality, and willingness to take risks to arrive in new places, and open different ways of seeing and speaking. Over coffee in the Poetry Café in Covent Garden – ahead of a reading by her publisher Martha Sprackland – we spoke about her rebel great-grandmother refusing to have her feet bound, Chinese ghost stories, diaspora experiences, writing in multiple languages and dialects, arriving in England from Malaysia, and what feminism means outside of America and Europe. To give readers a sense of her multi-lingual poetry live, L. Kiew recorded three of her poems, which are available at the end of this interview, with more on her website.
AH: Your biog says that you’re an accountant and a dancer. Were you always a poet as well – and when did you start actually writing the poems down?
LK: I probably wouldn’t have thought of myself as a poet until my late teens. As a younger child I was happily writing little stories. In my late teens and early twenties I began to think a lot about language, and about the people I was speaking to, and about the challenges of communication. That is when I moved into poetry. I was very influenced by the more experimental work.
AH: Were there any poets who particularly inspired, encouraged or supported you?
LK:Very early I found Lisa Robertson. She was very very influential. I stumbled across Reality Street Press, so I was reading a lot of work from them. That really opened up things for me and made me think about language in quite a different way.
AH: When you are starting out, if you can find someone who is working in your area, it radically expands the field, and your sense of the possible. When it’s on the page, you can engage with it at your own pace. If you are taught in class, often it is being slightly pulled out of you – whereas sometimes you need to work more quietly.
LK: The curriculum was always quite conventional. The canon of English poetry. Obviously it is changing now. I read English at University.
AH: Likewise. Sylvia Plath was as close as we got to contemporary poetry.
LK: She was for me too. Sylvia Plath was quite a big influence on my work, as were a lot of the Imagist Poets.
AH: I really loved HD.
LK: That was a kind of beginning.
AH: Did you have any kind of mentors – or were you just writing on your own?
LK: Pretty much writing on my own. There was a writer in residence at the University. I saw her once. I felt very outside the thing that everyone else was doing so it didn’t really gel. All of my engagement was pretty much on the page.
AH: ‘Swallow’, the first poem in The Unquiet is about working within a multi-tongued framework.You write about “overeating from the dictionary” and “nouns as sticky as langsat”, but also that “The words I swallow become/ feathers poking through my skin.” Would you say that language learning can be a form of migration in itself, separate from travel?
LK: Yes, because I think when you learn language, you move from one view of the world into another. It is about a change of state. I am a different person in one language than I am in another. Jennifer Lee Tsai write about this in her poem ‘Another Language’, published in Wild Court this year. It is a poem about being different in Cantonese and being in English and I feel that very much too.
AH: I grew up speaking French as well. Your thoughts take different shapes, reflecting the word containers that are available. I wondered if it was important for you to allow your readers to make this journey as well, into a different language, through the physically embodied textures and sounds of Malaysian dialect words with which your poems enact themselves?
LK:Language is a visceral thing – because it comes out of your body, and you experience it through the body as well. I wanted that to be in the writing. I also wanted that sense of when you walk down the street, and things are partially heard.For me, language is all about the lines between one kind of experience and another. I think of conversations and literature and your experience of reading as beasts that rub up against each other. You may rub a little longer some times than others. Sometimes you rub, and you move on. I wanted all of those to be possible in the experience of reading The Unquiet.
AH: When you read words that you don’t understand, you pronounce them in your head because you are trying to get the physical feel of them, to make an engagement. That is definitely a kind of rubbing that also opens your head to different sounds.
LK: I think you can engage in things in all sorts of different levels. One level doesn’t have to be privileged over another.
AH: Absolutely. Would you be able to say a few words about your own childhood – because that is where your understanding of the world originated? You were born in Malaysia, where both your parents were scientists?
LK:Yes, I grew up in Malaysia until I was 10. I came to the UK to boarding school – only going back in the school holidays. Both my parents are scientists. My mother is a botanist and my father is a zoologist. Nature plays a really big part in my writing as well, because of that experience.
AH: Once you started to come to England for boarding school, you were cutting between Malaysia and England, so you were having parallel but very different climates and landscapes?
LK: Yes. In Malaysia, my parents would do field work at the weekend, so we often went on expeditions with them, when they were collecting locally. When my parents went on longer expeditions, we went too. My father ran a field study station for the University for many years, and we spent a lot of time there as children. People in Asia are very tolerant of children so the university students let us be underfoot. I had this wonderful experience – of playing there all the time.
AH: This was in the rainforest? With that density of sound and heat and visual stimuli?
LK: Whatever the students were studying, we were looking at too. We were alongside when they were trapping and collecting things in the rainforest. It was all very close.
AH: It sounds really fantastic. Like Natalie Linh Bolderston, whose pamphlet The Protection of Ghosts has just come out with V. Press, your poems occupy the voices of people from multiple generations. I’m thinking of Ląomà and Ah Jek in ‘Haunts,’ but also ‘Pitched in’ and ‘The Catch.’ Could you say something about those three poems?
LK: Some poems in the book are about ghost stories that I remember – family ghost stories. ‘Haunts’ is a series of ghost stories that I was told about people in the family. The Chinese love ghost stories. I really wanted to explore that because it’s not a genre that translates into English much. I was really wanting to write a whole series of ghost story poems.
‘Haunts’ is also about my great grandmother who came from China. I have been thinking a lot about her life, because she moved at a time of great transition. When you look back, she was an incredibly strong woman. For her time, she made very very difficult choices. She chose not to have her feet bound and she came all the way across to Malaysia.Because her feet were not bound, she had to marry a much much older man. He died very early and then she had a whole brood of children that she needed to bring up. She was a very successful matriarch in that way – but also so incredibly tough.
AH: She would have had to be tough from the start to be able to resist foot binding at a young age?
LK: She had an iron will, I have to say. You have to admire those people who get through life with that strength when so many around them are, in a certain respect, powerless around certain things.
AH: What period did she come over to Malaysia?
LK: I don’t really know. Sometime between the turn of the century and before the second world war.
AH: There is real sorrow, and pain in ‘Pitched in’, which ends simply “dragging steps/ msa”msĭ/ the water is dark”. The words feel wrung from the speaker, but also flinty. You begin:
kangbāng covered in dust
a worn shirt on the line with no one to fill it
Father at the door
I refused twelve
this was all that was left
kiaogià empty rice bowls
anguish springs like bamboo
on steep slopes
LK: ‘Pitched in’ covers choices about whom you marry. I was thinking of my grandmother’s generation, where those choices were not great. ‘The Catch’ comes from a family story about my great grandmother and how she didn’t have sons until quite late, and she adopted one son.
AH: ‘The Catch’ has this wonderfully direct, but also swimming-with-feeling, emotional language.Its metaphors are viscerally embodied, and through this, inclusive of the reader. We get the mood of the poem, its love, combative-ness, and wounded-ness, because we can intuit them from the diction. I’m assuming ‘our little fish’ is her son? The poem in total reads:
When he brought that stinky parcel
of catfish home from the market, Mother-in-law turned her eyes away like swifts swimming across water.
My heart was an empty
house with its red door swinging wide.
I held our little fish
safe from the monsoon, the gossip
of storm clouds hurled and smashed papayas
against the shutters.
It’s impossible to wash the face of
our house clean.
LK:In Asia, it was quite common that if you don’t have a son of your own, and somebody else had an abundance of sons, then you would come to an arrangement. It is a rumoured in the family that is what she did, so one of my great uncles is apparently adopted. As with all family stories, only half of it comes down to the next generation.
AH: Children come into families in many ways. What matters is the welcome that they receive, rather than the door that they entered through.
LK: Yes, and in Chinese culture a son is very very important. A son is always treasured.
AH:I love all the physical textures in the poem. The “storm clouds” and the “smashed papayas” – and how they speak to a world of unarticulated, but deeply felt emotions around this tiny baby coming into the house from a different background. You’re making in your words a very different world to what some readers in London know – and making it very tangible and palpable. Having been born in Singapore, I really appreciate it. You register heat, and humid atmosphere. That level of physical detail makes different realities three dimensional – rather than saying one place is real and everywhere else is ‘on the map’.
LK: It’s very real for the characters in the poem. I wanted it to be the same for the readers.
AH: That really comes across. There’s also a strong strand of feminism which runs through The Unquiet, again spanning generations, and social classes. ‘Francesca’ pays a beautiful tribute to a housekeeper “who walks to church/ daily, strong as bamboo// as persistent.” Elizabeth Bishop also wrote about women in positions of service, and more recently the film Roma honours a woman obliged to take this role in her employer’s family. Was it important to you to give space to this area of working lives? You say also that she “makes sweet/ and sour pork better than anyone” and “tends/ the avocado tree, […] picks its fruit”.
LK: We privilege experience in different ways. I feel that work is equally valid regardless of where it is done. Everybody has a thing they do incredibly well, that is very valuable. I wanted to foreground that because it’s very easy, when you read from a position of education, to say ‘They weren’t educated. They didn’t have great options, so their lives must be less rich’. I don’t that is true. It is really important to show that all of these experiences are equally valid –regardless of their relative socio-economic position, regardless of the position that we read into it coming from the west and being educated, and with a certain reading of feminism as well. It is really interesting to be asked about feminism in relation to this because I read feminism as a western concept. I don’t think my great grandmother or Francesca would recognise it in the articulation that exists. They would say ‘well of course we do these things but there are constraints’. But you know you can get around these constraints. It’s just a different articulation.
AH: I think if you have Francesca’s role, you are a functioning economic unit and that gives you agency. Every being needs agency. Having a value put on your services gives you the ability to pay for food, to pay for housing, to educate your children. It’s a very powerful way of claiming your space as a human being.
LK: There were people who chose domestic work as a career path. That’s not any different from any other career path you would choose. You know I would say Francesca, from the stories that she told me, chose it deliberately. It wasn’t that there were no other options. This is a path she deliberately chose.
AH: That was a real profession and a respected vocation. I just love that poem. It’s really beautiful and unapologetically celebratory. It really chimed with me.
LK: She is a marvellous and again, a very strong woman. Lots of strong women in my background.
AH: ‘Learning to be mixi’is one of several poems which suggests that acquiring English language and culture can be a bruising, as well as enabling, experience, socially and personally. You write:
I was buckled in, and taken off
to England, the boarding school (not like Enid Blyton, not at all) and Cambridge, the colleges,
the backs and the hate,
suppressing the suffix-lah,
being proper and nice, cutting
my tongue with that ice.
Could say something about this? It sounds as if you were not necessarily treated in the kindest way?
LK:England was a huge culture shock. I considered myself a speaker of English. My mother was English. I didn’t perceive myself as being unfamiliar with the culture, having read English storybooks. You have an expectation – then you arrive. It is so so different. As a child you just go through life. It happens to you.
AH: You live in your skin; you get on with it.
LK: It is only now that I am an adult, and have contemporaries with children at that age, that I look back and think that was actually quite a bruising culture shock. Behind this writing, there has been a lot of reflection – to do with reaching a certain point in my life and seeing other people’s children.
AH: The boarding school I went to very hierarchal and very prioritising of social class and conformity. My father was dead, and I was in a dormitory with girl whose mum was a single parent. The third girl was from Northern Ireland. We felt marked as different.
LK: There were a lot of children who went home every weekend. The ones that were left behind at the weekend had our parents very very far away. It made a barrier.
AH: Certainly in the 70’s, when I was growing up, English people were not very tolerant of difference. There was a reluctance to allow people to integrate in the schools that I went to. Hopefully that is shifting now.
LK: Yeah, it has shifted a lot. Not everywhere to the same extent but there is certainly a lot more openness. Moving from England to Scotland was a really interesting dynamic. Scotland was very mono-cultural but with a very strong self-identifying of itself against English. As long as you were not English, you were in. It’s been interesting to move around the United Kingdom.
AH: ‘Speech’ begins “Ah Ba speak red: liddat tone/ of voice sure salah wan.” The poem goes on to enact a merging of dictions, and dictionaries, ending:
And I let my words landslide,
ferrous, carrying both stone chips,
rice and tapioca roots.
I dig down, ah, I speak lah,
pearl and pebble, new shoots.
Did this combining reflect an act of healing that has taken place within the pamphlet by bringing in so many different sorts of words?
LK:As I wrote the pamphlet, I began to really embrace that movement across languages and through languages.Recognising it very much as the identity that I came from – because in Malaysia people are usually multilingual to varying degrees. That kind of dropping between languages is very common. Going to Malaysia with my partner was a lightbulb moment. I realised that shifting between languages within a sentence – something that I took as absolutely normal – was not something that everybody else experienced or practiced. I wanted to embrace that part of myself as I think in different languages. I grew up speaking different languages all simultaneously.
AH: My father was half-French so I have French and English. I learnt Italian, and can follow Spanish, so I’m quite happy to shuffle languages. My Italian and my Spanish are not particularly good but but I can get by and listen to radio or tv in all those languages. It gives you a different mindset.
LK:In England people tend to view a language like EU customs tracks. You are put into lines, but life is not like that.There is a lot of movement with the writing across languages. It is much more common than it used to be, and also in more of the poetry coming out of America, with writers who grow up with additional languages.
AH: Although you don’t give translations, because the words that you use are phonetically spelt, rather than written in ‘Chinese’ characters, and can be sounded out, I didn’t feel closed out as a reader. I could still get their sound quality. It didn’t feel that you were putting up icy walls that I couldn’t go across.
LK:I chose romanisation for The Unquiet because actually for me there is an interesting politics around the learning of characters, especially now when the only way to be able to learn them would be through Mandarin. And the primacy of Mandarin is a kind of construct that has come out of the rise of communism in China, and the development that they describe as Mandarin being the common language. That wasn’t the case previously. You can write all Chinese dialects in characters but when you do that, what tends to happen is that most readers will then attempt to read them as Mandarin, which they are not. I didn’t want that at all. I wanted to foreground the primacy of dialect in that space.
AH: Which is also functioning much of the time within the spoken space anyway?
LK: Yes. It is also about levels of literacy and levels of education which sit behind the text on the page. I am English educated, but I am not Chinese educated.
AH: You presumably hold the dialects primarily orally? As sounds in your head?
LK:For me, Teo Chew, Hokkien and other dialects were always oral languages. A lot of the older generation would never have completed school, so would read little or nothing. There is not much literature in dialect available outside of China and I’m not sure how much there is within China itself.
AH:So in fact the ghost stories you re-tell are political, in that they are a form of family literature, and shared storytelling. They may not be written down but they are your heritage and a resource. When we have stories in common, or stories that echo each other – even when you said read Enid Blyton and I got it – there is bonding over those common imaginative currencies.
LK: Yes, I think stories are common currencies across a lot of cultures. We all have a degree of archetype. They get changed according to the context – but there will be things that people recognise.
AH: I felt it with the “red shantung” dress in ‘Haunts.’ ,
Ląomà believes the dead
cling to their possessions.
My dress is red shantung;
its last occupant is
heartbroken and tugging
on my hem.
The widower holds me
at arms’ length, cold and stiff.
I waltz around, around.
When I sink down, a white hand
strokes my feet, smearing black
blood over my cracked heels.
It is saying that clothes which pass between owners carry stories, but the dress is also the vessel in which you choose to pour a meaning, that is probably an archetypal, universal one – which each culture, and reader, will particularise. It is a story about past and present, and difficult relationships, and strange things, but also how we make, and find, images to understand our lives. On that note, would you like to say something about your decision not to give any translations, so the English language reader has to try to hear and feel the words they don’t understand, rather than simply dismissing them into meaning? Poetry has that ambiguity built into it. When you don’t translate a word – are you making it an extreme poetry moment?
LK: The whole thing with poetry for me is the consciousness of language. I am foregrounding of it, and foregrounding the sound and the shape. For readers who can’t access the meaning automatically, they have to engage in it quite differently. I wanted those things not to be that smooth. I like your phrase ‘dismissing it into meaning’ because there is sometimes a tendency in how literature works that everything is made easy for the reader. That is, easy for the educated reader. So again there is a sort of dynamic of privilege that is in language. Choosing not to translate was partly about undermining. I want to privilege people who come from that multiple dialect background, and who can recognise some of it. I didn’t want to privilege the reader who has gone to Oxford and who has Latin and Greek but not any other languages. In their text, they might not translate classical Greek on the assumption that all the rest of us should understand. I wanted to shift that dynamic. We have Google translate these days and so actually it’s easy to find out.
AH: Yeah, I really loved it as it was. I think your realisation was a great triumph. Towards the end of The Unquiet, in ‘Cryptography’, you write about words which lie “like a forgotten cellar/ under the house of your childhood”. In ‘Lassaba’ there are “paper wings/ filling the hall with their shadows”. Whereas the earlier ghost poems called up histories in which there was suffering and cruelty, this seems like a more nourishing form of haunting – allowing the past also to be present in a sustaining way, and establishing a form of equilibrium. Does that seem fair?
LK: The past is who you are, and you can’t change it. Those stories form who you are. It’s about reaching an equilibrium, because you have to acknowledge it, and take where you are, then grow from that soil.
AH: If you said to me cheese soufflé, I would straight away see the cheese soufflé in my French grandmother’s house, because that’s where I ate it. Whatever that word means to anybody else, to me it means a kitchen in Normandy, how we beat the eggs, grated the Gruyère, the way the spoon broke the crust when it was served. Soufflé is just a word – but it holds so much for me.
LK: And it informs all your future cheese soufflés doesn’t it?
AH: I made it when my elder son came home from university for the first time. It was a deep celebration. I wanted to reach back into the good part of my past and have it with us. On that subject, I know you were with Nina Mingya Powles and Natalie Linh Bolderston on a Bi’an retreat for writers of Chinese heritage. Nina tweeted that there was a lot of food talk. How was that as an experience?
LK: It was actually amazing; I have to say, completely, completely amazing to be in a diaspora group.
AH: Nina is New Zealand Chinese. Nat is Vietnamese Chinese English.
LK: It was amazing to meet people who come from different places in the diaspora, in different the waves of diaspora. The commonalities and the differences were extremely interesting. Those sorts of things are really enriching and so very fascinating – because it wasn’t just a retreat for poets. I only really interact with poets on the whole, so it was fascinating to meet people who write fiction, who do life writing, who write for the stage and who write for the cinema. It was a really broad experience. We did some fascinating workshops around translation – which was also really interesting. Working with a group of people with different language levels to read across languages in terms of translation was absolutely fascinating.
AH: Nat and Nina I know came back very happy.
LK: It was an amazing experience.
AH: Have you taken part in any writers’ activities in Malaysia? I know that Romalyn Ante has been really supported by a programme, which she won a place on in the Philippines, for Filipino writers. Did you ever participate in anything like that – or maybe there aren’t those kinds of programmes in Malaysia?
LK: Not that I’m aware of. Malaysia until fairly recently had a small publishing industry. So most Malaysian writers you would come across, Malaysian writers in English, tend to have come overseas and are published overseas first.
AH: Before we go down to hear Martha and Jean Sprackland read, can I ask, in conclusion, where are you headed next, creatively and geographically?
LK:Creatively I am working towards my full collection. I have been exploring the language that people use about the natural world, and what is a native species and what is non-native species. It is very much about belonging – but also drawing on that heritage that I have, from my parents’ scientific background.
AH: That sounds really good. Are you going back to Malaysia, working on this?
LK: I don’t go back that often – every three to five years or so. The more I thought about it, the more I realised lots of things migrate. If you look in your garden, and see where your plants originally came from, you suddenly discover that they are from all over.
AH: I have this ferocious yucca – which is definitely not from an English hedgerow.
LK: Lots of plants we think of as very common, or that have become very common like cyclamens, are not from here originally. Cyclamens are from around the Mediterranean and down to Middle East. Tulips are as well. Lots of plants that we think of as native to the UK are naturalised. They weren’t originally from here.
AH: That sounds like a perfect note to end on. Thank you very much, and thank you also for give us live readings of some of your multi-lingual poems, featuring Chinese dialects, Malay and English, which readers will be able to hear with these links.
L. Kiew will be performing at Rich Mix in London’s Bethnal Green on Saturday 13 July – ‘with a sword on her head’. More details here.
There’s also a link to L.K’s website with more information about publications and performances. L. Kiew is shown with fellow poet and Westminster Library collaborator Joanna Ingham – whose debut pamphlet is due out with Ignition on 22 July.
Troy Cabida is the first poet I have had the privilege of interviewing about ‘saying the difficult thing’ in their work during lockdown, and the second librarian poet in this spot, following on from Karen Smith last year. Troy tuned into poetry while still at school (further details below) and has shared with us a live recording of his poem ‘In Conversation with Past Troy’ to a backing track by Gabriel Jones of Bump Kin, from which the title quote is taken. If you want to carry Troy’s live voice in your ears alongside our conversation about War Dove, Troy’s debut with Bad Betty Press, published on 2 May 2020, click on the link 
Widely published in Bukambibig, harana, TAYO Literary, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Macmillan, Troy was a member of two legendary London co-operatives, the Barbican Young Poets, and Roundhouse Poetry Collective, which previously nurtured Belinda Zhawi and Dean Atta, amongst other distinguished poets. Belinda’s and Dean’s interviews also feature in this series and tutor and poet Rachel Long’s is also available. 
opposites: where the first stanza focuses on a dominant and physical figure, the second stanza is about the more pensive counterpart. Having both stanzas hold six lines each, to me, meant that they were still standing on equal grounds even though they were different. In a normal situation, the “fist bouncing from chest” would have resulted in pain and then a cue to retreat, but in this instance, this clash becomes a gateway into a deeper relationship, where you can see “flickers of your eyes from mine to the ground”, and then the two personalities mix and learn from one another.
