5 Questions with Adam Aitken
Adam Aitken was born in London and lives in Sydney. He spent his early childhood in Thailand and Malaysia. He has been a recipient of the Australia Council Paris Studio Residency, and was Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Hawai’i Manoa.
He co-edited the Contemporary Asian Australian Poets anthology (Puncher & Wattmann). His memoir One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press) was published in 2016 and was listed for the ALS Gold Medal. Archipelago was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2018. He received the Patrick White Award in 2021. He teaches Creative Writing.
No.1
I’d like to start off the interview by asking you how movement and migration has informed your practise, especially as someone who’s lived and worked in various places (England, Malaysia, Sydney, etc) around the world. How do you think your different identities and affectations—surely an unwitting effect from these movements—have influenced your life and work?
It is an important question with no clear answer, or a question I try to answer without falling into formulaic descriptions of the ‘migrant writer’. What distinguishes me as a writer in Australia is the fact that my mother is Thai and her family and her culture have had a significant influence on me. My brother and I were born in London and we spent a good two years living in Malaysia and Thailand when I was a pre-schooler, and I developed a sensitive ear for language, and for how people behave in different cultures. My father was also a great influence on my taking up the arts and for taking an interest in photography, music, and painting. He grew up in Anglo-suburban Melbourne, got an advertising job in Hong Kong, and broke the colour bar and married my mother in London in 1960. His dream was to become a ceramic artist, and I am sure that the craft of shaping pots has something to with writing poems!
We migrated to Australia in 1968, and my mother had to do one of the last White Australia interviews, reserved for non-white spouses of Australians. We spent a hellish year in Perth, where my brother and I endured the worst of Australian racism and hostility. This experience has fed some of the themes in my work, and it gave me a unique view of Australia, one that other migrants might [also] have. You mention movement; what has been marked is my moving from the UK via Southeast Asia, then from Perth to Sydney, then during high school moving five times from rental to rental (as my parents had divorced and my mother had trouble finding affordable accommodation), then as a student moving from share house to share house. I guess my poetry has a similar rhizomic and restless quality, and I do have trouble staying physically still for more than 10 minutes!
But the move to Sydney was beneficial. I studied Arts at Sydney Uni and met a lot of writers, especially the younger, innovative ones, and felt I had arrived when I published my first collection of poems, Letter to Marco Polo. I wrote the manuscript while living in a flat near Bronte Beach, and I was very happy there. Those poems came from both my development as a writer in inner city Sydney, and it included a suite of poems about the time I spent living with my relatives in Bangkok in 1982.
That gave me much of my material for my memoir, but essentially going to Thailand as an adult was no diasporic return to roots, and although I managed to learn some Thai I never felt at home in Thai society. Of course a migrant writer may find the ‘home country’ very nourishing, though all my writing about identity and cultural allegiance is marked by ambivalence.
I think the first book [appeared] as a ‘genre’ of migrant Australian writing was emerging, with Anna Couani, П. O., Ania Walwicz, Brian Castro, Beatriz Copello, and many others leading the way with interesting work. My first publisher Phil Hammial was also a migrant from Detroit, and he has been a fabulous mentor. In the decades since the 1980s the distinctions between mainstream and migrant writing have thankfully dissolved to some extent, and it has been obvious that many younger writers with migrant backgrounds and those born in the country have brought innovation, experimentation, and new content into the scene generally.
I don’t see myself as concerned now with my own migrant themes. My privilege has enabled me to travel as an English teacher since the mid 1990s, and to be able to leave Australia for extended periods. I grew up in Australia, so most of my adult life has been spent in Sydney. I was able to teach in Indonesia, and take short trips to residencies in Hawai’i, Malaysia, and to China.
I was lucky enough to marry an English person with family in France, so I can now write this in our home in the French countryside. This too is a complex situation, with many French city dwellers now moving to the regions. What obsesses me now is the current debates in France around future immigration policy, about freedom of religion, the plight of refugees and of the poor in Europe. I am once again living the life of a ‘foreigner’ in France, like a retired country squire, of which there are many, mainly European. Someone once compared my situation to that of John Berger, the UK art critic who retired to France. He never gave up his leftist radicalism despite the move. But he spoke French fluently, and I don’t. I still consider Australia as my base however, as I am passionately concerned by what is occurring there politically and environmentally.
No.2
You won the Patrick White Award in 2021, but you’ve been long- and shortlisted many times in your career too, such as for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (2018), the ALS Gold Medal (2017), the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (2018), and more. How did Revenants come together?
Revenants is really the second part of the previous book Archipelago, which was shortlisted for two prizes. I had a manuscript accepted by Giramondo and I worked with Suneeta Perez da Costa and Lisa Gorton to reorganise what had been a difficult set of poems. For me personally the unity of a poetry collection is very important.
There are three or four geographical entities, and the poems include work about Hawai’i, about Sydney, and about France. A few key poems concern my father, who died on Armistice Day 2017. Lisa and I managed to clarify what were more or less subconscious themes and echoes, the key being the figure of the revenant, or the phantom that returns to haunt the living.
The idea of haunting is something universal, and my own naturalism and realism has always allowed a space for the symbolic ghost in the machine. Many of the poems are about the persistence of memory and of trauma, but also the persistence of culture and history. I wanted to write about hope and about looking beyond the past.
The ‘French’ poems are archaeological and grounded in place, but also, I think, lyrically unfettered. Revenants continues my interest in father-son relationships, and the shaping force of different postcolonial contexts. I had begun to understand this in my memoir One Hundred Letters Home. The first poems are about my father’s early career as a businessman in Hong Kong. One of the key long poems concerns the degradation of the Mekong river, so in some ways the collection is eco-poetic.
No.3
You’ve had a long career writing poetry, with several books and chapbooks under your belt. In my mind you are one of the ‘pioneering’ (for lack of a better word) Asian Australian writers, such as Ouyang Yu, Brian Castro and Eileen Chong, who, despite existing in an Australian literary landscape notorious for being conservative in both form and content, continued writing, and publishing large oeuvres nonetheless. In some way you’ve paved the way for many of us. Can you speak more to this?
I wrote about Brian Castro in my creative writing thesis, Ouyang Yu interviewed me a while ago, and Eileen Chong reviewed my memoir. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the term ‘pioneering’ due to its colonial connotations! That said, I have managed to carve out a niche, and found time and money to write. I decided early that I would pay attention to avant-garde poetics but to read widely and to find my own voice. I have always liked many contemporary Australian poets, modern US poetry, and also a lot of European poetry in translation, and now I am learning to read French in the original. I guess that younger writers can read my work and may be influenced by it, if only to find that my work gives them encouragement to experiment, to sound original, and not be afraid to be ‘difficult’.
With Michelle Cahill and Kim Cheng Boey, I co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, which is now a HSC text. Since that came out nearly ten years ago the field has greatly expanded. There is talk about a second anthology, to be edited by newer editors and with an expanded sense of what Asian Australian poetry means. Unlike the Asian Americans, stylistic factionalism has not emerged as a theme of critical debate, but who knows where our own categorisations about migrant experience are always changing. After all there have always been Australians of non-migrant backgrounds now living and writing offshore, who are multilingual.
No.4
When you won the Patrick White Award, you said in The Age that it made you ‘feel a lot more confident’. You also said that after your first book, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), was published, you ‘didn’t write for 10 years afterwards; I couldn’t repeat the momentum’. (Ed’s note: Aitken published his second collection, In One House, in 1996.)
Therefore I’m interested to hear what the writing process is like for you. Where does inspiration come from, and how does your work move from conception to completion in a way that feels creatively sustainable and fulfilling? What makes something ‘done’?
When I was in my early twenties it seemed quite easy to write, and my life was in some ways more conducive to writing, with less concerns then with earning a living than there was later. It was ten years not publishing [between Letter to Marco Polo and In One House]; I couldn’t repeat the work about my Thai ‘return’. But I did work on my poetry. Also, the nineties was a tough time for young poets, with a few established publishers closing.
With me, I am a kind of intermittent writer, with long periods of not doing much except read and think. [I find] other writing most inspiring, as is living in new places, or having unfamiliar experiences. I seem to need lines [to] pop into my head, often in the morning or between dreaming. My collection of Cambodian poems in Eighth Habitation was written when my partner and I were living in Siem Reap for a year, and I [had] read a thousand pages on Cambodian history. I also immersed myself in learning the language; new words seem to generate a poetic creative process for me. French has this effect on me [too]—words with no direct translation might lead to some improvisation in poems.
Another way I get going is to write letters to friends in poetic forms. My books all have a letter or two addressed to a particular person. It is the mix of description and affection, and poetry can be a very intimate way to communicate.
It once took me about ten years to complete a poem, as it took that long to be satisfied with how the poem ended. Revenants was inspired by a dream I had where the figures of peasant children appeared at my window in France. I felt that the dead were trying to tell me something, and although this sounds mystical, I felt that they were asking me to speak for them. I love archaeology and it is just a scientific method for finding a story in vestiges. I am now less hung up on completing a ‘perfect’ poem, and more interested in longer sequences which are open-ended and processual.
No.5
Do you think the conditions for you then, at least in terms of writing, are different now? What advice would you give to a young writer who wants to pursue writing poetry in Australia?
They are absolutely different to when I started. As a young writer I had a lot of time to read and write. Fewer major publishers is a limitation, but more online journals exist now, many of them excellent and very readable. I never did a formal creative writing course, by which I mean workshops, so for me ‘assessment’ was by peers, and by how many poems I could see published, and then by book reviews. I am not sure if there are fewer reviewers around, but more money for reviewers and for editors would be a great help. I think there are more great first collections of poetry being published than there were in the eighties, though it would be good to see more poetry zines.
The title of this collection, Revenants, suggests spirits and ghosts who return to the human world through dream and art, not to haunt it, but to remind the living that the present and the past are intertwined.
At the heart of the collection is a series of poems about the poet’s father, a Melbournian who travelled and worked in Asia as a young man, who married the poet’s mother in Bangkok, and whose life and death are commemorated here. The poems have settings in Asia, Australia, Hawai’i, and France, which has become the author’s second home. They reflect on the legacy of colonialism, not as theory, but as inherited experience. In them the poet himself may be thought of as a revenant, sharing his awareness of secret histories and local knowledge, stories of migration, the vestiges of forgotten people and places.
Get it from Giramondo here.