5 Questions with Cher Tan
by Leah Jing McIntosh
Cher Tan is an essayist and critic.
Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Catapult, The Age, Disclaimer Journal, Cordite Poetry Review and Overland, amongst many others. She is an editor at Liminal and the reviews editor at Meanjin.
Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging is her debut book. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri land.
No.1
Peripathetic is subtitled ‘Notes on (Un)belonging)’. I’m curious why you didn’t call them ‘essays’. Why ‘notes’?
Some of the essays were made up of scraps and notes that were already floating around, either in my phone, on my computer, in my notebooks, on public and private social media, etc. So I was mostly trying to make those notes more coherent, putting them together, a jigsaw puzzle of the unconscious mind. I was thinking of the book as a kind of palimpsest—layers and layers stacked on top of each other, and in this case they were literally notes. It was a way of speaking to something the jazz musician Charles Mingus said in an interview:
“What I’m trying to play is very difficult, because I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason why it’s difficult—it’s not difficult to play the mechanics of it—is because I’m changing all the time.”
I also wanted to gesture to the high brow/low brow dialectic that runs throughout the entire book. I think the word ‘essay’ tends to carry overly-serious connotations.
No.2
How do you think the internet / hyper-space / has influenced your work? Your work always feels to have an internet-texture to me. It’s so tight at a sentence level, and I think this, combined with how you move between ideas, gives it a certain online affect. How do you think of your own form?
If the internet didn’t exist I don’t think I’d be doing this interview with you right now. We might not even have met! Online was where I learned how to write, but on a collective level. Although I was already doing a little of that through zines, the immediacy that the internet provided was something that gave that sense of communality another dimension. Online spaces were also where I could gain access to texts and ideas I may not have encountered as someone who didn’t attend university.
That said, it’s a complicated relationship because the technology was invented by corporations and nefarious actors, and where you see things like co-optation occur up-close; as a result my work also seeks to interrogate power dynamics within hyperspace.
So my form is definitely a result of my history writing on the internet: in blogs and messageboards, and on so-called ‘microblogging’ platforms such as Twitter as well as private servers/chatrooms. At the same time, I wanted the form to end up marrying literary devices used in fiction—what I read the most—but also from the perspective of someone who knows multiple Englishes. I wanted them to all come together as one to represent the way I think.
No.3
There are two epigraphs in the book, one by Ania Walwicz:
“What do I think, what do I think about now? I want to think very well. I want to say what I say now. I diverge. I digress and diverge now. I go sideways. But I’m not linear. Is this the way to write my essay now?”
and another by Fred Moten:
“Its torqued seriality—bent, twisted, propelled off line—is occult, impossible articulation.”
I’m always interested in a book’s epigraphs. Can you speak more to them? Why were you drawn to them?
They are both quotes from essays which can be found online, Walwicz’s from this 1997 essay in Meanjin titled ‘No, No, No: The Reluctant Debutante’, and Moten’s from this response to Édouard Glissant’s work, titled ‘to consent not to be a single being’ published in Poetry Foundation.
Ania Walwicz greatly inspires me. I love how she was a first-generation settler-migrant artist who didn’t hew to conventions, and as we know from her poem ‘Australia’, hated Australia or at least had very mixed feelings—the opposite of that migrant ‘gratitude’ basically. I don’t find a lot of “Australian” artists very inspiring and I wanted to honour her, particularly for lighting the path for someone like me many years later.
As for Fred Moten, what he’s written (with Stefano Harney, who had once lived in Singapore and had gotten into a controversy at a local university for giving all 169 of his students A-pluses; a piece of trivia I find amusing due to its indirect connection to me) about the ‘undercommons’ greatly inspires me too. They refer to the undercommons as minoritised people who ‘do not pay their debts, do not come to fix what has been broken’—which is to say, those on the margins who don’t foreground assimilation into the dominant paradigm.
Harney and Moten write that ‘we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.’ Peripathetic seeks to honour the undercommons at every turn, so the citation was another kind of honouring, but delivered sideways.
No.4
You write that ‘innovation for its own sake is the artistic form of planned obsolescence’. I was thinking how sometimes this is so clearly true in terms of literary form. But also how your form is sometimes—if not an innovation, a subversion—that does feel functional.
Yes, because I’m not ‘innovating’ for its own sake; the form(s) I use aren’t gimmicks. The redactions and breaks are not new forms. I’d say it’s a weaponisation of available forms to suit each essay’s intention.
The two essays are sequels to each other: for ‘By Signalling…’, it was the beginning of my interrogation into the gentrification of the mind, and as you can see the title has a double meaning. It’s about the push-pull that comes with revealing and concealing, so the redactions worked in tandem with that concept.
As for ‘The Lifestyle Church’, I wanted to tell a story about my life existing within subcultures but also interrogating why it’s increasingly feeling that my psychic and physical homes have been corrupted and co-opted. So the breaks in that essay moves between two modes to tell a larger narrative that could be interpreted as a narratival stand-in for the zoom lens on a camera: zooming into the personal; zooming out to the societal and cultural forces around me. The form was inspired by one of my favourite novels, Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth.
No.5
How is Édouard Glissant’s idea of ‘opacity’ related to ‘truth’ in your work? I feel it features fairly heavily in Peripathetic, both on an explicit and implicit level.
Very much so! Again, I was thinking about fiction, which is often said to be a ‘truth-telling’ genre, and how opacity works through that form. I was also thinking about the subtweet, and how its energy is similar to subversion tactics used under censorship. I grew up in a society where the term ‘post-truth’ was a lot more evident very early on—things such as surveillance and suppression of dissent was a matter of course as a very young person. That society was a test-lab for a kind of libertarian authoritarianism in that it’s a zionist colony and a western imperial outpost with a Confucian Chinese atmosphere. I had to find ways to express myself outside of that growing up. And as we can see, this sociopolitical condition is becoming more relevant in many places in the world, so I wanted to speak to that too. I think opacity comes naturally to me, both as a way of being and a way to resist. It’s a wilful inscrutability, because I never want to be co-opted.
Find out more
ʻThere was something so captivating about always being on the edge, on that shaky precipice of promise — something new and something cool was just lurking around the corner and we’d arrive at it if we kick around long enough.ʼ
Peripathetic is about shit jobs. About being who you are and who you aren’t online. About knowing a language four times. About living on the interstices. About thievery. About wanting. About the hyperreal. About weirdness.
Cher Tan’s essays are as non-linear as her life, as she travels across borders that are simultaneously tightening and blurring. In luminous and inventive prose, they look beyond the performance of everyday life, seeking answers that continually elude.
Paying homage to the many outsider artists, punks, drop-outs and rogue philosophers who came before, this book is about the resistance of orthodoxies — even when it feels impossible.
Get the book from NewSouth Publishing here, or at all good bookstores.