5 Questions with Eunice Andrada
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet and educator. Her debut poetry collection Flood Damages (Giramondo Publishing, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award.
Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE is out now.
(credit: RJ Dela Rosa)
No.1
First things first: how did TAKE CARE begin to seed? Can you briefly run us through its conception and process?
There wasn’t one particular seed that started TAKE CARE, but a deluge of realisations, learnings, and personal events that are difficult to articulate in a linear way: therapy returning my language, beginning to be vulnerable with people I’ve considered friends for years, the irony of seeing the ex who assaulted me at an Invasion Day rally, studying in Jerusalem and being without sleep and without poems for months, wanting to keep my beloved safe, reading the work of So Mayer, having to move through a world with predators everywhere: in poetry, in school, at work, in public transport, everywhere. Predators and their allies.
Towards the end of 2020, I finally had time and space in my own little home—I was trying to care for myself and moving closer to the truth of care; a word associated with tenderness and responsibility, but one derived from the Old English ‘cearian’, one of whose many meanings is to grieve. To care for myself was to let myself grieve what had been taken away without my consent; the things that are continually being taken away from my beloved.
From Diane Seuss’ poem ‘White violet, not so much an image’ [from Four-Legged Girl], the epigraph of the first section TAKE: reads—’The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it.’ I wanted to break open the notion of care: what does it mean to come from a country that exports Filipino women overseas to perform the gendered, racialised labour of care? How does my settlership on stolen land disrupt the care systems of First Nations people? How do I care/grieve for myself and my communities against unrelenting structural violence?
The poems in TAKE CARE reflect the thought processes that helped me arrive here: the only way to care for myself and others is to destroy the interconnected systems of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy.
No.2
In TAKE CARE, you explore the concept of ‘care’ through the lens of US imperialism, colonialism and trauma. It’s also not tied to one place: you take the reader through the Philippines, the Australian suburbs, Palestine. To me, I get the sense that you want to emphasise that power is part of an interconnected network of violences (quiet or otherwise), and that by recognising a transnationality then we can begin to untangle and articulate those violences. Can you speak more to this?
Reading the work of So Mayer was life-changing for me. In their essay ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification’, they say:
Rape and colonialism are not commensurate, but they are kin. When we talk about sexual violence as feminists, we are–we have to be–talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of hetero-patriarchal capitalism.
Mayer’s articulation of rape as a structure changed the way I looked at my poems, my history, and my future. The pieces that I collected to form TAKE CARE had been written over the course of three years. I had thought that these poems belonged to different private and public writing projects. Reading So Mayer’s work helped me realise the way these poems are in an inextricable relationship with each other, because the experiences that moved me to write these poems are perpetuated by interdependent systems of oppression.
No.3
The collection is divided into 4 parts: ‘TAKE:’, ‘: COMFORT, ‘: REVENGE’ and ‘: CARE’—the headings give readers a clue as to the different moods evoked throughout. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about how those sections came together for you, especially as you say that the poems were written over three years? I guess I’m also asking this with the last line in the opening poem (‘Echolalia’) in mind, which goes, ‘For my human body to be seen as the centre / of a poem, it must be buoyant.’
Reflecting on the aforementioned line from Diane Seuss’ poem, I wanted to bind the collection through acts of deconstruction. The phrases ‘take care’, ‘take comfort’ and ‘take revenge’ are often said without a second thought, but I wanted to explore what it means to take care, to take comfort, and to take revenge.
For me, living with a history of surviving sexual violence in childhood and adulthood—and the threat of sexual violence that will exist as long as this white supremacist capitalist cis-heteropatriarchy continues—means having the capacity to care for myself be taken away; my comfort in my body taken way. And to be a woman of colour, when or if you speak about your experiences of sexual violence, your voice is ignored.
Against this imposition of silence, I wanted to take revenge on the page—because if I couldn’t have any true form of justice in the real world, then in my poems I could imagine a future where I wasn’t afraid of the threat of violence; where rapists and other predators would be the ones who lived in perpetual fear.
No.4
When in the process of writing and/or thinking, how do you interact with what you read? And how do you then intrapolate those influences into your own work?
I hand-write notes and journal a lot. I also share a lot of what I’m reading with my friends and ask them questions, or sometimes we just scream over the phone about how incredible a poem is. If I’m moved by a particular poem, I’ll bring it to a workshop I’m teaching and we’ll talk about all the different ways we’re reading it.
Sometimes I bring a passage to a session with my counsellor and ask her to guide me through parts I’m stuck on. Sometimes if I’m completely floored by a short shory, I’ll write poems to stay in that world for a while longer. Interacting with the texts I’m reading also means interacting with the people who wrote them. When it comes to living writers whose work has changed me forever I like reaching out to thank them, and if I’m using their words in a poem and feel unsure about how I’m doing it, I’ll ask for their blessing. That was the case with So Mayer’s words, some of which I reconfigured into poem form with their permission.
But I really just like reaching out to authors to let them know what their work means to me (fangirling is a very important part of my general art-making process), and sometimes they’ll ask to read the poems I’m working on. It was one of the things I loved about writing the poems in TAKE CARE—letting authors I admire into my work, which is new for me. I’m usually very private when it comes to drafts, which, most of the time, feel too vulnerable to share.
I don’t really have a set method for weaving the ideas together, because in my life they are already in conversation.
No.5
As far as I know, you’re solely a poet. I know many poets who are also essayists, critics or fiction writers. Do you see yourself ‘branching out’, so to speak? Why have you only written in this form so far?
I write in other forms, but I don’t feel an urgency to seek publication for these pieces. Not everything I write has to be seen. I would hate that. It would feel like letting strangers have access to every room of my mind and my heart. Some of my art-making is only for me and people I love.
I also feel like writers, particularly poets, are put under this weird capitalist pressure to branch out, to produce more (content?) and be known as this and and and. I just wanna vibe and share my writing if I feel like it.
TAKE CARE explores what it means to survive within systems not designed for tenderness. Bound in personal testimony, the poems situate the act of rape within the machinery of imperialism, where human and non-human bodies, lands, and waters are violated to uphold colonial powers. Andrada explores the magnitude of rape culture in the everyday: from justice systems that dehumanise survivors, to exploitative care industries that deny Filipina workers their agency, to nationalist monuments that erase the sexual violence of war.
Unsparing in their interrogation of the gendered, racialised labour of care, the poems flow to a radical, liberatory syntax. Physical and online terrain meld into a surreal ecosystem of speakers, creatures, and excavated histories. Brimming with incantatory power, Andrada’s verses move between breathless candour and seething restraint as they navigate memory and possibility. Piercing the heart of our cultural crisis, these poems are salves, offerings, and warnings.
Now out with Giramondo, or find it in all good bookstores.