5 Questions with kenji kinz
kenji kinz is barely pseudonymous for not a writer who still sleeps on Dharug land, 2148.
No.1
How did you come to poetry as a form?
Tumblr teen trash lit and rad slam poetry on YouTube.
No.2
apocalypse scroll like it was normal is your first book. Can you briefly run us through how it was conceived and/or structured? What inspired its becoming?
In 2018 I wrote an honours thesis, [titled] ‘decolonising the commons: fugitivity and future planning in end times’. After that I tried more directly to engage with ‘activism’ in so-called sydney. Trying to ‘put it into action’, or at least, trying to continue studying how we might do things that could be described as decolonising the commons. apocalypse scroll like it was normal feels like (at least hopes to be) a more poetic elaboration of those same strands that lead to and through all that.
Probably the most important text intellectually and poetically, for the thesis and so these pieces too, is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and Moten’s work more broadly, as well as the many artists and writers all of that converses and tangles up with. That, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples stand out most and definitely guided the trajectory that both the thesis and book fall in. Those texts alone are worth incalculably more than the cost of a media degree and I will be forever grateful for those teachers and those who brought their work into the classroom.
Much of apocalypse scroll like it was normal is collected and revised from various notepad files I accumulated during the time I was at uni, with some poems written while putting this together specifically. I have maybe been foolishly a bit stuck trying to put into words these sort of idk fundamental things, especially as sometimes I feel like, what else even needs to be said, by anyone, about anything? I suppose this endless elaboration is the nature and curse of language. I’m keen to continue playing around with videos and other media. But anyway, for now, if you want them to be, these poems can also all be thought of and read as love letters, or prayers, to and from the undercommons.
No.3
When I was reading apocalypse scroll like it was normal, I kept thinking of Donna Haraway’s provocation: ‘staying with the trouble’. It feels like the essence of the book, so it was a pleasant surprise to see you use those words (in ‘untitled 3’). Do you want to elaborate more on what that means to you, in your politics and/or your writing more specifically?
What that phrase means to me is something like surrendering oneself (one’s self, severing the singular) to the inescapable complexity and inter-relationality of our shared ecological existence and all the ‘trouble’ that brings, all the turbulence and toxicity of earthly living and dying. So it can be a useful affirmation against a kind of purity politics as well as a rejection of the rational man/self/master as the centre of the universe and all of its co-constituting binaries and boundaries, a framework basically for ‘how to live together in the ongoing ecological catastrophe of modernity’ (or maybe something more like ‘fabulating and flourishing in our multiple multi-species becomings’). But I dunno... it’s not the fault of any individual teacher or academic or whatever, but there were def times during uni where we’d be unpacking Haraway or whoever’s work and I’d feel a bit like the walls were melting. Feeling a bit like, aren’t we just talking about life and what people do? Why does this conversation feel so far removed from the thing it is supposed to be about?
Well, only God can judge so I’m just talking shit now as well, and I worry about the same things anyway, I wonder who will end up reading this and I hope it brings something good and useful to them regardless. And there is plenty good and useful in Haraway’s work and I’m tired of what feels like a lazy and cynical mode of criticism that seems increasingly taken for granted, where it seems all too easy to just consume and dispose of a person and their life’s work at the level of idk, a clickbait headline. Rather stay with the trouble, isn’t it? The same class also sent me to the work of Métis woman writer Zoe Todd, and in particular her article ‘Relationships’ where she asks these questions that stuck the whole time I was researching and writing the thesis:
“What does it mean to have a reciprocal discourse on catastrophic end times and apocalyptic environmental change in a place where, over the last five hundred years, Indigenous peoples faced (and face) the end of worlds with the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions? What does it mean to hold, in simultaneous tension, stories of the Anthropocene in the past, present, and future?”
Following those questions led me to learning of Indigenous author and activist Professor Tony Birch, who had been grappling with similar ideas in a more local context:
“For Indigenous people, the impact of climate change is not a future event […] Are these narratives of impending apocalypse something of a Western fetish?”
and Ellen van Neerven’s still invaluable ‘the country is like a body’, which similarly illustrates the (for want of better words) holistic and inter-relational nature of Indigenous knowledges and land management practices, where of course every thing is always already situated, before and beyond the imposition of empire:
”Living connected to country, there’s no wonder Traditional Owners are steps ahead of science. Indigenous Knowledges are old knowledges. They are accumulated through years of trial and error.”
So again I am hoping to reiterate the relief, gratitude, wonder, etc, upon coming across Black, Indigenous and other scholars who were also writing ‘against but within’ the colonised neoliberal university, against but within the holds of english academe and all its regulatory appendages, staying with all the trouble of being a kind of internal outsider, a gap in the walls, a leak in the ceiling. In other words, the historical context and therefore ever-present material stakes become immediately less abstract when writing and studying out of a place of survival or struggle, out of a kind of need that precedes and exceeds the individual, rather than as just an intellectual project. Again, I don’t mean to disrespect or pedestal anyone—we are all human and these are just words and of course scholarship is work and a job, but basically it feels significantly more fruitful, truthful, liberating, whatever, to try to understand ‘the world’ as a continuous, dislocated war of coloniality that comes to know itself primarily through the theft and plunder of Africa and the New World and then through the ongoing reification and reformation of those networks and machines of extraction and accumulation (today via the forms we recognise as global financed neoliberal technopharmacopornographic capitalism or whatever). As Sylvia Wynter writes, the project of (the current ethnoclass conception of the human) Man and its overrepresentation, or as Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls it, the White Possessive, and as Saidiya Hartman reminds us, we are living through the afterlives of slavery. Indeed, innumerable spectres haunt ‘the world’ and its many mutations.
This framework also helps to view the colonisation of this continent as continuous and constituent of the same project, which helps to think about ways through it that are locally situated while still attuned to all that is ‘new’ about the global. If there is any trouble to speak of, I think something like that is it. And if there are people who have survived all of this, and have passed and written it down, that seems like as good a source as any for guidance on ‘what’s going on’ and ‘what to do about it’. None of this is necessarily mutually exclusive with trying to encourage tentacular thinking with companion species in the chthulucene. But if you only have time to read one...
No.4
It’s obvious to me, from the title and from many of the poems in the collection, that your writing is derivative of and responsive to the existence of the internet, and I guess the larger condition of being “extremely online”, as many of us are now. Your poems explore the unrelenting news feed, racial capitalism, the inability to log off and more. What is your relationship to the internet like, and how does that change or help with the writing that you do?
Ambivalent but overall I try to hold onto some kind of faith in, I guess, human creativity and ingenuity, which got us into this mess to begin with. Sometimes I indulge in the luxury of nostalgia for a time of pure wonderment at DOS games, screaming over 4-player split screen, losing sleep finding HTML codes for animated cursors and forum sigs… the nostalgia is an indulgence because ‘we can’t go back’ (Haraway (1985) and Musk (2016) agree: we are already cyborg) and neocolonial extractive economies make the internet possible and the zoomers don’t give a shit. But actually, they’re also figuring it out and teaching us new ways to meme and so on, and really thinking the kids are absolutely all nihilists with 8-second attention spans and 24-hour memories feels a part of the same cynical programming that ultimately seems to reduce our capacities to think and remember.
The kids are obviously the future, and I think the truth is we are actually all way smarter and more capable than our devices often make us feel, and probably we should all also recognise how addictive and harmful the scroll can be. As technologies increasingly incorporate more of our lives and living, the need to stay grounded and present via something more real (such as a meditation practice, or perhaps just a craft or hobby that doesn’t require electricity) feels both increasingly difficult and increasingly important. This is basically at the level of looking after oneself, and I am trying to be better at that. Because at the same time, none of this shit is going anywhere any time soon, nor is any of it actually that ‘new’, and tomorrow there will be another thing, much like yesterday's. So the internet has materiality and historicity and there are endless funny or clever things to say about all that. I try not to feel resigned to any of it; that is probably how ‘they’ want us to feel (lol).
As above, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Aria Dean, American Artist and Alexander R. Galloway are the writers and artists that come to mind who helped me understand these technologies as continuous and constituent of the same global process and network of coloniality, of capture and control. Even in my relatively short lifetime, it is easy to recognise that the internet has changed a lot and things that used to feel exciting now feel mostly depressing and impossible. But no matter how hard they try, we (us, the kids, the people) will always be the innovators, leading the way and calling the shots, and they (the mods) will always be reacting and playing catch up, forever failing to regulate away our fun. In this way, I am also trying to ‘keep up’—trying not to feel old and liberal with naïve nostalgia for a time where the memes were simpler.
No.5
What authors, poets or artists inspired you in the process of writing apocalypse scroll like it was normal?
Tupac and Wu-Tang. Mulder and Scully. All the names mentioned here and in the book.
What if when we wrote our names we forgot them, every time, every word?
In apocalypse scroll like it was normal, kenji kinz dispenses a heady homebrew of poetic and essayistic offerings from and to the undercommons, those common (under)grounds we hold and that hold us. Following the insurgent and inventive intensity of innumerable others, kinz (dis)locates contemporary conceptualisations of multiple and overlapping apocalypses with a concern less for the doom-and-gloom of an assumed 'before' and 'after' and more for the seemingly unending stasis of the here-and-now.
From the city to the suburbs, at the action and at the afterparty, this text attempts to recognise and remember, to elaborate and extend an inheritance that we cannot recall, suggesting ultimately that perhaps the answers we seek are not only (im)possible but already everywhere underway.
Available from subbed in from Nov 2. Pre-order here.
Watch video poem untitled 1 (track 1 [fantasticity]) by kenji kinz over on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter.