5 Questions with Shastra Deo
Shastra Deo is a writer, reader, and videogame enthusiast. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.
Her second book, The Exclusion Zone, was published by University of Queensland Press in 2023.
No.1
It’s been a few years since your last book, your debut poetry collection The Agonist (2017). What were you up to in the interim and how did the idea for The Exclusion Zone germinate?
After I finished The Agonist, I spent a lot of time on Reddit. I first saw the message when I was scrolling through an AskReddit thread on creepy Wikipedia articles. It was late 2017 and tensions between the United States and North Korea were rising. I was thinking about detonation and fallout.
When I first saw the message I thought it was a poem:
This place is a message . . . and part of a
system of messages . . . pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor . . . no
highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
. . . nothing valued is here.
I need to emphasise that [work on] The Exclusion Zone started before this message from the Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant became a meme. I took it very seriously and was very earnest about it. How can we warn about the dangers of nuclear waste when its half-life is beyond our human comprehension of time? The Exclusion Zone began in pursuit of a language of warning, but over time, the collection became more concerned with nuclear histories, nuclear futures, and the zones of exclusion within the world and the self.
People keep asking me if I’m going to write about the 6mm by 8mm capsule of caesium-137 that fell off a truck and is currently lost in Western Australia, but to be honest, I think I already did (see ‘Interlude (Reservoir)’). Poetry as prophecy, poetry as play.
No.2
Between the poems in The Exclusion Zone lies another poem. Titled ‘It Survives’, it mirrors the format in Choose Your Own Adventure narratives. Readers—or as you say in the Notes section at the back, reader-players—are asked to make a ‘choice’ that leads them to another page further in the collection. What kind of possibilities do you see for poetry that engages play in this way?
Can poetry do things? Can poetry make things happen? Writers will always say yes.
Yes, there’s Auden’s famous line [from ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’]: ‘poetry makes nothing happen: it survives’, but he goes on to say ‘it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’ In the space of The Exclusion Zone, ‘It Survives’ undeniably makes things happen. The command ‘Turn to page __’, which doubles as a poetic refrain, is potent and real—a literary speech act that can nonetheless be enacted in the real world. Even if the reader-player chooses to ignore the poem’s command and flit to a different page, they are nonetheless establishing the poem’s agency through their defiance.
‘It Survives’ could be read as a simulation—a safe way to let readers explore a far-future nuclear waste repository and learn through imaginative experiment. But really, my goal here was to externalise the interpretive choices readers make when engaging with poetry. To me, the reading of poetry is play. There’s something inherently playful about revisiting, reinterpreting, relearning the discrete poems that make up a collection, and observing how those poems change when you shift their context. I hope ‘It Survives’ prompts readers to think playfully about the poems in close proximity, too.
No.3
I am often struck by the way you wield experimentalism in your poetry, and how you manage to weave together surprising threads to form a more coherent whole, even if this ‘whole’ isn’t ‘complete’ by any measure, sometimes even revelling in its unfinishedness. The Exclusion Zone plays with language and form to achieve this: you incorporate language from fanfiction, from Hindi, from Old English, as well as signs and symbols. Can you speak more to this?
I think, rather than setting out to wield experimentalism in my writing, many of my poems are experiments in and of themselves. Hindi—a first language I lost over one generation alone—features as a means of hiding information from myself, yet the text can be laid bare through the camera function of Google Translate, cycling through translation by translation as the camera focuses in and out. ‘Frameshift Mutations’ was a very rudimentary attempt at testing how a frameshift mutation—an insertion or deletion that shifts the way a DNA sequence is read—could be represented in plain language; to my surprise, the resulting poem, when read out loud, sounds remarkably like Old English. Many of these poems start with a particular hypothesis or goal, but the results are often surprising.
Fanfiction, on the other hand, has been an intentional part of my practice for a long time, and goes hand in hand with my intertextual gestures towards other poets and literature. Poetry, for me, has always been about channelling voices other than my own, and most often, these voices come from TV shows, videogames and contemporary films. I read into the gaps in these texts, experimenting with ways of (re)telling the moments in between the diegesis we see on screen. The central section of The Exclusion Zone, ‘The Game Room’, is almost entirely devoted to the Yakuza videogame series and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Experiments can only be tested through enactment, and for the poem to be enacted, it must have a reader. Perhaps that taps into the ‘unfinishedness’ you’ve identified—for the poem (the experiment) to be complete, a reader must activate it, play it through to its ending, and make meaning of it. Perhaps the reader senses that there are other ways to read, understand, or interpret a work, and thus, the work feels unfinished. That part of the experiment sits outside of me as the poem’s first knower. There is more work to be done—that work, of listening, of speaking, of passing the text on, is out of my hands.
No.4
Several of your poems touch on memory: lost memories, recuperated memories, as well as repressed and contested ones, and how this informs language. In The Agonist, you do this too, except the poems there zeroed in on the corporeal instead of its detritus. What makes memory a subject you’re continually interested in digging into, and what aspects of memory-making were you interested in tackling in The Exclusion Zone?
I remember speaking with Sumudu about memory-making [in an interview] some years ago—’memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together.’ Memory is the thread that stitches moments lived into the stories we tell ourselves, and tell about ourselves. The Agonist was interested in how the body remembers—how corporeality can hold memory through feeling or gesture, heartbeat or breath.
The Exclusion Zone turns to language in order to challenge language’s limits. Can language truly represent its real-world referent? If there is a gap, however small, how can language enact its memory-making potential? Or is memory-making held within the gap between language and what it attempts to represent? Words carry memory within them—for example, the etymology for ‘molar teeth’ finds its roots in the Latin word for ‘millstone’, the tool used for grinding grain into flour. These memories remain in the unconscious unless we go searching for them, but are enacted, again and again, by the throat and the tongue. Language moves through bodies, is activated by bodies being/speaking/doing. It is dangerous, always, to give language more agency than corporeal bodies.
But language, like bodies, bears the inevitability of decay—or, if not decay, then inevitable transmutation. Language constantly undergoes an unescapable de/re- generation. An ever-growing heteroglossia. There’s a memory of holding a DUALSHOCK®4 controller and that memory is encased in my hands. Can I impart that memory if I start speaking in button-presses? ×, □, △? ○, ○, ○?
No.5
What’s a writing habit you find yourself fighting against, and why? And then how do you end up navigating that?
My worst writing habit has always been only writing when I’m ‘inspired’, or in the mood, or hyperfixated on something. I have no discernible discipline. I used to fight against that—I tried daily writing prompts, then weekly ones, then responding to a book or TV show or videogame each month. I kept talking about input/output phases. The fact of the matter is I haven’t written for a long time.
I think often of Ha Jin’s poem, ‘Missed Time’:
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
I guess I gave into the habit. I’m living that life right now—my writingless, storyless, beautiful life.
(Credit: Kate Lund)
Find out more
Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of séance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.
Get it from UQP here, or at all good bookstores.