Notes from Admin; or, the Multiplicity of Form
By Robert Wood
In my last blog post for Liminal, I covered a lot of ground on diversity in general and ended by stating that the role of the diverse writer is to bring your people with you. The next question might be: where should we bring our people to? If we can agree that our aim is liberation, maybe even enlightenment and transcendence, we still need to articulate what that looks like in an everyday kind of way. I still believe in the mission that is good writing, which can teach us about ourselves, help us live good lives, and change the world. It is simply that I am not in a position to pursue it like I once did. I write as someone whose current role is to facilitate writing through the public service of administration, which means this piece is from the sidelines rather than the moshpit. I know too, in what follows, that there are so many people who have offered their views and my aim is simply to reorganise my own as a blog post, which always are thoughts in progress.
I work as an administrator in a community arts organisation that aims to have a social impact through sharing stories. We work with writers, but we also work with oral storytellers. If the West has taught us to privilege the written word, we must also recognise the wealth of knowledge, education, awareness that comes from talking and listening. I have found this particularly liberating. After all, there was a time, not so long ago, when I had pretensions of being a writer. Pretensions is the right word because there was a large degree of pretence to my practice—of getting paid, of making a political difference, of being mentally well. I gave up that idea when I realised that I could not support a family with my kind of work, that it did not actually help the material lives of marginalised people, and that it was taking a toll on my wellbeing. And so, if you continue to read this piece, recognise it as a cautionary tale that can teach you the most from my own failures. I am not jaded about my plans not working out, nor am I angry or disillusioned. In short, I only wish to have the personal authority to grant my younger self the permission to become more than decolonised, anti-racist, and a voice of protest. There is something utopian missing from the diversity conversation unless we count acceptance, if not assimilation, to a literary canon, industry, and practice that remain avowedly white. Surely, there is more to writing than hoping diverse people win the Nobel Prize let alone the Miles Franklin? Surely it is also about the self-respect that comes from supporting and representing your community as an act of governmental sovereignty?
I remember publishing almost two pieces a week in literary journals in a single calendar year and making $12,000 plus enjoying my volunteering with asylum seekers more plus putting a few noses out of joint, which I was loathe to do and still regret. That was what it meant to be a writer as I learnt my craft. Those were the conditions in which I worked. Afterwards, I, like so many others, worked in the casualised labour force of a major university, but that too did not sit well. There was a lot of institutional racism that manifested in small ways all reinforcing the fact that it was not my place. Now though, I am happy to rest in a non-profit that is still creative and is run by people of colour. In other words, it gives me satisfaction to labour in the community arts where there is respect for my heritage, family, perspective. It is also enough to see the wheel turning for emerging writers now, who have energy, cohesion, and possibilities that I never made available to myself.
In the common understanding of the literary sector, diversity is still attached to the experience of identity. When we say diversity, we mean who is doing the writing. Occasionally, diversity also includes editors or agents or book designers or publishers or anyone else in the sector. And yet, when we speak of diversity for all of these people we mean their identities as they are legible in a politicised frame of reference. This is grounded in liberal ideas of rights, including the belief that only one can voice one’s own experience, that every individual has value, that one’s embodied position is proof of one’s authority. And so it should be. One drawback is that writers often believe they can only speak about what has happened to them. It boxes us in so we are only allowed to speak of particulars that can never become universal. I see this a lot in my work where this white taste, including an internalised racism, determines what is written. The response though is not simply a liberal one—that we need representation. There is also a response many would argue comes from a labour tradition—that we respond with collective action to change the structure and do so in a coalition of solidarity. Call it a movement if you are so bold. Yet, both of those approaches are essentially political solutions in a cultural space. And, as we know from the schmoozing so common to festival circuits, writers can be as political as anyone. However, that might not be where worthwhile ideas take place, including how we can begin to think through and solve the issue of our continued oppression using reparative action.
We also need an aesthetic response when it comes to diversity.
This is not to forget politics, or even religion, but to see aesthetics as an indication of associated issues like ideology, network, taste, power, history, and so on. If we know who we are, as individuals in touch with our identity, then surely we know we deal in aesthetics as well, and, because we are writers this means issues like voice, style, rhythm, technique. If I proposed earlier that diversity is grounded in community relations, it might be necessary to add that a corresponding sense of multiplicity also matters for craft as well. Otherwise, there would be diverse people seeking out diversity in other areas, and, this is what distinguishes the fact that we are writers after all. We write and so it matters what we write not only who we are.
And so, what I would like to encourage is diverse writers embrace multiple forms. For example, it has become customary in Anglophone poetry written on this continent from our communities to be a type of politically engaged, protest poetry in free verse. And that is all well and good. But what of the forms of writing that are rooted in our identities? This is where diversity as a principle matters beyond simple identity. Thinking about form encourages new possibilities by recognising the history of specific countries that speak back to a flattening homogeneity that would simply discourage us from deep knowledge about who we are and where we come from. If I, as a Malayali just like you as a Ngarluma or Hakka or some other kind of person, write a sonnet, it doesn’t make the sonnet a Malayali form. The sonnet might change a little, but it remains a form that is foreign to me; maybe even hostile, dangerous, demeaning. And so, on this continent, today, where is the ovi or the abhanga? Where is the tjabi and jawi? Where is the basit, ritha, tawil? The rajaz, zajal, qasida? The fu, shi, qu? These are not idle questions, but go to the heart of writing when it comes to representing our cultures in ways that are respected and legible in a long tradition.
The dominance of the contemporary novel is well founded, and, the case is different for different types of writers. The examples I have cited above are all relevant to poetry, where questions of form are more pronounced than anywhere else. What that means, however, for prose writers is not only that the question must be asked somewhat differently; it is that what we read informs who we are and what is expressed. In that way, the traditions of the West are multiple, even in the novel, and here one might only cite realism and modernism as different schools of thought. But, when one expands the frame of reference, and acknowledges the West is constrained, and contemporary ‘Australia’ is even more limited, then one will see the possibilities that matter most for one’s own practice. This turn to form, however, is not founded in an immature anti-whiteness that would simply re-inscribes whiteness’ centrality through negation. Quite simply, there are limits to what white people can and do know. Besides, we simply prefer to do our own thing. It is about re-learning the forms of writing that are there in our archives, in our ancestors, in the elders of our communities, which go deeper than what we are initially presented with, by university teachers and even contemporary discourse that is based in marketable ideas of writing itself. That is why I gain so much from working with oral storytellers on a daily basis.
For example, I have been employed in translation, logistics and research by a Ngarluma organisation to help with mid-twentieth century song poetry. It involves repatriation, community ownership, retrieval, and a whole host of related issues. What matters most here is the form of the work itself, which are tjabi, or personally authored, public, song poems that can be heard and even composed by anyone at all. They are not songlines nor are they protest poems. It is not legible in the market of literary festivals, journals or bookstores; but it does provide a sense of community pride for people in the Western Pilbara and circulates as digital audio files on thumb drives in its own way. That means it has a different public, gaze, audience, and, all because tjabi is distinct. When there are five tjabi poets in a room talking they are not talking about being diverse after all. They are talking about what makes the ‘Marble Bar Train’ a good song poem, about that time someone came to record them, about why a voice rises in a certain section. What I have learnt from helping with this project is that there are forms that need to be cultivated, learned, respected more than ever. This has also meant understanding the discursive differences between stolen, sovereign and sacred country. Listening to traditional owners has taught me how to be a better guest inside those forms, and, it has returned me to my own traditions. It has also helped me as diasporic Indian become more attuned to my own history. This is with the hope that I can claim ownership over my own words in a lifelong journey that seeks to be in harmony with the world itself.
And so, if diversity is about letting us speak our own stories, it is not enough to assume that the shape, tone, style, metre, length, language, of those stories will be in a manner that makes sense to critical good taste. This is to say, the white gatekeepers that are ascendent at journals, festivals and universities might simply not know what to do with our traditional expressions even if they are remade for the contemporary by diaspora, immigrant, and truly local communities. This does not mean a naive return to a day when there was no cross-pollination, or a self-Orientalising adoption of forms that have transcended their locale to approximate the universal whereby we all write haiku instead of villanelles, ghazals instead of Shakespearean sonnets, pantoums instead of prose poems (though I would certainly welcome that). It means that I, as an administrator and a reader, want to see writing from Others that has involved research into the forms that are as powerful as we are. I want to see multiple answers, in other words. I want to see connected paradigms of writing that do not rest on the established ways of being written, and, not through an immature injunction ‘to make it new’ but as an invigoration of the deepest reality of being that comes with connection to a long line of ancestors. That is what we have as people free of whiteness. That is what it is to be proud of our colours.
What I do not think we should see though is the persistent suggestion by mediocre white men so common to Australian literature on what formerly colonised subjects should regard as formal inventiveness. It is not then about being nostalgic for James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, or John Ashbery. It is about the self-determined authority we have to gain when we look into ourselves. And so, if identity politics leads us to diversity in the voices we hear, in the authors we get used to seeing; then surely, it is time to have a multiplicity of forms, especially those above and beyond the conservative tendency masquerading as experimentalism, which is simply lukewarm modernism, re-heated communism. There is more to the world out there, and, to refuse it is to refuse our claims on beauty, depth, rigour, simplicity and intelligence.
This does not mean, either, that one must consign oneself to writing in a form of one’s people, as if we conflate the continuation of tradition as the only authentic way to express one’s present identity and change the structure. Rather, it might inspire us to go in new directions altogether and, in so doing, give a sense of energy and purpose to our writing in such a way that it reaches different audiences. Of course, if you want to take ovi to an audience here and hone your craft in one tradition, by all means feel free. The exploration of form opens one up to consider culture as a whole, and, it may inspire new forms that speak to the best of who we are. It is not only a case of perfecting jawi when everyone writes free verse protest poems or long novels that are social realist with a hint of experimentation. It is about deepening the engagement with writing as a whole so we are not only making political claims, but cultural ones as well. For it is in that space we can sense our specificity as writers beyond our desire for representation.
Representation is an issue that binds us to film and television, advertising, music, and a whole host of other culture industry questions. Representation also ties us to the house of representatives, and is, for the most part, political. What matters for writing then are the things that distinguish it from other fields, which is to say form is what matters most of all. That is where we need lots of different types of writing and different types of writers as well. So, if the role of the diverse writer is to bring your people with you then you need to take them to a place that reminds them of home while being resonant, affirming, distinct all at once. That might mean the refusal of the established ways of expressing one’s identity, but it might also mean embracing and remixing forms that connect us to our people in the collective.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.