Why Write?
By Robert Wood
After my last two pieces on diversity for Liminal, I had no intention of writing a third. But, here I find myself with more to say, thinking of associated issues to consider in this conversation. One point of my first piece was to highlight how diversity is about community relations and not only identity, and, that our aim as writers of colour means bringing our people with us. That was complemented in the second piece by claiming we must express our selves in our own literary forms in order to articulate who we are with a deep belonging conscious of our ancestors. Both pieces meant thinking about the social role of writers who are concerned with more than individual careers and the contemporary context.
Now, in this blog, I want to share some thoughts on why we must write in the first place, and the tone, texture, and shape of responding to violence. However, it is important to first state what the problem is. White persons, or even white people, are not the problem. Many of us have white people in our families, in our circle of friends, and in our professional networks. They have been supportive, kind, and generous, and continue to be so. We can even love whities; maybe, we should especially love whities. And yet, the diverse liberal sees the white individual as the barrier, or the exception. Nor is the problem whiteness, which is what the POC labour tradition considers. This is because it is a structural issue, a collective failing; racism as a type of group event. These are, of course, issues. But, to my mind, the real problem is the violence that limits our horizons including the trauma and abuse directed at our bodies for the ancestors we carry in our skin, organs, belief systems. It is violence that should concern us, especially in the habits of our own communities, where we must look and look again in order to be an example to others. Otherwise, looking at white people and whiteness distracts us from very real problems we can solve together. The point is not, however, to turn away from changing individuals or systems, or to say ‘not all white people’, but to unlearn our internalised racism as it functions towards each other and manifests as violence. There must be a collective desire for non-violent self-representation that allows us to radiate a sense of love that encompasses each other in all our very complexity, which includes our white mothers, our white fathers, our white siblings, our white partners, publishers, editors, and fellow writers. That is a spiritual task.
That means the subject as individual (or identity) and the group (or class) are insufficient building blocks for a theory of how we should be together. In other words, maybe Marx and Mill are wrong for us and always have been. However, only a fool like myself would say that. Who would suggest such a thing here and now in the Australian public sphere where our political inheritance regards both as fountainheads of uncomplicated pragmatic significance? And yet, these dead white men might simply be irrelevant in our quest for collective enlightenment. After all, we have to unlearn the discipline inherited in the colonies; to understand that historians, like Marx, like Mill, are poor at rethinking our future for now.
Thinking about history as a diverse person also means knowing that trauma is not a competition. But, competing can be traumatic. It is not a question of seeing who is more victimised as if to then dialectically claim a superior position against dominance, to become moral through adversity, to be a slave liberated from the master who oppressed one violently. And yet, we are dealing with very real questions of adversity just as we are dealing with our own lived experiences of freedom, which reminds us that we have always already been liberated.
For me, I often want to be in a place where my race is not such an issue. Not a raceless place, but a place that is less hostile on account of my race. And that meant going to India in my case and publishing there primarily. It is not to say India is not racist. It is to say, I am subjected to less racism there than in Australia because of who I am as a person of Indian origin. I am aware of the privilege that I could go there, even if I cannot claim citizenship; that I am welcomed by a community of writers; that I have a place where I am allowed certain powers and possibilities. In addition, if it is about being of a people and not only a nation, then I have to rest in Kerala, which is a subset and adjacent imagined community to India itself. Such a move is to reclaim the slogan ‘fuck off, we’re full’, all for the purposes of a truer self-determination. I was pushed there by the hostility I have been subject to by the white Australian literati, but also pulled there by the calling of my motherland. So, what has India or Kerala or being Malayali taught me? And how does that matter for the task of the writer committed to non-violence?
It has taught me many many things, and, it is not only India as nation that has done the teaching. Writers who disavow that very nation teach me the most even as they live on that subcontinent just like we live ‘in so called Australia’. One thing that is especially important for diverse writers and diverse readers is the polytheistic reality of continental rather than national thinking. In other words, continents contain many religions, many people, many potentials, including my own. The same can be said here as a bulwark against settler colonialism, which all too often prevents us from seeing the heterogeneity of Indigenous Countries, including Laws and customs where we live currently. And so, diversity must be against the white homogeneity of nationalism, monotheism, supremacy; precisely because there are lots of other world historical belief systems including our own from Asia be they Buddhism or Hinduism, and local religions like Birdarra, which is one Law from the Western Pilbara and what my gumbarli and yalboos follow. India, but not India alone, has taught me about celebrating our differences, about respecting our traditions, and resisting a conservative, one dimensional tendency that would flatten all diverse people into a single category. Part of that means reclaiming literary spirit in today’s world as it manifests in material.
To reclaim the spiritual is vital to what we must do together, and, it takes effort. That, however, is why writers can labour. It is not only about decolonisation, but rather about the literary spiritual reality we express when we put pen to paper. Daily life is riddled with spiritual experiences, and, the point of enlightenment is to see these for the truest possibility they innately hold. That means we can transcend the mundane by looking at it once again. We are free to change our perspectives. To do so is an interpretive act, a meaningful act, which allows us to recognise that everything can change in an instant, that every second is precious, that you and I are but atoms in a universe that reaches forever into the distance. Life is infinite and to know as much is not only a sublime experience. It is a humbling one that allows us to get on with the important work we have to do, which is why we choose to write in the first place.
And so, the work we have to do is fundamentally spiritual, and yet, it contains a politics, which was the subject of the first blog even as I came at that from a different angle, and it must also interact with culture, which I addressed in my second blog post. Spirituality matters to who we are in a fundamental way. It determines our practices and the ones that continue to live in us. I have had many intense spiritual experiences, some of them religious, some of them personal, some of them on this landmass, some of them in Asia, and others yet in other places. Spirituality interacts with culture and it interacts with politics. In one way of thinking, it sits above them. Why it matters for diversity is not only about tolerance and respect, which comes out of a liberal tradition, especially for the freedom of religious expression; and it is not only about ritual and community, which comes out of a labour tradition, especially the desire to worship as a group. It matters too, for changing our perspectives in day-to-day reality that matters for actions imbued with meaning. This is why it is important to introduce yourself to Country, or, why people eat certain foods at certain times of the year; why we listen most of all to teachers in times of trouble; or any other possibility that comes from living a spiritual life. When we speak of diversity in a political way, we can speak of decolonisation, particularly in responding to the power structures of the colonial founded as they are in a type of racist violence. When we speak of diversity in a cultural way, we can speak of anti-racism, particularly in responding to the expressions of our traditional forms that continue to have a deep connection to our collective being. And, when we speak of diversity in a spiritual way, we can speak of being enlightened, particularly as we transcend the messy reality here, in order to be grateful and humbled by the possibility of simply being alive as people committed to non-violence. All of them are about maintaining love when faced with white rage. That is a self-love when we realise the self is only the sum of all the Others.
All too often, when people consider diversity, they simply mean the representation of Othered identities. Or, they mean it politically—that these Other people author a story in a manner that makes sense to prize culture or the market or in another way that can be easily assimilated into critical taste. Less often, they mean it culturally—that these Other people have a story to tell that is unique and affirming to them and this should be recognised even as it takes more work to make this written offering legible. Rarest of all, they mean it spiritually—that these Other people have customs that are bedrock, that are fundamental, that can never be traded away, but simply are and so you must accept them on their own terms. These are legibilities, eases, and hierarchies of acceptance; of importance, of personal sovereignty.
It is a great sadness that intellectual public space in Australia has a hard time articulating itself spiritually. Occasionally, we might find out an author is Muslim, or went for a pilgrimage on Shikoku Islands, or references spiritual writers and figures from overseas. But somehow, writers today often lack the space to have positive visions of faith. And that is, to my mind, a deep, deep loss for our collective consciousness. In failing to speak of the soul, the practice, the ritual we are missing out on what makes us who we truly are.
You know that your role is to bring your people with you, and, it is good to do so by using forms that express your traditions. Why you could write and where you write from is the spiritual need to do so as it emerges from a collective soul. This is not to deny the mundanity or the boredom or the industry or the technique or the alienation or the respect or the challenge or the shitstorm or the crises or the apocalypse or the micro-hype or the time or the fluidity or the community or the pressure or the stress or the comfort or the therapy or the habit or the desire or the other reasons for writing. It is to suggest why people write through all kinds of weather, of why they do so for their diverse reasons, and that it is not about you as an individual. When it is not about you, it becomes particularly liberating. It allows you to just get on and do it, to stay grateful that there are gods and devils and heavens and ancestors and priests and prophets, and, writers just like you out there on the egoless grind.
For me, this has been reinforced in the process of parenting, where time for writing has changed. Parenting is a curious blessing that opens one out, and it is a spiritual experience that informs the desire to write. What parenting has allowed me in this last year is to reflect more on writing in such a way that I am clarified by the rare moments I get to do it, so much so it has become ritualised and fuller. Both are full of thankless tasks that no-one will ever see, and, for me, they support each other, particularly as you realise your own failure. It is a practice of care rooted in tenderness where one can nest in an expression of the deepest reality. It is a pastoral relationship of teaching, which means one must fight to stay attentive, open, and hopeful, during which one is able to encourage Others to speak their own truth; building from a sense of love and compassion rather than negation and the market. It also happens together, in the most profound way.
What that means for diversity is an awareness that it is spiritual work to write about identity as an Asian-Australian, as an Indian, as a Malayali. We all carry our history and identity and spirituality, but it is up to every single individual to determine how it is expressed and received out there in a changing world. To be of a people is, in some sense, to participate in the collective life that we have made over thousands of years. Language matters for that, even for those of us who have only recently made a written literature in the last twelve hundred years like us Malayalis. This is about an obligation to writing as well as a passion, both of which are there in commandments and precepts and visions and prayers and other demotic expressions of spirituality that matter for our identities.
Writing is a practice—you get better at it. Writing can also be an expression—of your diversity. But, perhaps more acutely than ever, I believe it is a mission that can uplift and heal, which allows people to speak from their scars not their wounds in a collective quest that is non-violent in its essence. It is about the desire to find a community of people that cares for each other without the competitive drive to win prizes, grants, and take up limited spaces. The ground to cultivate then is for the soul in its freedom, which leads to a great togetherness about who we are and what we might yet become. Writing as diverse people allows us to make a start even if reaching the end takes more time than forever itself and is littered with barbed wire and glass.
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.