Is Affection Just Another Word for Love?
by A’isyiyah & Carol Que
A’isyiyah: Hey Carol, we met online through Anticolonial Asian Alliance during a time when many solidarity actions were being organised. but for me, our true connection lies in our chaotic posting of articles on Facebook.
Carol Que: Yes, the discourse posting as well as shitposting that escalated during lockdown this year, when you and Nish started making instagram polls about AAA Melb vs Syd battles. That online drama/inter-community lateral violence really got me through iso, and now here we are having this convo.
First and foremost, I want to have this conversation with you as a response to the Darkness Outside blog’s post on ‘Anticolonial Affections: How migrants might spurn white Australia’s demands for love in favour of solidarity with Aboriginal resistance.’ I love that piece, but reviewing it, I’m like phew! How our politics have grown :)
We decided to look back at this as it’s important to engage with work produced by people we are in community with. Because for all our messiness and imperfection, I really do believe that many of us try to move from—in A’isyiyah’s words—‘love as the centrepiece of our anticolonial practice’.
I have two questions when reading back on ‘Anticolonial Affections’. First, is affection just another word for love? Second, why do we struggle to name that love is ever present in this work?
A: I think it's a multitude of things that hinder us from naming love. The white colonial notion of love is a linear journey that ends in the establishment of the family unit. Courtship then dating, a declaration of love (using the very limited phrase ‘I love you’ ‘cos English is such a garbage language) then marriage, property ownership then procreation. Then empire.
To me, love is a life force that permeates time, defies linearity.
I wonder if the masculinisation of ‘activism’ also pushes us away from rooting our actions in love, demanding love. Maybe demanding love is seen as weakness, reminiscent of how men who are asked to love more honestly or vulnerably will turn around and call their partners ‘crazy’ for even making such a request.
CQ: When you mention love as a life force, I'm thinking of the river (Yanghe) that runs through my parents’ childhood village— ma lived on one side of it, my dad on the other. They told me that the river was life and had sustained their community, yet it was also a place where many people drowned. So the reverence they had for the river growing up was because it held nourishment, as well as the possibility of death.
I speak in past tense because the river is muddy and polluted today, with the surrounding village now razed down to rubble because of CCP urbanisation schemes to acquire land. When I visited last year, we found a few of their old neighbours still living there, refusing to leave till the end. If that’s not (anarchic) love I don’t know what is…
I want my community work to flow like the river that gave life to generations of my family. This has nothing to do with diaspora sentimentalism, but rather I see it as genealogy and as metaphor for action and responsibility. I seek fluidity in the way I conspire with and learn from different people who are similarly committed to serving people at a very practical level—mutual aid, political education and community defence. But I also want to decolonise my reliance on the self-sacrificial, human-centred conception of love that is so common in the west, that I admit I still wrestle with as a Virgo sun whose love language is also acts of service ha! My cultural upbringing is part of this too. Alice Sparkly Kat blew my mind when they wrote about how martyrdom takes a central role in Chinese masculinity: ‘If you love someone, you will suffer for them. You will shed blood for them.’ 😓
What does love as a life force look like for you?
A: It’s so funny you brought up love as a river, cos I literally just revisited the Kahlil Gibran quote: ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.’
Love like flowing water really resonates. What you are saying about the Yanghe reminds me of Danau Toba in North Sumatra which is a volcanic lake. It is the giver of life in Batak culture (waters the crops, cleans our clothes, provides fish for food alongside its spiritual energies) yet people have been pulled down by the seaweed at the bottom of the lake and drowned too. There was a recent incident where an entire boat capsized, leaving around two hundred people missing. An energy like that is indescribable, huh? But despite the possibility of death, every time I think of Toba I think of the way that the waters of Binangalom Falls washes over my body, the same way life-affirming, regenerative love does.
On a slightly more sensual note, reminds me of those Summer Walker lyrics from SWV: ‘I love it when you touching on me/It's like water, oh, no, don't drown’ lmao. What do you think is the link between the possibility of death and love? Or rather, why is love as a life force so intrinsic to death too?
Gonna leave you with this Rumi poem—
Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep.
CQ: Black feminist scholar bell hooks talks about how death and love are interconnected. In All About Love, she explains that fear of death is rooted in fear of the unknown, and how we don’t want to surrender to death because it would shatter what we think we know about the world and our existence within it. But love, she says, ‘empowers us to surrender’, precisely because it is an ethic that presupposes everyone's ‘right to be free, to live fully and well.’
I always think back to what it meant to mourn and honour Mhelody Polan Bruno last year, when we organised a vigil with local Filipino community and Trans activists. It was a really mixed bunch who showed up; queer people of colour, Indigenous and non-Indigenous trans folks, Filipino families, and random passerbys who stopped to listen. It was intergenerational and unexpected. It felt like community, even if temporary. but it’s a bittersweet and painful reality to realise that it took the murder of a Filipina trans woman for us to come together. These deaths are a reminder of how community failed her, y'know? I find it hard to not be haunted by how this form of community embrace came to her only in death. hooks reminds us:
Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration. As we speak our hearts in mourning we share our intimate knowledge of the dead, of who they were and how they lived. We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us. We need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.
A: When bell hooks speaks of death and grief, I feel some kind of resounding affirmation because of how the practice of love is in part learned through rituals for the dead in many Indonesian cultures. I was thinking about beloved thinker and teacher of agrarian reform, Gunawan Wiradi, who passed away this week in Indonesia. He was 86 years old. I saw a recent photo of him smashing durries and drinking coffee whilst having a chat with younger farmworkers. Many younger anarchists back home have been grieving but the one quote of his that keeps getting shared of his is: ‘Dengan terus mengalir ke lautan, sungai tetap setia pada sumbernya’ which translates to ‘By continuing to flow into the ocean, the river remains faithful to its source.’ I read this as an acceptance of death but also a reverence of his work that lives through the young ones who absorbed his teachings..
But I have also been questioning recently why the commitment to love better under the onslaught of colonial capitalism feels more and more like grief and heartbreak with each day that passes. My mind immediately returned to the bell hooks quote from All About Love: "To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending." Maybe learning love is like one big upheaval - I feel as though I am shedding so much of what I thought love looked like and maybe that feels like loss to me, maybe I am grieving all of my old ways of being and relating.
CQ: Do you want to go into this a bit more?
A: Recently I have come to realise that I have a tendency towards saviorism in my intimate relationships which has led me to deep pain and suffering. I saw an instagram post that was like “Needing to reject parts of yourself so that I can feel safe is not liberatory, it’s codependent” which really hit a nerve and I guess harks back to previous convo about self-sacrifice and martyrdom. I’m trying to shed that. I am trying to honour myself in my pursuit of loving others better.
I want to honour the offerings of cut fruit from my parents by loving my kid in ways that go above and beyond cut fruit. So that she never has to guess whether my actions are out of love or not. I think the repression of embodying that kind of love is rooted in resentment of nuclear family structures too—like in queer white discourses around love there is a huge emphasis on moving away from the nuclear family model without an acknowledgement that for many Indigenous peoples across the world, we have always practiced love and kinship-making beyond simply family-building for the sake of ownership ndat.
Dr. Kim TallBear, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate woman, talks about this in her lecture ‘Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family’:
Growing the white population through biologically reproductive heterosexual marriage - in addition to encouraging migration from some places and not other - was crucial to settler-colonial nation-building.[...] We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family that continues building a nation upon Indigenous genocide and that marks Indigenous and other marginalised relations as deviant.
Whilst her work centres Indigenous life and land specific to Turtle Island, I feel like her provocations cannot be separated Quandamooka Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s analysis in The White Possessive, in that they both interrogate how the dynamics of our most intimate relationships shape the nation.
Do you reckon this kinda framework of kinship can translate for broader Asian solidarity? I feel as though boba liberalism is so anti-Indigenous and the recognition of the very existence of Indigeneity in Asia is so precarious. Tbh how can we even build love with Indigenous peoples here if we continue to deny the existence of Indigenous folks across our motherlands?
CQ: This is such a tough question and I can only speak from my position as someone who is non-Indigenous—I probably don’t understand kinship as you do. Kinship in my family and in broader Chinese kinship systems (亲情) is so much based on ancestors, blood relation, and patriarchal lineage. While my parents might’ve had an unnamed kinship with the river in their village, I don’t have that experience, having grown up in concrete towers in Singapore.
But maybe solidarity as material and relational practice can bring kinship into possibility. I’m defining kinship broadly as deep obligation and knowing your place in relation to others. It is important as Asian settlers that we learn our relation to whose land we are on. But this is more than just knowing the Indigenous name of country, right? If we look to people who have paved the way like Deborah Ruiz Wall, Minoru Hokari, Charandev Singh, and many others, there are deep forms of anticolonial love, kinship and solidarity by and for Asian settlers on stolen lands. Not to mention, Blak-Asian families have existed before invasion, so learning from interracial relations as well as strife is necessary to get past fixation on the white gaze.
I’ve been reflecting about AAA’s work, and the idea of allyship as a singular practice. It sometimes feels like a chain of command for mobilisable bodies. And while I get that seeking consent and learning to take instruction as a settler is essential, how can we be prepared for revolutionary struggle if we’re just waiting for someone else’s leadership/handholding? I really believe that the eventual goal is to co-struggle, to experiment, take initiative and start up new projects decentralised from the city/north.
So yea, you’re absolutely right. As we’re talking about First Nations-Asian solidarity, we also should aim to build an anticolonial practice that centres Asians at multiply marginalised intersections, against all forms of anti-Asian violence including those perpetuated by Asian community. This also is connected to anti-imperialism work, and to me, doing it where we are situated is important. I wanna acknowledge I learn a lot about this from RISE and friends Hamile and wāni who do mutual aid in the South East suburbs of Melbourne—these people teach me that I am deserving of solidarity too.
We need to link up with Indigenous struggles in Asia, and do so in a way that is not just connect-the-dots internationalism—material and relational solidarity! We need to study settler colonialism across west, central, south, south east, east Asia, also to build a deeper analysis of imperialism and neocolonialism done by Asians and name how they manifest materially— very often as governments, corporations, police/military. Then actually target these. While this is the diaspora’s essential role in anticolonial war, it requires building relationships and lines of communication, doing translation, redirecting resources from western institutions that are built on bodies and motherlands elsewhere. We need to be constantly checking our western mentality, we’re not about to save nobody in their own home.
A: I really love when you say ‘solidarity is not a chain of command’, because when we feel like we can’t even speak directly to the people we are in solidarity with we really lose the opportunity to build an earnest relationship with them, we dehumanise them. There were posts in the online group that were like “Hey so who should I chat to if I wanna organise around this specific Indigenous issue?” when there were multiple Indigenous groups already in existence who were actively organising around it that they could message directly.
You know when we say ‘kill the cop in our heads’, I really think that also means abolish our collective obsession with punishment. That includes the way we desperately seek permission from someone with more ‘authority’ to approve of our acts of solidarity and love. It is so dehumanising for the person on the pedestal and it requires the person putting them on the pedestal to remove themself from any visions of the future which feels like an act of absolving shame rather than an act of love. That’s where collective imagining comes in maybe and why it’s crucial for us to do that imagining and visioning together so that nobody gets left behind in the next world. Because there is definitely space for everyone in that world, no? I am reminded of that Jackie Wang quote from her talk Carceral Temporalities and the Politics of Dreaming:
Imagination is always in excess. It is that which can never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it. What night endeavours must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency, that special vibration, the one Sun Ra believed would set us free, when dream becomes a hammer we summon to shatter the realism of the prison?
CQ: Yessss omfg. [My friend] Anne-lise said to me, ‘the pedestal leaves no room for fuck ups’. We really have to smash it, and our own egos too.
At your undocumented book launch I said in the chat, ‘believe in Asian love.’ I wanna clarify that I do think it’s easier said than done, but it’s possible, and Asian love is worthy between ourselves and extended beyond ourselves. While Singapore has its own cooked racial dynamics with Chinese people being dominant oppressive group, growing up working class there till age ten in my neighbourhood and school I really was lucky to have grown up with a diverse lot, across all shades of yellow and brown, and then when my fam moved to Glen Waverley (as economic migrants, became middle class) it was similar. I'm lucky to have had that experience of just ‘being’ y’know? That’s also why I really like identifying as ‘Asian’ because my experience has been more than mainland Chinese where all my fam is from, even though I have love for ‘Chineseness’ too, whatever it is.
I wanna clarify that when I talk about Asian I'm not talking about those socially acceptable narratives of being Asian and a mythical collective identity. I don’t wanna make equal people’s experiences of colonial violence, neither do I want to play into a white liberal hierarchy of victimhood. But am keen for Asians to move away speaking of ourselves through the model minority framework of migrant loyalty, admiration, attachment—not saying it doesn’t exist, but to claim it as the primary framework of racialisation is so limiting, and keeps us performing to whiteness—be it in assimilation or in resistance. We have to believe that the state doesn’t demand affection from us, nor do we actually have real love for it.
At your book launch I also really liked what you said, about how there’s not a clear distinction between strategy and spirituality, and I feel that. Of course, not everyone comes to this in their own way, nor does everyone have the same access to spirituality either. Can you explain this more? I’m keen to go to material practices and clear direction for readers who want to organise.
A: I really love your brain. Thank you for being in collaboration and community with me, Carol. It is an honour.
What does strategic dreaming look like? What is the material link between spirituality and strategy? I think it changes from person to person and like you said, access and relationship to spirituality is different for everyone. I don’t think we are necessarily required to engage in spiritual practices to build a foundation for our organising but I do think we have to honour that Indigenous anticolonial resistance worldwide is underpinned by spirituality.
For example, I recently watched Our Mother’s Land which is a documentary following the stories of Indigenous women in Indonesia on the frontlines of land defense. One thing that moved me in particular was the ritual element of their resistance. Not only did they spend time in deep prayer collectively, and participate in Islamic and Javanese ritual in a blended way, they also revered their Samin (Javanese peasant movement) predecessors, and employed similar strategies to how they organised in the late 1900s— their groups are non-hierarchical, decentralised and devoted to redistributing land and resources amongst the people. Perhaps we need to be looking towards these examples in history to re-centre Indigenous practices in the broader conversation about anarchist/autonomous organising. There is a beautiful project organised by Indonesian anarchists at the moment called Proyek Suku Api which roughly translates to ‘Fire Tribe Project’ that seeks to document histories of tribal groups whose social structures were largely anti-authoritarian. They’ve just released a draft called ‘Anarkisme Dayak’ about the Dayak peoples of Kalimantan.
I don’t even have to reach that far back (what is time anyway?) to learn about similar ways of organising. When we lived in public housing post-detention, my father and three other men with refugee and undocumented migrant backgrounds would stay up all night smashing coffees trying to organise legal support and groceries and childcare for other families in the building. There was no hierarchy, just an urgent desire to meet each others’ immediate needs. That’s some Asian solidarity right there.
CQ: Bro, thank you. I feel the same way. A’isyiyah—you, and all other mothers, fathers, parents, caregivers on the frontline are deserving of more community protection and care. In your book undocumented, you write ‘childcare is a commodity, but we are reinventing family,’ and yea, this is always heavy on my mind seeing how all my caretaking friends do for the younger, the older, each other— it is blood, sweat, sacrifice. When Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman Lorna Munro set up a group this year for Blak mums to protect Blak kids, and the first childcare for Bla(c)k Lives Matter/Aboriginal deaths in custody rally materialised in Melbourne, led by Gunditjmara and Gunnai non-binary mother Arika Waulu, who organised with some of us, this really is the vision and blueprint for anticolonial love.
People tend to talk very casually about how kids are the future, how they will save the rest of us from climate catastrophe or whatever. This is so lazy. We must be right alongside them, and right alongside our elders too. Harry, the angel who connects us, said to me once how we’ll be ancestors too, how we gotta live for our future generations.
I feel the urgency of this everyday, we cannot let future generations grasp in the dark. So here’s to intergenerational, messy, imperfect anticolonial kinship and community, where (in your words) ancestors are ever present in collaboration, and nobody is disposable.
A'isyiyah is a formerly undocumented Batak and Jawa mama who grew up on unceded Cabrogal Land (southwest Sydney). They dream and study prison abolition, transformative justice and collective care and are the vocalist of erratic hardcore band Arafura.
Carol Que is a Chinese migrant settler living on Kulin Lands since age 10. Her writing, teaching, theorising, translating and organising is invested in anticolonial grassroots struggles. carolque.work
