Interview #152—Bryant Apolonio
by Hassan Abul
Bryant Apolonio is a writer and lawyer living in Darwin.
In 2019, his short story ‘Bad Weather’ won the inaugural Liminal Fiction Prize, and is published in Collisions, Liminal’s first fiction anthology.
His cool, considered prose inhabits every cranny of the spaces it describes, and has won him other prizes and accolades, including Overland’s Fair Australia Prize in 2017.
Bryant spoke to Hassan about what we owe to places we write about, how a voice might be constructed, and what could possibly be coming next.
How would you describe the image of a "writer"? Does that image, to you, seem like it meets any particular need in our current age?
The popular image of a writer would be someone who’s on the fringes, politically left-wing, atomised, searching, a little sad. Which does seem to describe a lot of people I know and probably a lot of young people generally. I don’t think I have good answers to your question but here are a couple of observations:
I think that the role of the modern artist is to diagnose and criticise power, the ideology of capital, imperialism, unjust war and the corporate state. This inevitably means that art – including literary writing – is created by outsiders and consumed by outsiders. (Then again, there’s a risk you get a little too academic, too remote and cute and suddenly there's no heartbeat: it's being written by insiders for insiders).
There are certain stories you won’t find on commercial television and cinema (i.e. the cultural products with the greatest reach and power). While this is changing now, writing still remains the most democratic medium of storytelling. All you need is a pen and paper, a middle-class education, financial security and/or the energy to do anything after work other than watch the TV you didn’t make.
I think this democratic potential is the same thing that made people feel hopeful about the internet, until we ruined it.
We all need and find in books that gooey stuff that anyone who seriously reads knows is true: literature lets us practice empathy, it brings perspective, it challenges us, expands the heart, etc, etc.
Do you identify as an Asian-Australian person? Could you tell me a bit about that?
Yes, I do. I came to Australia at three-years old, so I’ve lost all my Tagalog growing up and have no roots in the Philippines. My growing up in Australia has come at the expense of the culture my parents came here with.
I retained a slight accent as a child but I never realised I spoke ‘differently’ till I was in my early teens. No one really gave me a hard time about it, as far as I remember. At most, I’d get a double take from an occasional mispronounced word: maybe one that I’d never heard said aloud, or a word I’d only ever heard said at home.
At some point, though, I decided that I didn’t like the way I spoke – the same way some people find it unpleasant and disconcerting to listen to recordings of their own voice – and I started faking an Australian accent. I was very careful with my speech, very alert. I know this is something a lot of immigrants did and do. The model I went with was fairly metropolitan Sydneysider as opposed to the broad ocker the kids at school favoured. It can’t be an accident that I’m interested in writing – in expressing myself in very, very particular ways – given this childhood anxiety.
The choice you describe making as a child is interesting - selecting not the accent of your immediate schoolmates, but one with a different set of implications. How conscious were you of those signifiers?
Most likely, I was being a snob. If I was conscious of this choice at all. This is a retrospective psychoanalysis of a fourteen, fifteen-year-old Young Man with Airs. I did a lot of things as a teenager that are unaccountable.
In your writing voice, is there something you consciously direct yourself away from? Something you move towards?
I’m still at a stage where I’m mostly writing for myself, so I’m pretty comfortable with emulating and letting the writers I love most – Bolaño, Morrison, Tokarczuk, Pynchon, for example – influence my work and style in obvious ways: unreliable narrators, nightmare imagery, gnomic little anecdotes, running gags. I’m not interested in straight narration and realism. Writing magic realism makes me feel self-conscious.
I have gotten better at curbing certain impulses I have as a writer. My prose can get a little overheated or I might get all lyrical or fixated on some image. When that happens, I lean a bit more into vernacular, maybe throw in a dirty joke. If it looks like I’m on the verge of making some bombastic declaration about life or art, then another (lawyerly, academic) part of me jumps in to prevaricate and couch. If I get too sentimental, I’ll say something snarky to make up for it.
One of the things signified by voice is obviously class, and you mention both the utility of a middle class education for writing, as well as the role of a writer being situated "on the outside" in relation to (certain forms of) power. How do these co-exist for you? What kind of understanding of class is possible in Australia?
For me, personally, these things exist in contradiction. I can only write, because I can work part-time and still afford rent. I have worked from home for a year, even before the pandemic, and I don’t have a job that leaves me exhausted at the end of the day. For someone who wants to produce art, this is a position of great privilege. Also: I’m an immigrant. I live in the skin that I do, with all that entails. I’m a young person living at the business end of a recession. I went to a selective school and then to university where I’d go to one class whose function was to squirrel a thousand people like me out into consultancies and firms and think tanks, and then another that explained why I needed to burn those places down. I am wealthier than 98% of the world’s population. I live in a breezy house in a city built on blood.
At university, I found myself hanging around in activist circles and I helped edit a crypto-communist student newspaper. This was where I first took writing seriously and also where I was exposed to leftist politics like so many others (or maybe, more accurately, university is where they learned the German words for things they’d already intuited).
Spend time in these spaces and you’ll encounter people who are incapable of collaborating with the working class and marginalised in any meaningful way i.e. in a way that doesn’t come from a place of paternalism or condescension or scorn. It’s a real barrier in communication that seems to have only been reinforced in recent years. Art could overcome this barrier once, but not anymore. Another way to do it is through sport. But solving this problem is surely key to any social change in this country.
I think that the role of the artist is to diagnose and criticise power, the ideology of capital, imperialism and unjust war and the corporate state.
Speaking of power, how do you think about your relationship to it? What do you find power in?
I was taught that power comes from knowing things – and maybe part of me still does – but I think that to be empowered mostly has to do with learning and being capable of change and having the grace to listen and to be corrected. It’s also about standing up against injustice and it’s about feeling part of a community and changing it for the better and it’s having the conviction that what you’re doing matters, that it is not futile.
In what way did we ruin the internet? I have to know!
I was being glib! But I think that what I had in mind at the time was specifically Twitter and the blue checks who’ve lost the plot and spend all their time sabotaging popular social movements. When we spoke last, the Iowa caucus had just happened. What a hellish time to be online! Shortly before that was Corbyn’s defeat. Then the same thing again, persistent as mould, with hand-wringing liberal takes on the Black Lives Matter movement in America and Australia. That’s one reason.
But now imagine one of those old papyrus scrolls that unfurls and comically bounces and bounces and rolls out the door:
WHY THE INTERNET IS RUINED
It enables all the racists and misogynists and homophobes
It lets neoliberal grifters get rich on clickbait
Boomer memes
It’s because too many people take anonymity to be a license for cruelty
Sinophobic conspiracy theorists
Data collection
News Corp
Incels
Zuckerberg
Elon and Grimes
All the bad-faith horseshit in free speech’s evening dress
And so on.
When trying to reckon with the current historical moment, the words "atomisation" and "incoherence" are used a lot - individuals being isolated from each other, an avalanche of decontextualised information overloading our finite brains, a limited tolerance for inconsistency within oneself, et cetera. How comfortable are you with incoherence? Is it incompatible with precision? How do communities co-exist with it, and are communities even possible in a diaspora?
One reason why we are drawn to literature is that it imposes a structure on the incoherence you’re talking about. (Which, even though it feels singular to the stage of history we’re in, I think is just a function of living in the world. Internal inconsistencies exist in real flesh and blood people and well-written characters.) An author takes that apparent meaninglessness and fashions it into something that a reader can connect with. You can create art that revels in that incoherence, sure – blacken margins, fill in the holes of words, says Beckett, till everything is blank and flat – but nine times out of ten you end up with a detached and hostile avant-gardism, a communion with no one.
When we talk about incoherence within the diaspora, we’re talking about a narrower (but related) kind of incoherence. We’re talking about being uprooted or uprooting yourself from a homeland to settle for another that will never quite accept you. We’re talking about cultures and traditions that wither away or are preserved in a peculiar form. And we’re talking about improving your and your children’s material conditions while living with a perpetual, low-humming sense of loss.
Immigrants heave around the weight of their histories. In my case – and maybe this is familiar to a lot of people whose lives are set in similar grooves to mine, who felt the same imperatives to assimilate – I spent half my life trying to shrug the weight off and then the other half trying to pick it up again and failing and then finding a lack where it was once.
I think about the first Italian and Greek migrants coming here during the 50s and 60s. They brought their culture to Australia and from there it just shot off on a totally different trajectory to what they’d left behind, like an alternate timeline. They wound up with values and new meanings and traditions unique to them, and that would be alien to a person from those countries today. Maybe we’re going through that process now – we, as in the people who came to Australia during the 80s and 90s waves of Asian migration or were born shortly after – and maybe that sense of rootlessness, homogenisation, that culture of non-culture, is a temporary one. In time I hope it will all cohere for us too, the way a new style can bloom out of a few improvised bars.
What are the limitations of the empathy project when it comes to reading, writing?
First, empathy is something you need to learn the hard way (by living). Reading about other people and writing them is supplementary.
Second, the market defines the limits of who we get to hear from. The publishing industry is a culture industry and it is market-driven. It wants to produce things that bring investors a maximum ROI. It wants franchises, nostalgia, hype. It doesn’t care much for length or experimentation. It loves the middlebrow but not as much as it loves aimless provocation. Books will get printed if, above all, they’re calculated to sell well. Meaning we get plenty of books by white people – written for educated, (guiltily) middle-class, contemporary fiction-reading white audiences – and far fewer works from authors with diverse backgrounds.
I imagine this is felt sharply in a smaller industry like Australia’s where there’s less money and less of an appetite for risk though I do know this is something that’s now, slowly, being corrected at a grassroots level, without cynicism or tokenism, by small presses and publications like Liminal.
There’s obviously a lot to discuss here but, speaking strictly to the empathy question, if your average consumer goes to the shop right now and picks up a book and reads it to the end, what are the chances that they come away with a greater understanding of what it means to be a person like you or me? And what are the chances that they come away further identifying with someone who sounds and looks and lives like Winton or Franzen or Saunders or Rooney?
I was taught that power comes from knowing things – and maybe part of me still does – but I think that to be empowered mostly has to do with learning and being capable of change and having the grace to listen and to be corrected.
I want to talk a bit about the story with which you won the prize. It's quite a restrained, controlled piece of writing, and it's very particular about place - there's the orientation of characters to relevant bodies of water, the tracing of roads, the consideration of the vantage of each point. What do you think about when it comes to constructing a place in your writing? What responsibilities do you hold towards real places, and do these come with a sense of push-and-pull?
I began writing with a page of bullet point notes spread across two columns, intending to tell a story about one character’s life over the course of many years. Eventually, I settled on its current structure: two stories told simultaneously, each bleeding into the other, with a line drawn down the middle of the text (a motif that stands variously for the bodies of water in the story, the South-Western Freeway – now the M5 – and the movement of time). In an earlier Q&A, I mentioned that this piece was part of a larger manuscript I’m working on, so the setting and main actors were largely determined by that.
I am cautious when I write about the Philippines. Other than being born there and occasionally travelling there, I really can’t claim a ‘connection’ with the place. What I do know is Sydney. I know the sandbowl suburbs and the shopping arcades and foreclosed buildings and the brackish rivers and the indifferent westward march of gentrification. Sydney’s where I grew up and where I’ve lived for just over two decades. When I write about Manila and wet markets and stone churches: that’s pure invention.
We have to write what we don’t know or it’s all solipsism. I don’t believe that you need to feel any particular affinity with a place to create art about it. This goes doubly for fiction writers from migrant backgrounds who parry accusations of autobiography the moment they use the Philippines or Vietnam or Bangladesh as their story’s setting. This goes for women writers and queer writers and writers with disabilities too. We become begrudging ambassadors for the minority experience when we create characters who aren’t white everymen. (What’s the root of this presumption? That we can’t make shit up as good as them? That we don’t partake in the same Artistic Spirit that gave Western culture little gifts like Tonto, Fu Manchu, Gunga Din?)
What I do think is that if I write about something I’m too far removed from then I must do enough research and I must have specificity or else the writing will be bad. Bad as in inauthentic and hollow. Bad because I will have relied on essentialisations, photocopies of photocopies. If the point of reference is a degraded image, the representation will be an artistic failure.
Do you enjoy thinking about the future? Are you comfortable sitting with uncertainty? What does imagining futures do to them?
It’s hard not to feel doom-struck these days. Like so many of us, I’ve spent the last few months just trying not to walk off the map. I tend to find out about world-historical events second hand and then I project from there. I imagine socialist utopias and I imagine post-apocalyptic hellscapes with synth scores. Some days I actually do believe that you can jinx something by being too hopeful.
I swing between dread and quiet optimism all the time. We’re on the edge of something big. Soon it’ll be clear that either a more just world is coming or the old one’s going to dig its claws in deeper still.
Who are you inspired by?
My parents.
What are you listening to?
Kwame and Tka Maizda. ‘Sunday Roast’ by Nerve and JK-47 had a good long run on Triple J a little while back and you should’ve seen my girlfriend and I (haplessly) belt that one out.
What are you reading?
Daša Drndić’s Belladonna.
How do you practise self-care?
I go to the gym or cook or watch a movie. But the best thing of all is to sleep, uninterrupted, for eight hours.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
‘Asian-Australian’ is a label and it’s one that has problems. It’s a census category, a marketing demographic. It links together disparate communities, people with different backgrounds and different sacrifices, who’ve endured different cruelties. But in this strange grouping we can find solidarity and we can support each other in the struggle against colonisation and white supremacy.
We need to extend this solidarity with all other groups who fall outside the entrenched structures of power: most of all with the Aboriginal peoples whose ongoing pain and degradation we continue to benefit from. This land was stolen and we, Asian-Australians, settled on it. Now we need to help rip the colony up by its diseased roots. Start again.
We become begrudging ambassadors for the minority experience when we create characters who aren’t white everymen.
Interview by Hassan Abul
Photographs by Leah Jing McIntosh