Interview #173 — S.L. Lim
by Cher Tan
S.L. Lim is the author of two novels, Revenge and Real Differences, both published by Transit Lounge. Their poetry has appeared in the journals, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Burning House Press, and in anarcho-zines.
S.L. spoke to Cher about desire, finding solidarity across difference, and their ambivalence towards the notion of ‘clout’.
When we chatted on video prior to the book launch for your second novel Revenge: A Murder in Three Parts, I remember asking you how you came to writing, and your response was, ‘I just did it.’ Which is true for me (and I'm sure, many others) too, which is why it's so funny. But I think there's always some kind of backstory for this impetus, especially around the urge to publish. What's yours?
I’m very romantic about writing, which means I have to be cynical in talking about it. The urge to publish is a bit like that, a mix of the romantic and the cynical. There’s this experience of private delight when you read something where the writer—or whatever projection of self emerges from that work—just seems to get it. It’s very intimate. I wanted to be on the other side of that in a basic and visceral way.
At the same time, getting published requires you to interact with processes that are anything but intimate. As you would know. I basically avoided everything and sent manuscripts out and didn’t speak to a single person before they got picked up by Transit Lounge. I didn’t appreciate how lucky this was until later. More than one person has said that no-one else would have gone near my work, so I'm grateful.
One common thread I've noticed between your two novels, Real Differences and Revenge, is that—while they are essentially very different books—they are about characters coming to terms with the moral and political grey areas within postmodern society. Can you speak more to this?
Can you elaborate on what you mean by a postmodern society?
I suppose I mean it in the sense of ‘a time starting from the 1970s’ or so, which saw more thinking and art that commented on the behaviours that arose (and is still arising) from alienation, an accelerated media culture, and much more movement in terms of global trade and labour. Philosophically speaking, it is skeptical and subjective (which I think relates to what you said above about being a romantic and cynical). Your characters in both books seem to me to be a product of that, but they are also trying their best to respond within its constraints.
I’m interested in people’s relationship with their desires and their ethical commitments, what survives and what breaks.
How do you think you sublimate your political positions into your writing?
These things aren’t really distinct for me—it’s really all about desire. That’s the trip I’m on at the moment. Continuity between political and artistic and romantic and sexual desire. Wanting everything for everyone and wanting to be wanted.
At the moment, I’m working on this novel, and I can’t tell if it’s going to be amazing or a hot fucking mess. Mostly I just want to eat hot chips and not exist.
That said, I am kind of re-evaluating my view of the art-politics nexus. There’s a lot of rhetoric about how creating and consuming art is in itself an act of liberatory resistance. Which is empirically disprovable; Richard Spencer has a B.A. in English Lit! Remarkably, one prize-winning novel described the events of August 2017 in Charlottesville as ‘a game on both sides’. What an extraordinary and vile thing to write, after Heather Heyer was murdered resisting white supremacy. And what an extraordinary and vile industry, which would choose to uplift such a literary work. I wonder how writers like this think we ought to respond to white supremacists on the march—more ‘diversity in media’, perhaps? Should’ve just thrown your rancid little autofiction at those Nazis’ heads.
Cognitively speaking, there are people for whom other people simply are not real. They confuse images of suffering for actual suffering, and believe that self-soothing the vicarious distress induced in them by secondhand reportage of oppression constitutes resistance to that oppression. I kid you not, I have had several white acquaintances—as well as one East Asian one—describe hosting dinner parties, going to dinner and a movie, looking at pictures of cute animals, and following food pictures on Instagram as direct responses to both extra-state fascism and the murder of Bla(c)k people by police. And I do think that people who create art have some responsibility for this. If you supersaturate the world with images, you have to consider the work that these images do, which can be a work of substitution—cultural consumption as a stand-in for material change.
I know from exhausting (and personal) experience that the fact of someone reading, and even seriously engaging, with your anti-racist novel says very little about their commitment to anti-racism. To be clear, these experiences are upsetting to me but they’re not oppression. I mean they are, but in the scale of things, it’s important to retain a distinction between things which are really, really bad, and stuff that pisses you off.
Still, there’s also this pose of ‘LOL art is nothing, it does nothing’ which can form its own kind of shtick. I’ve definitely participated in that, but I don’t think it’s entirely honest. What we experience and how we feel and understand ourselves and other people and things is material—which is to say it exists in the world and has consequences in that world which are not solely interior. Creating work that evokes and illuminates that subjectivity can be powerful.
You know, I was talking to the brilliant writer and activist recently, Angela Mitropoulos. I asked what she conceived as the through-line in her body of literary work, and she said, ‘desire’—the gap between what people say they want and what they really want; their concept of themselves and their actual selves. This relates to the infrastructures of violence, like borders, which are created to service this gap. It’s not a word that is commonly associated with political analysis. I think her willingness to go there is part of why her writing is good and why it has been effective in achieving change which is bigger than writing. When you are willing to be unconstrained in looking at people’s desires, the why and the what of them, you can be honest about what’s going on and how to change it. And when you are unconstrained in your own desires, you can want everything for everyone. Maybe this relation with desire is the difference between a liberal and a radical politics.
And just as a segue, it’s cool how it’s so common for radical leftists—and I should say, those who are also racialised persons—to write poetry. Tabitha Lean, Alison Whittaker, Jackie Wang, Fred Moten, June Jordan, Yannick Giovanni Marshall, to name a few. White poets tend much more towards quietism, and white leftists towards straight-up analysis, although with honourable exceptions like Sean Bonney! What an amazing person.
If you supersaturate the world with images, you have to consider the work that these images do, which can be a work of substitution—cultural consumption as a stand-in for material change.
I'm glad you mentioned solidarity across difference, figuring out desire as people in the world, and the sick pursuit of social capital and clout, because these have been at the top of my mind too.
Maybe let's start with clout. I sometimes find myself reacting against it in a rather extreme way, such as by leaving social media completely, or by being quiet about something I've made/written, or simply feeling like wanting to give up making art at all, particularly when I see how it can be twisted to go against an artist's intention, or those who visibly manipulate the dynamics around it. How do you think we can continue to make art (that then inevitably becomes a cultural product whether we like it or not) while resisting ideas and attitudes associated with clout?
I feel we lack a working definition of clout. Off the top of my head, clout is any power or influence that arises out of informal social dynamics, as a result of having an image or being perceived in a certain way. But it isn’t sincere, or it's deployed in a way which lacks integrity. Or more benignly, it contains some truth but it’s a facet of the truth which is not complete.
I have thoughts on social media. I don’t see clout as being platform-dependent. There’s no categorical difference between a creative work which appears in a traditional venue and on Tumblr or whatever. The impulse behind creation is the same: wanting to be seen and validated, curating a projection of self that is not exactly co-extensive with self, but nonetheless reveals something important. Lots of shitposters are way more moral, insightful and innovative with form than most prizewinning novelists. But there’s this hypocrisy where wanting followers or likes is seen as trivial and degraded, whereas reviews, honorary doctorates and so on are regarded as this righteous reward for being a Great Artist™. It's why a lot of people are very attached to traditional publishing and its attendant hierarchies—it creates a space where desire is allowed and validation is possible.
I don’t know if the dynamics underlying clout are something you would wish away entirely. It’s okay to want to be looked at. It’s okay to have a bit of shtick. If people didn’t care about these things, there wouldn't be any art. As a person who writes books, it's important for me to own that and not be like, ‘oh, I was walking in the garden and I stepped on this rake, and it hit me in the face, and I fell unconscious and when I woke up my book was in the shops’. That is not how it happened.
So this sort of clout-chasing is really not benign, and I think centrists, liberals, and Labor party dripshits are not equipped to understand the dynamics surrounding these events. Because they have this pre-determined terrain of the kinds of desire which are worthy of analysis and can cause things to happen, as well as of the institutions that can create change—like, some peak body calling for better tax structures. Or a royal commission into why all the other royal commissions did not do shit. They’d rather look at those things than white nationalists, the sugar lust of clout, or the unholy combination of the two. People do the work but they can’t seem to hear it.
I’m getting off track. I guess what I’m saying is, clout can be bad. But doing this big gesture of renunciation isn’t necessarily more authentic. Exaggerated rejection and renunciation can also be toxic or just kind of annoying: Oh look at me, I am so radical and pure. Someone said in my Zen class: You will know when you’ve gone too far. Just pay attention and you’ll know.
When I think about desire, I feel it's wrapped up in so much, especially as you refer to what Angela Mitropoulos said about ‘the gap between what people say they want and what they really want’. Desire as utopia. But also desire as learned responses connected to empire and power. And then there's desire as commodity, which is, I think, how political positions then get sold as Lifestyle. How do you think you fill that gap personally?
I don’t have sex with people who have bad politics.
Let's move on to the book you're working on. In a recent tweet you mentioned that you are hoping to write a novel ‘that is pro-revolution and pro-revolutionary’. I'd love to hear more!
It’s hard to talk about it without curling into a ball. It’s about two people, one who understands everything except that they have power to change things. Not in the sense of saving everyone or fixing the whole world with the click of a button, but they can withhold their complicity, they can fight. And they need to go from a place of helplessness to understanding the existence of this power.
The other person has known for years that they have power—they have lived and worked in that knowledge and have taken risks, which are now coming home to bite them. So they are paying the price of having harmonised their commitments and their actions—of authenticity, if you like.
There is also a third person, one who is hot and then ceases to be hot.
Can I go off on a tangent? One of my preoccupations right now is conceptualising violence. The things we do and don’t name as such, the work that this choice does in the world. You have a phrase like, ‘cultural appropriation is violence’, and, ‘borders are violence’, and these are just completely different things. One seeks to draw continuity between everyday moments of banal racism and broader oppressive forces. Like, when Neil Perry cooks some gross fish with soy sauce and gets lauded as a genius of Asian cuisine, this reflects questions about who gets to be heard and how work gets valued, with answers ultimately based in imperialism and colonialism and so on. But the border is violence in an entirely different sense. It is adults and children in cages in Villawood, Manus and Nauru; it is 17,000 dead in the Mediterranean. It is persons cut to pieces on razor wire, designed to maim; it is lines of bloody clothes on an electric fence. I’m not trying to indulge in a pornography of suffering—I think it’s important to face what these things really are. Borders are violence as omelettes are eggs. They don’t have meaning without it, they don’t pre-exist these individual acts of brutality against the human form.
I worry there is a process where the thing about the soy sauce, and other aesthetic and/or representational squabbles, ends up displacing a real struggle against material oppression. Because they will give you the least that they can get away with. Institutions will divert and decoy, offering surface ‘diversity’ to hide their destructive nature, while inviting you to make a career from collaboration. I think some people—including radicalised and minoritised artists—are very cynical about exploiting this. There isn’t much point in trying to talk to them. But others really are in good faith, and it’s them who I’m trying to reach in saying this.
I am not going to hang shit on representational politics in its entirety. (I’ll define that politics as pursuing the inclusion of minoritised people within the realms of formal power. Which is itself derived from capital and state, which are of course co-constitutive). You know, POCs in boardrooms, etcetera. Representation yields some access to capital both social and actual, so it’s a material demand to that extent. And if there are no minoritised persons being supported at a particular platform, that almost invariably indicates a process of exclusion which is both harmful in itself and reflective of other oppressive dynamics. But representation is not the same as justice. It’s not sufficient for our liberation and when you look at the shitshow euphemistically called ‘the world’, it should be clear that we can stop at nothing less.
Okay, but: back to the novel. I am interested in the quote-unquote ‘climate movement’. This isn’t a finished thought, but I am beginning to suspect that even conceptualising it as such is a depoliticised, technocratic framing which obscures what is really going on. It turns climate change into a crisis without culprit or cause, and therefore tends towards coalitions and responses that are inherently ineffective. I see climate change as an act of violence. It is imperialist violence, it is colonialist violence, it is the rich waging war against the poor, both within and across borders. And it is violence which is done by someone and to someone.
There is this saying: ‘The people destroying the planet have names and addresses’. I’m interested in jumping forward ten, twenty years, and imagining what kinds of political formations might cohere around this understanding, as well as how it might feel to be a part of these formations.
I also just want to feel okay and for others to feel okay. Speaking of what art does and does not accomplish—there is considerable cultural and actual capital behind this idea that a radical left politics is wrong, that those who commit to it deserve to get hurt. At every level: the popular and the literary. Like, there is a Marvel movie in the works about the Avengers teaming up with a former Nazi assassin to kill anarchists. There is real money in this, and that money is spent for a purpose—to manufacture consent for repression to be deployed against anyone who dares to imagine that the ‘present state of things' does not have to be forever. Also to make us feel like we are useless, worthless and alone. And it works! They wouldn’t invest in it so much if it didn’t work. It is an all-out psychological blitz and we can fire back, ya know?
What does solidarity look like to you?
Good question. I just realised I throw the word around a lot. You know it when you see it? Right now for me it means being willing to work things out together and to act together on what you work out.
You have brought up notions of 'authenticity' a little bit thus far, which I think is an apt way of ending this interview. To me, the idea itself is a scam, an absolutist and idealised circus of appearances that then ensnares people within its attractive power, whether in terms of political positions, cultural and national identity and so forth. How do you think you broach this tension in your person and your work?
I don’t agree that authenticity is a scam! Which isn’t to say that purity or perfection are possible, on either a personal or collective level. No-one tells (or is capable of telling) the whole truth about themselves or about anything, really. But some things really are more sincere and true than others. Which, again, isn’t to say that sincerity is a sufficient condition for something to be ‘good’—a lot of bad art and bad politics are very sincere! But good art and good politics are impossible without sincerity. I really believe this.
Tracking back to what we were discussing about a liberal inability to imagine political desire: I think the flip-side of a failure to recognise that white supremacy is a material force that can 'do things' in the world, is not being able to see goodness when it’s right there in front of you. Like that horrible novel I mentioned earlier: ‘a game on both sides’. Maybe the Occam’s razor explanation is correct. Some people want us all to live free and are willing to put everything on the line for this. I can’t stress enough, that is not a circus. That is authentic. That’s the tweet.
Can I say something I’m not sure about yet? I think authenticity is impossible in terms of an identity but real in terms of a commitment. The ‘we’ of the nation-state is never real. But the ‘we of a position’ is real. So for me, authenticity means being willing to take a position and to be honest rather than self-protective about what that means for myself and others.
Do you have any advice for emerging novelists?
Keep your expenses low. Don’t be financially dependent on your writing; there is really no correlation between commercial success and value. Be cynical about the industry and romantic about the work.
Who are you inspired by?
Wendy Trevino. I had to stop liking her tweets because I was worried about being creepy. Her poems convey the urgency of political desire and I didn’t know poetry could do that. Recently she liked some of my tweets—the first one was, ‘Being dumb is so much fun u should try it’. What a time to be alive.
What are you currently listening to?
Pop! You know when you go to a Lebanese fast food place and the soundtrack is so fucking hype? Justin Bieber, Bebe Rexha, Rihanna. Bebe has this great line: Bloody noses, speeding cars / Lethal doses, desperate hearts. Just this lil’ Futurist manifesto snuck in there next to Lil Wayne. Also, they have these giant jars of Nutella for some reason.
What are you currently reading?
Exhalation, a short story collection by Ted Chiang.
How do you practice self-care?
Right now I am—physically and psychologically—a heap of trash. I haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t instant rice, baked beans, or soy milk from the servo in thirty-six hours. My sleep cycle is kind of reversed, and bizarrely, so is that of my pet birds. It’s pretty mysterious though it may be connected to my habits of doom-scrolling, listening to hype-up music, watching videos of cops getting bodied and drinking litres of iced tea before bed. But beans and rice together form a complete protein, so that’s self-care. I think I may be hungry.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
I hold an Australian passport, which makes me the beneficiary of certain kinds of structural violence. But I am not Asian-Australian. I have no interest in recuperating Australian nationalism with a multicultural face. I reject the premise of any and every loyalty test and of Australia itself.
I want to challenge this formulation of ‘being’ Asian. Racialisation is something that is done to us, not something we inherently are. In an Australian context we are made to exist always in relation to whiteness, usually a negative relation. That can change. To borrow words (from the collection Brazilian is Not a Race) from Wendy Trevino:
We are who we are
To them, even when we don’t know who we
Are to each other & culture is a
Record of us figuring that out.
Find out more
Interview by Cher Tan
Illustrations by Viet-My Bui