Opening Address
By Leah Jing McIntosh
Photo / Hashem McAdam
Eight years ago, Liminal began as a collection of conversations, a project built on shared dialogue around work, art, and race. Over the years, we have grown beyond this initial interview series; we’ve published art, writing, and criticism; we’ve run mentorships, residencies and literary prizes among other things. Each project, in its own way, is a kind of intervention into the historical racism endemic to the arts in this country. To me, criticism without action has always felt hollow. In order to expose racist structures and conceptions of excellence, we have spent the last eight years creating work, to make ourselves undeniable in a country which consistently attempts to deny our talent and our humanity.
In doing this, we have gathered community. The very best part of these projects has been meeting and working with talented artists across the continent, so it felt like it was time to loop back to our beginnings and to bring these writers into dialogue with one another. As so much of Liminal is found online, we wanted to create a physical space for these conversations—even just for a few days—where we might embody the terms of solidarity. There is something so special about being in the same room; where moments and ideas and relations can ripple outwards, and flow in ways no one can predict. This has happened to me many times over the years, in this very room; I would like to thank the Wheeler Centre for partnering with Liminal, and for understanding our vision. In particular I’d like to thank Diem Nguyen and Veronica Sullivan. My thanks also to Lucy Hamilton, Writers Victoria, and the Creative Ventures program at Creative Victoria for supporting this project.
Our host tonight is Liminal’s brilliant creative producer Hasib Hourani, without whom this festival would not have come together. Over the past six months, Hasib and I shaped this festival around sticky ideas of the nation, of borders, of violence, of fragmented and fraying histories, of languages we have inherited against our will and which we now carry. We wanted to reflect our shared desires and concerns about writing, and about living. Most importantly, we wanted to do it with our community. There is something quite unique to this festival, in that every programmed writer and artist has worked with us in some capacity before. Whether it is novelist Brian Castro, who has judged both of our literary prizes, or comic artist Lee Lai, who was our first ever interview subject back in 2017, or Mykaela Saunders, who guest-edited our most recent collection of poetry. Even the festival’s photographer, Hashem McAdam, and graphic recorders, Viet-My Bui and Kim Lam, have been working with us for many years.
When I use the word ‘community’, this is what I mean: it’s not just programming a writer of color for the sake of it, to avoid criticism or god forbid being cancelled. It is not networking, nor is it a transaction. Community should not be an empty invocation. To me, community is being in conversation over the years, whether in-person or just through reading and re-reading your favorite writers. It is writing alongside this work; carrying these ideas as you move through life, in the hopes of carrying out theory into the wider world through your actions; to create meaning with language that might enact change beyond the page. Community is found in holding one another accountable; in learning from each other, and in teaching, too. It is seeing criticism as a kind of love, a way to build together. Community is formed in conversation—whether difficult, gentle, joyous, or rigorous.
I have been thinking lately that we cannot forget that ten years or twenty years or definitely fifty years ago, we would not have had the privilege to meet like this. But this does not mean that there was nothing before. In fact, it signals quite the opposite. We are here due to the intergenerational efforts of our elders, and by this I mean the ever under-funded, under-acknowledged, under-valued projects have been made with love and sweat throughout the years. I’m thinking of Peril magazine, 4A gallery, the Asian Australian Research Studies Network. I’m thinking of books like Alice’s Growing Up Asian in Australia, where her initial introduction, which outlined the colony’s bloody history, was edited out before publication. And then, there are the countless small and not-so-small resistances committed towards our shared future that we will just never know about. So much has been done for us, with our present as some else’s future in mind. And so in our present we work towards another future too—a future where projects like Liminal are unnecessary.
We brought this festival together under the shadow of the ongoing settler-colonial genocide committed by the zionist entity in occupied Palestine. I won’t lie—in the face of this unrelenting devastation it has felt—and still feels difficult—to see the point in art and in writing work. I was thinking about this last week, while reading Hasib’s forthcoming book rock flight, (a book-length allegory of Palestinian occupation) where he writes, ‘the more time I spend with words / the more I realise that they just won’t do.’ If the poem were to leave us there, I think I would be inclined to agree. But the poem continues, pulling us along, amidst it all. Because—what else is there to do but continue? This gesture makes me think of one of my favourite passages in André Dao’s novel Anam, where he considers complicity in the colony. He writes:
‘Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.’
If capitalism and the empire have deemed us complicit, then let this engine our work. Let us choose hope over despair; let us work to make the world over. Writing has its limits, and tonight’s celebrations and tomorrow’s conversations do not promise to solve anything. Instead, we come together so we might bring care and community towards an unknown future, one that might be better. André ends his passage on complicity not with an answer, but instead with a simple question, posed by the protagonist’s partner, who asks: ‘Then what are we doing here?’ So. What are we doing here? I might not have the answer to this, but we have made a festival filled with people who do. We hope that these readings and conversations might shift you; that they might sharpen you thinking. We hope that they open up your world just a little more. Thank you.
—Leah Jing McIntosh
Naarm, August 2024
Leah Jing McIntosh is a critic, researcher, and the founding editor of Liminal.
The Liminal Festival took place 2–4 August 2024, in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. This collection of work is in concert with, and responds to, the panels, conversations and provocations put forth by some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers.
Find out more about the Liminal Festival here.