All Writing is Pigshit
May Ngo on Ania Walwicz
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
Breathless. Walwicz’s poem reminds me of meeting someone whom you haven’t seen for a while and you’re catching up and they tell you a story that may have taken place over years but it comes out all in one breathless movement and you are literally feeling like you are trying to catch up, trying to run alongside them, keeping pace. Breathless. Child-like, in the way that a child will tell a story—they don’t stop for breath, they get caught up, caught in the story. Hear me out see what I mean listen.
I came for the trash talk about writing (‘whole literary scene is a pig pen’—how could I resist?), and stayed for the traumatic event embedded within it. The prose poem begins in present tense—we are inside the trauma. There is no punctuation, sentences run on. Word association is frequent, reminiscent again of childish babble—also, of psycho babble. There is constant repetition (‘the steady world steady ready world they lecture me’) and use of alliteration (‘i poo poo and pee pee regress’). These devices propel the poem forward at a frenetic pace, almost tripping over itself; the cacophony signalling not so much a disharmony as a need to get it out, get it all out, once and for all.
Galloping forward as if a horse, Walwicz’s poem references the French poet Antonin Artaud, writing and pig poo, until we arrive at the central trauma, the narrator’s relationship with a professor:
the idiot professor love me invites me writes about me say i am a star now and flatter me i flutter
We find out it is a relationship that is tumultuous, problematic—maybe secretive—and that he finally leaves her before dying on her. The poem uses words that are generally considered ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’: the contrast of European imperial languages (‘une merde de cochon schweinerei schweinhund arschgesicht swinstwo swinia’) sitting alongside references to piss and shit and use of simple syntax:
i hide me i dumb me i pretend to be not me not me at all the piano teacher says why don’t you play i pretend not to do.
The pig imagery is appropriate—the professor is a pig, taking advantage of the power imbalance between student and teacher, as the latter uses and dumps the former. ‘All men are pigs’, as the saying goes, but especially those who take advantage of their power to cause harm. The link between the pig professor of literature and writing as pigshit feels apt:
he wont have me he wounds me he hurts me he kills me he murders me i stop work i don’t say word
The world in ‘All Writing is Pigshit’ is one where we are talking about high art—‘high’, in the sense of ambitious, meaning-making art—while using a primal kind of language, a kind of stream-of-consciousness. There is a contrast between the diction chosen in the poem—that of the everyday, or the grammar of the childish—with the world that it describes of the hallowed halls of the university: ‘i just teach and teach expository language’, and of literature: ‘i write poems the mayor of st.kilda gives prize.’ This deliberate contrast might be pointing to the ways that people, particularly migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, code-switch in the presence of institutions. It points to something intentional, as the speaker leans into the (forced) duality that linguistically marginalised people in the anglosphere often have to occupy, and perform, in different spaces.
All writing is pigshit! In the poem’s dual mode, Walwicz rightly points out an enduring contradiction too: as pretentious as poetry can be (and we all know it can be very pretentious), it’s also the literary form that’s the most accessible to write—poems can be short, and they don’t require enormous resources of time such as writing (or reading) a novel. In this sense, we see how it’s possible that poems can use and rely on the language of the everyday to create meaning; it can feel approachable and inclusive, especially when it takes on the form of oral storytelling or spoken word.
But accessibility or simplicity does not mean language that is not used intentionally. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this poem is how much the speaker’s voice gives us a sense of a whole world. It is astonishing: how a series of words placed one after another, with hardly any punctuation, can give us the pungency of a person, of a life—that of the speaker who is running alongside us, breathless, trying to tell us everything that’s happened, so close that we can almost smell their breath against our neck.
In what is arguably Walwicz’s best-known poem ‘Australia’ (1981)—the antithesis to the many grand narratives about the nation, as well as the antithesis to Advance Australia Fair—there is similarly the use of repetition, rhythm and simple diction; and just as similarly there is a voice ringing out between its lines: flippant ‘You have nothing to offer’, contemptuous ‘You bore me’, hurt ‘You don´t know how to be with me’. Instead of singing Australia’s praises as a national anthem would, it lists all the things wrong with the continent, culminating in perhaps its worst trait: ‘You don´t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self.’
This is the voice of the ungrateful, hateful immigrant, the kind who does not feel like she was lucky to have been able to move to the ‘lucky country’—instead this immigrant howls, what’s so fucking great about it? The derision for everything the Australian imaginary holds so dear—beaches, suburbs, shopping centres, the Australian dream of owning your own home: ‘You ugly furniture. You ugly house’; the simplified grammar that could easily be my parents speaking in English, that could be any newly-arrived immigrant from a non-English speaking country speaking in English, except this is the mirror opposite of the grateful, kowtowing, happy immigrant. ‘Australia’ is an interrogation: how lucky is the ‘lucky country’; how lucky is the immigrant to be here, really?
Despite its bluster and disdain and bravado, there is in ‘Australia’—like the speaker in ‘All Writing is Pigshit’—a sense of vulnerability in the speaker’s voice. It is the voice of a marginalised Other who comes out fighting in the text, in a way that they may not be able to do so in their day-to-day life. Both ‘All Writing is Pigshit’ and ‘Australia’ are led by a rhythm and repetition that is almost bouncing; it creates a hypnotic effect not unlike watching the little icon bounce from word to word in karaoke subtitles. Even though the poems indicate a lashing out, or maybe because of it, it feels cathartic, which initially seems contradictory since ‘All Writing is Pigshit’ includes the Artaud quote, ‘People that leave the obscure and try to define whatever goes on in their heads, are pigs.’And yet here is the poem, with a voice that is full of life, full of vigour, attempting to put traumatic events into words. Attempting to say something, almost anything, because that would be much more bearable than complete silence. Yes, all writing might be pigshit, and words may be far from enough, but it may well be all that we have:
pig in mud happy as pig now happy they said how intelligent i am i am back to back now in dark with antonin artaud that said
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May Ngo is a Teochew Chinese Cambodian Australian who currently lives in Prague. She is a former academic in anthropology, and is currently a freelance writer and editor as well as founder of the Prague Writers Workshop. mayngo.net