Introduction
BY Eda Gunaydin
It’s the dialectic that puts me back together every time I feel like I might fall apart.
This is a time of crisis, and it has been for some time. The contradictions of settler-colonial capitalism threaten to annihilate most of us: destroying nature, our livelihoods, and the bonds that hold us together, all the while that this same system insists that it and only it can deliver us prosperity. Life feels unsupportable but still we do survive it. We do this by forcing ourselves to hold two contradictory positions: the world is horrible and beautiful; this is all there is and this is not all there is; this is how things are and we must change them. As Beckett says: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’
Likewise, to live in diaspora involves reconciling the competing tugs of home and the other thing. Home is an idea that collapses as soon as it is subjected to any real scrutiny: flitting out of grasp, too transformed by time and circumstance to retain real coherence. The other thing—here—is transient too, a condition nearly impossible to settle into without sacrifice, namely that we yield to the demands it makes on us to embrace absolute and final identities—colonial or nationalist ones—that, themselves, are built on flimsy ground. However, that we are made up of disparate parts—one thing and another thing—need not mean we cannot form a whole.
I have edited and read and re-read these essays while forcing myself, one way or another, to believe in dialectics: through dialectical materialism, dialectical behavioural therapy, standing in front of Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery, stepping out of my psychologist’s office, both times rubbing tears out of my eyes.
These seven essays reflect how we stitch ourselves together, use the threads and fibres we have on hand to produce something wholly original. These pieces of writing play with colours and textiles; they put together reds and yellows and whites to make pinks and oranges and lemons. Tea blends with milk and produces something drinkable: a life, sketched, in Smitha Peter’s case, with crisp clarity despite its precarity.
Littered through these essays are mirrors, doors, closed, open, things in transitory states that put the lie, as Deniz Ağraz does, to the myth of permanence. There are other moments too: of exit, return, departure, desires to escape without the ability to do so, until, in Amelia Zhou’s words, ‘an unexpected passageway must reveal itself’.
In Eileen Chong’s words, ‘sometimes a poem is a window and sometimes a poem is a mirror and sometimes a poem is a threshold and at all times poems are lies / all writing is facsimile’. The lyric essays in this series are often writing about writing, as writers recombine facsimiles of facsimiles to create something new. Megan Cheong’s work fuses two ostensibly opposing essays in order to give the reader ways to understand writing/reading and freedom/privacy: ‘reading as writing divided by a door sometimes closed to create the illusion of separateness’. Jumaana Abdu, too, reflects on these impossible sums, or how it is that we can use the only tools we have for producing knowledge to ever succeed at producing knowledge. And Huyen Hac Helen Tran presents us with the sweetness of friendship, the pain of loss, and asks us to hold these feelings both at once, allowing them to rise and fall like a wave.
The texts hold contradictory forces up against each other. Yet they never turn a mirror into a kaleidoscope, or else something shattered. What I know is that we must not fragment.
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Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and critic whose writing explores class, capital, intergenerational trauma and diaspora. You can find her work in the Sydney Review of Books, HEAT Magazine, Meanjin and elsewhere. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance won the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Matt Richell Prize for New Writer of the Year at the 2023 ABIAs. @edapresents