Are we each other?
When I was a child, I would look at the people around me and wonder — are you me? Are you me with grey hair? Are you me ten years from now? Are you me if I lived in Kerala? Are we each other? Am I you? It’s a question that I’ve returned to in the last few months as I research the relationship between the places I inhabit and the person I am becoming. Right now, I look at the Hunter River in Newcastle, the water shimmering with light, dancing only slightly, gentle movement as the wind sends it my way and it hits rocks. Soft. Tiny splash. Then it retreats. I look at the Hunter River. Are you me?
This is the question that haunts me when I stand by Henley Beach in Adelaide — are we all iterations of each other? The human and the more than human world – versions of something. I love this idea, but it also reminds me that there is so much wrong in this world, and I am scared of how we have all become complicit in the breaking of this collective self. A pelican swims towards me and I think of the pelican I talk to at Henley Beach. Are you me? Are we each other? A child walks past pointing. “Look, it’s a giant bird!” When he looks up, he turns to me and smiles.
On the first day of the National Young Writer’s Festival, I am nervous but excited – a new city, a writers’ festival, words and words and words. At a workshop on the relationship between stream of consciousness writing and photography we are led by Cass Li. I watch everyone else. Are you me? Am I you? Surely, I am too uncertain to be anyone apart from myself? Cass starts the session by asking us to introduce ourselves with our rose (something good that has happened), bud (something we look forward to) and thorn (something that upset us) from the week. There’s such authenticity to the way she interacts with everyone — easy, laughing, light. We are held in this room and as she begins to explain stream of consciousness my face breaks into a smile. Possibly one of the best hands-on workshops I have attended, Cass talks about writing and photography being similar — how we find our lens and see the world through it. She gives us photos and we start to freewrite. As I examine my chosen photos — a solitary leaf on a ground, and generations of hands held over each other, words break through my fingers and suddenly I am able to write. I am writing, isn’t it wonderful? Words are happening. I am here amongst a crowd of writers. We are writing. Words and words and words.
Legacies
Later, I write in the Busan Chicken Hub. I’ve ordered my lunch, and I can hear live music in the distance. The sun falls over me and into me and I hope my vitamin D levels are rising. There’s a breeze rushing against my arms. I’ve been speaking to other writers – one of them came up to me as I held Lauren Fuge’s book ‘Voyagers’ in my hands and they said, “That’s my friend’s book!” And I said, “Wait – it’s my friend’s book too!” We laughed, excited. I am not nervous now, not really — we are all here united by this strange urge to collect stories and words, curating our lives around them as we try to understand the world. I listen to Cienan Muir moderate a session with Merryana Salem, Molly Hunt and Victoria Alondra where they speak about writing indigenous futures. Victoria says there are legacies of those who go before us and there are those who come after. She gives us one of the most beautiful ways of understanding speculative fiction — an otherworldly thinking that ruptures the present. Two days before this, I was in Melbourne, presenting at the Critical Autoethnography Conference. I talked about Emily Dickinson and telling the truth slant, of my best friend Hajrije Kolimja who says magic is a form of emotional translation. On Sunday when I buy a copy of ‘This All Come Back Now’ a speculative fiction anthology by First Nations writers, I read the foreword by the editor, Mykaela Saunders who says, “it sticks in my caw a little to call this a spec fic anthology given that for many non-Indigenous people that means it’s all completely made up. But I do concede that these are spec fic stories while I underline that these are not stories that diverge from reality, as defined in a Western scientific materialist sense”.
As Merryanna talks about the importance of re-indigenizing and re-learning the culture we come from, Molly talks about the ways we must learn to tell our old stories in new ways. I have failed at this so often — always looking towards the future, failing to hold onto the worlds before me. In Cass‘s workshop I wrote this:
There’s dewdrops against the leaf. Hands placed on each other – one over the other, generations of my hand. Here is my hand. Here is yours. When you hold a leaf in your palm you are holding a part of the world. When we put our hands on top of each other we are holding the world. The fallen leaf is on the pavement – the sky has cried and it carries her tears. When my world crashes down on me, and the sky breaks over me and water spills down my cheeks, hands hold mine and the world is still heavy, still too much, but we’re carrying it. Does the leaf miss the tree? Does the tree miss the leaf? Do we watch who we used to be – watch it fall away. I do not know my mothertongue. I do not know the language of the generations before me. How can I hold on? The leaf has broken and fallen as the clouds break and fall, spilling tears onto its surface. Is it doing the same to the tree? What links the tree and the leaf? What holds our hands together? The past? The future? My hand has a scar I don’t remember getting.
Molly speaks of not knowing her mother tongue and I remember my schooling. It was common practice for “English-medium” schools to punish students who spoke in any other language. English could take you further than your mother tongue ever could, and so my words have held onto the language of oppression, and I am once more complicit in colonization. Last year at an event in Adelaide Fringe I learned about Macauley’s children – a term used for Indians who reject their culture and wish to become westernized, the ones who in some ways search for colonization. A part of me resists what people see me as – why do I have to be a spokesperson for culture when nobody expects from the west. If I write about my culture, I am scared of defining and hence, reducing it. I want to belong to the past, but I am scared that I will forget to make the present. I think of Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn who in the event ‘Echoes and Interruptions’ reads an essay about her grandfather. The language is stunning and there is so much depth in the work. When she talks about the idea of haunting as a good thing, I think about how all my stories are the same story told over and over again. A family. A dog. Many fears and great love.
Later as I walk on Newcastle pavements, I call my grandparents. I had a missed a call from them the previous day and I am immediately filled with love when they pick up the phone. Responding to a previous request, they tell me they have found resources that can help me learn Malayalam from the beginning – the Kerala government’s Malayalam Mission website. My heart expands and my skin folds into birds and flies into the sun. I have this chance to find my language, at least a little. I have to try. When Molly talks about the intergenerational trauma that her people have lived with, she says they have also inherited an intergenerational strength. I think of my grandparents and my parents.
Fighting for and against
At the cryptology session I meet Laura Pettenuzzo, who with her co-panelist Beau Windon, is editing an anthology of crip stories. They speak of the need to create a world that works for individuals – that without paying attention to the individual, society cannot really progress, and I remember being a child with a novel under my textbooks. There are many things I miss about being a child, but one of the greatest joys of growing up has been finding the patterns that work for me – what gives me joy and how can I work with it. My time in Iowa and PhD have given me what I need the most – a way to find my own tempo, to create a room of my own – a space where I can find my own movements. I know my work is better because it’s a system that suits me and when they talk about how they made the call of submissions as accessible as possible, I can’t help but wonder how much better things would be if we were allowed to work with our strengths. Writing this, my letters are breaking with the cold, and the thought passes me – we’re breaking our own world, aren’t we? Are we each other? Are we ourselves? Are we somehow both? Individuals and a community?
At a later panel, Laura and Aqsa Magan speak about copyediting and the importance of fighting for and against. In the beautiful Press Bookhouse, I listen as they speak for the need to advocate, to assert our identity when we don’t see it in mainstream spaces, to create more opportunities for others to do the same. That we do not need to speak for others, but we need to make sure they are heard. My history, my present, my future. Others’ histories, presents and futures. My question is too simplistic – are you me and am I you? It’s a question fraught with difficulties because I do not have the right to speak for anyone else, but I do have the duty to make their voices heard. A friend, Sunny Ahmed in Iowa, often used to say, “It’s not a case of telling the right story, it’s about making sure there are multiple stories.” Not one correct truth but many different versions. We add our stories to the collective and make sure others are allowed their own voice. Laura and Beau spoke of disabled joy and a teacher’s words come back to me. Vijeta Kumar, my old professor from undergraduate and now a great friend, writes often about her experience as part of the Dalit community. Hurt by a caste system that renders people untouchable, Vijeta fights the idea that there is one story. She speaks of Dalit joy.
Over and over again, this festival is reminding me of how stories dismantle the world and how we must find ways to dismantle it for good. Molly’s words, “an intergenerational strength” return. I often talk about how I come from a lineage of love and maybe that’s something I need to think of even more. People who do the right thing because it is the right thing, loving and standing up for themselves and for others. At the National Young Writers Festival, they are fighting for this world, not giving up. In the session ‘Dungeons and Dragons: Writing Craft’ with Simone Corletto and Cienan Murr, they talk about how one starts D&D by learning its mechanics, then beginning to play with them, until finally one can break it. Draw on this for writing – learn, play, and then break the rules to find a way to write the right (or at least one version of) story. We’re taught our world works a certain way but as I listen to these talks and wander down the zine hall on Sunday, as I attend ‘Echoes and Interruptions’ where the audience is brought in to choose the story’s direction, as I sit by the beach and watch a man take dachshund for a skateboard ride, I wonder about the other possibilities, To play? To fight? To break normalcy and find a place for everyone?
As I write this, the bus crosses a bridge – always a place for metaphors, I’m sure it means many things for the moment, but I cannot choose one. In the story I am publishing in Overland, I use a ball made of coconut leaves as the metaphor — our selves as made of many other selves, our world made of individual worlds. I’m headed to the beach to sit and write by the water, but I return to my question again – “Are you me? Am I you? Is everyone the other?” The National Young Writers’ Festival gave me three special days to consider the question and I think my answer is this: we may not be the other, but we are made of each other – of the ways we interact, and our worlds intersect, and our lives touch just for a few moments. This means I cannot speak for the world, but it is important that space is created for the speech of every individual. I’m still scared of this world, of where we are headed, so I remember to grateful for the days in Newcastle where people cared, and I was allowed to listen.
