Imagining Asia
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| Panel on Imagining Asia, featuring (L to R) Tash Aw, Madeleine Thien, Boey Kim Cheng and University of London Professor of Humanities Roger Kain, courtesy of Elaine Chiew |
Rabindranath Tagore had a construct for Asia; he called it
“a continental mind of Asia.” Asia thus was conceived as more than geographical
landmass and the surrounding oceans, but even mapping it geographically can
prove tricky as its Western borders are conjoined with Europe. Asia as a continent also encompasses a
multitude of languages, cultures, ethnicities, religious practices, economic
pursuits and livelihoods. Keep in mind also the strategic configuration of powers and militarism
which accompanied the formation of ASEAN, APEC and various other regional affiliations, as well that the turn-of-the-century ideological
conception of Asia as envisioned by Okakura Kakuzõ in Ideals of the East was as a
foil of the East against the encroachments of the West, already forecasting
Japan’s military ambitions at that time. Thus, returning to the question of “imagining Asia”
and specifically how Asian writers like Tash Aw, Madeleine Thien and Boey Kim
Cheng imagine Asia, already implicate deeper framing issues of how long we will
remain locked within this semantical conception of Asia as a singular, cohesive
entity, Asians who are immigrants to the West as writers with fragmented
identities, and all of this understood with reference to the West.
Cosmetically,
as a panel moderated by Sarah Churchwell and hosted in collaboration with the Being Human Festival
from the U.K., the whiff of ex-colonial assertion here only underscores the fact
that there is no imagining Asia within Asia, that physical distance as
individually experienced is needed for a hyphenated-identity to rethink
Asia. Asia as an idea, thus, is always
not Asia as it currently is, nor Asia as it was, but Asia as it could be. It obscures deeper epistemological conundrums
for me: is there even an Asia as it currently is, or as it was? All the generalisations we make, if we were
to examine them, might not only be specious, they reveal how much these
generalisations were formed in order for the West to be able to imagine,
conceive of and tame Asia.
This
uneasiness can be seen in all three panelists’ response to the question of
imagining Asia. As Tash Aw said, when he’s
in Asia, he’s really thinking of “the specifics of being in Malaysia or
Singapore” or wherever he is in time and space (the idea ‘Asia’ here is
irrelevant). Madeleine Thien also
offered a more nuanced understanding of what it is to be a hyphenated-identity.
Rather than the simple model of fragmentation, perhaps a pluralistic identity
is more like “a series of photographs super-imposed upon one another with
multiple exposures.” East-West as a form
of dialectic can be an invidious framing device that forces the East constantly
to define itself as a self with reference to the West, without which it by
implication wouldn’t exist. If, however, we were to see Asia as a loose
agglomeration of disparate elements, for which Asia as nomenclature, as
category, isn’t even all that useful, perhaps we can start from Boey Kim Cheng’s
idea instead – any form of ‘border crossing,’ for anyone, is an act of self-translation.
This act, as Tash Aw started out with saying, “is an intimate act.” Asian
writers with multiple super-imposed identities whose works converge upon
specific locales within Asia should not be tasked with producing an Asia
imaginary, but rather, let’s pursue specifically what country, whose burden of history,
what timeline, what context, who acts or is acted upon, and what knitted web of
interstitial meaning can then arise.
The Absurdity in Everyday
Life
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| Etgar Keret, reading Pipes, his first short story, courtesy of Elaine Chiew |
Etgar Keret is no stranger to those of us who regularly write
bite-sized fiction (or wrestle with the genre called flash fiction or
short-short fiction), or those of us who love stories that mine the surreal in
the banal. His stories are characterised in English translation by his lean, spare, often ‘talky’ prose, and their subject matters are often wonderfully offbeat, where the bizarre walks hand-in-hand with the quotidian. SWF 2017 featured the irrepressible Etgar Keret in person, and
indeed, his sessions in the PlayDen were packed to the gills (the Chamber would
have turned less people away).
Listening to Keret, what hits home is that we are made of
stories. Stories grow from
anecdotes. Reality and gritty magical
realism may canter cheek-by-jowl but our sense of our world is limned by our
crazy emotional reactions to situations-at-hand. What makes perfect sense to one is nonsense
to another, and one person’s intimate revelation can transform another’s
understanding (his story Asthma is a perfect example). Keret regaled the
audience throughout his session with anecdote after anecdote: he wrote his
first story at age 19 while in the military and his father served coffee and
cookies to the enemy and his brother was tried for totemism because he tied up
a military antenna the way he’d tie up shoelaces; when his brother read his
story for the first time he was so engrossed he didn't notice that his dog had fallen on its side; his mother’s absurd rules during
his childhood that didn’t stand him in good stead in the military (“If there’s
something you don’t like to do, you’re allowed to ask the reason why”, which
really pissed off the army when he practiced it).
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| Etgar Keret with moderator Amanda Lee Koe, courtesy of Elaine Chiew |
Moderated by writer Amanda Lee Koe, who displayed a stage
vulnerability that complemented the fragile emotional heart of many of Keret’s stories,
some of the most affective segments of this dialogue were Keret sharing the
story of his best friend’s suicide, Keret explaining the different registers of
Hebrew (as the holy language of Scripture) and Yiddish (the colloquial form of linguistic
transportation in Israel), and how using both in writing a single sentence
sounds “half like the King James Bible and half like rap,” and finally, that
writing is a profoundly private act, and Keret often does not think about the
reader until he is done writing. More
importantly, it is the act of allowing the absurd to enter our daily
consciousness that liberates our writing and emancipates us from ourselves. Writing
from a private space means writing true, writing close to the bone; it exposes not
just your voice, but also your soul.
Keret also
emphasised that it’s not structure but movement that really energises a
short-short. Movement here targets not
just language, but also rhythm, tone, pace.
By movement, Keret could also be extrapolated to mean the internal
movement (the journey) the writer undergoes as he mows through his own reasons
and emotions for writing this story and not another, for telling it this way
and not another. Thus, even though the character may not change, the writer has. To have this happen at the level of each
single story is indeed writing close to what Robert Olen Butler called the ‘white-hot
center of you.’
Hope and Resistance in the
Age of Dystopia.
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| Junot Diaz with moderator Carolyn Camoens, courtesy Elaine Chiew |
At least 600 people attended Junot Diaz’s keynote lecture, held in a jam-packed Victoria Theatre,
on the topic of 'hope and resistance in the age of dystopia.' Rather than bang on about how to be better
writers (because "writers aren't threatened as a species, readers are"), for which Diaz humbly says he’s not instrumental for other people's vocational training, he
prefers rather to talk about the ‘civic imaginary’, and how in an age of dystopia,
exercising your aesthetic function as an artist in no way exempts you from your
civic function. Quoting William Gibson
who said, “The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” Diaz
went on to say that dystopia too has “arrived but also not evenly
distributed." In speaking about the issue
of the Boston Review concentrated on dystopia, Diaz introduced Tom Moylan’s term
‘critical dystopia’ by following Lyman Tower Sargent’s train of thought, a
nonexistent society that readers view as “worse than contemporary society but
that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the
dystopian be overcome.” This bears contemplation because of our normalisation instincts while ensconced deep within dystopia itself – that’s how it is, keep calm and carry on! – but dystopia
in literature jerks us out of a state of comatose complacence through its function
of mapping, warning and providing hope.
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| Junot Diaz, courtesy Elaine Chiew |
“We are all border guards,” Diaz said, and the border
guard in us draws lines between us and them, insider/outsider, belonging/non-belonging,
somewhere/elsewheres. It masks the fact that each of us are composite beings, with
individualised complicated relationship to ‘nation’. As Diaz commented, “Anyone who has an uncomplicated relationship to nation, I
commend you and I am terrified of you.”
Stressing that our current times is no more dystopian than similar
periods of the rise of alt-right and white supremacy in the past (”Even beneath
abysses, there are deeper mines; even in our worst objections, we find ways to
deepen hell”), what Diaz highlighted is the inherent danger in militarised neoliberalism – it encourages
people to retreat from public life, it wants to deal with ‘atomised individuals’
because that makes us easier to control.
The proliferation of multiple dystopian narratives encourages
self-disenfranchisement, self-disregulation.
It discourages us from building utopias with deeper connective tissue to
others.
We become anesthethised to the fact that we are continuously "cruising
on fictions." To the helplessness and
powerlessness we feel when trying to engage with those who hold violently
different beliefs, Diaz urged that we should stop ‘intellectualising’ or
logicalising ‘anger’. The fact that “our
purchase on society is narrow” and that we despair in no way mitigates our
ability to “step into the breach,” to do the civic labour that we can do, and model to those close to us. Close to
the end of his session, Diaz provided this reminder: Art is excellent for
resilience. Community work is excellent
for resilence. And resilience is a long
muscle. It can be a ‘bulwark against barbarians.’
Copy that, Mr. Diaz.
Copy that, Mr. Diaz.
Details: Tash Aw is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Map of an Invisible World (2009), Five Star Billionaire (2013), and Strangers on A Pier (2016). Madeleine Thien is author of Simple Recipes (2001), Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Boey Kim Cheng is author of Somewhere Bound (1989), Another Place (1992), Days of No Name (1996), After the Fire: New And Selected Poems (2006), Between Stations: Essays (2009) and Clear Brightness: New Poems (2012). Sarah Churchwell is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2005), What Americans Like (2010) and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (2013). Translations of Etgar Keret's work in English were published as The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God (2001 and 2004), the Nimrod Flipout (2006), Missing Kissinger (2008), The Girl on the Fridge (2009), Suddenly, A Knock on the Door (2012), just to name a few. He has also produced comics and directed award-winning films. Jellyfish won the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes Film Festival. Among several top literary awards, Keret received the Chevalier Medallion of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amanda Lee Koe is author of Ministry of Moral Panic (2013). Junot Diaz is the author of Drown (1995), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), and This is How You Lose Her (2012). He received a MacArthur grant in 2012. These books are published in all formats, widely available at local currencies.
