A Fire of Love and Protest: On Writing All Flowers Bloom

Kawika Guillermo’s second novel, All Flowers Bloom, is a queer speculative revision of histories and imagined futures. In this post Kawika discusses the persistent theme of love, including both self-love and love for others, and offers a view on how love (or a lack of love) is related to the race-focused protests currently happening across the United States and the world.

Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

– James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority: an Address,” 1960

My first novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, detailed the dejection that many people of color felt during the Bush years, and their attempts to self-exile in the face of the war atrocities committed in the “war on terror.” Hating their own country, the novel’s characters can’t help but hate themselves. They idealize suicide. They transport drugs. They become violent. Their stories reflect my own feelings of loss and anger during those years, when I lived and traveled abroad.

If Stamped documents my feelings of self-hate, All Flowers Bloom documents my journey learning to love myself. The novel follows two souls who reincarnate throughout human history, and whose love survives war, famine, and their own deaths. In every life, their love blooms in times of intense political change: the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, the British colonization of India, the Philippine-American War, and political upheavals far, far into the future. 

When I met my wife, I was writing All Flowers Bloom. Three years later, when she gave birth to our son, I was still writing it. All Flowers Bloom represents my transition from an angry, dejected ex-patriate, into a father, a husband, a son-in-law, a lover of love itself. And yet, the book’s roots remain deeply political, and angry.

I began this reflection with Baldwin’s often-cited quote, “love is a growing up,” because Baldwin himself saw love as a distinctly political act. He saw the bus boycotts and youth marches of the late 1950s as love speaking, love coming from the downtrodden who still had hope that their white oppressors could change. Protest was a way of tearing down walls, a way of saying “we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.”

The Bitter Peace by Philip S. Jowett - Conflict in China 1928-1937

Chinese history has long been ignored in the West, but a few spotlights do shine out from time to time on certain events, even if only to provide superficial understanding. These usually point to the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and, recently, the Sino-Japanese War. However, there is a small window of time in Chinese history that contained multiple smaller wars, which has almost been completely ignored by Western scholars. This brief era is what The Bitter Peace – Conflict in China 1928-37 by Philip S. Jowett illuminates.

Tsundoku #11 - July 2020

If you're out of lockdown lucky you - you can go to the park and read. If you're still in lockdown then you can stay in and read. It's all reading...and so this July here's some choices. Admittedly publishers are still defering lots of titles to later in the year in the hope of more bookshops getting back in business and the return of browsers, but still...

Debasmita Dasgupta: It’s Time to Tell the Truth to our Children

Debasmita Dasgupta is a Singapore-based, Kirkus Best Prize nominated illustrator and graphic novelist. She enjoys illustrating fiction, non-fiction, and poetic works for children and young adults. Debasmita is also passionate about art-for-change, and has created an online movement called My Father Illustrations to promote child rights for girls and better father-daughter relationships.

Debasmita’s debut independent graphic novel, Nadya, came out this year. Nadya deals with the subject of divorce from the point of view of a 13-year old adolescent girl living in the mountains. It has just been nominated for the Neev Book Award for distinguished children’s literature.

Despite the fact that divorce becoming quite a common phenomenon in many families in Asia / India, often it is still considered to be a taboo subject. Debasita hopes that her graphic novel will encourage open conversation about difficult family topics. Below, she reflects on the process of writing Nadya and her personal encounters with families going through divorce.

Nicky Harman on The Book of Shanghai: some exciting writing talent and excellent translators

As a follow-up to Rosie Milne's post on THE BOOK OF SHANGHAI, I have been thinking about what makes a good introduction to contemporary Chinese literature, and what can persuade new readers to dip a toe in unknown waters. Logically, short stories should be a good way in, because length-wise, they don’t require too much commitment. But I am someone who loves to immerse myself in a full-length novel, so I approached The Book of Shanghai with, let’s say, an open mind.

Historically, Shanghai has had a powerful grip on the western imagination. Of course, it was always much more than the exotic den of iniquity it was portrayed as. As Jin Li, one of the editors, writes in his excellent introduction, ‘The influences of a recently industrialized West mingled, interacted and cross-pollinated with the traditions of a culture that had developed over many centuries. As a contact point between East and West, with its unique location, Shanghai paved the way, acting as a testing site where various ideological and cultural ideas were welcomed, accommodated and re-imagined.’

But that was then, and now is now. In The Book of Shanghai, the picture emerges of a thoroughly modern city. These stories scarcely even hint at Shanghai’s exotic or insalubrious past. Instead, they describe the human condition as it is today. Not that all the stories are realistic. Some are quite fantastical and have beguilingly strange protagonists. But all of them are rooted in the present... or the future.

Shreya Sen-Handley Talks the Strange and Unexpected in her Short Stories with Elaine Chiew

Credit Stephen Handley

Bio: Former television journalist and producer Shreya Sen-Handley is the author of two books with HarperCollins, the recently published short story collection Strange and the award-winning Memoirs of My Body. She is also a columnist for the international media, writing for the National Geographic, CNN and The Guardian amongst others, a creative writing teacher, illustrator, and a librettist for the Welsh National Opera. She is currently writing her third book for HarperCollins, The Accidental Tourist, a travelogue, alongside her monthly column for top Indian newspapers, the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle. The opera she has co-written, ‘Migrations’, will tour the UK in 2021. 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Shreya. Congratulations on your short story collection, Strange (HarperCollins India, 2019). How long was it in the making, and tell us what your short story collection is about. 

SSH: Thank you Elaine. “What’s your next book?” asked my editors at HarperCollins the minute my first book ‘Memoirs of My Body’ was published in 2017. I said I was considering writing more short stories. I had written a handful in the 3 years my first book, Memoirs of My Body, had been brewing and each had gone on to be published, broadcast or shortlisted in competitions in Australia, UK and India, and thought readers might want a few more. I certainly enjoyed writing them and was eager to write more. My editors loved the idea, and noticed something I hadn’t really consciously wrought- an unexpected turn to most of my stories, and so this collection of ‘profoundly unsettling and unusual’ short stories was conceived. There were in the end, appropriately, 13 stories in all, and they covered a variety of genres – romance, comedy, science fiction, dystopia, horror, supernatural, crime, etc. There was no attempt to write on the same subject every time, or restrict myself to a genre. Instead the idea was to focus on the unexpected in every aspect of our everyday lives, and uncover, as a result, the strangeness that lies beneath the seemingly ordinary. 

Courtesy HarpeCollins India

Bookworm

Countries across the globe are currently enforcing various types of social restrictions to help reduce the infection rate of Covid-19. Under these bizarre circumstances, it is easy to feel distant and isolated from friends and family. Perhaps more than ever before, this is a time when it is important to celebrate community.

With this in mind, Asian Books Blog has decided to launch a new series entitled Bookworm. We will be interviewing different members of the Asian-books-loving community to delve deeply into their relationships with Asian literature. We hope that hearing from our Bookworms will help strengthen the sense of shared passion amongst our readers and will also provide inspiration for taking on new literary challenges. We aim to interview a diverse group of people, spanning all different sorts of identities, and living all over the world.

Shelley Herman works on data analysis in the defence industry, and currently lives on the Eastern Coast of the US, in New Jersey. She is our very first Bookworm!