Conversations Archive

Click here to preorder Cynthia’s poetry collection, nomad of salt and hard water.

Who are you?

poet.
young mama.
grassroots educator & organizer.
working class, queer, migrant
of Javanese & Chinese descent.
daughter, sister, Bali-born and raised.
visitor on unceded occupied Coast Salish Territories.
survivor.

I recently completed my first book-length manuscript, a collection of 47 poems that testify to experiences of migration, loss, violence, young mothering, resistance and love through the body-in-making of a particular kind of mythic figure, reflected in the working title nomad of salt and hard water. Like a nomad, the scrip travels back and forth through historical, mythical and contemporary times, and across various geographies – island, desert, coast, hard corner streets. The nomad is the poet and anyone without a “here” and “there”, anyone whose terrain is exile. This has been a project of recovery and revelation – of the ruptured self in conversation with its own displaced blood, songs, histories, legends. I’m very happy with this project and am looking forward to sharing it with readers!

I envision a relationship between publisher and author that is characterized by respect and mutuality, with the shared purpose of delivering the book to the people who need it (including folks who can’t afford to buy the book). I think that authors should be involved in publication and distribution, and publishers should be involved in editing/revising to strengthen the book. It also seems important to me that publisher and author are on the same page about what the book is, what it can and can’t do in the world, how to amplify its reach in the spaces where it does have legs,  and what kind of readership is ideal. I think that the author should have final say in the presentation of the book, and that the publisher should expect their input to be taken into account in that final say.

I am first and foremost writing to save my own life. It is because of an individual choice to commit that a book gets completed. I have to decide to wake up before dawn to write, because I work two jobs and I have a young son, and after the sun rises, time does not belong to me. I have to believe that the poems are more important than anything else I could be doing otherwise, and that I have the right to write them. I have to submit my voice to the gauntlet of craft so I can do justice to the poems I want to write.  And I have to live with the consequences of all these choices. So I think in terms of responsibility, writing is a a profoundly individualistic practice. It requires an individual surrender to the process.

But. In everything else – content, technique, inspiration, its very conditions of possibility – writing is inevitably a collective practice. And it is not only horizontally collective, but also vertically, as in through time. nomad of salt and hard water was generated, revised, and re-incarnated several times over the course of 8 months with the immediate support and critique of an incredible crew of poets, who I have to acknowledge here – Sevé Torres, Hari Alluri and David Maduli. But it was also made possible by an entire community & school of writers of colour, VONA, which gave me the boldness to want to be a poet at all. Then, there are the teachers who believe in you enough to make you want to be better at being yourself – Suheir Hammad and Willie Perdomo have been those lights for me. Every single poet of colour I have ever read, studied and through whose language (lifeline) I have pulled myself out of self-refusal – Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Mahmoud Darwish, Martin Espada, Aracelis Girmay, Barbara Jane Reyes, Chris Abani, Patrick Rosal, A. Van Jordan, Nikki Finney, Patricia Smith, Matthew Shenoda, just to name a few. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who gave definition to my history, supressed by 33 years of dictatorship, from a concentration camp in Buru Island. My mother, who works the assembly line 48 hours a week for minimum wages and daily conjures meals out of her sweat and prayer. My sister Gladys and best friend mia, both of whom co-parent my son. My son, Paul, who forgives me each time I tell him I have to go work on a poem. The truncated and persistent sounds, shapes, music and traditions of peoples I belong to and those that have been generously shared with me by other peoples who were never meant to survive.

I see writing as inherent to liberation struggles because writing is essentially about documenting and defining survival. It is about connecting a specific voice to universal currents. All of us are moving through a historical world shaped by colonization and its pillars – capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, racism, war/militarism, the nation-state, ableism, and so on. We are differently positioned, facilitated and blocked in our movements, and our very understandings of what those movements might mean are profoundly different – but we all move in alliance with and subversion of that world. I am a poet today only insofar as oppressed peoples have organized and fought for their voices and lives to matter. I am a poet only insofar as I have land to live on, and presently, it is land that has been wrested from its original and rightful guardians through genocidal violence.

At the same time, liberation struggles are only as powerful as the voices that they nurture, and in turn, give them purpose. I think poetry is one of the means through which we can nurture our voices and break the asphyxiation of colonized language. In poetry, language is an event where multiple journeys, including silence, are initiated yet controlled by the economy of a form and the skill of a poet. I chose to stop organizing while writing nomad because I wanted to discipline myself to the demands of the poetic craft. I wanted to learn how to honor feeling and experience, how to let them speak for themselves, because in articulating their specific origins and destinations they lead us to something less like the categories we have to operate with(in) and closer to ourselves.

what had happened was/i wrote myself out of damage/
this is the body of words and spaces/i have found to re-construct
-Suheir Hammad, from breaking poems (2008)

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes
and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
-Audre Lorde, from Poetry is Not a Luxury (1977)

I write because I believe I will never be enough, especially in the minds of those whom I love. Writing sustains the hope for me that I can redeem my life, that through it what I am might become something worth keeping. Writing is the place I enter to strip myself entirely of defense and to affirm life in its totality. It is where I surrender to the judgment of others and time.

I write because it hurts me to know that many of us will disappear in silence. We live in a world where people’s lives are intertwined and affect each other’s in profoundly unequal ways, and where the sole measure of permanence, memory, matter is the (English) written word. I want to save myself and the people I love from silence we did not choose, into which we have been thrown and which have become so ordinary that we barely know how to grieve, and survive, our own loss.

Enforced exiles have shaped much of my life and perspective. It is for me, the experience of being put outside and away from whatever/whoever might be “legitimately” defining reality. Sometimes it involves being targeted, other times it just means not being. Writing is my asylum while I am caught between life and language. I write to make peace with knowing that I will never be at home, both because I have been driven out, but also because the choices I make transgress lines that demarcate belonging. So I write because it makes me feel embryonically human. As a craft, writing
is very much like prayer to me in its striving towards meaning and its condition of faith that someone is listening.

I think all writing must presume relationality and stake itself on the probability of empathy. Poetry is no different. But it is also a form of creativity that prevents uniform control (and therefore, tyranny) of text and meaning by erupting language in unexpected ways. Poetry rejects the obvious and invites us to construct multiple meanings, to strive for connection without the illusion of having all of the information we “need”. And I think this is because the economy of a poem relies as much on controlling silence as it does sense.

A first draft for me is the initial response to a loss that has been felt, if not yet defined. In writing the poem, I try to speak to that loss, to put words where there is only the impossibility of longing. Usually what happens for me is the first draft either walks around the loss or plunges into its centre. In the first case, there are lines but no substance. In the second, there is a pure descent to absence, which is neither sensible nor relatable without some sort of contour to delineate its figure.  It’s like standing in a circle without knowing that is where I am because I can’t see the line that forms its circumference.

The revision process is where I whittle or flesh the poem so that it can acquire a body that is appropriate to the loss it is addressing. The more that I study other poets, the more techniques I learn about the range of possible bodies, and those that still need to be invented. I think that my best poems are those that terrified me when I was writing them – because I didn’t know how to realize them and felt like I had little to no control over them. But the better my craft, the more completely I could follow my instincts and the less likely I was to give up when the bodies I built
didn’t work. For me being a poet is like becoming a vessel: all I can do is train to be as seaworthy and resilient as possible then submit to the winds.

I try to tell the truth from my perspective while being attentive to what is obscured by the presentation of a line or image. I try to avoid literalism while remaining concrete. I strive to write poems that give myself and others permission to disarm, to honour feelings and experiences for which we have been punished. I believe in writing to (not for) an audience; that is, being invested in my truth reaching particular groups of people in order to support dialogue, reflection, perhaps even healing. I try to enhance the light by which we can see ourselves and to illuminate what is universal and necessary to the human experience across what has been made disparate or broken. Ultimately, I want my poems to participate in the struggle to recover all bodies as sacred, and to affirm life for those of us who are still asking why and how we should continue.