Originally posted Feb 24, 2025 on Substack (gross!)
Reading the copy of Siblings by Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris, and Nisha Ramayya in Emily’s apartment, I really enjoyed the part at the end of this roundtable, where they go back to the question of conventional vertical lineages (parents, grandparents) versus uneven, strange horizontal relationships (siblings, friends).
Nisha Ramayya: For ages I’ve been telling the story about how I write poetry because my mum, when she was a girl or teenager, she used to write poetry. She was the one who encouraged me. But then recently, some friends from Glasgow—one of them found this box of material, our notes and stuff from school. We used to write really silly poems to each other. We made up these little characters. Really silly, silly teenage stuff. (…) That was how we socialised, and we definitely couldn’t let anyone else know. But I’d somehow erased that from my story, what I say about how I became a poet. And actually it’s about friendship and humour and joy and being uncool, doing these little outsider-y things. Now I’ll often credit friends, like the friends I made in my twenties changed my whole life and got me politicised and this or that, and I’m so grateful to them, but in a way that still might be suggesting some sort of lineage. So, how to think about the horizontal, or the other things that contribute to how we are.
(…)
Jay Bernard: You know, so often the conversation will go to, like, my mother and my grandmother, I went to this writing workshop. But, when you dig into it a little bit more, you’re right, there are all these other relationships and some that were possibly uneven in less palatable ways and that we choose not to talk about. But also, do we have a language in our culture for those kinds of silly, comedic, playful, frivolous relationships that probably did really inform who we are today? Like, I think about the first book of poetry I ever bought, The Nation’s Favourite Poems. When we were all 14 or something, I remember buying it from Waterstones and passing it around and everybody loved it, everyone was really into it. Everyone would come up to me and be, like, can I have the book?
(…)
Mary Jean Chan: I’m suddenly remembering my best friend from secondary school, who is still a close friend of mine. She was born in the US, so her mother tongue is technically English. She came to Hong Kong when she was five. Since she was my best friend, we would speak in English to each other voluntarily after class, because that’s what she was most comfortable with. It was like our secret language. (…) And that’s probably why I love English, because it’s also the language of friendship for me.
In this same section, they also bring up the artist/writer bio and the maybe obvious but still interesting notion that the things that are expected to be in a bio are all about power—going to this program or winning this prize and being from this place. Will Harris notes that it’s also a way of telling other writers that they can go and do these things as well (see the practice of looking at where writers you admire have been published, and reading those publications and submitting to them in the hopes of being published there too), which is inevitably a perpetuation of power and the maintenance of certain locations/spaces as places of power.
This makes me think of the call from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi to "hijack the space of the bio”, which I’ve been thinking about ever since I read their essay ‘Notes on craft: writing in the hour of genocide’:
We might escalate this narrative terrorism towards a constant aesthetic terrorism; we might pursue infrastructural damage to the arts and to the structures of publishing. This might mean, among other things, clogging submission portals, hijacking the space of the bio, as Rasha Abdulhadi has modeled, hijacking the interview and the podcast and the craft talk and the classroom and the call for submissions and the $75 payment via Venmo for the poem. It might mean writing things that are unpublishable and forcing publishers into doing it anyway; it might mean circumventing or ignoring the structures of publishing in favor of means of circulation outside the bounds of capital and therefore free from the grasp of the invisible hand. It might mean boycott, pressure, and refusing to allow the return of the oppressive dailiness in any space we inhabit. It might mean being loud, annoying, and resolutely steadfast in our refusals and our insistences. It might mean joining with writers who are extending solidarity beyond the page and into direct actions against the complicity of our institutions, literary or otherwise. It might mean, too, building alternative and sustained networks of support for our fellow writers who lose jobs, opportunities, or face harassment. Like a net, we tie ourselves to one another to stop the dailiness from getting through; we tie ourselves tight enough so none of us get lost along the way. Maximal commitment, minimal loneliness, to paraphrase a comrade.
It’s funny because the bio part is the only part I really remembered from this whole paragraph, that really has been staying with me, but coming back to it now, I think a lot of what I’ve been doing for the past year has been so much about all of this. And a lot of the loneliness I feel comes from feeling like I’m constantly in spaces where not enough of this “constant aesthetic terrorism” is happening, where I feel like I’m the only person who isn’t willing to join the mood that is the mood of the room (Sara Ahmed…), and what it means to be living in a mood that is not smooth or happy or harmonious but rather permanently contentious and unsettled—which actually was the mood of many of the rooms I was in during the summer of 2024, this sense of grief and rage in solidarity, this sense of knowing others were feeling something like what I was feeling—interruption, disruption, eruption.
I had my showcase at FAWC on Friday. Alison gave me an incredibly moving and kind introduction; I can’t describe in words how meaningful that was, but it was unbelievably special and I can’t believe there are parallel universes out there where Alison wasn’t the one who introduced me <3 I read the entirety of ‘Sequence from a dream,’ which I had previously timed to be 27 minutes and 57 seconds, but then I got really stressed that I’d gone massively over time in my real reading, even though it’s silly to be worried about taking up too much space in a context where a) I’m supposed to take that space and b) taking more of it is not a bad thing at all. I think I also netted one or two new donations to Mahmoud’s and Hossam’s campaigns, which is the thing that really matters. It did also matter to me to get to read ‘Sequence from a dream’ in full. It’s really long (5800 words). You don’t get a lot of opportunities to really do what you want to do. In some ways, I’ve realised that some of that hijacking has become habitual for me. (Also at the CAA conference in New York.) Growing up, I wanted to avoid being annoying at all costs, but I was still quite annoying to people without knowing it, and I had to figure out what to do about that, about the fact that something about me just bothered others and I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t seem to control it. Now, I try to be annoying on purpose a lot of the time, yes, it is annoying, yes, I am going to be that person, yes, the person who points out the problem becomes the problem, the Sara Ahmed of it all.
Anyway, bios and playing with words with teenage friends reminds me of some of the things I did when I was a teenager that I don’t really think about that much anymore.
1
I once sold an artwork at a small charity exhibition at my school and my bio for it was this really fanciful little paragraph that had nothing to do with my achievements because I didn’t have any to put in there. I was a big fan of John Green at the time and I distinctly remember a line in the bio being: “Wants to be one of those hurricane people.” The feelings I’ve felt about that bio over time: pride, satisfaction, shame, cringe, bemusement.
2
My friends and I had a series of notebooks that we passed around during class and used to write an extremely long collaborative story about one character who kept dying and being reborn in new bodies and having new adventures. We were so into it that we needed to institute rules for our entries, like “Each person can only write 3 lines per turn,” which quickly led to people squishing their letters and writing their words diagonally in order to fit more inside their allotted space. This was all we did for a long time, maybe a year.
There were also versions in email chains, but these notebooks I still have on the laden bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, material evidence that the story I usually tell when people ask me how I started writing—that I was an editor first (with Sine Theta), and that I first started writing earnestly during the COVID lockdown—is only one very simple version. I was writing a lot all throughout my childhood in this borrowed language of English—at the same time private (I was the one in my family who first really mastered it) and public (as Olga Tokarczuk wrote in Flights [English translation by Jennifer Croft], how crazy it is for monolingual Anglophone people that their personal intimate language is also the language that everyone else can understand) and hegemonic (needless to elaborate)—and I was also editing: I owned the notebooks we wrote in (our means of production), and I was probably the one making up the rules about how people should be writing their entries (gatekeeping). I was probably a diabolical editor. I still am a very strict one.
I said I wouldn’t write essays on here, so I’ll leave these thoughts where they are and go no further. One last thing: I’ve been reading The Black Insider by Dambudzo Marechera (recommended to me by Vita) in fits and starts, and whenever I pick up the book again I keep coming back to this one paragraph. The context is that the narrator is reflecting on his time in Oxford after he’s expelled from the university and becomes a writer, freeloader, and hanger-outer:
There was only one other black person apart from myself, Stanley, with whom I had read English Literature; we had read each other’s poems and short stories and criticised each other’s efforts with that sincere insincerity of two people who know each other only deep enough to wound. There were lots of black people in the university but I had lost the capacity to recognise them in myself when their smiles for me became arid and harsh as soon as the news got about that I had been sent down in disgrace. It seemed I could not meet any one of them, including Stanley, without being given a lecture on the I-Told-You-So-Got-What-You-Deserve theme. Before Peter and Shelagh gave me a roof, they had all turned me away from their doors with the usual I’ve-Got-My-Own-Life-To-Lead blues. I slept three nights on the roof of the English Faculty Library, dazed somewhat by the unusual first time without a roof, polish of the stars shining down on my sleeping bag. I was just about to start a journey of discovery in the real United Kingdom.
As I look forward to going back to my ‘real life’ in Oxford, I wonder what my sense of community has become and feels like and could be. Anyway what do you think about that, for you?
Okay bye!
Jiaqi