#gtlf2018

As a social animal I am a perpetually-soft-shell invertebrate; or possibly some sort of blind cave-dweller?

Sharon and I were participants in the George Town Literary Festival - a long weekend of panels, discussions, chats with writer-ly and cree-a-tor-ly types. Felt like three long weekends origami-ed into one; there was just SO MUCH.

I was so overwhelmed I forgot to take pictures. I took zero pictures. Here’s the one picture I took -- an after-the-fact photo of the books we brought home:

In a counterclockwise outwards spiral:

1) NutMag Volume 3 - a zine of young-writer voices from Penang; 2) JK Asher’s “The Inverted Banyan Tree” - novel. Picked this up mainly because it’s set in Port Dickson, and features a tiger spirit; 3) Mohan Ambikaipaker’s “Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain” - reading this now. An ethnography of the London-based grassroots antiracist Newham Monitoring Project. Clear-minded, rigorous thinking about racial dynamics in modern Britain; 4) Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “Inside my Mother” - poetry out of the Australian desert, by a Indigenous poet; 5) Aidli Mosbit’s “Chantek” - plays by one of Singapore’s busiest theatre persons. I’d gifted a copy of our book to Aidli for her birthday, so she gifted her book to me in return. Her’s the four times the size of ours; I think we’ve come out ahead in the exchange; 6) Azhar Ibrahim’s “Bahasa dan Tantangan Intelektualisme” - a book about the challenges and contestations surrounding Bahasa Melayu as a language.

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From my fractured notes of the panel discussions, some personal highlights:

1) Playwright Aidli Mosbit on being Malay-Muslim woman in Chinese-majority Singapore. “For a woman + Malay doing theatre, in the English-language theatre cannon, there are not many Malay-women roles to play - started writing to address that - more multifaceted Malay roles - in Malay, because I wanted that voice, even though English is where the money is.”  2) Poet Lemn Sissay, talking about his childhood. “My mother landed in [in the UK] in 1960s - forced into mother & baby home - social worker tried to force her to sign adoption papers - I thought my name was Norman Greenwood for 17 yrs - when I left the care system I didn’t know anybody who knew me for more than a year - this is colonialism in microcosm.” 3) Mohan Ambikaipaker, discussing political blackness and whiteness. “ ‘Black’ was ruptured in Britain to not be manners & customs, but to be political resistance / identity - IWA common cause with Afro-Carribean [community] - galvanise people in similar circumstances, re: racism - instead of treating these as separate instances, joint solidarity, because structural conditions are similar - whiteness is about maintaining a social position in hierarchy - ‘Rivers of Blood’ elite political narrative has a dynamic connection to somebody being attacked on the ground - [white racism] is not the actions of working-class few.” 4) Azhar Ibrahim, pushing back against mainstream Malay discourse’s obsession with the figure of Hang Tuah as the model Malay (male). “Remember the 'Hikayat Hang Tuah' - courtly text! Hang Tuah was court’s idea of a model subject!” 5) Ali Cobby Eckermann, who said many impassioned things about environmental / social doom and Indigenous ecological wisdom and the future -- but two things stood out for me. At one point she stopped mid-sentence, and sighed, and said: “I keep saying ‘Australia’, but you know we don’t have an aboriginal name for the place called Australia?” And: “For us, the first sin is land ownership. And, well, aboriginal culture is the oldest contiguous culture in the world.”

The discussions were all interesting, and I learned lots. Wish they were longer, though? Each was only an hour long. Also everything overlapped?

But I guess that’s what a big buzzy lit festival is like.

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Here’s some photos (that I didn’t take) of the big-ass panel I was part of:

(Source)

It was a panel titled: “On Privilege And Freedom And Freedom To Write In And Of Malaysia”. A big-ass subject. Here’s a close-up of me pontificating:

(Source)

Saying stuff like:

“Sharon and I think a lot about where stories come from, and how they return to those places. Stories come from or are created in particular geographies and communities. If I write a story, and it is never made accessible to the people or place that inspired it, then what I am doing is an act of resource extraction. Basically like logging.”

And:

“My privilege is that I live in a house that belongs to my family, rent-free. Basically it's a subsidy. My parents subsidise my work.”

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Sharon set up a chill time-out corner in the marketplace area of the festival, on the final day:

(Source)

Basically a sit-down-shut-up-mess-around-with-colour-pencils-and-decompress type deal. We huddled in our corner (with artist Mary Tang), and people came to us to sit down and chat.

Everybody I talked to seemed to like Creatures of Near Kingdoms.

Swapped notes with so many people -- in the festival itself, as well as with our friends in George Town, generally -- about translation and genre and animal myths and intersectionality and queerness and ethnography and fantasy and language and responsibilities towards our readership / communities and publishing gossip and being actually haunted by actual ghosts.

Because this is Penang, after all; every house or hotel has a ghoul or a god.

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Evenings after dinner we skittered back to our hotel room and fainted into bed. (No hantu bothered us.) Missed all the night-time performances and the poetry slam and the closing party, even.

Georgetown Literary Festival 2018 will be holding the very first Malaysia National Poetry Slam.

To participate in the slam, submit a video of one of your poems (BM, English or bilingual preferred) between 1st July and 16th September, to:

Submissions Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1268720583164407/

Read about the prizes and the rules at http://www.georgetownlitfest.com/slam/