RETORTMAGAZINE.COM

by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Interview with Fiona Sze-Lorrain on Water the Moon

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is the author of a book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010). She writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. Born in Singapore, she grew up in a hybrid of cultures, and graduated from Columbia and New York Universities before pursuing a Ph.D at Paris IV-Sorbonne. A guzheng (ancient Chinese harp) concertist, she has performed worldwide. She serves as one of the editors at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), and has authored a book of critical prose and photography with Gao Xingjian (2000 Nobel Prize in Literature), Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (Contours, 2007). Her CD (with erhu performer Guo Gan), In One Take is forthcoming in Spring 2010. She is also the co-creator of Vif éditions, an independent poetry publishing house in the City of Lights, and is in the midst of completing a French critical monograph on Gao Xingjian’s dramatic literature. Currently, she lives in Paris, France and New York City.

I encounter the poem “Moon” as one center within your chapters of poems, its opening lines jump-cutting to closing lines in the following: “Moon // symbolizes fear in my culture, / a dark force that hunts / until you cower… From sky to sky, I gulped / silver stars, clock hands / that moved against the tide. / Their delicate flight / blanched the celestial space. / Secrets swallowed the moon.” I adore the title of your book as both an act of instruction and a work in naming. Tell us what went into the titling of this book.

Moon and all its implications — including Time (capital “T”) and not time (small “t”) — is indeed a central image and focus in this collection. The cover image of the book illustrates this intention as well. Look at the clock. Metaphorically speaking, it is none other than the moon. Entitled “Cortona” by Blake Dieters, this black-and- white photograph also contains a starking graphite feel that accentuates a physical, dimensional timelessness in general.

The title “Water the Moon” has a sensual appeal and mythical touch. It is like a fable. Most of the time, I look out for titles that speak and authenticate processes, and not titles that are restrictive, terminal or grasping/characterizing specific imageries. In reality, it is impossible to “water the moon” as to water a plant. The moon is far and beyond reach. So it is like a dream-like vision to be able to do so, hence rendering alive the moon like bringing alive a plant.

Since the moon has been immortalized by countless artists across all times, I thought of mortalizing it, as a change. The simple gesture of watering it is both magical and lyrical. It carries with it a mysterious and transparent sense of landscape and time. Water is a very powerful astrological element. Further, I found the title quite delicious, organic and crystalline all in all. There is a subtle celestial taste that is at the same time very natural and nourishing; this is fitting as well as positive, given that the book contains a couple of poems about food and its various cultural nuances/contexts.

Ethnically Chinese myself, I’m intrigued by how much ancestry and knowledge that’s passed down through the generations seem so important in our own life narratives, even though I’m the first to problematize any neat definitions of identity. There are poems with “grandmother” and “grandfather” written into them. Please tell us a bit more about this wisdom imbued in your work. You’ve also lived in Singapore, Britain, America and France. I notice some of your poems distinctly mentioning place and history, like “China”, “A Brief History of Time”, “Dear Paris”, among others. Can you tell us how being a person of such travel has shaped you and your writing?

Places permeate my writing since you may say that I am someone of travels — in exile and displacement, so-called. I’ve traveled, yes, and at times, without a choice, but I am never a tourist. Pierre Nora sees places as sites of memories; I see places as moments and years. I thought that writing about places as memories risks falling into the trap of flat sentimentalism, or a re-invention of the past. Unlike most artists in exile who eschew geographical precision, I look towards the porosity of borders — both physical and temporal — for inspiration. Otherwise, places are no different from identities, and any kind of identity will never fail to imprison souls.

France is my home, French is the language of my present. I was born in Singapore, and English as well as Chinese are the languages of my family heritage. I do not have a native tongue. While New York remains a space that triggers strong emotions for me, it has always been Europe where I feel rooted and centered. In terms of outlook, I am parisian. My life is a sequence of individual histories that involve plural cultures and geographies, in which places translate into different phases of creativities and energies. I do not distinguish places from personalities or situations. Naturally, places shadow in Water the Moon, since the poems move in fluidity across geographical and cultural borders. In terms of drawing materials from my heritages, I don’t think I was merely writing about my “grandmother” or “grandfather.” Like places, they are not just fleeting streams of memories. I wanted to write something specific about them and their generation that is both encompassing and reflective of an era little known or easily forgotten today. I try to write about them with a removed temperament and at an invested distance, just as the same way that I write about places and travels. It is harder, because emotions scrutinize at all times, especially when there is absence. But once I think of them as years and spaces that breathe — just as places and travels — the page opens up, and people transcend flesh and human form.

A Romanian gypsy once told me that the more you travel, the more you do not. This is where I am currently in terms of reality. Specific references to places occur in my writing mostly as an impetus for a larger narrative. They never contradict one another. If they do, the poems will simply fall banally into the broad category of “diasporic writing.” That, I thought, would be a huge alas, a pity.

I agree with Tess Gallagher’s reading of your book as “delicate and mysterious and empathetically open and spiritually anchored”. One of my favourite poems in this collection remains “Along Ludlow Street”. Such a well-crafted villanelle that comes across tender and warm and invested in its own song. Tell us about the challenge of poetic disciplines in the writing of these poems?

Wislawa Syzmborska has an early poem that I revisit often, “Epitaph” (1962):

Here lies, old-fashioned as a comma,
the authoress of a few poems.

Eternal rest

the earth has granted, although the corpse
did not belong to any of the literary groups

“Epitaph” (1962): Wislawa Syzmborska

I enjoy working with forms tremendously, but I do not declare allegiance to any single mode of expression or style for matters into which I mould poems. Water the Moon contains some villanelles, a sestina, a ghazal… Your question seems to hint that forms are “difficult.” What is “difficult” and what is “easy”? These are qualifiers that judge and probably do not quite speak much. It is like judging a poem or a personnage as good and bad, which is different from perceiving something specific as positive or not. If one was to perceive forms as “difficult,” there is a strong possibility that one has yet found his/her way to transcend beyond their technical rigor. Forms are as supple and accessible as one may want them to be. It is like yoga. Or like playing Bach. It is about seeking the touch — the lyrical limberness that makes a little difference. It shouldn’t be an inhibition at any level.

Forms are not writing exercises for me. They contain no “formula.” They come naturally to me, usually at the same time as the subject matter. Although they come naturally, they do not arrive at a rhythm that I can determine or control. It involves a lot of waiting and patience. I do not “decide” them. To some extent, the choice of form could color the poetic texture, its sensibilities and energies. That said, how do forms come about exactly? I don’t know. It is like meeting your Mr. Right — at the right time, at the right place. Sometimes it is sheer accident, sometimes it is… destiny? After all, who really knows? Perhaps a mystery is best kept as it is.

I love the poem “Act VI: Epilogue” and its first segment: “1. A friend came by for a visit. I opened the door. / “Are you going out?” she asked. / “No,” I replied, “I’m not going out.” Reminds me of how director Stephen Daldry used doors and thresholds to move between temporal spaces in The Hours, adapted from Michael Cunningham’s stunning novel. Your collection establishes its cinematic quality both within a poem’s movement and across the book’s broader arc. Can you tell us how you lined up the poems within this collection?

It is an important agenda for me to create a dialogue among the poems themselves. So in terms of their line-up, I was primarily concerned with how intimately they are able to speak to one another, and how much of a visual imagination and delightful inventiveness they could command from a neutral reader. I am mildly interested in linear movement or chronology of any sort. A temporal space is in truth a flux of conscious. It cannot be delineated, nor inhabited. Further, it constantly evolves. It is a living beast; there is no way you can “pin it down.” So why not just leave it alone and let it have its own life?

Sectioning the poems into three parts does not mean that they are categorized into three “groups.” Quite the contrary. The fact that I have chosen to give these three sections their own titles — which are quite telling in their own ways — is to open up further fresh themes and diversity among the poems themselves. Each of these three sections thus becomes an expansive poem in itself.

Arc? Yes! Of course there is an arc. But “the earth is round, spherical,” says the nineteenth-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid. Therefore, one needs to transcend beyond the so-called arc structure. How? you may ask. Up to you!

From one writer sharing with another, I honestly find it tiring and altogether disheartening how many readers so readily want to box the pronouns and characters in a text of poetry or prose, graft them into their own preconceived notions that then remain embedded and immutable. My characters may inhabit their own quiet id, and another gendered/ungendered character’s ego, and even the super-ego of a Naum Gabo sculpture, if only as another engendered/re-engineered concept, and yet animate themselves in separate surrealist or absurdist humanscapes. I thus found myself quietly happy when I saw writers you were referencing for your own literature, like Celan and Beckett and Stein and Cavafy, all of whom I’ve always read as iconic yet authors who probably appreciated facelessness, the eternal textual drift. Can you tell us about how you view the speaker within your poems, or the poetic self as construct?

Self-mythology is a rich wellspring for me when it comes to literary creation, and I am not bashful about it. This also reminds me of a post-Dada French writer, Noël Arnaud who wrote a line, “Je suis l’espace où je suis (I am the space where I am).”

To be faceless, the “he/she/it” must be a strongly articulated persona first and foremost, of wits, humor and fine surprises. The speaker is not necessarily a gendered human being. Literally, it could be anything — an object, a place, an idea, a feeling or even a word. Taoists believe that “self” is chaos. I disagree. For me, if it is a poetic self as construct, it must become a specific that constantly seeks to expand, extend and reach out — towards more uncertainties, paradoxes, plenitudes, questions and answers. Otherwise, this self is merely autobiographical, which is limiting in terms of scope.

Mark Strand once generously shared with me his book, The Weather of Words, and I found in it an essay of his, “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” very useful, honest and clear. He clarifies the overlaps between apparently opposite modes of autobiographical poetry: the subjective-visionary and the confessional, highlighting subtly how “self” can be either a “ghost” or a “sense.” As far as the ideal poetic self in Water the Moon is concerned, it has a clear voice, confident, elusive, very playful and transformative by nature. It is essentially a self that is free. That said, it does not mean that there exists no enormous tension in the poems, because this self is not certainly a commentator, either. It seeks to revitalize, not reveal.

I now cite Angélica Tornero in her “As For My Poetics”: “I’m suspicious of those who speak of the possibility of forming idealized identities… I cannot, therefore, speak in general terms about my poetics, I can’t circumscribe what I’ve done and what I will do into one single statement…. By nature, I’m multivocal and open, in constant motion. I declare myself in dialogue with the world; my constancy is constructed in relation to what is other. I want to keep listening; I want to let myself be vulnerable, though perhaps only secretly, to the things of the world.” I love the idea of the debut collection as being semi-autobiographical, if only post-confessional. Could you tell us how much autobiographical form and substance this debut collection employs?

This is a difficult question for me. I don’t have an answer for you, I’m afraid. Did André Breton answer the question, “Who is Nadja?” I think he subverted the urgency of such interrogation precisely such that his seminal work opens with the enigmatic phrase, “Qui suis-je? (Who am I?)”

From the writing perspective, I was exploring ways to share with readers my “eye” and how this eye perceives “reality.” But whether it is autobiographical or not, that is not part of my space when in the phase of creating. Autobiographical or confessional modes have to some extent an imposing tonality that seeks to prove oneself right instead of being amused. “Confessional” narratives do not necessarily embrace a meditative space. I have difficulties reconciling with the term “autobiographical” because it implicates catharsis and therapy. Do you actually mean “straightforward” instead of “confessional”?

After all, poems as a form of craft and artistic expression are not pages from a diary or newspaper. As I had tried to mention earlier, the “I,” the poetic self as construct, though not fleeting, is a complex composite that grows and evolves all the time. If need be, it even dares to mock itself. How much a reader identifies with the “I” and the biography of the person who pens it down is somewhat a subjective politics. I do not mean that every poem is not intensely personal. Quite the opposite. Every emotion present in the writings is not an invention. How the mapping of an emotion comes into being is another story. When working on a poem, I just tend to occupy myself more with how language can move ahead of thought, and how word cadences can shape feelings. In the end, it is thrilling to transcend beyond the autobiographical “self,” which is largely an earthly concern.

I just finished reading essays by Gao Xingjian which he wrote between 1990 and 2002, collected in the book, The Case For Literature, also the title of his Nobel lecture delivered at The Swedish Academy in Stockholm. I picked out this paragraph for this question: “Literature transcends ideologies, national boundaries and racial consciousness in the same way that the individual’s existence basically transcends this or that ism. This is because man’s existential condition is superior to any theories or speculations about life. Literature is a universal observation on the dilemmas of human existence and nothing is taboo. Restrictions on literature are always externally imposed, by politics, society, ethics and customs, which set out to tailor literature into decorations for their various agendas”. Could you share any reflections you might have on Gao’s statement, and also tell us about what it feels like to work in poetry after the nonfiction of Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian?

The Gao Xingjian I know is someone who holds apolitical views towards literature and art. Such perspectives correspond to his aesthetic and life experiences. He is one of the artists who has reckoned seriously with what it means to live in a problematic society and time. Much of what he has written is not naïve art for the sake of art, though they strive a great deal for the ideal “aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics.”

I do not think he intended his opinion as biblical “truth” or dogma that others should subscribe to obediently. Being apolitical is another way of being “political,” if you would want to consider it that way. Even silence is political — or apolitical. Being apolitical does not mean denying or not bothering to know anything about politics. Not at all. Most artists (or non-artists, to be candid) of my generation have very weak political consciousness. To have a strong and perspicacious political consciousness is totally different from direct political engagement. I think it is easy and convenient to misunderstand what apolitical means. To some extent, it is intellectual laziness. Nothing is taboo in aesthetics, but in order to recognize what this “nothing” is, one needs to know exactly what other “things” are. Otherwise, aesthetics be it fresh or not, is non-consequential in terms of social meaning and context. Pound says, “Make it new.” How about “Make it real”?

I started on some of the poems that are part of Water the Moon at the same time that I worked with Gao on Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian. One of my tasks was to translate from the French (together with a colleague, Ned Burgess) the principal poem in that non-fiction book, “Way of the Wandering Bird.” There were a lot of visual illustrations that needed to be addressed in terms of relating to text. These two projects were basically in parallel veins when it comes to timing, but they bear different creative agendas. One is solo, the other collaborative, hence more of a responsibility for the latter than an open-ended creation in the former.

As an interdisciplinary artist, I’m always self-conscious of how many artisan plates and diabolos I’m trying to juggle at once, wondering whether keeping to one genre of writing or disciplining myself into working on one artform at a time might better serve my art. Yet, I’m constantly impelled to operate on different creative registers. I see a clear reference to music in “Apologia to Dora” and am interested in how your musical training translates into poetic lyricism. Indeed, how do you frame yourself as an artist given that you both play the zheng and write poetry?

I understand the need others may have for the “identification” of being “interdisciplinary.” I personally do not believe in this word. I think it is an error. It is just a social label, like many others. By using it, one is merely asking the question of where his/her art belongs, when this question in itself becomes relative in importance if he/she is looking hard at what and how his/her work is tempting to be useful. Wittgenstein has a famous saying, “If you cannot say it, point to it.” This is what I try to do when it comes to writing — if I cannot write something out, I will attempt to articulate it with guzheng. Vice versa.

Music and literature (or painting, sculpture…) are not identical, but they are not different. They are two different beasts living on the same planet that are tempered with in respective ways. Sensibilities are not the same, I agree, but fundamental epiphanies and empathies cannot be so different as long as it is an artistic expression that responds to the question of humanity. Asking me how I “frame” myself as an artist is asking me how I “frame” myself as a human being. The word “artist” is too overloaded for me. I do not frame myself. And I don’t know how to do so either. The word “frame” — just as the notion of “interdisciplinary” beyond its initial appeal —  is not as elastic as it really is.

I just rediscovered Tobias Wenzel’s “My Question For Myself” series in Granta’s 100^th edition. At the end of his interviews with writers, he asked his interviewees to switch places in asking themselves a question of their own. Gao was one of his interviewees, posing this question to himself: “Gao Xingjian, what have you never done that you would like to do?” His response to his own question was: “Music. Inside of me there is a rhythm. But it’s very complicated to make it real.” I’m putting you in the same self-querying enterprise, so if you could, please end this interview with a question you would have liked to have been asked, and share with us your ideas on it.

“Fiona Sze-Lorrain, if reincarnation existed, what would you like to reincarnate as?”

—        Ocean. To house the world and return to life’s source.

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Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
© Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé 2010

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. His work in lifestyle and developmental journalism took him to Australia, Cambodia, France, Hong Kong and Spain, and saw him writing numerous stories, including features on Madonna, Björk and Morgan Freeman. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, Desmond is a recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award. His poetry and prose have recently appeared in Agni, Diagram, Everyday Genius, Gulf Coast, Monkey Bicycle, New Orleans Review, and Versal, with work forthcoming in Blackbird, Cerise Press, Copper Nickel, Luna Park Review, Pank, and Ganymede. Also working in clay, Desmond sculpts commemorative ceramic pieces for his Potter Poetics Collection. These works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.