From Carrianne Leung's Word Feast Lecture, September 20, 2019, Fredericton, NB


Of Beginnings

​My social media feeds have been filled with photos of bees. Bees on flowers. Bees in a ballet of flight. Bees on bees. My friends are obsessed with bees. In the context of the complexities and catastrophes facing us, of course we are obsessed with bees.
 
Simultaneous to the appearance of bees on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I keep trying to write, but it’s not going well.
 
We writers know the power of the flow—that magical place where words pour from us like soft water. We intuitively feel for that surge that is from us but not quite of us. This is the part of the process of writing that makes our work so enlivening and occasionally terrifying. But when the words and stories do not flow, when we are caught in low tide, when floundering… I have been floundering.
 
There is no magic to be found lately. Icebergs are melting, fire is setting the world alight, 50% of our biodiversity has been lost. The scale of human suffering is insurmountable. Hate crimes, incarcerated children, state terrorism, missing and murdered women, overpoliced bodies, people floating on water, people crying, people rising. We look for bees in our state of seeming helplessness with the sole duty to not look away. What do I write?
 
I don’t know, and this talk will not give any answers, but I hope it gives us a space to think about, talk about, write towards something. Perhaps this talk is not even about writing. It may be more about being human existing in this precipice of something else, some deep transformation, as our world is also transforming.

Of Human

I tell my students, everything you write is about what it means to be human. Even if your characters are aliens, teenage vampires, cats, you are writing about humanity. Stories have always been my instruction manual on being human. When I first immigrated to Canada as a child, I learned English because I loved to read fiction. It wasn’t a compulsion to communicate, but a compulsion to understand and a need to be reflected. One writer in particular, Jean Little, wrote of lonely children, children in pain, children growing up despite this loneliness and pain. I appreciated her so much because it was told against all the other narratives of childhood where I could not locate myself. I was in awe—how did this writer have this profound understanding of my feelings? How did she reach out from the page to remind me that I am part of a human family, not monstrous or Other, but just a child? I suppose this is the quest that I am on in writing this talk. I am seeking to know that I am not alone, and I am seeking to understand this pain and to put language like a salve upon it.
 
And it’s not just of suffering, but of putting the words to our complicated joy too. We mustn’t forget about joy. We will need to re-imagine what this means, re-imagine what a good life is by other metrics.
 

Of Archive

I’ve been thinking about literature as archive. Literature is knowledge, document, testament to what a culture at a given time values and doesn’t value. For that reason, some writers who do not see themselves in the pages, write the absences, the blank space between lines, the margins. Every story that gets told is made possible by other stories that do not, could not come. These stories exist in silence, like ghosts, like haunting. I believe this is what makes someone like Toni Morrison genius. She re-inserted black ancestors to a 400-year archive of America in her novels despite the persistent erasure of black life through slavery and anti-Blackness. She restored complex personhood and dignity to the lives of ancestors and descendants.
 
In discussing Morrison’s work, Sociologist Avery Gordon writes about ghosts and hauntings as power that can be named and not named, the density of concepts like Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism but also, the delicacy of what these things feel like, sound like, act like in the lives of oppressed people. 
 
We are thick with ghosts that can be named and not named. The recent surfacing of consciousnesses that movements like #MeToo, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter are giving shapes to ghosts, showing the outlines of absences, of the power that gives forms to our lives. It’s not that gender violence, white settler colonialism or anti-Blackness are recent events but a trajectory of destruction that hides in policy, in rhetoric, in the everyday practices of ordinary people. It is not easy to write the delicacy of mundane violences, the artfulness of subjugation, the slow death drive of hate and greed. These affects and effects are not so easy to describe, to name.  So, we write the stories of these hauntings.
 
What gets read, what gets published, what gains traction are important questions to consider.  If dominant stories that are repeated like some kind of truth are no longer working, if the assumptions about what is universal are proven untrue, we need counter stories, haunted stories, unburied stories. We need to clear space for them. Even in this moment when we face an uncertain future, or if we can’t imagine what the human future will be, we must create and continue to serve this archive. The archive is for the past and the future, but also for now. It is hard to be human, it is hard to be a writer. Tell this.
 

Of Witness

We are changing necessarily. Our consciousness, our roles in history, our sensibilities—all are changing in these dangerous times.
 
If we are to write the world, to bring it in, let it permeate our words and blur the boundaries between text and life, what are the stories that must accompany us in this transition? To write, I must be filled with compassion. It’s the only way I know how to do it. So, where does my compassion lie? I hope it will always be on the side of justice.
 
One of our functions as writers is to bear witness. Poet Billy Ray Belcourt pushes us farther and states that “I think that part of the work of the poet in the 21st century in the West is to not just bear witness, but to trouble and denormalize the way in which cruelty actually is a part of the fabric of life in Canada.”
 
Does this goal seem lofty? Maybe. Is it necessary? Yes. Is it a dangerous time? It is. There is more at stake than ever but perhaps, this has always been so. Everywhere, throughout history, somebody has struggled for their lives and humanity, and somebody has picked up a pen, a paintbrush, used their voice to express this sorrow, this rage, this insistence to life.
 

Of Relationship

We need audacity in order to re-write the world. But what kind of audacity? A Hero’s journey? I am re-thinking this metaphor and narrative. I am turning the central protagonist around, so she can look at others, embrace them, engage, understand that she is born in a nest of relations and her heroism and courage is not a solo trek.
 
Instead of being a “good person” or a “good writer”, I have started to think instead of fostering good relations. I count myself in the company of brilliant contemporary writers who are also wrestling with these preoccupations. The ideas weave like conversation in our stories, poetry and essays. There is a genealogy in our literary histories, and this genealogy makes all things possible, generating language that I can hold and build. I believe our words are a commune also for readers. If we are dreaming the same dream—how miraculous, how incredible! Perhaps I have been hoping all along that I am working towards this same dream or a path towards something that feels like love, like life, like justice, like the human.
 
While I was writing That Time I Loved You, I felt a bit concerned by how my characters took over my life. They emerged as fully formed characters and followed me everywhere. I met Lee Maracle for the first time during the writing of this book, and asked her, in a scared whisper if she ever felt she was haunted.  Lee, matter-of-fact replied, of course, writing is speaking to our ancestors. She accepts this as her practice. If this is indeed what we do—this divine invocation of ghosts, of history, our duty to ancestors, then perhaps we are also learning how to be good ancestors ourselves.
 
Writing possible futures must necessarily lead us back to relationship, and this includes non-human life forms. I have felt the need to slow things down, to walk at a snail’s pace. On that encounter with the butterfly, I thought how strange that I offered a right of way to a butterfly, but isn’t this so? Isn’t this the most basic of things, the coterminous inhabitation of this space and time? Perhaps we can still retrieve and renew the possibilities of relationship that does not further harm, but can re-imagine the relationship between a woman and a butterfly that would exceed my understanding of the world as I know it?
 
I’ll ask again: what audacity do we need now? I’ll offer my answer: We need each other.
 

Of Story

Duty is not contrary to creative freedom. In fact, I think of it as part of creative freedom and the height of imagination. Story finds fertile ground when we understand what ours is unique to tell. This does not mean borrowing or inhabiting another voice as the case of cultural appropriation. It is the acknowledgement of what is facing us vis a vis a web of relationships.
 
Some writers have written dystopia, of the after-effects of catastrophe—whether this is a climate crash or a humanity crash. We also need to think about what to write in the time between, the transition, the ways we will change AS we are changing. The change will be rapid and slow. When I think of the time before Trump was elected to now, it could have been a million years ago. Or a minute. The temporal becomes something else in dangerous times when we are unprepared for how deeply we can sink, how deeply it cuts. And so, as writers, we play with time.
 
There is theory in storytelling, so there is deep knowledge found in our literature. Leanne Simpson writes in Dancing on Our Turtle's Back  that elders have said that everything we need to know is encoded in the structure, content and context of Indigenous stories including an ethics and responsibility. And so, we need to make more space for these stories.
 
Even if you are not Indigenous or colonized, we may begin to free ourselves from the confines of colonial logics, structures, forms and a return to the communal, of relationality. We, as Frantz Fanon indicated, must attend to the colonial wound. The wound that is also evident on the land, the waters that will soon no longer sustain us because of the same colonial and neoliberal violence that is and has been enacted on human bodies. We need to free our imagination from the trajectories of violence and destruction in order to write with an agency towards different futures.
 
If our work is not about this witnessing and touching on a deeper understanding of our humanity—a shared, dignified humanity for all of us, then what is it for? Dionne Brand says that we write in order to transform, and this touches me deeply. At the end, we need to banish the idea of a “return” to safety … Perhaps the task is not to write ourselves back to an illusion but to a transformation. The role of writing, the role of art has this special task.
 
As we proceed, we will re-gather the most essential things, and we will write more love stories, our comedies that are shot through our tragedies, our betrayals, our pride. I hope there will be new ways of seeing, thinking, loving even as we remember. We will have choices to make: will we be generous? Will we be just? How will we act when we are afraid? Our literature will reflect all of this.
 

Of Endings, Of Futures
​
During one sleepless night while I waited for my child to be born, I learned that birth requires patience. I recalled that it was bloody, full of pain, full of euphoria, utterly magic.  And so now, I think maybe patience is required for all kinds of birth—to write, to listen, to die. Even in death, there is a process of creation, and so, even in this moment I remember there needs to be patience.
 
As I was finishing this talk, I read an article in the Washington Post by Dan Zack titled, “Everything is Not going to be OK: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in Trouble.” He writes, “Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor.”
 
I will be slow and patient, as I turn the problems in rotation and trust, the stories are coming. 
 
I have deep respect for the work of writers. We sit in solitude, in meditation and reflection for many hours of our days, crafting something exquisite that comes with pain, with joy with tremendous purpose. Sometimes we turn to write as simply a way to relieve ourselves and our readers of this pain of existence, to offer shelter, and I do not mean to take away such necessary relief and shelter. But I do want to ask you, respectfully, gently, to not re-direct your gaze from the wounds of this world. I would like your participation in this project of what it means to be human in our fullest form, with each other whether that be in your writing, in your relations, in your sense of yourself in the world.
 
I believe in the power of literature and the power of writers. We have a special opportunity and responsibility ahead. How privileged are we to be writers, how brave, how open we are to be the witness and the mirror! How lucky we are to be in a web of relations to everything! And also this, as much as the times we live are dire, we are also fortunate to be the ones living it.
 
It seems that we have some choices to make, it seems that we do this day by day, just as we will write it, word by word. I think we can be afraid, but I think we also have courage.
 
I extend my hand to you. I watch this butterfly cross. I’ll keep looking for bees.