PROSE: CARRIANNE LEUNG

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

 WRITING IN A DANGEROUS TIME

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.

What is to be said at this time? What is to be awaken, what essential truth is there to hold? I am only a storyteller, and all I’ve ever known has been that stories are necessary.

Of Looking
I started writing this paper in the spring. The days were growing warmer, the leaves on the trees burst into my favourite hues of fresh green, flowers re-emerged like sleeping beauties. Unlike my usual joy at greeting this season, I wondered what I did to deserve this wonder?
 
One day, as I was walking, a monarch butterfly flew close, crossing my path. I stopped to give it the right of way, and it fluttered, in that zigzag way that butterflies do, pass. I wanted to apologize for not having given full attention to their fierce tenacity enough in my lifetime. I wished that I had paid better attention. Do butterflies know how beautiful they are to us? Do we know how beautiful we can be to each other?
 
We know that a writer needs to attend to the world, and I do. But I do so lately with an intensity that can only be described as a last gasp, as if all this will fall away like illusion at any moment, and I must remember it to record properly. I don’t have the discerning eyes of a scientist who can perhaps detect the smallest evidence of our unravelling. I only have the eyes of a writer who seeks beauty, humanity and life, even in scenes of death. Everything looks deeply sacred to me now—trees, birds, strangers’ faces. There is an illumination to everything. Is this what mourning looks like? I am full of grief and fear and wonder.
 
What are we really looking for? Who are we becoming in this looking?
 
There are other things happening. My child turns 12 and starts middle school and is worried if they will have friends. My parents grow frail but attempt to be more kind. Some friends have just had babies, and I have to remember that babies are still being born. Who am I to despair? I am in the middle of life, a really good life that I may or may not deserve. I need to be called back to the minutiae of the everyday.
 
This is my predicament of being a writer in a dangerous time—the simultaneity of life and death on scales big and small … as I search for what stories to tell. What is to be said at this time? What is to be awaken, what essential truth is there to hold? I am only a storyteller, and all I’ve ever known has been that stories are necessary.

 
Of Language
Here I am in Nova Scotia, on an island off the bigger island where birds outnumber people. It’s now August and I continue to struggle with my writing. Toni Morrison has died, and my social media feed is full of her interviews, essays and excerpts of poetry and fiction. She leaves a stream of life in the wake of her passing.
 
The seagulls scream here, as I read Morrison’s words on a rock by the shore.  The sounds interrupt my concentration, and I imagine that they are repeating insistently their history. I have been listening, but I can’t understand their language, and I won’t pretend that I ever will. I am here by the water and watch the many lifeforms each with their own sense of place, time and storytelling. The tide rises and falls regardless of whether I wake or die in the night. The rocks unmoved by my presence. My brief visit is not even brief in their timeline but just a speck. I am a speck. This gives me some comfort.
 
Author and poet, Dionne Brand claims that Morrison changed the texture of the English language, and I think this is what it takes in times like these.
 
Language increasingly is weaponized. We are and have always been engaged in a struggle over language and meaning. There have been warnings before—George Orwell’s 1984  alerted us to how language can be co-opted from the people and delivered back as something else to contain the people. The Ministry Love, Ministry of Truth, of Plenty were exemplars of what Orwell said was Oceania’s doublethink. The Ministry of Truth, for example, was in charge of propaganda, the perpetual broadcasting and repetition of falsified histories, production of facts, the ultimate spin doctoring. Orwell writes, “I do feel writers have the ethical responsibility to dismantle the fascist language that we are seeing and resist the cooption of language to shape that agenda.”
 
We are in a storm of fascist language, I think. Hate gathers like fog and enunciates itself as policy, as rhetoric, as headline. Morrison asserts that this kind of language is not “like” violence but very much is violence.
 
Part of what we do as writers is to wrestle our language free of its institutional cages, its slogans and branding. We must create a sentence like Morrison or Brand to call attention to our humanity, wake us from this frozen state of hell, caress the texture of things. To sit with the noise of bees, of clover, of the scream of gulls, to listen even if we do not understand. I think of Morrison and her reach for language. I think of the sacred space as we, her readers, must reach to meet her.
 
I understand language as my craft and my spell that I must invoke with careful intention. When we write, when we leave our marks on the page and our words walk off into other people’s lives, I hope they bring a new way of being and seeing our humanity. I think of Morrison.


​Of Violence
I can’t turn away from the constant feed of evidence on my feed or the news. I have tried to log off social media. Not read the news. I do this because I do not know what to do in the face of so much violence. Every day, there are fresh killings. Every day, the news scream that we are in peril. I am so privileged that I can attempt to filter it out because my own safety is not as precarious as so many others, those of friends, those of people I love, those of strangers. The line from me to you, to them, to out there, to the bigger logic of things. These lines connecting all of us are becoming clearer. I am here only because “they” are there, in harm’s way. There is a suffering that comes in bearing witness, to being unable to make it stop. We are not exempt, not safe, not innocent. There is no neutral place to exist or to write. But there never has been. 
 
In an interview with author Thea Lim, Booker Prize winner, Marlon James stated that depictions of violence are gratuitous if we do not show its aftermath, the suffering and the survival. We seem to spectacularize violence. We know the brutality against Indigenous, Black and brown people and communities. We know the trauma of widespread sexual and gendered violence in our institutions, our communities, our homes. We know so much and yet, violence is pornographic if we go numb. Thea Lim responds to Marlon James and extends that perhaps the flipside of violence is tenderness and intimacy. Perhaps then, this is the reach?
 
On Twitter, there was a post by Indigenous CBC journalist, Jesse Wente that stayed with me. He wrote: “Dystopian novels are not warnings, they are preparations”. And so, I re-think books like Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves, Larissa Lai’s Tiger Flu. I also think of what Thea Lim told me about her novel, Ocean of Minutes when I asked her if it was dystopia, and she replied that it was allegory.
 
In all these books, characters are forced to navigate a treacherous world, a world on the brink--but the central story is not about this. It’s about what is required to survive. There is immense tenderness at the core of this survival, an expansive love that may not immediately topple the regimes but provide a path to sustain us on the way to doing so. These books offer an opportunity to re-imagine the world, draw on history and spirituality to re-fashion how to be human. And isn’t that the whole point of literature? To show us to ourselves and keep pursuing this question: what does it mean to be human?
 
I think about Indigenous writers and Black writers whose work are not prophesizing apocalypse because their communities are already post-apocalypse, or their apocalypse continues. Their lives through generations have already been devastatingly interrupted and they are bringing us life after. I think of BIPOC dystopian literature as perhaps not dystopian at all, and more as Afro or Indigenous futurisms. The power of imagination, the calling of ancestral knowledge to the fore, the inheritance of what it means to enact humanity—all this is in books. So, in times like these when I can’t find words, I have always conversed with books. I am doing so again. I am learning. I am grateful.

Stories have always been my instruction manual on being human. 

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.

Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, published by Inanna Publications was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, was released in 2018 by HarperCollins and in 2019 in the US by Liveright Publishing. It received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, and was named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, That Time I Loved You was awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019 and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019 and long listed for Canada Reads 2019. Leung’s work has also been appeared in The Puritan, Ricepaper, The Globe and Mail, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire and Open Book Ontario.