To Avoid Psychic Isolation, Read This Amazing Interview With Jackie Wang

Jackie Wang is interviewed for Mask Magazine's "Heretic Issue." Wang discusses how her new Semiotext(e) book came about, her mentors, how her feminism and activism evolved, her writing in dialogue with them, entering the PhD program in African and African-American Studies and History at Harvard, the incarceration of her brother, life growing up in Florida, and "[how to navigate] various identities as a poet and writer in these literature worlds that so often are dominated by misogynists?"

Answer: one foot in the political, and thanks to the feminists. "If it weren’t for my feminist crew there would be no way for me to confirm that what I think and experience is valid or real. It must be really hard for people who don't have that because the psychic isolation can drive you insane...."

Editor Hannah Hurr asks amazing questions ("What about afro-pessimism interests you?"). And how about the poetry world's social formations? "There is a community feel in the poetry world but there's not an emphasis on sharing your life with others, like in the anarchist scene."

A good excerpt (but really, read it all!) that nears how Wang's busy life/work resolves or unfolds internally:

...Self-doubt is usually the point of departure for a lot of my work. I always have to write through that doubt. Sometimes I sit down with an idea for an essay, and I'm so paralyzed by self-doubt and that I have to incorporate the doubt into whatever I'm working on in some way, or else I can’t move beyond it. I resent that I have to do this, but I also question the motivations for bracketing that experience because the excision of self-doubt is political (in that it’s gendered and racialized). And a lot of women are plagued by self-doubt and specifically anxiety around writing or asserting any kind of authority in their writing. Owning that doubt can be a political gesture.

In Against Innocence you write about white space or colonized space as a place where certain stories just don't matter or aren't interesting. It seems this fraught relationship you have to yourself and to producing your views of the world are so intimately connected to that. That is the experience.

I guess it can be generative in some ways. I've always been suspicious of writers that feel comfortable in language, which is why I've been drawn to Samuel Beckett, Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector. All these authors have a fraught relationship to language. Kafka as well.
Really hating the writing and still having to do it.

Right. There's this Samuel Beckett quote, “The writer is like a fetus trying to do gymnastics.” Writing is the impossible yet necessary task. In some ways maybe this friction is the lifeblood of my writing, this struggle to utter anything. Maybe I resent people who don't have self-doubt because they seem like they can get to a place that I can't because I have to wade through the quagmire of self-hatred before I can even begin to start doing the thinking and the work that I want to do.

As for the literary world's pervasive misogyny:

...It's totally crazy-making, the world, the writing world, especially as a woman. I feel like the only way to not let it corrode you psychically is to not be embattled with these patriarchs and gatekeepers, to not seek recognition from the white male literary establishment. That's a lot easier said than done. There's an erotic dimension to this power dynamic, and the women who are embattled with these patriarchs sometimes have intimate relationships with the men who are in positions of power. The closer you get to that power, the easier it is to be taken advantage of. Proximity can destroy you. It’s easier for me to maintain distance because I'm not very interested in men romantically.

I don't really put my hopes in the literary world. I'm never surprised when it comes out that there's all this sexism in it. I have one foot in the literary world and one foot in another world, the political world maybe. I've never really felt that the forms of life that I am looking for or that I'm trying to create will emerge out of the literary world. Oftentimes I feel like it's full of people who only care about social capital. There's nastiness in any world or subculture but I never really felt that the people in the literary world are my people even though I probably spend more time in a literary context than anywhere else. Maybe my disidentification with the literary establishment enables me to maintain healthy distance.