Review 31 Interviews Sarah Howe and Layli Long Soldier

A new series of interview at Review 31 starts with a double-interview with Sarah Howe and Layli Long Soldier, conducted by Stephanie Sy-Quia. "We’ve chosen to place these women’s work in dialogue because of their use of found poetry derived from legal texts, their differing subversions of imperial epistemologies, and their writing of the Umbrella Movement and Standing Rock protests, respectively, from afar," writes Sy-Quia.

"Here, Review 31 examines the modes these two remarkable women have employed to confront the utterances of oppressive states." An excerpt from Howe's interview:

Moving on then towards the Umbrella Movement – this is actually the only question I have which faces towards Long Soldier’s work. Both of you have written about seminal recent protests to take place in communities you can lay claim to in recent years. She has written about Standing Rock and you have alluded to the Umbrella Movement and other forms of protest against Beijing, but neither of you were actually there. What were the aims and complications of contemplating these events from a distance?

First off, Whereas is a tremendously powerful book. At each revisiting, I find myself astonished by its humanity, its formal ingenuity and rhetorical force. In their reckoning with history, Long Soldier’s poems skewer the hypocrisy of the state: something I’ve been interested in too, in another key. The way she turns back on itself the official language of the treaties used to genocidally dispossess native peoples like her own: I am in awe of it. 

I find it hard these days to talk about my abandoned poem, Two Systems, which is an erasure of the Hong Kong Basic Law [Hong Kong’s ‘mini-constitution’]. I had some fun making the rather dry legal text say things like ‘Power to the people’ or ‘There is a need for art’, releasing its anarchic undersongs. It was an abortive project that I worked on for a number of years, before and after the Umbrella protests, but I don’t think I’ll publish any more of it. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that I started to feel like I didn’t have the right to do that work. One of my great pleasures of recent years has been making contact with a community of Hong Kong poets writing in English, who tend to be quite politically active and vocal about the territory’s present struggles. When they publish poems on this subject, they are genuinely risking something. The worst that could happen to me, as a British citizen resident in the UK, would be to be denied a Chinese visa. I’m not going to be disappeared in the night. I thought that maybe a participatory public art project might be a way of getting around this issue of my voice, or any individual voice, being not quite right...

Read on at Review 31.