Posts filed under 'belonging'

The Perennial Moon: An Interview with Li Zi Shu and YZ Chin on Mahua Fiction

Mahua writers. . . have eschewed the “pure” language passed down through the eons in favor of depicting reality on the ground. . .

Mahua literature, or Malaysian Chinese literature, emerged in the early twentieth century, drawing inspiration from the Wusi (May Fourth) Movement and reflecting on localised identities, questions of belonging, and negotiations of culture within plurilingual, multicultural Malaysia. Often subjected to nationalist policies that prioritise creative works in Malay, Mahua literature occupies a liminal space, overlooked by Malaysia, mainland China, and the larger Chinese-speaking world, yet resonant in its transnational and Sinophone dimensions, according to scholar Cheow Thia Chan in Malaysian Crossings (2023). Many Mahua authors write in conversational Chinese (Bai hua) embedded with atmospheric Malaysian locality. Called a “transperipheral” formation outside borders by Chan, it navigates a global marginality with a style that’s almost an anomaly—and rightfully so.

Among these Mahua voices, Li Zi Shu stands out as a representative figure, along with King Ban Hui, Li Tianbao, Zeng Linglong, Ho Sok Fong, and Ng Kim Chew. Born in Ipoh, Perak in Malaysia, Li Zi Shu worked as a schoolteacher, dishwasher, shoe store salesperson, and then a journalist before dedicating herself fully to writing short novels. Eventually, she began writing longer works, including her celebrated first full-length novel The Age of Goodbyes, published in its Chinese original in Taiwan in 2010 and in mainland China two years later. Chosen as one of the best novels by Asia Weekly in 2010 and China Times in 2011, the novel was translated into English by Louise Meriwether Prize-winning Malaysian fictionist YZ Chin for Feminist Press.

In this interview, I spoke with Li (in West Malaysia) and Chin (in New York) in a conversation that spans Li’s novels, especially The Age of Goodbyes, the diaspora of Mahua writers and Malaysian Chinese communities, and what it means to not belong.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Zi Shu, your novel The Age of Goodbyes was described by Michael Berry in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2016) as “not only a new take on Malaysian Chinatown life during the 1960s but also a fresh use of the Chinese language, tinged with a neoclassical style, and a complex metafictional narrative.” Could you share how this novel come together over time?

Li Zi Shu (LZS): The Age of Goodbyes was written before I turned forty. At that time, I felt a sense of urgency—I had been writing for over a decade, mostly short stories and flash fiction. I was eager to try my hand at a longer form, or rather, I truly wanted to craft something more “grand,” something that could be regarded as a “great” work. Looking back now, I realize that was a somewhat naive perspective, and perhaps a misunderstanding of what literature is. Over the years, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the subtle and the minute. Nonetheless, before I turned forty, I held high expectations for this long novel. I wanted to pour all my knowledge and ideas accumulated over the years into this one work. The use of a metafictional narrative was a deliberate “device,” partly because it allowed the novel to have more space—much like adding an attic or a cellar to a house, enabling multiple layers of storytelling to coexist. At that time, I was eager to demonstrate everything I could do with a novel within a single piece. The structural choice of metafiction was driven by that desire.

READ MORE…

My Literature, My Voice: A Conversation with Max Lobe and Ros Schwartz

I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?

Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.

In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.

Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.

I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.

READ MORE…

Distance Shapes Memory: An Interview with Karla Suárez

In my case, at least, I look first, get muddy and sweaty, and walk away. Only then do I write.

As I coordinated this interview with Karla Suárez, I had the impression that she was in constant motion. She is an inveterate bike rider and, even while working, takes “virtual trips by pacing around [her] writing table.” Her abundant energy is evident both in her productive career (nine books and participation in no less than forty-two anthologies during the last decade and a half) and in her female characters, canny women who are the architects of their destinies.

For Suárez, the mind’s attempt to understand is best complemented by a strong dose of the physical, because the body offers its own truths: “The best thing to do is to make love,” declares brainy Julia, the protagonist of Havana Year Zero. “. . . not think, offer up the body, the body, the body, the body, to the point of exhaustion . . . and the next day another body, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.”

Suárez’s background as an electrical engineer and a classical guitarist is evident in her novels which have the timing, complexity, and structural elegance of the proverbial Swiss watch. She likes her chapters to be about the same length to offer the reader rhythmic consistency, and intertextual gems await the attentive reader. But she is also something of an imp. She likes to have fun—and so do her characters.

I started our interview with word association, just as friends Lucía and Circe do in Suárez’s second novel Viajera, and she played right along. Then we talked about writing about home through the twin lenses of time and distance.

— Dorothy Potter Snyder

Dorothy Potter Snyder (DPS): Let’s play word association.

Karla Suárez (KS): Okay.

DPS: City?

KS: Should have an ocean.

DPS: Ocean?

KS: Motion.

DPS: Body?

KS: Sweat.

DPS: Stranger?

KS: What I am sometimes.

DPS: People call you a Cuban writer, but above all you’re an urban writer, whether the setting is Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome, Paris, or Lisbon where you live now. Can you imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have anything to do with a city? Or are they—and Havana in particular—indispensable to you?

KS: Four novels (Silencios, La viajera, Habana año cero, El hijo del héroe) compose what I call “my Havana Symphony,” because the characters in them are either from Havana or live there. In those novels, I wanted to deal with themes that concern the country and the city where I was born and raised, a Havana that goes from the 1970s to the ’90s. They are independent stories, of course, but there are subtle links between them. For example, some secondary characters appear in more than one novel; there are scenes in which the protagonists of several novels meet without knowing each other; and there is an object (a backpack) that passes from one character to another and thus travels from novel to novel. I wanted to create a micro-world where my characters cross paths—and even I with them, because I also appear in a very subtle way (though not as a protagonist) in some of these stories. This symphony is now complete, and I’ve started another cycle. The story I’m writing now, for example, does not take place in Havana nor does it have anything special to do with the city. It’s part of a different symphony. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesdays: “Fragments from a story of my life I’ll never write” by Ruska Jorjoliani

"I go on. Until my nights end, as they did with Grandfather, with nothing left to tell, and he sings me a wordless song."

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, join Georgian writer Ruska Jorjoliani as she tells the stories of her grandfather and their people. Becoming a refugee as a result of war, Jorjoliani’s first-person narrator gradually finds new words, before finding the need to use those words—telling the story of family, dear yet far away.

Horses

Among us, epic tales were like wedges to keep the workbench of daily life from wobbling, benches with cheap tools on top, all of us dragging ours behind us the way we did our long, grueling winters. When I was a girl, the first creatures that roused my imagination were horses—starving, weary beasts, but still horses. Every morning I used to watch our neighbor Ciko saddle his bay, settle a rough woolly hat on his head, let out a shout, and gallop off, disappearing into the mountains. Ciko’s horse and Ciko, bent low over the halter, were the only beings who could travel beyond, exceed those limits set down by the laws of nature first and then by men, the only ones who could taste another air, other worlds hidden to the common gaze. After about twenty km, the rider had to dismount and walk up so that the horse didn’t fall into a gorge, then you’d arrive at a lake, green in spring and blue in summer—what it looked like in fall or winter you didn’t know, since no one had ever dared try the climb in those seasons—and then finally the mountain would begin to shrink like the tail of a hibernating dragon and you could make out the first houses of the others in the distance, those strangers, children of another god, the Kabards.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2018

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

Whether this March the leaves are falling or only starting to grow, new books in translation continue to push through borders and languages. This month, our editors review new translations from Germany and Lebanon, whose stories span diverse regions and explore complex notions of belonging.
Pearls-new-cover

Pearls on a Branch by Najla Jraissaty Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Inea Bushnaq, Archipelago Books

Reviewed by Anaka Allen, Social Media Manager

It happened or maybe no.
If it did, it was long ago
If not, it could still be so.

For twenty years, in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1990, the traveling theater company Sandouk el Fergeh (the Box of Wonders) traversed the Levant searching for inspiration for their live shows. The actors and their marionettes would travel from shelters to refugee camps, villages to towns, performing the oral tales painstakingly collected by their founder Najla Jraissaty Khoury. It was no small feat trying to find and record stories during wartime when suspicion and fear were particularly acute, not to mention the difficulty in assembling complete narratives from a depleting cache of collective cultural memory.

Oral tales are one of the most fragile cultural legacies, and too often die with their storytellers. So, what happens to the oral history of a region suffering through war and displacement? That’s what Khoury hoped to find out, and the question is what inspired her to embark on a rescue mission in search of these unwritten remnants of Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian culture. She collected dozens of folktales, writing them down exactly as they were told (repetitive phrases and all), culled one hundred from that catalog, and published them in Arabic. English speakers now have the opportunity to read a selection of thirty stories in Pearls on a Branch.

READ MORE…