#thora siemsen

[antiquery]

Andrea Long Chu Is Ready for Criticism

In conversation with The Nation, the critic and theorist breaks down her nonfiction debut Females.

Short, sharp shock, like three bullets from Valerie Solanas’s gun, is the resounding effect of what the critic Andrea Long Chu writes. That’s how her high school English teacher phrased it—“after a lyric from a Pink Floyd song,” says Chu with a laugh, “which at the time I took great pleasure in knowing was itself after the lyric from Gilbert and Sullivan’sThe Mikado”—and, like most high school English teachers, she was right. Luckily, most readers are happy to be shocked if it’s for a good cause. Chu’s cause? Females, by which she means everyone. In the brief and blazing treatise that is her debut non-fiction book, Females, the 26-year-old polemicist considers the work of Solanas, Gigi Gorgeous, the Wachowskis, anti-pornography feminists, and more in service of her notion that “femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels.”

[thelonguepuree]

I think that there are many ways we can take up this notion of the afterlife of slavery. Certain representational structures continue to produce black death, or death as the only horizon for black life. There’s another way in which the afterlife of slavery produces a certain set of aesthetic and intellectual, conceptual challenges, and I think one of those for me is around temporality, and how do we narrate time?

One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense for black folk. How does one narrate that?

Given that the afterlife of slavery means that black death is the normative condition of civil society, what is the character of the aesthetic in the context of terror? Does death find its antidote in beauty? Do we find a way of regarding death and reckoning with it in beauty or impossible beauty or monstrous beauty? These are things that I think about when I think about the aesthetic and the way that a variety of artists and writers are taking it up.

I think of Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, the Arthur Jafa short film. It articulates the intensity of the brutal disposability and precarity of black life, and then the making and creation and aesthetic genius that also unfolds in that context, too. That’s the pressure. Ultimately, part of that remaking is about anticipating a world in which slavery has ended. To most North Americans, that might seem bizarre, the tense of that sentence might not make sense, to imagine a future world in which slavery has ended, but that’s part of the project. What would it mean to not have a social political order that’s founded on settler colonialism and slavery, racism and anti-blackness, in particular?

Saidiya Hartman, “On working with archives,” a conversation with Thora Siemsen in The Creative Independent (April 2018)

[durgapolashi]

Thora Siemsen interviewed Édouard Louis — it’s terrific, go read. 

What do you miss about childhood?

I'm a very nostalgic person. It's very bizarre. Even if I hated my childhood, I am nostalgic for it. How can it be possible? Probably because the past is—in a way—settled. I think that childhood is a moment where the world is growing every day. Every day the world is bigger, reality is bigger, reality is deeper. When you become an adult, everything shrinks. You realize that the world is smaller and smaller, and people's minds are not as big as you thought.

When I originally read The End of Eddy I remember being stuck on certain passages like, “During this period, the idea that I really was a girl in a boy's body, as everyone had always told me, came to seem more and more real.” I think it’s a really worthwhile conversation for gay men and trans women to discuss these similarities and differences in our childhoods, conversations which your literature makes room for and help open up for me.

Your parents, your family, your milieu, your society, they build a body for you, but you don't belong to this body. I think that is, in fact, as you say, very relevant for transgender people and gay people. I could say that for Eddy, he's not the child I used to be, but he's the child that I never succeeded in being. Eddy was the name my father chose for me, and through choosing this name, he chose a body. He was the expression of a body my father wanted as a son. In France, there was this big thing where you give American names to the child, and so Eddy was a very, very working-class name. I was not Eddy. I was not this masculine child. My father wanted to reproduce his own masculinity though my body.

Photographs by  Christian Werner

[merulae]

An orientation towards wonder, as a poet, is absolutely necessary. I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder. Maintaining an orientation towards wonder in a time where the government is conspiring against it, in a time where black people are being murdered at the hands of the state, in a time when the Earth is very much trying to warn us about what we’re doing to it, maintaining an orientation towards wonder becomes really difficult. It’s the work that I have to do every day, the work of trying to find sources of wonder, even in our sadness and loneliness, or even in our anger.

Kaveh Akbar, in conversation with Thora Siemsen for LitHub

[therumpus]

I have noticed in the queer community, as well as the political left in general, to venerate the concepts of survival and survivorhood, often at the expense of critically interrogating the means by which that survival is achieved. In particular, intra-community violence, competition for resources, abandoning or exiling those with the greatest needs. Survivorhood as an identity seems to be a commodity that we are eager to claim, perhaps because it comes with the connotation of being the moral high ground. In third wave feminism, there has been a push to replace the word ”victim” with ”survivor” when referring to those who have experienced abuse. I actually don’t really see much difference in the way that those terms are used in activist or queer communities. They both reduce the person in question to a single idea that often fails to express the full complexity of what it means to live through violence. As most survivors of abuse and oppression find out, we have to do terrible things and make awful choices in order to survive violence. We have to leave people behind. I don’t want to just survive; I want to thrive. I want to flourish and grow.

THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #87: Kai Cheng Thom

[coloradocowgirlforchrist]

'Do you think your identity as an older sister informs your tone as a writer?' Yeah, because you're kind of always telling somebody what to do, or how to feel or how to react. Even my inner monologue is didactic, or sort of like someone's along with me. I don't think, 'Okay, I'm going to walk down the street and turn left.' I think, 'Here's what we're going to do. We're going to walk down the street, we're going to turn left, and we're going to have to wait at the cross light.' It's always 'we'. And I don't know who the other person is yet. I think it's everybody.

Thora Siemsen, interview with Jazmine Hughes

[parkersmood]

I work a lot with scraps of the archive. I work a lot with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus. That’s where my imagination of practice resides. That’s where my heart resides. I think that there’s a certain notion of the intellectual capital “I.” It’s not that I’m not an intellectual, and I certainly want to produce work that people find valuable and of use, but I guess I already feel so fortunate and so rich to be in the company of thinkers and artists that I’m a part of. That just feels like an incredible gift. ---- While I think that each space can be a context for the production and dissemination of ideas, what’s different about the university, at least for me, is that I think of my classroom as a laboratory in thought. In the classroom, I try not to have an audience, even as I might, in the case of a lecture, sometimes lead and direct the engagement with ideas. I really enjoy being a part of this collective exploration of thought, one that feels open-ended and exciting.Not that museum spaces can’t do that. I think that’s what I really enjoy, the sense that there’s something at stake, and we’re all a part of that, as opposed to I’m speaking and there’s an audience observing. I really enjoy the collaborative process. At its best, the classroom can be that.

On working with archives: An interview with writer Saidiya Hartman with Thora Siemsen (April 2018)

[chenchenwrites]

What are some ways that writing a book becomes a frame through which you view the world?

I don’t think it’s a frame. I think a book is a grand necklace. Me writing a book doesn’t necessarily illustrate how I view my life. It’s something that doesn’t consume my life, but it’s a beautiful part of my life. It’s something that I can put on my neck, and I can show it off sometimes, or I can put it in a jewelry box if I want to. I don’t think it’s a frame at all. I don’t want it hung on a wall. It’s something that I can put on me that’s part of who I am as a person. But I’m not my poems.

     —Joseph O. Legaspi in an interview conducted by Thora Siemsen at The Creative Independent

Love this interview with Joseph, especially this response. I so need this reminder that poetry is one part of my life, one way I experience and engage the world. Yes, poetry is a very important part, a critical way. But I am nourished by so many different arts, conversations, flavors of boba tea.

Also, "I'm not my poems" is beautiful—identifying too much with one's work can be a trap. I want to dwell in a space larger than that.