See: Generic Postcard of Plane Taking Off
See: Runway
See: Stretch of Green or Brown Fringing a Horizon
See: My Father drawing a Fibrous Yellow Line from the plane to land
See: My father drawing another from vehicle to border & back then to where the vehicle will
Be: Between Horizon1 & Horizon2
Hear: Nothing
( this: is a dream )
( context: i believe my father is plotting his next destination )
( or: the next destination he believes i should be pursuing )
( i do not care for either; but the Fibrous Yellow Lines do ) terrify me
Write: Kiri / left
Not: the act but the direction
Nor: the direction indicative of the act
This colonized tongue: misreads kiri as
Kini: now
Distinctively Think: Sini /
Here: Fibrous Yellow Lines partition
a sky; Crowd the expanse so
i cannot see
the plane, the sky, the green or brown but the runway
which firmly remains empty and free to occupy
Vidya: Tell us about your artistic practice.
Zhi: I am a poet. I write primarily to navigate my selfhood and cultural inheritance. I wish I didn’t talk about food so much but I end up in that realm a lot.
In my work, I have been investigating my relationship to appetite and food: as feed and nurturance, and as vehicle for nostalgia. I have also been thinking about my relationship to my body; and am trying to understand myself as a desiring being. I am very interested in spaces in poems and how the use of them reflects / embodies my personal sense of place.
As part of my poetic practice, I am exploring expression on social media (or, for me, almost wholly on Instagram stories) as I approximate towards an expression that feels most embodied and truthful to me.
What prompted this poem?
In considering the prompt of the series, I thought about consequential moments / decisions that I did not come to see were significant within the moment itself. It isn’t until (long) after the fact that, with the benefit of hindsight, I understood the importance of those moments.
I am trying in this poem to reconcile my personal sense of self today, with the self my parents perceive(d) me to be—both selves products of meeting their expectations (i.e. of migrating and pursuing an education and career in a field deemed stable enough to them).
In exploring this, I decided to wind the clock back to the point of leaving homeland; and attempt to undo the knot that is the person I am today, the person I was and the remnants of that time that continue to reside within me.
I’m interested in the layers of distance in this poem: not a runway, but a postcard of a runway. And the various imperatives in the poem to see, hear, and write to an unnamed other. It’s only at the end that a personal ‘I’ emerges.
Wow, I didn’t realise that I was imparting distance until you pointed it out. Yes, I was trying to frame each item in the scene I visualised in a way that brought me greater clarity. I wanted it to exist outside of me, compartmentalised before me in a manner that I felt I could process if my body was removed from the scene. The end of the poem is an admission or surrender to the truth that this all has come to pass, and that I am very much a part of my past and present; and implicitly a future that I could personally direct.
Perhaps relatedly, I love the space in this poem: the feeling of absence on the page, the footnotes that go nowhere, and the gap around what happened to this persona in the future. It’s suggestive to me of difficulties around identity and nationhood.
Yes, I am struggling with this. The footnotes initially made distinctive from one another—that distinction does not exist today. Only today does. I can’t speak to how anyone else feels but my personal sense of identity and sense of place continue to teeth. It is a state that is ever-revealing itself to me as I grow.
Today I feel more Malaysian here than I do in Malaysia; in Malaysia, I feel lost. I proudly identify myself as Malaysian here. But when I return, distance from my homeland is made tangible to me by my haziness around languages that used to come so naturally to me; by my body that has fleshed out into a size that isn’t convention in Malaysia. I am continuing to grapple with this—being a mongrel to both countries.
Who are some poets you’re currently reading, or commonly turn to?
I was recently given a copy of Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith, from which I am still recovering. Jennifer S. Cheng has been haunting me for six months now, if not more. I am very moved by the constructions within her poetry and the use of space, implied and actual, in conveying longing and displacement. I am also still reading Past Lives, Future Bodies by K Ming Chang who has lit in me a path / language towards my personal queer expression.
About the author
vidya rajan is a writer, editor and performance-maker. she currently lives in melbourne and is a writer in residence at the malthouse theatre. you can get in touch on twitter.