FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS The following is an excerpt from an e-mail interview with Larissa Lai conducted in July, 1998, the final month of Lai's term at the University of Calgary as Writer-in-Residence for the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers' Programme. Lai's first novel, When Fox is a Thousand (1995), was nominated for a Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, and she has worked in various cultural communities as researcher, editor, writer and organizer in Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver. According to Lai, When Fox is a Thousand is about anti-racism - although it goes far beyond that. Lai takes an element of Chinese mythology in which foxes have the power to transform into women, and combines it in a story that links the lives of a ninth century Chinese poet/nun and a contemporary Asian-American woman. Many of us working in anti-racism arenas talk about "racialization" as a process whereby a person or people are, in effect, made into racial beings - that is, where a dominant force and/or mainstream designates a person or people as "belonging to" a certain race, a designation that is often accompanied with perjorative values. With such a working definition, how could you or would you describe your writing and activism as coming from a "racialized" place? When I began getting involved in anti-racist work in the early '90s, I was interested in challenging white folks' racism in direct, analytical ways. Part of this was coming to terms with the fact that... I had and have been racially designated in particular sorts of ways, something that liberal society insists we deny as a condition of our (partial) acceptance into that society. It was incredibly empowering to refuse to play the game and also to look at the world through an analysis that allowed me to think and talk about various experiences in terms of racism. At the time, the form my writing took was mostly critical non-fiction. I was very interested in questions of strategy how could people of color and First Nations people empower ourselves and one another given the colonial and neo-colonial contexts were are all forced to live with? In a collective sense this meant taking particular stands on issues such as appropriation and affirmative action as a means of forcing white liberals to look at the hypocrisies of color-blindness, multiculturalism and other stances that had seemed so liberatory in the '70s. I don't think all that many of them got it, and in the meantime more conservative types, white and of color, went apeshit.... I love the power and the romance of confrontational politics because there is a purity in that refusal to back down, that refusal to take shit, or to compromise. But in another way, I found increasingly that to engage politically in that manner also confirmed and validated precisely those liberal racist politics we meant to dismantle, by always placing ourselves in opposition to them. In other words, to claim the opposite was to affirm and validate as original and meaningful precisely those insipid ways of seeing and behaving that I found most offensive.... When you perform your work in front of audiences, you often begin by describing the traditional "fox" story before you read from When Fox is a Thousand. Can you explain this strategy and how you come to "re-write" that story in your novel? In writing Fox, I wanted to re-introduce and re-vitalize a very ancient story that has not been circulated much in the West. And then I wanted to play with it and take it apart. But the problem is, if you critique what is unfamiliar, people don't necessarily understand it as a critique.... So what do you do? In a lot of ways, the text is a very self-affirming text. I write from the core of what it familiar to me, I write from what feels to be a part of me. I write from a place where the traditional fox story is understood. It is empowering to both myself and the reader because the understanding is that we are both coming from the same place. And if the reader is not coming from the same place as me, well then, they have a little research to do. Which is alright. I do research on white people all the time. I do research on my own cultures, since my education hasn't handed them to me whole. I like research. So why switch strategies for the oral presentation? It is not as though the traditional story is not there between the lines of the text of Fox. It is, but leaks out slowly and, I suppose, in less detail than the way I tell it in my presentations.... I think there is a different kind of intimacy in oral telling than there is in textual telling. Orality requires a different kind of immediacy that text does not. At least does not necessarily. And so my telling becomes an expeditious way of bringing people in on the otherwise subtle humor of the text.... Your bio in Fox says you work as a "community activist, writer, editor, critic," and I'm intrigued by that ordering. A number of folks with books out seem to describe themselves as "writers" to the exclusion of other such occupations, yet that's not the case with you. Can you write a bit about activism and how that affects your work? My activism has been really important to me as a grounding place for my writing. It was an education - the one I didn't get in university. In a lot of ways, my fiction is an extension of my activism, an extension which allowed me to speak of things that were difficult to speak of while organizing exhibitions or conferences, and difficult to write in essays and reviews which always seem to require you to declare yourself before you've had the time and space to think things through. Fiction lets you talk about how many contradictory things can exist at once, which I found very freeing.... And I think writing is activism, only in a different kind of way. There are anti-racist impulses behind Fox - lots of them: the assumption that all characters are Asian unless otherwise specified; lots of different representations of Asian women, most of them not particularly heterosexual; fictive constructions of Asian women's histories to fill gaps in the current record and so on. But I think what was really empowering about writing was to be able to present complex and contractory realities from the root of who I am, rather than repeating the same political arguments over and over again to people who are never going to agree with me, but think I am stupid for repeating the same political arguments over and over again. To begin to write fiction was infinitely less frustrating. And people really do listen to stories and take them to heart. "Perhaps one can only say that the hodgepodge trail of these transliterations marks the disruptions in the (super)natural journey from past to present, from 'here' to 'there.'" You write these words in your acknowledgements to Fox and I'm wondering if you would say a bit more on the subject of transliteration: I am very conscious of the irretrievability of history, particularly of women's history, and of how historical writings must always necessarily be about the present. Fox is a history of sorts, albeit a highly invented one. In light of then current discussions around appropriation, I was aware of the many disconnections and disjunctures between my life and that of the women I wrote about, and at the same time very conscious of needing those histories for my own sanity, however imperfectly known or understood. I am not one of those 'freedom of speech' types who feels she has no responsibility to the society in which she lives when it comes to what I do and don't think it is respectful to write about. Of course I have the right to write about whatever I want, but there are some things I choose to discuss and some I don't. People who scream 'censorship!' when someone suggests their behavior may have been a little less than responsible drive me crazy. Criticism is not censorship. Criticism is merely someone else exercising their own freedom of speech.... |