Elee Kraljii Gardiner : Memory (for Nikki Reimer

from Report from the Reimer Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

We are both in love
          with tractors, the farmlife at the end of our arms
                    just out of reach of everything
but nostalgia We are romantic
          for past utility, brightly-eyed as a blue Ford
                    it’s gear shift slender as a sapling

We get sad talking about tractors        
          Stretching through silver keys
                    towards communion         we furrow
                              brows, grow a little teary remembering
how many things
          we have never touched
                    I offer you ribs of the radiator, at least what I have heard of it
                              and you spin the spiney axel my way

When you begin with a begot, you continue the unforgotten

i’m the son of the son of a tractor;
your lonely fist brings back memories of that time in southern Alberta
dad pointing to where the granary stood,
where the house was—
former foundations now an indentation in an empty field.
over a fence the cattle herd watched me placidly.
they could tell i didn’t know the first thing about agriculture.
my other grandfather was a traveling salesman:
little ribs ease up on the clutch.

 

 

 

 

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor whose award-winning books of poetry include Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and three chapbooks: Residence, WATCHER with Gary Barwin, and Trauma Head: the medical file. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Originally from Boston, Elee lives in Canada where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. eleekg.com

Elee Kraljii Gardiner : An interview with Danila Botha

Elee Kraljii Gardiner speaks with author and artist Danila Botha about her portrait series.

 

 

 

 

 

The practices that develop in these restricted times are fascinating: sometimes logical, sometimes therapeutic, sometimes functioning as a steam valve for the compressed creativity we experience when our preferred channels are blocked. For months I have been grinding our pepper with a mortar and pestle, which is less a project and more a daily metaphor, I suppose. Why I insist on “small batching” pepper when I have no fewer than four working pepper mills nearby is equal parts ritual and the pleasure of the tactile—it’s an antidote to all the digital work my days consist of now. Several provinces away, author and artist Danila Botha has been churning out a remarkable pace of wildly exuberant portraits that use the same vernacular of electric colour and thick lines in each one to different effect. Sometimes the likeness is remarkably evident and other times a deeper gesture is at play. Her pace has been spectacular, feverish, and as effervescent as the chat I had with her in Google docs.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner: Danila, for the last few months I have seen your Twitter feed fill with portraits in your Canadian Author series, viewable here on your site.

Can you tell us about the series? 

Danila Botha: Thank you so much for following it so closely, Elee. It means a lot to me. I started a few months ago. I’ve always painted, and I’ve always had sketchbooks full of drawings—I studied visual arts along with creative writing as an undergrad, and I did after school art programs in South Africa—but I haven’t done a concentrated project like this in a long time.

I’ve missed the writing community. I appreciate online events but it’s not the same. It is so much fun to spend time looking at people’s faces, and I always use vibrant, bright colours but they feel especially right as a contrast to Covid. I’m so happy and grateful with how people are responding. I’ve missed being in touch with everyone. Last December I had another baby, a daughter named Zohar, and so I’ve been up at odd hours, which seemed like the perfect time to draw or paint. 

EKG: What happy news about Zohar! Midnight art sessions sound beyond my ken, so hats off to you. What was the impetus for the series, which I read you consider to be a “Covid project”. I had my own outburst during lockdown, “BECAUSE I AM STAYING IN”, a series of cloth-and-object reproductions of paintings, which was an intense period of making things I don’t usually make. Is your series filling a need that the pandemic created?

DB: I love your Covid project, it’s brilliant and so innovative. I love it. To your question, I think so. It’s weird to suddenly have more free, creative time. It’s such a gift but it’s strange, too. I often do sketches of my characters as I write, to help me to visualize and remember to embody them. My first drafts are often just thoughts and feelings, with very little description. To tell you the truth, I have Rheumatoid Arthritis, and it attacks my hand and wrist joints the most. I’m really stiff and in pain in the mornings (even with great medication and treatment) and drawing and painting is a good way to stretch the muscles and use the joints, and it always makes me feel better. I was having a flare and I thought, I should paint some of my literary heroes. Once I started, I kept thinking of more people and I couldn’t stop. There is so much talent in Canada, it’s unbelievable. I tried to incorporate all my admiration, excitement about people’s work, their personalities if I know them, etc. I hope you can feel the enthusiasm. 

EKG: Tell me about the materials and method you use in the portraits. They are each euphoric and electric and seem dominated by The Line, which for a writer seems very nascent!

DB: That’s so kind. I really appreciate it. I love The Line. I also love Matisse, and all the colours of Fauvism and I love Lucian Freud. His portraits are so fantastic, what he did with texture and colour is insane. I feel like these are standard answers, but I love Picasso and Degas and Van Gogh and a lot of classic stuff. I love Cecily Brown’s amazing, huge work, too. I’m all about colour and texture, I guess. I also love graffiti. When I taught art, we used to visit graffiti alley off Queen W, along with the AGO and Mocca, and all the cool galleries.

I use acrylic paint, and lots of fine brushes, the smaller the better for all the precise little lines, and big flat brushes for washes and backgrounds. I like to mix the fancy stuff with the everyday paints; it’s fun to mix expensive, high-pigment paint with standard series sometimes, just for the contrast of colour and texture.

EKG: How do you pick the subject of your portraits?

DB: I started with my three big literary influences, which would probably be no surprise to anyone: Zoe Whittall, Heather O’Neill, and Lynn Crosbie. People talk about being afraid of meeting their heroes, but I can’t tell you how fortunate I’ve been and how deeply I appreciate it— it would be enough if people were just that talented and living in the world, you know? Then, I started painting people whose work had changed my life. So I painted Catherine Hernandez, Carrianne Leung, Rebecca Rosenblum, Dionne Brand, Jen Sook Fong Lee, Alicia Elliott, Ivan Coyote, Mona Awad, Dina Del Bucchia, Cherie Dimaline, Ayelet Tsabari… it’s a long list. We are so fortunate in this country to be surrounded by so much talent. I think as a writer it’s so important to read and it’s important to support our community, and each other. We learn so much when we do. These portraits are a small gift to thank people for all that their work has given me. 

EKG: Do you have a sense of how long it might run?

DB: Not really. I keep thinking I’m done, but then I think of more amazing people to paint. 

EKG: I’ve pulled a few of the portraits from your site. Will you share your thoughts about them?

DB: This is a portrait of Alicia Elliott. She’s smart and incisive and her voice is strong and powerful, so honest and vulnerable and beautiful. When they talk about “the voice of a generation” one day, they’ll talk about Alicia. I wanted her strength to come through, and her ability to write about so many subjects. I tried to represent that through a mix of colours and still unify them. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is brilliant and I can’t wait for her novel. 

Lynn Crosbie

I was an undergrad at York when I discovered her writing and it changed my life. Her work is so fearless and so beautiful, each line is thoughtful and resonant. She finds beauty in everything. She’s been like a literary fairy godmother to me, sprinkling my life with her magic so I hope this looks as magical and generous and beautiful as she is.

This is a portrait of Catherine Hernandez. Scarborough is one of my favourite books ever, the way she captures all the voices, with so much compassion and attention to specifics…I cried so many times. This was inspired by the dream sequence at the end, which is so beautiful and a little surreal. Catherine is an amazing reader, maybe the best I’ve ever seen, so I wanted to capture a direct gaze.

This is a portrait of Dionne Brand. What We All Long For changed my life, but I adore her poetry, too. I was lucky enough to be able to take two classes with her when I did my MFA at Guelph. (It is, I imagine, what it’s like to be taught by God.) She’s so brilliant and smart and incisive, all the time. And she’s funny. I wanted to capture how self-possessed and kind and generous she is. Her work means so much to me that I wanted somehow for the viewer to feel it too.

This is Ayelet Tsabari. She’s powerful and talented and badass, and I think this captures her in her literary superhero glory. I loved The Best Place on Earth SO much— she’s so talented at capturing the many shades of people, the complicated feelings, the many layers. I love her non-fiction too. I hope that comes across here. 

EKG: Is the blast of color or the practice of these portraits infiltrating your writing? Are you noticing any cross-contact between the two practices? What, or how, are you writing these days? What’s up next for you?

DB: I am writing. I’m actually pretty deep into my short story collection right now and I’m not sure how or why, but the two practices seem to feed each other. The short fiction started out as funnier but I have some newer stories that are darker, so maybe it’s less of a departure that I originally expected. I’m having a great time. 

EKG: Danila, thanks for sharing your thoughts about these portraits, and for drawing me!

 

 

 

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is a director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. Eleekg.com

Author portrait courtesy Danila Botha

Danila Botha is the author of two short story collections, Got No Secrets and For All the Men (and Some of the Women I've Known) which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and The ReLit Award. She is also the author of the novel Too Much on the Inside, which won a Book Excellence Award and was shortlisted for a ReLit Award. Danila teaches Creative Writing at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and mentors writers at Humber School for Writers. She’s currently working on a new collection of short stories, and finishing her new novel.

Selfportrait by Danila Botha

 

 

Elee Kraljii Gardiner: An interview with Khairani Barokka

 

 

 

 

Elee Kraljii Gardiner converses via document with London-based poet Khairani Barokka about her second book of poems, Ultimatum Orangutan. Described by Ilya Kaminsky as one of “planetary poetics”, the collection considers ecosystems that move beyond biology and include language, indigeneity, disability and the non-human.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner: Okka, few books manage to find a title that works in one language, nevermind two. Can you share your thinking about the title?

Khairani Barokka: Having a bilingual title was a puzzle I loved finding the answer to. ‘Ultimatum’ here refers to the urgent, urgent, urgent need for colonial capitalism to end, lest extinction cover the world in a gaspless smothering even more, as it already has for centuries. ‘Orangutan’ is a compound word deriving from two Indonesian words: ‘orang’ means person or people, and ‘utan’ means forest. So when people say ‘orangutan’, they are speaking of the respect we give the animal, regarding them as peoples of the forest. And in a way, they are also referring to Indigenous peoples, unknowingly.

EKG: You develop the themes of orangutan>King Kong>cultural survival>disability>belonging>responsibility through the theme of colonialism and Indigenous survival so fluidly that the flow of the book exemplifies how these are multi-valenced ideas, overlapping systems. Even here in “Eropa” the orangutan slips into the poem camouflaged in sound.

There is no you without an us, oratorios
                     diminished from which the wealth is wrought,
                     spices and infants traded over raucous dinners,
                     doctors inspecting our bodies as curios.

What was your process for sequencing the collection, both practically and theoretically?

KB: Ha, thank you for that insight into the sonic presence ‘orangutan’ may have in ‘Eropa’. I don’t see any of the themes or categories you described as separate, ever. Thinking or feeling about them never lives in what I call my soulbody as separate. Yet we live in a world where they are treated as though separate, and that is a form of violence--that white gaze, that categorisation, that Maria Lugones (rest in peace) wrote of with respect to colonial naming and gender. So thank you also for recognising that continuity in the poetry. I think the sequencing of the poems in the book really came together once I’d written, last year, the titular poem, and once I understood the Terjaga (Indonesian word for ‘protected’ and also ‘awoken’) sections, which were originally one continuous four-part poem, to be section markers, in a sense. And then it’s about feeling out the musicality of how each poem ends and begins, and what parts harmonise so they can lead into the other, not just in affect but in content.

EKG: In “epitaph” is a couplet that is both an ars poetica and (what feels like) a survival strategy: 

whole languages dying while i hypocritically write in one
                     I refuse to speak with my mother.

The poem “barmouth” dreams of this resistance:

i close my eyes and imagine a bajau boy
who knows how to hold his breath until
the body quietly demands inhalation, who could survive
floods, heat, and isolation in white spaces
simply by going for the swims that are birthright,
each gulf a bay of earth-wound spilling welkin-tint
blood, a harbour in which to grieve and return

KB: Thank you for recognising survival strategies as part of our linguistic choices. I wanted very much to pay my respects to Bajau communities, without exoticising them, and I hope ‘barmouth’ approaches that ethic. I want indigenous communities to survive in ways that reflect passed-down wisdoms, without having to resort to selling our cultures, or having them wholly eclipsed by others.

EKG: The poem “gives me a pass” is a visit with your dead grandmother:

someone sitting on the edge of my bed,

looking gently at this startled face, and at the same moment
                    i realise: i’d forgotten to take my nightly medicines,
                    without which i might wake in agony,

and I tell you, stranger danger, shadow of god, gold wind,
                    angel-type, sparkle-shine, djinn,  my grandmother martini,
                    my grandmother sayang,   my any-one-of-the-dead,
                    i thank you from the very cavities of bones,
                    that perhaps you take inventory of travelling pills

that perhaps you are pharmacist of the vast euphonious night (p41)

That last line slays me. This poem takes place on the day you and I met, for the first and only time (so far) face-to-face. Am I right?

KB: I’m unsure if it was the exact day, but it was definitely during the trip I took to Vancouver during which I met you! And though some of my poems are fictional or contain fictional elements, everything in this poem happened to me. It’s happened a few times, as I intimate in the verse, and when it does--this awakening when I’ve forgotten my necessary night meds, which thankfully doesn’t happen often, accompanied by the distinct sense of a presence sitting at the end of my bed--I always feel grateful, and a little unnerved.

EKG: You work in many forms here: lists, an abecedarium, even a Golden Shovel. And your consideration of sound and anaphora and allusion are such a pleasure.

In “self-portrait as fern and stolen motorcar”, a riveting poem about the surrealism of cars abandoned in fields, these two lines gesture towards an integration of history and self as an artist: “there is a fern pattern in textiles,/the fern poem on cohesion, returning.” This seems to me an example of your facile movement from one system of knowledge into another and your ability to transport terms and ideas into equivalences—it’s inherent, not pedantic.

KB: Terima kasih banyak for your kind words, and I am so glad to read your last line, as it’s exactly what I wanted for the work. I think multiple systems of knowledge operate together all the time, especially as someone uprooted from where you come from, trying to make sense of a new place in terms that feel like home. In Minang culture--which is interwoven throughout Ultimatum Orangutan, from the cover including a photo of Tanah Datar to the book being dedicated to four of my Minangkabau elders--leaving and returning to your home village with wisdom and resources for your community is called merantau. And so there is at least, for me, the slightest bit of guilt alleviated in that my travelling is also an inherent part of my culture. It’s the returning that I think I’ll be working on my whole life, from continuously returning to Indonesia physically to giving back to my communities in whatever ways I can.

EKG: Your previous book Indigenous Species works similar themes of eco-destruction and cultural resistance through ideas of water and textiles (read about it here) It is a profoundly visual book with beautiful illustrations. Ultimatum Orangutan also has a fantastic cover—and a text description of the cover image is in the back for vision-impaired readers. I have never seen that before and want one in every book!

KB: Thank you so much. Indigenous Species is available in accessible e-book formats that contain cover descriptions; in fact, most of the books I’ve worked on do, by virtue of having the fortune to work with indie publishers that allow me to include them. Whether in co-editing Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, who obviously share an ethos of access, or for Rope and Ultimatum Orangutan. I think accessible e-book versions will be more likely to have cover descriptions, and though it isn’t always necessary to include cover descriptions in the print versions of projects, I see it more as a reminder to everyone that the books do exist in forms accessible to blind readers, and that all books should.

EKG: I had such a good time at your online launch in April with the friends and readers and translators who joined you. (Here’s a link to the launch and book site)

KB: So glad you enjoyed! I am always grasping at community, and it meant more than you know to have such a warm, supportive launch, with friends and family cheering on from various locations. Writing is a lonely pursuit, and even more so for us chronically ill writers, and even more so in a pandemic, when eugenicism is ramped up even more, and our perspectives as disabled people (and especially disabled migrants or people from exploited populations) are hardly evident in mainstream discourse. I’ve been fairly homesick, and when I get to visit Jakarta again, at the end of this year, it will have been two years. So I want to thank again Jane Commane and Angela Hicken from Nine Arches, Vahni Capildeo, Rishi Dastidar, Fitri Nganthi Wani and Eliza Vitri Handayani for reading their work, and everyone who attended, especially my family. It feels nice to say I’m a part of collectives such as Malika’s Poetry Kitchen for poetry, or Shadow Heroes for translation, or Jaringan Seni Perempuan (Women’s Art Network) in Indonesia, or to be working on the Ceritrans project with Indonesian creative partners. I am always learning from my peers.

EKG: I feel that in your work, Okka. Thank you for being in conversation with me. I’m grateful for your writing and thinking on these ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

Khairani Barokka is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta, currently based in London, whose work has been presented widely internationally. Her work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She is currently Research Fellow at University of the Arts London's Decolonising Arts Institute, Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK), and UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation. Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation's Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. She is author of Rope (Nine Arches) and Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), and co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). Recent commissions include the ICA and Southbank Centre, and Okka is finishing an art and poetry commission for purchase by Wellcome Collection. She has just published poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches).

[Pic description: Black and white photo of an Indonesian woman with short hair, earrings, and a patterned dress, lying down on her front, pen in hand, ready to write. Pic credit: Derrick Kakembo.]

@mailbykite

Annah: Nomenclature at the ICA
https://www.ica.art/on/live/khairani-barokka-annah-nomenclature

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsIoIawX01s

https://www.ica.art/on/live/khairani-barokka-performance-qa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ejnAxXS_Yo

 

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is a director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. eleekg.com

[Pic description: Selfie taken at arm’s length of a white woman in a blue hoodie with wavy hair wearing a mask with geometric design in grey and navy with splotch of orange in front of blurred multi-coloured bookshelf.]