Lydia Kwa
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Jasmine Gui
Dated 8 June 2020
Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore and moved to Canada in 1980 to further her studies in Psychology at the University of Toronto and then at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Having begun her clinical therapist practice in Calgary, she is currently based in Vancouver. She first started writing during her time at Queen’s and, since then, has gone on to publish two poetry collections, four novels and a mixed media chapbook. Her work has been nominated for the ReLit Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian fiction, and shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2006.
I am leaving again
This time for somewhere unfamiliar” (Sinuous 38)
Kwa’s first poetry collection, The Colour of Heroines (1994) was published the same year the seminal “Writing Thru Race” conference was hosted in Vancouver, a writing conference open only to writers of colour, which was quickly engulfed in a battle of identity politics. The early 1990s saw a small but critical mass of Asian Canadian writers coming together to assert a presence in the larger literary landscape of Canada. Their aim was to create literature and literary structures and communities that would sustain and nurture writers. Emerging into an upheaval of thought around race and power in the literary scene in 1994, Kwa’s poetic questions are genuine and relevant. Within the struggle for intersectional solidarities amongst the Asian community, Kwa’s diasporic voice, queer and distinctly Southeast Asian, is a critical addition.
To the strongly Cantonese diasporic Chinese community active in Toronto and Vancouver at the time, Kwa introduces another kind of Chinese consciousness through the opening poems of The Colour of Heroines, and the scattered presence of Malay, Hokkien, and Hakka. Carefully mapping out the emotional interiorities of a queer childhood over distinctly Singaporean terrain, Kwa explores a literally different landscape, one with its unique histories and entanglements with colonial education, war and poverty. This collection of poetry maps out a landscape of the personal and the banal, interrupting it gradually with the specificity of diasporic Canada: fortune cookies, the Globe and Mail, The World of Suzie Wong and North America’s Chinese restaurants. These markers of the Canadian diasporic experience signal different arrivals, and represent contact zones that Kwa’s “I” experiences and is impacted by. These interactions connect her to histories previously unknown to her, which she now inherits through the imagination of shared lands and shared journeys.
hole in time, through which we might
enter another’s history
nothing will be the same again (The Colour of Heroines, “Traveling Time, I” 26)
Kwa’s departure from Singapore is a journey woven out of complex relations to queerness and family. If the diasporic “I” is always othered on arrival, then Kwa’s “I” is doubly othered through the experience of queerness in liminality. Kwa celebrates the queer women in her life through personal recollection and memory. These inscriptions of relationships through text are direct interventions into a landscape where they are largely absent, and carve out not just spaces of existence, but offer complexity and emotional depth. These literary articulations, fraught with nostalgia and yearning, are made poignant against the backdrop of the 90s’ larger conversations of racialized pushback against discrimination, the pan-Asian struggle for visibility, and the right to exist outside of diversity tokenism, to exist not as marginal but as essential in the larger landscape of Canadian writing. The landscapes constructed in her poetry reflect an isolation that isn’t necessarily accessible. After all, to be a queer woman of colour in the Canadian literary scene in the 90s was to be besieged with the question of belonging and positionality, akin to a staring into the void.
To write, to make room with words, is to de-colonize, to lead the woman-child out of the labyrinth where she had been lost for lack of tongues.
Mother’s is not father’s is not English is not mine. (The Colour of Heroines, “Father:Mother:Tongue” 38)
The Colour of Heroines ends with a poem titled “Peranakan,” where the speaker reflects on her recently discovered Peranakan heritage. It is notably on a Vancouver street where an encounter with another “she” brings that inheritance into consciousness. It is, as Kwa describes it, “[t]o spend years confined to one niche, and then [have] peranakan manifest[ ] on the tongue and skin.” Kwa ends with a new discovery, drawing attention to another arrival at a new personal history. If The Colour of Heroines constitutes the meditative fruit of Kwa’s persistent attention to her stories, it ends with a reminder that the exploration only begets more questions.
The themes of diaspora and pan-Asian hybridity are further developed in her prose, as Kwa reimagines the void by queering history and mapping the diasporas through imaginative intervention. In This Place Called Absence (2000) and Pulse (2010), Kwa calls forth absences in the literary landscape: queer female sex workers, older, racialized protagonists navigating urban Vancouver, the early diaspora in Singapore. At the centre of both novels, Kwa confronts the most totalizing of absences: suicide. Death here eludes meaningful interpretation and performs a totalizing self-erasure. Protagonists in both novels find themselves affected by a suicide that has occurred back at home. The suicide is an event that triggers a journey back, but also stirs up the direction of the future. In Kwa’s literary world, the homeland is a place of recurring trauma, even for the diasporic individual in exile. Neither novel shies away from the lingering hold of trauma. Instead, they take on a difficult grappling with how trauma is represented, and how it becomes inheritance.
Both novels are set between Singapore and Toronto, and Kwa constructs Singapore for a readership that largely has no concept of the island-state. The attention to historical detail privileges histories that are marginal and structurally forgotten. The emergence of a literary Singaporean locality is a rare addition to the Canadian literary scene, but is a necessary presence through which Kwa explores larger concerns with inheritance, traversals, and family. Through these intertwining narratives across time and space, of carefully accurate histories mingled with fictions, traversal becomes complex, becomes pathways of negotiations, and Kwa’s characters forge identity and belonging through the act of crossing and recrossing, maintaining fluidity and gaining hybridity, instead of coming to a static whole.
The Walking Boy (2005) and its prequel, Oracle Bone (2017), expand Kwa’s reimagining by queering history on a larger scale, settling into Zhou dynasty, tracing the rise of China’s only female empress Wu Zhao. Unlike the poetry collections, which by their very form reconstructs a single, though splintered, subjectivity, the novels allow Kwa to explore her thematic goals through a multiplicity of figures and points of view. The ancient city of Chang’an, the main setting of these narratives, are peopled by outcasts: Harelip, who is queer and deformed; Baoshi, a hermaphrodite; an immigrant trans community; Ardhanari, a queer traveling artist; Xuanzhang, an elderly person bound to the state; Qi Lan, the half-human fox spirit; Ling, the Daoist nun; Xie. the possessed; and Shangguan Wan’er, who is both saved and enslaved.
With the addictive readability of young-adult novels or of coming-of-age narratives, but with a characterisation reminiscent of Chinese folk tales, these transhistorical fictions begin in a series of departures and move toward reunions of many kinds. There are spiritual demons to put to rest, episodes of historical violence to confront, separations to explain, and traumas to heal, but in the end, Kwa’s narratives emphasise survival and continuity. The landscapes are full of hiding places, from Buddhist caves, to the interior of the Imperial Palace, to the vastness of Mount Hua. These fantastical, strange tales are Kwa’s response to the need for Queer histories and reflect her interest in relational communities, complex vulnerabilities and crossing the threshold of fear. In her novels as with her poetry, Kwa retains optimism in her authorial voice, meditating on the fractures created by the diasporic experience, even as she is attuned to its emergent possibilities. Freedom has a cost, and Kwa repeatedly explores in degrees the different prices that people pay for the sake of survival.
Kwa’s heavily anecdotal novels and poetry collections are testament to the difficulty of that exploration. The presence of detailed footnotes, references, and oft over-explained narrative details in her work reveal her anticipation of an unknowing audience. In this sense, Kwa’s work is distinctly diasporic. The question of who the audience is, seems something that cannot be easily answered. Yet, in pushing to map the contours of alienation, Kwa’s care for detail also offers entry points into the narrative for the reader. One familiar with Chinese mythologies, with wuxia, and Chinese historical fiction will find themselves comfortable within Kwa’s prose. Others will find their expectations and assumptions of ancient Chinese characterisations challenged. The varying evaluations of Kwa’s stylistic voice within the Canadian literary community reflect the barriers of access Kwa has erected within the text. In spite of this, a lengthy index invites her diverse readers to bridge a bit of the gap.
needed to leave the country
to dream
a new heartshed inheritance
from inside out
when outside of in-still, beneath my feet creaks
that rustic past (Sinuous 85)
In Sinuous (2013), Kwa’s negotiation with her positionality within the narrative landscapes of city and country becomes evident as the spine of six years of poetry writing. The first section, titled “wandering phantom,” opens with a poem that charts out a list of Toronto-specific references, placing the speaker into a specific time in Kwa’s personal history. Distinctively, this speaker cannot see her reflection in the landscape she inhabits. The old life is a phantom within the body, and the body is a phantom within the city.
In contrast to The Colour Heroines, Kwa’s poetic persona in Sinuous appears to yearn less for the homeland. Time is nonlinear, curving and weaving through retellings of events, anecdotes and personal memory. The act of remembrance brings together co-existing interior and social worlds, and the memory of suffering appears in the present as a haunting. Although on a first reading it seems that Kwa is revisiting old wounds, her poetic retellings in Sinuous present new fights to pick. The traumas inflicted on queer, racialized, immigrant women are identified within the body and within history. The violence of colonial histories from homeland Singapore, through Toronto, to Vancouver expand and saturate Kwa’s understanding of her own diasporic journey. Although the names of historical events differ—theft of indigenous land, residential schools, racial segregation, Chinese Head Tax, Exclusion Act, internment, detention—suffering is always present. Kwa intertwines her personal histories with those of others who have arrived on Canadian shores, reaching out once in a while to connect with mirroring traumas happening elsewhere.
In this world rife with such tragedy
what could I offer?Simply this wish to reconcile
without pretence (Sinuous 98)
Sinuous ends on a journeying outward. Kwa’s speaker moves out toward the world, away from an isolated interiority. This emergence, however, is also characterised as a reaching, as the cracking open of something for truth to surface. Kwa’s “I” gasps for life, despite and through the heaviness of histories and their traumas.
In 2017, Kwa won the Earle Birney Prize, awarded by PRISM, for her prose poem, “Letter to My Former Selves.” The poem, in many ways, gestures to where Sinuous ends. The motif of the house reappears, and Kwa’s “I” speaks directly to multiple past selves, recognising them as part of a necessary journey. The “truth” surfacing in Sinuous is, in this poem, a truth treated “like a bitter poison,” “adrift as a ghost in your own mind,” as “embedded instead in the innermost folds, waiting determinedly for your return.” The outside that was chaos is now “loss and disaster”. The speaker is once again in a house that was once a silent house but now appears full and rich. In this fullness, the speaker, recognising herself in the enormity of history, disappears as the past falls away. Kwa’s prose poem suggests that truthful reconciliation is also sorrowful, effaced physically by the ineluctable continuation of history. Her “Letter to My Former Selves” remains a witness and an offering to a world rife with tragedy.
Kwa’s body of writing calls to mind a Janus-like attentiveness—it is invested in looking both ways simultaneously, in considering both the beginnings and the ends as part of the same movement. In that process, the things which are lost, erased and forgotten are present, different, and banal. Kwa’s diasporic voice is always simultaneously crossing a threshold and speaking a space into existence, the site of a crossing but also the configuring and re-configuring of hope.
Works cited
“Interview with author and artist, Lydia Kwa.” Jane Eaton Hamilton, 28 June 2016, https://janeeatonhamilton.org/2016/06/28/interview-with-author-and-artist-lydia-kwa/. Accessed 5 July 2018.
“Interview With Lydia Kwa.” Ethos Books, Ethos Books, 10 Apr. 2015, https://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/blogs/interviews/77792261-interview-with-lydia-kwa. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Kwa, Lydia. Oracle Bone. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017.
Kwa, Lydia. Pulse. Ethos Books, 2014.
Kwa, Lydia. Sinuous. Turnstone Press, 2013.
Kwa, Lydia. The Colours of Heroines. Womens Press, 1994.
Kwa, Lydia. The Walking Boy. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019.
Kwa, Lydia. This Place Called Absence. Kensington Pub Corp (T), 2003.
Lai, Larissa. “Other Democracies: Writing Thru Race at the 20 Year Crossroad.” Write Magazine, 2014.
“‘Letter to My Former Selves’ by Lydia Kwa Wins the Earle Birney Poetry Prize.” PRISM International, vol. 56, no. 1, 14 Aug. 2018, http://prismmagazine.ca/2018/08/14/letter-to-my-former-selves-by-lydia-kwa-wins-the-earle-birney-poetry-prize/.
