Posts filed under 'power dynamics'

The Double-Edged Possibility of Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

I think this kind of [queer] isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen.

In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.

Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write. 

SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?

HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.

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Di Antara Akses dan Penolakan / In Between Access and Refusal: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

. . . the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.

Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.” 

In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping? 

Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points. 

I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).

This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that. READ MORE…

Art as Universal Refuge: Ji Yoon Lee on Translating Blood Sisters

We make art so that we don’t forget what our truth is.

This month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, Kim Yideum’s novel Blood Sisters, raises profound questions about class dynamics, gender roles, and the power of language to uphold existing hierarchies. In today’s interview, translator Ji Yoon Lee talks with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone about the challenging process of recreating the tones and nuances of the original Korean in English. They also discuss the parallels between Korean political narratives of the 1980s and the current discourse in the USA, as well as Lee’s innovative use of Spanish to translate Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.”

Jacob Silkstone (JS): Referring to her work as a whole, Kim Yideum has said (in your translation) that “A female writer needs to fight to build her own language against the default system.” It feels to me as though there’s an echo of that statement when the protagonist of Blood Sisters says, “I speak with my own mouth, so I will address others on my own terms. . .”Could you say a little about that “default system” that Kim Yideum’s work struggles against? Are there any aspects of the struggle that feel unique to Korea?

Ji Yoon Lee (JYL): I absolutely see the echo there, too. Specifically, the protagonist, Yeoul, is resisting: in Korea, we often address people by the role that they play in our lives, such as “teacher,” “president of the company,” “older lady,” and so on. Once intimacy develops, there is a shift in the form of address, often towards familial terms, even when you are not related: “older brother,” “older sister,” and so on. That is meant to make people feel a closer connection beyond the societal roles they play for one another.

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