Some days you fly, others you glide, yet others you dive, deep beneath the subterranean waters to retrieve glimmering offerings as though you were a maiden offered to La Serenissima’s liquid embrace.

Fourteen years ago, while still in law school and reading translation after translation of Dante during my mad Italian Renaissance kick (which came hand in hand with my mad mahler classical music kick), I wrote a three part poem to reflect the internal sea-changes within myself, as I made the transition from dreamy schoolgirl to older undergrad. It was a period of intense creativity coupled with undergraduate angst. I offer you the first part both because the poem is in my head today, and as an exhibit in the ongoing discourse concerning hybridity. I wrote poems reflecting how words by Italian renaissance poets and writers affected my insides, but I was never ontologically insecure. How could I be when these lines were pencilled in a notebook as I sat outside a lecture hall on cement steps, bathing in the heat of an equatorial afternoon? How could it be, when I returned home to a typical, working class Malaysian neighbourhood that was bordered by a Malay village? I did not consider myself escaping. I straddled worlds. I painted pictures of the in-between hidden places. I wrote byzantine texts that welded the Italian Renaissance with African history, with Asian myth. An on-going process, that. Some of that made it to the Yrole Triptych.

This poem is still raw, for I was still young. I did think of cleaning the whole thing up for submission somewhere or other, but I’ve had it on the web for over a decade before I took all the poems from the Chiaroscuro and White Feathers collections down, so I think that will not happen. It will make it into the What the Woods Mean anthology at some point, though.

Milan in Tangles: I
(c) Nin Harris. All Rights Reserved.

milan in tangles
a woven tapestry
of water-lapping stones.

the musk, it hides a message
for a discerning nose
while my anxious feet still
ache to tiptoe

across the secret routes of history

mahler holds the baton while i stop
to suck my thumb, ponder in indecision
whether my flying days have come

and still…

my thoughts are yet but fragments,
a chiaroscuro of sensation
and hidden porticoes.

where’s il paradiso?
(June 1996)

When I was growing up in Penang, Roti Jala was always this extremely special dish you’d eat with either chicken or mutton curry. The feeling of specialness waned a bit as I grew older and the catering industry made it so that Roti Jala with sub-par curry was at most official functions and parties. However, no one (in Malaysia, at least) can resist Roti Jala, even with sub-par chicken curry. I tried to make Roti Jala once, about a year ago, but with my manufactured mould (a yogurt cup with holes poked into it), all I succeeded in making were very strange pancakes. However, the wonderful ubergeek who had been experimenting successfully with roti jala, brought me this fantastic mould from Singapore when she visited me, earlier this year.

Armed with the ubergeek’s moral support and various Roti Jala-making videos on YouTube, I decided to be brave. This was the result.

As you can see, I didn’t get a perfect, lacy net, because it’s kinda my first time using the mould and I’ve never been good at intricate stuff outside of sketching and illustration. The ubergeek far surpasses me there, as is evidenced by her exquisite jewellery-making skills. However, I’m absurdly proud of my Roti Jala. The recipe calls for coconut milk and some turmeric for colour/flavour but is basically almost the same as your generic pancake/crepe recipe. I had no coconut milk with me and substituted w/ regular milk. Tasted fine.

And here `tis, with my lamb curry.

The curry had the absolute right consistency for Roti Jala. By accident, I managed to get it to taste like the kind of curry you get at a good mamak store. Not the heavily commercialised 24-hour mamak stores which are now everywhere, mind you, but the real deal, the older long-standing shops from the `80s or `90s. Better still, the kind of delicious food you’d get if you were lucky enough to have friends and neighbours who cooked the divine stuff. And so, I had to pay homage to my good old-fashioned curry by making Roti Jala. I do hope I can make curry this good again and it wasn’t some freakish good luck. However, since my last two curries made me want to sing, I think perhaps I have levelled up in mad curry-making skillz. Yay!

Now, it doesn’t exactly look like it, but these are actually rolls of lacy pancakes.

Here’s one roll, isolated so you can see what it looks like. Rolling it up hides a variety of flaws, I wonder if this is why the rolls have become the standard for Malaysian caterers Anyway, I also think the fluffy consistency of the rolls makes for better absorption of the curry, which is why rolls have become more popular than Roti Jala triangles in Malaysia. It was different in the `80s.

My mood has been definitely brightened by these turmeric-coloured, fluffy and lacy crepes, as well as by vintage Bollywood videos from the `70s. Time to go back to working on my thesis, since I’m all revved up to wrangle with postcolonial theory and stuff about gothic revenants. If one must be haunted by textual ghosts, one must arm, or at the very least, ground oneself within the bedrock of every-day, domestic routine and comfort spice. Spice and warmth is needed, when one has the tropics in one’s veins. Also, if one must traverse the haunted arenas of inner, ontological landscapes, the physicality of the Heideggerian ready-to-hand is essential. It’s funny how explaining something so matter-of-fact is so impossible sometimes.

I grew up on an island full of idiosyncratic buildings; a merge between many cultures, some with strange corridors that led to nowhere, others with even stranger tiny courtyards and airwells. Some of Abeyance, my long-abandoned “Great Malaysian Gothic Novel” was set in a house exactly like this. As a kid, growing up with ever-nomadic medical parents, I stayed in government houses and single-story bungalows that were said to be haunted. Whether they were or not, I leave for others to decide as I’m not interested in believer/unbeliever debates on this blog. What is relevant, however, is how it coloured my childhood, surrounded as I was by raintrees, flames of the forest and the mythologies of more than one continent to either enrapture or terrify me. A mixture of local superstition and horror stories from sources as diverse as Edgar Allen Poe to your trashiest local Malay horror paperback.

I’m thinking about all this as I work on two things:

(1) My thesis chapters and outline, since my research is undergoing a bit of flux and mini-crisis.

(2) An assignment that’s due at the end of this week.

I’ve no energy for much more beyond my considerations of all things Gothic, the sublime, the postcolony as well as the Punch and Judy Show! What? The Punch and Judy Show? Yup, I’ve decided to incorporate that into the assignment I’m writing for one of the compulsory postgraduate courses. Which, in turn has me considering older manifestations of the show, which seems to be leading me straight back into the Hermetic mysteries. Wait, what? Am I barking up the wrong rain-tree? I hope not! Much work and more academic issues await me. As well as more good food. All of which leads me back to the haunted spaces of my youth as well as the application or possible misapplication of Derridean hauntology (warning! link’s a .pdf file!) as has been discussed by academics in a couple of presentations I attended. I’m not a Derridean but I can’t help thinking about this, especially in relation to my own Heideggerian meditations. I may have let go of my philosophy supervisor, but there’s no way anyone is going to be able to take the philosophy out of this girl. Ever.

I’ve been experiencing some financial challenges which makes for less grocery shopping. This has caused me to overindulge in the consumption of home-made wheatflour bhajis instead of buying bread. But, the bhajis are lovely, even if they contribute to the expansion of my waistline. Indian food is necessary for deadlines; I cannot describe how amazed I am at how well tonight’s dinner turned out: Pilau rice, chicken curry, and vegetable acar. Such things are needed when one is hungry and stressed. As is blogging.

This is all for now. Sleep awaits. Then a full day of writing now that I’ve done most of the research, groundwork and necessary scholarly sleuthing.

One of the problems with being in the “business” of academia is feeling sometimes like reading or writing for pleasure has become somehow wrong. It feels perverse, yes. Many of us are also poets and creative/fiction writers. And we’re literary postgrads or teachers because we’re passionate about reading. We get selected to write reviews or present at conferences because reading is and always will be our top pastime. So why this guilt? I guess it’s easy to understand. When you’ve done copious amounts of reading and have piles more to read, the idea that you’re squandering your reading energy on something that is actually for fun can be sometimes devastating. And then there’s the fact that you write. So anything you read might remind you of something that you’ve written (Oh no! Someone else has already used this neat idea I thought no one else had and what if they’ve done it BETTER?), or remind you of that review you still have due (sigh), or remind you of the several thousand words you’ve promised your supervisor which requires you reading several thousand more words. And you should be spending your time scouring through your primary texts with an eagle-eye.

But let me tell you something I’ve learned from doing my M.A. thesis on Angela Carter.

There are only so many times you can read your primary texts. Sure, with a writer as rich as Carter, every time you scrutinize her writings you will be sucked in and there will be layers to peel and new views to get lost in. But having said all this, there’s such a thing as getting too close to a text, particularly if all seems dark and hopeless. Magnify this several times for your Ph.d. research, particularly since it involves looking at issues to do with postcolonial and hybrid states of being as well as issues of othering that you face sometimes on a daily basis in your real life, whenever you venture out of your safe habitat up on the side of a hill. This is why several steps back is almost always needed. This is why I have my reading for pleasure books in the bedroom and I jealously hoarde the few paragraphs a night I allow myself to read. Or more, when I’m just fed up of it all. Right now, ill as I am, I’m looking forward to a weekend of thesis-writing, and reading this truly annoying novel I have to review. Tonight, I am going to curl up under four layers of blankets and read a love story, set in Venice. A memoir, rather. With lots of food and recipes. I think I kind of owe it to myself. Because I chose this life out of my love for reading.

I frequently think about madness as well as the ironic disconnect between what I write about in my dissertation and what I sometimes face, when it comes to my meatspace interlocutors. Justine Larbalestier’s excellent post on “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining” spurred other tangential thoughts in me. I’ve been wanting to write this post for several weeks now, but some part of me balked at being so public about it. But, what the heck. Tons have been written about madness and silencing, from Gilbert and Gubar’s now-canonical The Madwoman in the Attic, to the idea of articulation or the lack thereof, found in texts such as Trinh T Minh-ha’s Woman/Native/Other and Ketu Katrak’s The Politics of the Female Body. I spend days, nights earnestly poring over passages in my primary texts and my secondary sources, contemplating these things, contemplating the struggle to communicate and the great gulf between our internal selves and societal expectations/norms. So I feel that, if I don’t voice these things, I will become a victim of the very things I write against.

I come from a country where censorship is accepted and pretty much considered a virtue by the general public. If you’re a writer, you don’t write certain things. It is to keep the “public peace”, because saying too much would incite “civil disturbance”. If you write/say too much, you may be detained, although this has been addressed in various plays. I grew up with this reality.With an awareness of this, at the age of 13 or 14 years of age, I decided I was going to write within the sf/f genre(s). My rationale was that there would be no danger that some stray detail/curiosity within my text or truth that I wanted to articulate would land me in jail, because for crying out loud, it’s frakking fiction! After all, the slammer can’t be a comfortable holiday destination. This may give some of you some framework of the ramifications arising from our national political drama towards the end of the `80s. A major newspaper was shut down and various people shunted off to detention. I am always afraid to talk about these things. Even writing this blog post feels like stepping off some imaginary precipice, even if this blog isn’t prominent enough to make a difference. So. That was one form of censorship and silencing. I got used to it, I understood where it came from. I understand what keeps me censoring myself. I know there’s always some struggle between individuality and public responsibility. I knew my country’s history, I knew what was at stake. I love my country, and I know how easy it is for certain things to be magnified outside of cultural contexts. In many other ways, I was free to talk about other things, a luxury I enjoyed and sometimes miss these days. The freedom to critique the politics of other countries, the freedom to discuss certain peculiarities between cultures, even the freedom to gripe against the government. Within certain parameters. No one ever told me I was mad for being outspoken. I was just outspoken when I wasn’t quiet or demure. Most of the time I was quiet, because I came from a family of loud, larger than life and outspoken overachieving females.

There were always certain truths that were too private to be shared, but I became used to articulating others.

So. I came here. And I found I had autonomy and independence in a certain way. I enjoyed it. I still do. But in other ways, I found that I wasn’t able to say things. My Asian politeness became interpreted as “dishonesty”, even if I hadn’t said anything in particular, even if I hadn’t even reached the stage of judging or pigeonholing because I was enjoying the experience of being in a new country, enjoying learning about new people and standing on my feet. A lot of that was based on intercultural projection and people’s misreading of my facial cues, which tends to happen when you’re an INTP and the rest of the known universe is some other personality type. Anyway, inevitably, I began to speak my mind. This is when I learned the pitfalls, sometimes hilarious, sometimes frustrating, of cultural construction. I began to learn that being a writer who is expressive and who may have a peculiar blend of Asian reserve/forthrightness can be misinterpreted in so many ways. What I considered ironic was translated as “depressive”, what I praised, became a “subtle insult”, and oh, heaven forbid if I actually admitted to having a bad day! It didn’t help that I didn’t always do things the way they were supposed to be done, and I’ve always been a little eccentric. I make no apologies for this, I like myself and I’m comfortable with who I am and the fact that I constantly evolve and am changeable. In the end, I came to a conclusion, not about this city, which I love, not about the people, whom I’ve gotten used to and am, in my own way, quite fond of. No, my conclusion is about Westernised mainstream culture and how “madness” has become a code for “speaks too much about things we’d rather you not speak about”. It’s about the whitewashing of home truths, by prescribing therapy for everything. It’s about how much money the mental health industry must be making out of these mainstream schematas. I reacted, of course, by just concentrating on work, socializing only with other geeks, because geeks aren’t as susceptible to mainstream projections. Well, not most of them.

In short, if I’m isolating myself, or seem to be isolating myself: (1) I’m not mad/angry (2) I’m not depressed (3) I’m not antisocial (4) I’m just busy and don’t have patience for silly people (5) Touchy-feely emo comforting gives me the heebie-jeebies, though I won’t say no to a good, friendly hug (6) There’s nothing wrong with me apart from phd-related stress and monthly, hormone-related moodiness due to the feminine ailment.

It’s no great coincidence that both of my writers, in their own way, write about madness. It’s no great coincidence that this is linked to that place in between where we struggle, oh how we struggle to be voiced. Because there’s always something at stake when you speak up. There’s always something someone wants to protect or keep under wraps. Something political, or personal. But the personal is always political, isn’t it? Perhaps this should explain why platitudes annoy me, why whenever someone suggests to me therapy or tries to explain things to me that I already know, I get rather irritated. I see some conversations as acts of negotiation or dominance, when they shouldn’t be. Usually it occurs where one party or another fears what you may say. To which I generally say: Why fear?

Be open. Listen with open minds. Nothing I write here is meant to be malicious, it is out of a simple desire to communicate, to voice things that should be voiced. Because I need to voice myself, and this is my space. And yes, perhaps the teacher in me hopes that some of what I write will be of value to someone, out there. Grow up. This isn’t about anyone. This is about the big picture. It’s about the forest. It’s about all the trees in the forest, and how they connect to each other. These words should serve as a reminder. If you’re talking to someone who is saying what you don’t want to hear, either tell them they’re making you uncomfortable, or try to address their points in an honest, forthright manner. Do not suggest they need therapy or give them unsolicited advice about how to handle their internal states of being. Especially if you haven’t been made privy to those states of being. It’s rude and disrespectful.

There is a cure for this ailment of “hysteria” or “madness” with which they still like to accuse outspoken women, of any color, shape or size. It’s honest communication, as opposed to dominance games.

Whenever I have one of these conversations, where there is unmalicious honesty, my heart is a little lighter, and I walk with a spring in my step, because it gives me hope for the world and for the promise of solidarity amongst creative types. Such souls are rare and a breath of fresh air. Whenever I encounter the other, strange, mainstream creatures who try to talk me into unnecessary therapy and dish heaps of unasked-for homilies, I think of the Victorian method of therapy for hysteria. Do note that not all of them are quite as, ahem pleasurable as the one method that has been making the rounds in steampunk writing. Thinking of that one method does enable one to laugh internally, rather naughtily at said creatures. If I’m mad, I’m no madder than most, and if you’re going to be prescribing therapy for me, it damn well be something pleasurable.

I’m talking about chocolate ice cream, of course! Tsk.