July 24, 2015
“Quintan Ana Wikswo has carved out a space of artistic living unlike anyone else. Her work bleeds into multiple disciplines, from fiction to poetry to photography to performance art to simply living in a sort of shamanistic kind of world, where every mundane or broken object becomes endowed with importance, where no story is off-limits from its telling.
Her new work, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, from Coffee House Press, is a collection of stories and photographs that reads and feels like a dream map of a visionary’s brain. It is unlike anything else out there. The stories breathe with peripheral intensity. Upon reading them, one can feel how far and how deep they reach back and forward, what and whose stories they are trying to un-erase.
Combined with the photographs – taken with broken cameras – the text begins to sneak into different places of the brain and back again. There is a rhythm to this movement, a music, a life. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Farmay change the way you view the book as object, the story as word.” – Devin Kelly in Warscapes
Read the full review and interview here.
more excerpts:
DK: Some of your prose has this metered, rhythmic lyricism that calls to mind epic poetry. Where do you find yourself drawing and pulling from when you write?
QAW: I grew up in remote areas of the American South and Southwest, and that relationship to language has its legs wrapped around my DNA. The pace, the pauses, the intonations and inflections, hesitations, emphasis, nuance – all this drawn from nations that were often destroyed but can still be heard in slight variations of the lips and tongue – the lyricism and rhythm of place. I grew up around Mennonite and Amish accents that contained vestiges of 15th century Dutch intonation. African tribal languages, the Gullah of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Richly gorgeous mixtures of Comanche and Dine and Tohono O’Oodham meter and rhythm. My mother always hated dictionaries because they gave “official” pronunciations, whereas all around us were thousands of different ways to make English all your own. My father’s physics lab was filled with global researchers who helped me learn to read – I learned more about English from Sri Lankan speakers. More about rhythm from Koreans. I love how the full body of poetics allows anyone to put her own tongue all over language, and claim it.
For most of my life, I’ve primarily read poetry, rather than fiction – in particular, Aimé Cesaire, Paul Celan and the Serbian poet Novica Tadić’s’s entire body of work. I appreciate the structures and unstructures available in poetry, the occlusions and pauses, the agency for the reader to participate in the creation of meaning, and in the pace at which the words enter the psyche.
The poetry I am drawn to and inspired by has a command over the metaphysics of emptiness and lacunae – what is left out, what exists in allusion, what can be assembled from small fragments and broken parts. Also, the time required to inhabit a work of poetry is almost a ritual process of unfolding, a processional of processing compact intensities that for me often emerge moments, hours, or days after I have read a stanza.
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DK: Many of your stories seem to focus or hover around the inadequacy of our containers – our bodies, our maps, our words – and yet, at one point, you write: “without the word all our utterances would be a scream.” What are your thoughts on this – on the inadequacy of language, coupled perhaps with its necessity?
QAW: When one thinks about it, why should it be possible for all of human existence to be satisfyingly contained by language? If existence were that simple, we would have figured out dark matter by now. Or how to get along with one another in between our hundreds of thousands of languages, extant and extinct. Language itself is one of the great mysteries – there are millions of lost languages, lost words, and behind those losses are occluded stories and emotions. Yet those needs to express ourselves still float out there in our minds, unresolved. We simply can’t contain the psyche into language – the dream is to come as close as possible. But perhaps that’s also a nightmare. We need private places inside ourselves where we are shocked and humbled by our own internal mysteries.
At the same time, the book is obsessively absorbed by this simultaneous passion for precision of language, and the sensual joy at celebrating its rebellious refusal to comply. I love the interplay of science, love, war, and dreams because these visceral existential crises are sites where our ignorances and passions are so huge, nobody even knows the language to wrap around the wonderment. Some mysteries cannot be tidied up. Some pains cannot be packaged. Some joys refuse to be bounded. And that’s as quixotic as it should be.
Inadequacy is very haunting and important to me. As a species and as individuals, we are inadequate in nearly every way – what happens when we die? What is gravity? How do you make amends to those you’ve hurt? Why can’t I fix your pain? Why does this emotion cause salt water to pour from my eyeballs? We write, and we write, and we talk and talk, and then we refuse to talk, or others silence us, or we silence one another, and these are at the heart of powerful crimes and revolutions. Language insists on reminding us of this haunting knowledge that we are contained by ignorance. There is a point, perhaps around age fifteen, when most of us realize that there is abject human ignorance at the heart of this entire planetary enterprise. It’s heartbreaking. Perhaps a few decades later, it becomes liberating.
The word figures highly in many creation stories. The word of the gods. The holy words, the sacred words. Lies and truths. To inhabit a container is to surrender to a system of language that tells us what reality is. If we step outside that container of accepted, dominant meaning, then we can liberate ourselves to step into our own realities, and perhaps have a glimpse of a different kind of freedom.
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DK: You talked about working in human rights. Could you speak more about that, and, specifically, your work in relation to sexual violence? How has that informed your worldview and your mission as an artist?
QAW: I worked in human rights for twenty years, from the community to international level, from grassroots to governmental and nongovernmental agencies. My last two jobs as a professional human rights worker were helping set up gender violence shelters on the Tohono O’Odham Nation, and working with survivors of sexual violence during genocide. The female and female-identified survivors I worked with ranged in age from infants to women in their nineties, and spanned suburban transgender teenagers who had or were transitioning from male to female, and women who had been imprisoned in rape camps in conflict zones.
These two jobs showed me that as long as I represented an agency or organization, my own freedom to express my own truths, perspectives, and ideas for change would be policed and limited by others’ politics and agendas. I decided to become an artist in order to gain agency over my own self, to gain the confidence to speak my truths, and ultimately to more ethically advocate for the people with whom I am truly allied. I created the multidisciplinary projects MERCY KILLING AKTION and OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL to speak my truths about these last two jobs. After twenty years, these were my first experience as an unfettered activist with full agency over my own self-expression.
DK: What did you experience in those jobs that made you feel the need to break out, to speak and gain agency for yourself and others?
QAW: In one of my first jobs at nineteen, the majority of the female workers were sexually assaulted in the line of duty. I saw the policing of social power and control acted out against the female body via sexual violence. Over decades, I came to see sexual violence as an act of retaliative power against humans who are seen as prey – an action and a choice committed with nearly complete impunity in nearly all cultures, in nearly all situations. I never saw any true consequences against the perpetrators, especially if they were white and had any social power.
As I moved between agencies working on disability, race, ethnicity, and class, the thread that carried through was that a human’s gender invariably triggered violent yet socially acceptable abuses of power, and that sexual violence was rarely seen as a human rights atrocity. Every woman I knew had experienced sexual violence – often multiple times, across many years, and many generations. Even within the activist community of conscience – and even more so within universities, the military, private and public institutions, parking lots, nursing homes, day care facilities – gender violence is a commonplace war against female agency that begins at birth and ends at death.