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A new anthology published by 5ever Books and edited by Jennifer Cheuk.
A new anthology published by 5ever Books and edited by Jennifer Cheuk.

BooksJuly 3, 2024

‘More is always more’: Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another, reviewed

A new anthology published by 5ever Books and edited by Jennifer Cheuk.
A new anthology published by 5ever Books and edited by Jennifer Cheuk.

A new anthology that gathers the experiences of mixed-heritage creatives in Aotearoa expands on what’s come before and stirs a hunger for more.

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another is an anthology of work by mixed-heritage creatives across Aotearoa, edited by Rat World founder Jennifer Cheuk, and published by underground Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based  publishers, 5ever. It comes in the wake of a wave of recent anthologies that centre around identities that have been historically – and continually – marginalised in Aotearoa. There’s Out Here, a poetic anthology of queer New Zealand writers; A Clear Dawn, an anthology of Asian writers in New Zealand; Hiwa, an anthology of Māori short stories; and Ngā Kupu Wero and Te Awa o Kupu, anthologies of Māori non-fiction, and poetry and fiction in turn… and that’s just to name a few.

Somewhat strikingly, the anthologies I’ve listed have all come out in the last three years. Naturally, Everything is part of this movement – an intervention into an industry and society that are systematically unequal, where there are numerous barriers to entry and difficulties writers from certain communities face – like racism – even once their book is picked up by a publisher. Not to mention how difficult it is to be a writer at all, because basically no one will pay you to do it. 

When I saw that a collection of work by mixed-heritage people was coming out in New Zealand, I was excited and I was also nervous. You could say I felt mixed. But let’s start with excitement. 

As a Chinese and Pākehā New Zealander who spent my childhood across Hong Kong and Tāmaki Makaurau, I have spent much of my adult life yearning and searching for art that speaks to my experience. I remember reading for the first time last year, Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home, a novel following the experience of a young Samoan man living in New Zealand. While the protagonist is not mixed race, much of his description of existing across multiple cultures and countries, in Pākehā and non-Pākehā dominated worlds, resonated with me. In some ways, it’s sad to think that it took me 25 years before I found a work that was set in New Zealand and spoke to me like that. It’s interesting to think about how coming across Everything at a formative younger age might have affected my life. Regardless of its content, I would’ve been glad for the recognition of mixed-heritage existence in New Zealand. 

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another is an interesting and varied collection that contains work from a range of creatives, of differing backgrounds, as well as work across a range of forms. I was pleasantly surprised to find the collection contained poems, essays, photography, paintings, mixed-media art, comics, and pieces that reflected on works of art, like plays, that have already existed in some form in the world. This variety in form was a delight, and clearly allowed for a range of creatives – not strictly writers – to partake in the project. For this reason, it felt like the collection held the art of not just one, but many creative communities. It was inspiring to see that many of the works had clearly been made in active conversation and collaboration with people in the artists’ communities – mothers, friends, colleagues. This was particularly apparent in the pieces by Jill and Lindsey de Roos, Dr Meri Haami and Dr Carole Fernandez, Maraky Vowells, and Chye-Ling Huang, to name a few. 

On my mind, as I made my way through the collection, was the notion of diversity. In my view, the lack of diversity in publishing takes at least two forms. Firstly, it’s a question of who does and doesn’t get published. But secondly, it’s a question of what is getting published – do the stories that get told reflect the variety and expansiveness we award to Pākehā authors, for example? I find it particularly disappointing when the only art from marginalised communities that breaks into the mainstream is that which happens to conform to reductive ideas that are already in the mainstream. If I read another story about a good East Asian migrant family, for instance, I might scream. Not because I think there’s no truth in it or that the story shouldn’t exist, but because it must be so lonely up there, being the only kind of East Asian – or worse, Asian – representation we see. 

As many people of marginalised communities and identities know, representation is often a burden dressed up as a privilege. When representations are so few and far between, it is easy for things to become crystallised and stagnant. For instance, is there a “mixed-heritage experience” in New Zealand, that could ever be reduced to some kind of totalising narrative? Of course not. There are commonalities, but there are also countless differences. 

As I began the collection, I swung back and forth, worrying at times that the pieces were going to be, on the whole, consistently close to familiar archetypes. I reflected on the fact that “mixed-heritage” is an incredibly broad category, that houses people from vastly different places and backgrounds. In the first third of the collection I struggled with pieces that felt overly abstracted and vague, where the specificity of the narrator or writer was held at a distance, and instead what came across were sentiments that felt more like platitudes or personal affirmations. I worry that work at this level of abstraction can create the impression that all mixed-heritage people are having the same experience – of a particular kind of angst. When emotional assertions are hollowed out of their specificities and particularities, they fall flat, and it’s hard not to receive them as tropes. 

As I read on, however, I was relieved to see that the collection broadened to house a wide range of works, some that touched directly on a familiar mixed-heritage angst, some that drew on themes of ambivalence and multivalence, and others (and I wish there were more of these) that never explicitly approached the topic of being mixed-heritage at all. 

There were many standouts in the collection for me. Pieces by Jill and Lindsey de Roos, Evelina Loles, Chyna-Lily Tjauw Rawlinson, Damien Levi, and kī anthony were touching and enlightening for their specificity and sincerity. I was impressed by Yani Widjaja’s piece, ‘Oey黃 is for Widjaja’, which explores the history and meaning of their Chinese-Indonesian name, and reveals the non-essential, historicised nature of identities across time, culture and place. Eamonn Tee’s short story, romesh dissanyake’s poem/ prose piece,  and Cadence Chung’s poetry stood out to me for their meticulous crafting. 

Kátia Miche’s paintings, What Melts Into Air? felt impactful in their playful mix between discernibility and indiscernibility, and it was a joy to have them interspersed throughout the collection. 

The collection ends with possibly my favourite piece, Jake Tabata’s ‘Stop Fucking Asking Me To Watch Anime With You!’ – a hilarious and absurd playscript that leads to a violent crescendo and ends the collection with a cathartic expression of rage. I was so enthralled to see the absurdity and violence of bureaucracy and whiteness come across the page. 

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another, is a thought-provoking, enlightening and entertaining collection. It’s a memorable moment for mixed-heritage writers in New Zealand, but it is not the beginning or the end. I’m hungry to see more works that build from here, and continue to skewer, decentralise, or avoid altogether the myths of homogeneous white culture. When it comes to diversity of expression nothing is final, identities are contextually situated, and more is more is always more. 

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another, edited by Jennifer Cheuk ($65, 5ever Books) can be purchased directly from 5ever Books

Keep going!
Jake Arthur’s Tarot-inspired poetry collection. Image design: Claire Mabey.
Jake Arthur’s Tarot-inspired poetry collection. Image design: Claire Mabey.

BooksJune 29, 2024

‘Celtic Cross, anyone?’: Jake Arthur on a tarot-inspired poetry collection

Jake Arthur’s Tarot-inspired poetry collection. Image design: Claire Mabey.
Jake Arthur’s Tarot-inspired poetry collection. Image design: Claire Mabey.

Jake Arthur explains why his latest poetry collection was inspired by the Pamela Coleman-Smith illustrations on the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

Done well, a Tarot reading, like all rituals, creates its own aura. Like walking off a busy street in a European city into the quiet and cool of a church, a reading is one of those times when you naturally go quiet, when you get serious, because there is this atmosphere of heightened significance, of higher mysteries. 

I first encountered Tarot when I was studying for my PhD in the UK. I had a friend who, whenever it reached about 1am and we were still at her house in Oxford, would reach for her goblet of red wine and get mystic. 

Dinners at hers were elaborate. As an entrée she always served gold-dusted quail eggs with dipping salts. I’d never had a quail egg in my life; I didn’t even know if you had to shell it. Even the food was a kind of ritual with her.

Her parties ended one of two ways. The first had us all putting on our jackets and gathering around a crucible in her garden for a therapeutic burning. On scraps of paper we would name bad boyfriends, bad vibes or bad feedback from our thesis supervisors, and then toss them in. We’d hold hands and she’d say some words and reduce them, and what they represented, to ashes with her lighter. 

Either that, or she’d get out the Tarot cards. Celtic Cross, anyone?

You’d be forgiven for assuming Tarot is just another of those vaguely “Eastern” fads, like mood rings or aura cleansing, that the White West is desperate to empty wallets for. It’s true that someone at least is making bank from the minor industry Tarot has become, with custom decks and accompanying books promising the cards will guide you to financial success, tantric sex, personal enlightenment and, of course, romantic love. 

But Tarot’s origin is European. The face cards we associate with Tarot – the ones with names like Death, the Hanged Man, and the Wheel of Fortune – are trump cards, or tarocchi in the Italian, used in a card game popular in the Renaissance in Europe. The suits, cups, swords, wands and pentacles are equivalents of our more garden variety spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts. 

It was only in the 19th century that these alternate suits and face cards, long absent in Western Europe, re-entered circulation. By this time they had become unfamiliar enough – mysterious enough – to be used for cartomancy: fortune telling with cards. Their enigmatic names and designs contributed to a sense that there was something occult about these cards.

It’s time to put my own cards on the table. I’ve written a poetry collection called Tarot, where each poem offers a snippet of a different character’s life inspired by the design or meaning of a specific card. And yet I’ve just spent three paragraphs demystifying Tarot. Why am I killing my own mystique?

Three of the Rider-Waite cards designed by Pamela Coleman-Smith.

Because what fascinates me about the history of Tarot is that it shows us how things can become mystified. Our civilisation is like a very bright light: we are obsessed with illuminating everything; we seem to hate shadows. But I think we still feel a deep, unspoken pull to the strange and fantastic – and Tarot is a symptom of that.

The Industrial Revolution substituted machines for the labour of human hands just as, ironically, medicine taxonomised our bodies into machines that could malfunction and need repair. The light of science and industry drove back the borders of the unknown. But even as this was happening, the inverse was true in popular culture, which was turning to folk traditions, to exotica from abroad, and to the gothic.

It was as if the loss of mystery in one part of life meant it had to be supplemented from elsewhere — as if mystery was something people needed, as if it was essential.

A normal card game became mystified, transformed into a ceremony with a whole host of new trappings: gloomy rooms, rich fabrics, with a Mediterranean beauty or crone leaning over a table, first reading your palm in the candlelight before turning to the Tarot. The designs on these cards are so strange and otherworldly, that it seems like they must know something we don’t. They seem to come from a deep past. Why wouldn’t they have wisdom to share?

When my friend did her reading for me, she chose the Celtic Cross: an intricate 10-card “spread” representing not only what’s ahead and what’s in the present, but your past, your hopes and fears, the root of your problem and the forces preventing you overcoming them, as well as the “outcome”: the answer to the question you ask the fortune-teller.

The first card placed in the Celtic Cross represents the querent: the person asking the question. I was dealt the Hermit, a figure cloaked in drab colours who holds a walking stick in one hand and a lantern lifted in the other. The last card placed is the outcome card, and mine was the Two of Swords. The card shows a blindfolded woman, dressed in white, her crossed arms holding huge swords. 

My friend told me the two swords symbolised the choice before me, the two paths my life could take. She told me those paths were perfectly balanced in my mind. I was the Hermit, peering with his lantern, trying to see through the dark. I was over-cautious; I distrusted the evidence of my senses; I distrusted my gut. I was at risk of self-deception. And from these coordinates my destination was stalemate, inertia. Like the blindfolded woman, I held two futures in my hands and looked at neither of them.

I’d sought guidance, but instead had my predicament thrown back at me. The Tarot refused to answer my question and called me myopic, twice. 

“Top-up?” My friend asked brightly, swirling and almost spilling her half-charged glass.

What we need isn’t always an answer – sometimes it’s just a moment to frame the question.

Does it matter if Tarot is what it says it is – if its origin is really occult or not – if the ritual that we’ve made around it helps us to be open to ourselves and to the possibility that we need a helping hand, a steer in rough waters? Doesn’t it matter, that we might have a fortune waiting for us, if only we could tell it to ourselves?

Baby
or The Star

Lithe leveret!
More arms than two
IN your mother’s fore
Swaddled naked, in fat
& soft bones, hard gazing
At the swish-swash colours
Forming you for you.

It’s a lot.

All’s new under the sun
& the sun itself is but a kitten
Held by neck in the teeth
Of a stray starry dam.
I am a kind of monkey
& I’m your daddy,
Hello.

Tarot by Jake Arthur ($25, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available from Unity Books.

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