Lydia Kwa
Credit: Ronnie Hill Photography
Biography
Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore but moved to Toronto to begin studies in Psychology at U of Toronto in 1980. After finishing her graduate studies in Clinical Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, she moved to Calgary, Alberta; then to Vancouver, and has lived and worked here on the traditional and the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples since 1992.
Kwa has published two books of poetry (The Colours of Heroines, 1992; sinuous, 2013) and four novels (This Place Called Absence, 2000; The Walking Boy, 2005 and 2019; Pulse, 2010 and 2014; Oracle Bone, 2017). Her next novel A Dream Wants Waking will be published by Buckrider Books in Fall 2023. A third book of poetry from time to new will be published by Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2024.
She won the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2018; and her novels have been nominated for several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction.
She has also exhibited her art work at Centre A (2014) and Massy Art Gallery (2018); and has self-published two poetry-visual art chapbooks.
Poetics Statement
Now I apply myself to the task of a borrowed language, becoming mine, yet never mine. For whom is English an exclusive right, birthright, language entrenching a colony of values? 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.
~ previously published, from "Father:Mother:Tongue" in The Colours of Heroines, Toronto: Women's Press, 1994
"Part of an ever-evolving Southeast Asian diaspora, I am tenuously connected to my history growing up in Singapore, and somewhat precariously situated here on these traditional and unceded territories of Indigenous peoples. I am both here and not. I am sometimes comfortable and sometimes discomforted. I want my language—particularly poetry—to be slightly uncomfortable because it challenges assumptions of solidity and the use of language to placate. I would like my use of language to gesture to the fleeting, the unstable, the layered, somewhere that eludes being imprisoned. I would like my poetry to inspire in others, an appreciation of psychological complexity, often through a pared-down lyric.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Walking, As If
(For Angie)
stitching
a map of memories
as if still in childhood
watching the roti prata man
corner of Koon Seng and Joo Chiat
his deft slap of dough on the oily surface
extends large then largest
come sizzling still on the plate
or—further down Joo Chiat
the caramelized hints of rock sugar
wafting from the confectionary
we grew up in the same neighbourhood
a decade apart
now grown-up
we have walked together
only a few times
separated by differences
in trajectory
whenever we speak of Joo Chiat
I feel such pangs
as if I am there now
on another walk with you
Future Enterprise
Three state-of the-art vending booths exist in this novelty alley. Future Enterprise has become a major tourist draw, even for the locals.
Back to Normal, the most popular option.
Select the option, slip your $20 note into the currency sucker. Then enter the booth, sit down and hook yourself up with electrodes as shown in the demonstration video. Enjoy eight minutes of simulated normalcy. Memories are activated of former privileges such as unfettered movement, ignorance of one's impact on others. Listen to music that's sexy because it reminds you of no one else. Olfactory stimulation awakens flavours of favourite meals in restaurants, unhampered by health risks. Ignorance is Bliss.
Next most popular option Eternal Romance floods your brain with neurotransmitters to create the experience of falling into Love. Sweet scents, sex scents, scents of the sea, the illusion of an infinite horizon, accompanied by subliminal pining and sighing. Amplification of longing followed by satiation followed by longing. You pay $40 for ten minutes of exquisite torment. Any longer a duration and you're dead.
Curiously, there aren't as many people selecting the Wealth simulation. Perhaps the price at $50 for five minutes is too prohibitive? Even though it promises an intense experience of both "Back to Normal" and "Eternal Romance."
A handful of humans choose Peace which is a steal at $10 for 20 minutes. The person gets to feel inner serenity, the opposite of excessive stimulation and attachments. Maybe humans prefer to visit sacred sites for this?
No one selects Uncertainty. Maybe because it's too real. We may delete this option in the next model we produce.
Impossible Proposition
wind whistles
through interstices
waking life
conceals
that which lurks
veils of flimsy appearance
empty of assurance
hypothetical probability
or performative structure
the seal of veracity
is an illusion
raw sensation
each breath
never repeated
infinite rupture
between now
and next
this now that flees into
the past