Panel #8 Session 1
Thursday 30 November - 14:30
Building 25, Room 1
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Playing Western mahjong and writing western stories: It’s hysteresis not hysteria! Poetry as balm and method
- Emily Sun
University of Western Australia
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I will read and discuss poems from my creative/scholarly essay “Mahjong, the PhD, Bourdieu and Me” (Sun, 2024). My work is inspired by and builds on Gou et al.’s (2021) “Writing, Playing and Transforming,” —a creative practice-led research paper that examines the impact of neoliberal policies on university cultures through ludic inquiry, an approach that uses games to explore a broader sociocultural phenomenon, and encourages a playfulness that imbues the functional world with expression” and the personal (Sicart, 2014).
My focus is on the “Western” mahjong games that I played at a white working-class senior’s centre where I experienced the familiar “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, 1994) feelings that still surface in my interactions as a creative writing PhD candidature at a “Sandstone University”. Although I have sufficient cultural capital to enter these spaces and play games with others, I am a newcomer and marginalised by age and race within these Anglocentric institutions. While there are some aspects of my habitus that align with the dominant group habitus, the mismatch results in uncomfortable feelings that do not meet the criteria for any DSM-5 diagnoses, and grand theories also fail to adequately capture out-of-place ness or take into account the contestations within these spaces that impact on wellbeing. The mental discomfort caused by the hysteresis effect can only be explained and ameliorated through poetry.
I will also discuss how the new insights gained in adopting this poetry-led method changed the focus of and genre of my current PhD project, which was initially a traditional novel set in regional colonial and earlier Federation Australia.
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References
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Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
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Gou, Y., Di Niro, C., Spasovska, E., Walker, A., Cannell, C., Clarkson, R., Nilsson, A., & Levy, N. (2021). Writing, playing, transforming: a collaborative inquiry into neoliberalism's effects on academia, and the scope for changing the game. In Reimagining the Academy: ShiFting Towards Kindness, Connection, and an Ethics of Care (pp. 219–238). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75859-2_13
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Sun, E. (2024). “Mahjong, the PhD, Bourdieu and Me.” [Manuscript accepted for publication]. Routledge.
Emily Sun is a poet/writer/ researcher from Western Australia who has been previously published in various journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Westerly, Meniscus, Cordite, Text and Growing up Asian in Australia. Her debut poetry collection Vociferate (Fremantle Press) received a Highly Commended in the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (2022) and was a finalist in the WA Premier’s Book Prize (2022). She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia. https://iamemilysun.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4893-940X
Speaking About the Unspeakable: Poetry as a Way to Bear Witness to Suffering
- Miriam Wei Wei Lo & Emilie Collyer
Sheridan Institute of Higher Education & RMIT University
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This collaborative paper will be a performative conversation between poets Emilie Collyer and Miriam Wei Wei Lo. Collyer and Lo will explore the unique ways in which poetry, as a form of creative writing, can bear witness to unspeakable acts of violence, and to the experience of suffering. This paper will include shared storytelling and performances of two particular poems by Lo and Collyer that are in close conversation with each other (Collyer’s poem is about rape, Lo’s is about domestic violence). This paper will discuss specific aspects of poetic form that allow poets to put a shape around trauma (including the poetic line, stanza, and possibilities for use of space of the page). It will also address confluences and tensions between poetry on the page and performed poetry as different ways to speak and read the unspeakable. This collaboration will draw on a range of theories that connect poetry to ways of bearing witness to human suffering: including poetic inquiry as social justice, poetry as a practice of sacred lament, and broader feminist approaches to writing from the body.
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Emilie Collyer lives on unceded Wurundjeri Country where she writes poetry, plays and prose. Her poetry collection Do you have anything less domestic? (Vagabond Press 2022) won the inaugural Five Islands Press Prize. Emilie is a current PhD candidate at RMIT where she is researching feminist creative practice.
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Miriam Wei Wei Lo writes to practice doing gratuitously beautiful things. Her latest poetry collection is Who Comes Calling? She is a 2023 Westerly Mid Career Fellow and teaches creative writing at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education. She lives and works on unceded Noongar boodja in Boorloo/Perth.