The Paper Drinks the Ink: A Conversation with Sam Roxas-Chua

Sam Roxas-Chua is the author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, Echolalia in Script, and Fawn Language. Poet Tyehimba Jess describes Roxas-Chua’s work in this way: “Surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history, this poet’s vision transcends oceans, blends geographies and bleeds a multi- tongued heritage for us to better find ourselves. We need more maps like this in the world, and cartographers of language like Sam.” His poems and artwork have appeared in journals including Narrative, December, Cream City Review, and The Missouri Review. Interviews, essays, and reviews of his work appear in Rhino Poetry, The Georgia Review, and various literary radio and podcast shows. He lives in Eugene, Oregon. His asemic work is featured in Bellingham Review‘s Spring Issue 82.

 

STEPHEN HAINES: First, I just want to say thank you very much for taking the time to talk with Bellingham Review. We are big fans of your work and of course of your beautiful contributions to Issue 82! I realize that you get asked this first question fairly often, but in an effort to situate our readers who may not already be familiar, would you mind talking a bit about what asemic writing is and what it means to you?

SAM ROXAS-CHUA: Thanks for supporting my work and for the opportunity to share what asemic writing means to me. There are many approaches to this type of writing practice and I always make it a point to communicate that my approach is but one of many. I call it a practice because it involves conscious mental preparation—I have to ready myself because what may look easy on print and web form causes a great deal of exhaustion, that sometimes I need to sleep for hours after writing. It is a type of inner-work, I believe. Personally, it’s an avenue to look at my traumas.

The best description I’ve read that still rings true is that asemic writing is an open form of writing. That’s it. Essentially, to me, it is just an open form of writing where one’s sentience is present. It’s literally a writing implement touching a surface from which a script is born—a dot in the middle of a sheet of paper can be seen as an island, a brush stroke across a page is a macro-image of a vein. You decide what it means for you.

When I say open, it means I don’t have preconceived thoughts of any particular outcome. I let my feelings guide me. There’s no calculation. I remain open and trust my memories to show me an image related to what I am working on. Here’s a quick explanation of what I do: I locate an area of my body where I feel a strong emotion. I press my non-dominant hand to that area and begin to ask: What more would you like to say? What memory do I need to remember? Show me. That’s when my brush touches the paper. Asemic writing lets me reach another layer of feeling through hand, wrist, and memory.

My approach is through poetry. When I am in the process of writing a poem, sometimes a line will carry a weight in an image I am not ready to hold. That is the invitation to write asemically. I dip my brush to my ink and let my hand and wrist traverse the chest of the paper. As the paper drinks the ink, memory somehow locates an image or phrase that I am looking for.

STEPHEN: All five of the asemic pieces that you contributed to Issue 82 are really stunning, but I continually return to Chapel of the Seedhouse. There’s something so natural and beautiful about it and yet also unfamiliar and fragmented. Do you find that this juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar is part of your own process when you’re creating asemic art? Is that underlying tension inherent somehow?

SAM: Interesting question. I would say, no. It’s a line that showed up while I was working on the poem Notes from the Seedhouse. It’s a poem that I didn’t include in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater because the poet, Marvin Bell said that “the poem is in its own turf.” I never did get to ask him to clarify. I wrote the piece before I left Catholicism, and come to think about it, I believe my poems had already jumped ship before I did. [Laughter] The asemic work led me to an image of my favorite chapel in the heart of Manila, Philippines, where I was born. It’s an open air chapel with entrances from all sides. I remember how the birds that flew in and out of the chapel sang louder than the priest’s voice on the P.A. system so they would have to shoo the birds away. It was hilarious! The image was created when I took a break from the first two stanzas of the poem.

I wrote this note as I left
my heart with my mother who sat
by a table in front of God’s house,
a chapel carved from cement and push.

Dear siblings of the First Petal
there is one less servant now,
one less key on the piano—
singing from afar.

Let me swim in the next flood
with a dagger between my teeth.
Let me untie the baby, the mother,
and the lamb—let me soften their blow.

This reminds me of a workshop with Joseph Stroud in Port Townsend, Washington, where he decided to skip a poem of mine called Atlas. He explained that the poem is what is called “The Deep Image.” He said that whatever we say about the poem, it lives in its own world. To this day I didn’t know what he meant and I don’t think I want to. Perhaps blending opposites is my normal. Beautiful with the ugly, loud with the soft, death breathing into life. I don’t know. Yeah, that would definitely create tension.

STEPHEN: New Beak and Exhale is another favorite of mine from the work you contributed to Issue 82. I have read that you often use processes like ekphrasis in your work, and I can’t help wondering about that act of creating art in response to other art. Is the asemic writing in the right panel of New Beak and Exhale a direct response to the image on the left? The other way around? Or is this entire piece in conversation with something else entirely?

SAM: I was abandoned as a baby, but was fortunate to have a birth certificate and for some causes and conditions I was able to locate her in 2012. It didn’t have an Oprah show ending. A second rejection happened. I could go on and on about this story but find that it’s best to focus on the two images in hopes that it will let me narrate what I find difficult to tell. The two images are in conversation. Thank you for giving voice to that.

Coming up to that anniversary, I drew the bird image using collected soot made into ink, together with drops of squid ink. I wanted to write a poem by drawing an image. I mean, who is to say what a poem is and isn’t? In the tree where I was abandoned, I imagined I was fed by birds. When I was adopted, I was malnourished and had worms living inside my stomach. I was bloated like an egg. I believe the natural world was answering major questions. “Am I good? If I am good, why was I relinquished? What is wrong with me?”

The asemic writing on the right was a letter to my mother in asemic form where I was trying to exhaust everything I wanted to say. The image of the bird and the letter put together in conversation translates to “I am made of new beak and exhale.” Here is a poem where the title New Beak and Exhale now lives:

THE POEM I WISH I HAD WRITTEN IN MRS. BESLOW’S
SEVENTH GRADE POETRY CLASS WHERE I WAS TOLD
NOT TO WRITE ABOUT THE HEART OR THE TONGUE

The truth is
we need thunder
from time to time
to remind us
that the main
reason for bones,
skin, and other
vernaculars
of the body
is to protect
the heart.
The truth is
we must palpate
the regions
of our bodies
where blood
remains a boy,
a girl, or some
where in between.
We must counsel
each rotating corner
of muscle and pull
about the nature
of thunder
and lightning.
We must remind
the heart that it must go on swimming and reach the highest octave of reason
and mattering.
The truth is
there is no
bowling alley
in the sky.
There is no
hellfire down
below. There
are no beings
who can pull
their hearts out
and light them
on fire. There
is only a red cradle
in the middle
of the chest
and its oars
are our fingers.
There is only
one muscle
that has the last
word and whisper.
The truth is
we need rain
from time to time
to remind the chest
of breathing and other
dialects of beak&exhale
and what happens
in-between being born
and the last expel
is the joy of knowing
others. Those
gestures of touch,
shudder, and sleep—
small collections
of embrace when loss
kicks the doors
of the body down.
The truth is
we must remind our tongues to go on reaching for the longest vowel in the anthem.
We must let our
loudest words rest
in the natural
imperfections
of being born
weeping.

STEPHEN: It’s wonderful to get to see some of your poetry in here. Thank you so much for being generous enough to share some of it with us. You do so many wonderful things in addition to the asemic art. Fawn Language (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater (Lithic Press, 2017) are two gorgeous collections of your poetry. You do fascinating work with video, photography, and music. I’m curious what sort of conversation is going on for you across these different forms? Do you find that you are often in a space of “translation” with your multimodal work? With other artists? How do different forms influence and suffuse one another in your experience?

SAM: I’ve always been interested in the after-poem, feelings left behind in which we do not have words. Sometimes, our known languages are limited and I want to give voice to those unpalpable feelings that exist in the fathoms of human drama. It’s my experience that asemic writing pulls my interest in videography, sound art, and photography. There have to be ways to give voice to the wordless. I feel that poems that have transformed and moved me have touched only the surface of the emotional water I carry. I believe there is a place where each heart of a poem lives and it’s lit up by darkness. Think of the heart, it swims and works in the dark. That inspires me. That is where asemic writing lives for me. It is a tool to tap into memory and feeling through open-form writing and the electricity of the heart.

I’ve been a fan of the Japanese theater movement called Butoh and performances by Meredith Monk. In their expression of dance, I am learning that all human movements, slowed-down, are a type of dance. So I hit the video record button on my mobile device and study how a body, through gestures, interacts with a poem or an asemic illustration. From there, I start to listen to things around me.

A few years ago, I asked a dying tree in front of our house how it felt about having some of its limbs chopped off due to a hard winter. Later that spring, I strapped a contact mic around the trunk and recorded its sounds. In the recording, you could hear tiny creature movements and noise from squirrels. There were no interesting tree sounds, but let’s just say the tree is thriving. I’d like to believe that there is great power in the simple task of asking how someone or something is.

STEPHEN: I read that you grew up speaking four languages: Tagalog, Hokkien, Mandarin, and English. Do you ever intentionally blend aspects of different languages with what you put on the page? Or is your asemic writing always its own separate thing in your mind?

SAM: I think in those languages. In writing I will mix the languages I know together and leave it for others to google or better yet, befriend a person who speaks the language to help in its translation. Depending on the weight of the poem, the brush stroke imitates that weight. So to answer your question, I don’t believe it is separate anymore which explains my non-linear way of writing and thinking. Thank goodness for patient editors! [Laughter]

STEPHEN: I have been following you on social media, and you are always posting something interesting. I particularly appreciate how much music seems to be part of your process—you have a habit of almost always including what you are listening to with each piece of art that you share. I have noticed artists as wide ranging as Johan Johannson, Yo La Tengo, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Brambles, Loscil (all of whom I love, and some of whom I listen to while writing/working myself). Is music always present when you create art? What role does it play in your process? In your life?  What art (be it music, poetry, asemia, film, or anything else) has moved you lately? What are you reading/listening to/staring at these days?

SAM:

MUSIC
You know, I’ve had tinnitus since I was a teenager. I have the high-pitched mosquito type. It’s most noticeable when I’m worried and stressed, but I learned to live with it so I can listen to My Bloody Valentine records and see The Jesus and Mary Chain live—two bands that clearly may cause one tinnitus [laughter] but their music was expressing an angst I carried. But it was only later in life I realized my angst was unattended trauma. I also went to a lot of punk shows when I was younger.

I do listen to a wide array of music that helps me shape my day. If I ever open a record store the music would be categorized in Polaroid images that pull at a feeling. The punk rock section would have a photo of a mouth wide open and screaming, death rock music would be a photo of a candle or Siouxsie Sioux, vocal jazz would have a photo of my father putting on a record holding a glass of bourbon. You get what I’m saying.

Today I was listening to Claire Rousay, a fellow field recordist, who makes ambient music and mixes it all together. You should check out Rousay’s work. It’s conducive to writing.

BOOKS
Mary Kim-Arnold’s The Fish and the Dove
Dao Strom’s We Were Meant to Be Gentle People

Cameron McGill’s In the Night Field
Sacha Archer’s Mother’s Milk
Don Domanski’s Bite Down Little Whisper
Any works by Teddy Griarte Espela online He also has a book coming out soon.

FILM
Two words. Akira Kurosawa

STEPHEN: I will definitely check out Claire Rousay! That sounds right up my alley. And I second that on Akira Kurosawa! Incredible! Do you play any musical instruments? Do you create your own music in any way?

SAM: I play my mother’s broken Yang Chin (Chinese Dulcimer), a two-string cello, a kid’s bass guitar, a found electric guitar, and dabble in electronic music. I like making two-minute score music.

STEPHEN: Do you have anything new in the works that you would like to share with our readers?

SAM: I’m toying with the idea of creating a podcast as my fourth book. Something new that is uncharted territory in the literary world. I think it will be fun.

STEPHEN: Please keep us posted on the podcast! We’d love to check that out. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with Bellingham Review?

SAM: “One eye sees, the other feels.” –Paul Klee

 

Be sure to check out Sam Roxas-Chua’s work in Issue 82 of Bellingham Review. You can also connect with Sam on his website www.samroxaschua.com.

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Featured Image by Sam Roxas-Chua