ARCHIPELAGO

1 ARCHIPELAGO . INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE ABYSS. (TUNING IN TO EDOUARD GLISSANT). A FOREWOORD BY TRINH T MINH-HA. Note: Quotes from Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997; French original by Paris: Gallimard, 1990) are here put in conversation with fragments excerpted from my writings, some of which are from previous publications (with slight modifications), as indicated. The bold characters are mine. ELEMENTS The elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely Exclusion is the rule in binary practice, whereas poetics aims for the space of difference not exclusion but, rather where difference is realized in going be- yond (Edouard Glissant, 82). What's your name? The woman breathes out in relief. She has just finished taking a stones journey with her inquirer and is now ready to give a reading of what she has seen. "You're a dreamwalker I see a large blue but- terfly at your throat. A very large silvery blue butterfly slowly opening and closing.

2 Your name appears to me repeatedly. I. can still hear the sound but I can't imitate it nor write it down. I got help from your guardian spirits and was simply told it was 'Autumn Butterfly.'". Autumn bathed in rich golden light painted in colors that neither summer nor winter has ever seen a season of letting things go with its swan song T he color is a futuristic light blue grey: not the result of a black and white m tissage; not two in opposition or in juxtaposition, but a one-in-four where blue, grey, silver, and white (or a mixture of red, green, blue, and silver) come together. **. To refuse the ready-made of packaged, specialized knowledge is to maintain open that relation to infinity within the finite. Pol- itics as a dimension of one's conscious- ness permeates our everyday, which turns out to be most difficult to discover . because it is what we are, what we do, ordinarily. The everyday evades our grasp;. we may try to tame it with order and control, and we tend to equate it with habit, but it allows no hold.

3 It is where the familiar could turn out to be extra-ordinary. As the feminist struggle used to remind us, the personal is political. Not because every- thing personal is naturally political but because everything can be politicized down to the smallest details of our daily activities. Each encounter is utterly bound to the elements that define it [and] the speci- ficity of each encounter would dictate a different course for each film. Each film having its own field of energies, the unique form it takes on in the process remains non-predetermined. Here, form is a way of tuning in with the formless. (In conversation with Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez in Inde- pendent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos, ed. Michele Meek, New York & Lon- don: Routledge, 2019, 240-253). PATHS - Out loud, to mark the split Creolization is not merely an en- counter, a shock (in Segalen's sense) a m tissage, but a new and original dimen- sion allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry (EG, 34).

4 When the very idea of territory becomes relative, nuances appear in the legitimacy of territorial possession" (EG, 15). I am a stranger to myself and a stranger now in a strange land. There is no arcane territory to return to. For I am no more an overseas person in their land than in my own. Sometimes I see my country people as complete strangers. But their country is my country. In the adopted country, however, I can't go on being an exile or an immigrant either. It's not a tenable place to be. I feel at once in it and out of it. Out of the named exiled, migrant, hyphenated, split self. The margin of the center. The Asian in America. The fragment of Wom- an. The Third within the Second. Here too, Their country is my country. The source continues to travel. The predicament of crossing boundaries cannot be merely rejected or accepted. (From Elsewhere, Within Here. Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, Routledge, 2011, 34). **. Why follow only the vertical and its hierar- chies when the oblique and the horizontal in their multiplicities are no less relevant and no less fascinating for the quest of truth and knowledge?

5 Why not explore first and foremost how any theory or any writing speaks specifically to us to our situated social and individual selves from where we are, in our actualities, our cultural differences, our circumstantial position- ings and diversely mediated background? How does a text engage and strike the reader? What layers in the investigation of self and other has opened up in her as she interacts with it in her reading journey? In this continuum where the past and the future happen in the present, one should be able to come in at any point and re- verberate accordingly. (In conversation with Toroa Pohatu in Cinema Interval, Routledge, 1999, 188). APPROACHES - One way ashore, a thou- sand channels A poetics of structure. The creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation (EG, 25). Always start with water and earth when sky and sea meet and land lits up with the sunrays turning sweet, tangy and juicy the world goes round blue blue like an orange gushing over Paul Eluard's line la terre est bleue comme une orange.

6 **. If you record a scene, or let's say, the qual- ity of light in the in the kitchen space of a house as I did in the film Naked Spac- es: Living is Round, what you capture is the intensity of a sun beam that gives a feel of the dark interior, you are not mere- ly showing African or West African houses even though the mode of light- ing is characteristic of these houses. You are first seeing the light through the camera eye and also conveying with it, the experience as a visitor coming in from the blinding sunlit outside into a very dark inside and discovering as you move deeper inside these stunning shafts of light that define the hearth of a home. The whole trajectory shows, for example, what going inside towards the unknown requires; it is at once a physical and a spiritual jour- ney one in which, in order to see, the move from outside to inside demands that you go temporarily sightless. Here, reflex- ivity becomes all-inclusive: everything is interrelated and mutually reflexive.

7 The way we make film, the way we engage people, the way we live our environment, and the way images, sound and text re- flect each other, sometimes beyond our control. (In conversation with Kaori Nakasone and Mayumi Inoue in The Shadow of The Real, forthcoming in FAR-NEAR, ed. Lulu Gioiello). APPROACHES - One way ashore, a thousand channels Errantry, Exile Rhizomatic thought is the principle be- hind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is ex- tended through a relationship with the Other (EG, 11). Criticism is not a mere matter of judging or of pointing, from a safe place, at what is right and what is wrong. The finger pointing out is bound to point back in. In telling, one is told. The reflexive dimen- sion of film practice, for example, could be extensive and indefinite. It is not a mere matter of self-criticism, for what is at stake could be much larger than the self and the human. In the politics of representation, it is not enough to come up with a narrative of self-location as a solution (by showing oneself on camera or by revealing one's attributes, background, and conditions of research for example), just so as to give oneself the license to go on with the busi- ness of representing others as usual.

8 This was how certain cultures' observers con- veniently reduce the question of reflexiv- ity to a question of fieldwork technique and method in their attempts at correct- ing or improving their politics. (In conver- sation with Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez in Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Inter- views, Profiles, and Manifestos, ed. Michele Meek, Routledge, 2019, 240-253). **. For me, what is called documentary could be a movement from outside in. You re- ceive the world and what comes out in documenting is the way you take in the world. What is called fiction film could come from the inside out the way you reach out to the world from the inside. Those two movements are in fact one . one multiplicity. Partaking in what has been called reflexive cinema, each film reflects on itself and refers to itself. The term is, however, prone to misunderstand- ing because reflexive is often thought of only as a focus on oneself.

9 But the self can be small or very vast. With an emp- ty or non-reductive self, for example, one can take in as many identities as there are encounters in one's life. Rather than being bound to let's say, Asian, Vietnam- ese, woman, or doctor, lawyer, scientist or artist, one could actually be skin, water, sea, tree, moonlight in the many realities one lives. Reflexive on all levels at once: between maker, viewer and viewed; be- tween diverse elements of the cinematic fabric, so that the film in itself its forma- tion, constitution and composition is re- flexive. (In conversation with Kaori Nakasone and Mayumi Inoue in The Shadow of The Real, forthcoming in FAR-NEAR, ed. Lulu Gioiello). ELEMENTS - The elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely Closed Place, Open Word (EG, 63). Far Away, From Home The Comma Between (From Elsewhere, Within Here, Routledge, 2011, 11). APPROACHES - One way ashore, a thousand channels Poetics Relation informs not simply the relayed but also the relative and the related.

10 (EG, 27). What is new? There are no new objects so to speak; rather, there are new relations that one can draw from things, from the way people relate to one another, the way things communicate among themselves, and the way language reflects back on itself even when it is used to point to a reality outside itself. What seems more important is how one puts oneself in relation, in the intervals of things, people, moments, and events, for example, so as to bring forth new forms of subjectivity and explore new relation- ships in their differences and multiplici- ties. (In conversation with Toroa Pohatu, Linda Tyler, Sarah Williams and Tessa Barringer in Cinema Interval, Routledge, 1999, 182-83). APPROACHES - One way ashore, a thousand channels Poetics The poet's word leads from periph- ery to periphery, and yes, it reproduc- es the track of circular nomadism: that is it makes every periphery into a cen- ter; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery (EG, 29).