Editor's Preface
Cover image: Look Out, Jillian Cheong (Singapore)
This issue, I’m thinking of kin-making, across borders and boundaries, visible and invisible. While working on Issue 6, I’ve also been busy co-editing Making Kin, an ecofeminist collection of personal essays from Singapore (forthcoming, Ethos Books), as well as working with my publisher Blue Cactus Press to put together my debut poetry collection, Red Earth. As part of marketing for Red Earth, I conducted an eco feminist poetry writing workshop Entangled Empathy, which made kin with women from various parts of the world, whose expertise and backgrounds ranged from publishing, visual arts, education to the military. Despite our differences, we came to the workshop with a shared purpose: to explore the entanglements in poetry, nature and the environment, and the role and place of the woman within these discourses.
Kin-making typifies environmental work, and reciprocity is the guiding principle by which the natural world operates. Through cooperation, interdependent species are more likely to survive than if they were to go it alone. The symbiotic relationship between tree roots and mycelium, also known as the mycorrhizal network, is one such example, where interdependence is mutually beneficial to both species. Similarly, in recognising the interconnections between ourselves and others, we are more likely to be able to imagine and work towards more democratising and inclusive visions of what a sustainable planet looks like, for all stakeholders, including our human and more-than-human kin that inhabit this earth.
Two documentaries I watched recently that foreground this sense of interbeing are Netflix’s My Octopus Teacher and Seaspiracy. While the former has inspired in me a greater love of the wild, of wild places, plants and animals, the latter, in spite of and perhaps because of its controversy, convinces me that we cannot claim to devote ourselves to nature without considering our human nature, that is to eat others in order to survive. Mary Oliver writes about this “other-creature-consuming appetite” in her chapter “Sister Turtle”, and while I am a long way from turning vegan (let’s remember that plant life is just as sacred as animal life, as plant medicine will teach us), I’m more conscious about my entanglements with the lives of others that I recognise are bound to me in one way or another.
Issue 6 is our largest issue yet, with works that honour wild plants and flowers in the poems of Meenakshi Palaniappan (Singapore) and Maria Nemy Lou Rocio (Pangasinan-Hong Kong), as well as the photography of Heather Teo (Singapore). We enter forests with Tanvi Dutta Gupta (San Francisco-Singapore-India) and Zen Teh (Singapore), leaving a bit of ourselves behind each time in its encompassing arms, we marvel at the moon’s music and magic with Sofia Wutong Rain (Beijing-USA-UK) and Lauren Bolger (Illinois, USA). We navigate sorrow, grief and loss with Thomas Bacon’s (Sitka, Alaska, USA) “Currents” and we grow old with Cassandra J. O’Loughlin (Newcastle, Australia). The bilingual poems of Fran Fernández Arce (Santiago, Chile-Suffolk, England) and Joshua Ip (Singapore) take us to the fields and rivers of language and dreams, while Danielle Fleming (Louisville, Kentucky, USA) dreams her speaker into memory, tree and elephant song. After Verna Zafra-Kasala (The Philippines-Guåhan (Guam)) questions the habitability of home in “After the Fires”, Lauren Lara’s (Angleton, Texas, USA) Make Space offers us a way of making home hospitable to others in our midst.
As you take your time with this issue, I invite you to meditate on these lines from Theophilus Kwek’s (Singapore) poem, which reminds us of the omnipresence of the other, whether we are aware of it or not: “and all / around us the river radiant everywhere”.
Esther Vincent Xueming
The Tiger Moth Review
