Interview #162 — Kaya Ortiz

by Robert Wood

Kaya Ortiz is an emerging writer and poet from the southern islands of Mindanao and Iutruwita/Tasmania. She is interested in histories, identity, heritage and languages.

Kaya has recently published work in After Australia (Affirm Press).

Kaya spoke to Robert Wood about language, heritage, and routes.

This is a loaded question that I will ask as a friend—where do you come from? The question can often be rude, or it is benignly curious, a kind of happy othering, at best. And yet, I am asking it because there are so many directions to take it in—as an artist, as a citizen, as a geography, or, in other ways.

Everything I am stems from where I have come from, in ways both seen and unseen. So I can understand why you ask this question; in fact, I have a whole poem dedicated to answering it, because it’s something I’ve often asked myself. Nevertheless, I’ll try to answer it differently here, and without quoting the entire poem.

In a literal sense, on my father’s side, I’m from the group of islands in the southern Philippines known as Mindanao, with personal and familial connections in a few different cities and provinces: Zamboanga del Sur, Koronadal, Cagayan de Oro. On my mother’s side, I’m from Nipaluna/Hobart in lutruwita/Tasmania, with familial roots in England and Scotland.

In a poetic sense, I’m from islands, from water, from mountains. I’m from the stories my mother would tell us about her childhood, from monthly calls with my grandparents, from 8-hour road trips to my dad’s rural hometown. I’m from a legacy of movement and migration, and from an unconventional life. I’m from dreaming and fear and the not-knowing.

Building from that I guess is the overlapping and interweaving of many threads in your practice. I am most familiar with your poetry, and, here I want to open out that work to others. How and when did you become interested in poetry?

I first became interested in poetry from a young age, around ten I think. During my primary school years, we were given poems to memorise and recite in front of the class, and while I wasn’t much for performance then, I did enjoy writing, so attempting poetry seemed only natural. I stopped writing for a few years when I started uni and academic writing sapped my creativity. In 2016, when picked it back up again, it quickly became an obsession. At times it seemed I was constantly scribbling notes into my phone or on scraps of paper—at work, on the bus, before falling asleep. Inspired by spoken word videos on YouTube, I soon found the sole open mic night in Hobart, Silver Words, where I became a regular. In those early stages, none of the poems I wrote were great or groundbreaking, and many were bad, but all of it was necessary.

Who do you like reading and who have your influences been? That is related to getting a start in poems, but who are the other poets that have stayed with you, whose work lingers, that you respect?

My early influences were the poets I saw on YouTube channels like Button Poetry. Spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in particular, was big influence in those days, partly because like me, she is also mixed race. She showed me it was possible for someone like her to have an audience and write poetry for a living, and she was a big part of the reason that I decided to start performing my work. Another big influence early on was Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo. Like Sarah Kay, I found her work on YouTube, but the first video of Elhillo’s that I came across was sixteen minutes long, and titled ‘Alien Suite’. The first time I heard it, I thought it was one long poem, and I was amazed at how she had seemingly memorised the entire thing. But it wasn’t just the length that shook me. It was the way Elhillo played with language and told stories to convey experiences of migration and being in diaspora. It was Elhillo’s work that truly inspired me to work hard on improving my craft, because she astounded me by showing me what poetry was capable of doing with language, with form, with emotion. I watched that video so often, I began to subconsciously recite certain lines over in my head as if it was a song. There have been so many poets and poems that have touched me and stayed with me, but I think that even now, it is Elhillo’s work that feels like home.

To stay with the poetry for a minute, what are your thematic concerns? I guess I see identity, sexuality, place, history, nature, struggle wrapped up in there. But, is there something that binds these together, a kind of uniting thread, which helps you make sense of the world through poetry?

Something I’ve felt for a while is that writing poetry is, for me, a way of keeping a record. It’s a very human thing, to want to record things, to want to remember. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had this tendency of holding onto objects of sentimental value. When my family moved countries, flying from the Philippines to Australia, we only had a single suitcase each, and into mine I carefully packed an orange box of things that represented the life I was leaving behind as a teenager. I’m an adult now and I still have that box, along with several other newer boxes, but I also have poetry, and writing poetry has become another way of holding onto the memories, experiences and emotions that I am so afraid of losing.

More recently, I’ve also become fascinated by the idea of truth, and poetry as a bearer of truth. In terms of my own poetry, writing my truth is a way to navigate around my own silence and fear. I think of these lines in Audre Lorde’s poem ‘A Litany for Survival’: “when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard / nor welcomed / but when we are silent / we are still afraid.” I write because I have something to say, and poetry for me is the best way to say it. It allows me to be in control of language, to be clear or ambiguous, to be vulnerable and honest, and to let go of my incessant need to be completely understood. It allows me to be known, and yet not known.

To answer your question in two words, I suppose the uniting threads, weaving into each other, would be 1) memory, and 2) truth.

On this too, we need to consider issues like style and form and taste and craft. Do you have any particular formal concerns? Here, I would think of something like voice in particular, but also authority and authenticity, of experience coming through in lyrical moments, and direct address. Can you speak about form for a moment?

For a while now, I’ve been in this phase where my poems are structured in very specific ways. I don’t often use conventional poetic forms, so I have to create my own structures to work with. This is a lot of fun for me, because I like experimenting with form and the visual aspect of the poem, and I also like having the challenge of fitting a poem into a structure. For example, I’m really into numbered stanzas and symmetrical verses. I’ve also played around with structuring each verse differently within a poem, and with adopting more mundane forms like charts, lists and tests.

Can you share a poem for us?

One of my favourite poems that I’ve written (possibly ever, at least so far) is entitled ‘Habi (Woven)’, published earlier this year in Peril magazine.

I am floating down a river

soaked to the skin

a baby in a makeshift sling

my mother

wrapped in a malong

washes her clothes by the rocks

I awake on a woven mat

I awake

and the house is on fire

my body is whole

I am ghost or ancestor

fingers to yellow paper

a descendant pens a letter

my grandparents write

in english

different mother tongues

somewhere it is flooding

letters in a battered suitcase

elsewhere it refuses to rain

water, stone, my bones

a grave in a coconut grove

a faded malong

is an archive

is a record for who?

mum tears a malong in half

another river dries up

the table set for breakfast

I close my eyes and picture

a child in my father's lap

apu

this future for another life

the past unfolding into us

I forget

time is a woven cloth

the Tagalog word for

remembering

everything

is ( alalahanin / lahat )

Talk us through this poem—its process, its approach, where it sits compared to other poems in your oeuvre. And, does it represent anything for you in particular?

‘Habi (Woven)’ was inspired by two things: the first was a workshop I attended, Stories from the Future, run by Diversity Arts Australia, which aimed to imagine a more diverse and inclusive future for the arts. The second was an art installation my sister created as part of her final semester at art school; I titled the poem directly after her project.

I’m really proud of this poem, partly because it’s a contrapuntal—it’s written to be read three different ways: the left side, the right side, and from left to right as you normally would. I’d attempted contrapuntals before and found it very difficult, but this poem basically fell into that form as if it was made for it. When I first wrote the lines, I wrote them formlessly, almost stream-of-consciousness style. It was only later, as I was playing with the poem’s structure, that it became fully realised in this form. I love how perfect this poem is in its weaving—through place, time, language—and the way the contrapuntal form highlights that. The kind of magic I found in this poem is the reason I keep writing: for the moments I become a conduit for my art, as if the poems are writing me more than I am writing them.

‘Habi (Woven)’ fits in very much with current body of work, since much of it is concerned with history, heritage, language and the self. But I do feel that compared to my earlier work, it represents a maturation. I’m no longer writing out of a need to process the trauma of migration; rather, this poem, while it reflects on grief, represents a deeper questioning and a greater focus on craft. At the same time, it also represents my family and my heritage, so it’s an important and special part of my body of work.

I write because I have something to say, and poetry for me is the best way to say it. It allows me to be in control of language, to be clear or ambiguous, to be vulnerable and honest, and to let go of my incessant need to be completely understood. It allows me to be known, and yet not known.

What are you working on right now? And where is the destination of this? Do you tend to write with places and audiences in mind?

Right now, I’m attempting to write a fictocritical essay for my class in experimental writing. I have no idea if it’s any good, or if it can even be considered fictocriticism, since I only just learned what that is for the purposes of writing it. Since I’ve been at uni, most writing—except for assessments—has been on pause, but I have had a goal for a while of completing a collection of poems and hopefully having it published. I like to think that with every poem I write, I’m working towards that goal. With individual poems, sometimes I’ll write with a place in mind, if I see a submission call with a theme that catches my imagination. I wouldn’t say that I write with an audience in mind. I give myself permission to follow my impulses and interests in my writing, because that usually results in my best, most honest work. I like to think that my audience is simply anyone who wants to read my writing, whether they can relate to it or not.

Finally, if I asked where do you come from at the beginning of this interview, I want to ask, where are you going? Is it a place, a feeling, a poetic territory? Is it unknown, and from that, how do you plan to get there?

I’ve reached a point in my life recently where my vision for the future suddenly looks very different to how it used to look. It’s both terrifying and exciting, because it feels as though, for the first time in my life, I’m truly forging my own path. Any future is, in some way, unknown, and that rings especially true for me now. But there are some things I can picture: getting my Masters, and eventually a PhD, are a big part of it. For some reason I see myself in academia, and if I do end up there, it would be amazing as a queer woman of colour to be the representation I never saw in my own lecture halls. Publishing a full-length collection of poems, and maybe a second one. Figuring out what this new life, this authentic life, is going to look like. Being brave enough to do all of that. And how do I plan to get there? I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, and that means feeling the fear and jumping in anyway.

Do you have any advice for emerging poets?

There’s no single perfect path to ‘success.’ You can start wherever you need to start, whether that’s writing poetry on Tumblr or Instagram, in a classroom, performing at an open mic, or honing your craft for years until one day you get published in a print journal. Every path is valid. I believe the most important thing is to keep learning, reading, writing, experimenting. Try new things, find your voice, find other emerging writers, find community. Also, if you get discouraged and wonder if this is all worth it, that’s normal. We’re not in poetry for the fame or the money, but for the love of it. Hold on to that as much as you can.

Who are you inspired by?

I’m inspired by my family. My dad, who worked his way through school in the Philippines until he got his PhD at the age of 39. My mum, who started a Bachelor’s degree in her forties. My sister, who started out studying maths, lived in another country for a few years, and then came back and went to art school. All of these examples are academia-oriented for some reason. I guess that’s the headspace I’m in but at the same time, these stories all represent the idea that there is no single perfect path and that it’s never too late to do or learn something new.

What are you listening to?

I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s folklore album since it came out. I’m not great at keeping up with podcasts but my favourite one that I try to listen to is the Filipino-Australian podcast Titas and Tea, hosted by Gloria Demillo.

What are you reading?

I’ve been reading from Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and a bit of Michel Foucault’s A History of Sexuality Vol. I, both for the fictocritical essay I’m working on. Once this assignment is done, I plan to start working through my pile of unread books, starting with Throat by Ellen van Neerven.

How do you practice self-care?

I think maybe I’m not very good at self-care. But I plan my days off, and I try to make sure I always get enough sleep. I put my feet up after work and I watch Star Trek: Discovery with my partner. I create new monthly playlists. Maybe this is enough.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

Firstly, to me, being Asian-Australian means acknowledging my privilege as a settler on stolen Aboriginal land. It means being in solidarity with First Nations people against ongoing colonial violence, racism and white supremacy. It means acknowledging the homogeneity of Asian as a category, and questioning all the assumptions that come with it. It means recognising that Australia is a colonial nation, and that to be a non-Indigenous person on this land is to be complicit in the oppression of First Nations people. It means knowing that in spite of these critiques, the term Asian-Australian aims to create a space for us and recognises that, as diverse as we all are, there is a commonality to our experiences, especially within the context of white Australia, and that we can find community here.