Briarpatch’s annual Writing in the Margins contest is back for its 14th year, spotlighting new poetry, creative non-fiction, and photography that bring to life issues of social and environmental justice.
This year, we have a very exciting panel of judges: Erica H Isomura will judge creative non-fiction, Natalie Wee will judge poetry, and Annie Sakkab will judge photography.
You have until December 1, 2024, to enter the contest – details on how to enter can be found at briarpatchmagazine.com/writinginthemargins. It costs $25 to submit (which also gets you a one-year subscription to Briarpatch) and we have bursaries that allow 10 low-income writers and artists to submit for free. Winners are published in Briarpatch Magazine and receive $500 each in prizes; runners-up are published on briarpatchmagazine.com and receive $150 each.
Vicky Huang asked the judges about the role of art in revolution, creating art under capitalism, and their dreams for a better future.
Meet the judges:
Erica H. Isomura is a writer and interdisciplinary artist of yonsei/四世 Japanese and Chinese lineage. Erica won Briarpatch’s 2018 Writing in the Margins contest with the creative non-fiction essay “For The Dreamers” and was ROOM Magazine’s 2021 Emerging Writer. She is currently at work on a visual book.
Natalie Wee invites you to re-commit yourself to life: to resist the genocide against the Palestinian people, to refuse the displacement of Indigenous peoples worldwide, and to pledge yourself to a future of collective liberation. A queer creator deeply informed by grassroots community work, Natalie is the author of two poetry collections, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (San Press, 2021) and Beast at Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022).
Annie Sakkab is a Palestinian-Jordanian-Canadian independent filmmaker and photojournalist. Her long-term project, A Familiar Stranger, challenges contemporary Western views and constructs of Arab women, raising broader questions about how we perceive repression and freedom. Her photographic work has been published in numerous media outlets. She is a member of Boreal Collective and Women Photograph and is represented by Middle East Images. Annie’s second short documentary, The Poem We Sang, examines intergenerational trauma and post-memory in the context of Palestine.
What do you think is the role of the artist in a revolution?
Erica H. Isomura (EHI): Artists and writers are constantly practising new ways of creating language – whether through words, images, movement, etc. – and this can offer insight into past or present-day issues of colonialism, racism, political unrest, and the climate crisis. I think the role of an artist in a revolution is to work alongside grassroots communities toward shared goals of liberatory world-building. Each artist’s role looks a little different depending on their knowledge, experience, and community’s needs.
Natalie Wee (NW): I think the role of the artist is twofold: first to illustrate radical possibility; the other to excavate fact. When artists articulate the world as it can be – equitable, just, abundant – it’s the promise of possibility that keeps us going amid revolution. The artistic work of visioning goes hand in hand with the militancy of being in the streets: as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi wrote, “Palestine demands that all of us, as writers and artists, consider ourselves in principled solidarity with the long cultural Intifada that is built alongside and in collaboration with the material Intifada.”
A crucial part of this work is excavating fact amid the noise and distraction and daily brutality, laying the world bare as it is. Over the last months we’ve seen escalating perversions of language – what happens when we misname genocide as self-defence? Interrogating these narratives is the duty of artists in revolution, because that clarity is so crucial for us to organize against colonial narratives and counterinsurgency. That is precisely why artists must carry an allegiance to truth, to fact, above all else – always, but especially in revolution.
Whether it’s sit-ins at the NYT’s office by Writers Against the War on Gaza or creating counter-programming as part of the No Arms In The Arts campaign – which successfully contributed to pressuring Scotiabank to halve its investments in Elbit Systems – it’s no longer enough to make art for art’s sake. We must find a way our art can live in service to revolution.
Annie Sakkab (AS): Art moves us; it also provokes. In a revolution, the role of the artist becomes even more significant. When you see art, it makes you stop, look, and care. It can reveal what people don’t want to talk about, especially through unsettling visuals. At the same time, art can be inspirational, stimulating the senses and pushing the boundaries of creativity.
A picture can say a thousand words, and a powerful image can change policies and influence how people react to what they see.
Most importantly, the role of the artist is to witness and document what is happening. How do we know the truth? Art creates a visual and historical record that we can look back on and learn from.
What are some struggles that you’ve faced as a radical artist operating within a capitalist system of production? How do you reconcile the contradictions that arise?
EHI: Writing and artmaking are not very “productive” in the capitalist sense of time and resources. How does one go about placing a dollar value on the creative process? And yet artists still need to pay their bills and deserve to be fairly compensated for their labour.
I only recently started calling myself an interdisciplinary artist. When I was younger, I really believed that I needed to pursue a career that was more “practical.” The reality is that I began to pursue my writing and art more seriously when I could afford to do so: I benefited from working at jobs that paid a living wage, receiving scholarships and support from family to pay for school tuition, and early career development grant funding. These things add up over time and I recognize that I’m in a privileged position to be able to create art now.
Respecting artists’ time, knowledge, and budgeting for more-than-fair artist fees is important in my organizing work. As well, sharing resources is one of my love languages and is essential to challenging the scarcity mindset that capitalism fosters.
NW: I’m not sure if I know how to reconcile the contradictions that arise. As much as I can, I allocate time to organizing and refuse opportunities that don’t align with my principles. That sometimes doesn’t feel like enough, but I hold onto the fact that most of us who do cultural and organizing work give our time and labour for free. My artist friends and I joke sometimes that we’re passing the same $20 back and forth. We cook for each other, lend each other books and materials, and spend time loving each other in grief. How can we exist in relation to each other outside of production, exploitation, and capital? That’s what I return to time and time again.
AS: This is a difficult and very real question. It’s crucial to stay true to myself and my work; to enjoy the process and to develop my skills without restrictions on what I want to say or how I want to say it. That’s why I try to get funding from arts councils and non-corporate funders. It’s where ethics come into play here. If I want to create honest and impactful work, I need to stick to my values and my way of working. I often remember what my teacher in the photojournalism school said when we discussed manipulation in photography. If you try to fix something, even if it seems insignificant, do you know when to stop? Once you make a small change, thinking it won’t hurt, it’s just going to get worse. The same applies to ethics – there is no middle ground. It’s definitely a struggle to self-fund personal work trying to keep it separate from the assignments I do to earn a living.
Erica, your essay “For the Dreamers” won the creative non-fiction category in our 2018 Writing in the Margins contest. In it, you denounce individualism while constructing a thread between environmental and racial justice move ments. What is the significance of cross-movement solidarity for you?
EHI: At the time when I experienced the events that I eventually wrote about, I was feeling a lot of frustration with white-dominated environmentalist spaces, which often ignored root causes of climate justice issues as they relate to ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. To me, the connections seemed apparent, but maybe this was because my peers and I had such different life experiences and perspectives.
I often return to Arundhati Roy’s speech “Come September” (published in her 2003 essay collection War Talk) in which she draws connections between 9/11, critiques of American nationalism and “democracy,” and the occupation of Palestine, among other things, through the lens of power. Roy’s speech was delivered more than 20 years ago and I believe these threads of cross-movement solidarity and understanding are more important today than ever before. The significance is in the interconnectedness and many solutions can be revealed there, too.
Natalie, your poem “Today I’ll Write About Revolution” was recently published in Protean Magazine. You write: “Revolutionaries are always told one small life can’t rewrite economies of death / Still they have and will take to buses, arms factories, pipelines, & say enough.” As people on the Left so often will resign to nihilism, the resilience and defiance you convey here is refreshing. What advice would you give to those who currently feel defeated?
NW: I think what we consider resignation to nihilism is actually a product of soul-crushing grief that comes with recognizing what we’re up against. We’re outnumbered and out-resourced as we attempt to build lives worth living within these colonial, carceral structures. It’s the ongoing epoch of the bomb, with the escalating class warfare, and the daily brutality enforced by paramilitary forces and other state agents. I think often of “Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, which opens with “I wake up & it breaks my heart.” It broke my heart to write “Today I’ll Write About Revolution” because it broke my heart to learn about how Hamzah Jihad Furqaani worked 136 hours at 13 cents an hour, while incarcerated in California, to raise $17.74 for Gaza relief efforts. And that’s what it means to live, wanting better. You wake up and carry your broken heart somewhere.
Ada Limon wrote, “Funny thing about grief, its hold / is so bright and determined like a flame, / like something almost worth living for.” I think a lot about that. Sometimes surviving and resisting fascism feels like treading water in an interminable sea, and then once in a while the brilliance of a lighthouse pours over. When I’m convinced our individual efforts are useless, I turn to the reminder of Furqaani’s work. When fear suffocates me, I turn to Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”: “it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” When I’m convinced my devastation is final and solitary, I turn to my comrades and friends, so we can witness each other and nourish our shared dreams. And that shared witnessing is a powerful thing, or at least it is for me. It’s a reminder that we are witnessed in our surviving, that our dignity is not diminished even as we do the work of witnessing and experiencing crisis, of resisting unspeakable brutality.
Annie, your latest project, The Poem We Sang (2023), is an experimental short constructed out of present and archival footage of Palestine. What was your experience working with historical images, especially since many of these referents have been destroyed by Israel’s attacks on Palestine?
AS: I love talking about archives. Working with archival footage on this film opened up a whole new way of storytelling for me.
Because many Palestinian archives have been stolen or destroyed, it was difficult to find what I needed. I came across a lot of material from international media outlets, but it was useless to me – most stories were told from a colonialist perspective. When I looked into Palestinian archives, there wasn’t much there either. Eventually, I found footage from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency library. At least these were human stories, told from the perspective of an NGO. But of course, that meant there was lots of footage depicting refugees and a destitute nation, which I didn’t want to use. I didn’t want to portray Palestinians as victims or refugees, and I didn’t want to mention the occupier’s name or acknowledge their existence.
For The Poem We Sang, I wanted to create art, a film, as therapy and self-healing, not just for me but for all Palestinians. We have intergenerational trauma that we don’t talk about enough though I’ve noticed that this has started to change with the genocide happening now in Palestine and Gaza. And I do feel that there is a new wave of Palestinian films moving toward healing rather than documenting what’s happening, like the films of Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to make a film that reimagines Palestine without occupation, and that shaped how I used the archives I was able to find. The only time I used archival footage to tell history was when I showed the exodus of Palestinians crossing the Jordan River from Palestine into Jordan. The rest of the time, I wanted to tell our story – my story – through others in the archive. I used the footage to tell the story of my childhood in Bethlehem, my time with my uncle, and my family’s story through the characters I connected with in the archives.
And because I couldn’t find the exact footage I needed, I was forced to push my visual narrative and technique further. Even in this reimagined context, the archival footage – because of the way it looks and feels – still tells history, just in a different way. I compressed time and space, making the past become the present, and the present become the past.
RAPID-FIRE ROUND
What’s the most intriguing work you’ve read or seen recently, and why did it interest you?
EHI: Landbridge by the late Y-Dang Troeung is a beautiful non-fiction book written in fragmented prose.
NW: George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. It’s been an incredible read about political philosophy and organizing.
AS: I’m reading Kristin Lené Hole’s Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video, a detailed study on female Palestinian filmmakers. The book focuses on decolonial imaginaries and offers ways to reimagine Palestinian futures. Another one I’m reading is Nadia Yaqub’s Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. I keep asking myself: What would Palestinian cinema look like if Palestine were never occupied? What stories would we tell? It’s heartbreaking to think that our films are always made in the shadow of occupation, as if that’s our only story.
What projects are you currently working on?
EHI: I’m currently working on a visual non-fiction book which blends prose, poetry, illustration, photography, and ar chival materials. It explores my family histories (both Chinese and Japanese) as well as stories of land and waterways.
NW: I’m working on a poetry project about living despite – despite the border, paramilitary forces, state brutality, mass disabling events, and all the forces that threaten all we love. I’m also trying to return to this fabulist novel project I’ve been working on for over a decade, which deals with queer lovers, mythological realms, and resisting gentrification.
AS: I have a few projects but the most exciting one is an animated feature film. I love animation and I love archives. I want to put the two together.
What are your dreams of a better future?
EHI: Safe and affordable homes for all. Intergenerational care. Clean water. Free access to education and health care (in cluding culturally competent counselling, massage, and gender affirming care). No billionaires. Bison roam freely across the prairies. Wild pacific salmon are thriving!
NW: I joke a lot with friends about building a queer socialist commune together, by which I mean I dream that one day we can live lives interwoven in reciprocal care with each other and the natural world around us. I want everyone to have this: a space for joy and rest, the end of policing and the border, the end of capitalism, the end of the war machine, for us to see each other and hold that with care, and for us to live in abundance and total liberation.
AS: For everybody to be treated equally, regardless of race, religion, gender, or cultural background. To be less consumerist, and more respectful to nature.
