Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another, ed. Jennifer Cheuk 卓嘉敏
5ever Books, 2024

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another is a mixed medium anthology edited by Jennifer Cheuk. The contributors are of mixed heritage and the work includes photography, multi-media art, poetry, prose, essays and comics. The evocative title is taken from Cadence Chung’s poem cycle, ‘Visitations’.

In her introduction, Jennifer talks about her own mixed-heritage experience, the joy of meeting other creatives from mixed-heritage backgrounds, and the resolve to edit an anthology that both celebrates their experiences and highlights corrosive assumptions. Jennifer underlines how important the project is in view of connections and community building. I carried the word ‘connections’ with me as I read, along with the word ‘conversations’. This is an oasis of vital conversation, between the artists and between the works they have produced. It is also a result of community building, as we see in the list of people that supported Jennifer and its arrival in the world.

How timely and important this multimedia multi-heritage conversation is, crossing place and time, autobiography, epiphanies, challenges.

The cover image, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’, is an evocative artwork by Harry Matheson, and like other examples of his work in the anthology, the rock is layered in poignant meaning: I see boulder, weight, screen. I am reminded of poetry collections by mixed-heritage or non-Pākehā poets that reference the plague of questions the writer endures. More than anything, ‘where do you come from?’ and ‘no, but where are you actually from?’, even when the poet is born in Omarama or Ōtautahi or Tāmaki Makaurau.

At times, creating work, whether visual, textual or aural, is a matter of navigating ‘who am I?’, across bumpy terrain, down side alleys and along flight paths, drawing upon precious experience and soaring imagination. It might draw upon what we speak, what we eat, the stories we inherit. These creative works speak to and for and with and of the creators’ mixed heritages.

The opening comic by Kim Anderson shares the experience of growing up Asian Māori by collaging family scenes, graphics, real photographs, self reckonings. Entitled ‘Kim Anderson’s Museum’, it works as a map of the museum and it is so cool, so affirming, it makes me hope every secondary-school library orders a dozen copies of the anthology.

Cadence Chung, a poet whose work I have long admired, has created a sequence of poems, poems that address visitations, from Chinagirl to Scheherazade, Penelope, an unnamed beloved, a dead grandfather. The sequence presents variations on perfection and failure, self doubt and self resolve. The poems stand as vessels to hold close.

Maybe one day the ride home
will not feel like an ending; it will be
another night in the grand progression
of all things. Yes, I cannot paint myself
as beautiful and chinoi, even though

I try. I cannot sleep without trying just
a little, deluded prayer. I cannot even
tell a thousand stories, like the woman
I crave to be. I have not written a thousand
poems. I have only ever written one.

 

from ‘VISITATION (myself)’

Jefferson Chen’s sequence of photographs entitled ‘blending in standing out’ juxtaposes arresting images (a photograph of a windowed wall, grey, with a mirror image bird and occasional bar codes) alongside text that edges between postcard and poetry. And in the seams of writing and imaging, the plague of corrosive questions throb.

Nkhaya Paulsen-More’s ‘Walking Between two Worlds’ builds a personal lexicon of words that bridge two worlds, South Africa and Aotearoa, a glossary, a guide, links edges harmonies.

Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another is an essential anthology that underlines the strength of conversations that promote connections, diversity, that lay down challenges, that make personal experience count, that encourage us to review who and where and how we are. Today, in this toxic corrosive world, it is so very important. This book is a rich gift indeed.

Jennifer Cheuk, Hong Kong Chinese, Welsh-European is an editor, researcher and curator. She is the founder of Rat World Magazine and is highly involved in the theatre scene as a reviewer and writer. Her interests lie in community arts practices, alternative forms of storytelling, independent publishing and creating more accessible spaces for people to experience the arts.

5ever Books is an underground publishing house based at Rebel Press, Trades Hall in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They are committed to honouring Te Tiriti O Waitangi in Aotearoa.

AUTHOR AND CONTENTS LIST:
Nina Mingya Powles – a creative response
Kim Anderson — Where r u really from?
Cadence Chung — Visitations
Kàtia Miche – What melts into air?
Damien Levi — Ngā mihi
Jefferson Chen — blending in standing out
Ivy Lyden-Hancy — te manu and the sky waka
Jessica Miku 未久 — What Kind of Miracles
Ruby Rae Lupe Ah-Wai Macomber — My Moana Girls
Ying Yue Pilbrow — Wayward
Emma Ling Sidnam — Sue Me
Jimmy Varga — The Asian
Jill and Lindsey de Roos — What are you?
Daisy Remington — What Makes Up Me
Chye-Ling Huang — Black Tree Bridge
Evelina Lolesi — Self Portrait: Mapping Tidal Whenua
Eamonn Tee — Innsmouth
Emele Ugavule — For Ezra
Harry Matheson — Between A Rock And A Hard Place
kī anthony — Never Quite Home
Maraky Vowells — Created Communicated Connected
Dr Meri Haami and Dr Carole Fernandez —
Kechil-kechil chili padi: Ahakoa he iti, he kaha ngā hirikakā
Nkhaya Paulsen-More — Walking Between Two Worlds
Yani Widjaja — Oey黃 is for Widjaja
Chyna-Lily Tjauw Rawlinson — My Whānau
romesh dissanayake — A Remembered Space
Jake Tabata — STOP FUCKING ASKING ME TO WATCH ANIME WITH YOU

EDITED BY: Jennifer Cheuk 卓嘉敏
PUBLISHED BY: 5ever books (see here)

Check out a terrific review by Hannah Paterson at The Spin Off