Francesca Beard : Interview

Below is a transcript of the original, unedited interview (though slightly abridged towards the end) conducted with Francesca Beard at KLPAC on 29 Sept 2006


Carmen Nge (for Off The Edge): When did you start writing poetry? Did you start performing it before you wrote it?

Francesca Beard: I very much started writing it in the way that I think a lot of people write poetry, which is they write it for themselves, in a diary. They wouldn’t dream of showing it to anyone. It’s usually about feelings of love and anguish. Actually, how I really first started was I used to really love reading as a kid. And the first things I made were these little books called Maffy Paffy… you know Miffy the Rabbit? So I used to completely copy these books, kind of cut out the paper, staple it together and draw the things and I used to do these stories and made them for my brother. I was always really fascinated by books and writing and used to love to read. And then, as a teenager, I would write poetry but never ever thought that anyone would read it. Although I might have had some kind of fantasy that after I were dead, like Emily Dickinson, it would suddenly be discovered.

But then I was going out with a guy from New York. And in NY—it was already happening in London, there was a spoken word scene. So, performance poetry and spoken word. So it would be maybe rappers, stand up comedians who wanted to do something different, actors who thought, Oh, I want to write. So there was a scene and he said to me, you know your poetry is really good but you should go out and perform it because what are you going to do? You are never going to show it to anyone. And I was like, no way. That was just completely: Ooh No. I couldn’t possibly. And then he dumped me, saying you’re a coward, you’re never going to do anything that you’re interested in. Blah blah blah. For other reasons—he didn’t just dump me because I wouldn’t go and perform my poetry. It was also because of my terrible character! (laughs) And he left. He was like a kind of a minor rock star so he flew off to Japan. It was very glamorous.

So I was in my flat in London… you know when you’ve just been dumped… you just can’t be on your own and you can’t be with anyone and you’re just going kind of a bit crazy in your mind. So I looked through the listings magazine and I saw an open mic. So I went along to this open mic, I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew me—it was great!—with my poems and I signed my name to read and I was so scared.

CN: How old were you by then?

FB: I was quite old; I was in my mid, late twenties. Already well on the way of the journey of life without ever having thought that… you know. So I signed my name up and I read my poetry and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a performance background or anything. But for that whole time that I was there and riding back on the tube on the way home, I just was completely high. And I’d forgotten entirely about this (emphatically in a whisper) bastard. And then of course I remembered. Then the next night, I looked and found another open mic. (smiles) And it became a kind of painkiller for the end of that relationship. And it was actually an incredibly empowering thing as well. (looking reflective) So that’s the very long story of how I got started. (smiles)

CN: Were the poems that you performed that first time about the relationship?

FB: No. No. I mean I hadn’t really had the chance to… Some of them might have been kind of inspired by the great love, you know… and I do remember choosing things that I thought would… I remember even having had no experience, looking through… it’s amazing what an effective editing process performing your work is… coz stuff that you think… oh, that’s beautiful, oh, it’s so sensitive, oh, how wonderful and then you think, I’m gonna actually have to get up and say this in front of people. And then you think: No. No. No. Cut that line. (voice gets louder and laughs)

So immediately there, also, that was quite a revelation—that it was a great editing process and I think, yeah, it was very very quick… it was very apparent to me immediately that this was a great thing to do and a very useful thing to do and not an egotistical thing to do because if you care about your writing, then it’s a way of getting instant feedback and a way of not being self-indulgent and actually not being egotistical, weirdly. Coz I think there can be something very egotistical about oh my work is so wonderful but I’m not showing it to anyone. Whereas if you actually stand up and read it out, you have to be prepared for other people to be bored or say that I disagree. You have be prepared for people to judge you and so you have to be a bit free.

CN: Brave too, I would think. No?

FB: Well, it’s a weird one, bravery, isn’t it? Coz it’s so close to stupidity! (Laughs out loud). No. I mean… I think for me it was about… (looking thoughtful). There was something necessary about it at the time. I don’t think I would ever have done it if I didn’t feel that I had almost no alternatives…

CN: Necessary personally as well as emotionally…

FB: But I’m quite evangelical about the great benefits of performing your work now. And it’s not just my experience. I’d say that a lot of my colleagues, my most respected fellow poets in the UK and also ones I’ve met internationally, I think we all feel quite similarly that it is a very democratic art form. By which I mean, you don’t need to have a degree, you don’t need to have an amazing… With painting you need a certain skill, and then you need to have the materials.

Really, with performance poetry, all you need is the desire to communicate with your peer group and the desire to communicate needs to take the form of spending enough time and energy to make it meaningful for people to listen to and to try and make it entertaining for them. It doesn’t have to be funny, as long as it’s somehow worth people’s time to listen. And I think pretty much anyone has the right to a stage, given that they’ve put the right amount of attention in it.

Whereas I couldn’t say, alright, I’m an architect. Here I go. (laughs) I think I’m an architect. Or I’m a fine artist. I’m a sculptor. I know some people who don’t even write their stuff down so you don’t even need pencil and paper.

CN: Like improv type things?

FB: For some reason, particularly a lot of rappers or people who love music, they can be quite dyslexic so they really write in their heads, so they’re kind of playing with couplets and lines in their heads rather than scribing it. Of course, it’s one of the oldest art forms. It’s oral culture and I suppose when you say performance poetry, people here think: poetry. Oh, how’s that going to?? Coz poetry in most people’s experience is slim lines in a little book or a big dusty book with words you don’t use anymore. Actually it’s not about that. I’d say there are storytellers who are classified as performance poets, there are comedians, there are performance artists, there are rappers. So really it’s whatever your particular skill is that you use.

And I think one of the reasons that there tends to be internal rhyme and certainly rhythm in the work, is that if you want to memorize long pieces, the language has to have a pattern to it. And memorizing is such a chore. It’s so boring to learn just an amount of lines that actually you have to know that the line is worth saying to commit to memory otherwise… you think oh really, am I really going to bother to learn this line? There’s nothing interesting going on. It’s not just about the ideas, it is about the language on that level. And that’s why it’s poetry because it’s about developing a style and a voice and also a love of language.

CN: What do you do to prepare for a performance? Other than memorization, is there any other way for you to get into the zone?

FB: I get so paranoid and neurotic before a performance, actually! (laughs).

I went with the British Council to Colombia—this is a bit of a sidetrack—it was this amazing poetry festival. There were poets from all over the world, international statesmen, you know—African, Asian, South American men and women who were politicians who had helped set up their countries, really great people—the International Festival of Poetry for Peace, in Medellin, the murder capital of the world. Pedro Escobar’s birthplace. Incredibly violent city, the people are gorgeous. And they have this amazing festival every year. I saw all these poets in their 60s, 70s, 80s.

CN: Wow, so old?

FB: Really! With great gravitas and huge experience, amazing poets. They were incredibly laidback and easygoing about most things but just before the performance they all got completely bratty. They were like Whitney Houston meets Mariah Carey: Where’s my water? I don’t want that sandwich! Take the blue Smarties out of the dish! (laughs)

I was like, oh, what’s happening? And then when they got on stage, it was amazing. They were in this state of grace, they were completely present. They were just emanating this positive energy to the audience and were completely emotionally available. It just gave me a real insight into (inaudible) behavior because you kind of need to be able to do that when you’re on stage.

For me it’s less so but for someone who comes with great expectations both from the audience and from themselves, there’s more pressure. You have to deliver. You can’t go out there and phone in your performance. You have to be really there. So, basically, going back to your question, the more experienced I get, the more nervous I get and the more I tend to, therefore, try and deal with the nerves in a useful way by preparing.

So yesterday, I arrived at 12 and we just spent the whole day doing the technical get-in, which is laborious but very useful because you’re just working out the lights and the sound levels. Really, the attention to detail is quite important because… you know, and just making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And for me, as well as remembering the lines, if I’m physically in a space and there’s a light, that’s a memory trigger as well… so even though it’s an hour show, I just thought I can’t speak as fast as I usually do because I can’t take for granted coz English is people’s second language. Although everyone has a really good understanding of English but my accent could be unfamiliar.

So, I’d say there’s quite a lot of preparation time that goes into it just from being in the right space. And also making sure you remember everything is important.

CN: But we wouldn’t know if you forget.

FB: No, you wouldn’t but I… if you forget… it’s like hurdles. Did you ever do hurdles? Because if you get the first one wrong, you’re screwed. It’s just a nightmare—you know you got the first one wrong and you see the whole line of hurdles stretching and it’s Oh Nooo… and the weird thing that happens with time and performance as well. I think it’s like sportsmen and women experience. You can be in a zone and it’s not like you’re in control of time but time is kinda somehow plastic and malleable and you can see things as they happen. You can go with the flow. It’s kind of like this material that you feel comfortable in and that supports you because like music particularly, with songs, it is like that because it is so durational. You’ve got to get the right kind of beat and with poetry as well. If you don’t get that right you’re continually trying to catch up. Or you think I’m going too fast and you’re out of it and trying to get back in. It’s so important to be in that zone because otherwise… and an audience will pick that up, that kind of tension. That Ooh God, where am I?

CN: You do bring in a lot of audience participation. Was that a conscious strategy? I don’t think a lot of people bring in audience participation into performance poetry.

FB: My partner is a stand up comedian and I was really inspired by watching stand up comics and watching how “live” they are. I don’t particularly improvise my work but if you have moments of improvisation, it instantly gives an energy to a performance. An hour of poetry is a really big ask, it’s very tiring to listen and following on from that, the other thing about the interaction is that I know from my own experience from being an audience member, I get very tired listening. Even if it’s the best thing in the world, after a while I get tired. The more active you are, the more work that you do with an audience, the more fun you find it. So that was the principal of it really. The fun element and trying to make the audience engaged in the most literal way.

CN: One thing that struck me is that you managed to weave in what the audience said into your performance. It coalesced very interestingly and it worked. Do you find that in certain places with certain audiences it doesn’t gel as well?

FB: It definitely depends on an audience. In a way it would be cheating if it didn’t. That’s the whole point: that an audience can really affect the whole… I’d hope that there was enough of a kind of buoyancy in the rest of the work, the way that I’d react to whatever I’d got given that it would be entertaining for people who were a bit subdued and weren’t really taking part. In actual fact people didn’t really respond that much last night… people are usually much more forthcoming and much more talkative. So, that would be an example of a night where people seemed really into the show but were a bit reticent in the audience participation. The really difficult ones are where the audience doesn’t seem that into it.

One of the things about performance… Well, there’s two things. The first thing is that even if everyone is smiling and laughing and having a good time, if there’s one person who is falling asleep or snoring or looking really pissed off, you just focus on them. So one of the things about performance is that you’ve just got to learn to get over that. I can’t remember the other thing now.

CN: It’s a contradiction or anti-poetry in a way, because poetry is about controlling the words and language and when you bring in the audience because you can’t control how the audience reacts.

FB: For me it’s very logical in terms of how I feel about spoken word and performance poetry because I love reading poetry on the page. I just recently finished reading a Caroline Duffy collection which… I just find her poetry amazing because, on the one hand, it’s so rigorous, which is obviously great and on the other hand it’s so entertaining, and that is what I aspire to. So it’s not that I don’t ever read poetry on the page because I love poetry on the page and that’s how I started out.

When I was writing poetry that wasn’t for performance, I very much had in my mind a Paul Celan poem. He was writing in the 1930s and he said that writing poetry was like sending out a message in a bottle basically, I think because you never really know if anyone is really going to pick it up and get it. So it’s an act of faith. And I found that really true as an experience and also incredibly moving and quite sad. So one of the things I love about performance poetry is that you don’t have to just send out your messages in bottles and never know whether anyone’s going to pick them up because you’ve got a live audience. So if you’ve got a live audience, for God’s sake talk to them. And not just talk to them but ask them questions and listen to their answers. And that seems to me very logical. That’s what…. it’s different poetry on a page, it’s different from performance poetry. You have a live audience. If you have a live audience, then deal with it. (raises her voice emphatically)

CN: You are also very involved in Poetry in Education. To me that takes poetry out of the individualistic mode and becomes a social thing. Can you tell us a little about the education part of poetry?

FB: I really love it. I’d say that it’s not… I think when I started out, and I wasn’t very good at it, I thought well, ok this is a way that I can make a living as a poet, by working in education and that’s cool, but now I’d say that it gives me as much fulfillment and personal job satisfaction as doing the performance. I find it really challenging and rewarding.

Like a lot of my contemporaries, I believe that performance poetry is a democratic art form and that actually, everyone can do it. And I know that’s a really risky thing to say; as soon as you start saying everyone can do it then you start kind of getting to lowest common denominator: if everyone can do it then what’s so special about it. But actually I think that everyone can do it and I really dislike the way that art has become, in certain cultures, this thing that only certain people do and other people don’t do. And I think that everyone has the right to express themselves creatively. And can. It’s like libido, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.

When I do workshops, it’s just really exciting to either be working with people who already acknowledge that in themselves and I learn an enormous amount from them. Or to work with people who I can see in the course of an afternoon or even a hour, just think: wow, I’m really creative. I can write poetry. I’m poetic. And it’s that simple. It’s like magic for me. It’s like this gift that I can give to people, which was given to me. It’s a really great thing. Everyone uses language and everyone has a right to play with it.

CN: A local professor once said that Malaysian poetry in English is more or less dead because very few people read it. Poetry is also not widely discussed in schools. So what is the reception of poetry in London and UK?

FB: I think performance poetry is really growing. In fact, what it’s getting to be called more and more now is live literature; it’s a new term that’s being used by the British Council and the Arts Council. I think it’s possibly a better definition because live literature also encompasses people who write novels but instead of just getting out some dry passage and reading it like that (makes a strange tone) on lecture tours or in festivals, they’re actually thinking: which passage am I going to be able to dramatize, which passage is going to be most interesting for an audience. And they’re really storytelling. So that can be live literature. And a rapper who’s taken the time to really think about their lyrics can be live literature. So live literature in the sense that it can cover everything that performance poetry can be plus authors who definitely write for the page but also like working with a live audience. And it’s a really growing scene in the sense that there’s more people doing it—there’s more practitioners—and there’s more audience for it.

In answer to that professor, I came through in April this year and I worked with a group of Malaysian poets. I was really blown away by the quality of the writing and the performance. It wasn’t just the writing that was really great, it was that people had in between banter and introductions and were really witty. And the audience was there as well, which was amazing. It’s not enough to have artistes, you have to have audience for it. It was at La Bodega with the Troubagangers. It was a fantastic evening and I was really impressed by the quality of the poets I met. So, just on that level it’s going on. And there were a couple of poets who performed in Malay and that was great and the audience loved it.

CN: How many languages do you speak?

FB: One. I speak one.

CN: In your performance last night you talked about the different languages spoken in London and also how certain languages are dying out. In terms of poetry, if few people understand the same language, they can’t access the poetry for its meaning. Do you think then that there needs to be a lingua franca in poetry? When you were in Colombia, for example, was the common language Spanish?

FB: Such an interesting question. What they did in Colombia, because they were working with so many international poets, was the poets that didn’t speak Spanish, they put with a translator and for me, because I’m a performance poet, they put me with an actor as well. So, I had my work translated and then an actress performed it—simultaneously kind of, to me. So I performed it and then she performed it.

CN: Wow, that’s really unique.

FB: Yeah. But why not, in a way, if you’re going to go for it. I’ve heard poetry spoken in different languages, like in Farsi or in Bahasa and I’ve really enjoyed the performance and I’ve got something from it. I’ve got some quality from it. I haven’t understood the sense of it but the musicality of it and also when you’re in an audience in a crowd, you kind of feel like a little kid. Coz everyone’s laughing and you start laughing and you don’t know why. It’s a nice feeling actually.

CN: Maybe that’s why performance poetry lives because there is the performative element even if you don’t understand the language.

FB: Absolutely, yeah.

CN: How long have you been in London? You were in Malaysia as a kid, right?

FB: I moved to London after university. From my twenties, really. So, I’d say a good fifteen years I’ve lived in London.

CN: What has it been like for you, as a poet and as a Malaysian, in London in those fifteen years?
FB: I love London. It’s actually one of the things that really inspires me. I feel very passionate about London actually and one of the reasons I do is because I didn’t directly go there. When I left Malaysia, I lived for a while in smaller cities in the UK and I found that quite difficult. I found that kind of English village thing very difficult to deal with and I was uncomfortable and I was just very conscious of being different. And what I love about London is that it’s so mixed.

When we had the World Cup, I don’t know of many other cities in the world where when Portugal wins against England, it’s just parties in the street and huge cheers and everyone goes wild coz you’re just going through a Portuguese area. Everyone goes nuts and celebrates. Or when Italy wins, everyone’s just hurray… Because there’s so many Italians and so many Portuguese, there’s so many Ugandans, there’s so many Ghanaians, there’s so many Cantonese, there’s so many Malaysians. It’s a really mixed city, it’s very multicultural and that can be stressful.

CN: In what ways?

FB: Well, in the way that you can’t assume that everyone has the same belief system and values as you. And in a very concrete way at the moment, with what’s going on with the Muslim community in London… I think there’s a lot of people who are very upset about the war and the situation and the fact that there’s becoming this terrible situation where it’s the West against the Muslims… which is ridiculous because we, I think, actually all share the same core values of respecting life and people and so, what’s going on in London at the moment is that there’s such a huge Muslim community there and the Muslim community has a voice and they have power. London’s now really having to deal with… what are we going to do? It’s not as simple to say oh, these guys are the enemy, oh these guys are bad. So because it’s so mixed, and there’s so many people come from different places, there’s got to be a real intelligence and subtlety to reaction and to behaviour and obviously sometimes that doesn’t happen and then there’s problems. Sometimes that does happen and that’s really beautiful.

CN: Are there Muslims performing, poetically?

FB: Yeah. A friend of mine is actually a comedian. Shazzier Moser (sp?). I think she’s from a Pakistani background, certainly Muslim. But yeah, people from all backgrounds are performance poets.

CN: Is there a possibility of seeing poetry as a kind of bridging point for people?

FB: Yeah, I’d say so, definitely. And I also think that the performances and workshops are very integrated and organic in a way. They can really go together. Ideally, what happens is that you have a performance and then you have a workshop and in the performance, hopefully, the audience can see that… I mean, when I do a performance, I don’t want an audience to go away thinking, Oh that’s amazing, I’m blown away but I could never do that. I’d like them to think, that’s really great, I had a really good time. I could do that. And so when you do the workshops then that kind of facilitates it and that’s what’s great about working with the British Council actually because I think they are committed to cultural exchange. And so then they do program workshops.

With performance, it’s not that interesting actually. You go in, you do your performance. I get to talk to the audience but I don’t really… you know… But in the workshop, you really do get an exchange I think.

CN: How was your workshop in Kuching?

FB: I did a workshop with 60 schoolchildren. It was really nice. We had a great reaction. Some of the teachers were a bit bemused. One of the teachers said, halfway through: Is this what you do? Because I think we only had an hour and I was just thinking, I’ve got so much to do with these kids. I didn’t do any performance until halfway through because I just wanted to get to the creative writing bit for them. I could sit down there and do a 60 minute performance. If I perform first, then it might… sometimes they just think: I have to do it like that Oh, I couldn’t do that. If you don’t perform at all then people think, well who is she? The exercises I do are quite fun really and quite like games. 16-18 year olds.

I like working with young kids. The youngest kids I’ve ever worked with are the 3-5 age range. It was so sweet. At that stage it’s really about language skills.

CN: Did you have good memories of your childhood?

FB: I had very dramatic memories of my childhood. I didn’t have a very relaxed, easy, idyllic childhood but I had a very beautiful childhood full of love. It was quite stressful. I wouldn’t change a thing. It wasn’t a great childhood. It wasn’t very smooth, it was quite up and down.

CN: How did your mum feel about you being a poet?

FB: My mum is called Lisa Quah—that’s her name before she got married—and Lisa Quah was a DJ for Radio Malaysia and actually she used to host Bachelor’s Hour! (laughs) When she was 18 she went to work for Radio Malaysia and so yeah, she was this kind of like girl about town DJ and then she met my dad and she gave it up. And she had me and my brother. She never went on about it. She was an incredibly humble woman, even though she had quite a glitzy lifestyle and was quite famous in her day. But she was AMAZINGLY supportive and just so sweet. Especially as she got slightly older because she was always very beautiful and quite glamorous but she had that kind of real charm where she didn’t really realize that she was very beautiful and glamorous and in fact would always kind of dress down. But she was amazingly supportive. She would sit there and not look at me, so as not to put me off. At first I was like, I didn’t want you to come, I didn’t want you to come. She died 3 years ago so one of the rituals I have before I go on stage is I always think about my mum.

My dad is English and actually, he met my mum when he was in a play with Faridah Merican.

Both my parents were amazingly supportive. My dad’s a chartered accountant so he was always saying don’t be a chartered accountant, don’t be a lawyer. Do what you want. So they were both really tolerant and supportive of us.

CN: Do you have any children?

FB: I have one child and I’m expecting another one.

CN: What are your hopes for them?

FB: I hope that they enjoy language. My daughter in fact is really keen on painting. I’m not sure if it’s painting or cleaning! Involves brushes of any kind. Brushes and water (laughs out loud). She loves painting and cleaning at the moment. I am completely unartistic but she really shows an aptitude for painting and cleaning! (laughs again)

CN: So what’s your next project?

FB: I write plays and the next piece I am doing is a theatre piece. I am attached to the Royal Court. I am getting into writing theatre. I used to be in a band. The guy who wrote the music for Chinese Whispers is not touring America in a solo tour with Ben Harper.

3 Fat Virgins Unassembled : A Review

by Carmen Nge

Student theatrical performances can be nerve-wracking events. The weeks leading up to opening night are often a volatile mixture of inexperience, inordinately high hopes and fear of the unknown: will audiences respond favourably or will the play be a flop? Anxiety plagues professional theatre practitioners as well but student actors have an added concern: they want to be evaluated as legitimate performers, not beholden to the yardstick of ‘student’.

One way to break free of this limitation is to take on a play that is both sufficiently challenging to showcase the amateur talents as well as sufficiently “adult” to indicate that the students are ready to break away from their university cocoon. Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu’s 1995 play, 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled, was indeed an apt choice for the first batch of students to graduate from Sunway University College’s Department of Performance and Media.

This writer attended their last show, curious to see if the young actors had the stamina to outlast their five-performance run. The ensemble of four female actors, directed by Zahim Albakri, held their own, adroitly navigating a rather tight space with a minimalist set, and playing to a full house comprising college mates, relatives and members of the non-Sunway affiliated public.

The play tackles themes that are decidedly gynocentric: girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, wife-hood, and the bane of a woman’s existence: men. Three actors—Cindy Tey, Helena Foo and Nurul Ain Mohammed Jamlus—interchanged the different women characters, while Joylynn Teh played the narrator and the men.

The performances were energetic and despite inhabiting different characters, each actor communicated a particular personality on stage. Tey was very versatile—endearing as the wide-eyed, science experiments-loving child and affecting as the serious proto-feminist. On the one hand she was stoic and no-nonsense with the overbearing and sexually crass men in her life; on the other, she was insecure and conflicted about her choice of career and sexuality.

Foo’s character explored women’s uneasy relationship with food, a source of both pleasure and pain. A remarkably entertaining actor, Foo made her audiences laugh out loud with her gastronomic antics and hilarious striptease; but she also infused the character of the dieting wife with a subtle melancholy reserved for those who want to be happy with themselves, yet at the same time, are desperate to fit into a body conscious society.

Nurul Ain was mostly confined to playing the role of wife and mother, which she infused with soft-spoken sophistication and executed with practiced ease. She was demure and domesticated, content to live the fantasy of motherhood bliss and oblivious to her lusty husband and his unabashed paramour.

If the women were decidedly feminine and frenetically frivolous, then Teh’s male characters oozed with bombast and machismo. Yu’s play chose to capitalize on stereotypically sexist male traits, which Teh camped and hyped up. There were more than one male character but they became an undifferentiated mass of testosterone. Teh’s resonant and rich-timbered voice also suited the role of the narrator—a calm but scathingly critical omniscient presence.

Unfortunately, the fragmented pace of 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled did not really give much room for this writer to ponder exactly what Ovidia Yu meant by her term “fat virgin”. The surrealistic ending of the play, which found the characters relishing their freedom in a virgin forest, was an ill-fitting and clichéd essentialist climax to an otherwise postmodern satire. The four women, however, proved that one does not have to be fat or a virgin to be actors of mettle, worthy of a rousing audience.

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This review was published in Off The Edge, 2006.

Transmission by Hari Kunzru : Book Review

by Carmen Nge


Techies are never given enough respect. We ridicule them about their anti-social behaviour and joke about their lack of fashion sense. We watch movies that exaggerate their thick-framed spectacles and satirize their loveless lives in front of their computer monitors.

But when robust viruses and sneaky computer worms infiltrate and decimate mainframes, servers and international databases worth billions, we genuflect at the feet of these geeks. We wait for their viral-busting verdicts and deplore the state of our own ignorance, secure in the knowledge that these masters of technology will prevail and save us from certain doom.

Let’s face it: computer geeks wield power. They are capable of binary-coded benevolence but they are also capable of unleashing great terror unto the world. Such is the thin premise of Transmission, a highly enjoyable, addictive novel by British writer, Hari Kunzru.

With his liberal use of spot-on adjectives, generous doses of sarky humour and sly snippets of satire, Kunzru takes us on a thrilling ride worthy of someone noted in 2003 as one of the twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta, the prestigious literary magazine.

In many ways, Transmission is an updated postcolonial novel; it traces the life of a young Indian computer geek, Arjun Mehta, as he chases his American Dream as an IT consultant in the Silicon Valley. The modern day postcolonial subject doesn’t just aspire to become big in Britain—he really wants to covet a slice of American pie.

“Amrika: Residence of the Non-Resident Indian,” Arjun’s interviewer, Sunny Srinivasan, is glowingly optimistic. “Good programmers like you are gold dust over there. Everyone knows American college students are only interested in cannabis and skateboarding.”

Thus, 23-year old Arjun takes a leap of faith into the imperial unknown, leaving behind his nouveau middle class family in BigCorp Industries Housing Enclave, a corporate-owned township for upwardly-mobile Indians. Arjun’s family is fawning and fiercely competitive, using their children as pawns in the one-ups-manship game that only relatives of huge extended families can play. But if life in New Delhi is suffused with ambition and suffocating, life in California is a void.

The American dream is a hoax and Kunzru paints us a picture of an economic dustbowl that is bleak, yet darkly funny. Life in suburban California is miles askew from Arjun’s fanciful imaginings. Left to rot in a low-income area full of black and brown inhabitants, he comes face to face with American poverty for the first time, something he cannot fathom because it doesn’t exist in his cinematic consciousness. This is the unadvertised America he has to get used to—take-out fast food, mind-numbing hours of trash TV, and the growing stench of joblessness coupled with the stale sweat of despondency.

Kunzru paints a picture of America that is perniciously poised on the precipice of emptiness. A country desolate and devoid of life—a manufactured nation, built on the foundations of its own public relations. This is a California far from the glitz and glam of Hollywood, ignored by those languishing in the seat of superpower status. A year later, Arjun was still at it—shacked up with Tamil Java programmers in a neighbourhood of enormous Samoans, resembling a scene from a WWF wrestling program in retirement—jobless more often than working.

But just in time, salvation arrives, wrapped in a package called Virugenix—global computer security specialist, “home of the Ghostbusters”—and nestled in the nature-infused municipality of Redmond, Washington, “a town with nice graphics and an intuitive interface”—an ideal town for a programmer. Working as an assistant tester, Arjun’s job was the next best thing to being a virus analyst.

As a novel, Transmission takes us on two very different plot and philosophical trajectories, which eventually clash and collide like a good art house film. Arjun’s out-of-control, haphazard postmodernist roller coaster ride to success—fed on the grand narratives of Bollywood romance with Amitabh Bachchan as hero—is matched by 33-year old “paper millionaire” Guy Swift’s carefully plotted modernist pathway to fame and fortune.

“Genetically gifted with height, blond with clear skin and a cast-iron credit rating,” Guy is all about visual perception, image-making and no substance. He is surface slick not inner depth—the quintessential postmodern hero. Sprightly world traveller—the neo-colonial in a technologically advanced world—Guy, cocooned in his international agency, Tomorrow, is ready to infiltrate new markets with his brand of Euro marketing strategy: TBM: Total Brand Mutability. An evolution of an earlier acronym, CAR: Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Guy helps sell sporting footwear, game consoles and snowboarding holidays. His future is the science of “deep branding—the great quest to harness the emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand”.

Kunzru’s novel is a meditation on the idea of belonging. Brand identity is about feeling a deep connection to a brand, embodying its identity, its signature. What is identity in a postmodern world? A man like Arjun craves belonging more than Guy but both men need it. Guy, as a means to mold and solidify his business, and Arjun, as a crutch with which to bolster his own self-esteem as a non-resident alien: never American but forever dark-skinned foreigner, potential security threat.

Yet, identity is an amorphous concept at best. It can be vacuous and slippery, highly unstable and bowing to the whims of national and personal idiosyncrasies and agendas.

Arjun is awed by surface trappings—free lattes at Virugenix, a refrigerated cabinet of free sodas, the geeky paraphernalia of the senior anti-virus team—and also confused by them. The high tech America of state of the art soft- and hardware, also houses the hippie, early 20-somethings eco-grunge workforce in dreadlocks and shorts, Birkenstock sandals and tattoos. This is a culture all about the visual, where identity is a surface marker.

Arjun is member of a generation fed on the social mores of computer alienation—holed up in his room for hours, trying to fathom and then master a binary code encased in a shell. These living and breathing computers birthed a new desire: touch. The longing for human skin on skin, something more than virtual massages of the mind. Arjun’s obsession with creating viruses was akin to procreation without a partner—it was the only outlet of a shy, quiet boy with no true friends but his PC.

Unleashing the Leela virus was Arjun’s way of dictating his future. From LA to Auckland, Europe to East Asia, a beautiful sari-clad icon was dancing on computer screens, systematically wiping out entire systems and years of database inventory, corrupting classified data, reorganizing information (George Bush Intercontinental Airport mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport) and driving corporations built on internet interfaces to their own destruction. This is the new face of terrorism and Arjun is its geeky, bespectacled Osama.

Hari Kunzru is a masterful storyteller of his time; his finger is firmly on the pulse of the here and now: the consolidation of Europe and the assertion of an EU identity; the plight of migrant workers, both legal and illegal; the torture of detainees and prisoners of conscience; the rampant commercialization of values; the ludicrousness of corporate-speak and senseless marketing jargon.

Yet he never loses his sardonic, acerbic wit nor does he compromise on giving us a damn good read.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.

"Everyone Can Do It" : Francesca Beard and the Performance of Poetry

by Carmen Nge


“Poetry in most people’s experience is slim lines in a little book or a big dusty book with words you don’t use anymore,” Francesca Beard says, candidly. “Actually it’s not about that.”

Hailed as the Queen of British Performance Poetry, this Penang-born, London resident chatted with Off The Edge while in KL touring her solo show, Chinese Whispers. Professing to be “quite evangelical” about the virtues of poetry as performance—rather than merely poetry as written text, lifeless on a page—Francesca is a vivacious and luminous testimony to the power of the spoken word.

Her two shows at the KLPAC last month were an unusual cocktail of poetry, comedy and banter with an audience expecting an hour of literary seriousness but then found themselves answering questions about the meaning of their names, pontificating their animal preferences and voting on how they’d like to die. When Francesca gleefully quipped at the start of her show that audience participation would be required, the parameters of performance poetry became decidedly elastic.

The primary offshoot of spoken word, which has its roots in literature, performance poetry flowered in the 1980s, and its advocates reveled in its grassroots appeal. Poetry and music collaborations were not unusual and performance poets from principally US and UK often traversed a wide artistic arena.

“I’d say there are storytellers who are classified as performance poets, there are comedians, there are performance artists, there are rappers,” Francesca corroborates.

The popularity of performance poetry lies in its interactivity. Rather than remain rarified as great literature in academic circles, poetry now mingles with regular people who don’t need a literature degree to appreciate the rhymes and rhythms of a live show.

“[Poet Paul Celan] said that writing poetry was like sending out a message in a bottle. Basically because you never really know if anyone is really going to pick it up and get it. So it’s an act of faith and I’ve found that to be really true as an experience and also incredibly moving and quite sad. One of the things I love about performance poetry is that you don’t have to just send out your messages in bottles and never know whether anyone’s going to pick them up because you’ve got a live audience,” explains Francesca.

The “live” element in Chinese Whispers is very much inspired by the poet’s fascination with stand-up comedians—her partner is also one—and their ability to entertain and engage the crowd. “If you have moments of improvisation, it instantly gives an energy to a performance. The more active you are, the more work that you do with an audience, the more fun you find it,” Francesca acknowledges.

She is also rather realistic about what she expects from her audience: “An hour of poetry is a really big ask. I know from my own experience from being an audience member, I get very tired listening. Even if it’s the best thing in the world, after awhile I get tired.”

Although a little over an hour long, Chinese Whispers managed to entrance. Francesca’s mellifluous voice proved to be a powerful instrument—oftentimes sonorous and resonant, rich with embellishments and rhetoric; other times light, airy and sotto voce in tone, capturing a merry sense of mischief and a jocular whimsy. When she sang, Francesca’s voice was hauntingly beautiful and her soft focus form, bathed in shadow and light, conjured up smoky cabarets and seductive tunes.

Francesca performed long, ruminative poems about the multi-cultural London scene and the cacophony of languages reverberating through its streets; interspersed lyrical memories of a Malaysian childhood with funny alliterative paeans to her pet dog Fluffy (who was anything but); impressed audiences with dizzying poetic factoids gleaned from hours sitting in front of the TV watching the Learning Zone; boggled the mind with awe-inspired lines about quantum mechanics; and spun sassy stanzas about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And her audience lapped it all up.

It’s really hard to believe that Francesca was really scared when she first dabbled in the art form in her mid to late twenties. She had just ended a relationship with a musician from New York, who had been pressing her to perform her poetry.

“So I was in my flat in London,” Francesca recounts. “You know when you’ve just been dumped… you just can’t be on your own and you can’t be with anyone and you’re just going kind of a bit crazy in your mind. So I looked through the listings magazine and I saw an open mike and I went along to this open mike. I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew me—it was great! I signed my name up and I read my poetry and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a performance background or anything. But for that whole time that I was there and riding back on the tube on the way home, I just was completely high.”

“And I’d forgotten entirely about the bastard,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper. “And then, of course I remembered! So, the next night, I looked and found another open mike,” she continued, smiling. “It became a kind of painkiller for the end of that relationship. And it was actually an incredibly empowering thing as well.”

Apart from touring, and attending and participating in international poetry festivals and events, Francesca also works as a workshop facilitator in creative writing, poetry and performance. She has traveled to Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic and Russia to run workshops and master classes with the British Council Live Literature Department.

Live literature, Francesca tells us, is a new term used by the British Council and the Arts Council to encompass practitioners who are interested to animate literature, to make it come alive for audiences. Being a poet in education enables Francesca to make a living but she clearly derives a great deal of joy from her role as an educator.

“Like a lot of my contemporaries, I believe that performance poetry is a democratic art form and that actually, everyone can do it. I know that’s a really risky thing to say; as soon as you start saying everyone can do it then you start getting to the lowest common denominator: if everyone can do it then what’s so special about it? But actually I think that everyone can do it,” Francesca emphasizes.

“I really dislike the way that art has become, in certain cultures, this thing that only certain people do and other people don’t do. I think that everyone has the right to express themselves creatively. And can. It’s like libido, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.”

Workshops appear to be integral to Francesca’s vision of performance poetry because they facilitate the kind of poet-audience exchange that would not be possible in performance alone: “I think that the performances and workshops are very integrated and organic in a way. They can really go together. When I do a performance, I don’t want an audience to go away thinking, ‘Oh, that’s amazing. I’m blown away but I could never do that.’ I’d like them to think, ‘That’s really great. I had a really good time. I could do that.’ So when you do the workshops, then they kind of facilitate that [thinking].”

Francesca’s love of performance is deeply rooted in the social; poetry is, for her, not an individualistic enterprise. To her, performance poetry is “a way of getting instant feedback and a way of not being self-indulgent and actually not being egotistical, weirdly. I think there can be something very egotistical about saying, ‘Oh, my work is so wonderful but I’m not showing it to anyone.’ Whereas if you actually stand up and read it out, you have to be prepared for other people to be bored or say that they disagree. You have to be prepared for people to judge you and so you have to be a bit free.”

The freedom that Francesca speaks of is deep rooted in a desire to communicate, to engage with and to genuinely care about the dialogue between the performance poet and her active audience.
“Really, with performance poetry, all you need is the desire to communicate with your peer group and the desire to communicate needs to take the form of spending enough time and energy to make it meaningful for people to listen to you and to try and make it entertaining for them. It doesn’t have to be funny, as long as it’s somehow worth people’s time to listen,” she says earnestly.

In a world where the lines of communication are increasingly stifled or broken down, performance poetry continues to flourish—from the popular, celebrity-endorsed Def Poetry Jam on HBO in the US to open mikes in KL organized by local poetry outfit Troubagangers. Perhaps Malaysian youth will soon cotton on to the raw potential of performance poetry as a legitimate outlet for expression and real life connectivity. But not before Malaysian parents appreciate its worth.

“Both my parents were amazingly supportive,” Francesca reveals. “My dad’s a chartered accountant so he was always saying, ‘Don’t be an chartered accountant, don’t be a lawyer. Do what you want.’”

Her mother, once well-known DJ Lisa Quah of Radio Malaysia, would often attend Francesca’s performances, sitting quietly and not looking at her daughter so as not to put her off.

“She was amazingly supportive and just so sweet,” Francesca reminisces about her mother. “She died 3 years ago so one of the rituals I have before I go on stage is I always think about my mum.”

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.