By CD Boyland

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It’s often good when you don’t know what to expect. Onstage, in the Lawrence Levy Studio at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, ahead of Sean Wai Keung’s performance piece Knead, was a simple trestle table with a bag of flour and bottle of water arranged upon it. By the end of the show, the table was engulfed in clouds of flour, the water bottle was empty and the audience had been confronted (and, I’m sure, surprised) by a performance of thumping power and emotional catharsis.

It’s easy to describe what happens during Knead. Wai Keung stands onstage in a black chef’s jacket, mixes flour and water to make dough while reading from slips of paper.

These readings alternate between a kind of potted history of bread making, and poetical/autobiographical insights into Wai Keung’s life growing up in the UK as a mixed-race child with a white, British father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother.

After each reading, the slips of paper are torn up and added to the dough – dough which, it quickly becomes clear, will never be edible.

It’s less easy to explain the impact this has, how the piece works on the audience, rather than just how it unfolds in front of them. Put simply – bread making, with its usual associations of hearth, comfort and sustenance – isn’t usually experienced as an angry process.

But there is an essential anger in Knead, born of Wai Keung’s struggles to reconcile the different, and sometimes conflicting, sides of his identity and lived experience – which comes out through the way the dough is beaten, the paper is ripped to shreds, the resultant mess is pounded hopelessly, in search of a reconciliation between opposites that may never be realised.

Moments of adroit physical theatre made this a more impactful performance – for example, the floury white handprint left on Wai Keung’s black jacket after he beats his chest for emphasis serves as a striking visual metaphor for his over-arching theme – that of the difficulties he has lived through, in terms of reconciling the two sides of his personal history.

Throughout, Wai Keung’s voice remains level and matter-of-fact. The anger in Knead manifests through the work of his hands, the increasing violence in the way he pounds the messy, sticky, papery dough onto the table-top and the contrast between this process – with its sub-text about words (those written on the shredded paper mixed into the dough) having to be eaten (but by whom?) – and his deadpan delivery.

This contrast speaks of surfaces, outward behaviours and things being one thing ‘on the face of it’, and quite another beneath. It gives Knead a startling, compelling, visceral power. One that we were keen to explore, when we caught up with Sean after his performance at this year’s StAnza International Poetry festival.

Read on for our full interview and more!

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GRB: Hi Sean, thanks for taking the time to speak to the Glasgow Review of Books. Can we start by asking you to tell us a bit about what you’ve been up to recently?

Sean Wai Keung (SWK): Recently I’ve been interested in the idea of cultural grief, especially looking at intergenerational migration and what becomes lost over time – memories of specific places, for instance, or spirituality and rituals, or recipes and agricultural knowledge. I’m trying to work on new things related to all of that and figuring out if and how any of it can be presented to audiences, if it’s on the page or live on stage or whatnot.

GRB: You’ve just performed Knead at Stanza this year, in which you mixed stories of cultural exchange and multiplicity with the process for making dough – how did this work come about, and what are you hoping the audience will take away from it?

SWK: Really it all comes from the idea that the act of kneading is an almost universal one, that no matter what the grains or ingredients or processes involved so many cultures have their own version of combining dry with wet and then using their hands to combine both into a single foodstuff which can then be baked or steamed or whatever.

I also love the symbolism of two or more things being worked together to form one thing, which i think can be a great metaphor for cultural exchange in general. Hopefully the work challenges the concept of what’s expected when different cultures meet – how it shouldn’t be about one culture assimilating to another, but instead meeting in the middle and forming a new, better thing than before. I hope the audience will be encouraged to think about these things more both during and after the performance.

GRB: Food features a lot in your work, can you tell us a bit about how it’s come to be so central to your poetry and creative practice?

SWK: I got into poetry through my love of broken English, local dialects, accents and the slang, all of these ‘improper’ ways to use language which actually connect communities in a day-to-day way. For me, food is just another form of language that can be used similarly. Food can be ‘improper’, it can be hyper-local, it can be a connective device that bridges gaps where other languages can’t.

Over the years I’ve also found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with doing more standard poetry readings, where I just stand in front of folk and they listen as I read. Don’t get me wrong, I love attending readings like that as an audience. But for me as a creative for some reason it just feels much more fun to make my own readings a little more performative and interactive while also trying to figure out ways of doing that where it isn’t gimmicky or just for the sake of being different. I want the form and content to always be as aligned as possible, and often this means that if I want to write about food in some way then I think to myself ‘why not make food at the same time?’ as well.

GRB: You recently published your debut, full-length collection (‘sikfan glaschu’) with Verve Poetry Press – can you tell us about your process, in selecting and bringing together the poems that make up this collection?

SWK: It all stemmed from the 2020 lockdown and not being able to share food or go to restaurants or cafes with friends, so I started to write poetry where the titles were the names of places I had eaten at in Glasgow in the past. Sometimes this became quite memory based but other times it became more about the literal names of the establishments, or even the different migratory histories that the places symbolised.

GRB: The title ‘sikfan glaschu’ references the Gàidhlig name for ‘Glasgow’ – what effect has living in Glasgow had on your work?

SWK: Glasgow has such a deep connection to migration stories in so many different ways and it’s honestly one of the things I love most about living here – being able to have access to so much history and narrative and language and food, it all makes me want to explore my own history at the same time. I also think that Glasgow in general is just a great place to be a poet, as there are so many different communities and opportunities here to connect with other writers and readers from so many different backgrounds.

devotion

• what do you see outside

on the train down

to the funeral all

you can think about

is how each of the

trees you see out

of the window

must have been

planted by a human

hand – much like how

the dry stone walls

demarcating farmland

must consist of stones

selected by someone

now dead. somebody

built this trainline you

think to yourself

and how unfair it is

that nobody knows

their name. the cows

meanwhile know every

blade of grass in their

green fields but never get

to leave their pastures – the man

three seats down from you

on his phone has no idea

about the grass – his window-blind

is rolled down to the world

as if the very thought

of anything beyond this metal

tube is too painful for him to bear

and meanwhile each day

the trunks of the trees grow taller

while more and more leaves fall

off branches to turn into mulch

to grow the grass for the cows to know

and for the people to build empires on

before they too become forgotten

and then you hear now approaching your destination

By Sean Wai Keung

GRB: Your poetry crosses borders between British and non-British identities, presumably requiring acts of cultural and linguistic translation by you, as the author – to what extent do you think this creates opportunities for your readers to learn and see things differently?

SWK: I hope to challenge audiences’ ideas of what belonging means, and through that to then go on to encourage them to think about what connects themselves to others around them. It’s becoming increasingly rare for people to live in the place where their ancestors lived, and even then, how far back do you go before you get to someone who migrated from one town to another, or from one part of a country to another part?

Migration and immigration is often framed politically as a bit of a modern concern but really I think it’s one of the things that could define humans as a species. At some point we have all had to translate culture and language, even if that’s just understanding an accent from another part of the country or learning how to navigate an unfamiliar ritual.

I would like my work to offer audiences the opportunity to think about their own relationships with these things, and hopefully through that they can feel more connected to others around them, whether that’s their literal next door neighbours or another human who lived decades ago on the other side of the world, speaking an entirely different language. 

GRB: You recently contributed work to an anthology (published by Broken Sleep Books) on masculinity – what opportunities do you think poetry offers (in any of its written or spoken forms) to challenge stereotypes and progress broader discussions about male identity and what it means to be a man? 

SWK: I believe that poetry can be one of the most accessible creative forms available, at least if you define ‘poetry’ in a broad way. No matter who you are and what resources you have there are opportunities to make poems, either using language on the page or through wider use of sounds and/or movement.

Because of this, I think poetry can offer people a more comfortable and safe way to explore their own identities and relationships. Some of my favourite experiences of poetry have been at workshops or in events with people who would never consider getting their work published or trying to ‘be a poet’ but instead are just using their language(s) to explore something within themselves. I think that can be beautiful.

In many parts of the world men have also been traditionally been told to repress their creativity or at least to not use their creative skills to self-explore, and so I think having poetry be accessible can be a great starting point for men to do so, either in a group setting or even just on their own as the travel through the world.

GRB: You’ve worked with organisations like the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), and Tramway in Glasgow, to develop performance work like Knead, which explore mixed-race identity, do you feel there’s more of a burden placed on people from non-British backgrounds, to ‘do the work’ in promoting and normalizing diversity and multi-culturalism. How much of a struggle (if any) do you find this to be?

SWK: This is a difficult question as on the one hand I do wish that arts organisations did more to promote multi-culturalism but on the other so many arts organisations suffer from a lack of multi-culturalism within their own structures that I think some forms of multi-cultural outreach can feel patronising, tokenistic and/or fetishistic.

With both NTS and Tramway I felt much more like I was just offered a platform upon which I could research and develop my own ideas without pressure for particular outcomes or goals and for me that was what conversely made me feel comfortable with making work which explored my own identity. Compare this to other times in my life where I’ve directly asked me to write ‘about being chinese’ or something, and that feels very different. Suddenly it feels like the burden to represent any and all chinese-heritage people is put on me.

So for me, I think at this moment in time arts organisations should instead be prioritising just giving creatives with diverse backgrounds the platform to make whatever work they feel called by, whether that’s directly about multi-culturalism or identity or if it has nothing to do with those topics at all.

There are also so many great community groups and initiatives that exist for under-represented people, and arts organisations would do well to reach out to those groups directly to work with them in offering their resources, rather than trying to second guess exactly what resources different groups might want or need.

GRB: One challenge that poets frequently encounter, is the struggle to find time for their own practice alongside paid work – what advice would you give someone, about how to stay productive and creative, while also having to routinely ‘hustle’ for income?

SWK: Be patient with yourself and don’t compare yourself to others. Eat well and drink water regularly. Mark out particular days or times where you promise yourself that you won’t work and you also won’t write, and then use that time to go out into the world and immerse yourself in a park or a street or a museum or a place you’ve never been to before. It sounds counter-productive at times but honestly the desire to ‘Keep Working’, whether that’s for money or for your own projects, can be a huge and unhealthy burden upon creativity.

return

a caterpillar coccoons itself in

an airholed bucket in the hallway of the old house

the problem with resurrections is that

they require a death to occur

first

By Sean Wai Keung

GRB: What other poets’ work have you read recently, that you think our readers should know about?

SWK: At the time of writing Gutter, Issue 29 has just launched, which is the first issue that I’ve worked on as an official editor. I’m really proud of the selection of poems in that and I think we have a really magical combination of work in there. I also had the chance to read and review Marjorie Lotfi’s ‘The Wrong Person to Ask‘ in that issue, and I loved it so much that I will jump at this chance to recommend it once again.

GRB: Finally, what creative plans do you have for the rest of 2024?

SWK: There’s an exciting performance-based work that I can’t say much about right now but will be coming down the line this year. I’m also still working on page poetry for my second collection, which will be 64 poems looking at ideas of cultural grief in different ways. Follow me on Instagram for more updates!

GRB: Sean, thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, and very best wishes for what comes next.

Sean’s collection ‘sikfan glaschu’ is available now from Verve Poetry Press. Click here to order a copy.

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