✐ WRITING PROMPT: POETICS OF THE THIRD SPACE

Consider hybridity as a new language born from displacement and multiculturalism. Much of language and culture today is complex, intertwined, and ambivalent, existing in an in-between realm. In relation to that, identity becomes fluid, and not prescribed or permanent. 

Homi K. Bhabha building on Edward Said’s ground-breaking work on the creation and understanding of the Other mentions the First Space as the dominant (usually a majoritarian group’s or the coloniser’s) perspective, the Second Space as the subordinate (usually a minority or the colonised) perspective and the Third Space as a meeting point where these two groups are in conversation (clashing and transforming each other.) 

Poetics of the Third Space are characterised by form and fragmentation, multilingualism and linguistic code-switching, ambivalence, and counter-narratives (challenging the dominant perspective.) With that in mind, consider the erasure, The War Racket:

1. Intention: What does the text tell you about the modified meaning? What new language is pulled out from within the source language? 

   Select your own source text and make new meaning from it. Consider your connection to this source text and then erase or redact or strike out words from it. Consider the mode of elimination and why you chose it? Is the new text distancing itself from the dominant narrative? Is it sanitised of emotion and complicity? Does it subvert the purpose of the source text completely? Is it in conversation with a particular diaspora? 

2. Resistance: What does the redacted sections present? Is it a new language? Is it silence, a gag order, a decontextualised narrative, censorship, a harm averted? How does the opacity enrich or hinder your experience of the text? How does it make you feel?

   Write a multilingual piece, where one language challenges the other languages in the text. Feel free to think of language outside of mainstream meaning-making for e.g. language as space, as mother tongue, as punctuation, as image, as action etc.

3. Conversation: Write a letter in response to this piece. Declare your identity at the beginning of the letter as a citizen of or outside of the nation. Share your views/concerns. Pay attention to word choices and tone.

4. Negotiation:  Consider the culture born out of displacement, exile, and diaspora: a home away from home. What does it look like? Who understands the language you speak, what are some rituals and traditions that provide respite, what comes up when you speak to the people of a land you left behind, what do you keep and what do you discard, how does it change you? (Explore diasporic in-betweenness, longing, object markers, rituals that preserve a connection to your source history)

5. Continuous Remaking/Transforming: Take an old poem or essay you had written and try the Burning Haibun form on it. What new meanings emerge from the modified text. Perform as many iterations as possible. Be intentional.

   Or take a printout of the piece, cut up phrases or words from it with a pair of scissors. Remake the piece by re-arrangement of the various parts of the text. Try not to eliminate any part (word or phrase) or add any new parts to it. What does this exercise bring up for you? Think of this exercise as an allegory for the ways we are made and remade in our engagement with other spaces through language, food, narratives, borders etc. If you are inclined, draft a poem on your experience of doing this exercise.