Green Linden Press

Interview with Brenda Iijima on Bionic Communality — December 20, 2021

Brenda Iijima is a poet, playwright, choreographer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including the recent collections Bionic Communality (Roof Books, 2021) and Remembering Animals (Nightboat Books, 2016). She is also the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs and the editor of the )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)). Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. As the UN Climate Change Conference was ending in Glasgow, with yet unconvincing results for the future of our earthly commons, Brenda Iijima and I sat across our pixelated images to pertain to and discuss the strange, visceral entanglements of our Bionic Communality, title of her last stunning poetry collection.

Beatrice Szymkowiak: As editor of )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), would you consider Bionic Communality an )((eco)t(ex)t)? How so, or why not?

Brenda Iijima: I feel that, as a terrestrial being, I am always situated within terrestrial concerns that are environmental, political, social—these modalities function in a matrix, and I never want to separate them, so yes, Bionic Communality seeks to parse the focus of the various valences that constitute the world. )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) is a book of collective voicings. I think of Bionic Communality also as an assembly of presences, vocalizations, and body gestures, always gathering and dispersing. Our bodies are formed of many other organisms participating together in tandem and in diversified ways, such is the case for all living beings. Bionic Communality is about perception and consciousness and how it is formed by inter-species togetherness and co-participation.

Szymkowiak: How would you then define Bionic Communality?

Iijima: I’m interested in how, as humans, we have arrived at our “humanity”—a human construct, it is dangerous to forget this. Is, therefore, the concept itself “human” a bionic component? I work with and against this supposition. The concept “human” is a fortified position, particularly in a Western construct, where, cultural-historically “Man” was understood as standing apart, imbued with special attributes that no other animal or plant had: more important, self-possessed, noble, and thus, by extension, a perception of a birthright that the world was theirs to manage and use in whatever fashion, etc. Ecocide, genocide, and femicide were made easy under this banner. This has always mystified me. All animals and plants have particular attributes, symbiotically coexisting in particular environmental habitats. Animals and plants are co-dependent on each other within formations of ecosystems. We arrived at humanity within a lineage of mammals that goes back millions of years. How can we integrate what we understood, as mammals throughout time, into our toolbox? Perhaps that knowledge is latent. “Bionic” signals that we’ve added a lot of layers of interface—conceptually, technologically, socially, etc. This is a deep dive into considerations of what it means to be human and a reunion with other animals, all other natures.

Szymkowiak: In my reading of your work, three poems (or gestures) introduce your collection. The first one invokes four elements (fire, water, wood, and metal). The second poem evokes a movement of/towards interrelation and interconnectedness, or may I suggest, an “inter-” or “trans-surgency”? The third poem brings forth the “we” of “here and now” and “futurity.” Would you say that these three poems foreground your collection? If so, in what way?

Iijima: The text is a surge of somatic information, arising out of the direct experience of being with earth and cosmos, unfolding with earth and cosmos, unfolding with the historical data that is submerged in the ground—the earth and cosmos. These channels of information are often obfuscated by various blocks affecting attention and consciousness. It felt important to go back to elemental considerations. Look at each element. Hold it, be shaped by it. We shapeshift out of water, wood, metal, and fire. Each element has various states, so I very much tuned into that. I love the term “trans-surgency”—it really expresses the energy of expression that arose in a confluence of exchange between various bodies, materials, various forces.

Szymkowiak: Those elements are also resources we extract.

Iijima: Exactly, those are our threats and our resources; those are the power of the earth, the power of the cosmos. Recently, while working on a novel, I found out that almost 5% of the human body is comprised of metal. We are metallic. Iron is pulsing through our body. We have solidity. Even plants are metallic. And we are very much water, and we have attributes of wood, cellulose. These are so intrinsic to what it means to be a living being. I wanted to forefront these evocative facts. Interrelation, interconnectedness, I felt like I was less myself than a conduit. I used my body as a conduit to connect up with (especially in a settler colonial context) the unsavory fact of political and social wrangling on this continent, a lethal triangle of genocide, ecocide, and feminicide. I never strayed far from my investigation of how these threats arrived together in the past and persist in various forms in the present.

Since I danced these site-specific dances, on mostly private property, I was very aware of my whiteness. The access it provides. The neutralization it performs. I was trespassing almost casually. That would not have been a casual relationship had I been a person of color. I know this intimately because I’ve been married to a person of color for 25 years and am acutely aware of the volatility and violence percolating around the edges of social space when we travel together in time and space. I am female, petite in stature, therefore unthreatening. In iterations of the dances, I performed on a spectrum of fem and butch. I was interested in the differences of response in my body and others. Some people did get alarmed by the dancing—they thought I was experiencing a drug episode, and threatened to call the cops on one occasion, it was still very benign, considering what trespassing means in this country and continent. The delineation of property tells you: you can go here on these sidewalks, but if you step here, you are trespassing. And also, if you walk too many times up and down the road, you’re deviant, suspect. That’s how the “I” gets segregated. However, if we’re a “we,” we already can’t quite be as segregated; we can’t quite be forced by boundaries. So when people ask me what my pronouns are, first I say “all of them,” then I say “we,” as it is more open-ended.

Szymkowiak: “A body arrives on the sidewalk” is the opening scene of your collection. This anonymous body in motion seems to be at the dynamic center of Bionic Communality. In the afterword, you specifically define your text as “a choreographic account of somatic involvements in [your] hometown of North Adams, Massachusetts.” What is the significance of the body in your collection, especially in terms of bionic communality? What is the process behind a textual choreography? How does this process inform (or deform) the collection?

Iijima: The body has this great ability to dissipate into space. We are leaving bits of ourselves all over, we are shedding skin follicles, hair, breath, digested matter, consumer waste. Every exhalation is reabsorbed by the atmosphere, and the cycle begins again on a micro and macro level. Yet, we have this rigid notion of identity, of what is considered “me.” Especially in Western rational systems, all beings and things are specified individualistically without making connections, and this results in very narrow bands of care and concern for the world. All bodies are morphing, becoming, and dissolving. There is nothing resolute about the body. It is an optical illusion that the self congeals in time and space. The togetherness of a particularity is fleeting. Everyone leaves traces of the timeframes (and scales) they’ve participated in. I wish all the trash I ever generated had my signature on it, and all the co-producers had their names listed, and where the materials were resourced was mentioned, and how it impacted those living there, etc. I really would like to see the mound of waste I’ve generated in a lifetime. I want to be more responsible for the way my body has dissipated in and out of space. Even vocalizations continually travel, perhaps up above, reaching certain boundaries in the atmosphere and bouncing back or continuing on somewhere in the cosmos. Conceivably, aspects of the self are forever in space and time because of the recirculation of matter and the ability of sound to travel infinitely. Whatever is shed will be recycled into another being.

Szymkowiak: I would like to know more about your choreography and the process behind it. How did your words come from body and movement?

Iijima: Written language is given the most emphasis because of our legal system. One can see how a legal system permeates everything. Much of literature is organized around a thesis and is then supporting and defending in one way or another. I thought that using dance, loosely construed, was a way to decenter language or arrive at language in a more explicit way via the body and materiality (a totality of form). It helped me shake up any kind of preconceived notions. I was a gymnast and I studied dance as a child into my teens. For this project my focus was not about technique or expertise. I wanted my body in spacetime to come across as anomalous but also strangely totally ok. I hoped to inspire people driving down the street to question what was going on and why, to think about my motivations, to ask: “There is this woman, and we know her, but what is she doing?” The dances took place unannounced with no explanation. Our world is so wonderous and complex, yet it is easy to become numb to the myriad nature of existence and just follow one’s routine, dulled, so not aware of forcefields, of emergence.

Szymkowiak: Did the movements preclude the words, or did they come naturally with the movements?

Iijima: The movements came first, and then I extracted the words from the movements. I really wanted it to happen this way. It was important to consider 360 degrees in space, not just float in my imagination as I am apt to do—to be cerebral, to intellectualize. These instantiations often began by noticing where I was, feeling out the space, beginning to move my body nonnormatively. Asking my body to recognize itself with others, sentient and mineral. To remember who lived here before. Normative gesture is so encoded that to go outside of normative behavioral movement is fascinating and revelatory; it doesn’t take much to bring forth alternative formation. Difference is one degree away. For example, I met a European clown one time on a plane, and she explained to me that all her clowning was in her face. The twitching of her facial muscles. That was provocative to me, that made me think: how do I not use my arms or hands usually? That little bit of difference, what is it going to evoke? It could be seismic; it could be a game changer.

Szymkowiak: Would you say that moving outside of those norms also changed your perception of space?

Iijima: I amused myself greatly [laughter]. I wanted to snort reality. To caress it. Why aren’t all senses tuned in all the time? I want to hear everything; I want to understand tactility anew. I was clawing the ground, ecstatically. I reveled in the permission the earth offers. It is permission that gets abused. The earth is incredibly generous and generative. I wanted to give of myself and give back and give in. Interconnectedness is key: the trees and the dirt—and how I join in through the systems that support life, how I join in through those relationships, where everything is transient, momentary, very sensitive. This heightened sensitivity of all living beings is the greatest revelation. Every touch is also to be touched by others. Here I was on my hands and knees touching everything and everything was touching me, simultaneously breathing in and out of being.

Szymkowiak: Early in the choreography of Bionic Communality the speaker declares, “I am performing for full disclosure.” Can an eco-text avoid the performance of nature or “the us of houses of epistemological space” that you mention in the collection? What do you think?

Iijima: There are many tropes that guide action unconsciously and consciously. Some are super seductive, like theoretical constructs and ways of thinking that are hardwired into our being or integrated thickly into thinking patterns. It takes maximal focus to notice and work alternatively. Sometimes it means becoming illegible. Working outside of recognizability. Especially when it comes to the hallowed category of the “human.” Anybody outside of the human is discriminated, disparaged. This is graphically clear. We have done a such good job of alienating ourselves! And if you don’t fall into line, you are shamed for not playing your role. There are disciplining measures in place to best replicate with extractive principles operative.

Szymkowiak: There is in the collection a constant threat of enclosure, in the shape of norms, infrastructures, commodification, etc. Even the “I” self-enclosure, appears as “a collapsed mechanism.” Could you explain this threat in relationship to the notion of bionic communality?

Iijima: Sylvia Federici was a great influence for me when I was working on this project. She delineates how the commons have broken down and how capitalism has enclosed us. I don’t think it’s just solely capitalism; there are many other features to the power dynamic: geopolitical realities, imperial designs. Enclosure has some softening, tender features too, of dwelling, of home. There are layers that are necessary—buffers. I was just reading about the lungfish; it is one of the oldest fish in existence on the planet. It creates an enclosure for itself when a drought occurs and estivates, meaning it doesn’t need to eat or drink, for seven to nine years. And then, when water comes, it wiggles out of its pod and swims away. That kind of enclosure sounds amazing, and I want to study that! The worst kind of enclosure is probably the industrial military prison system, that forces people into cages. The nation-state is also an enclosure. But I love how a juicy apple encloses itself in its skin.  

Szymkowiak: You use the fabulous and strange word “extimacy.” Can you expand on its signification or significance in your collection?

Iijima: That’s a Lacanian term. Lacan problematizes the polarization of the interior and exterior. For Lacan, the exterior is present in the interior, in what is considered intimate. The intimate can then be thought of as other. This seemingly unlikely connection is what is important. Lacan is always thinking in psychoanalytic terms, between analyst and analysand. I use the term to branch out. If intimacy is about bringing in, extimacy has another dimension, perhaps one more worldly, more inclusive and open-ended, a collective unconscious that opens beyond the human realm. I use the term as a placeholder for the floral-faunal-mineral energy and consciousness pulsating within everything. The term jostles signification in a meaningful way.

Szymkowiak: Speaking of language, there is a multiplicity of pronouns without specific referents pervading the text of Bionic Communality. I am particularly interested in the collective “we” and the individual “I” in term of ecopoetics. In a passage of your book, the two pronouns seem to become one: “the we resembles an I … we come together as curved comeback / same as the semblances’ differences / an I that is we comes to take a reading / of traumatic residue (ache).” Could you expand on this conundrum?

Iijima: I love that shapeshifting conundrum. Our affiliations can be many, we shuttle around in different groups, with different identities, within different structures.

Szymkowiak: Would you say then that the absence of referents speaks to that constant shift of identity that we operate within?

Iijima: Absolutely. Going in and out of alienation, of where we are participatorily safe, with all that is living and dying, in a mutual environment—this has to yield a “we.” It is holistic to understand the mountain as an “I” and “we.” We are participating.

Szymkowiak: Some uses of the pronoun “we” can be…irritating [laughter]. I am thinking of the COP (Climate Change Conference) and its use of the “we.” It might also be part of the “us” as humanity, as bionic entities, with all our iterations, with all these parts of “us” going in different directions, but not perhaps always the direction “we” want.

Iijima: It is very important to point out and resist the universalizing tendencies of a colonial settler mentality. The “we” that’s represented by the point of view of the corporate elite is, of course, hollow, manipulative, destructive. And it is also troublesome for white people to flippantly claim inclusivity while ignoring different levels of access. All that being said, I think there is a baseline where an acknowledgement of sharing space can take place, has to happen more energetically, generously. Resisting communality is a death knell for not only humans but the entire ecosystem.

Szymkowiak: What will be your next move after this book? Are you currently working on another project?

Iijima: I am finishing up writing a novel, and I am now starting another one. The novel I’m in the process of editing traces the fieldwork of the scientists who are presently researching golden spikes, the lines of sediment within core samples that delineate when the Anthropocene started. There are eleven different sites on the earth that they are taking core samples from, looking for isotopes from nuclear fallout, ash from coal-firing plants, mercury and lead, etc., elements that are humanly generated, to find out conclusively when human impact became noticeable. I contrast the work of the earth scientists with a group of performers, all dressed in hazmat suits, doing remediation work, and through their sensitivity with floral, faunal, and mineral presences, they are able to notice and interact with others—we don’t know if these others are from another timeframe, previous or post-apocalyptic. Now I’ve started to write a horror story [laughter].