Borderliner
This series deploys and renews the term borderliner (an obsolete and racist epithet for people of mixed heritage) as a catalyst for multiple, innovative discussions of issues of identity, race, ethnicity and language.
Edited by: Hannah Lowe
Listen nowSpotify | Apple | YouTube
Borderliner
Hannah Lowe
“I see a person standing … in the English countryside, at a juncture point… Maybe there’s a stile. Maybe my imaginary person climbs over and walks through the wheat field or into the field of maize. They can choose.”
Poet Hannah Lowe on the racialised language of slavery and Empire and its aftermath and the racial slurs she experienced as a child.
Dear B
Nina Mingya Powles
“I can still hear your perfect pronunciation, your textbook tones. The way your voice went higher each time you crossed the border between the two languages we held inside our bodies.”
Nina Mingya Powles writes to her longlost friend 'B', who she met at the age of thirteen and shared many experiences with.
Diary 17-26 November 2019
Will Harris
"I have a habit of leaning on homophonic coincidences and echoes. I guess they’re puns, but I don’t think of them like that."
Ten days of diary entries from writer Will Harris as he prepares to give a talk about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 poetry collection Dictee.
A world full of ‘Johns’
Arji Manuelpillai
"I couldn’t be bothered with the long awkward introductory elocution lesson followed by the question: ‘Where does that originate from?’"
Arjunan (Arji) Anthony Manuelpillai's response to his publisher's question about the name he uses for his poetry collection.
The identity parade
Johny Pitts
“I look at the landscape of my childhood … spaces where mixedness took place: drum and bass raves, high-rise estates that served as canvases for a legendary graffiti scene, barbershops, illegal blues parties.”
Johny Pitts on identity parades, the commodification of 'multiculturalism' and its detachment from the lived reality of the working class.
The strangers
Pema Monaghan
"I’m running towards, not from – towards love, community, sometimes anonymity."
The Tibetan-Australian writer and journalist Pema Monaghan on growing up mixed race in Australia.
Border / Line
Jay Gao
“The dead poet is unable to tell me if he has or has not read ‘The Waste Land’.”
Jay Gao's poetic meditation on his translation of Hai Zi's poem, which he titles 'Cruelty'.