On Kinship, the Anti-Memoir and Growing New Ears
A conversation with Kyo Maclear about "Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets"
Seven years ago when my husband and I moved to Vancouver together, we read Kyo Maclear’s book “Birds Art Life” as we tried to ground ourselves in our new shared city. Those early days felt fragile and uncertain, and the book offered us hope and validation as we tried to root in new soil and keep our connection alive. As we read we posted quotes from it on our fridge as a way to remind ourselves we were part of communities of beings who had left their home too and planted somewhere new.
This year I read Kyo Maclear’s new book “Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets” and was deeply moved by this gentle, thoughtful meditation of kinship and family. In these past few months as the genocide in Gaza has continued unabated, Kyo Maclear’s Instagram page has been a source of hope and gentleness. Recently we had a chance to chat together about listening, collective storytelling, the somatic nature of grief and uncertainty, the practice of canon building, the meaning of kinship, being an ancestor and so much more. Here are excerpts from our chat. (Note: this interview has been edited for clarity and length).
Shagufta: This book not only speaks so deeply and specifically to the moment we're in now, it also tells an incredible story about your family. On page 81 you write:
“I was also starting to understand how difficult portraiture or memoir become when we cannot trace the area around “me” and “you,” how ludicrous the tidy mechanics of narrative and display are when there are no solitary individuals, no privatized selves, separate from the wonder and the wreckage of the world; what is an “I” if we are all just light and energy, going to pieces?”
How did that understanding of memoir inform your note taking and your approach to this book even from the early stages?
Kyo: I think about that question all the time. I didn't necessarily know that this was going to be a book from the very beginning, but I was taking notes because that's just the way I process things that I'm experiencing in life. Maggie Nelson says that writing for her is a way of engaging in a metabolic activity. She says it's a way to churn things and let them kind of churn inside her until she understands what they mean. And that's the way I grapple with things that I'm experiencing in my life - writing is the way I experience things.
But in terms of your question, how do you create a story when there's no kind of clear circumference to the self - this is a question that interests me immensely. I'm really drawn to memoir, but not memoir in the traditional sense. I'm in some ways anti-memoir, because I really think that the idea of creating a self on the page that's separate from the flow of history, the flow of our social attachments is kind of artificial. I don't think we can understand certain choices that we make or that people in our lives have made without understanding the kind of social and historical pressures they were under. So I'm really interested in biography and memoir that places the singular individual in the flow of a larger conversation.
I've always been drawn to the French memoirists. Annie Ernaux talks about auto ethnography. Her book The Years for example, is the story of her life. But you can't separate it from the context and setting in which she was living. The whole thing is kind of a chronology of her life, but only in the context of what was happening socially and historically in France at the time. I'm really drawn to that idea. For example, one of the things I investigate in this book is the idea of family secrets. I don't think that we can even understand family secrets unless we understand the context in which those secrets were created or the taboos and the shame that existed at the time that created this pressure for people to be secretive. I really wanted to look at that question in particular because I feel like my parents made certain choices, but they were definitely choices that were made under pressure and I needed to get to the heart of that.
The part you just quoted is from a section which I'm kind of talking more ecologically, and I think that the way narrative has been formed in the West, particularly since the advent of the modern novel - this is something that Amitav Ghosh talks a lot about in his book The Great Derangement - that we've really relied on this idea of the individual as a kind of motor for storytelling. I think that it's kind of been a disaster in terms of thinking about ourselves as sovereign individuals outside of a collective. In that book, Amitav Ghosh really looks at how there are other traditions of storytelling that rely more on the idea of the collective. I'm increasingly interested in the idea of how we can tell collective stories, how we can tell our own story in the context of the collective. I think there is a particular kind of Western Enlightenment model of how to create a narrative, and it's created a lot of problems in the way we understand the world around us and the way that we see ourselves as kind of exceptional or supremacist or separate from the life forms that surround us.
Shagufta: Tell me about the structure of the book. It’s structured around Japanese seasons, but I found myself really curious about the titles of the chapters, and how the form and length changed from chapter to chapter.
Kyo: I think it was a bit intuitive. Part of it was that I was receiving information in these small parcels, and so I really gravitated toward the miniature form. But I was also really drawn to this idea of the micro seasons or the small seasons. There are twenty-four in Japan and those are actually broken down into micro seasons and there are seventy-two of those. I love the idea that instead of thinking about seasonal change and these large blocks of four - like the way we think of our four seasons, that there could be smaller granular seasons and that it would change the way we paid attention. Like it was this really descriptive, poetic phenology for thinking about the way the setting in which we live is changing all the time; the ground of our stories is constantly shifting. And that to me felt very accurate in terms of the way I was experiencing my story.
It also made me realize that we think of a setting as fairly static a lot of the time. And one thing that I really wanted to create was a consonance between this idea of the background and the figures in my life who had been portrayed as background or secondary figures. So my mother was not a big protagonist in the sense that partly because of racism and misogyny, she was never seen as a big player, whereas my father was a white man and he was really celebrated as the big protagonist, a war reporter. So his story was always writ large, and my mother's story was really very much in the background. She was the kind of ambient person in my life. She was there, and yet partly through my own inherited ideas and assumptions about her role, she was kind of a background character. And so I started to think really about what that meant and how I underestimated actually how much of a player she was and what a big story she actually had. And I started to think more about this idea of what we consider the background, and I wanted to animate that a little bit.
So the smaller seasons became a way of thinking about how the background is always in flux. It's always changing. It has a lot of agency and it can actually change everything in our lives. I was really drawn to this idea of the small seasons and also to the idea of paying attention to smaller variations that occur. That there's a whole vast, hidden, teeming world of things that are occurring around us all the time in our environments. And we don't pay attention sometimes to those things and they can actually have a huge impact. So, it was a double move. On the one hand, to articulate how important background characters are, but also to pay more attention to what we consider the background and give a little bit more play to the vibrancy of what we consider the seasons and nature and the kind of life around us.
Shagufta: There is a call throughout the book to really widen who we think about as family. You write:
“One way to look at family is to see it as the perimeter we draw against all those we don’t know; something to be fortified and patrolled through the logic of protection. Another way is to see family as forever fluid, regularly and gladly made strange.” (86).
Much later in the book you quote a friend in order to draw our attention to the fact that:
“Scarcity love [as opposed to abundance love] justifies barbarism. It can play out at a familial level or a neighbourhood level, a national level or a race level, but the governing ethos is out of my love for my own, however “my own” is defined. I justify whatever it takes to protect my own.” (308)
You describe living tightly and its impacts and you counteract that image with incredibly evocative language found throughout the book where you are looking at plants, you are looking at birds and you are drawing our attention to smaller things. What do you hope readers take away about picking up seeing as a practice in their lives?
Kyo: When I discovered that my father wasn't biologically related to me, I went on a search, but it wasn't because I wanted to find a new genetic family. Like I really didn't. I'm at a point where I didn't really need that. Although I was curious, I certainly didn't want to come up with a new narrow definition of family. I thought, I'm in this permeable space - what happens when we're in the space and we don't close down? It was counterintuitive in certain ways because I think one thing that happens when we're anxious or we have fear in our life or uncertainty is that we can constrict. A natural tendency is to go into enclosure, to fortify yourself and create an armored wall around you. I think there's a certain kind of myopia that happens when that occurs. One of the things that happens when we're anxious is that we often become very ungenerous. You know, when you're stressed out and then somebody asks you to do something and you're suddenly like, no! And you just feel kind of ungenerous and unwelcoming toward anything that's coming in from the outside. And I had to kind of fight that feeling because I knew that that was a feeling that hadn't served me well or my family well.
But I think what I realized, that maybe relates to what you were asking about the small, was that permeability is actually kind of a superpower and the more I learned about gardening and botany and horticulture (and I have to say, I'm not a great gardener), I learned that actually in that world, in that cosmos, permeability is a strength. The idea of being fortified and hard just doesn't work in nature. The more pliant you are, the greater your chances of survival.
And then I started to think about that in relation to what we're seeing around the world. You know, the Iron Dome and fortified borders and anti-migration sentiment and flourishing white supremacy and nativism and anti-immigration and xenophobia, and I realized that when you look at the opposite of permeability, the idea of strength being fortified and hard has led nowhere good. That vision of strength is increasingly toxic to me. It’s a Marvel Comics version of strength that we have to be hard and fortified and singular in order to be strong. I began to realize that that was not a vision that was healthy for me personally, or in the world.
So I think what I was really working toward was thinking about kinship in a different way, because there is a tradition of these memoirs now that look at these DNA surprises. And often they go in a certain direction. They kind of re-entrench this idea of the true family and blood and belonging. And I really didn't want to go down that road. It didn't feel authentic to me. It wasn't a story I wanted to re-inscribe. So I feel like it was a bit of a gift for me to be cracked open in this way.
Shagufta: I love the phrase willful entanglements that you use in this book. And it made me ask the question: who do I want to be willfully entangled with? In this book you describe that despite being a person who teaches others about listening, you are listening to your mother in a particular way, and then that changes over time. By the end you say, your mother doesn't need to speak in a different way, you need to build a different kind of ear. What kind of an ear do you think we all need to build to meet the moment we are in today?
Kyo: I wish we could answer that question together. I don't know. It makes me want to cry thinking about that question, to be honest. Well, first of all, you use the word willful entanglement. I think one of the things I'm realizing is that sometimes it's an unwillful entanglement, sometimes we’re tangled with communities that are really complicated and difficult. I live in a very multiracial home and community, and certainly in my adult life, I've had activists around me who have always spoken against oppression. And certainly the Jewish communities I've been part of have been anti-Zionist and certainly anti-ethnostate. So I feel in some ways I've been lucky because I haven't had to have those sit down conversations with family members that break you apart. And I wonder what that would be like - to be able to listen in that context, because it must be super heartbreaking, to be entangled with family and to have them say things that go against your values so profoundly or that feel just hostile to everything you believe in. And I don't know what that conversation would be like, and I don't know if I would have the compassion or patience to build an ear in that context.
I will say that one thing I learned from my mum is that I wasn't a good listener. I talk about this in the book because I was kind of controlling the story. I needed to have answers. And I had an almost fanatical desire to find out what had happened. I was the reporter's daughter who had to go in from every angle. It was very extractive the way I was trying to drill her for answers. And it wasn't a healthy way of trying to get a story from my mum. And certainly my mother was not going to have any of it. Like she was not a willful raconteur. She was not a dutiful subject. You know, she never would have been, but she was especially not in that moment.
And I realized the ear that I needed to build was one that wasn't controlling, that wasn't trying to determine the outcome or wasn't trying to fix things. I think about this a lot because my friend who is incredibly wise says “Sometimes when a friend comes to you with a problem, they're not looking for a fix. They just want to be heard.” And it’s really hard for a listener to sit with the uncertainty and the lack of resolution and the inability to help. And he says that actually sometimes the fix is only beneficial to the listener. And he compares it to a drug fix - we get addicted to this idea that we can fix things, that we're omnipotent, and then we approach our friendships in that way, that we can fix things for our friends. And sometimes that's actually not the most helpful thing. Sometimes we just have to listen and help them find their way on their own. And that's really hard too. So I don't know. I think we need a bunch of different ears. I don't know, is there an animal with many ears?
Shagufta: I want to ask you about research. This book is a feast. There are so many references and concepts and ideas that you offer. Why was it important to have this banquet that you're offering to the reader?
Kyo: Well, I would say it goes back to your question about circumference or the idea that I actually have a very wide circumference. My feelings and emotions and thoughts are constellated by a lot of people. I feel like I've been created by all the people around me and I don't think of my thoughts as my own or solely my own.
It goes back to this idea of kinship, which is actually the most important kind of expression of it for me, which is the idea of all those people. My artistic kin, my literary kin. I feel like I'm in conversation with them all the time and sometimes across time. And actually, in the past few weeks, I’ve found such comfort in reading things that were written a long time ago or you know, even going back to read (Edward) Said or John Berger or people who are at least a generation removed from me. And finding such clarity and such kinship and companionship in their words. That to me is a constant reminder that kinship is actually really generous and multifaceted. I'm really drawn to this idea of canon building. We grow up with this idea of what a canon is. You know, we think of the western canon. And I feel like every book is a way or an opportunity to do a little bit of canon building. So for me, this was a way of building a new canon around this idea of kinship. Who is it that informs my thinking around this idea of kinship and can I bring in some unexpected people and bring them into the conversation?
Shagufta: This book talks about what you inherited but there's a theme of the future as well. What are you excited to be the ancestor of?
Kyo: There are a lot of answers to that question. I think increasingly I'm interested in narrative that moves away from the individual and the discrete narrator with a discrete singular story. You know, Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner creates a lot of her books in a kind of choral form. Her book about Chernobyl for example, is all multiple voices. And I think there's something in that for me. I'm very interested.
But beyond that, I'm just really interested in literary community. I really feel like there are so many amazing people that are writing and doing Substacks and creating conversations that feel literary, but also extra literary. They are modeling ways of thinking about the world at a really difficult time. And so I'm really happy to be part of that conversation. That's exciting to me and it's happening in podcasts and in Substacks - it's happening in all these different ways. I feel like it's kind of a groundswell and I feel like it's kind of mycelial. I think about that a lot. You know, my friend said to me that we think about roots in one way - that we kind of grow from one root and then we have this family. But actually if you look around, there's so many different kinds of roots, right? There's shallow roots, there's wide roots, there’s the mycelial kind of structure. I'm interested in thinking about how we can think about roots differently, even in terms of our literary roots and branch out and think about other literary forms beyond even mainstream publishing. I'm excited in all the different kind of forms that kind of storytelling takes. I don't do podcasts myself, but I listen to them avidly and I'm now reading Substacks a lot. I just find that exciting.
Shagufta: I do want to ask you about faith. In the beginning, you write:
“It now occurs to me, with some curiosity, and a little sadness, that people, particularly the “faithless” and those without reliable rituals, grieve in unusual places and that these places are not always so obvious.”
And then you speak in profoundly beautiful ways about the sukkah, how that has shaped your relationship to your own social values, to the unhoused, to social justice, and you speak about Jewish futurities. What was it like approaching that part of the book? What sensibilities were you bringing to writing about faith?
Kyo: Yeah. I think of the Judaism within our family as more cultural and almost ethical and philosophical. I've always been really interested in this idea of welcoming the stranger, which in its pure expression, is an idea that comes out of Jewish theology. But it's also an idea that's been adopted philosophically by people like Derrida and other people who are really interested in Jewish ethics. And that means in Derrida's terms that we don't actually define who is being welcomed or how they will be welcomed because that maintains the power dynamics between the host and the guest. And we want to dismantle that hierarchy. And so it's about inviting oneself to be decentered sometimes and all of that. So that was kind of where that came in.
Shagufta: Your book made me want to read more Jewish philosophy and ethics, and expand my own faith practice and my own political sensibilities through that reading. That’s not a question, but a gratitude for bringing that into the book because it was very impactful.
Kyo: The other thing I think about faith is that I'm really drawn to people's faith practices because sometimes we can't get to things just by having conversations that deal with the material. A lot of the emotions and feelings and what you call soul work that needs to be done needs another language. Maybe that language is ethics and maybe it's for some people, it’s religion. But I feel like we need to have conversations that can allow for us to get to those parts of our psyche and emotional lives and even things like the brew of emotions that people feel. I don't think one can understand them entirely unless you think about people's investments in their faith, the kind of devotion they have. I don't think we can understand that unless we get into the language of it and the ethics of it and the thinking around different kinds of faith texts. I don't feel I'm the person to speak to this directly, but I do feel like it’s a huge part of the conversation that's happening right now and needs to continue.
Shagufta: Because this Substack is called A Little Bit of Hope. Like what is giving you a little bit of hope right now?
Kyo: People are awake in a certain way. And it's painful for a lot of people who are awake. I'm not going to universalize because it's not a time to universalize in any way. But I do feel like I'm seeing a lot of people having really difficult conversations, and I feel like there are a lot of people taking risks to speak truth. And the blowback and censuring have been really frightening. While it pales compared to the terror faced by those in Gaza, I hear every day about people who are facing repercussions for speaking up. And at the same time, I feel like it's a really important moment, and that there's a lot of courage that I'm seeing around the world. People calling for an end to genocidal wars, for an end to Palestinian suffering, siege and occupation. I'm seeing a lot of compassion. I don't know if everyone's building better ears for listening, but I have to feel a little bit of hope. You know, I just feel like there's so much despair right now. I feel like there's conversations that have opened up that weren't even possible like five, ten years ago. So that's giving me a little hope.
Shagufta, thank you for this sub stack. Liked reading it and have lots to think about.
Keep up the good work of enlightening your readers. May you continue to write often.
Love, Farida Okhai