Water, Tongue, Land, Touch

Pulau Pulau is the confluence of islands of writers swimming in deep ocean. One calls to another, many begin calling. We find and lose understanding. In the ocean, no language is sufficient. We are forced to pay attention to the water beneath us, time becomes something else as we swim, we follow one another in movement and sign. Sometimes we draw closer, in other places the seas between us appear impassable.

As writers, we are used to swimming alone. For the inaugural Pulau, we brought together eighty writers who between them speak over forty-seven languages, and fashioned tides where writers can swim together. 

We matched into pairs and tasked ourselves to create pieces across language and place that go beyond what each of us can make on our own. We arrived with our traditions, cultures, histories and lives shared in distinct places. Each of us a swarm, we asked each other, how can we write together? 

In this issue of Portside Review, we share two responses to this experience. Marsha Habib and Sayasi Ghosh expand the detective noir genre in the letters between two old friends who after decades of silence have cause to write each other. In the intimate space of their letters, we become entangled in the practice of care between friends against domestic violence. Conversing in poetry, María A Perdomo and Pramudith D Rupasinghe explore the grey that permeates ecological and human journeys in the aftermath of war. 

We try to relate to one another from moving points on different islands as we swim in the waves of the sea. This is the work of our collective, the archipelago, to form relationships between writers and artists in their fight to reimagine their communities. In this, Centre for Stories and Robert Wood have been a longtime friend and ally – from the stories of life in Jakarta in Issue Four to the Makassar International Writers Festival, and the shores of new islands this year. We give thanks to Robert, the Portside team, and Centre for Stories’ community for swimming with us from the Indian Ocean to far off seas.

We continue our work to write together and form community. From island to island, tide and current diverge, crash. Water, tongue, land, touch. 

* Translated to Farsi by Hazara writers Mozhdeh Ahmadi and Hussain Fayazi
** Translated to Bahasa Indonesia by Indonesian playwright Nataya Bagya