The term multi-hyphenate, one Kendra Sullivan references in passing in the interview below, doesn’t quite cover it. In the 1.5-plus decades I have known her, I have had the pleasure of encountering her as a printer and bookbinder, a publisher, an event organizer, the collaborating custodian of a former diner turned cinema and all-purpose gathering space, a builder of boats and ecologist, a scholar, a friend who cooked me food and would have loaned me money if I had let her when I was hungry and broke after a terrible breakup, a mother, a teacher, and, of course, a stunning poet. Somehow, I had forgotten, in the midst of all these talents and roles, that in another life Kendra was an elite athlete, but yes, that checks, too. I was honored to speak with her on the occasion of the publication of her new book Reps (UDP), a collection that I look forward to hearing read aloud by Kendra as soon as possible, because it’s one thing to know intellectually that someone is a prismatic and multidimensional being; it’s another to hear their voice filling the room.
—Lucy Ives
Lucy Ives: I wanted to ask you what the title, Reps, means.
Kendra Sullivan: Dan Owens and Kyra Simone at UDP urged me to reconsider my original title, Exercises Against Empathy. We arrived at the idea of Reps together. Both Exercises and Reps nod to Kathy Acker’s “exercises,” a writing practice that grew out of her devotion to calisthenics and weightlifting. My title points toward repetition, reproduction, and representation, some preoccupations of mine. The book’s form and method were inspired most directly by Renee Gladman’s Calamities. Also by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. And, of course, you, Lucy!
LI: I’m very honored to be included in this illustrious group. Also, are you into weightlifting?
KS: I have no idea if this is interesting or embarrassing, but I was a competitive gymnast until I injured myself in the middle of a floor exercise during a meet at age 16. My identity was “gymnast.” After a year and half of physical therapy marked by superficially insignificant yet structurally profound reconstruction, I strapped on two offloader braces and got back to the gym. But nothing worked. Because a springboard is easier on the knees, I became a competitive diver at a pretty elite level. Now I’m a certified yoga and pilates instructor. Repetitive exercises are something I return to when I don’t know how else to bridge an impasse, a kind of repair work. As I get older, it seems like every day presents an impasse, so repair is ongoing.
LI: This is very interesting. Will you say more about how Reps works? Will you tell me more about the original title—why “against empathy”?
KS: The methodological inquiry at the heart of the project could be described in three ways. The first inquiry builds on your suggestion that memories are an inexhaustible resource, a reservoir that yields abundance without drawing down or diminishing its store—something you shared during your Zoom workshop on “Memory Palaces” for the Project during the pandemic.
Following my interpretation of your logic, I wondered: Are listening and reading portals to speaking and writing? Is the urge to read a sublimated desire to write? Or is the urge to write the sublimated desire to read? Either way, desire renews itself in its near other. It may be that reading and writing are circular, like breathwork. When, in Columbus and other Cannibals, Jack Forbes writes, “That which the tree exhales, I inhale. That which I exhale, the trees inhale. Together we form a circle,” it suggests to me that language exchange is also a circuit that connects bodies through listening and voicing in much the same way as breath connects bodies through inhaling and exhaling. The stories we share shape and activate a common vascular system.
The second inquiry explores nonlinear and anti-narrative storytelling. Anti-narrative is one way to chronicle lives without the drag of “stable identity” slowing down a character in flight. As a poetic praxis, it courts high drama, disordered plot, and the stringing together of associative insights. By skip-hopping between rising action, falling action, resolution, exposition, and climax, the poems blend plotlines into an intrapersonal memoir. It’s like a community biography riddled with potholes or portals into other plotlines and people’s lives.
LI: What’s the third?
KS: Right. Nawal El-Saadawi has said that personal memories are a source of political power. The third inquiry asks what happens when an individual lays claim to memories that do not map onto direct experience but—without feeling any less real—originate in intrapersonal, intracultural, and intragenerational memories.
Audre Lorde famously referred to herself as a hyphenated person—a string of seemingly discrete identities connected by her lived life. El-Saadawi is an Egyptian writer-physician, a feminist critic who has produced literature and policy around female genital mutilation, and an activist-psychiatrist who has lived through multiple inflection points in history where the pinwheel of time turned the world on its head. A hyphenated identity enabled El-Saadawi to skip-hop between sectors, between epochs, and between movements.
These authors theorize ways to escape the idea that chronology and coherence are central to (solo or group) identity. Narrative might seem like a stylistic or aesthetic entity that holds reality together, but I actually think it fragments, undermines, and even polices a less containable, living universe. A refusal to contain life is also the path of abolition, and in my opinion anti-narrative is on the side of human and nonhuman liberation. I have no illusions these poems will secure it at any scale.
LI: How does form play into these commitments?
KS: The formal arc of the book takes the reader from confined to unfettered, from prose blocks in “Exercises Against Empathy” to free verse in “Margaret, are you grieving?”
LI: Do you consider the prose poem an unconfined form?
KS: I chose prose blocks for a sort of diagrammatic reason. They became a visual prop that enabled me to sustain a conceit stemming from my fixation on the trappings of Western, scientific empiricism, which is by nature an expression of the patriarchy.
Brownian movement or motion describes the way that particles suspended in a liquid medium behave erratically in enclosed spaces. Brownian movement is key to theoretical physicist David Bohm’s theory of implicate and explicate order—two ontological concepts that explain the implications of quantum theory for theories of human consciousness. Bohm says explicate order can be seen, tested, or proven. It’s a “matter” of “fact” and “fact” is “unfolded” through material reality in action. Implicate order on the other hand can be sensed, perceived, or intuited. It’s a “matter” of consciousness. Consciousness “enfolds” “matter” into mind where it gains a different kind of foothold on reality. Enfolding is his word for how humans internally and autonomously reproduce reality and then act on and in that reproduction.
But wait, let me tell you what this has to do with prose blocks! Scientists got to know Brownian motion by observing the behavior of insoluble particles suspended in a container full of colloidal fluid. Scripted by collision and impact, their motions appear random—locally—but exhibit a pattern if considered from a more global perspective. I imagined the characters in the poems as particles. The liquid medium in which their actions, inactions, decisions, and deliberations are suspended is, of course, language—the activity of language.
Recently, Coco Fitterman introduced me to Marguerite Feitlowitz’s translation of Chilean poet Ennio Moltedo’s Night. Moltedo’s notion of the prose poem as a mini-epic or mini-fiction excites me: his poems strike me as maximalist in terms of drama and minimalist in terms of plot. They illuminate certain truths and protect others from the light. The suppression of key details that might locate the speaker, the addressee, or the poet in a real place and time may be a result of the fact that he was writing under Pinochet’s dictatorship. The motion to reveal and conceal is constructive of believable inner realities that don’t need to be propped up by narrative scaffolds. I turned to prose poems because, as Moltedo writes, they enable the poet to speak without a handrail of stanza or free-verse forms.
LI: Still, there’s something explicitly autobiographical about these poems. Proper nouns, what I take to be people’s names, title the poems in “A Typology of Possible Biographies.” Are these folks you know?
KS: Yes! I read that the formula for George Eliot’s nom de plume was “To L I Owe It,” in honor of her partner, George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived in union until his death, although they weren’t able to marry. I should have called this book “To L I Owe It,” because Memory Palaces really was the catalyst for the first and second sections. “Typologies” came out of the exercise you shared with us wherein each person tells a version of their life in relation to a random plural noun. I practiced this exercise with friends from around the world throughout the pandemic, and each time, while they told their story in relation to “books,” or “beans,” or “parks,” I reverse engineered writing prompts to close a circle of call and response that led us out of the individual or particular and into the shared. I guess you might call the poems in this suite lyric forms that rely on methods of deep listening. This relational writing process helped me think through how many strands of meaning, moments of inter-being, and paths of inquiry might be derived/abstracted from the basic unit of an individual life.
LI: You write, “A version of Earth that ignores its own suffering is called a map.” This seems to reformulate the “map versus territory” tension from Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science”—could you say more about this?
KS: A central idea of the book is that the individual and systematic disavowal of suffering has robbed humans of their humanity. Humans are on and of the land, so when humans injure their humanity, the land hurts. “A version of Earth that ignores its own suffering,” is a hypothetical that might be best understood as land that has been alienated from the many lifeways it gives rise to—including plant and animal life, hydrologic cycles, and human cultures or cosmologies—through exploitative use. (I borrow this definition of land from Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, a.k.a. la paperson, whose book A Third University Is Possible has been important to me as a scholar, educator, and institutional actor.)
A “map” here might be real estate. Or what Anna Tsing refers to as a plantation: ecological relationships stripped of complexity. A landscape painting, a land-grab university, the expropriated land upon which the fortress of higher education sits—the list goes on. It might be surface acres sold off to various resource sectors to plant timber forests, to graze cattle, or to erect oil infrastructure for pipelines and bomb trains; subsurface acres sold off separately from the uppermost soil horizon to allow subcontractors access to oil, gas, and minerals underground. I’m thinking here of Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s research in High Country News and Grist. It’s twice- or even thrice-sold land! It’s dammed and channelized rivers. It’s a biological and cosmological ecosystem that’s been swapped out for a postage stamp.
LI: Will your book show us how humans can regain humanity? Asking for a friend.
KS: One of the engines powering Reps is the question of compassionate action, as a variant of right action, born of making and sustaining contact with suffering—my own and others’—to transform myself alongside the material conditions that produce the possibility of suffering in the first place.
Compassion is the felt sense of solidarity, it demands feeling with and acting on. It demands action. But what kind of action? And how much is enough when it’s never enough? I feel like Julietta Singh describes this as propulsive inheritance in Unthinking Mastery, though my copy is in storage, so it may be The Breaks. A central question in the book is, having contacted another person’s pain, other people’s pain, and living with the imperial boomerang’s inevitable return home to each of us in turn, what do we do? The imperial boomerang is Michel Foucault’s notion that most catastrophes were incubated under colonialism. He was talking about the catastrophe of Nazism. But the category might include the Nakba—which literally means “catastrophe” in Arabic—debt, war, incarceration, extractivism, or the unequal impacts of climate change. His forecast is that colonialism’s ripple effects will touch and destroy even their own origins in time.
Multiple times a day, in reaction to some ambient or visceral trigger, I sense rising in myself a nearly autonomic responsibility to act on the pain of others—to lessen it directly or else sublimate my helplessness by turning my energy toward tweaking some small part of the system that I can infiltrate, to borrow poet and immigration activist Marco Saavedra’s term. But sometimes aversion wins. I might dodge an encounter with suffering and slip past the call to act because I am late to a work meeting or a parent-teacher conference. One might say it’s a survival instinct of the everyday, but survival at what cost? When I bypass the opportunity to acknowledge pain and extend care, I barter my humanity. In writing Reps, and in living my life, I keep coming back to this idea that compassionate action, even without demonstrable impact, preserves and delivers my humanity back to me.
Marx asks which systems make collective action impossible when he writes about “the idiocy of rural life,” in “The Eighteenth Brumaire.” I ask which systems make compassionate action impossible. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed describes institutionalization as a means to naturalize the unacceptable, such as war, famine, homelessness, incarceration, and gender-based violence. To take for granted as “inevitable” or to accept as “natural” that which could never be acceptable or natural, i.e. mass human suffering, requires tremendous effort. In “Exercises Against Empathy,” I was trying to trace or narrate the mental gymnastics taking place within the individual institutional actors who propel more diffuse systemic efforts to naturalize the unacceptable. I often wonder about the Eichmanns alive now, and I wonder how to quantify or qualify the sheer amount of work the average individual performs ongoingly—mostly below the line of cognition—to ignore the vast scale of human suffering that is our climate, the very air we breathe, the air that makes so many of our children asthmatic. It takes a lot of pretend, pretense, and suppression to tie back or stifle the moral reflex. Each day people ignore the urge to attend and address pain, to tend and dress wounds, their own and others. How did this come to be so? And how is this human bulwark against empathy upheld?
LI: Can you say more about how these questions inflect your practice?
KS: This might not be exactly what you are looking for, but I direct the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities, a research center at a public university. Our work, in one interpretation, is the navigation of a structure, both concrete and ideological, that harbors the potential to consolidate privilege, power, and resources or to redistribute privilege, power, and resources—to perpetuate or regenerate itself, to grow its own alterity.
Lately, for example, I’ve been trying to figure out how to support research and adjacent activities that foster reproductive solidarities across discrete locales, from South and Central America to Palestine. At the university, filling in for the city’s failure to provide social services that honor migrants’ humanity, dignity, and inherent worth, the Student-Parent Organization and the Dominican Studies Group, both organized by student-activist Mariel Acosta Matos, teamed up with Maya Hernández and Sofia Stafford from the collective Doulas en Español to offer immigration and birthing services to newly-arrived migrants who are also soon-to-be parents. Many traveled to New York in perilous circumstances, and most are living out of asylum hotels receiving little to no pregnancy, parenting, or immigration support. That they should “risk life”—to quote the scholar Jennifer Morgan in her daughter Emma Morgan-Bennett’s 2023 film Mama, I’m Through, about Black motherhood, the BLM movement, and aftrofutures—to risk life under such dire conditions requires, I think, seeing through the present into a totally different universe.
The mothers-to-be come once a month to the Graduate Center to shop and drop off outgrown items at the free store, to share birthing, lactation, and migration strategies, and to give and receive advice about navigating a maternal health/care nexus known to be hostile to women of color. La Morada, a Oaxacan restaurant in the South Bronx, brings flautas, sopa de la milpa, and mole. In this way, a busy student lounge becomes the site of a community of care, as well as knowledge creation and circulation practices that feed the hearts, minds, and families of people who are unaffiliated with the university, with people who are not only unprotected but imperiled by the very frameworks that lend the university its might and heft.
You probably know this, but laboring down is a term used in birthing circles to describe taking rest before actively pushing the baby out of the birth canal. Most days it feels like I’m laboring down. I find myself pausing midway between the university we inherited and the university we need. Taking deep breaths.
LI: How does this affect teaching going on in the same space?
KS: One question that comes up a lot is the role of advocacy in deep reading and/or research. What is gained and what is lost when an activist-scholar gives up the pretext of objectivity? How does the knowledge sector feed into and learn from movement-building and visa-versa? Can public education systems save us from political disengagement and stratification? Can public higher education systems be saved? (Yes on both counts, btw.)
LI: On bad days I think that literature can’t escape its collusion with aristocracy. Like once upon a time it was fashioned as a tool to help the landed divert the negative oedipal impulses of their kids so that they might inherit in a timely fashion and reproduce the family nicely—by studying Virgil in the manor, for example. Literature could be a lure to draw people away from patricide. Like, meditate and let your dad die in his sleep or whatever, rather than hurrying things along.
KS: Totally. Generally speaking, the first colleges and universities in America were founded for one of two key reasons. The first was to ensure that a continued lineage of literate clergy were able to rule congregations who could read the Bible. They followed a European cloister model imported by early colonists. The second was to add real estate value to settler railroad stations trying to conjure a town around their platform. I’m essentializing, but from one angle at least, education in America has always been driven by creating and maintaining lineage or creating and speculating real estate. Colleges and universities and to a lesser extent agriculture and mining schools were places where young white men were trained to occupy their positions as leaders, landholders, and ruling elite more effectively. When HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and Normal Schools (established to train both men and women as elementary school teachers) come into play, they widen the demographic reach of the university, but even so, the function and structure, and even the demographics, of some colleges and universities remain unchanged today! So exactly as you’re describing, one way to understand private liberal education is an architecture that shelters wealth and a pedagogy that transmits intergenerational power. But that selective retelling of history ignores the transformative power of student-led protest and the counter-institutional impulse that bubbles just below.
LI: Succession remains an under-contemplated dynamic in terms of what is going on in higher ed, in my paranoid opinion.
KS: You’re reminding me of Erik A. Havelock’s scholarship around the transition from a culture of orality to a culture of literacy in Ancient Greece. He talks about how Socrates believed that a new poetics—the dialogic, his so-called method—could upend the social, political, and aesthetic order of the day. Socrates kind of straddled the transition between oral and literate cultures but Plato, his inheritor as it were, did away with poetic forms like epic and drama altogether in favor of dense, theoretical prose. Oral modes of epic and drama are forms founded on recitation and remembrance. They need live people to participate in their embodied transmission. Written prose on the other hand relies on the circulation of books, not necessarily bodies, circumventing the need for direct contact between knowledge holder and knowledge receiver; or more to your argument, father and son. Havelock’s conjecture is that knowledge exchange becomes less relational, that is, less contingent on specific communities of discourse, when knowledge moves from the mouth to the page. Running with your theory, I wonder if narrative tropes in literature may have been erected to keep prose in line, that is, to preserve lineage.
Havelock also says that this shift from oral to textual transmission of knowledge makes an exertinalized and enforceable moral system necessary for the first time. And while I’m not sure I agree and I’m way out of my disciplinary comfort zone here, but in ancient Greece, the word “public” is drawn from the Latin “populus,” root “pube,” meaning “adult male.” Though not all adult males. Not enslaved people. So the “public” was conceived as a small group of homogeneous people who possessed the economic and political power to defend their status as self-determining political agents operating within and on an imperial state. So here are the archons: clone-stamped, standing around the Acropolis, arms linked. What do they need laws for? I’m joking. But they are in agreement.
But like Arendt says, disagreement is democracy. Or maybe she says, argument is democracy. Either way, she’s right. Historically speaking, when the public becomes more demographically complicated for any number of reasons—globalization and trade and so on—moral systems need to get a whole lot more stable. And so do the stories a society tells about itself.
LI: Our society is poorly set up for the things that people actually need.
KS: Have you read Ned Blackhawk’s new book Rediscovering America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History? He describes the Puritans’ arrival on the shores of—
LI: The apocalypse, or the city on the hill.
KS: Right. He talks about how Narragansett women were in charge of reproductive labor, of course, but also village economies and horticulture, as in where to plant and when to harvest. Femicide, biological warfare, ecological colonialism, and environmental injustice destroy any semblance of power that women, especially Black, Indigenous women of color, hold. But why am I bringing this up right now? Because this is one of the things I was thinking about while writing Reps. How carefully things had to be arranged by the colonists, and continue to be arranged by extractivists—patriarchs all, regardless of their gender—in order to build a future that works explicitly against the grain of life, against the very grain of livability, against birth. We see this of course in the rolling back of reproductive rights and Roe v. Wade. The volume, scale, violence, precision, and tediousness of their work astonishes me.
LI: In your book the poems aren’t lyrically or psychologically inflected with, in shorthand, “I’m okay—you’re okay.” They don’t validate transactional recognition.
KS: For me, the simultaneity of disclosure and nondisclosure is what makes poetry feel like a safe place to admit, “I’m not okay—you’re not okay,” but also, “I’m not me—you’re not you.” Shulamith Firestone said the oppression of children and the oppression of women are mutually reinforcing and that revolution calls for children’s liberation. Artist Amy Ruhl makes work about this. I’ve spent the last five years thinking a lot about children’s rights, children’s autonomy, developmental theory, and the science and mysticism of early literacy.
LI: Mysticism?
KS: I think of reading and writing as mystical rites of passage. While scientists and educators understand how children learn to speak, they still don’t exactly understand how children learn to read. In “NAVAL (FRICTION)” I write: “Reading is augmented reality.” To me, literacy is the mouth of the tesseract, the wormhole that passes us through the slick surface of the hyperpresent into the infinite dimensionality of existence. And it fits in a book you can carry in your bag. So when I say reading and writing are mystical, I mean the whole body of literature to date is a kind of Frankenstein, an assemblage of raw parts imbued with surprising animisms, altering the biological, relational, historical, and material reality of its makers, its humans. What happens if humans as a species stop reading?
LI: I have the sense that at this point it’s not something good. I’d have to save my most dystopian speculations for another venue, such as a novel.
KS: You and I both have young children in our lives. I want to describe a common scene to illustrate my ambivalence about what role empathy can or should play as we navigate daily, direct experience.
Every day, but also one specific day, I am walking with my child to the bus. Now, we are riding the subway to school. Now, we are transferring. I am vigilant of our immediate surroundings. I am every second thinking of children in Gaza. Why children? Because children’s sense-making strategies in the face of crisis are front of mind as I explain to mine that the man lying on the platform has overdosed. Now, I am explaining Narcan. I am explaining that though the EMTs seem rough and unkind they are technically saving this man’s life. I am saying yes, he is probably in pain. I am saying no, I don’t know how to help him. I am saying yes, he will go to the hospital; and no, I don’t know where he will go after he is discharged. I am saying yes, I am an adult; and no, I am still learning, I still don’t understand. We are scanning the platform for the man’s other Croc, the loss of which troubles my son. I promise we will find the shoe. And we do. After he has been buckled up and wheeled away in what they call a stair chair. I drop my child off for circle time and ride downtown to work. I am consumed by love. I am accustomed to grief. I cannot understand why I haven’t gotten off the train, pulled up the tracks, or returned its metal rails to mineral earth so Earth can rebirth the system.
The everydayness of this “ride” is the backdrop of the book, where every morning is the Big Bang, and every midnight is more than just a position of the clock, it’s a threshold we have to cross each in our own way. Poet Celina Su recently commented to me that she shared my suspicion of empathy. And I am suspicious of its political use value, its susceptibility to sentimentalism, and its proximity to “charity.” But I’m also selling it as a radical expression of risk and solidarity. Someone could criticize the impulse to be empathetic, these allegedly useless moments of extending oneself toward another, perhaps only in thought or perhaps through action, but I personally wouldn’t be so judgmental. Maybe I should, I just wouldn’t. I act on feelings. Any filing system set up to put feelings away is organized by the patriarchy with the explicit intent to disarticulate, to disjoint, and to weaken the bonds forged by interconnected struggle and—no less significantly, though not the subject of Reps—joy unbroken since beginningless time.