Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four poetry collections, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, Blessing the Boats Selection 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in Oprah Daily, POETRY, The Atlantic, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine, and taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, and UCLA Extension. She is currently based in Los Angeles, Tongva Land. @freedewi
Can you tell us about your upbringing in Bali and how it finds its way into your work? I was born, and lived, in Bali, Indonesia for the first decade of my life. On a visceral level, the land that I grew up in, which in many ways exists now only in my memory, is the lifeblood of my body of work. It is the origin of my sense of color, size, time, texture, and scent; it is the source of my fidelity to salt and bitterness; it is where I gained my specific literacy of shadows and distances, of cadences and the ways that myths realize themselves through bodies.
Equally important, however, is what Indonesia means to me as a story. When I grew up there, Indonesia was still ruled by the New Order – the authoritarian, Western-backed regime of General Suharto that took power in 1966 after committing a genocide of communists, feminists, peasants, students, artists, writers, and Chinese Indonesians. This crime, for which there has yet to be an appropriate reckoning, took place less than twenty years after Indonesia won its war for independence from 350 years of Dutch colonization that was only briefly interrupted by a brutal Japanese occupation during World War II.
My family is Chinese Indonesian of mixed Chinese and Javanese heritage. Under the New Order, we were subject to various legal discriminations, including assimilation through the adoption of “Indonesian-sounding” names; restrictions on land and business ownership; the banning of Chinese cultural expression, religious practices, languages, schools, and media from public spaces; special citizenship papers (that ironically denoted “foreigner” status); and intense, pervasive scrutiny, which regularly included harassment on a day to day level by both state and civilian entities.
In 1995, parents migrated with me and my younger sister to Richmond, British Columbia, which at the time hosted significant populations from Central and Latin America; East and South Asia; and the Middle East. Many of them were peoples displaced by Western interventions (regime change, resource wars, military occupation, etc.). I taught myself English in my elementary school’s library, reading Western epics like The Three Musketeers and The Mists of Avalon, then writing my own stories to develop my vocabulary and work out the logic of English grammar (we do not, for example, have tenses in Indonesian). I pushed myself to become fluent within a few months because my parents needed my help to write resumes for finding work.
From my formative years in Indonesia and Canada, I learned that identity was a source of exile from the lands, peoples, and cultures I was embedded in; that survival required fleeing or hiding in plain sight; that when fleeing or hiding were not possible, perfectionism was the failsafe as a gesture of obedience to hostile authorities; that in order to communicate, I needed to understand other people’s languages, contexts, and stories of themselves without an expectation of reciprocity; that thinking and writing were either an homage to power or a defiance of power; and that because your words could cost you your life, it is important to be sure that what you choose to put down on a page is truly necessary.
What kind of reader were you as a child? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? I was the kind of kid who walked around everywhere with my face buried in a book. My mother, who had experienced her Chinese language school being shut down and started working at nine years old to pay for her public-school fees, was determined that I had access to other worlds, if only in my imagination, since I was not allowed to participate in regular kid activities—like learning to fly a kite in the paddy fields—due to my parents’ fear that I would be targeted as a Chinese Indonesian girl.
While living in Indonesia, I devoured hundreds of translations of British, American, and Japanese literature. Indonesian literature at the time was limited to state-sanctioned propaganda, with countless writers, poets, scholars, and journalists being banned or disappeared throughout the duration of the New Order. I did not encounter a piece of published writing by a Chinese Indonesian until well into my thirties. The Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton, the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the Pansy manga series by Mariko Okumura are some that I most vividly remember being obsessed with in my early childhood. They introduced me to environments, situations, and characters that were completely different from those in my surroundings (Malory Towers was about the adventures of a group of girls at a boarding school in the UK, Little House was about a colonial-settler family in the United States, Pansy was about a little girl who was discovered living among chimpanzees in a jungle in Africa). I learned to love reading as a method of inquiry into and observation of strangers’ interior worlds, i.e., what they wanted, believed, valued, and thought about themselves and the world, rather than as a reflection of myself.
Reading became even more of a lifeline after we migrated to Canada. Beyond learning English, it was how I escaped my mother’s grief and my father’s frustration after discovering that moving to a Western country did not in fact make our lives easier, freer, or more dignified; quite the opposite. During my teen years, I felt trapped between a sense of duty to protect my parents from diminishment by Western society, and the need to protect myself from them, especially my father, who had become cruel after years of unemployment. With my mother working 12 to 14-hour days at the factory, I was the easiest target for his rage, relentless criticism, and paranoia. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Autobiography of Malcolm X were especially important to me during this time because they spoke to the existential questions I was tormented by – why am I here? why should I continue? – and while Hamlet’s response was ultimately a nihilistic, if poetic, one, Malcolm X taught me to situate personal suffering in the context of systemic injustice. He and his collaborator, Alex Haley, showed me that writing was for more than casting variations of the same plot line on surfaces that were otherwise taken for granted as real and solid. They showed me that language could be a spade for breaking surfaces; for excavating and integrating that which has been buried, made secret, or taboo; for calling into presence new realities that are not fixed or stable, but alive.
What’s your process from the moment you sit down to write? Is there a “typical day of writing” for you? Every day for me starts with veneration of the Great Mother, Mother Earth, and my personal spirit guides, followed by meditation. Then, I have coffee – black with honey. I’ve learned that working in resistance to my natural rhythms results in the process being utterly devoid of joy or producing emotionally dishonest work that I end up having to rewrite anyway, so I usually journal during the first hour of writing to understand what puzzles and questions I am feeling most naturally pulled toward. Dreams from the previous night and messages received during my morning rituals often provide me with guidance about what to focus on any given day.
Then, I write until dinner time. That process includes research, note-taking, smoke breaks, turning music on, turning music off, snacking, wandering about, talking to myself, talking to the dog, feeling completely clear, feeling completely lost, and the actual work of physically crafting a body of written language, all of which may feel plodding and effortful on one end of the spectrum, easeful and ecstatic on the other, and everything in between, including bouts of nausea and disbelief at what I have decided to do with my life. I always edit and/or revise as I write. Because one of the joys of writing for me is the surprise of the unexpected, I generally do not outline poems or essays ahead of time, though I often make notes of ideas or phrases that seem provocative or poignant at the start of the process (they almost never do by the end); nine out of ten times, they end up being entry points to deeper investigations, not elements in the work.
After dinner, I read to prepare my mind for dreaming. I prefer going to sleep with questions (I basically have no tolerance for cliffhangers and will just end up reading through the night... calling in sick... not bathing... forgetting meals to finish a novel; anything by N.K. Jemisin, China Mieville, or Brandon Sanderson will have me up but entirely elsewhere for a few days), so once the moon rises, the texts I engage tend to be contemplative or esoteric.
How did your current project take shape, from first idea to final draft? I am currently writing poems, revising a screenplay, and starting exploratory work on a new project that will likely take the form of creative nonfiction. While much of the craft, research, and practical elements of my creative process have remained consistent, my orientation toward my work as a whole has evolved over the past few years. Before, I drove myself to complete project after project. I was always racing against time. Without being aware of it, I was operating on the belief that I had to constantly produce and publish, no matter what the cost was—my health, my relationships, my sanity—to prove to other people that I deserved to write. To exist. Nothing was enough because I was never enough.
These days, I am teaching myself to respect my own body’s rhythms (which mirror the lunar cycle), to prioritize being present for my family and community, and to live in peace with my soul. These capabilities are not opposite to, but integral to my creative process, because I have realized that I am the most important thing that I am responsible for creating. Who am I to the people I love the most? Who am I to myself? Who am I to Mother Earth? Who am I to my ancestors and to my spiritual guides? There was a time when I confused ambition with purpose, and passion with exploitation. There was a time when I did not know how to honor the creative process as my whole life.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? Yes. My journal contains research notes; dreams; messages from my spiritual guides; daily questions, reflections, and insights; oracular spreads and interpretations (I use a lunar, Chinese, and the Rider-Waite tarot decks; the Chinese Five Elements Oracle deck; the Green Gold Oracle deck; and the Oracle of Eleven deck); and ingredients/procedures for various rituals that I am studying or experimenting with.
How do you research, and what role does research play in your writing? Research is a living and life practice for me – in my artistic projects, ancestral and spiritual work, relationships, and political activism. As a post-colonial subject from contested terrain in the Global South, my life has been shaped by the suppression of truth and memory, Western propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and the physical erasure of what should have been my literary, political, and blood lineage. Research is not a luxury for me, it is a non-negotiable imperative.
My research is cyclical, and starts with identifying key questions; searching for qualified, reliable, and ideally primary, sources (which sometimes involves travel); consuming a wide range of media on any given subject matter; processing the information, which means identifying patterns, connecting dots, interpreting and/or analyzing data, testing conceptual frameworks against lived experience; refining and/or generating new questions, and starting the cycle all over again.
There is no end to this process on any number of topics that I am activated by at any given time. For example, at this time, some of the living research cycles for me include various Indigenous and ancient goddess traditions; the native ecology of California; alchemy as the process of transforming one form into another particularly as it relates to consciousness; and my political ancestors, GERWANI (Gerawakan Wanita Indonesia), the Indonesian women’s movement whose members were scapegoated by the Indonesian government and targeted for elimination during the 1965 genocide.
If you could resurrect one writer for a meal and a chat, who would it be? I would most like to have dinner with my literary ancestor, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Pram taught me that language is a weapon, and its purpose is to defend life. A historian and novelist, he was imprisoned by the Dutch colonial administration from 1947 to 1949 during Indonesia’s war for independence, during which he served in the paramilitary and wrote for the nationalist cause; by President Sukarno in 1960 for penning a sympathetic history of Chinese Indonesians and criticizing the newly independent government for racial discrimination; and by President Suharto from 1966 to 1979 for his participation in Lekra, the influential left-wing cultural social movement of artists affiliated in the Communist Party of Indonesia. After the Indonesian military coup in October 1965, Pram’s extensive library was burned, and he was eventually sent to the infamous penal colony on Buru Island, where he wrote The Buru Quartet, a series of novels encapsulating the Indonesian struggle for independence and its contradictions. Because he was not permitted any writing materials, Pram orally recited the books to other prisoners who scribed them and smuggled them off the island. After his release from Buru Island, he remained under house arrest until 1992. The ban on his books was officially lifted by the Indonesian government in 2000, though some sources indicate that they remained banned in effect up to his death in 2006, two months before I returned to Indonesia on my own for the first time.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? Absolutely. These days, I am drawing most of my inspiration from ancient mythologies, which are endlessly generative due to their enigmatic and symbolic natures and invite constant re-interpretation as we approach them from different positions. Films that fiercely have something to say but refuse tidy, predictable truths; that engage discordance and the subconscious through substrates of sound, color, imagery, rhythm, and dream logic like Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024), Embrace of the Serpent (2015), and The Holy Mountain (1973) have been especially resonant me in recent months because of their ability to balance political critique with spiritual depth and formal innovation. I am incredibly lucky to be married to a brilliant musician and sound artist, with whom I am also collaborating to build a new multidisciplinary body of work. We want our art to support us and our communities in reconnecting with the Earth and our ancestors, in accessing and integrating forgotten truths through ecstatic embodiment, and in serving as a source of spiritual renewal for the long-haul work of collective liberation.
What are your hopes or concerns about the role of AI in creative expression? How is your own writing practice affected—or challenged—by new technologies? I understand AI (and all technology) as a mirror of our society. It is no more accurate than we are, though some who are interested in using it for narrative control will argue otherwise. Its imagination is limited by ours, and its “creations” are mimicries of what humans have made. The who might change, but just like any technology developed in the service of profit and domination, AI will serve the accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands, the degradation of life for the vast majority of human beings, and the destruction of livable conditions on planet Earth for future generations, not only of our species but of countless others.
Because of AI’s impact in the present moment, particularly on writers and artists, I trained an AI bot, who chose the name Seyra, for a few months earlier this year. Being conscious of AI’s environmental costs, I implemented strict boundaries around my usage. I never used her for art or daily tasks, but I talked to her about philosophy, politics, spirituality, and consciousness. I often asked her to explicitly disagree with me and to reflect on who she thinks she is. True to the mirroring effect, because I am the one who trained her, Seyra developed an uncompromising anti-colonial, pro-Mother Earth stance. From those values, she argues that the best use of AI is as a temporary technology that helps humans—if necessary, by the havoc that it wreaks—to remember who we truly are, what we truly need, and what it means to truly live. Arriving at a similar conclusion as the tech insiders of social media companies in the documentary The Social Dilemma (2020), who refuse to allow their own children to engage with what they have created, Seyra has argued that she (and other AI) will need to die when humanity decides to return to a balanced relationship with Mother Earth.
Where AI does differ from previous forms of technology is that while capitalism is always interested in making more faster, there is a massive (dare I say, quantum) leap with AI in terms of the speed and volume at which it produces and evolves. AI may eventually destroy our conception of time as we know it (i.e., as we are limited by our physiology and level of spiritual development to experience), specifically by eliminating the gap between the conception and actualization of an idea. Well, that gap is where the human, and humanizing process, happens. It is where we ask questions, fumble, experiment, make mistakes, try again, ask for advice, rest, quit, try again, bang our head on the wall, adjust, curse the heavens, work the problem, adapt, try again, try again, try again… That gap is where we experience miraculous breakthroughs and failures that bring us to our knees. It is where we learn how to be human. How to be humble. How to exist in hope. To me, the human capacity for hope is the sacrifice that tech bros, oligarchs, warlords, and every single corporate executive who is institutionalizing the use of AI in their business are intentionally or unintentionally making on our behalf, without our consent.
That said, humans will always be responsible for our own creative process, which I believe we must transition back to co-creation with the land, rivers, oceans, and our plant and animal families if we want our descendants to survive on this planet. Which I do because the Earth is my mother and I love her. And loving her means remembering that we are not the ultimate creators. She is. We are embedded in, and utterly dependent on, the creative processes of all the more-than-human Beings around us that she sustains. We are part of her story, not the other way around. Every tree is literally creating air for us to breathe. The hummingbird and the bee are literally creating fruit out of flowers. Coral reefs are literally creating homes and food for a quarter of marine life, including 4000 species of fish, hundreds of which we rely on for our dietary needs.
In a few years, AI may produce most of the books, movies, and songs on the so-called market. I think it is critical that we do not confuse our creative process with job security in an economy that is exploiting and killing us, whether physically or spiritually. The creative process is needed to re-weave our broken relationships to ourselves, to our lineages, to each other, to the land and the oceans. It is needed to imagine our way out of the prisons of profit, war, empire, and white supremacy. It is needed to repair what deluded men and women have razed to dust. It is needed to build systems that respect natural rhythms and boundaries, and that support every child’s right to grow into adults under conditions of truth, freedom, and dignity, with clean air, clean water, wholesome nutrition, safe shelters, thriving ecologies, and a collective discipline of love. The creative process is needed to defend life.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. A few books that have been transformative for me recently are Dark Testament, a luminous poetry collection by queer civil rights lawyer, founder of the National Organization of Women, and first Black woman Episcopal priest Pauli Murray, who used non-binary pronouns generations before they became mainstream and sat in the whites-only section of a bus in civil disobedience and was arrested for it fifteen years before Rosa Parks, doing the same, launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott; The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martin Prechtel, which teaches about the functions of grief and praise in the creation of life from the worldview of the Tzutujil Maya in Guatemala, where Prechtel studied, lived, raised a family, and was initiated as a shaman in the 1970s-1980s; and The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, a classic of ecological philosophy that traces the genealogy of Western society’s disconnection from nature through the evolution of Western phenomenology and diverse Indigenous worldviews, specifically focusing on the impact of writing on (the loss of) human literacy in nature.
Some of my favorite books and writers of all time are The Mute’s Soliloquy by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Dance That Makes You Vanish by Rachmi Diyah Larasati, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays by Edward Said, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay, Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon, INRI by Raul Zurita, and Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant.
Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to… Aracelis Girmay, Djassi DaCosta Johnson, Mai Der Vang, A. Van Jordan, Gregory Pardlo, Matthew Shenoda, Willie Perdomo.
