In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with Nicole Raziya Fong
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe SUBTEXT to someone picking it up for the first time?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: SUBTEXT is a lyric repositioning—a passage through the personal and historical by way of memory and dream, as well through real and imagined dialogues with friends, clouds, and my father. The work seeks to situate the self within the breathing complexity of the diasporic condition, bringing past and present into dialogue, creating new relations and ways of speaking selfhood.
The book calls upon archived documents as well as images from my life. I take these materials—including the ledger book of the 19th century ship Salsette, which carried indentured Indian citizens to the Caribbean; visual and textual collages; and personal photographs, one depicting the colonial architecture of Fort Zeelandia in Paramaribo, Suriname—and transform them in appearance to coexist alongside my writing, which itself explores memory in different ways.
SUBTEXT moves variously between poetically rendered forms: the stage-play, the dialogue, as well as structural experimentations in poetic form. Form is associative in the sense that there are not rigid boundaries between sections of the book or the themes occurrent within; rather, these forms are all in conversation with one another, constantly referring back to itself. As such, the book functions as a whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.
Ultimately, SUBTEXT is future-facing, concluding with a motion towards community and potential despite its inherent challenges; friendship in the face of loss; and our ability to look outside of ourselves so as to understand the world as it is: shifting, relational, unforeseen.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: Poetry’s resistance is formal, historical, and personal. Poetry is a place where we can begin to approach that which cannot be plainly stated in ordinary speech. Poetry has the potential to work within language to dissemble the walls created between things—both visually and conceptually.
If poetry is meant to be a reflection of reality, as Aristotle says, how can we use poetry or literature more broadly to also change reality? Speaking is in resistance to erasure. Poetry can both reveal and obscure in its elisions and adherences. What the poet chooses to say, how they do or do not say it, how its meaning is altered through poetic technique—poetry is an active force which changes our thought in experiencing it.
In writing SUBTEXT, I was thinking through creolization and opacity in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation— the destabilizing effects of language as bringing the potential for new modes of connection and self-positioning. This point of encounter with the unforeseen is history’s transformative mode—and contains the possibility for a deeply rooted social change. Poetry has the power to act as this initial point of change, invoking new potential in the nature of our relations with one another.
In my mind, there is nothing so dangerous as the fixity of late-capitalist and colonial thought which moves itself forward endlessly, mindlessly devouring everything that exists before it. Because poetry cannot provide use-value in the sense of the commodity, I believe poetry in itself can exist in resistance to capitalist—and by extension—colonial worldviews.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: Poetry’s borders are signified by the ability for its margins to be stretched, doubled, reversed, reduced—in poetry I am able to have a tactile sense of the space I’m working in. I choose to characterize my poetics through and by way of this mutability of forms.
In SUBTEXT, the formal choices made in the text are my attempt to explore issues of identity with the same diffuse and changing material that constitute both thought and sense perception. In this sense, such an approach—the lack of clear boundaries between visually or thematically disparate works within the book, the visual variation occurring on the page—is a reflection of my mental process and approach to in which I explore the material presence of written language—a site that I find poetics is especially receptive to.
SUBTEXT situates the exterior in line with the interior—most notably through a psychological unveiling by way of memory and dream. I’m beginning with the past in order to find a way forward—to find a new approach to obscured or sedimented histories; to shine a light on and reclaim narratives which might otherwise be forgotten or lost. It’s a way of remembering—remembering myself as well as gaining a sense of relation to all that came before me.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: This line by Kamau Brathwaite, which appears in History of the Voice (and also serves as the opening epigraph to SUBTEXT), characterizes my thinking on what resistance can mean in language: “The hurricane does not roar in pentameter.” Brathwaite writes in relation to the need to find new forms that depart from colonial poetic structures; those which speak authentically to Caribbean experiences and dialects.
As a queer, chronically ill, and mixed-race second-generation Canadian, I always struggled to see myself within the narratives that were presented to me—I wanted to find a way into my own story within these narratives. Rather than adopt another’s narrative as my own, I choose to use language and poetics as a vehicle for expressing my reality (psychic and physical). This quote characterizes my stance on finding authenticity in one’s personal language, while keeping in mind how these forms can also be broadened and made accessible to others.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: I am grateful to create alongside a close community of friends and mentors who are brilliant writers, poets, artists, teachers, and thinkers. Being in dialogue with others is fundamental to my creative process: a practice of co-creation that allows community to flow, opening space for new connections and ways of being in relation with one another. SUBTEXT draws upon many historical literary and philosophical influences as well—Jiddu Krishnamurti, James Schuyler, and Hannah Arendt are all quoted in the book, where attribution and thought-sharing play a significant role.
Artistic collaborations are another way I engage with community—a kind of relation which introduces new perspectives and influences. For example, SUBTEXT includes an image-text collaboration with multi-disciplinary artist Stephanie E. Creaghan; my previous book ORACULE included an essay by poet and archivist Andy Martrich. A lot of my work carries the inflections of these friendships which often moves my own practice into new terrain.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG: It can be difficult to think about poetry as being a necessity during a time which seems particularly rife with human injustice, political upheaval, and the effects of climate crisis. Writing and engagement with art is a way of witnessing and participating in the world; it reconnects me to my human soul and comes out of a need to process what is happening in the world and in my mind. That said, I have not always been able to sustain a practice during such challenging times.
I think anger has an important part to play, though it’s an emotion that we tend to shy away from or repress. To be aware of injustice and feel nothing is compliance with that injustice, even if you feel you are not directly involved. Anger can be a starting point for change and accountability. Anger can be creative and productive, not just destructive and harm-centered—SUBTEXT perhaps carries the inflections of anger at the injustice of the realities of this world—but it is not characterized by this anger.
It’s a question that I have increasingly been grappling with. Life is to be lived alongside poetry; poetry written alongside living—ultimately though, poetry must always remain in service to life.
Read a poem from SUBTEXT
Reprinted with permission from Talonbooks.
Watch Nicole Raziya Fong read a poem
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Nicole Raziya Fong (they/she) is a poet, editor, and painter living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Québec, Canada. They are the author of SUBTEXT (2026, Talonbooks), ORACULE (2021, Talonbooks), PERFACT (2019, Talonbooks), and other works. Writing appears in journals including The Capilano Review, carte blanche, and Social Text. Their work has received support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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Thanks to Nicole Raziya Fong for answering our questions, and to Talonbooks for the text from SUBTEXT, which is available to order now (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
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