Jody Chan is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press, 2018), all our futures (PANK, 2020), and sick (Black Lawrence Press, 2020); and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. They are also a performing member with Raging Asian Womxn Taiko Drummers.
Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan’s impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism, and “money models of madness” and “wellness” checks.
Interview by Nancy Issenman
Nancy Issenman (NI): I am very honoured to have been given the opportunity to read your book so thoroughly. Because so many poetry books wander into my space, I don’t take the chance to really delve deeply. Your collection, I discovered, is certainly not a book to breeze through. It is suffused with dazzling art and craft as well as revolutionary politics. Could you say more about your relationship to Mad Queer Revolution which seems to be the backbone of this collection? What and who has influenced you?
Jody Chan (JC): Thank you for reading impact statement with such willingness and close attention! This book delves into histories of madness, institutionalization, and resistance in Toronto. I invoke the specific lineages of Mad Pride, which was founded in Toronto in the 1990s by psychiatric survivors in Parkdale, and of disability justice, which was first articulated as 10 principles by Sins Invalid in 2015. In my own life, disability and healing justice spaces have been some of the sites of my deepest politicization. Mad liberation has offered me tools I needed to literally stay alive (like mad mapping and care teams and safety planning), affirmed alternative non-consensus ways of being in and perceiving the world (what we sometimes call dissociation or psychosis) and provided a framework through which to understand revolution as a necessary madness, the madness of devoting one’s life to the long horizon of liberation.
NI: The title, impact statement, is so perfect. I’m wondering what kind of impact the writing of this collection has had. Has it changed you and/or your writing? Have you seen an impact on the therapeutic community to whom you generously offer a unique lens, raw & tender I might add.
JC: In the time since I wrote this book, I actually left the therapeutic community, one which I was part of for a number of years, working mainly with queer/trans, racialized, and sick/disabled clients. I wonder if that was one of this collection’s impacts on me: by the time I officially made the decision to close my private practice, I felt like I had already processed it. Trying to build trust and intimacy to delve into topics of complex trauma, grief, crisis, suicidality, with the constant spectre of surveillance and criminalization hanging over our heads…Naming the entanglement of collective liberation and personal well-being, while working within a hyper individualistic paradigm, a closed therapeutic container, and understanding the ways in which Western psychiatric frameworks have pathologized resistance and upheld colonial ideas of what is human and what is not… Contradictions which I had to inhabit in my poetics became untenable to continue working with in practice. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon says our task is to “drive the system quicker to its own destruction.” Organizations like Project LETS, the Fireweed Collective, IDHA, the Disability Justice Network of Ontario do work around these contradictions, that both drive the system toward destruction and also build tangible alternatives in the meantime.
NI: I love how varied and creative the presentation is in this collection. You have used different forms such as erasure, ghazal, palindrome, list, prose. Do you start out with the form in mind or does the form become clear as you write? When and how did the overall shape of the book start to come together?
JC: One of the earliest poems I wrote for impact statement was actually the long, eponymous poem that closes the book. As that poem unfolded, the core questions animating this collection— around home and confinement, madness and community, queerness and carcerality— started to reveal themselves, and to dictate what other poems I needed to write. As for the forms you named: I like writing towards novelty and challenge. I see madness, too, as a formal constraint. What forms of witnessing and survival move between a lyric-we and a lyric-I? What is the poetic architecture that can hold psychosis, dissociation, fragmentation? Then, in the editing process, my editor Mercedes Eng pointed out that the entire book felt like one long poem. And that really helped me understand how to order the manuscript, what associations to prioritize, what connective images to thread.
NI: In the poem ‘A NOTE ON WHITE’ you write this gorgeous line: “I slip on the paper skins of Blanche/ and Velma…” I’m curious about how you thread your own experience with the facts and stories you uncover in your research.
JC: I wrote this line, I think, as an effort to wrestle with my ethical relation to the archive. Slipping on the paper skins…I’m pointing, maybe, to the always-present risk of claiming, speaking for, over-identifying with, a story that isn’t actually mine. And then, too, to Blanche and Velma’s whiteness. There was the problem of how difficult it was to find stories of queer, trans, disabled, racialized people in any so-called official archives. I took that as a testament to their resourcefulness, their presence humming in their absence, how invisibility may have been one of their only weapons with which to survive. Whenever I allowed myself a “we,” I tried to be as specific as I could in defining that momentary collective. I tried to show myself as separate, but a part. Risky! I still have a lot of questions!
NI: How did you stay grounded and keep on writing into the nightmare that is still our mental health system?
JC: My answer to this has always been and will always be: organizing. Both to ground me in the power we actually do have, to do things like fight back against a carceral mental health system and build community-based, principled alternatives that actually take care of ourselves and each other, and to remind me that my responsibility is to the people, always to the people (Jamila Osman writes, “the people are the artist’s moral compass”), not to my own career ascension, or some idea of success as a writer within a colonial, capitalist system. Craft goes beyond the page.
NI: In the poem ‘ABANDONMENT ISSUES’ you mention Saturn return. I’m familiar with the astrological event though many people are not. For me it’s a real point of reference. My second one was a wonderful upheaval! The speaker in your poem imagines “spending my Saturn return in the bathtub.” I’m guessing, given this book and everything else you’re engaged in, that this is not where you spent yours. Can you briefly describe how those 2-3 years played out for you and tell us what’s up next?
JC: I think the phrase “Saturn Return” often evokes a doom-and-gloom kind of vibe, but for me it was actually something I really looked forward to! A friend of mine once explained Saturn return to me as a time of foundational and structural evaluation— what’s working gets more deeply entrenched, what’s not working rises to the surface and reveals itself. I’m a Capricorn moon who takes great comfort in systems and structures, and a Sagittarius rising who craves a bit of disorder and chaos (leaning all the way into astrology here, apologies to the astrologically agnostic!). My Saturn return came with many wonderful upheavals, to borrow your phrasing, and many painful transformations that are still ongoing. I’m allowing my intimate relationships to take unconventional forms, in order to make space for commitments to community, collectivity, organizing, solidarity to always be my top priority. I’m growing my understandings of stability and home— I feel ready, maybe, to stay in one place, one partnership, one project for a longer time than I’m used to. I’m trying to write a novel now! So on some level, I must be.