I Want to Become: My (Own) Reference List

ABSTRACT

Embarking upon my PhD journey as the Other at the age of 37, I soon became emotionally involved in dealing with the process of not knowing my becoming. Reading and writing, then, create the possibilities of both re-immersing and reinventing the self in the plane of self-referential immanence. Using embodied writing as a method of discovery, this autoethnographic poem exemplifies ‘how to document becoming’, creating new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing. Through the embodiment of contemporary thinkers and scholars, I (re-)immerse myself in their works, uttering each poetry line through my untold desire of becoming. This creative writing process, in turn, allows for the novelty of knowing and becoming identities, bringing meaning and power into play. By applying Deleuzian philosophy, I realise that the imagination itself can be meaningfully rehabilitated as a productive capacity, of giving me desire and agency, to construct the aspirational self for an imagined terrain of academia.

KEYWORDS:

• becoming
• creative research
• embodied writing
• poetic inquiry
• sociology
• seminal thinkers

Remember that no one can read for you, and people who read a lot can always tell when others don’t. If you read hard, you’ll likely find concepts that can help re-orient your thinking so you can think differently about whatever you want to think about.

St. Pierre (2021, 6)

Feeing like an outsider,

 I want to become Michel Foucault (1988/1990),

Daring not to learn how to speak the imperial language,

 But becoming known to master how to be outspoken,

 Challenging the grounds of authority, power, and justice,

Revealing and demystifying—

 The institutional secrets of academic scholarship.

Writing ‘writing-stories’,

 I want to become Laurel Richardson (1997),

  Crossing the pungent smell of literary terrain,

As a viable way to learn about the Self,

  Attending to feelings, and ambiguities,

  Thinking through the body of an ethical subject,

  Effecting sociology of knowledge for the Other.

Locating the self in multitudes of discourses,

 I want to become Julia Kristeva (1982),

  Daring to engender such abject materials,

  Showing a traumatic death of one’s own,

  Pondering the future of rebellion and yet still experiencing jouissance,

  Leaving ‘The Scandal of the Timeless’ only in the postmodern age (Kristeva 2002).

Finding the conceptual enigma that (re)orients my thinking,

 I want to become Elizabeth St. Pierre (2021),

  Singing the vocal work for the writing of ‘reality’,

  Extending the method of doing and knowing about the Self,

That I naïvely took in use until now

  I have realised the dilemma of being truthful—

That not many (re)viewers are applauding

  My abject voices of being and becoming.

Now only echoing shameless sorrows repeat in self-citation (Yan 2011, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023).

For, through the eyes of the other,

 I constitute the self in relation to ‘you’ (Buber 1970/2023)—

  Becoming an object of representing the Other.

Departing from my own Reflections on Exile,

 I want to become Edward Said (2000),

  Honouring the embodied abjection;

The restless embodiment of my own idea,

  Exposing the knowledge and the power

  Of knowing the becoming of the Self.

Increasingly aware of my gender trouble (Butler 1990/2007),

And getting lost in this foreign land (Yu 2004),

 I want to become Tony Adams (2011),

  Narrating a love story culled from memory.

Not for cherishing the old memories kept in folds untold,

  But to make new memories dear

  And let us live close and sincere.

 So let us not just reminisce,

  Of days gone by with heavy heart and wrist,

  But cherish every moment here,

  With eyes open embracing now, today, here.

For what’s past is but a trace,

 Of moments lost in time and space (Deleuze 1994),

For what’s to come is but a fleeting dance,

 Of the memories we will make in this place.

Becoming to know the real value of life,

 I become David F. Wallace (2009),

 Reminding us of the truth often hidden in plain sight.

The tendency of over-intellectualising that materiality

 Could eventually get us stuck in abstract nonsense instead.

At the end of the day,

 ‘Don’t be afraid of being a nobody.’ In fully realising the Self,

I will become, perhaps, Václav Havel (1985/2015),

   Holding ‘The Power of the Powerless’

To unleash the voices of the ‘ordinary’ that echo throughout the academy.

(Oh, I understand, of course) Judged by ‘so-called’ meritocracy—

   my abject voice will be censored

    Out of existence.

Truth Be Told—[Life] is a ‘bad’ drama (Barber 2017),

   That I cannot play YOU (Kepnes 2014).

Yet I can best become—the Semitic mem and consonant e—ME.

    Constituting the entity of being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1953/2010).

Seeking not the objective, but subjective form of writing the human ‘I’.

For the moment I left my mother’s womb,

  I became the ‘figure of the stranger’,

   Ghosting the work of Sarah Ahmed (2000),

   Expounding ‘my legitimate anger when I speak of the injustices’ (Freire 2002, 22).

The abject ‘I’ holds a dreadful truth,

   Troubling me day and night.

   For unknowing—what am I becoming?

Within The Poetics of Space,

     Bold upright by Gaston Bachelard (1964/2014),

     Maybe it is a good thing for me.

Keeping a few dreams in Deleuzian thought,

That I can become an infinite possibility,

     And that ‘I shall live in later, always later, so much later’ (81).

     It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

     When a bell tolls,

I shall become ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes, 1977).

And not a single soul shall (re)tweet my abjection,

On the political dimension of discourse,

Artificially kept open in order to render impossible

The notion of being and knowing.

    In the darkness of truth,

    I am bloodied and befuddled,

    In the Pandora’s Hope (Latour 1999),

    Of becoming my own reference (list).

In the wake of the tolling bell,

Through the haunting utterance of this poem,

I have, instead, chosen to embrace my dead body (Donne 1923/2015),

Cherishing my discovery of such intricate interweaving,

Of the heuristic power of capital that has nonetheless (Portes 1998)

S h a p e d

My thinking and knowing—

   Revealing the secret of my Be(com)ing.

Author’s note

This poem is born out of inspiration, from that ‘aha moment’ when I found that movement of doing, being, and knowing. As a framing statement, the abstract is developed to allow the reader to enter into the poem’s space. The epigraph further reveals a secret which is significant to my poetic inquiry (Wu 2021). All ‘that reading, writing, and thinking gives [me] expertise and confidence and will very likely point [me] toward something to do’ (St. Pierre 2021 6).

Within a liminal space, embodied writing as a research praxis (Anderson 2001) allows me to produce the desire of the Other in the form of poetry. At the engagement between the creative, and the relational, the writing self is constantly engaged and writing the self is ‘an encounter [that] is not a confrontation with a “thing” but a relation that is sensed, rather than understood’ (Jackson 2017, 669). Writing the self is, then, a process of becoming, with desire as its force, transcending the personal, historical, social, and cultural into which the existent is thrown.

Producing the words on the page carries with it the imprint of this embodied experience; the notion of otherness (an outsider) serves as a starting point to explore how the truth of its desire, which may well lie in a history of bodies, can be implicated in the process of reading and writing. Yet the notion of being Othered is deliberately ‘sketched’ rather than ‘detailed’ in this work. This is more of a strategy for ‘losing itself in ambiguity’. As Simone de Beauvoir (1949/2014) explained, ‘Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought’ (xxiii).

If truth be told, my sense of otherness is not singular and essentially different. Being an immigrant, I am made aware of my different ways of doing and thinking (Yan 2022). Writing otherness is not a representation of experience but is an embodied and sensory experience in itself. Writing the self, then, confronts and is further troubled by the process of the doing of the writing self. This embodied form of knowing is emancipatory and empowering.

Meanwhile, I am very guarded when revealing more about my experiences and expressions of ‘otherness’. My past experience has taught me that not all reviewers are sympathetic to the becoming of the Other. For instance, on one occasion a reviewer praised my submitted work (not this poem) during the review process and then asked me to make some revisions and to provide some context if this work had been adapted from a thesis/dissertation. When I revealed that, as a rejected PhD applicant, I was mostly self-trained to write scholarly work, the reviewer rejected that paper for other ‘legitimate’ reasons.

As deceived as I felt, that experience made me question to what degree the abject Other can reveal their identity to narrate the becoming of the self. Being the rejected higher degree applicant, it took me almost a decade to fight for my right to pursue research in social science. My biggest mistake is that I believed I needed a PhD in order to participate in knowledge production in academia. The desire of ‘becoming to know’ pushes me to read and write about the self, opening a door that leads me to explore new forms of academic scholarship.

I had once lost hope because I could not see the dawn coming. I tried to get into a PhD program over the years. Looking back, I realised that all I needed was to read the ‘right’ work and keep writing and get my writing published. No university lecturers told me that back then. As an academic abject, being cast off from the academy has forced me to self-train through reading a vast amount of literature that orients my understanding of being and knowing. (And it worked.) Because of my lived experience, my creative research seeks to decolonise scholarly publishing by merging narrative styles with academic discourse.

  NOW with delicate grace I must address,

Issues that whisper, yet need confess,

  My ways of doing and being

  That grant me the right,

  To voice my thoughts and bring them to light,

Before they’re hushed and forever stilled,

  In verse and rhyme, my abject voice fulfilled.

Postscript

This poetic piece is written and dedicated to the rejected group of ‘students’ (like me) who once had a dream of pursuing research. But the higher education system rejects them, considering them unfit (or not good enough) to engage in knowledge production in academia (Yan & Poole, under review). To many others, you might face institutional access and exclusion for various reasons. I want to emphasise that these rejected individuals are nothing less than great and what happened to them is quite unfortunate. I share the feelings of every one of you.

If this poetic piece sees the light one day, I want to urge every Other to rekindle your shattered dreams by writing the self and getting your work published in reputable journals. I encourage each of you to engage in social science research, uttering your once-silenced voices. Such scholarly works can only be produced by YOU (even if you do not hold a research degree). However, it is essential for you to choose the ‘right’ works to read—those that can orient your thinking and realise a sense of being.

It took me about a decade to see the dawn coming (2010–2022). Last year, I eventually gained admission into a PhD program and was awarded two types of scholarship. As a result of my academic trajectory, I am choosing to become an academic Other, writing differently, and thinking philosophically (Yan et al. 2023). And I finally become to know the secret of becoming the Self. Echoing St. Pierre (2021), ‘I encourage you to read hard, write hard, think hard and invent new forms of inquiry that might create a new world and a people yet to come’ (7).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dave Yan

Dave Yan is just a name whose gender identity is he/him, but whose story may represent the marginalised voices of they/them. Resisting conventional norms of scholarly writing, his academic work seeks to amplify the lived experience of the abject Other and produce different kinds of knowledge. He is particularly interested in using innovative methodologies for (post-)qualitative inquiry and telling stories through his creative work. For interested readers, examining his other works may help to know Who The Author Is.