Resonance

Dearest Y-Dang, 

Thanks so much for everything you did this year to restore my students’ trust in their own hearts and minds. Not for the first time, you have lightened my workload and brought ease to my life. I decided to teach Landbridge as part of a third-year course titled “Embodying Power” at my university in Mangaung, South Africa, and all I needed to do was sit back and listen to your voice come to life in my classroom. Even as you spoke from lands foreign to most of my students—Canada, Cambodia, Hong Kong, the ancestral realm—your landbridge stretched all the way into the heart of Mangaung. Immersing ourselves in your words left us with a world newly alive with meaning, our senses retuned to the nuances of depth and surface, pain and beauty, loss and regeneration. 

My students have been struggling to emerge from the self-doubt brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been worsened in turn by technologies of digital distraction and the temptations of AI. These cumulative pressures have undermined their trust in their own embodied wisdom and have made it especially difficult for them to find resonance in their undergraduate curricula. With your guidance, their podcast assignment—which I built into the course assessment structure to foster greater interactive and analytical presence—became an exercise in regenerative co-creation, surprising me and our TA, Leila, with the depth of insight and feeling that emerged for our students as they journeyed into your wor(l)ds. You write in one of your letters to your beloved son Kai that one of your greatest dreams in life has been to teach young people “how to think and, more importantly, how to live, despite all the thinking” (251). This distinction is so important to us in South Africa, too, as we try to metabolize an education system ill-equipped to ease the weight of our country’s singularly racist history and the unrealistic expectations of upward mobility that students carry in their bodies. Alongside you and artists such as Visoth Kakvei, whose work you include in Landbridge, we “delve into a spiral of infinite darkness, but we also swirl into a field of life: a lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration” (258). 

We rage with you at the cruelty of academia’s demands for detached, disembodied productivity and abstraction, not least when confronted by the horrors of torture and war. The topic of affective coercion recurs in our conversations, and we register consistent outrage at a world in which the humanity of victims and survivors of genocide is illegible except when packaged in a smile (an affective duty, as you so compellingly explain, that makes the refugee “both the centre of attention and completely invisible” [117]). At the same time, your lessons about the vortex as a generative force resonate deeply: a source of connection, repair, creativity, and vitality that serves as a unifying echo across the students’ podcast episodes. Much like the Apsaras offering air bubbles for survival in a “churning sea” or the lotus flowers rematriating war’s monstrous earthly scars (207, 254), you offer us lifelines, a landbridge, lifeworlds, guiding us towards “the book that strikes us, resonates with us, bringing with it not rice or medicine, but words and stories that treat us, help us flourish, prepare us for the darkness ahead” (290). Thanks for this incomparable gift. 

With deepest love, 

Helene 

Works Cited

Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge: [life in fragments]. Alchemy, 2023. 

Helene Strauss is a professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her publications include the books Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (U of Toronto P) and Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge; co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola), as well as co-edited special issues of the journals Interventions, Critical Arts, and Studies in Social Justice. She is currently a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies.