Zine Alchemy, Part 2: a story about the healing power of making a zine
By Dal Kular
CW: references to racism, mental illness, transgenerational trauma.
Read part one here
Images of The joy and belonging of Over Here Zine Fest 2024! From left to right: Black Nature in Residence Zine by identity on tyne, Dal & Sheree (elder-zinesters), Love Notes to Nature Zine by me, and Nabeela with her zine created at Peaks of Colour zine-making workshop.
As a Brown woman having visited zine fests and exploring online zine distros the under- representation of WOC zinesters was evident, although there are many more of us now. Although Sinor (2003) says that “zinesters perform through word and image the pain and joy of being outside, of being different.”, Laverne-Daye suggests there seemed to be a failure to acknowledge that WOC zinesters are outsiders within zine culture, reflecting the same power relations and discourses that are replicated in the white Western world.
Addressing this silencing, zinesters Seleena Laverne-Daye and Saffa Khan organised ‘Over Here Zine Fest’ for Global Majority zinesters in 2018, “…to build self-sustaining alternative models for publishing, art, activism and collaboration in our communities” and,
“It’s about taking up space within subcultures that are infiltrated by white people (punk and the world of zines) but also taking up space in doing things that aren’t ‘meant’ for black people like playing punk and creating art.”
Over Here Zine Fest is going from strength to strength after a brief pause during the pandemic. In 2023 and 2024 I finally got my chance to table and take up space with my fellow zinester-sister Dr Sheree Mack. Over Here zine fest is a joyous and supportive community for Global Majority creatives to connect with and uplift each other. It’s for us. By us. I’m hugely grateful for all the effort and energy the Over Here team put into this fest.
Images of some of Seleena’s zines
Seleena Laverne-Daye herself is a pioneering Black punk zinester who’s written over 40 zines including Brown Girl Zine and Poor Lass Zine, collaborations full of essay, prose, illustration and poetry. Seleena’s work represents a legacy archive, a grassroots memory text sharing the lives of ordinary people, a form of visibilising self and community, writing, creating and shaping their own narratives on their own terms.
Zines are a bit like a cooking pot – they can be a holding space for the many complimentary and contradictory ingredients and experiences of our lives with the potential for stirring up some fresh and surprising flavours, challenging normative expectations and disrupting assumptions, both within ourselves and others. The multi-layered multi-media format encourages creative freedom often resulting in epiphanies and revelations with the potential to map out new connections and trajectories.
My Wild Ink zine and the process of making it became a therapeutic “third space” cooking pot, an entirely new space that helped me to better understand and assert myself by negotiating cultural production in my own way which stands outside of traditional frameworks or institutions. Crucially, I was rejecting interpretation or analysis by an expert. When I began making Wild Ink I knew I felt stuck and I knew I wanted to heal.
It was an intuitive, creative and healing process, as if the zine was making me. The physicality of the cutting, tearing, sticking, pasting, re-arranging images, documents and words resonated with Toni Morrison’s idea of ‘pieces’ from memories sparking my creative process and ancestral memory. I was also inspired by Audre Lorde’s description of, “…a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…” which is full of ‘ancient and hidden’ transgenerational memories, source material for creativity and power rooted in “… unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling”.
Guided by Audre Lorde’s words and wisdom from Toni Morrison, I managed to create a space where I was spontaneously able to develop my own alchemical language to express the ‘moveable feast’ of my identity, affording me the opportunity to experiment with re-historising on my own terms.
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Images of Collage page and poetry from Wild Ink
The most startling epiphany from making Wild Ink was the surfacing of transgenerational trauma as a grandchild of the Partition of India and the unexpected transgenerational healing and grieving process which followed. Wild Ink became my way of cathartic talking, listening and understanding this massive experience which both my parents had lived through as children.
I felt as if the physical process of zine-making helped me surface the ‘unanswered questions’ and ‘gnawing grief’ and burden of ‘indirect witnessing’. This reminded me of the importance of creating these kinds of legacy works so that the (great) grandchildren of the partition or other global upheavals get to engage in their own re-tellings and understandings,
“The narratives of these traumatic events can never be told once and for all. As historical circumstances change, the stories must be told and retold by each succeeding generation…But, more importantly, stories take on new meanings for subsequent generations as they rework their social heritage and confront new sets of challenges.”
(Neal, 1998 cited in Singh, 2015)
The zine was a holding space as well as revealing space. Reading my poem, ‘Dear Aunty Audre’ and the list of mental health challenges I’d experienced throughout my life, I wonder how much of this has been the burdensome task that I as a grandchild of the partition had been acting out due to inherited trauma, that was not possible for my ancestors to process? Factors that impacted my mental health are many and complex and beyond the scope of this article, yet here, in the process of making a zine, I had unearthed something profound which had been buried in my body and mind all my life.
Perhaps Wild Ink, as a third space creative cooking pot had managed, ‘…to rip the veil over “proceedings too terrible to relate” helping me to start participating in a conversation that “…we were seldom invited to participate in…even when we were its topic”, especially as both my parents had now passed away. Toni Morrison refers to the writing of our heritage stories as ‘literary archeology’ and,
“On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork, you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.”
Wild Ink was not only a ‘site’ where I could explore the fragments of creativity, identity and wildness but also a site of reconstruction: to form some kind of meaning, retrieval and decolonisation of my past history and memory. Toni Morrison advises me that memory helps us to access the authenticity of our “own cultural sources” rather than the literature and sociology created by other people for us. This is the potential of zine-making. We get to create for ourselves authentically, learning to listen to our inner voices full of deep wisdom and knowledge and divesting from the overcultures which demand the performance of our identities in ways that sustain white supremacy.
Images of Collage, cut up and prose poetry from Wild Ink
Sharing Wild Ink means I allow others to access my world and experiences. Whilst sharing can feel vulnerable and exposing, it can also be part of the healing process. As bell hooks says I’m capturing “…intensely subjective ‘truths’ as well as challenging their relationship to the larger context of my history”, and as Toni Morrison suggests possibly, “Creating discomfort and unease to encourage the reader to rely on a ‘different body of knowledge’ to that of mainstream discourse with its legacy of colonialism. Given today’s climate, this is more crucial than ever. I truly hope that my zine is a source of inspiration for other Global Majority folks, especially older, silver-streaked, post-menopausal women like myself for whom there were very low expectations when we were young. We have the chance to change that and pass our wisdom on.
It may sound like a platitude but making Wild Ink zine really did change my life. I can’t promise this for everyone making a zine! I can promise that everyone can make zines in their own way and that it’s a beautiful, joyful, healing and often profound journey. Zines also have the potential to engage with the massive and critical debates of our times for readers as well as the zine-maker, perhaps helping us make sense of them or holding space for when nothing makes sense at all. Whether you make a zine on your favourite flavour of crisps or on Black Nature or a zine full of your mother’s recipes and treatments, the best encouragement I can give you is, just start. You never know where this journey may lead you.
Dal Kular (she/her) is a writer, maker, zinester and facilitator of creative and nature-allied arts for healing, liberation and joy. She left school at 16 years old with 3 O-levels having been told she could never be a writer – returning to the power of words in her late forties – as an act of radical care and healing. Her debut poetry book (un)interrupted tongues, published by Fly on The Wall Press, emerged from a zine she created during her masters dissertation about the therapeutic and healing powers of zine-making. She loves making zines and handmade books. Dal’s latest zine is called ‘Dear Nature…’ and created during her writing residency with Peaks of Colour. She lives in Sheffield. You can read more of her work here.
Dal will be facilitating an online zine workshop for us on Friday 28th March as part of our online series of events Building our own archives: Zines as a tool for resistance.
