Welcome to Carnation Press!

We are officially open for submissions to our inaugural issue: Our Liberation Notes.

There’s a very famous Frank O’Hara line from his poem To the Film Industry in Crisis, “in times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love”. When the world feels like it’s falling apart, as temperatures rise and forests fall, as we continue our slow march onward in the grey-toned capitalist existence, we are reminded of what our values are, and who are those we extend compassion to. A conclusion that I have come to is that grief and love exist as two sides of the same coin: because I love the world and the people in it, I constantly mourn its state and limitations. To love the world in its purest form is to bear witness to the tragedy of contemporary existence under capitalism. And yet in this feeling, despite the sadness that often feels like it will consume me, I find myself moved to act.

I am a writer. I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. Writing is perhaps the longest relationship that I have cultivated throughout my life; it has been my passion, my praxis, and my most sincere form of expression. Like many, I have found myself in the words of others, I have learned, grown, and changed through the consumption of literature. It is literature that has provided me shelter in the dark and cold haze of this wide and vast world. With that in mind, I hope to create something similar for other people. Like many before me, I cannot be content with my own feelings of joy and satisfaction. Rather, I must do my best to help those around me, and even those beyond me, to feel the same. My own small moments of happiness can only feel slightly incomplete without a more collective liberation.

So with that, I bring you Carnation Press.

We are a small, youth-led, independent literary journal and publisher that aims to platform left-wing voices, cultivate community, and facilitate discussion on anti-capitalism, liberation, and resistance through culture and the arts. We hope to be a place for writers and artists in Malaysia to share their work, their aspirations and hopes, and their feelings for change in the struggle. Inspired by both the works and actions of writers such as Ghassan Kanafani, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Baldwin, and a myriad of others, we hope that we can be a part of the small movement forming in our home country against the rising wave of fascism and repression.

Our Liberation Notes, our first issue, is a meditation on the ideas of liberation, what it means to exist in contemporary Malaysia. We achieved independence in 1957, and became a unified country with parts of Borneo in 1963, yet in the decades that have passed, we have seen repression and marginalisation in various forms. Malaysia exists in a space of many contradictions, a thin veneer of peace plastered over much discomfort and dissatisfaction. What does it mean to be liberated now? What do we aspire for, in both our individual and collective liberation?

A Che Guevara quote that I find myself thinking of often goes as follows:

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

I don’t remember when exactly I first came across it, but I feel it has been the backbone, a core tenet, of my revolutionary practice. It so perfectly encapsulates so many of my feelings. I think being an artist is something like that, too. To be revolutionary is to aspire for a kinder world, to have a great feeling of hope. To be loving is to open your heart and be vulnerable, to allow yourself to be seen in an authentic and raw form beyond the performance of life under capitalism. To be an artist could perhaps be a meeting of both. There’s something inherently a bit ridiculous about bearing our hearts to the world through our work. Yet we do.

Aarani Diana
Editor-in-Chief
Malaysian Carnation Press