Issue 4: Bruna Gomes
“xi. robotics
it’s fate, baby / you and me / wired like this”
~ Computer Programmer’s Guide to Love by Bruna Gomes
Your poem “Computer Programmer’s Guide to Love” explores the experience of love in the digital age. Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind your piece?
When considering the relationship between love and technology, my instinct is to deem them incompatible. I had a feeling that to accept technology as a good habitat for love is a gruesome allowance of contamination. But that instinct, I realised, is some sort of divine feminine urge to be superior to technology, to transcend it. Because in reality, technology is a very natural habitat for all love – romantic, platonic, familial. Consider a friend’s simple request: text me when you get home. Consider a long overdue overseas FaceTime call with your family: first you must work up the courage to call them, as you know you will start crying with longing as soon as you see their glitching faces. Then you laugh with them, tell them stories, watch them argue about the faltering sound, then cry again as you prolong the goodbye. All the while, you are holding a phone up in front of your face like some shoddy influencer. A parent is a firewall, an email is a catalogued antiquity. Technology, then, facilitates love.
While writing this poem, I sought to ask one question: does the emotional self and the electronic self create a double life, or do they integrate into a unified being? My answer: our thoughts are generated by a piece of meaty tissue with electricity running through it. We are coded to love.
Your piece is structured in 11 playful stanzas which utilise internet-speak and common digital tropes. Is play and experimentation an important part of your creative process?
Yes, playfulness is essential. Often, that is all writing is: to play with the sounds and structure of words, to choose each syllable with intention, to organise them like a child organises colourful bricks on the carpet. I don’t like to venture too far into humour – I don’t consider myself a funny writer – but a deadpan tone is a suit I find very amusing to occasionally wear. Especially for themes like love which are historically treated with utmost drama and seriousness, experimenting with how I should deliver them is a great exercise in unfolding new or unsettling ways of perception and understanding.
As for the internet-speak: seeing robots and computers develop fully formed sentences scares me. Siri scares me. I like to think I reclaimed a little human divinity or wit by taking the digital language and throwing it into a poem. Perhaps, though, a robot could do just the same, or even better.
In June 2022, you were a writer-in-residence at The Museum of Loss and Renewal in Italy. How did you find this experience and what creative projects are you currently working on?
My experience as a writer-in-residence at The Museum of Loss and Renewal was a tremendous learning experience. I was among fantastic artists – a memoirist, an actor and playwright, a filmmaker, a hybrid media artist – and realised that writing is at its best when it is interdisciplinary in its process. While isolated in the Italian countryside with all these brilliant minds, collaborative thinking and interwoven trains of thought became very valuable to me. I was previously a writer who insisted on isolation when it came to conceptualising and researching a good story. Now I encourage myself to reach out, to ask questions. I have not yet given up on writing in isolation, though. Once a project is in the process of being written, it stays in the world of my mind and is not shared until publication.
Which books are you looking forward to reading this summer?
This summer, I’m returning to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, particularly The Story of a New Name. The Ischia setting is the perfect summer read, a poisonous paradise. The jealous, obsessive friendship of Lila and Lenù is so masterful, so delightfully scathing, that I often crave to read it in an almost sadistic fashion.
Admittedly, I’m never up-to-date with new releases. I wait to spot them in my local library, or else they remain unread for many months.
Bruna Gomes is an Australian-Brazilian novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel How to Disappear and the poetry collection Triple Citizenship. Bruna’s work is featured and forthcoming in various journals including Overland, the Cordite Poetry Review, Paper Crane Journal, and The Columbia Review. In June 2022, she was a writer in residence at The Museum of Loss and Renewal in Italy, where she saw fireflies for the first time in her life. Bruna is the recipient of the Fred Rush Convocation Prize and the Association of Heads of Independent Girls Schools Prize.