Poetry Against Imperialism

PORSHA OLAYIWOLA: I’m super excited and honored to be here with y’all, whose work I often pore over. There’s so much going on and I personally am filled with feelings. Let’s start with a favorite book you keep returning to, especially in times of turmoil.

JAKE SKEETS: I’ve been rereading Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor and Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson. I’m very much a poet of place: How do poets interrogate a specific region, a specific landscape? That helps me come to terms with the world around us, seeing poets interrogate where they are existing.

SAFIA ELHILLO: I am on my 27^th reread of Aria Aber’s first collection, Hard Damage, and I find something new each time. Aria is Afghan, raised in Germany, and the poems are written in English, so there’s a real stretchiness to the English that is very exciting to me. It is a wide-spanning collection of poems, but one of the things at its heart is an interrogation of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. What I appreciate in this current reread is the deep rage and the ways in which the language of the poems is in conversation with that rage. Misery loves company, so I’m having a nice time reading whatever angry poems I can get my hands on.

MOSAB ABU TOHA: I come from Gaza so most of my favorite books are in Arabic. But among English translations, I’m thinking about Mahmoud Darwish’s prose book Memory for Forgetfulness. These days I’m writing about memories — not distant memories, but recent memories of the wars happening now. We are writing about these things while they are still happening, and even when we are writing about them in the future, we are writing about them in the hope they will not be literally forgotten, but they will be a lesson for humanity, that this should not be happening again. This book talks about the siege in Lebanon in 1982, when Darwish talks about the symbolism of death, of coffee, of doves, of minute details he was living through, the struggle he went through trying to make a cup of coffee when there was a tank opposite his window. I’m thinking about this book a lot, because it could be written right now in many, many, many places.

JOSÉ OLIVAREZ: The poem I return to the most is ​“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” by June Jordan. Like Safia, I’m attracted to the rage in the poem. I think in these moments, especially in the United States where I grew up and where I write from, there’s this weird insistence on propriety and maintaining the norms, maintaining bureaucracy, even when it’s clear the norms are resulting in massive violence. In the United States there’s a weird aversion to anger — it’s the emotion we are most discouraged from showing in our writing. So I’m attracted to the way the poem’s rage is grounded in love, in this understanding that we can and should be doing more for each other.

PORSHA: I immediately thought of the poem ​“Power” by Audre Lorde, because of the rage. I also thought about Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, simply because we are existing in the time the book takes place, which is terrifying. Thinking about influence, I’m pulling from a discussion I had with Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: Why do you write? It’s a simple question, but Kiese stated reparations was the reason he writes, reclaiming things and bringing it back to himself or to his people. This has been a question that has grounded me. Sometimes I write for memory or to have a permanent space for my people.

MOSAB: It’s not a luxury to write, as Audre Lorde once said. We can’t go to war zones and protect the people who are being slaughtered, but at least we can write about them. We are not only reporting about what’s happening, but we are showing things that people may value in other people’s lives. We don’t want people to perceive other people as numbers. Let’s say 100 people got killed yesterday, 500 houses were bombed last month. My role as a poet, as a writer, is to show it was not a house which was bombed, that it was more than that. 

I have nothing else to do. I can’t go and snatch an F-16 from the sky and return it to the military base, but I can stop that moment after the bombing happened and show the humanity of the people, not through words, but through images. I hardly escaped Gaza with my wife and kids. Even if I had the willingness to go back to Gaza, I can’t, because there is no border crossing right now open between Gaza and the outside world. But at least I can continue to write.

SAFIA: These days I’m thinking about how one of the functions of poetry is to defamiliarize. Some of the work of a poem is looking at something in slant or upside down or backwards or through a crack in the wall. We are living through deep aberrations in nature and having them gradually become normalized. The work of making poetry is important and helpful in reminding myself that none of this is normal.

In the first couple of weeks of the war in Sudan, I felt so useless. I live in California, literally on the opposite side of the planet, and I could not, for the life of me, come up with a task that felt proportionate to the scale. Almost like a sort of penance, I made it so that anytime I encountered a video or image, anything — I had to watch it. The act of witnessing was my contribution. And then the strange, cognitive thing that started to happen is, after a while, nothing bothered me on a physical level. At first I would be sick to my stomach at the sight of blood and destruction, and it would be jarring, then weeks later — one can get used to anything, which I think is kind of to our great detriment in moments where deep empathy is called for. That is what returned me to the page. It feels like a great corruption is being done to my spirit, to my psyche, to my body, that I am able to look on atrocities like this and my brain is like, ​“yep, normal, business as usual, the natural order of things.” One of the only ways I know to keep things strange is poetry.

JOSÉ: I think a lot about power. We live in a moment when news agencies that purport to be objective go to official authorities as their first source. Oftentimes the people committing the violence are the ones expected to self-report on the violences they are committing. So we get all sorts of ridiculous constructions of language, whether it’s the passive voice that hides who is doing the violence to whom, but we also get accounts of situations that are, in fact, not at all true. For me, writing is an opportunity to interrogate some of those sources and disrupt those kinds of easy roles.

JAKE: Writing builds coalitions across regions, across communities. Because we’re thinking about language and the capacity of language, we’re able to then understand the capacity of our communities. We begin to have conversations in and around the violences, in and around the kinds of movements we have toward a kind of liberation. For me, I feel like this is a question that’s been asked of Native communities across the country. There’s a scholarly essay called ​“What Do American Indians Want From Writing?” It’s by a Native scholar [Scott Richard Lyons] who is writing around the sort of perspective of rhetoric. I feel like Indigenous communities here in the United States have always been responding to or writing toward a kind of sovereignty, whether that’s a physical, legal, or rhetorical one.

What does it mean to think within the grammars, within the beauty of those grammars of your own individual communities, as opposed to conventions or constructions of settler states? For me, that opens up this idea of a temporal sovereignty, where we’re able to not necessarily free our communities, but we’re able to position our communities within a kind of temporality that’s existing outside of a settler stream of consciousness or time, where everything is so linear, so black and white. The job of the poet or the artist is to reach in and find those pockets of opportunity to help us see the world in different places.

In short, I write because I’m trying to reorient the world, or the people around me, or myself, to look at the day in a new light, in new ways.

PORSHA: I’m also thinking a little bit about the political climate in which Trump was president. We saw this boom in erasure poetry, blackout poems. I’m curious what things you are deliberately trying to do in the context of craft that you think is informed by your lived experience within the sociopolitical climate of this world?

SAFIA: I haven’t written that much poetry in the past year and a half or so since war broke out in Sudan, which I’m kind of using to mark a before and after time. But I do find myself notably moving away from figurative language. One of my earliest tools as a poet was the metaphor and the simile. And I feel that I have, at least for now, abruptly lost interest. Claire Schwartz has an essay reviewing Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and talking about the role of the simile and how ​“like” is not ​“is,” and it opens up into this larger conversation about the failures of the project of empathy when it comes to literature. I am trying to do the futile work of calling for help, calling for attention for my people, for a war that is often referred to in mainstream media as the ​“forgotten war.” My initial impulse is simile, is metaphor, to be like, ​“you should care about this, because it is like this other thing that you care about.” And that is really heartbreaking, thankless labor. It is not interesting to me on a personal, political or craft level anymore to talk about what it’s ​“like” instead of just talking about what it ​“is,” because it is not my job to get a reader who doesn’t already care to care. It is not my job or my people’s job to humanize ourselves to someone who does not already hold our humanity as a core belief.

I’m not being like, ​“abolish the metaphor, abolish the simile.” Hopefully in gentler times, I will find my way back. But I don’t feel I have the luxury in this moment of trying to think about what it’s ​“like,” because there is such a dearth of language about what it ​“is,” and my responsibility is to the language of what it is right now. Right now, we’re in triage.

PORSHA: Reminds me of a poem where Ilya Kaminsky says, ​“The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.” Thank you, Safia.

MOSAB: I write in two languages — my native tongue, Arabic, and also, English. I don’t remember myself writing a single poem in the Arabic language since October 7 [2023]. In Arabic, I’m mostly addressing myself as a human being who is part of this big world that is about 14 billion years old. Whereas in the English language, I’m talking to the Other, the Other who does not live with us. Gaza has been under siege since 2007, has been under occupation since 1948, just as other Palestinian cities. But the Other has never been to Gaza. Unless they are journalists who had the permit to enter, I’ve never seen a foreigner coming just to visit Gaza, to meet friends, to visit relatives.

The amount of destruction I witnessed, the danger I was in when I was in Gaza during the first two months of the genocide, these experiences and these emotions have given me new images, new similes. For example, there are not enough ambulances, paramedics or fire trucks. There is not even enough fuel for these vehicles, if they were there. There is not enough medical equipment, or even stretchers. So in one picture, in one video, I saw a group of people carrying the body of an injured person on a door. So that image itself gave me the idea that these people are a wall carrying the door with them. So it was kind of a moving and very cruel image to see — that the door to a room is being carried by a wall of people.

If in the past, I had one ton of shrapnel or 100 liters of blood in my poems, now, there are more pieces of shrapnel, there are more corpses, there is more rubble. And I’m noticing that, in some of my new poems, I focus on repetition, because everything is being repeated. I have a poem about a family that was wiped out called ​“Shrapnel Looking for Laughter.” I think I can make it even longer because there are more families who have been wiped out because of the genocide. It keeps happening and happening, and this repetition is reflected in my writing.

JAKE: I come from the Navajo Nation, and when we were being actively settled, we were placed in detention camps across the American Southwest. One of them was just around the New Mexico-Texas border. Weaving is a big part of our culture, a big part of our creation story. I don’t want to speak for all Diné writers, but a big craft element in Diné writing is the knowledge of weaving. While we were displaced and removed from our traditional homelands, our weavers, up until that point, worked within colors that were created by dyes from plants in the American Southwest. So generally that means black and red. And through trade, we were able to get indigo, so blue began showing up.

And then removal/​displacement happened, where we were able to get these vibrant colors of artificially dyed wool, because of the United States being able to have these artificially created colors. While these weavers were detained in this detention camp, there was an explosion of utilizing all the colors that were available to them, like blankets they were given. For me, that tradition of trying to figure out how to write a letter toward some kind of future or past at the same time, using things around you, I feel like is the way I sort of think about writing right now. Epistolary forms help me situate time and temporality a lot in my writing, because when you’re writing a letter, you’re almost writing into time.

JOSÉ: I come from a people that migrated to the United States because there was no more opportunity in the small rural village where they grew up in Mexico. There wasn’t running water. They migrated to the United States only to find what they hoped [for] was not actually available — they found more kinds of economic instability. I used to think that migration happened once. That there was a place of leaving and a place of arrival. And I think more and more I’m thinking about the fact that my family may have to migrate again, that there may never be an end to migration. Part of it because of climate change, part of it because of ongoing wars, part of it because of economic disaster, food shortages and water shortages.

Right now I’m trying to write a novel. I’ve been trying to reverse some of the stories we tell, particularly in my community, in the Mexican American community, about what migration means, what does triumphant migration mean. And try and poke some holes into some of the comforts that those kinds of stories might give us, and try to tell a new kind of story that imagines different possibilities and tries to reimagine what community can look like in the context of not necessarily being able to rely on a place to give you stability.

PORSHA: I have been working on a collection of poems that center Black folks and water. I’ve been using water as an informative piece of how my craft moves. I believe it’s Toni Morrison who says ​“all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” That’s how I’ve been thinking about language. 

I don’t know if this is a lighter question or a heavier question, or maybe I’m just a messy girl, I’m curious to know your unpopular political or poetic opinions.

MOSAB: This is a general saying that I say: By the time you start to massacre other people, victimize other people, you are no longer a victim. This applies to any place, to any conflict, to any kind of people. You can’t continue to say that ​“I’m the victim” for 100 years, and during this time, you continue to victimize other people, to occupy other people, to kill other people. By the time you victimize other people, then you are no longer a victim.

I wanted to comment on the Toni Morrison quote, because she said that every drop of water has a memory. I think this also applies to the rubble, to the stones. I’m thinking about the stones that constitute the rubble of houses that were bombed, whether in Gaza, whether in Yemen or Sudan, maybe the houses of the Natives who were blown up by the colonizers. Or in World War I or World War II. These stones once belonged to a living room, to a kitchen, to a ceiling. I think even stones have memory, just like water does.

PORSHA: Thank you for that. I believe the same is true for the land, that it knows everything.

SAFIA: I have a poetry hot take. I think that being able to write a poem in inherited form, like a sonnet or a sestina, is not a flex. Those forms are tools. It makes me a little itchy whenever I see the form named in the title. So if the title of the poem is like, ​“Sestina, in which I’m …” — just start your poem. If I can see that it’s a sestina, cool. The poem should work even without me being able to recognize that it’s a sestina.

PORSHA: I love it. I’m guilty and I love it.

SAFIA: I’m guilty. You know, what you hate in another is what you fear in yourself.

JOSÉ: That’s great. I’m also guilty. I have to change all my titles now. My unpopular opinion is that reading for empathy is bullshit and self-serving more than anything. In the essay ​“The Banality of Empathy” by Namwali Serpell, she gives this great example where she says if you see someone is drowning in a lake, you don’t need to empathize with them to act. And so the idea that, in times of crisis, the first thing some people think about is ​“let me read so I can empathize,” as opposed to finding ways to act however they can, feels disingenuous to me.

JAKE: I have two. The first is that studying creative writing, or studying writing in general, should be divorced from the English departments. I don’t think students need to study literature to understand creative writing or understand poetry. I feel like if we want to develop truly sovereign modes of thinking and writing, we need to divorce ourselves from the history of the English department, the history of the university itself, to create these new ways we want to teach writing toward a liberatory movement.

The second is probably the most controversial. If you really want to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you should first give up your land if you own a home, or you own land — you should return that to the nearest Native nation. And you should wipe out your savings account because hoarding wealth is not looking toward liberation, it’s acting into capitalism, which is the driving force of settler-colonialism.

PORSHA: I haven’t decided exactly what mine is, but I will say I’ve seen one too many TikToks about Kamala Harris. I’m very excited and I’m also terrified. I think that is probably the duality of living in this country, unfortunately, just always a little skeptical.

What’s giving you strength at this time? What’s bringing you joy? How are you taking care of yourself?

JOSÉ: I joined a basketball league. I’m very bad, but it’s been fun to run around with real people.

SAFIA: I don’t know that I have been reaching for joy in any kind of noticeable way for the past little while. But the thing that gives me strength, that gives me energy, that is my engine, is that I’m so pissed off. I’m so angry. I sometimes get done the things I need to get done out of spite, almost. And I know that is not a sustainable engine, necessarily. But for right now, this is what I’ve got.

JOSÉ: I go to the gym out of spite.

PORSHA: I agree with that. It’s like, you know what? I’m gonna keep on living. I’m gonna take care of myself.

MOSAB: I’m not really finding any joy these days, I’m searching for hope. I see a lot of rays of hope in this world when I see the young generation taking to the street, shouting and posting about the injustices, not only in Palestine, but everywhere in the world. I think this generation will be leading any change in the coming few years and I think they need our support. I think they need our poetry. In some demonstrations, I saw people carrying posters with the poem ​“If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer. They were flying kites. I think the more kites they are flying in the sky — whether in Europe or in America or in Africa or Asia, or even in the oceans — the less destruction will be falling from the sky.

JAKE: I think joy is a desire. It’s almost like reading Manifest Destiny, this settler construction of what we’re supposed to attain. That if we work really hard and participate in society, we will reach this utopic joy, right?

But looking into where I come from, in Diné, we would call it hozhǫ́, which kind of means balance, that you’re looking for an orientation toward beauty and hope, but acknowledging that the world around you is a violent, dark place, that people can be very harmful to you, that at every single waking moment, you’re not going to be enjoying life, but you’re going to be surviving and you’re going to be working toward the next morning and the next morning and the next morning. And if all you ever do is try to reach that next morning, then you’re living a fruitful life, right? That, for me, is much more interesting than attaining joy.

SHERELL BARBEE: This has been just a really beautiful conversation. If y’all don’t mind, I have one more question. I know folks keep talking about Toni Morrison, who is often banned heavily in prisons and schools, and I’m thinking about how Georgia just banned Advanced Placement African American Studies. So I’m thinking about this idea of American culture and who gets to participate, and what voices aren’t allowed in. I just want to hear your thoughts on this current idea of a ​“culture war” or ​“culture in crisis”?

SAFIA: I don’t know that I believe there is such a thing as American culture. I think it’s too big, it’s too many people here for there to be a single, unifying American culture. And so when I do hear language around culture wars or the canon — like, whose culture, whose canon? Because my canon is doing fine.

There’s this imposed ambition to cross over into mainstream American culture, where a ​“true platform” is supposed to exist — and that is a project that is fundamentally uninteresting to me. I don’t want a megaphone. I want to be in constant, intimate, close, proximal conversation with the people that I’m actually talking to, and if anyone else wants to eavesdrop on this conversation, by all means.

While it is deeply infuriating that all these restrictions are being put into place in the schools, my hope is that will drive the curious minds to go outside of the classroom for information. We are increasingly living in a moment where there are so many different ways to access literature, culture and language. That actually is a long, robust canonical and educational coming of age journey, to be dissatisfied with the kinds of information that are available in institutions, and using that as the engine to go seek knowledge elsewhere. I think as the restrictions continue to grow and the institutional classroom becomes a decreasingly viable space for learning, I hope the alternative learning spaces will be reinforced by the continued need for them.

MOSAB: There shouldn’t be anything that’s called a cultural canon, or even literary canon. It depends on us, what we want to be learning and what we want to be teaching to the young generation. For me, anything that has to do with humanity, with our shared human rights, should be the criterion for this. So anything that does not go in the same lines as our shared human rights, as our shared human feelings, our shared human experiences, should not be part of any canon. We should be the ​“People of the world” with the capital P. We are who decides what is in our canon. There shouldn’t be any American, Arab or British canon. It should be a human or People’s canon.

JAKE: If there is an American culture, it’s definitely a settler one and imperial. One of the things it does quite well is co-opt movements for liberation. How do we get books for free to kids who don’t have access to them in the classroom? We can’t rely on a classroom, because the classroom has always been a tool of empire and settler culture, a mechanism for removal and assimilation. We can look to Indigenous communities across the world, at residential schools and boarding schools, to see the ways in which education has always been used to enact violence. So, I don’t think the canon itself is something we should even aspire toward. It should be something that’s ever evolving, always moving and in constant flux.

PORSHA: When people ban books, they’re banning ideas, ideas from people they would actually like to ban. Making sure folks read the banned books has secretly become a part of my mission. I’m starting a bookstore and our bathroom is a banned book bathroom, literally putting the text of ideas folks said shouldn’t be spread, on the walls. Thank you all for making the world, or at least my world, a better place.