by Domenica Ghanem
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Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY and an MFA from New York University. His books encompass several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet. Among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. Ali is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. His new book of poems, Inquisition, and a new hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, will both be released in 2018. Learn more at his website. Photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones.
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Domenica Ghanem
(DG): What do you think is
the relationship between your poetry or poetry in general and politics,
especially in “Trump’s America?”
Kazim Ali (KA): Well, we have all of us always
been "political," or functioned in a political and social context. To
be given additional context or attention since the election due to the racism
and prejudice slung my way does not make a better situation for me or other
Muslim writers. Still, I am glad to see many younger Muslim voices in poetry--Tarfia Faizullah, Solmaz Sharif, Kaveh Akbar, Ruth Awad, Fatimah Asghar, Leila Chatti
and Zeina Hashem Beck all come to immediate mind but there are so many others,
so many I couldn't even count them.
Truly in the past ten years there has been a wave of young Muslim poets publishing
and for this reason I feel very sure, very confident, not at all in crisis. I
write about the body, I write about the spirit, I write about music, art and
dance, but none of these things, none, are separate for me from one another or
from this vague term "politics." Politics means how we live in the
world. Unless you live with the privilege of being able to ignore that then you
are political.
DG: Many people
have become more aware of social issues because of the Trump administration’s
open assault on many communities. But for many people, including us in the
Muslim American community, we haven’t had the privilege of ignoring these
issues. In what ways has the work you’re doing today in your writing and in your
classes changed or been affected by today’s political environment, or are you
working with the same themes you’ve been building on? What themes remain
relevant?
KA: A little while ago I thought I
ought to stop writing about God. The reason is that I was starting to have
ideas. Ideas mean a system of ideas. Every idea you have may preclude another.
I thought that it would be better to have a space of unknowing and that other
poets would continue to make poems about God. I don't know if I have kept my
promise or not, but by turning away from the task of trying to know the unknown
and from the vocabulary of the spirit, which is necessarily the language of
abstraction, I was able to come back into the world.
What occupies me now is physical landscape, the
history of places, the ways human communities work in time and space -- maybe I
have become a sociologist or a geographer -- but I still work in sound and
gesture. At the moment it's contested places that interest me --the struggles of
the Pimicikamak Cree of Northern Manitoba against the provincial government
which dammed the river that gave them their livelihood and compromised their
culture and their way of life; or perhaps the work I do in offering yoga
teachings and trainings to Palestinian people in the West Bank. Or the "border"
communities that exist in every American town and city, not just those on our
southern border.
DG: You’re described as an “American poet”, but I
understand you have a layered ethnic and national background and do a lot of
international travel -- how do you find your poetry is received differently in
different countries? What themes seem to resonate on a universal level?
KA: I have traveled a fair amount,
but it is (mostly) not to do poetry readings or participate in international
literary communities. I have done some of that in India and was fortunate
enough to publish a book of selected poems in India a couple of years back. But
my travel in other places has been as a private citizen, a wanderer, an
explorer, a writer (to be writing, not to have a public life as a
"writer"), for international solidarity work or for my work as a
(volunteer) yoga teacher. I have been strongly affected myself by the literary
contexts of the places I visit. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Urguayan
Cristina Peri Rossi have both been very important to me. Among French writers
Ananda Devi and Marguerite Duras are both touchstone figures. In India I met
many incredible poets and writers whose work nourishes me.
DG: How do you use poetry as a tool to teach about
subjects not necessarily having to do with poetry – like social issues, or
general self-expression? Things you often learn about in college that aren’t
necessarily dictated in the curriculum. In some of your work you talk about
being both Muslim and queer. Do you find that there’s a lot of push and pull
between those identities? Has poetry helped you reconcile them?
KA: On the one hand for me there
isn't a push and pull between the identities because they each live inside of
me. Also, the identities are fluid and I construct them and they construct me
through my life. My relationship to each has changed. Certainly, of the poets I
love, dearest are the ones who can reveal to me the internal life, the strange
negotiation that we all have to make in a larger external world that does not
include us. That's not unique to being Muslim or to being queer but to every
person. Poetry too can give us a sense of how time works, how place/space and
its construction by political and social forces govern our beings.
DG: I’ve often struggled with what it means to be
a “good Muslim woman” and sometimes more importantly a “good Muslim daughter.” Have you had similar struggles of trying to be a “good Muslim son?” What level
of support have you had from your parents?
KA: I can't talk too much about my
family here, beyond what I've put in books. We are trying to find our ways and
some times have been easier than others. But I will tell you this much, Islam
is a religion of plurality and always has been. You must find what truth is in
it for you and what place it has in your own life. That too has fluctuated and
changed for me throughout my life. As I say in a poem called "OriginStory," "I have not been a good son." It's as ironic a statement
as it is sincere. I have no answer.
DG: There are so many prolific Indian, Iranian,
and Egyptian poets -- do any of them in particular inspire your work?
KA: So many. I am working on editing
a (very small compact) selection of contemporary Indian anglophone poets for POETRY; I'll say Eunice de Souza, who
recently passed away, was a favorite for me. Sohrab Sepehri, the twentieth
century Iranian poet, is a major touchstone figure. I've translated three of
his books (published in one volume by BOA Editions). I find in his work a
marrying of physical and spiritual, concrete and abstract, that I have found
nowhere else.
DG: In a recent interview about your poem “Checkpoint,” you said that
sometimes you feel like a journalist and that “Checkpoint” is an interrogation
of passport control at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Life in the occupied
territories is certainly an under-reported story. What are some of your other
poems that might offer us a glimpse into the stories you’d like to see reported
in the news?
KA: I worked on many poems from my
experiences traveling that are in my two forthcoming books; I'm working on two current
projects, both of them are nonfiction. The first is a short book about the
Canadian dam I mentioned earlier. The part of the story I didn't tell you is
that my dad was one of the engineers who helped to design the electrical systems
of the dam. I don't think any of the workers back in 1976 knew what the impacts
of the dam would be, but I grew up there, in a trailer-park town in the middle
of the boreal forest, for four years while this dam was being built. Last year
I went back up there to the reservation and stayed for a little while and
researched and interviewed aboriginal elders, activists, and government
officials.
I am trying to recount the simultaneous stories of
my own personal journey and the story of the Pimicikamak. My second project is
about teaching yoga and making connections between the ancient teachings and
the current situation in the Middle East. What most people may not know is that
yoga has been in the middle east for hundreds of years. In the 1500s one of the
more enlightened princes of the Mughal empire, Dara Shikoh, commissioned Farsi
translations of all the texts and yoga made its way across Persia and into the
Arab world. It may be new to teach in the context of life in the contemporary
West Bank, but it's not new at all.
DG: You have two
new books coming out this year, what excites you about each?
KA: I have a book of essays called Silver Road: Essays, Maps, & Calligraphies. It intersperses short essays
with diary fragments, short poems, and lyric "prose maps," that each
try to tell the story of a place in movement. I like the braided form and the
book has been a long time in the writing. In fact, all the braided strands were
written separately and apart from each other-- there was no intention at the
time of original writing that they would make a book together-- so it feels
organic, an archive of my life and a pattern of my way of thinking.
In March, my new collection of poems is coming out.
It is called Inquisition. I am excited about it because I feel like I have moved into different
modes -- it includes lyrics, narrative poems, even two pieces that had their
origins as spoken word pieces. With each new collection I want to turn a corner
formally, but I also want to challenge myself as a poet in terms of subject
matter, how honest I can be, how many risks I can take. So, this book has a
couple of poems that worry me, that frighten me in terms of making me feel
exposed by putting them out in the world. So that's thrilling and
anxiety-inducing.
DG: If someone were
exploring your work for the first time, which work or works would you suggest?
KA:I couldn't say. I have written in
so many different genres and modes that they make a beautiful pattern for me.
If I could suggest anything I would hope a reader would not just read one book
but would try two or three or four.
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Additional
Links
A reading of the essay "Poetry is Dangerous" by Kazim Ali from ORANGE ALERT: ESSAYS ON POETRY, ART AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE (University of Michigan 2010).
"Peach" by Kazim Ali (The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database).
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Domenica Ghanem is the media manager and co-manager of
the communications team at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is an activist and writer on issues of
the drug war, criminal justice, justice for Palestine, rape culture, and
Islamophobia. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with degrees in
journalism and political science in 2015.
