I was definitely brought up with a lot of conventional American English craft. In high school, all of the readings I can remember doing were Hawthorne or Shakespeare—very white Anglo-American canon. I remember learning to write the five paragraph essay, and book reports, and things like that—being directed when examining literature to identify themes and answer questions and to believe that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between symbols. Usually there’s some latent Christian messaging as well. Funnily enough, I didn’t feel very keen on poetry until adulthood because the poetry I’d been exposed to before then just felt very mechanical, sort of transactional, like you’re extracting meaning. 

Then I studied comparative literature in college, which was a little better because we were looking at literatures from multiple languages and nations, but still in a bit of an abstracted way. I was expected to theoretically examine texts according to a few frameworks, whether it’s Adorno or Althusser, and literature was very much presented as this capturable, break-downable thing. And I never personally experienced literature that way at all. I experienced it as a very mysterious, undefinable power that evaded simple categorization. 

I was really interested in what felt interstitial, what was in the shadows, or the gaps, or the white spaces. There seemed to me to be an aura around the literature that most moved me, an aura that was supra-linguistic; a thrill and danger that was more than the sum of its parts. And yet, writing and literature were so often broken down into parts, given to me as formulas or rules. So it took me a long time to actually become a creative writer because when I followed craft directions, it seemed to be taking me parallel to the literature that I experienced as a reader. 

Later,I went to journalism school. Journalism has its own set of rules and conventions that also felt completely evacuated of humanity. It’s much more formulaic and has a more explicit commercial aspect to it in the U.S., where formulas are basically derived based on what is believed to sell to readers with diminishing attentions. So that was also a really suffocating kind of space to write in, one that felt very mercenary. I was trying to cover topics like Syrian refugees, or the Arab-American community, or women’s issues, and I constantly had to flatten and diminish the humanity, power, and political import of what I was writing about because of the craft conventions of journalism. 

So from both sides, academia and journalism, I just felt like I never had that many satisfying writing experiences. That changed when I dropped off from any writing for a while. When the pandemic hit, it was a time to seclude, and by then my disgust with American journalism had grown to the point that I basically swore off writing altogether. I was silent for a period of months.

My eventual return to writing meant forgetting craft in a lot of ways, and finding this intensely private space. I was actually waking up in the middle of the night—like I was having these ancestral dreams—and then waking up and writing almost in a hypnotic state. Those moments were a gift, circumventing or short-circuiting all my training. I was writing only half-consciously, just in accordance to what felt good, and what I felt like saying. Conventional craft would have never gotten me there. I was using language in all kinds of experimental ways to try find some clarity, maybe some memory as well. 

I did that for long enough that when I finally woke up and was writing by choice and not hypnosis anymore, my body had a new sense of what writing could feel like. I was writing from a more instinctive, intuitive place. I was smashing syntax and eschewing grammar. Eventually, it became a very political practice where I recognized craft as discipline. I decided my language had to be feral after that—it had been very domesticated up to that point, and I wanted to maintain more of a sense of the independent, the angry, and the defiant. 

I do connect those two a lot: pleasure and mystery. I think about Audre Lorde’s approach to the erotic as the source of our greatest power. I see the erotic as the space in which you are working, or living, or loving from a place of abundant truth and aliveness. That’s certainly different for everyone. But for me—from a very, very young age—I had this sense of life being so exhilarating, so vivid. It’s so hard to access that feeling right now, if I’m honest—in a time of genocide, of course, and generally as an adult. 

But as a child, I had this sense of wonder, this joyful feeling of the world exceeding one’s understanding, both bewildering and benevolent.. Every day, life gave itself and unfolded, and I really loved being alive. Still, pleasure for me in its simplest form is when I feel like I am learning something new, or am being challenged, put in a place to feel strange, even. Obviously right now, in the shadow of genocide, mystery for me takes on a much heavier undertone. I wasn’t naive a year and a half ago, of course. I was in the middle of writing a book about the Nakba. But now, my vision is so often saturated with the immediate, with material conditions, and I am bewildered in a much more menacing sense—how could it possibly be that this genocide has gone on for fourteen months? 

When I can, I push back on my despair by thinking about human goodness, love, and community I witness firsthand. It’s another source of mystery. And I guess there’s still something in me that believes in the worthwhileness of being here. Even when it feels like I can’t locate that in myself, I see it in people in Gaza, in my family there; the desire to continue living, to continue loving, to continue having children. 

To connect it back to writing—the mystery of literature for me does its best work when it cuts through, in the sense of what Roland Barthes called the punctum in photography. It’s different for every person, but he writes about how, when looking at a photograph, we might encounter some detail that pierces—through the mundane, through expectation, to the heart—and makes an imprint. For me, it’s through those moments of piercing, whether in beauty or grief, that the universe, life, and the erotic flood in. And it fills in a way that nothing else fills. Whatever it is that floods in that moment is the only thing, at the end of the day, that keeps me going. It revives in a way that basic necessities like food and water don’t. I’m seeking that for myself first and foremost when I write, and I really am dazzled and humbled if anything I write in pursuit of that ends up being meaningful for someone else. There’s definitely a shortage of it. That’s why, as idealistic as it might feel to say in a moment of genocide, art still remains essential. Beauty remains essential. 

There would be moments as a young adult, early teens to early twenties, where I would stumble across a line or two of poetry and it would take my breath away, but I was still more disciplined in those moments, so poetry also scared me. I remember Emily Dickinson’s poems terrified me. And she’s not even the most formally experimental, but there was something dangerous in her poems because of the way she strangles language.

So while I stayed away from poems that seemed too easy to capture, I also stayed away from poems that felt wild. It was only in 2020 when I was in that period of torpor that poetry really became important to me because it, at its best, colors outside the lines, and can reflect urgency in a way that longer forms don’t. To name a few, in that moment, Solmaz Sharif, Kaveh Akbar, Dionne Brand, Mahmoud Darwish, and June Jordan were particularly nourishing and instructive for me.

I love poetry that feels like it has broken edges, because I think that language should always spill into silence. I think that silence is much more important than words—language can so often exclude, or attempt to control, but silence is abundant in its emptiness. Poetry has more of a capacity to respect silence, to gesture toward all that exceeds us 

I now feel like I’m always going through poetry with everything. I make a distinction now that might seem unimportant, but to me, it’s critical—I tell people: I’m not a journalist, I’m a writer. Because I refuse that myth of objectivity now. I only dwell in nonfiction because I’m invested in the possibilities of reclaiming it. It’s also definitely easier to categorize my work as nonfiction instead of journalism, but both of these categories have this sheen of supposed truth because it’s “not fiction.” Leaving journalism was very much due to my outrage at having to flatten the stories I was covering, whether of Syrian refugees in Jordan, or the Yemeni population here in New York City. Editors wanted an Arab-American journalist, but only to translate, in every sense of the word, for an American audience. I was hyper-conscious of the fact that any warmth, color, or anger in my language would all be chocked up to bias, and likely cut. And yet, my editors were also asking me to basically victimize my subjects, to portray them as victims. They wanted me to confirm their biases, in my Arab voice.

Absolutely. Even though my characters really didn’t belong inside those narratives. For example, I remember being sent to cover women’s issues in Saudi Arabia and meeting vibrant, ambitious Saudi women—but they weren’t allowed to exist that way on the page when I came back to write for American audiences. It was infuriating and demoralizing. I only managed to eke out a handful of stories in that mode before I just felt so disgusted and done. I didn’t write about Palestine at all during this time, because I felt like there was no way to write about it in a remotely humane or politicized way without being accused of being rampantly biased. There’s an argument to be made for trying anyway, but at the time, my soul couldn’t take writing Palestine for liberal white audiences. In general, I’d argue Palestine is the most disciplined subject in American journalism.

So I was moving toward poetry around 2020 as I was also severing my allegiance to any audience, but especially the white American audience. At the time, I was not saturating myself with just any poetry, but particularly with work by writers of color and queer writers; writers who I was realizing I belonged with.

Besides losing my interest in either earning or keeping an audience, I was trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say and who I came to speak for and to. Those questions had all just been decided for me at the beginning of my pedagogy, without me even realizing it. There was an implied audience and an implied set of subjects and ways to speak about them that I had inherited and hadn’t questioned sufficiently. The poets and other writers I was reading were helping me think through that.

HF

I’m curious about your feelings about the term nonfiction. I personally always hated it because I find it to be a nonterm; the thing that is not fiction, when it actually refers to such a wide and rich constellation of forms, sensibilities, and approaches.

SA

It’s so funny what people bring to that term. Like I said before, it has the potential to slip into some of the dangers that come with saying that journalism is “objective,” as if “nonfiction” has no invention in it. I don’t know what the root of the word “fiction” is—I assume it has to do with fabrication, but I think anyone who’s honest knows that we’re all living our personal narratives all the time. All of reality is created by imagination. Of course, we could also talk about emotional truth versus “factuality.” Since 2016 especially, people have made so much of the idea that we’re “post-truth” or that we now have “alternative facts.” I haven’t wasted that much breath trying to enter that conversation. 

When I started writing my book, I was trying to figure out a way to tell my reality, which is penetrated by multiple temporalities—ancestors, the future, the dead—and in this midst, glimpses of a self that is changing from one moment to the next. I was trying to grapple with all of these dimensions, unknowns, and silences—all of these modes and geographies, my imperfect Arabic and my imperial English—all of that happening at once. 

Attempting to represent all of that on the page, I tried out all kinds of different forms. I was mixing language, using devices like redactions and footnotes, and weaving in ghost stories; stories of my grandmother’s ghost, which felt so real to me that it did belong in “nonfiction.” I was trying to narrativize history in a way that mingled with archival work, reported fact, imagination, and ancestral intuition. I decided I needed all of those things to approach what I thought was the truth, which did not boil down to the strictest definition of “nonfiction.” That’s what art offers.

The book exists, but it hasn’t been published yet, so we’ll see what people will think—but I have a peace of mind knowing that what I wrote was my best attempt to approximate that multiplicity, vastness, and mystery.

HF

The politics of knowledge is very contiguous in the context of Palestine and the West. The Nakba couldn’t be a legitimate term and history here until “brave” Israeli historians cracked open the archive and got the documents, until aging Zionist war criminals felt comfortable enough to proudly confess what they’d done in memoirs and documentaries. But Palestinians, of course, have always known what happened. There were always survivors and their descendants who knew and relayed what happened. Obviously, it’s not to say we don’t need the careful archival and historical work, but there’s a much larger issue here on who gets the “permission to narrate,” as Edward Said would put it.

SA

SA

Exactly, and so I didn’t want to just be writing against them, just to prove that we’re not those things. That’s why I started writing toward other women or queer people, or even men in our community who are both deeply flawed and also abundantly beautiful and full of love. Writing against the oppressor’s expectation of me in that instance would have only reified it.

I’m now thinking about how Barghouti, in I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, writes the histories that “history” won’t record for him. He writes: “I want to deal with my unimportant feelings that the world will never hear. I want to put on record my right to passing anxieties, simple sorrows, small desires and feelings that flare briefly in my heart and then disappear.” A little later, he goes: “We shall retell history as a history of our fears and anxieties, our patients, our pillow lusts, and our improvised courage. . . We shall make the two hour electricity cuts to our houses important events because they are important events.” 

I love how he focuses on the social mundanity of Palestinian lives. This is another ethos that I bring into writing. I really like the humility and the softness with which he writes and then has these moments of surging political feeling, as well.

Yeah, my book definitely weaves multiple timelines, and it is fragmentary in a way. Because Palestine is such an overdetermined category, his book was a breakthrough for me. It showed me you can take something as small as a single taxi drive, a single conversation, and write about Palestine through that. He talks about how “politics is the number of coffee cups on a table.” There’s such humility and boldness in zooming in on very simple details like that, especially because after ’67, his family couldn’t be in one place because of the occupation. I Saw Ramallah, for instance, opens on him standing at the crossing between Jordan and Palestine, and it’s just a moment-by-moment inching through this ordeal of crossing the border. It’s very simple and understated.

He also didn’t just write with a global audience in mind, but very much with his village, as well. He’s constantly cracking jokes at his own expense. He’s constantly questioning if he’s the right person to write about Palestine. And he’s coming from this place writing poetry in a time when it was trending toward the very ornate and abstracted, whereas he wanted to write with a simplicity that did not equate shallowness, or a lack of seriousness, power, and love. It was very freeing for me to realize that I could write about Palestine in any decibl, that I didn’t have to shout, and it didn’t have to be dramatic. Adania Shibli shows this so well in her book Minor Detail, how the occupation is experienced in the little things. Barghouti talks all the time about how the meaning of the occupation is witnessed in some absurd or obnoxious thing, like how two teenage lovers can’t meet. 

I started reading poems when I was thirteen, and I was really autodidactic. I learned how to write poems by reading poems. And when you read a lot of poems—constantly, every day—you learn how to pick up intuitively the kinds of things they teach you to notice in school.  I instinctively learned a lot of different elements of “craft” when I started writing, and then later on learned all the terms for them.

There are so many different ways to talk about how a poem works, and so many different metaphors. But, in certain contexts, thinking about a poem as a machine can be really useful. Looking at a poem, and asking: how do the different pieces of this poem operate together? I love thinking about the intricate ways a really good poem produces emotion. The way that I like to think about craft is on a reactive level: how did this poet manage to do this, to produce this feeling? There is certainly value in analyzing a poem from a cold, academic perspective. But I think that value evaporates when that’s the only lens a reader uses to approach the work with which they’re engaging.

The poet who made me want to start writing poems was Vladimir Mayakovsky. There was a poet-in-residence at my middle school, and she had this tiny little desk in a tiny little library where I spent most of my time. One day, I found a poem in a book of Mayakovsky’s open on her desk, “A Cloud in Trousers,” and the thing that struck me the most was this unbridled emotion. In the poem, Mayakovsky is stood up by this woman who he’s in love with and who’s married to someone else, and his reaction is to explode onto the street. But as a child, I was awed by the vivid lack of restraint, this chaotic, wild, beautiful, and complex outpour of feeling, which was something that I didn’t have a lot of access to. And I discovered that language could open that door for me. 

Mayakovsky and the other poets of his generation, his ilk, the Russian Modernists, had this really beautiful synthesis of emotional sincerity and intensity with political necessity and urgency. Mayakovsky himself was a propagandist, an agitator. Stalin called him his favorite poet (and then likely killed him—or instigated the conditions that led to his suicide). But for me, the ways in which poems allow a reader to access feeling, I think those are also the ways in which poems are really useful political tools. Because a poem does not allow politics to be disentangled from the material reality of feeling.

Well, first and foremost, in America, we can thank the CIA (the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the MFA program, “show don’t tell,” etc) for this very intentional disconnect of politicality from cultural production. There’s also the French “poésie pure,” the idea that a poem or a work of art needs to be concerned only with questions of “beauty.” It is in the best interest of the people who created these kinds of classroom environments, the people who invented “craft,” to distance poetics from politics because of their own particular political positionality. White men are much better served by poetry that is only focused on these lofty abstract questions of beauty and truth. But I also feel strongly and see widely that those monoliths—both the writers that are taught and the way that they are taught—are beginning to fall away.

And what they can’t do, as well. The idea that the classroom was ever a de-politicized space in any way, shape, or form—I don’t give a fuck what class is being taught inside of it—is just simply untrue. As we know, everything is political, right? But a classroom space is especially political. Education is political: who gets to learn? Who gets to teach? What is taught? These are all wildly political questions.

The teachers and professors I encountered who most influenced and shaped my own poetics were poets who were themselves deeply interested in questions like: what does a poem mean in the world? John Murillo and Martín Espada were early teachers who had a real impact on me. Espada is, of course, a great Puerto Rican political poet whose poems are emphatically concerned with the lives of people and the systems that organize, disorganize, and oppress them. I tried to seek out teachers whose conceptions of poetics felt engaged with the living world. And then the ones who didn’t did not have very much to offer me.

HF

I think we would all benefit from having that kind of clarity on what we’re seeking. From my experience, those teachers can also really harm your thinking and hold it back.

CB

Yeah! One of the primary purposes of a teacher is to teach you what to read. Not even necessarily how to read it. But Martín, for example, introduced me to this wide universe of Latin American poetry, a poetics that is so deeply, fundamentally, and materially engaged with struggle, with politics, and with political organization. Poets like César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Eduardo Galeano, Delmira Agustini, Ernesto Cardenal, Alejandra Pizarnik, José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Julia de Burgos, and Raúl Zurita, of course; all of these poets for whom writing happened in concert with revolution. Che Guevara wrote poems! They’re middling, but he read poems voraciously. I was exposed to this different kind of poetics that wasn’t circumscribed by American sterility, by this emphasis on removing the conditions of life from the pool of acceptable subjects.

HF

You mentioned this term “engaged.” What does that look like to you?

CB

CB

Yeah! The agency that Zurita gives the natural world, it happens throughout every book of Zurita’s. And not just every book, but every poetic act. Because Zurita’s work has not limited itself to the physical page but has exploded onto the world in these really large-scale, incredible ways. In INRI, there’s this really intimate, one-to-one connection to the landscape to the grief, and struggle, and possibility of Chile. This insistence that the land is an actor in the political life and struggle of his country. This idea is written into every line of the book. 

In an interview, Zurita writes:

“The struggle in Chile was not for the words, but rather for their meaning. What does the word homeland mean? What does the word Chile mean? It means what the military wanted it to mean. What the fascists wanted it to mean. The landscapes of my country are mine. And they are mine, because they are built through poetry. Poetry created those meanings. From that point is from where the landscapes emerge. They are creations of art, fundamentally built from words. So the landscapes moved me first as such, and also well, these landscapes were the only compassion, the only thing that received so many bodies dropped from planes, crushed bodies thrown to the sea. That sea is also the sea of our dead.” 

In Chile, the violence of the Pinochet regime was spread across those landscapes, across the mountains, the deserts, the sea, and a huge part of Zurita’s project is to refuse this natural world as a graveyard for the regime. And so, in so many of his projects, he endeavors to return language to the land. The phrase, “ni pena, ni miedo,” (neither shame nor fear) is bulldozed into the Atacama desert. It’s two kilometers long. He did a skywriting project over New York City in the 70s, of his poem, “La vida nueva:” “My God is hunger. My God is snow. My God is disillusionment.” He commissioned a plane to sky-write his poem over the New York City skyline. He had poems projected onto the mountains in Chile. His projects have really fundamentally made this connection between the poetics of resistance and returning an agency to the land that allows the land to resist with the people. 

And I think there are so many connections one can make there to the relationship with the people of Palestine with the land of Palestine. The land has always been enormously central to the Palestinian struggle. And the poets of Palestine have unfailingly connected their struggle with that relationship.

And the land abhors that. We can think of guerrilla revolutionaries in Latin America, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the jungles of Cuba, and the ways in which resistance co-conspires with the land. Always, the people who know their home are so much more able to defend it. The success of the Vietcong in the war was due to their intimate knowledge of the land and the place in which they lived. An invader, or an outsider, or a colonizer cannot win against the land. The only way to “win” is to destroy the land. 70 percent of Gaza has been fucking bulldozed. 

Forced disappearances, which are also a staple of many fascist regimes, are certainly happening in Palestine constantly, and have been for generations. But now in particular, with imprisonment and disappearances. They are such a central node of grief in INRI and throughout Zurita’s work because it’s worse than killing a person. A forced disappearance creates this imposition of a violent hope for the people who are left behind, where they are unable to grieve. The particular horrors in Chile, the dropping of bodies from airplanes and into the sea, the destruction of bodies in the desert with explosives, people whose names were not written down, who were not kept track of, who are gone, but are not allowed to fully be gone because the question is allowed to remain as to their survival—it’s horrifying. And what I love about this book is that it allows the land that received these people to speak, and to grieve, and to move, and to house the dead in a different kind of way. It’s a long elegy. And elegies are important. They are political. They allow us to move with and around and through our grief. They are a kind of gift.

Yes, though I did not really work officially for the Public Radio. The project started as my initiative to dig more into my granddad’s music, because my grandfather is a composer, and my great-grandfather, Tsolak Vardazaryan, was one of the Armenian jazz pioneers. He founded the first jazz band in Armenia in 1936, which performed frequently at the recently opened Moscow Cinema in Yerevan. That is why I had a bit of this connection and legacy to dig into the archive, which is not very accessible. It’s kind of strict in this sense. One summer, I helped digitize records that were on tapes, reel-to-reel, and this is how I got into digging through these amazing recordings. I thought I would try making a show, and I pitched my idea to NTS back in the day. They really liked it, so I got into making Panorama Yerevan til nowadays.

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

I come from a very musical family. I think a lot of inspiration came from my granddad when I was growing up. My mom, Anna Vardazaryan, is also a musician, so I grasped along that vine because they were improvising together a lot at home, and classical music and Armenian stuff was always playing in the background. My personal musical journey started with digging for music online around the age of fourteen, but mostly for non-Armenian stuff. I spent hours looking for stuff on Last.fm, discovering niche music. This later developed into curating selector sets and working with radio format. My interest in Armenian music came along when I was already twenty-four or so, and it started with my granddad’s music. Before that, I didn’t really completely acknowledge his legacy as a musician. I knew something—yeah, it was cool, he was famous in Armenia, still is, kind of—but everything opened up for me when I actually started properly discovering and listening to his music. That sparked an everlasting interest in discovering Armenian music, contemporary and old.

That’s a very interesting question, because there were other people who actually worked at the archive—I cannot claim the legacy of actually digitizing the archive. I was just basically a small helping hand. But they were bringing tons of materials, like tapes, hundreds of them, upstairs from the below-ground archives, basically digitizing them and saving the physical carrier, the physical material from time- and environment-related damage. The recordings were kind of forgotten in the post-Soviet era and were handled with little care. I am really thankful that they managed to preserve them in time, because some of it was damaged beyond repair. There was also a huge fire in the Public Radio archive, and the entire 1940s recordings were lost. Basically the first jazz recordings, also from my great-granddad, were lost. So the archival material begins from the 1950s. 

I remember one of the first things I heard that made me really cry was not music, actually. Well, it was music. It was interviews with Armenian Genocide survivors in the US. There was one scholar, Richard Hovannisian, who actually did that. He traveled, dedicating his life to recording the memories of the genocide survivors. At work in the archive, the employee is digitizing them and then you hear it. They have the full volume up and you have to just go through the entire tape without skipping, just listening. It took a long time, but it was so beautiful because they were remembering the folk songs they were singing when they were kids, or throughout their lives, which they brought with them to the US. Basically, these recordings are the only kind of memory of what has happened, and they all came from different regions of the Ottoman Empire, nowadays Turkey. Every song was so special and so personal that it really made a huge impression on me. How beautifully and purely a ninety-year-old person could sing as if they were a child, or the child in them was reborn. That moment was so magical and it made a huge impression on me. I realized how important the work of documenting history is.

This is a very challenging experience. It’s also sometimes easy—I feel like I’ve developed some kind of intuitive attitude toward it. I already kind of feel how I should curate a show, and I think of ideas for different specials from now on because NTS kind of wished the show to be more focused on one particular thing from episode to episode. Because my two most recent episodes—which I love the most, to be honest—because they span both old and new, this becomes, like, doubly challenging. Having these different focuses helps show Armenian music in its spectrum, a “panorama.” Because I have this background where I was digging a lot, as I mentioned, and I was making some mixes, not club music but rather experimental listening or curatorial playlists or whatever, I kind of implemented this intuitive feel and this skill and brought it to Panorama, just doing it by feel. But also, some of the shows, not many, are chronological. For example, the jazz episode. I tried to give more perspective, like, “okay, this is where it started, this is where it is now.”

AK

So we have that more linear chronological approach, but then, between the two latest episodes—most recently the Sayat-Nova special, and before that Armenian rap from the 2000s through today . . . Yes, very different historical periods and contexts, musical origins, contemporary influences, etcetera. The program has this effect of time being collapsed when you listen and scroll through the episode list. You’re creating this continuum, or the way you put it, a spectrum of cultural memory.

LK 

I want to make it really accessible. I want to make it enjoyable. I also want to make it informative. I want to encourage more research. I want people to go, check the track list, dig the artists, and so far from the feedback, I think I am achieving this. Someone recently reached out to me and said that they heard a song on the Panorama years ago, and they really loved it, and they implemented it in their theater piece or opera piece in Belgium, which is random. They were like, “I just love this particular song and I love your show,” and it was an absolutely non-Armenian-related theater piece. It’s just this particular song, this particular performance inspired that move. So I don’t know, trying my best.

AK

Nah, that’s awesome to hear. I was thinking before this interview, too, “damn, I wish there was a public radio archive near me doing this same kind of project so I could do that kind of work too.” It sounds like incredibly rewarding research. But then also bringing that work to a popular and a public audience, it’s really an effective and accessible bridge we can see in music and sound archiving work between the history, the theory—why are we doing this, what is the significance—and then going into the direct material work of archival research. And then, because we’re working with these digitized files, now we can turn them around the next day and send in a mix and reach people on many other ends of the planet. Through time, too, they will continue to be resources. In that way, do you ever keep in mind how these programs might be received in the future?

LK

LK

I don’t know, back to physical stuff, I guess. Yeah, there’s no answer to that yet.

Yeah, just making reel-to-reels of Panorama Yerevan [laughs]. “And back to the archives,” as they say. One aspect of the Public Radio that might inform this is that, back in the day, Public Radio of Armenia had relationships with many other radio stations across the region and around the world. Some recordings in the archive were received in tape exchanges with other stations. Some recordings were bootlegs, too, of concerts and broadcasts from the 60s and 70s, when there were not really enforced copyright laws. It was also common for singers to come from other countries and make recordings at the radio station itself, singers from places such as Iran, Russia, Georgia, and beyond. Many of these versions have limited information and nobody at the archive knows all of the details about them, but they provide evidence that long before the internet, people were transmitting music from place to place, context to context.

I think I’m still developing a vocabulary. It’s a topic that’s so undertreated and underdiscussed. When we speak from a particular vantage point, culturally, nationally, religiously, racially, using the language conferred by the context of those positions, we speak from our individual subjectivities in a way that can often flatten the complexity of the question of race on a global scale and over time, right? And so, if we’re describing Blackness, or a Black experience, using language that emerges historically from a US-American context, it’s kind of anachronistic when we’re talking about contemporary depictions and experiences of Blackness. And the language fails differently, if we’re talking across national or culture boundaries, too. So, the language pieces are really complicated and probably require a reimagining on the part not only of Black folk from the Arabic-speaking world, or Black folk, period, but of all people who are awake and alive [laughs] in the mind, and spirit.

That’s the second piece. The first piece was that I wasn’t writing about race, or really identity in any way, for a long time. I hadn’t really begun a journey of racial reckoning with myself, and so, by extension, the poems could never contain it. I mean, poems have to be always an extension of us, regardless of whether or not we’re writing about our own lives. If we write about anything, and perhaps especially when we try to write away from ourselves, like when we deliberately choose a subject that cannot be misread as autobiographical, then we are, perhaps, most stitching into that poem ourselves, our own minds, our own psychologies, predilections, predispositions.

But as a subject, race and identity, and questions around race, weren’t really in the poems. Not until I began an individual journey of healing and really began to look at what I had inherited culturally, growing up in a mixed-race, binational, bicultural, bi-religious family. When I really began to reckon with the implications of that heritage — which is gorgeous and for which I am so grateful, but which brought with it difficult questions — something in me broke open, and the poems just started to pour out of me.

I wrote that poem probably that first summer that I went to Cave Canem’s writing retreat. Yes, it was the beginning, in a way: I’d grappled with racial questions earlier in life, but their apparent unanswerability led to my suppres- sion of them. So, it was a beginning that was also a return, we could say. The “beginning to understand” holds that sense, but the more operative component, for me, was the “African” as opposed to “Black.” It was important for me to establish my consciousness around the questions of identity that I inherited from my mother: it wasn’t just that “Blackness does not equal African. African does not equal Black,” which feels like an obvious thing to say, though is something that many seem to need to be reminded of, including some Africans themselves, but also that the North of Africa is Africa, which also feels like an obvious thing to say, though, too, can bear being repeated or affirmed. Relatedly, one of the things that I’ve had to think about a lot, too, is how to reconcile, or hold, the non-American origin of my Blackness with my Americanness.

It isn’t completely different. I remember somebody told me when I was beginning to talk about the complexities of my particular Black experience, as a kind of critique, “I mean, I understand where you’ve arrived, but you could have just been Black. You could have just written a book that put you forward as Black and affirmed that identity as given, so people would question or challenge your belonging less,” rather than the book I wrote, which demon- strates the way in which an identity that most people presume is hard, fast, fixed, given, immutable, unchallengeable, had been almost none of those things for me. That story is actually the truth, or my truth, rather than a posturing at something.

The first section of Trace Evidence is the one that feels most explicitly connect- ed to the poems in the first book. What I try to do is integrate the poems about race from a Black Arab context as a mixed-race person who is also phenotypically lighter; and demonstrate how there is always already a conversation between two threads: the complicated inheritance and interpersonal intimacy, affection, love, relationships. The third section of the book looks at time and mortality and the present moment and my relationship to the future or to projections of an arc of a life.

It was revelatory and predictable; hard and easy. I was returning to my ancestral homeland. It had been a while since I’d been there, so there was a freshness to the experience, even as there was a level of familiarity. And what I found there was what I had imagined I would find there, what I had found in my apartment in the Bronx my entire childhood — a cultivated anti-Blackness that was so integrated psychologically that even firmly Black-presenting Moroccans were aghast at the notion of even conversing about Blackness. It was hard for me during that trip, and in my life, to find Moroccans who own Morocco as a nation in Africa. So, I found, in a way, what I expected to find — and it was that that was revelatory: that I did know the narrative, that it was widespread.

Of course, there was also the accident, the bus accident, that prematurely ended my time there. The centerpiece of the collection is a long poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” that chronicles that experience.

The way that my family holds race is kind of necessarily global, or at least continental. And I know that we can say all Black people in the United States carry that too. But I mean the acculturation of being born out of a different kind of cultural context within Blackness. There were ways that I had to be thinking globally to make sense of my family story, to consider blended families like ours and how we were distinct. What, at first, seemed like a denial of Blackness in my mother, I came to understand was much more complicated: when she came to the US, the identity categories germane to her experience, like woman, Arab, Muslim, Moroccan, (eventually) mother, shifted. There were more central or pressing identity categories that she had to reckon with, namely race and being read as African American, and her resistance was not necessarily to embracing the truth of our Black heritage, it was to the very real sense that, by doing so, her identities, as she understood them, were being taken away from her.

The reverse happened to me when I left the US, whereby it was the same process — the operative identity categories shifted, in a way. When I first got to Europe, I was in London for two years. I was working in the corporate world, trying to figure out how to be a poet while working at Bloomberg LP, writing poems and reading Neruda on my lunch break. People in suits were like, “What’s with that guy with the Neruda?” [laughs] I was totally a fish out of water, although I did well there. As far as identity was concerned, I was the American guy, the guy from New York, the gay guy, maybe, oh, you know, the bloke with the Irish father and Moroccan mum. But when the cultural heritage, the nations from which my parents emerge were named, it was never through a racial lens. So, it wasn’t like the mixed-race guy, which was interesting and kind of a relief, to be honest.

I love that question. Because [pauses] it articulates or it reaches for the thing that I am reaching for in the work, which is a return to or a reminder of the innate knowledge and wisdom that exists inside all of us; I want to believe that we are all the same thing, that we are one, in a way that I think would make people roll their eyes, because we live in such a divided and divisive world. And I don’t mean to say that our differences don’t exist, because our differences are beautiful, and many, and super powerful. It’s kind of like that initial state of being, before language, before we are named, and gendered, and raced, and languaged, and cultured. That state must exist, because we don’t come into the world with those things, right? That moment of connection, of return to our oneness, is something that I think happens in profound experiences of art.

When we sit down and read a poem, what I believe is happening is that there’s this alchemical process between the words on the page — the imagination and the craft of the writer — and the subjectivity, the imagination, the personal history of the individual reader. And then the poem drops us back out into the world or into our own experience, and that ineffable resonance, like the afterlife or the echo of a poem that we feel in our body, that we recognize when something deep inside us has been touched, that resonance, I believe, our being in that connected state from which we then slowly return to our own subjectivities — to our own self, as it were.