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.