Poetry “carr[ies] the most human of voices” for Deema Shehabi, a Palestinian-American writer whose work has appeared in publications including The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology and Kenyon Review. Shehabi earned her undergraduate degree in History and International Relations from Tufts University and Master’s in Journalism from Boston University, previously served as the vice president of the Radius of Arab American Writers, and has received four Pushcart prize nominations. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and Diaspo/Renga, the latter of which she co-wrote with Marilyn Hacker. In this episode, Shehabi shares how Diaspo/Renga emerged out of four years of email correspondence with Hacker. Together, we celebrate the collection as a testament to the “private humanity” between its two poets. Shehabi also speaks to the homes she’s found in Palestine, Kuwait, and California and the “perpetual expansion and contraction” that accompanies exile and return in her life. In negotiating this state of flux in her relationship with language, Shehabi talks about the burden of translation and always having to “teach people how to read” when she writes. Finally, Shehabi gifts us a striking reading of her poem, “Tracery of Dune and Chamomile,” which is modeled after Marie Howe and gazes upon the truth of humanity and intersections.

Published Date: January 17, 2024

Transcription

Phuc:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for the third year and have invited a [inaudible 00:00:16] of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Kate:

Hello podcast people. Welcome. Welcome back. Another installment of Bloomsday Literary Live from AWP. We have Deema Shehabi here today, a poet and just all-around literary rockstar. Did two panels today and is now doing a podcast. Were the panels yesterday? When were the panels?

Deema Shehabi:

The panels were yesterday.

Kate:

Okay, so you did get a night's sleep in between.

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely.

Kate:

Nice.

Deema Shehabi:

Thanks for asking.

Kate:

Sure. Sleep can be hard to come by at these events. As we were talking before we got on the mics, it can be really invigorating and then hard to wind down.

Deema Shehabi:

Yes. One of my friends described all our conversations recently as like bees, like bees buzzing, and it really does feel like that.

Kate:

Yeah. I feel like we could mine that metaphor for a long time. Yes, for sure. Well, let me introduce you. We are so excited to have poet Deema K. Shehabi here. She earned a BA in History and International Relations and an MS in journalism from Boston University. Shehabi is the author of 13 Departures from the Moon with Press 53, as well as co-author of ... I forgot to ask you how to pronounce Diaspo/Renga.

Deema Shehabi:

You got it. Diaspo/Renga.

Kate:

All right. That is her second book that she co-authored out with Holland Park Press, 2014. I'm feeling a little buzzy as well, so I'm going to try to slow down and be less of a bee and more of a slower insect. What would be a slower insect for you?

Speaker 4:

A spider maybe.

Kate:

Yeah. There's something sort of ominous about a spider. Deema, do you have an idea?

Deema Shehabi:

A caterpillar?

Speaker 4:

Oh yes, nice. Nice.

Kate:

Yeah, I like that. Deliberate.

Speaker 4:

Until they become a butterfly.

Kate:

I'm still waiting for my butterfly stage. It's going to happen.

Deema Shehabi:

This is fun.

Kate:

We like to have fun. Okay? We like to have fun here on this show.

Speaker 4:

Yes. Yes.

Kate:

Okay. Back to your impressive bio. Her work has been featured on Poem a Day and also has been anthologized in the Poetry of Arab Women, a contemporary anthology out with Interlinked Books. Welcome to the show. Thanks for making time.

Deema Shehabi:

Thank you so much for having me, Kate, and thank you to Phuc as well for your hosting us. I so appreciate that. I'm excited to be here, really. It's been a wonderful journey so far.

Kate:

Thank you. I wanted to start by talking about your 2014 book of poetry. I find it so interesting. It was co-edited as a collection in response to the bombing of Baghdad's historical literary district. And you collaborated with Jewish poet Marilyn Hacker on a book of Rengas that confronts what it means to be living in exile and how a sense of apathy can prevent us from really understanding or digging deep or figuring out what to do with the continuing hostilities that we're seeing ignited in the West Bank. We can see it in Ukraine, and I'm wondering what a book like that collaboration, what's the place of that book in our political upheaval that we're experiencing now?

Deema Shehabi:

Thank you so much. It's a very good question. Even though I think about what poetry can do to stand against war economies in general, and of course human rights abuses, I feel that through time, poetry is pretty much ignored or less ignored throughout time. But for me, poetry's power lies in, of course, its ability to carry the most human of voices. By centralizing the human voice, poetry rises above that fray. Even media speak is such a fray, and also it not only rises above that fray, but also what I'm sensing more and more as time goes by are commodified, more transactional relationships. So it offers a distilled and sculpted truth based on human experiences.

Now, what was beautiful about her correspondence, Marilyn sent me a Renga just out of the blue, not expecting for me to respond to the Renga. Once I did, and then she sent me another and then another, then the book just took place over four years before we published it.

Kate:

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 4:

Wow.

Deema Shehabi:

But it made it less-

Kate:

Just organically.

Deema Shehabi:

Just organically. And she didn't even expect me to respond. But then it was like, "Oh, this is wonderful."

Kate:

And had you had a preexisting relationship?

Deema Shehabi:

We were friends by email. She lives in Paris, I live in Northern California, but there was something that we had, just a humanity together. But I do want to say that when Marilyn and I began corresponding to another through the Renga, it didn't matter that she was Jewish and I was Palestinian. It just mattered who we were to each other as poets and friends. A lot of the reviews at the time came out and said, and I felt this was kind of an artificial construct around the book, calling it a dialogue, or interfaith dialogue, and thereby just politicized it. And I felt that was really genuinely all false, and I find that these labels and catchphrases are just that; labels to distract from the private humanity of two individuals, if that makes sense.

Kate:

Absolutely. We just had a conversation with our previous podcast guest about the importance of nuance, and that when we're assigning labels or as you said, overtly politicizing a book that didn't ask those questions to be answered, that was not its purpose, rids any nuance. It erases the nuance if that's what we're doing.

Deema Shehabi:

And it erases our humanity as two people. And so I felt very strongly about that, and I was always dismayed by the media coverage over it. And I just feel like sometimes as poets, Arab-American poets, Palestinian-American poets, this is so weird, I hope this comes on the right way, but we have to teach people how to read us properly. And not to just contextualize it, but if there's an illusion that's not understandable, Google it. The onus shouldn't always be on us to explain and explain.

Speaker 4:

No, exactly. To translate.

Deema Shehabi:

To translate. Thank you.

Speaker 4:

And to be the tour guide on their journey.

Deema Shehabi:

In their journey, exactly.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, no, no.

Deema Shehabi:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kate:

Yeah, that's a form of exoticism, right?

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely. It's the othering, exoticism. Thank you for saying that. That's perfect. And also for me, it's fascinating for me as a Palestinian woman living in the West, how certain wars are covered by the media. In the Ukraine War, for example, you see the media calling out the aggressor and labeling the Ukrainian resistance as freedom fighting, where it's virtually impossible for the media to call out Israel and its current onslaught on children and decades-long human rights abuses, or see Palestinian self-determination as humanity. And in our groups and at RAWI and my group of poets, we can't help but notice-

Kate:

Which is Radius of-

Deema Shehabi:

... Arab-American Writers, which has been in existence for a long time and does wonderful advocacy work for the community, whether through workshops or marketing, or I've attended several residences with them in the past, and it's always been wonderful.

Kate:

And so those groups exist as a way to help lessen the burden for you as the poet of doing that heavy lifting?

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely. For example, yesterday at our panel, which is called the panel on the mother tongue, an Egyptian political prisoner came up to us afterwards. Yeah. And he was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you guys are here. I need a community. The way that the publishers want to sell me is in this ..." "I want to write a story about prison friendships," he said. "I don't want torture porn." So it's so important for him to be able to talk to others, and RAWI just exists to alleviate that burden and to be in community.

Kate:

Yeah. If we're honest, it's hard enough to put the pen to paper as an artist who is trying to create beautiful art.

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely.

Kate:

And then have this whole other institution that you're working, whether it be the journalists who are covering your piece or the way maybe the publisher is trying to position the book. It's a lot.

Deema Shehabi:

It's a lot. It's a lot. And it's a burden. And it's not just representation, but you need to tell your story in the way that you feel most representative to who you are. Yes.

Kate:

Yeah. Right. Right. I had such a lovely time getting to know your work, getting to know you as a poet. I found you first on your Poem a Day poem. That was the first thing I read. But in preparation for talking to you, I read an interview where you described going on summer trips with your mother, where you left your hometown of Kuwait and visited your mother's homeland in Palestine. And you say, and I'm going to quote this back to you because I thought it was so beautiful, "It was as if a part of her would expand tremendously within the context of her home, her history and her family, and then that you understood her better in that context." And I meditated on that a little bit and then thought about the reversal of that, if then there was a contraction. And I'd like to know when she would return home to Kuwait. And so I'd like to hear maybe about your experience leaving and then what it's like to be in your home in California, which is your home.

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely, yes.

Kate:

I'd like to just know about if you have the same contraction-expansion experience or if it's a little bit different for you.

Deema Shehabi:

Beautiful observation and beautiful question.

Kate:

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Deema Shehabi:

I feel myself in a perpetual expansion and contraction. Perpetual. In our panel yesterday with my Arab sisters, we discussed how those of us who grew up straddling two cultures live on the threshold of language's limitation and expanse. And so that does echo with my mother's own experience. And so I'm beginning to understand that that'll just be perpetual state of flux, and I'm okay with it as-

Kate:

An MO.

Deema Shehabi:

At this point, yeah. The Palestinian author and scholar, Edward Said, and musician as well, said, and here I quote, I love this quote of his, "The pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with solidity and satisfaction of earth." Of earth. And he said homecoming is then out of the question. So it's really interesting. And when I first arrived to America as a young Palestinian from Kuwait, I sat fanned out on the university lawn, I was a young woman, and my dad stood there, looking down. He noticed that I'm a little bit nervous about ... it felt like a kind of immigration, right? He says, "You've come so [foreign language 00:12:02]," which means love, "But there's no shame in turning back." And both my parents are gone now, and his words continue to haunt me because I have a deep sense that my history and renaissance will never be complete without return. Return, return. Where? I can't tell you. And this is the truth about exiles in general, and I'll read a poem which also intersects.

And of course, I grew to love the earth of California. I live in this beautiful valley that's surrounded by hills. In the spring, when we're having tons of rainstorms now, it's verdant and green. It's green as far as the eyes can see. And then in the summer it turns the yellow of a lion's back. And so there's this movement of color. So this next poem, actually, and I'll read this to you, intersects the landscapes of California and Palestine at uneven longitudes. And it's both a conversation with belonging and language at the same time. It's called Tracery of Dune and Chamomile. It's after Marie Howe.

It was only when your eyes finally closed against a weeping cherry, lashing your face in the spent season, lashing roses spent in fugue with a long drought, the soil beneath sun-flogged and showing its white wormy marrow like it was the beginning again when we wrote each other supplicant sentences. But there was no beginning as when you held a mirror to my face saying, "This is what language is, a smoke crumbling on the light. Your voice beyond argument, insisting on joining the emphatic dead." When I realized how dream-led I am, my face not yet broken by butterflies.

Defiled by roses, a garden lifting towards the Jura mountains and drinking white butterflies with a half-red face. Greenhouses with damascene roses brushing the distance, but there is no perfume in the air when in rows of successive summers, the woodpecker maims two poplars in ritualistic, primal ... And in the dream, we patch those scars with sawdust, filling until even our nails pierce yellow and our eyes float grit. "Is this innocence lost?" I ask as you swear your allegiance to poplars over the woodpecker.

Smoke in my nostrils from the Calder fire when flames sprout in the hills above Jerusalem, unearthing Palestinian terraces, swelling like topographic maps of our could-have-been childhood. But there was no childhood that wasn't an allegory, as when I stood outside, watering the garden grapevines, all the while feeding my eyes to the ashes and wondering about this colossal of origins when I finally understood your silence as hope, your non-belonging to me as hunger.

Kate:

Thank you for that. That's lovely. So lovely.

Speaker 4:

You got your butterflies in there.

Deema Shehabi:

Yeah, I was thinking, the butterfly theme.

Kate:

I don't think I feel transformed, but I feel transported.

Deema Shehabi:

Lovely.

Kate:

Yeah, that was lovely.

Deema Shehabi:

Thank you. Thank you.

Kate:

One of the things we do on the show is talk about publishing journeys, and I would love to talk about maybe 13 Departures from the Moon and what it was like, especially since we've already talked about the importance of having a publisher or a publicist or the machine that works around your book to help launch it into the world, the importance of that infrastructure to support the book in the way that it needs to be supported.

Deema Shehabi:

Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Kate:

In a way that makes sense to you as the author and aligns with your values for the book. So maybe could we talk a little bit about how the manuscript came to be?

Deema Shehabi:

Of course. And so again, first arriving as a Palestinian from Kuwait, I experienced a profound sense of alienation, although poetry in English became a home that was more honest than artificial acculturation and assimilation. And I'm thankful that we live in an America now that doesn't insist on assimilation, acculturation. There is more celebration now of voices.

Kate:

You're feeling more space.

Deema Shehabi:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4:

At least in California. We're from Texas. Okay. Okay.

Deema Shehabi:

So you're not feeling the space in Texas?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I'm in Houston, so there there is space, but Texas is quite large also.

Deema Shehabi:

Yes. Yes. Very familiar with-

Kate:

The further you get away from the cultural centers, the urban centers, I think the less space.

Deema Shehabi:

That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

Kate:

There can be, right?

Deema Shehabi:

Oh, absolutely. And I think that's true in California, by the way. Yeah. So there's these pockets of, what can we call it, tolerance or understanding, and then there's pockets that are certainly ... yeah, absolutely.

And then so for me, writing erupted as a culmination of that sense of alienation and exile. So literally in college, I started writing in English. I took a bunch of poetry classes. I was in Boston at the time. And so as a culmination of exile and of being away from a sense of place, I found myself in writing, both in the metaphysical and in the literal sense. Many of the earlier struggles, Kate, had to do with being in translation as a Palestinian-American poet and having to find a voice that bridged two sensibilities, namely where I came from, where I am now. And my perception of what constituted expression in language at the time as a young woman seemed diametrically opposed to the dominant modes of thinking at the time, which was poetry had to be purged of its historical and political references. And so I think another mode of thinking was that language had to be restrained and cleansed of ornamental representation. My relationship with language had everything to do with my mother tongue and had everything to do with evocation of place and insistence on that spiritual and sensuous ethos.

Kate:

Back to the Said quote, back to earth.

Deema Shehabi:

The earth, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

Kate:

Lovely. Who helped you through that transition? Were there people? Were it classes? Was there a mentor?

Deema Shehabi:

Really great questions. The Radius of Arab-American Writers were perpetual. Naomi Shihab Nye, who sometimes, I was telling my friend yesterday, is a saint. She's living on this earth to uplift others, and I'm always moved by her. She was there. She put us in anthologies, advocated for our work, along with the Radius of Arab-American Writers. And then finding other voices on the bookshelf like mine, and pulling them out. And so that is the best. Yes.

Kate:

Yes. And maybe a little bit of AWP. You get to see the people that you found on the bookshelves, right?

Deema Shehabi:

Oh, 100%. Yeah. I've been coming to AWP for so long. Oh my goodness. Yes. Yes.

Kate:

It was a pleasure getting to know your work, and a pleasure getting to talk to you today.

Deema Shehabi:

Oh, the pleasure was mine. Thank you so much.

Kate:

I do want to know, just lastly, as a parting gift, what's the most AWP thing you've overheard?

Deema Shehabi:

"I'm hungry."

Kate:

That's a good one.

Deema Shehabi:

To be honest.

Speaker 4:

Okay. No, that's great. Because there's a lot of things keeping us from food, you know? Yeah.

Kate:

Well, Deema, we hope you have a lovely rest of your trip here.

Deema Shehabi:

Thank you.

Kate:

I hope we can remain friends, and I can't wait to see what's next for you and your writing.

Deema Shehabi:

Thank you so much. It was lovely to meet you both. Honestly, a pleasure.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Same here. Thank you.

Phuc:

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin-Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusty and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh, with special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff, without whom this would not be possible.