Exploring the specificities of a diaspora while also calling upon ancestral experiences is just one of the many threads Maha Ahmed weaves through her poetry. Like many members of diasporic communities, Maha’s experiences as an Egyptian American do not always resemble the grossly generalized “immigrant story.” We had the opportunity to chat with Maha about writing herself out of this pigeonhole, as well as how she experiences life as a student, scholar, and poet. She received her MFA at the University of Oregon, and is now a literature and creative writing PhD candidate at the University of Houston (Go Coogs!). She specializes in colonial Egypt, Arab-American diasporic literature, and Arabic to English translation. We talked with her about Rusted Radishes, a Beirut-based literary magazine, and the big-city-but-small-world way she was offered the position as its poetry editor. We dive deep into the US-centric and profoundly skewed notion that immigrants’ stories only matter once they land on US soil. It is exactly for that reason, Maha insists, people of the diaspora can acknowledge ancestral ties to a place even when it may feel uncomfortable to do so with a hyphenated or dual identity.

Published Date: December 7, 2023

Transcription

Phuc:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for third year and have invited a gallery 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.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the show again today. We are here with Maha Ahmed, who is a poet and also a literature and creative writing PhD candidate at the University of Houston, our hometown. Shout out to Houston.

Maha Ahmed:

Oh, amazing. I didn't even know that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Maha Ahmed:

Okay. Awesome.

Speaker 2:

Should we say go Cougs?

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah, go Cougs.

Speaker 2:

We just did it.

Maha Ahmed:

We have to represent

Speaker 2:

I didn't finish that you're specializing in Empire Studies. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon where she was the recipient of the Promising Scholar Award, and her interests include Arabic to English translation, colonial Egypt, and Arab-American diasporic literature, exploring abolition, gender, liberation, geography, imperialism, neo-imperialism, and all the other isms. Is that correct? Is that true?

Maha Ahmed:

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2:

That's a hefty list.

Maha Ahmed:

It is. It is. And I feel like that's an old bio.

Speaker 2:

This is my least favorite of all podcasting experiences.

Phuc:

There's 20 more things added to that.

Speaker 2:

When I find out the internet is a liar.

Maha Ahmed:

No, but it's a very relevant bio. I'm just so embarrassed at how many things I claimed, I feel like, to be an expert on.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Well, the embarrassment is more on my part for not doing proper research and knowing the things I know about the fickle lover that is the internet. It can give you gold or shit.

Maha Ahmed:

It's a recent bio. I think it's just more fleshed out. It's a very, this is who I would be in an ideal world, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Maha Ahmed:

So it makes me look good. It makes me look good.

Phuc:

No, you should just lean into it. Just lean in.

Speaker 2:

We're manifesting today.

Maha Ahmed:

We're manifesting.

Speaker 2:

Y'all, come on. Okay. I'm really truly excited to get to talk to you today. I want to hear about all the things. I want to start with Rusted Radishes. I want to know about it. I didn't know about it until I started doing the shoddy research work, apparently, that I've been doing, but it's a Beirut based lit mag and you are the poetry editor there. Is that still correct? Did the internet tell me correctly on that?

Maha Ahmed:

Yes, yes. The internet did you right this time.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Phuc:

Just one time.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. But I'm so glad that you brought that up because I just did my panel on world literature in the US and peripheries, and I feel like Rusted Radishes is one of those journals that kind of exists on the periphery, but they're so important. They're doing really important work highlighting work from the Middle East, highlighting people from the diaspora who have any sort of connection to the Middle East, and I just want to shout out Rima and Nourhane, who I work closely with, and they're so amazing. I feel like you never know what you're going to get when you work with other literary people.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Say more, or maybe don't say more. I don't know. Tell us about working there.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. It's like working with people who are bound to this collective goal of amplifying these marginalized voices, and it's like we never lose sight of that. All of the petty stuff that goes into just dropping things and picking them up and who did what, we just never have that conflict because we don't lose sight of the bigger picture of what we're doing with the magazine, which is to make art and amplify art from people that wouldn't have a voice because we're providing this specific space for those specific voices.

Speaker 2:

Right. How did you find your way there?

Maha Ahmed:

Oh, it's such a funny story. It's such a funny story.

Speaker 2:

I love it. Let's hear it. Can you share it?

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. I'm happy to share it. Oh, it goes so back. Okay. So I did my undergrad at DePaul University.

Speaker 2:

In Pittsburgh?

Maha Ahmed:

In Chicago.

Speaker 2:

DePaul. Okay, sorry.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. Yeah. I had a professor who was really engaged and into my future as a writer. His name is Tim Mazurek. Shout out to him. Okay, so he was really cool. We had a great connection. Fast forward a couple years, I'm applying to graduate schools, and I sent him my resume and my latest publications, and I just had a poem published in Rusted Radishes, and he's like, "Oh my God. Rusted Radishes. My best friend runs that magazine."

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

This happens more often than not in the literary ecosystem, but it's small.

Maha Ahmed:

It's such a small world. It's such a small world. So we had a little moment and just a few months later, Rima was like, "Hey, listen, our poetry editor is on her way out. I loved him. He's my best friend. Your poetry's great. Do you want to just slide through?" Do you want to? Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Maha Ahmed:

And so it was very serendipitous, but yeah, I'm happy to be there.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Maha Ahmed:

I don't know if that was a cool enough story.

Phuc:

No, that's perfect. Perfect story.

Speaker 2:

I think, yeah, that happens more often than not, that we sit down at the table, we talk about this or that, and then there's some connection. We could be halfway across the country or halfway across the world.

Maha Ahmed:

Totally, totally. Right, because Rima is living in Beirut, but they did their MFA together, I think, so, yeah. It's crazy.

Speaker 2:

How have you found the community at U of H as a graduate student? You have this poetry background and then you choose to go into literature and with this literature and creative writing, with this emphasis in Empire Studies. Tell me about the community there.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah, I think I got so lucky because I really did want to emphasize in Empire Studies, and I really did want to do that specialized literary research and the literature professors at UH are so amazing. They're so cool, and I think that they're-

Speaker 2:

We hear so much about the creative writing department, but I love to hear that about the literature department as well. Yeah.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. A lot of them are South Asian, from the Middle East. A lot of them are not, but I think that they're just so rigorous and so helpful and so supportive and so interested in our work as graduate students. You feel like you're having more of an exchange as opposed to a one-way, I am the smartest person in the room, and I'm going to tell you everything I know. I feel like they're really open to learning from us, and yeah, I love being there. I just feel so lucky. I am so lucky.

Speaker 2:

That's really great. We heard the same thing in our last podcast. There's a lot of good vibes around the world right now at AWP. I'm feeling it. It's awesome. So I wasn't able to join on the panel where you were talking about, because I was here doing interviews, but I did want to dig a little bit deeper to talk more about, especially what you talked about with this US-centric notion, particularly in literature, that the immigrant story truly only matters until that immigrant lands on US soil. Did you guys get into that then on the panel, and can you give us a sort of bird's eye recap?

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. We got into a lot of stuff. And I would go look up Kaitlin and Kartika and Zarlasht and their work, but we wanted to just be specific about what each of us is doing, and I think the immigrant story was more of my focus, so I can talk more specifically about that.

Speaker 2:

I'd love to.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah, I mean, the idea for my part of it came from my feeling like this hybrid identity or the dominant immigrant narrative didn't really exemplify what I was going through as an Egyptian who grew up in the Gulf.

Speaker 2:

Wait, I thought that all Egyptians who grew up in the Gulf felt the same way and had the same experience. Is that not the truth?

Maha Ahmed:

Exactly. Right. That's exactly it. Right.

Speaker 2:

You're Egyptian, tell us your Egyptian immigrant story, and make sure it isn't in this mode.

Phuc:

Yeah, you read one, you read them all, right.

Maha Ahmed:

Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. That's really the problem, and it makes us as writers so self-conscious because we're like, "Oh, we need to write in this trope in order to be understood, and if we go outside of that, we're going to be inherently misunderstood or we won't get published, or et cetera, et cetera." So I just wanted to push back against that and to remind people that we are so different and we can still collectivize and we can still connect, but through the specificities of our experiences, we don't have to forget and then become an amalgamation of people of color in the US and continue to write through loss and memory and forgetting.

There's so much more that we can do with our identities if we commit to going back before immigration and really listening to or looking for what our ancestors were telling us and what they were writing to us. And I think a lot of us feel a lot of self-consciousness and guilt about trying to claim that and trying to go back because it's like, oh, that's my great grandparents. That's not really mine anymore because now I'm a hyphenated identity. Now I'm Egyptian-American, so I can't really fully claim that. And there's also a lot of-

Speaker 2:

Or that religion or that culture.

Maha Ahmed:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

The culture that my grandparents had, I don't get to claim it because of this hyphen.

Maha Ahmed:

Right, right, right. And I think that that's so... First of all, it doesn't work because it's like that loss is always going to live with you. You are always going to be haunted by that thing that you don't know and that you need to go and retrieve. So it was really just about inspiring people to go and do that and retrieve and go to the archives and not be self-conscious about it because they wrote it for you. A lot of people write with future generations in mind, and that includes you, whether you believe it to be or not. It includes all of us, I think, but we have to do our own work and share it with each other and collectivize based on that sharing, instead of collectivizing based on a forgetting and a not knowing, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the void, right. Or the loss.

Maha Ahmed:

Totally. Or the loss, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Oh, man. So good. I'm going to do that thing where I quote your work back to you, and I want you to be okay with that. Is that okay?

Maha Ahmed:

I am so okay with that.

Speaker 2:

I was struck by these lines in your poem, Ars Poetica, that was published in the Recluse. When a city imploded, I wrote hard about trees. In Workshop, the Arab Spring was considered extraneous or overrated. Nakba Day was an opportunity for the white kids to stay silent.

And I think I would love to ask you about your workshop experiences, the things that these lines reference, and maybe sort of compare and contrast that to what it's like... The MFA experience is different from what you're doing now, and I'd love to hear about that in light of these lines.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is something I also wanted to address in my panel was how the institution of poetics literally doesn't give you the room to explore the specificities, and I think that it's nobody's fault that workshop is set up a certain way, but I think that... I mean, for example, just going into class and then having everybody read the one poem, and then not having a holistic or wholesome understanding of what you're trying to do and what your project is-

Speaker 2:

The sort of silent recipient of feedback approach.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I wrote that poem when I was so, I don't know. I feel like I was so begrudged at... I think it goes back to feeling misunderstood. Wanting to write something and not knowing how, and not feeling like I had the space to do that, and not feeling like even my colleagues had the space or time to engage with me. And I don't think that that's their fault necessarily. I think it's the product of the way that the MFA is just two years and workshop is just so like bam, bam, bam, bam.

It's interesting that you bring that up because I think that that shows a gap in my own the work that I should have been doing, I think, in order to really, really go deep into that history instead of using it as kind of an identity marker. I think, again, it goes back to... I think I wanted to write the diaspora poem. I wanted to write the Arab-American poem, and I was like, "Oh, I'm doing the thing that I'm supposed to be doing. Why doesn't anybody understand?" And it's like, well, actually, I don't think that I was doing the thing that I should have been doing. I think I should have been really engaging with the history of the Arab Spring really, really closely instead of just claiming that I am a product of or related to people that might've been involved in it, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 2:

That's a lot of heavy lifting though. I mean, you're learning craft, right?

Maha Ahmed:

But that's what I'm saying, right? It's no one's fault. You know what I'm saying? It's no one's fault. It's just the situation. It was a very difficult situation. But I think that now the conversation is changing and people are becoming a lot more open to all kinds of poetry.

Speaker 2:

Well, and it's all part of the evolution of you as a student, of you as a poet, and of you as a scholar. You went through the MFA and it led you to the next thing, and now it's leading you back to your family, your culture, your religion, how that's going to show up next in your poetry.

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah. And I like that you brought that up because it's all like an ebb and flow, and it really will depend on where I'm at in my life. Where I'm living, who I'm in conversation with, where I'm going to school. And yeah, that'll show up in my work in the same way that'll show up in everyone's work. So that was... Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Even if it's not the perfect person that you need. I mean, you've had some of the right people in the right times, and then sometimes you have the wrong person who also tells you where not to go.

Maha Ahmed:

Right.

Speaker 2:

Reflects back, "Oh, this is not my space. These are not my people. This is not what I need to be doing." This can be existential. This dead end, right.

Maha Ahmed:

Right, exactly. All of the yeses are equally valuable as the noes.

Speaker 2:

That's good. That's really good.

Maha Ahmed:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Okay, this is the most hard hitting of all the journalistic questions we're going to put your way. Are you ready?

Maha Ahmed:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I need to know the most AWP thing you've overheard. #overheardatAWP. What is it?

Maha Ahmed:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

Are you ready? I'm ready.

Maha Ahmed:

I'm just going to say it.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Maha Ahmed:

Okay. This shit is overwhelming.

Phuc:

True, true. True that.

Speaker 2:

Was that me? Did you overhear me say that when we were setting up [inaudible 00:18:05] Instagram?

Maha Ahmed:

I feel like it's-

Speaker 2:

Decided to hide the button that I needed to push, just not there. Yeah.

Phuc:

Have you found it overwhelming?

Maha Ahmed:

This is my first AWP, and it is pretty overwhelming. I think it's very overstimulating, but it's so exciting too. I think maybe because it's my first time, but yeah. Yeah. Can I say a few words, please?

Speaker 2:

Yes. Yes. The mic is yours.

Maha Ahmed:

Not to go off script, I just-

Speaker 2:

Yeah go.

Phuc 1:

Is there a script.

Maha Ahmed:

I just hate when these things end and it's like, bye bye. So I just want to say thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I was so surprised when you guys emailed me, and I'm so honored. I'm really so honored.

Phuc:

We're honored.

Maha Ahmed:

Thank you guys so much for having me. This was so fun, and we'll do it again, hopefully, in Houston. Houston, virgin.

Phuc:

We'll see you in Houston.

Speaker 2:

Let's do it.

Phuc:

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