Karthik Purushottaman | April 2022

Kazim Ali

In the year of Covid, poet Kazim Ali put out three slim works defying literary genre but each nonetheless spoke to our pandemic experience. First was a book of poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra, named for the British-Indian pop singer who lost her voice to illness around the time Ali had found his time-flattening poetic form, a seismic event that the UC San Diego creative writing professor traces back to a phase in the late 2000s that produced the work Bright Felon. Just as TVOSC compellingly portrays Chandra’s schismatic personal tragedy on a continuum of thriving diaspora voices, next in Ali’s trilogy of cosmic optimism during one of the darkest years in recent memory is When The Night Agrees To Speak To Me, translating Ananda Devi, the French-Mauritanian poet of Indian descent, compiling brutally introspective poems that read as if we’re watching a person unflinchingly perform surgery on themselves.

Most recently, Ali released his memoir-meets-longform reportage Northern Light, in which the poet meta-narrates the story of his journey back to his childhood home up in Cross Lake, Manitoba. In a narrative that walks the line between personal story and reportage, Ali describes in real time the events that changed the purpose of his visit from refreshing his hazy memories of an idyllic suburban upbringing to investigating the plight of the Indigenous peoples at whose expense, arguably, Ali lived out his aspirational first-generation immigrant experience. Engaging whole-heartedly with the impulse to build solidarity through his reportorial practice much as he does through editing Nightboat Books or writing his poetry, Ali in Northern Light delivers a singular How To—especially by bridging the transcendental elements of a plurality of cultures and traditions. Essentially, Ali cautiously strives to whittle down the obstacles towards building true solidarity between the various struggles for self-determination waged around the world.

Seeking valuable insights into his language fluency that’s unbothered with meaning yet is somehow razor sharp in its anti-imperialism while remaining formless and indescribable, I spoke to Ali first about his three new books, by extension covering a sizeable portion of his work.

Karthik Purushothaman: Through revisiting your hometown in Manitoba, Canada, Northern Light goes deep into who you are and whatever that means. The text offers a metafictional aspect—you are narrating the journey as you undertake it. Why?

Kazim Ali: I needed the process of figuring out the scope of the book to be a part of the book, because when I started, I had no intention of writing in depth about the Pimicikamak community of Cross Lake. I thought the book was going to be about the question of home as it related to me, but ultimately, there was a dual journey. There was a journey into realizing that my home wasn’t at Cross Lake anymore, but on the other hand, what this community had endured throughout—they had been there before me. They are there after me.

Purushothaman: Early in the book, poet Layli Long Soldier muses that it seems like you have been “called” to write about the Pimichikamak people. Can you tell me how you went about portraying the mysticism of that experience, which plays out like a quest of some sort?

Ali: Layli and I talk about the ceremony performed by the elders of the community, calling on the spirits of the land to send assistance to the community that was in crisis. I myself had woken up after forty years of not having thought of this place, then was invited to the Sweat Lodge Ceremony, and all of a sudden was emailing with the governing council, making plans to fly up there, in the midst of work, cancelling everything. So, Layli came up with this idea that the ceremony set off some kind of psychic radio waves across the continent.

Since I published this book, I have begun teaching courses in Indigenous literature at UCSD. I had always read Indigenous writers, but reading them with the eye towards teaching, I started to discover a sense of the superreal, which in a Western context we might see as “supernatural,” implying some sort of mystery or magic. In the Indigenous context, I started to use the term “superreal” signifying the “realer than real,” such as the notion of ancestors being present, of land having consciousness itself, and of stones and trees and wind having spiritual qualities. The closest thing in the Western conscience to an acceptance of the super-real is the not quite secret way that some police departments use psychics to find people who have been kidnapped. There’s a good book by this Canadian investigative journalist named Tanya Talaga who wrote about the deaths of seven young people in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Indigenous elders on the reservation found the bodies by following visions, saying, “He’s down by the river, by a big rock, by a bridge,” and then the Thunder Bay police would go there and find the body.

Purushothaman: As a poet, your doing journalism is fascinating to me, especially since I’m trying to do a bit of that myself, talking to you. Interdisciplinarity isn’t new to you, though. Right?

Ali: I have been a political activist from the beginning of my conscious adulthood. When I was in university, I did probably more political organizing than studying. After graduation, I worked as an organizer for four years, and was in Albany for a year working as a registered lobbyist and running a small association. I capped that career by running a national association in Washington, DC, dedicated to federal legislation in higher education during the Clinton administration in the ’90s. It was not an overly friendly administration to higher education, in addition to which there was a right-wing Congress, so it was a challenging time to work in policy.

Even after I made my shift over, and started writing and teaching, I always remained, as a private citizen, interested in political work. One of the issues closest to my heart is that of Palestinian sovereignty. In 2011, I was on sabbatical from Oberlin, where I was teaching at the time, and went on a delegation run by an organization called Interfaith Peace Builders (now called Eyewitness Palestine), where they take scholars and activists to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We traveled around and met with activists—Israeli and Palestinian both; Arab and Jewish both. We met political people, soldiers, and settlers. Drawing from my experience in Palestine with the delegation, I knew whom I had to meet heading up to Cross Lake. I wanted to talk to the elders, go to the schools, talk to the principals. I’m hardly an investigative journalist now: those are highly skilled and incredibly brave writers, but I realized that I was not going to just be able to think like an artist, assuming that the way I see the world is interesting because I’m an artist and looking. Whether painting, making a film, or writing a poem, we’re normally taught that we’re artists who depict the world as we see it, right? What I learnt in Palestine and Pimicikamak was that I cannot only be a passive receptacle. It’s not enough to know what the basic narrative is, because the conditions on the ground, the people who are here now, what their lives are like, is the important part of the story here.

Purushothaman: As the pandemic has exposed a split-screen reality, in which the developed world is well-equipped to fight the pandemic and the developing world is denied the means, how do you engage with living and writing in the US, for an American or an international audience?

Ali: I don’t necessarily feel that I’m writing for an American audience. I think that might be what happened de facto, based on where my books are published and who finds them. In English, untranslated, I’m writing for any English-reading audience—in particular, Canadian, Indian, American, and British audiences. I don’t have any connections yet with writers from Australia or New Zealand, or the Anglophone African and Caribbean, but in India I’m involved. I know a lot of writers there, go there a lot, and do readings there. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been because the Modi regime changed the visa rules. My dad is Pakistani, so it’s not easy for me to go anymore. At one point, I had a ten-year visa and was going every summer, but Pakistanis can’t get multiple-entry visas anymore. My white next-door neighbor has an easier time going to India than I do. Nonetheless, my connections to India are real to me. In the UK, The Voice of Sheila Chandra has been well-received. It was a summer selection of the Poetry Book Society of the United Kingdom, an organization founded by T.S. Eliot.

Purushothaman: Under such circumstances, why write and publish in the American context?

Ali: One of the best things is when I get an email out of the blue—not from somebody I know, but somebody writing to tell me about what my books did for them. One of my favorite emails was from a young Pakistani twenty-something guy from Lahore saying, I’m in bed with my boyfriend right now and reading to him from your book. This is the most intimate thing I could imagine, and it was special because he was explaining to me how difficult it is to be gay and Muslim, how his family doesn’t know, and how my books have helped him. He said, even when I was not writing about anything to do with Islam or being gay, it still sustained him somehow. At such moments, I feel like all I need is a readership of one, where all the work can travel between us. I think about Rumi and Shams Tabrizi, whom I’ve written about before. Rumi was the head of a spiritual community in which many students looked up to him and depended on him as a teacher, but he had only one person he looked to—Shams. When I read poetry, I’m looking for that one moment, poem, or poet who’s going to move me. I don’t need ten or twenty. The most important poets to me have been important for thirty years. Every time in an interview when someone asks, it’s the same list.

Purushothaman: Who are on that list?

Ali: Jean Valentine, Lucille Clifton, Jane Cooper, Donald Revell, Mahmoud Darwish, Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander, Susan Howe, Fanny Howe. They are my ancestors. There have been plenty of poets from then to now, whom I love, read, and teach, but there are certain sacred texts that are at the foundation of what I do. When I go back to Jean Valentine, when I read her work now, it’s as strange and new to me, as fresh—I just taught a poem of hers from 2010 maybe, and even though I have read that book and that poem so many times, it’s brand new.

Purushothaman: Your book, The Voice of Sheila Chandra, was a similarly significant text for me. At a time when a lot of poetry engages with words on the page as presentation of thought, your work seems to commit to sound. Can you talk about the importance of sound to your poetry?

Ali: I love poems that have an architectural or sculptural quality, rather than a rhetorical or narrative linking structure. I admire reading poems like that by poets who work in the mode of creating the sort of situation that’s uncovered through the movement of mind in language. I’m really excited about poems constructed in a way that might not be how a person ordinarily thinks, but the poet is creating a work of art somewhat different from ordinary thought pattern. So, I think of poets like Myung Mi Kim or Cecily Nicholson, or Kathleen Graber—who also writes essayistic poems—this way, creating poems that are almost like dioramas or staged actions. I think of my own work that way. I’m interested in constructing a piece like it’s music or choreography. The poem always moves by breath, and it’s my breath. I’ve spent so many years practicing yoga and dance, so there’s a lot of improvisation and movement in my process too.

Purushothaman: Has there been an instance when sound gave you catharsis more than language?

Ali: All the time.

Purushothaman: Can you think of an example?

Ali: I can read you a poem if you want. I can think of one right now.

Purushothaman: Yes, please.

Ali: Sometimes, I don’t even feel like I’m writing in English. I’m using English words, but it feels like I’m allowing the grammar to lead me in different directions. So, this is a short poem that’s an example of what I’m talking about. It’s called “Sukun.” Do you know what a “Sukun” is?

Purushothaman: No.

Ali: It’s a form of Arabic pronunciation, and it’s in Urdu as well. It’s a diacritical mark over a consonant, a small circle, that denotes the consonant is a rest, without a vowel sound. The word itself means a “pause” or “tranquility.” So, here’s “Sukun.” I can’t remember if I’ve published this anywhere. I don’t publish a lot; I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. When a book comes out, a book comes out, but other than that, I don’t spend a lot of time sending my work out; I don’t know why.

Sukun

The world is wound
Around me wound
That blessing that approaches
Reproach that world that would
Wind wood wind wound
How thunder would sunder
The sound there sown there
Is shown shone sewn
To a one that wood
Remain remains still
Won in the world could
Will I will I shunned
Son soon swoon sukun

Purushothaman: Can you describe what you feel when you read out this poem?

Ali: The shunned son is trying to be in the world. The world is wound around me. “Wound that blessing that approaches” is the pun of course, from French—“blesser,” the verb, means to “wound” a person. To bless is to wound? How strange. So, is the shunned son wounded or blessed? Blessed by his wound? Blessed by that thing that others think of as a wound? His queerness, maybe? Remains remain still; both “remains” and “remain” have different meanings and “still” is a word with multiple meanings also. It’s like that. It’s music. It’s choreography.

Purushothaman: From asking about your recent work and craft, I want to understand how you forayed into poetry after your idyllic childhood growing up near the hydroelectric plant. How did you start Nightboat Books? How has your vision changed through the years?

Ali: Wow, that’s a big question. I always had poetry with me. All those years I was doing other things, I was also writing, thinking about and reading poetry. After I left organizing and had a personal crisis—broke up with my partner and moved back to my hometown—I realized that the one thing I could count on was writing poetry, and I wanted to use it to help me live my best authentic life. I went to the Community of Writers in the Olympic Valley in California, and studied with Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, and others. I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in

Provincetown and studied with Agha Shahid Ali. Both were in the summer of 1998. That’s when I realized that this is what I want to spend my time doing.

It was at the Community of Writers that I met lots of other poets for the first time who were serious about doing it well. Then, there was a group of young people I was spending a lot of time with, and they were all students at the MFA program in NYU, so I applied to twelve MFA programs and one PhD program the following year. I got into the PhD program at Boston University. I got into one of the twelve MFA programs, and it was NYU. Boston was where I wanted to be, but between the PhD and the MFA, I chose the MFA and that was my birth as a writer. Yet, I didn’t want to take the literature seminars and craft classes offered in the program because I wanted a different approach to writing. So, I asked for and received special dispensation to not do those credits normally counted in literature and craft classes, and instead do them in dance and performance.

Purushothaman: Wow, that’s incredible. What sort of classes did you take?

Ali: I studied a little bit in the dance department, but mostly in the Gallatin School at NYU where there were dance classes happening in an interdisciplinary context. I did a course on Storytelling and Mythmaking in Tibetan Buddhism where we were reading Dharma art and choreographing performances. Then I did another one based in authentic movements and psychoanalysis. After the MFA, I studied privately with Olga Broumas. That was the second turning point for me, an incredible one in terms of language, breath, utterance, and movement. Her work is so important, so foundational to how I feel about myself as a writer. She taught at Brandeis for many years, and has since retired and teaches yoga and meditation.

Purushothaman: Where do you locate yourself in the lineage of the American lyric?

Ali: Do you know Jorie Graham’s book from 1987, The End of Beauty? It was sort of a rupture in her work, departing from her earlier two books that had much more traditional lyrics. The End of Beauty signaled her move into this form that privileged interruption and disruption and fracture and fragment. So, after the height of the confessional poets and privileging of narrative poetry through the late ’70s into the ’80s, Graham was re-embracing the modernist approach to the lyric that was espoused by Hilda Doolittle, Mina Loy perhaps, and even Dickinson who I think of as a modernist in that the true nature of her work only came to us through modernism; it didn’t come to us in the late 19th century because those were the edited, “tamed” versions. Graham reached back to that, and to ancient sources such as Sappho, and explored fragmentation in that sense, not for aesthetic purposes but by war and famine and history, you know?

In addition to Graham, I think of a writer like D.A. Powell here as well, as signaling the “end of beauty,” saying we’re not going to do the transcendent humanist truth but look at the graveyard of the 20th century and move forward from that. Others such as Lucie Brock-Broido, Ann Lauterbach, and Gillian Conoley certainly, all around the same time—late ’80s and early ’90s—presented this new approach to the lyric that I fully embrace and love, although for me the source is somewhat different.

Rather than the ruin of the mid-20th century caused by the atomic bombs, beginning our current age of planetary imbalance, climate catastrophe, and pandemic, I draw from Indian and Arabic ancient canons grounded in decentering and fragmentation. The Quasida as the journey poem is an unrooted form without a home. The ghazal is a decentered form as Agha Shahid Ali talked brilliantly about. Adunis, of course, the great Syrian writer, said, “Modernism came to the Arab world in the 7th century,” and he was serious; he wasn’t being coy about it. What modernism meant for the West in the 20th century, we did that in the 7th century.

Purushothaman: If we can accept that the former grand narrative was one of imperialist ambition and conquest, how do we ensure that new emergent forms break free of those tendencies?

Ali: People not able to receive material benefits from their own communities is what we’re talking about when we talk about “imperialism.” That’s what we were talking about in Cross Lake, in Manitoba, anciently considered to be the land of the Pimicikamak people. Archaeological evidence has shown that there’s been culturally contiguous presence in that area for 12,000 years. The Nile civilization is like that too, but their place in our cultural imagination is commensurate with that, as opposed to the Cree of Northern Canada—people don’t understand what an ancient presence they have had on the land. Yet, this dam, which makes billions of dollars in revenue for the province, including from the sale of surplus power, shares very little with the Indigenous peoples. They don’t receive dividends. That’s what imperialism is, where faraway imperial capital receives the benefits from the province. In Palestine, it’s the same.

There are two reasons—and I won’t say which one is more important—why the territorial expansion into the 1967 territories has not ended. The first is the religious and cultural idea of what we here call, “Manifest Destiny,” which promotes all the region as ancient Israel, belonging to the modern state. But there’s another reason: the three major aquifers of the region making up to 37% of the fresh water used in Israel—the rest is treated seawater and brackish water from the desert—are in Palestinian territories. Two of them are in the West Bank, collectively called the Mountain Aquifer, and the third, called the Coast Aquifer, is in Gaza.

I don’t know the answer to how to build solidarity across communities, except I think that exposing the mechanisms of imperialism is important. Showing it actually exists is important. We don’t want to know the truth of how we ourselves are tricked into being part of this structure. Even when we know, it’s difficult to extricate ourselves, right? I mean, I live in the city, and I require electricity. Maybe it comes from unceded land. Plus, as Americans, our tax dollars are paying for a lot of things, including the occupation in Palestinian lands and military operations all over the world. Those have to be addressed at a structural level. They can’t just be addressed by people feeling like I want to get better, or I’m going to do a teach-in for my friends. It’s good to do those things, but there has to be structural change at the level of government, electing representatives who understand the mechanism of empire and its destructive qualities. If we are to solve these planetary problems we are facing, we cannot proceed from the point of profit being most important. We’re going to have to make the right decisions at the policy level about emissions, material development, international development, foreign aid, and militarization of our culture, which should not be made based on profits but on asking how we are going to continue as a species.

Purushothaman: How did you end up founding Nightboat, which has had some great recent releases—Aditi Machado’s Emporium, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy? Can you give us a glimpse of the journey from the start, up to this point when you’re almost a household name?

Ali: In college, I was reading Anaïs Nin’s novels, another work I thought was brilliant but was not in print anymore. Although Nin’s diaries have been in print, her novels were hard to find those days. So, I would go to this used bookstore in Albany, and ask the guy there—he was quite a bookseller. Back in the ’70s, he was friends with the people who founded Copper Canyon Press. He knew Tree Swenson and Sam Hamill, and he knew Al Poulin who founded BOA. He knew the people who founded Graywolf and Milkweed as well. I’d go to him and say, I need this book, and when he’d go on his next buying trip, he’d look out for me. Then, around 2001, Jean Valentine told me to read Fanny Howe’s novels. Only one or two were in print, although she had written about ten or more. That’s how it started. I thought I should reprint Fanny Howe’s novels. I didn’t know anything about publishing, what it involved, or how much work it would be, but I had this commitment to literature that I believed in, which I wanted to bring to new readers. Then, I also wanted to publish new work. That was the vision of Nightboat from the beginning. CLMP gave us a technical assistance grant which gave me fifteen hours of mentorship with Michael Wiegers, the editor of Copper Canyon. He mentored me on the phone about how to build a press, how to fundraise, how to write a mission, everything from the get-go.

I did it with my partner in the press, Jennifer Chapis, for three years, and then it became clear that it was so much work. I had my teaching career. I was trying to write. I actually gave up dancing to start publishing. For dance, depending on if you have a show, you have to do many hours a day, and we were doing four pieces a year. I couldn’t do it anymore because I also had a full-time day-job. So, we started running the press out of my railroad apartment in Beacon, New York. There was a hallway down which we had to slide past stacks of boxes. After a little bit, we hired a managing editor who had a basement, and so then we were able to move all the boxes there. Eventually, it became clear that we needed somebody who was an expert on the business and organizational side of things. Stephen Motika had actually come on as an editor of the press the year before, and I said, do you want to take over and become the director of the press, and I’d just switch roles with you and become an editor. He directs the editorial program. I’m still President of the Board, but I’m one editor among many.

Purushothaman: Your work is so wide-ranging that we didn’t get to spend any time on the many individual aspects, but can you end on the note of letting us know about your most recent and upcoming titles?

Ali: My friend Vandana Khanna just sent me one of those black t-shirts with four names, do you know that format? The shirt she sent me said: Meena & Shreela & Ananda & Sheila. These are the four Indian women I have spent the last few years working with. Meena is Meena Alexander, whose book In Praise of Fragments we published at Nightboat. She passed away before she could see it. Shreela is Shreela Ray, a poet who was born in Orissa, India, moved to the US for college, and stayed here the rest of her life. She had published in Poetry as early as 1966. She went to Iowa for her MFA, was publishing in major venues such as New England Review, went to Breadloaf and all of that. She published a book in 1977, and that was the only book she published. She died at fifty-two from a lung condition in 1994, and twenty-five years later, she is mostly forgotten. So, we just brought our Shreela Ray: On the Life and Work of an American Master. I had a coeditor named Rohan Chhetri who used to edit the poetry list at Hachette Books in India, and he is now a doctoral student at the University of Houston. The volume we put together is about 100 pages of poems, and 100 pages of letters. Of course, Sheila from that quartet is the British-Indian singer Sheila Chandra, from my last poetry book.

Lastly, Ananda is Ananda Devi, a Mauritian writer who lives in France now, and is well-known in the Francophone world as a novelist and poet. There have been movie adaptations of her books. She has been knighted by the French government. I translated her work when I was in Pondicherry, the old French-colonized part of India, and was taken with it. Translating those poems gave me access to a different voice in my own work, which I tried to bring out in my book called Inquisition (2018). I felt translated, translating her work, accessing a certain kind of—you talked about my somewhat reticence when it comes to the coarse details of autobiography, but in her work, I found access to the emotional tenor that one would attribute to negative emotion such as anger or disappointment or bitterness, which didn’t really show in my work as much before. There was plenty of disappointment and bitterness in my life, but I never brought it directly into my work.

I feel very impacted by not only the act of translation when it comes to Ananda Devi’s poems, but also by the language and form of Shreela Ray’s poems, my affinity with her as a writer between cultures and nations, one whose allegiances were to various aesthetic and historical lineages. It’s impossible to overstate my debt to Meena Alexander as both a poet and a human. She came into my life when I really needed to hear from some sound outside myself. I read her book Illiterate Heart the same summer I read World Hotel by Reetika Vazirani, and they were two books that presented me a different kind of lyric and different kind of approach to the line, one that might incorporate the seismic rearrangements that life as a migrant—a nomad I would really say—can have on the supposedly grounded form of the personal lyric. I am, after all, a person without place.

Anyhow, my mentors, my mother and father figures, are gone. Agha Shahid died twenty years ago, Meena is gone, Jean Valentine is gone. Reetika died the same summer I read her book. Etel Adnan passed away. We are living and dead, but alive in sound and breath in poetry. Throughout all of this, a constant you might say, was the music of Sheila Chandra, the voice of Sheila Chandra. I write in multiple modes and genres. I cannot restrain my self (though my own name means “restraint”), I cannot limit myself, I cannot stay within the lines, I cannot stay within borders. In the liminal zone where things unbind, that is where I live and write and breathe. In the note between notes, in round sound of breath.

Karthik Purushothaman is currently finishing his first collection. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prizes and Best New Poets anthologies, and he was a special mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He has had poems and essays in several literary magazines.

excerpt

from The Voice of Sheila Chandra

The Voice of Sheila Chandra

Breaks is constant was like
The river light on the river
Riven that remained a rift
An old rill that sounded
She merged with the vibe
Ration of the drum a hum a A home womb and um
She OM moaned in the loam
Dark earth come Sheila
Dame ocean dome this poem
Roam to tome tomb foam
Original fountain that fed
My mom Zam-zam when I
Was born

*

Vantablack was made for missiles
Or planes for defense purposes so dark
No eye could see it some voices are
Like that no one could hear them it
Is not good to be lost to be lost is
More than metaphor for spiritual
Condition I sit at the terrace overlooking
The green sea perhaps it is failure
That ought to be sought the voice
That fails falls silent Sheila’s or
The body’s the blue failed me the sun
Fails every evening I we you have all
Failed too everyone who strove these
Years for peace failed

*

Calligraphy is a meeting point
Between abstract and particular
By certain combinations of visual
Marks to make symbols Chandra
Lost her voice around the same
Time I found mine at midnight
We went to swim in the sea so
We could be in the dark and not
Know the bottom but the moon
Lit up the surface so silver so
Slammed and then the boy
With the fear of failure falling
Architecture voice God depths death
He swam

*

Who can born then believe
Beleaguered besieged be seen
Leagues from where you started
Parted in league with my liege
Legions of sound sound sounder
Her then be leaved darkest black
And be unseen a voice tracks back
For frown fawn fawned founded
Fundament firmly this firmament
This fund of sound born when you are
I did not want to be found how
Can you say that how can you now
Know what foe no she sang out flow
She breathed be real eve and lo

Excerpted from “The Voice of Sheila Chandra” from The Voice of Sheila Chandra. Copyright © 2020 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted with permission from Alice James Books. All rights reserved.All rights reserved.