Interview with O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, On His Premier Collection No. 18

Image of young Nigerian man in sweater

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, a Nigerian poet, recently published his poem chapbook The Sign of the Ram in the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set series, Tisa, — an African Poet Fund (APFB) project set up for “poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.” Agbaakin, alongside ten other poets, features in the 2023 limited-edition box set. You can purchase The Sign of the Ram here.

In early days of writing poetry as a law student at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Agbaakin had not initially considered himself a ‘poet,’ even when he found his works in the pages of blooming literary platforms springing up here and there. Thinking about his journey of what he considers “self-confidence,” he’s thankful to have been nourished by the kind and warm support of friends and family. When he set out with publishing his poems first on social media like every other writer of his time, he had his “impressionable” non-writer friends and family believing he’s “the next Wole Soyinka and that the Nobel prize is finally coming home,” an endeavor that labors under the burden of great expectations.  

When I first stumbled upon his poems published in the “World Rhyme and Rhythm–an  anthology through their Briggite Poirson Poetry in 2016,” I was immediately smitten by his keen eye for detail and profound understanding of theology, human relationships, and behavior, and they weave together with such empathy and insight that make his poems feel destined, imbued with an almost prophetic quality. From “Isaac’s confession,” “Tenebrae,” “A thesis on language,” the speakers in Agbaakin’s poem are often on quests for self-discovery, not through outward ambition but through a deep desire to understand their social standing. They yearn to understand their place in the world, engaging in a constant dialogue with society and its reflections.   

His poems are published in The Tems Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, EPOCH magazine, Guernica, Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, Harvard University’s TRANSITION magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, and “places where my favorite poets at the time have been published.” Agbaakin is currently pursuing a PhD in English with Creative Writing concentration at the University of Georgia.  

I recently talked to Agbaakin over the email about his new chapbook, the story behind his poetry, and how he knew writing was the one after a string of trials with his lawyerly dream. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin (Interview Respondent) in front of a blue wall

Photo credit: O-Jeremiah Agbaakin 

This interview was conducted over email by MAR Assistant Editor Aishat Babatunde.   

Interviewer

Congratulations on your first published collection! How do you find the experience? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

Thank you, Aishat. The experience has been cathartic for two reasons. One: it was a kind of release from some anger about a familial crisis which coincided with the period I was becoming more aware of my artistic vision. Two: it was a dream come true. I will focus on the second reason right away. I would say the feeling of both excitement and catharsis is no longer as familiar, like a vivid dream fades away upon full waking. When Siwar Masannat, the managing editor, reached out in January 2022 that Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes had selected the chapbook for publication, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve always wanted to be a part of the African Poetry Book Fund family. I had read many of the chapbooks from the series such as Warsan Shire’s Our Fathers do not belong to us, Gbenga Adesina’s Painter of Water, Ejiofor Ugwu’s The Book of God, Leila Chatti’s Ebb (among others); and even the full-length poetry collections like Clifton Gachagua’s Cartographer of Water. APBF has been and is doing a vital project of publishing, archiving, and promoting contemporary African poetry. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that, right? Thanks to the generosity of previous authors under the series, I was nominated to submit a short manuscript sometime in 2018. I had no quality body of poems I was working on at the time. They rejected the manuscript. I think it was a karma for submitting such a mediocre work that they didn’t nominate me the following year! It was the year I wrote “Good Friday” , the poem which I think is very important (unknown to me at the time) to The Sign of the Ram. I emailed APBF to ask if they had nominated me but their email didn’t reach me (haha) but seriously my submission/contact email address had been deactivated by the University of Ibadan. They said they had not nominated me! The following year, they nominated me. I submitted; they rejected it! They asked me if I was interested in being nominated the following year. I said yes and submitted and they accepted it! I’m saying all these to express my gratitude to Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the trust and support they gave the tiny book. I don’t want to take my blessings for granted.  They helped promote the chapbook boxset extensively with readings at the Africa Center in NYC and a virtual reading with Woodland Pattern book center. It is not often in the literary industry that publishers organize that level of publicity for a chapbook. Today, I don’t feel that way (elation) about the chapbook anymore. I feel like the speaker in The Sign of the Ram is now alien to me. It is a 2018 version of the speaker in my current poems; which means sometimes I am embarrassed by his audacity and vulnerability despite the mask of the persona of Isaac that I used! I am focusing whatever energies on my first full length poetry collection. One wonders what and how a future version of the speaker is going to look at the current speaker in my poems!  

Interviewer

How has your experience in the US influenced your writing, if at all? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin

This is an important question, one that I have mooted a response to so many times informally and formally. It’s also a tricky question because it assumes that the place (one moves to) automatically influences the art that’s produced; and therefore, if a Nigerian writer were to leave and start living outside of the country, their writing ceases to be Nigerian. While these assumptions are valid, it reduces influence to a cannibalistic process where the artist consumes everything in his immediate environment and the environment consumes the artist, spits out the artistic vomit to something alien or at worst, amorphous, all to the chagrin of the fundamentalist bemoaning the loss of an authentic native (substitute for Nigerian/African) writing. There has been much thought-provoking critical writing against the death of Nigerian literature. To their hubris, they believe their jeremiad is original; but its’ not. As long as people will not stop migrating (regardless of the motives), the discourse surrounding the authenticity of native art will not cease. All this to say this didn’t start today. Pius Adesanmi wrote about this issue in 2005, almost the same time the idea/movement of Afropolitanism was taking roots in African literature. It’s a deja vu for those that know history. Interestingly, this is what happens to the creatives who leave home. In a bid to stay ‘original’, the writer turns inward to nostalgia and memory. But that memory is fraught. It is unreliable in its recollection. The place called home doesn’t wait; it changes, such that memory as a literary expression is now foreign to the experience. Anyway, my short answer is that America has influenced my writing in the way that I hope I have described. Yet, it has allowed me to stop taking things for granted. Critics have not examined the problem of books and access to books back at home and how that limits the wide range of influence available to new creatives. Here, it is easier to obtain both historically important works and contemporary African books here than back home. Also, the themes that I didn’t pay attention to in Nigeria are starting to force their way into my creative interests.  

Interviewer:

You have a background in law. When did you realize you fell in love with poetry more? Did your legal background influence your poetry in any way? Are there surprising connections between law and creative writing?  

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

How bold of you to imply that I fell out of love with law! Haha. The last time someone asked me last year–  I think it was Maggie Graber during a poetry reading in Oxford, Mississippi– I told her that I didn’t have an answer for the question and if I found one I would reach out to her. I said that because it was a live interview and I couldn’t think on my feet for an appropriate and honest response. With you, I have an advantage of mulling over the question longer (Gotcha!). But really, this goes back to the previous question on influence. No experience is immaterial to any artist. One of the ways by which I determine the maturity of a poem I am working is by asking myself: has it, i.e. the speaker and the poem undergone an experience (vicariously through me of course) commensurate with the ambition of abstract language? Does it possess any wisdom that one often gains through a process by which the experience is aware of (and even documents) its own prior inexperiece? You need to go through the fire to be able to have a language for some kinds of writings. I am in that stage where the experience of being trained as a lawyer (without one year of Nigerian law school and call-to-bar experience that I am sure you know about!) has yet to present itself as a conscious material in my work, as a project; or even where it may exert some influence, I am unaware of it; which means that it doesn’t matter what I say now. The influence may just be outside the threshold of perception, but it is potentially there or not. I don’t think my writing would have been different if I had studied English or architecture or anatomy! But maybe in the future, I would produce a work that explores that intersection between law and art or raid all the knowledge I have gained from studying law for five years, the way M. NourbeSe Philip, the Canadian writer and poet used her training as a lawyer to write the haunting book, Zong! about the Zong massacre. I knew I always wanted to do creative writing even before I started studying law at the University of Ibadan. If you remember correctly in our last interview with Tell! Magazine I have always inhabited the world of story-creation (and later on, poetry) since I was very young. Do you remember our interview on Tell? And to what degree do you think you have grown as a journalist and brilliant book and culture commentator?   

Interviewer:

Absolutely! It’s fantastic to hear from someone who remembers our chat on Tell. I may not recall the specifics after so many interviews, I do appreciate our interview on Tell! magazine. 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

As for how I’ve grown, well, I think anyone with a curious mind keeps evolving, you know? I think the more I delve into different stories and the more I’m let in on people’s personal experiences,  the richer my understanding of the world has become. Maybe my writing has matured a bit, hopefully in a way that keeps things interesting! 

Interviewer:

Earlier, you argued against the idea that a writer who leaves Nigeria loses the ability to write authentically Nigerian literature. What are your thoughts on the counterargument that perhaps a writer’s physical distance from their home country can lead to a more critical or objective perspective on their society, in a different way that enriches their work? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I think I started taking my writing more seriously after that interview! It’s like “look I made it” moment for me at the time (haha). Growth is scary. It is unpredictable. You think you know it all now; wait for a couple of years! That is my guiding principle whenever I try to express an opinion on something. But the fear of growth shouldn’t stop one from sharing an opinion or thoughts. It is better that one has the opportunity to be wrong now and grow through it than one to have no opinion at all. This is a good counterargument. My opinion on the idea of alienation of the Nigerian writer both physically and psychologically is that it is inevitable, as inevitable as migration. The writer must do with it whatever they see fit with their condition. One’s work will not automatically enjoy the benefits of distance (such as clarity, foresight, objective perspective, and so on) by that virtue of removing oneself alone. It’s like going to the mountain, doing nothing, and expecting the rewards. The ascent is only an element of the process. You must scream at/on the mountain to test the timbre of your own echo and carve a voice out of it; you must sit and pray before transfiguration can happen. You must be disciplined to not be carried away by the relative ease you have now found and forget the condition of your life, which although is now past and lost (lost because it’s severed from place, time and one’s psyche). You must also climb down from the mountain. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the descent is harder than the ascent. You need patience unless one may be stuck on a plateau to find that the landscape has changed. It reminds me of the speaker in Safia Elhillo’s ”origin story” from her January Children collection whose grandmother upon her physical return to the homeland tells her to “shred dill / by hand she means to teach me patience  she calls it length of mind”. Afterwards the grandfather reminds her ”it is time to come home”. I guess I’m speaking too much in metaphors but that’s the best way I can respond. Staying away from home can create a disconnect between the writer and the temporal realities of home, yet it gives the alienated writer the opportunity to be free from the clock(work) of the society’s psyche. I think  it was Charles Simic that quipped that it is the ambition of lyric poetry to stop time. If that is true, then the alienated poet can hold on longer to that momentary pause.  

 Interviewer:

In your poem “towing // or the book of isaac I” (published in The Temz Review), there are elements that seem both personal and observational. Can you talk about how you navigate the tension between memory and observation in your writing, particularly when it comes to capturing the speaker’s blackness? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

This one is tough because that’s a really old poem (written in 2018 and published 2019 I believe) And your question suggests that I still navigate the tension between memory and observation the way I navigated it “Towing…”. Talking about growth, that will not be the case! At the time that I wrote the poem– and this is true for all the poems I was writing at the time– I wasn’t aware that there’s tension between memory and observation in writing that poem. But the very nature and the relationship between memory and observation is fraught with tension. One deals with sensory data captured instantaneously while the other is a matter of data retrieval and the subsequent iteration and reiteration of data. One lives in the moment, the other lives in the past and desperately wants to live in the moment. But the moment even the present is reproduced in words or strokes of color, it ceases to merely be a matter of observation. Now that I am more grown, I try to play the role of a mediator between the two. I honor memory; I remind the present it, too is a vapor. So there really is no tension. Because the moment will also become a vapor, I must live in it. I must write about my immediate environment . I have written about Oxford, Mississippi. During a hang out with one of my professors, Beth Ann Fenelly and other new students in January 2021, I shared the fact that James Meredith, the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi, travelled to Nigeria to continue his education in Political Science at our alma mater, University of Ibadan. Seeing the reverse-parallel between us, she challenged me to write about that. I didn’t! (In my defence, she didn’t state in what genre I should write it!) Instead I wrote about the 14-year old black boy, George Stinney jr., the youngest person to be executed by the electric chair in the United States, in my poem, “Devotion” , one of the poems in The Sign of the Ram. What tension can possibly exist in writing a poem like “Towing”? I was not Black at the time in Nigeria the way I would now be considered black in America. The speaker in the poem is Isaac, who is an object of near-sacrifice the way black bodies are in the history of civilization. By using the persona of Isaac, it becomes easy to collapse collective memory of a cult figure in Abrahamic tradition and a racialized body/site of violence with an active observation of an event of being on the road at the time I wrote the poem.    

Agbaakin reads from his newly published chapbook to an audience at the University of Georgia.

Photo caption: Agbaakin reads from his newly published chapbook to an audience at the University of Georgia.

Interviewer:

Do you see a role for African writers in the diaspora to bridge this gap in access to books back home? Perhaps through advocating for increased literary resources or even incorporating those limitations into their work? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I think it will be unfair to task the nomadists with solving all the problems with our literature. The problem of the dearth of literary resources is on an institutional scale, and requires an institutional solution. I think this is one of the innovations of the African Poetry Book Fund Libraries. Currently, they have libraries in six African countries. That is a huge stride! Despite the pessimism of many critics about the death of Nigerian literature, there has been a renaissance in the system of support. I think Kanyinsola Olorunnisola (whom we both know) wrote about this in his essay, “Our Literature has died again” where he declared himself among other japa writers the nomadist movement. This is a more interesting term than Afropolitanism. Anyway, he lists the plethora of prizes, journals, editorial fellowships, grants, seminars and so on that are actively promoting Nigerian and African literature at large. Like I have mentioned, the government has to involve someone. The scale of the solution must match the scale of the problem. I have chosen to be optimistic. We, writers in the diaspora and at home can be the impulse that sets the wheel in motion. If not us, who will?  

Interviewer:

Given your experience living in liminal spaces, how do you define your relationship to Nigeria? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

It depends on the time of the day, seriously! (Haha). It’s a frustrating relationship, really. I hate that the country has created and sustained the conditions that would make a majority of its youth want to leave in droves every year. Now my generation may want to think that they are in exile, but that is not entirely true. I think it was in Teju Cole’s Open City where Julius in his interaction with Farouq said something along the line that we are not in exile if we can always return. To quote directly, Farouq says: “To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely?” If I am in no exile, then what/where am I? The question is important because what I am defines my relationship with my native land. Clearly, I still don’t have the mobility capital of the Afropolitan; which is why I don’t identify as an Afropolitan, to answer your previous question. Yet, I (this is true for many of us) have a unique set of circumstances that is close to being in a state of exile. If I have to travel outside of the United States (to Nigeria of course), I have to renew my expired VISA; to go through the humiliating immigration process again. You are reminded that you’re an ‘alien’ anytime you apply for an opportunity that requires an American residency. I have defined my relationship to Nigeria as that of being a Nigerian. For all the respect that Nigerians command worldwide, the country itself commands none. Therefore, I am proudly Nigerian but feel nothing for the country itself beyond the feeling of frustration. I am not sure if I have experience living in liminal spaces. Some days, you feel fully Nigerian, Your voice comes to you unchanged. Other days, there is a great sense of spatial disorientation that you even feel it physically in your body. I guess it’s the same experience as speaking English. English is our language. Where we are right now (the place, the culture, the history) is a kind of home. If not? Then what is it?  

Interviewer:

What is your writing process like? Do you have a specific routine or preferred environment for writing poems? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

I am a very slow writer. I envy many of my friends who are able to write a poem at a go. I write lines that add up over time and when I have a coherent draft, I take forever to revise it. Writing is like planting for me. My best planting season is sentimentally in April where I have a better structure. I write a poem a day for the whole month, then trash like a half or three quarter of the poems and revise the rest for the rest of the year. Outside of this ritual, I don’t write a routine. I prefer writing while on the bus or while I am walking. In the past, this is what I did during the revision stage: I take the poem on a walk until it’s forced to say something of its own accord, not what I have written into its medium. Now, I walk to get the writing out.    

A copy of The Sign of the Ram, Respondent's poetry collection

Photo Caption: A copy of The Sign of the Ram.

Interviewer:

Can you share a poem from your collection that resonates with you personally, and tell us a bit about its inspiration? 

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

All the poems in the chapbook resonate with me personally because I poured my heart into them. It is a collection about being vulnerable  and confronting the alienation between a father and a son, told through the lens of the sacrifice of Isaac. The story has been told many times in Christianity and Islam as a testament to the faith(fulness) of Abraham. It is a story of man-divine relationship, while largely devaluing the man-man dimension of the story. Talking of liminal spaces, it is a story of the liminal space of awkward silence between a father and a son on their way back from the foiled sacrifice. If the two patriarchs were to talk as one mortal to another, what would their conversation be about? There is the subject of forgiveness, which inscribes itself as a divine virtue. Another question is that what about the conversation between Isaac and God during the whole episode, without the appositive insertion of Abraham? Was Abraham God in that moment he took full control of his life and the language used to mediate or excuse the exercise of tyrannical power? In what ways do men in patriarchal societies embody the voice of God to abuse their own power and cause violence? I think that is the broader question I was asking in The Sign of the Ram. 

Anyway, if this chapbook had only one poem in it, that poem would be “Good Friday”. I feel that is my most authentic poem ever. I have not been able to reproduce the moves I made into my other poems, especially the compact structure, the wirework of allusion, personal history and communal memory embedded, and so on. It starts with a dialogue with a divine son and a divine father who sucks at snake charming; father as in God. The snake as in the serpent. It takes the risk of being iconoclastic but (let me tell you) it becomes less  irreverent when I tell you that the father is also a physical father and the speaker is a physical son. One day, a spitting cobra (Sebe) entered our living room while my brother and I were watching a movie at midnight. The electricity had been coming in a low current for a few days. One midnight, the bulbs shone brighter (because people were sleeping and not using their home gadgets) so my brother and I decided to watch a movie that we’ve been burning to watch. I think the title is Sekeseke (boundage), Yomi Ogunmola was the main character. You can guess where this anecdote is going: if we weren’t watching the movie that night, there’s no telling what the snake would have done undetected. Anyway, the snake slithered away when it saw that it was exposed. My father said we should leave the snake. That it was not coming back! The other men in the house (it was a family house) insisted that we hunted the snake down. Lo and behold, the snake was slithering back into the house again. I don’t remember much else from that night but my father’s psyche was interesting. If we had listened to him… yet, maybe he could have been too tired after a hard day’s job, or maybe he’s just pro-animal rights (haha). We never had this conversation till date so we are still living in a liminal space about that incident.  

Interviewer:

What are some of your favorite things about being a poet?  What are some of the challenges?  

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:

Easy one. I use a mask, to cast the shadow of a truth! The truth is difficult, too bright and stark to look at so sometimes it is better to look at it at an angle (Dickison’s tell the truth slightly?) or wear goggles, or like me, wear a mask! By mask, I mean the persona of other mythological (and often Biblical stories). That is my signature move that finds antecedence in my beloved Peter Weltner, among many other poets. The mask allows me to blend private ethos with a more universal mythos. Which is why I love it when other poets go into their poems with a raw face. How do you do that? I don’t consider myself too interesting to expose myself in my poetry. Yet, there are moments I feel naked when I read my poems and I get it. The feeling comes with a sense of satisfaction that I am the only one privy to a fact in the poem, and that comes with its own catharsis as well. The most important thing is that my language must take control of the poem. This reminds me of what Jessie Nathan said of Richie Hoffman’s: ““All technique, no passion, a critic said” of Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, “but,” writes Richie Hofmann, “that was what I liked.” It’s as if what moves the poet is not the feeling directly, but the way that feeling emanates from the completeness of its subordination to the craft.” At the end of the day, we are not special. At the end of the day, our suffering is not special but it is ours. The greatest pleasure I get as a poet is when a revision goes well. It is when the poem finally speaks! Another favorite thing is when I am able to finally document a childhood experience, a haunting into an artistic language that doesn’t call attention to the experience itself but ruptures the temporal prison where they used to be. It was not that I forgot those things, but that before I knew I was a poet, I didn’t know what to do with them. Thank God I am a poet. The greatest challenge of being a poet is how do you live outside of the impulse to literalize every single experience that’s happening now? How do you live in the moment without trying to make meaning out of it? It is almost like going to a vacation in paradise with a camera. If you don’t capture it, you can’t remember and write it as it was; but if you write it, you are not enjoying the beauty viscerally. It’s hard! But sometimes, I deliberately forget that I am a poet. That helps. 

Interviewer:

Thank you so much for your time. 

Interview with Aamer Hussein, On Characterization No. 17

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi. In 1970, at the age of 15, he moved to London to complete his education. He graduated from SOAS with an Honors degree in South Asian Studies. He simultaneously studied European languages. He began to publish short fiction in the 1980s. Mirror to the Sun, his first collection including new stories with others previously published in journals and anthologies, appeared in 1993. This was followed by several other collections including Cactus Town and Insomnia, and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He returned to shorter forms with The Swan’s Wife (2014) and Hermitage (2018). He has since published his first collection in Urdu and a volume of memoirs and autofiction, Restless (2021). His stories have been translated into Italian, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Urdu. Aamer was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 soon after the publication of Turquoise, his highly acclaimed 3rd collection. He was also a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Literary Review and The Independent for many years. He is currently a Senior Editor at Critical Muslim and a regular columnist for the literary pages of Dawn (Karachi). Aamer Hussein’s latest work is a selection of his stories, memoirs, and essays, entitled What is Saved (2023). 

Sheeraz: Many of your characters are seen walking, biking, sitting in a moving train, or planning to go somewhere (e.g., the protagonist of “37 Bridges”). This often corresponds with their mental miles across continents and years. What makes them go places? What makes them develop a sense of belongingness everywhere and nowhere?  

Aamer: Let us go back to beginnings. My mother was born in Indore in what was then called Princely India, but both her parents came from elsewhere. Though she retained many of the ways of Malwa, where she grew up, and was always nostalgic for its green spaces and its monsoon when she moved to Karachi after her marriage, she told me many years later that she always felt she did not belong in Indore. In Karachi, where she had a busy social life and dedicated herself to classical music and to women’s rights, she found the topography alien and spent much of her spare time planting flowers and fruit creating gardens with my little sister and me assisting her. I believe her children inherited her “sense of belongingness to everywhere and nowhere” though to tell the truth I do not think I belong everywhere. I began to feel like a stranger in the city of my birth when I was a child and often longed for rainy Malwa and its cold winters. Not one of us returned to live in Karachi once we left. I spent four formative years between the ages of 11 and 13 shuttling between Karachi, Indore and various Indian cities, until I spent 18 months studying in the Blue Mountains in South India before moving to London at 15. So I experienced a sense of inquietude at a very early age; although I spent many years trying to settle down in London, and didn’t begin to travel abroad till I was 20, I chose to belong nowhere. By chance or unconscious design, many of the friends of my youth were transients, wanderers, and exiles. At 21 I began to travel in Europe; at 26 I visited Bangladesh, where my sister lived, and since then I have frequently travelled back and forth between London and South Asia. Like my parents, who moved back and forth between their homelands all their lives, I put down some tentative roots in Karachi in the second decade of this century to assuage my sense of longing for a permanent home, but continue to move between languages in my writings and contrasting landscapes in my memories and anticipations. I suppose my characters’ constant flights reflect my own adult life and journeys. The title of my antimemoir, Restless, captures my writing self and to some extent my private world too. 

Sheeraz: Critics have read some of your characters as fictionalized real people (e.g., the protagonists of your novel, Another Gulmohar Tree as writer Ghulam Abbas and his Greek-Scottish-Romanian wife, Zainab or poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and his British wife, Alys). To what extent is this reading correct? How do real people contribute to the development of fictional characters? How do you decide on what to allow of a real character to enter the narrative? How do you keep a fictional character different from the person that inspires it? 

Aamer: Fallacy. Faiz and Alys have nothing at all to do with my story. I did read “The Girl with Golden hair”, a story about a transcultural marriage by Ghulam Abbas, the unsatisfactory conclusion of which provoked me to start AGT as a rejoinder, but it was quite a while later, when I was well into the Karachi section of my story, that I discovered Zainab/Chris Abbas’s charming illustrations in a book of her husband’s poems and tales for children. Since I am not an illustrator, I found them enormously helpful in depicting a British woman’s attempt to give her pictures an unexotic Pakistani flavor. Usman is one of the most difficult characters I’ve ever created, and entirely unlike me; since I have read very little about Ghulam Abbas’s life, any resemblance between him and Usman owes all to happenstance. I later found out that Ghulam Abbas happily lived with two wives – now if I’d been writing about him, where would that have taken my story? In most cases, when a real person enters my story, they appear as themselves; for example, “The Lady of the Lotus” is drawn, with her approval and collaboration, from my mother’s diary. There are exceptions I can think of; my Urdu story “Zohra” (an English translation was included in The Swan’s Wife) was inspired by the tragic death of the very talented Lahore poet Hima Raza, and drew tears from the eyes of her sister when the latter heard it read out in their native Lahore. My friend, the late great Indonesian poet Toeti Heraty, asked to be portrayed in a story, and not only chose the name of her fictional self but loved the story “Insomnia” when she read it. Inspiration, however, usually comes from characteristics writers observe in the many people we meet, and indeed contradictory aspects of ourselves, not from fictionalizing any one person. When I went on to write about real people, I chose the form of the personal essay, a form I approached in my 60s with some trepidation and then increasing confidence: I’ve written about the role the writers Qurratulain Hyder and Han Suyin played in my life, on a note of elegy; and about encounters with Abdullah Hussein, Intizar Hussain, Fahmida Riaz, sadly in the form of obituaries. But my Karachi friends Mehreen, Taha and Shahbano appear as themselves in some pieces, as does my Chennai friend Mukund in “A Convalescence”, which is often read as fiction, but is actually fact, an experimental and time bending memoir; its dreamy quality derives from the large quantities of painkillers I was taking during the eponymous convalescence. There are one or two “lockdown” stories in Restless which trickily navigate the middle ground between genres, because I wanted to fictionalize myself in that time that slipped away from time, rather than follow a diaristic approach or a strict adherence to clock or calendar.   

Sheeraz: Most of your characters live in big cities (e.g., London, Paris, and Karachi) as globalized, educated, middle-class people. They find friends in swans and doves and trees and waters but are often seen struggling with developing human friendships. How do relationships define a character? 

Aamer: I would say that my characters struggle with betrayals and unrequited love, not human friendships. Poet Mimi Khalvati, at the launch of my collection Insomnia, described my abiding concern as friendship and love beyond the narrow confines of the erotic. The title story of that collection, for example, and “The Angelic Disposition”, are both about friendships between men and women that defy sexual desire. And Restless, too, embodies this in its factual or semifictional depictions of my abiding friendships. My characters, at least since my third collection (and to an extent in my novel The Cloud Messenger, in which romantic love becomes friendship), are defined by such relationships, which sometimes as in “Knotted Tongues” only end with the death of one person. The stories in Hermitage, which are fables drawn from my imagination in which characters like the Buddhist monks appeared before me from nowhere, or from traditional sources like the legend of ‘mad’ Qais and Laila, do often deal with love and separation, in an attempt to reach out to the grand Sufi tradition. And yes, as Ali Akbar noticed in his interview with me, my characters do find solace in quiet green places, by rivers and lakes and the sea, among birds and sometimes other creatures: but their walks are often companionable, chatty rambles with friends, not solitary expeditions.    

Sheeraz: Your poetic short short, “Dove,” is a character story. For an expert reader, the phrase, “country’s queen of melancholy verse,” when read along with the cities named, is indexical to poet Ada Jafarey and adds her life history to the meaning of the story. How do you decide what to mention and what to keep out for the reader to fetch from their knowledge, experience, or emotions?  

Aamer: I can’t say much about the story except that it came as a kind of epiphany; and yes, the central image was inspired by a passage in Ada Jafarey’s magnificent autobiographical work, Jo Rahi So Bekhabri Rahi; but I never met or even saw the lady in person, and wanted to present the era in one life, not a biographical essay about the poet. So no, not a character story in my book, though for a reader who knows of the poet situated in history, it may appear to be so, and the reader who doesn’t may not need to know the inspiration behind it, though I mention it in an afterword.  

Sheeraz: I heard you speak in a craft talk about a composite character inspired by multiple people from real life. Would you like to elaborate on the creative process behind writing such a character?  

Aamer: I think you’re talking about Sara in “Zindagi se pehle” (translated as “What is Saved”)? Her cats, and the walk in Regents Park, are inspired by my friend the novelist Mary Flanagan, as is the visit to exhibition in the story: but Mary does not see herself in Sara at all! The life of the painter LM, who never appears but plays a catalytic part, is entirely fictional: I felt her work was inspired by the paintings of Lee Krasner, until my friend Alev Adil, herself a writer and visual artist, reminded me of our visit to an exhibition of the paintings of Etel Adnan, whom I knew, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park like the exhibition in my story. Memoir forces the mind the observe ‘truth’ in chronology and location; fiction gives me licensee and plays wonderful tricks, as it did in this case, where memory took me to a spot I had forgotten. That is why I wrote the story as fiction and not as an essay or memoir: an unconscious process, as is the creation of character.    

—Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Mid-American Review  

Interview with Han VanderHart, On Poetry

Han VanderHart is a queer writer and arts organizer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast, edits Moist Poetry Journal, and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey. 

Your book, What Pecan Light, explores the intimacies of a speaker’s long and winding relationship to the American South. It seems that the poems fluctuate between love and criticism quite fluidly while pausing at many different points in-between. What made you decide to write an entire book on this subject? 

I love that you entwine love and criticism in your question—I think of Iris Murdoch (via Simone Weil’s) “just and loving gaze”—there is no love without justice, or justice without love. Poetry does this work so well: holding the tenderness and the anger together (for example, the collected work of June Jordan, which I’ve been reading the past few months). I think the answer to your central question of what made me write a book on the topic of the south and my family’s relationship to it is that I couldn’t not write this book—it is an account-giving, in the old, congregational sense of the expression, where you stand up in front of you community and you tell your story, and where you have come from, and where you are now as a person. 

Coming from a small, rural town myself, I really enjoy the speaker’s fascination with life on the farm. Why do you think your poetic imagination is so drawn to this particular landscape? 

The late Louise Glück wrote, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” That young, pre-frontal cortex is so open to the world—to image, to love, to harm—to learning how to move through the world. Environment ALWAYS gets into our poems, no matter our age, but the growing mind’s early impressions are an Ur-impression of the world—almost a platonic ideal, not in the ideal or positive sense, but in their importance in how we read the world. I grew up in an isolated, rural environment, locked into my mother’s back-to-basics world while my father was deployed overseas. Writing What Pecan Light is definitely a version of Diane Seuss’s “building a bearable myth.” 

 What does your process look like when writing poetry? Do you consistently use a certain space, how many drafts do you go through, etc.? 

Chaotic and varied, ha. I was born under a new moon (Cusp of Energy: Taurus/Gemini), and I am happiest when I bring a variety of energies to my writing. I joke (but it’s a serious joke!) that the best thing you can do for your writing is something else. Go garden. Go spend time with animals, music, baking. The poems will come to you more willingly this way, if you don’t hunt or stalk them. I often write on my phone, in the notes app (this method results in saved poems, as I’m impossible at remembering physical drafts). I try not to be too precious about writing time—I do it when I feel like it! I don’t experience writers block, which I suppose is something writers who force themselves to sit in a chair experience. I don’t think writing should be forced, or painful; I think it should be pleasurable.  

Who would you say are your strongest literary influences and why? 

Like which writers a reader might see in my poems, or who I like to bring up in every conversation? Haha. I adore Iris Murdoch, an Irish novelist, philosopher (and sometimes writer of very mid poetry—forgive me, Murdoch). Murdoch was genderqueer, and deeply invested in human desire and self-fantasy; you know a Murdoch character is intensely in their fantasy-comfort when they quote Saint Julian of Norwich’s “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Murdoch impresses me by richly detailing the impotence of that comfort, in a human life—no, it will not be well! But we can still “find something good and hold onto it like a terrier” (from her novel, The Good Apprentice). I also love Simone Weil (“it is better to say you are suffering than that the landscape is ugly”), and Wittgenstein (“a word’s meaning is its use in the language”), and basically many of the ordinary language philosophers. For poets, I’m deeply attached to C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss—all of them paying great attention to both recklessness and restraint. 

 What is the best advice you could give to beginner writers, especially in this unprecedented age of AI and collapsing humanities departments within higher education?  

Find your community; build the spaces you need. Your peers are the support who will keep you going, who will be there for you. The world is big, and various, and having non-transactional relationships where you make art together, at the end of the day, is what will sustain you and keep you going. Isolation is the death of artists. 

How has co-running a press affected your writing? Do you ever feel hindered by having to read so much of other people’s work? Or do you think it keeps you inspired and curious?  

River River Books has brought a greater understanding to my own manuscript submissions—I see my work as one among many. I think more (because this is a never-ending process and cycle in a writer’s life!) about the times I have falsely concluded my manuscript was “done,” when no—it was not. It is hard to be patient with one’s own writing—but you can’t force bloom a book, and you shouldn’t want to. Oscar Wilde said there are two tragedies in life: not getting what you wanted, and getting it. But there is a real inspiration in working with someone you admire and respect, and Amorak Huey is probably the greatest inspiration to me, along with our beautiful press authors. 

If you could change anything about the current professional writing world, what would it be and why?  

Do I have to choose between healthcare, or childcare, or job stability? Doom-jokes aside: we are somehow creating out of scarcity—we are somehow loving each other through forced competition, hierarchy, and gatekeeping. In some ways, we have never had such great access to information and art—think of everything we can stream! from a sonata to a French film to a museum talk or poetry reading—at the same time as such economic stratification and polarization between working and professional and upper classes. We can’t act like these things do not affect our colliding artistic communities—they do, at every level.  Every $30 press reading fee financially prohibits some poets from submitting their work—so let’s start with that: making these fees optional, as we do at River River Books. 

What has been the biggest challenge to your success as a poet so far?  

First, I would ask what you mean by success—a book? A community to make art with? I think the biggest challenge has been the lack of parental leave after giving birth (I was back in class a week or so postpartum, and I should not have been, but the department pressure was real, and birthing bodies are supposed to act like they never birthed) and the lack of care for years as a chronic pain sufferer. Artists are best able to make art when their bodies are cared for and when their bills are paid. 

Why should people in today’s world take an interest in reading poetry?

We see how profit reduces our bodies and our labor to numbers: to hours, to datapoints. Poetry refuses to be reduced: it subverts capitalist values, it thrives especially against censorship and political oppression. I think there IS something deeply populist about poetry, and when the academy tries to rarify it or keep it ivory-towered, they lose the heartbeat of poetry. Poetry is for the people the way graffiti and street music and parks and libraries are for the people. Eugenio Montale wrote that all you need for poetry is a pencil and paper, and he was right. 

What are you currently working on? Can we look forward to seeing anything new from you soon?  

I finished my second poetry manuscript Larks—largely about my sisters, trauma, birds, Ovid’s telling of Philomel—and am mostly finished with my third manuscript, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely—erotics and art and the geneaologies of desire. I’m hoping Larks finds the right press home this year! 

Tell us a little about “Of Poetry Podcast”.

Of Poetry Podcast has been a space of abundance and friendship and craft for me—I began it in summer 2021, as a way of supporting other poets with books published during the pandemic. It has grown and flourished and transformed, and I’m so grateful for the way it expands my own thinking about poetry, and brings the gift of other’s poetry to me. It is a community space in a way I could not dream of, and recently reached 10,000 downloads across listening platforms (Apple, Spotify, Google, etc).  

––Meagan Chandler, Mid-American Review

Featured Writer: Amorak Huey + Interview

On Thursday, February 29th at 7:30 pm, Poet and writer Amorak Huey will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

Amorak Huey, a poet and writer, has authored four poetry collections, including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021) and Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018). He co-authored Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and won the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize for Slash/Slash (Diode Editions, 2021). Currently a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, Huey hails from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and has a rich literary background.

Assistant Editor, Ahmad Bilal interviewed Amorak Huey for the blog.

Ahmad Bilal: You’ve had a fascinating journey from journalism to poetry. How has your experience as a journalist influenced your approach to poetry, and vice versa?

Amorak Huey: I have a couple answers for this question. The first one has to do with language: my years as a copy editor were spent considering the sentence. How efficient is this sentence at delivering information? How does it connect to the sentence before, the sentence after? What work does each word here do? Are they necessary, and if they’re not necessary, are they important in some other way? I think (hope) this practice has shaped my poetry.

The second answer has to do with audience, purpose, the larger world. When you’re writing or editing at a newspaper, you have a very clear sense of audience and purpose with every story, every image, every headline. You’re communicating in a very real sense with a very real and very local audience: the 65,000 people in the Tallahassee area who subscribe to this paper or grab it from a newspaper box because they care about what’s happening in their community, for instance. So, you always have them in mind. I hope this practice, too, carries into my poetry: a sense that I’m writing to a real, human audience interested in what I have to say about the world, in how I make sense of the mess that is the human experience. 

AB: Your poetry often combines humor and social commentary, as seen in titles like Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. How do you perceive the impact of this blend within your poetic work?

AH: I don’t know if I think deliberately about the effect or rhetorical outcome of blending these things, humor and commentary. At least not when I’m writing a poem; if I were writing, say, a newspaper column or a speech, it would be different. But in a poem, for me, it’s more about how we’re always operating at multiple levels of language. Think about code-switching, how we’re all using different diction and vocabulary for different facets of our life. Poems are looking for layers of meaning, right, like, instead of code-switching it’s code-layering — all the versions of yourself can be present at once in a poem. We contain multitudes, etc., so yeah, sometimes the joke-making self and the grief-drowning self and the self with something important to say about the planet (among myriad other selves) — in a poem, they can converge, coexist, contradict each other. 

AB: In your poem “BROKEN SONNET WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AND OFFICE HOURS,” how effective do you find the use of dialogue in addressing intergenerational perspectives on climate change?

AH: Effective within the confines of that particular poem? No idea. That’s a question for a reader, not the poet. But as a reader, I do have a fondness for dialogue in poetry. There’s something about the use of quotation marks that changes the poem’s relationship to truth; the quote marks are a kind of promise that what’s inside them is what a person (perhaps an imaginary one) actually said, though certainly a poem has no obligation to keep that promise. And of course, dialogue is a great way to explicitly give a poem multiple voices, to explore contrast and juxtaposition. 

AB: You’ve also published several chapbooks. What draws you to this shorter form, and how does your approach differ when writing chapbooks versus full-length collections?

AH: For me, a chapbook happens when I have something I’m interested in exploring for 10-15 poems or so. A chapbook is the perfect container for something like this. As a reader, I prefer chapbooks that stand alone, that aren’t just a bunch of loosely connected poems that will eventually also be published in full-length. As a writer, I’m not really a project poet, not enough to fill out a whole collection. My attention span, my willingness to listen to myself go on the same topic — it tends to cut off after a chapbook’s worth of poems. I can’t imagine writing 48-60 or however many poems that are as tightly connected as a chapbook allows. I would bore myself way before that point. I’ve said before that I don’t write books, I write poems, which can cause problems late in the process when it’s time to assemble my poems into a manuscript. So, I tend to have to write double or triple the number of poems a book needs before finding the ones that speak to each other, that coalesce into some larger form: the book. 

AB: Co-authoring a textbook on poetry is a unique endeavor. How did you and W. Todd Kaneko approach creating Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology? What insights did you gain from collaborating on this project?

AH: Our process began by spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we wanted the book to be like, what sections and ideas we wanted to include. Helped that our offices were right across the hall from each other at the time (again, the value of local community). Once we had a rough outline, we just each drafted the chapters and sections and dumped them into a Google folder; once we had everything drafted, we went in and edited each other’s work. Because we trusted each other, because we knew we were on the same page about the direction of the book, it was easy to set ego aside and know that the other’s edits were always about moving the project forward, helping it find its final form. We learned a lot about our own writing process and about trust. After we finished that first edition, we also collaborated on a collection of poems about the rock guitarist Slash, following virtually the exact same process. Because we’d done the textbook that way, we had the kind of trust you need to let someone else mess around in your creative work, right? By the end, these were not Todd’s poems or my poems, but our poems, which is kind of magical place for a project to end up. The chapbook is called Slash/Slash, and diode editions published it. 

AB: As a professor and an active writer, how do you engage with the literary community? What advice do you have for emerging poets seeking to connect with other writers and readers?

AH: My advice is: find your people and hold onto them. Make cool shit with your friends. Share your work with people who are excited about what you’re doing. Don’t think of it in any kind of mercenary or reciprocal sense—what can I get out of this—but because you value the kind of connection, the kind of relationships that art makes possible. It’s not about collecting followers on social media or networking on LinkedIn or whatever, it’s about finding people who value what you value, people you can talk to about reading, or writing, or the beautiful messy chaotic work of shaping our lives into and around art.

––Ahmad Bilal, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Alisson Wood

I recently got the chance to talk with Alisson Wood about her incredible memoir Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020). The book maps her journey from being a high school student struggling with her mental health to being a victim of grooming to being a woman ready to rewrite her own narrative. During high school Alisson takes refuge in her writing and her English teacher, Mr. North, offers to mentor her. Instead of building a student-teacher relationship built on care and support, Mr. North goes on to exploit her. One of his tactics is to give her a copy of Lolita, framing it as the ultimate love story rivaled only by theirs. In the years after the abusive spiral of their “relationship”, Wood learns to see the truth of both her story and the story of Dolores Haze. Being Lolita is a must-read memoir of redemption, survival, and breaking free of dangerous narratives. 

In addition to Being Lolita Wood’s writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Check out her Instagram, Twitter, and website to learn more.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Memoir writing is an incredibly vulnerable art form, especially when it involves the topics you address in Being Lolita such as grooming and misogyny. How did you decide you were ready to write and publish this book? 

Memoir is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable art form. So many other mediums such as sculpture, fine art, theater, and music involve working with an object outside of yourself. Writing is intrinsically an attempt at making the internal external. Memoir is particularly vulnerable because it is explicitly centering oneself. When a memoir is circling trauma, or some sort of traumatic experience, that can be really tricky.

My number one recommendation is if you are thinking about or in the midst of a project that involves trauma, is to find a good therapist. Because this sort of work is difficult. It’s not only difficult on a craft level, because just like writing a novel, there are all these things that you need to be working with like plot, theory, dialogue, scene setting. You need to do all of those things, all of that same craft work,  while you are also navigating your own emotional experience, your past, your present, even your future, in a memoir. 

It wasn’t like I decided to write Being Lolita. It didn’t feel optional. This was the book I needed to write. Which I was not thrilled about. I did not enjoy the process of writing this book. I did not experience the writing of this book as an act of catharsis or as any sort of healing experience. A lot of times people expect that. They’ll ask questions in interviews like, Do you feel healed now? And it’s like fuck no. No, writing out my trauma in detail on a page for an audience of strangers has not made anything better. I do think that that sort of question comes from a place of care and from sort of a place of hope. Someone reads my book, and it’s pretty awful at times, and they sort of hope like, oh, this helped, right? I read this awful thing, but you’re better now. Right?  I am better, but that had nothing to do with the book. Writing this book did not change what happened to me. It did nothing to change my trauma. However, work in therapy has done a lot of that. 

Publishing is always a choice. I’m very proud of the book, and I’m very glad that I published it. But there was a lot that I did to prepare myself for publication like therapy, talking and getting support from close friends, and connecting with family. When the book came out I spent about six months talking about my trauma over and over again in readings and on podcasts and in interviews and then in a documentary. So it was something that I had to prepare myself for. Which, again, is why I always recommend therapy. 

Can you share a bit about the recollection and writing process that went into Being Lolita? Was there anything that surprised you when you revisited the memories and archives of your younger self? 

Your own memory can be fallible. There was a very explicit crossing of the line from this man being my teacher to this man making sexual advances to a seventeen-year-old year old girl. There was this moment where my teacher was talking about the size of his penis in a note to me in study hall. In my memory that had happened towards the end of the school year, it had happened like in May or something. I remembered it being close to when I graduated, when I was already eighteen. But when I was going through my high school journals I found an entry referencing it. The entry was from November, so I had known him for at most two months. It was really shocking to me when I realized that my memory was not accurate, in a way that only made things worse. That just underscored how quickly the relationship had escalated from a teacher paying attention and giving me support with my writing to grooming and sexual abuse. 

I still have a box of photographs and receipts from our “relationship”.  As an aside, it frustrates me that there’s no word for what happened between he and I. That just feels like a reflection of the misogyny in our language. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I would prefer not to use the word relationship, but that’s all that we got. But anyways, in the process I kept having to confront the fact that this was actually much worse than I remembered. I had been sort of lying to myself about the severity of how quickly things escalated. There was one experience where I was in the school play. He was directing it and I remembered this moment of him taking a photograph of me backstage in my costume. I remember how it felt to have that photo taken, how I felt sexy and powerful. I was like, look at me, a cute little Lolita, just like you want. Then when I was writing the book I found the picture. I looked so young I could have been fourteen or fifteen. I looked so young and so sad. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t some seventeen-year-old girl who looked much older. I was a young girl who looked really sad. That reckoning was hard. 

 My experience of going through my archives, including my high school journals, was both incredibly painful and helpful to the project. I was expecting moments of, Oh, I thought this happened. Oh, that’s not actually what happened. Instead, I found myself more disturbed by people remembering what actually had happened. I was expecting to hear from people from my high school, from my past, from his friends who would push back on my memories. Instead people reached out to me, saying things like Oh, my God! He was so creepy! or I tried to talk to another teacher about this because I was worried, but no one cared or I was a teacher then and I didn’t know what to do or, most awfully, this happened to me too. I also found out that my teacher was still teaching. Until very recently he was still teaching high school. That was particularly difficult, but it also wasn’t surprising. 

I’ve had to read Lolita many times for my own project and noticed a narrative structure similar to your memoir. Can you talk a bit about the structural choices you made and how it does and doesn’t mirror Lolita? 

I very explicitly mirror the structure of my book to the structure of Lolita. Part one in both books is sort of the escalation of this “relationship”, this escalation of the grooming and the abuse. Part two of these books are these kind of extended road trips, trying to not get caught. Then part three is the aftermath, which is where I separate from Nabokov’s structure. Dolores Haze is dead, and her story ends. But unlike Dolores Haze, I am not dead. I get to keep going, which is very nice. 

Nabokov really sneaks in the violence of the book in so many ways. Starting from the first line, readers have the point of view of Humbert: this is love, and so on. But before then we have the opening from the doctor and the criminal charges Humbert is facing. It is just tucked in there that Dolores ends up dead – they use her married name. And the thing is, that’s all at the beginning of the book. Nobody knows who this person is. We haven’t been introduced to this character. We don’t even know that her name is Dolores Haze for quite a bit. Unless someone goes back to the beginning and carefully reads through that opening again, they will miss it. They do not know that she ends up dead in childbirth. She never even gets to complete her life cycle. Her moving from girlhood to womanhood (where she becomes a mother and is no longer a child) is where she dies. I think this is just so reflective of the book as a whole. Those most vital pieces are hidden and hidden in plain sight. That’s very frustrating to me. 

 Mirroring the structure of my book to Lolita was a choice that I made in the editing process, not something I decided at the very beginning. At first I was just writing the scenes that were the clearest in my head. I began with the scenes that were the hottest, and I don’t mean hot like sexy, I mean hot emotionally – the ones that are the most emotionally packed. I made the structural decision later, when it revealed itself in later stages of the book

On the topic of structure, particularly memoir structure, I believe that if you’re going to make some sort of interesting craft choice, like making your memoir non-chronological or from the second person, I deeply believe that you need to have a reason for doing that. Why is this non-chronological? Why should this be the way the story has to be told? There needs to be a good reason, because I really believe that chronology can create empathy. We all love to follow a hero’s journey. To see something happen from the start to the end. And I think that, especially in memoir, it really helps an audience follow the main character to the end of an experience. 

I’m also a big believer in a really strong beginning. A hard truth is that unless you are in an MFA or other writing workshop, no one has to read your book. No one has to read your essay. No one has to read your short story. That can be a big shift for people exiting a writing program. You have to earn your reader’s trust. You have to earn their time. You have to earn their attention. 

The opening of my book is, “The first time he kissed me wasn’t on the mouth.” This was both instinctual and a craft choice: the opening line allows readers to get right into the story. There’s immediately questions. Who is he? If he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, where did he kiss you? What is the context here? Who are you? Opening with questions isn’t always the right choice for a book, but I felt like it was the right choice for mine. The diner scene immediately (hopefully) brings in curiosity and stakes. In the short space of that chapter – it is under 2,000 words – I tried to establish what was important: I’m in high school. This is my teacher. We’re meeting secretly. Lolita is important. Writing is important. There’s also a few moments where there’s this innate reference to violence present, with the slamming of the lockers, with the ink bleeding. 

You spend a lot of your memoir unpacking Lolita, especially when it comes to cultural legacy and the role that it had on your own story. What do you wish was more commonly understood about Lolita, both as a novel and also as a cultural touchstone? 

I wish people took Lolita seriously, in a way. Far too many people see Lolita as a piece of satire, and undercut what is actually happening on the page. Now, I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that. Books are made to be read, and should be. However, I do think that Lolita needs to be read in context, both in cultural context and in literary context. Lolita has to be read with a very critical eye. Culturally, people don’t think of Lolita as a victim of rape as a child who was kidnapped. We think about Lolita as a shade of lipstick or a makeup line. We think of Lolita as in Lolita fashion: short little frilly skirts and low-cut tops and ribbons in your hair. Lolita is in place of sexy: she’s such a Lolita. Culturally, we don’t acknowledge the reality of Lolita. 

After the first time Dolores Haze is raped, they stop at a gas station. Humbert has this laundry list of things that he picks up for her: magazines, lollipops, candy, and so on. And right in the middle, just snuck in there, are menstrual pads. If you’re not a careful, critical reader, you just gloss over that when the reality is she needed menstrual pads because was bleeding from violent rape. She had a physical injury from it. That’s something that’s hard for readers to acknowledge. It’s much easier to think of Lolita as if she’s a little Jezebel, like some sexy thing. That’s also linked to the fact that, due to patriarchy and misogyny, women are primarily valued on their looks and younger is considered better. There’s all this power linked to being a young, sexy girl. In many ways Lolita is both a reflection of that point of view in our culture and part of the problem. 

Lolita was in my own story from the beginning. Everything in the book connects in some way to Lolita. My teacher gave me Lolita. He read Lolita to me. His favorite drink was one that he made up called the Humbert Humbert. It was gin, and whatever it is that Humbert drinks. He gave me a stamp collection that was all Nabokov butterflies. Even the sections about fairy tales or Greek myths. That’s the kind of stuff that Nabokov loves.

Now, as a professor, I teach an excerpt from Lolita in my course, the opening. But Lolita is always the last thing we read. I found that when we read Lolita in the beginning of the semester, before weeks of practicing critical thinking about literature, people often got swept up in the romance and the lyricism and the beauty of the prose. Contrarily, by the end of the semester, we’ve talked about poetic devices. We’ve talked about choices and point of view. We’ve talked about narrative. We’ve talk about all these things. So they are ready to do the work of critical thinking and come to the text ready to ask questions. That’s the way Lolita should be read. Lolita is a beautiful book. I mean, it is a little bit masturbatory in its excess. Nabakov famously hated editors. I think the book could be shorter, honestly. But there’s a lot of beauty, and a lot  hat is worth reading and talking about. I think that it’s the lack of critical eye and cultural context that lets down Lolita, and lets down women.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor