Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, Jan 2024). Q&A conducted by Gauri Awasthi, Associate Editor.
Donate to The Offing! Our Patreon supporters received early access to this Q&A with Sarah Ghazal Ali, as well as exclusive access to her list of favorite ghazals. The Offing pays our contributors, and we appreciate the help of all our supporters in sustaining our work.
◆
Gauri Awasthi: In the opening poem, “My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails,” “My faith is feminine, breasted / and irregularly bleeding” sets context and tone for the rest of the collection as the speaker grapples against and reclaims the existing notion, often masculine, centered around faith. How did this dichotomy of sorts develop through your work?
Sarah Ghazal Ali: This is an interesting question that really got me thinking, thank you. I wasn’t trying to set up a dichotomy between masculine and feminine conceptions of faith, between culture and scripture. Distaste, or revulsion even, for the feminine is a cultural product, and one that isn’t at all unique to the South Asian context that I’m writing from. The language of the Qur’an is imbued with mercy, and I lament the absence of that mercy in the way I’ve seen faith be instrumentalized for harm, seen it manipulated into calculated certainty.
Theophanies is certainly a book that pushes and pulls its obsessions, and privileges duality over dichotomy. The poems are built on a foundation of refusal — to choose between two truths, or between piety and purity, or this sacred text and that one. Perhaps the duality at the heart of it is the one I’ve imagined between Sarah and Hajar, and Sarah and Mary, and, truest of all, between contemporary-speaker-Sarah and scriptural-Sarah.
GA: In “Annunciation” and many other poems, there is a deep sense of reverting the judgment of women to the reader, like a returning of the gaze, with the powerful ending line, “What would you have done?” How much of your poetry process is working towards indicting the reader?
SGA: Close reading of a text can often seem like a one-sided engagement. The words on the page are these static artifacts to be puzzled through, or from which fixed truths can be coaxed out. I find it more exciting when I’m writing to imagine a text speaking back, to imagine a woman known through letters speaking back and close reading me. I want readers to feel involved in the reading process, as involved as I did in the writing process. I want their senses to be activated. Asking questions like this one is part of that activation. I welcome it all — indictment, self-awareness, and the real work of imagining beyond what is written, of embodying it.
GA: Similarly, the animal imagery in the poems, like the geckos, the cranes, and the bees, occupies so much of the world. Could you speak to this choice?
SGA: I don’t know how coherent of an answer this will be, but I think it’s tied to my uncertainty about the natural order in the world — are humans central? Are we ancillary, and if so, to what? Do animals serve us? What greater purpose do we serve when we decimate their habitats? The hierarchies across species confound me. I’m not a pet person, and the zoo makes me sad. I believe that a spider once saved the Prophet’s life by weaving a web across the entrance of a cave he took refuge in. Enemies searching for him assumed he couldn’t possibly be inside. And still I guiltily kill spiders. Really I just have a lot of complicated feelings about taxonomy and roadkill and sacrifice and ownership (and, and, and…), and they bleed into the poems. They populate my poems as naturally as people do, I hope.
GA: One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Daughter,” where the speaker says, “Even a mother is myth, fabling / to survive a marriage miscarriage man.” There is an imminent sense of women’s survival and the generational survival of their stories in this collection through the many mother, daughter, and sister poems, which makes me think back to “Poetry is not a luxury” for women, as Audre Lorde said in her famous, oft quoted essay. How do you view your collection in the context of personal and literary lineage?
SGA: That essay and much of Audre Lorde’s work has been a light in the dark for me. I love especially where she describes poetry as “not only dream or vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives,” a bridge across our fears so that they might have less control over us. I am afraid of absence, of empire, of my loneliness, and of suffering in silence. I see this collection as a voice contributing to its own history, writing about women that deserve for more people to write about them, to write toward and in praise and in recognition of them. I see this collection as a daughter of Incarnadine by Mary Szybist and The Book of Hours by Rilke, and a sister or cousin to Deluge by Leila Chatti and Hagar Poems by Mohja Kahf. I see it as a mother to my next book, whatever it may someday be. For anything to survive, it must be seen, shared, spoken, tended to. Theophanies seeks to enact all of that in the interest of women’s survival and thriving.
GA: Despite the central narrative being tied to the “mother line,” there is a clear sense of a conflict with the father figure, which becomes first clear in the “Story of the Cranes” with the refrain “Baba do you know / everything?” — could you speak to the merging of mythical, religious, and personal in some of these poems?
SGA: The father(s) in the book are icons of the capital F Father, the Patriarch. They are as mythic as they are real to me, and as grounded in the weaponization of culture as they are in the instrumentalization of religion in my life and in the lives of those I love. Where do we get our knowledge from? Where and upon whom do we project authority? My mother raised me to be critical of every little thing a man tells me, no matter the context, whether it’s in school, or in line at the grocery store, or at the mosque. She would tell me often, and still does, that men are taught to move in service of power, and women are taught to move in service of men. In “Story of the Cranes,” the speaker loses her innocence and gains a worldly awareness simultaneously — she realizes as she asks that question that no, Baba does not know everything, and she must learn for herself what she will move in service to. Sometimes you have to rewrite what you’ve been told, whether it’s a myth, or a fairy tale, or a doctrine.
GA: So much of the work is directly linked to shame in the female body – hair also becomes a recurring site of resistance and liberation. How do you tackle shame in your writing practice?
SGA: I tackle it by writing into it even when it makes me feel physically ill. “Litany of Hair” to this day makes me itch because it’s just too close and too personal. I took it out of the manuscript multiple times and each time had to force myself to put it back, to lean into the discomfort. My instinct is still to write around shame, to avoid touching the bruise. I am someone who wants to always appear put together, devout and exemplary and self-assured with some pep in my step. Shame follows me everywhere, and I fight daily to not succumb to it. But that isn’t a healthy way to live, and I’m working now, in newer, messier poems, to encounter shame head on, and to write into it by telling myself I don’t have to publish anything — I just have to write it. Some things can stay private. Some things can remain for my eye only. To get to the point of deciding what to do with certain poems, I have to get myself to write them first.
GA: Partition informs so much of the understanding of these poems, especially in terms of geographically tying the speaker’s lineage. In making this postcolonial work, what was your approach to grappling between languages – Urdu, English, Arabic?
SGA: I wish I had the courage to write deeper into Partition and its reverberations in my family, but it was too painful to probe at the stage in my life when I was writing Theophanies. It exists as an undercurrent, an atmosphere that, as you said, informs the understanding of much of the book. Urdu only appears occasionally, maybe even just twice, if I’m remembering correctly. Once as transliterated dialogue, and once as a word the speaker learns against her will and so renders in Urdu script as something other, something newly gained. There’s something to say about the choice between transliteration and transcription. The dialogue I transliterated because that is how familiar Urdu reaches me. My parents text me in transliterated Urdu; it feels close, just as the Urdu dialogue in “Daughter Triptych” feels, however uncomfortably so. The word in “Apotheosis” presented in Urdu script is meant to appear almost foreign, unfamiliar even to the Urdu speaker of the poem. Why would she know the word “behead” in her mother tongue, in what world would she have learned it? Arabic in the book emerges always in the context of faith, since Arabic is the language that I pray in. It is exalted, one I wield with reverence and extra care. And English is the language I write in, the language I learned to write in. They each hold a different status: English as the language I think in, Urdu as the language I love and languish in, Arabic as the language I believe and beseech in.
GA: What responsibilities do you feel toward the ghazal form? Especially as a poet who understands the form before it traveled west.
SGA: I’ve written about my relationship to the ghazal elsewhere, so I’ll keep this short so as not to repeat myself! When it comes to the ghazal, my allegiance is to music and sound above all else. I feel a responsibility to make sure people understand its history and its lyricism, and that they understand the reason for its form before they attempt to break or bend it. My responsibility is also, at least personally, to make it clear that I consider my ghazals amateur attempts and a record of their own striving toward honesty and vulnerability.
GA: And lastly, how has your experience been of working with a small press? Any suggestions for writers applying to contests? Or sustain the writing practice?
SGA: I have had a lucky experience with my first book, in that it found a bewilderingly supportive and loving home. Alice James Books has the best team. They’ve been transparent, kind, and encouraging. Though my book was selected through the contest model, it doesn’t at all feel like Theophanies is just another book to be churned out and then forgotten, or that I’m an author that the press is not interested in maintaining a relationship with. I know that isn’t true for everyone, and I recognize just how lucky this is.
For transparency, I submitted my book in one application cycle to ten prizes. It received two acceptances, one semi-finalist nod, and one finalist nod. I strongly urge writers to do their research before submitting to contests, and to always ask for fee waivers. Don’t submit widely hoping that just anyone will pick up your book — you put so much work and love and care into crafting it. Why wouldn’t you put that same care into seeking its home? Ask around about what kinds of experiences others have had with specific presses, ask to see examples of contracts. Take your book seriously and don’t accept scraps for it. The right home is out there, even if it takes a while to find it. Be patient, but also — and this is something I have to keep learning for myself — be audacious. Ask for what you want! For sustaining your writing practice, my advice is to never stop reading, and again, to be audacious. Don’t write with publication in mind. Write bravely and without hesitation. Worry about publication and reception later.
◆
Patrons got it first! Consider becoming a monthly supporter of our Patreon. All donations are tax-deductible.
