Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Source is a poetry podcast miniseries hosted by Divya Victor and Ashna Ali featuring conversations with five poets who discuss one of their poems and the story—and source—of its creation. 

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Ashna Ali (AA): Hello, I’m Ashna Ali. 

Divya Victor (DV): And I’m Divya Victor. 

AA: And you are listening to The Source, a poetry podcast produced by Asian American Writers’ Workshop. And we are your hosts.

DV: Ashna is a queer disabled poet and a child of the Bangladeshi diaspora. Their debut collection, The Relativity of Living Well, came out in September 2024 from Bone Bouquet.

AA: Divya is a poet, essayist, editor and educator, and a daughter of the Tamil diaspora. She is the author of several books including Kith and Curb. She is also the director of the Creative Writing program at Michigan State University. 

The Source came to be because Divya randomly saw one of the four tweets I’ve ever tweeted in my life. In that tweet, I asked why no one had created a show or series where close readings of poetry could be showcased in the way that music often is. She DMed me and asked if I would do it if given the chance. And then she gave me that chance. 

DV: This was during the pandemic lockdown, which resulted in loneliness and separation from sites of our creative practice, and simultaneously there was a feral exuberant outburst in creative collaboration. Ashna and I had never met each other but we decided to make something together. We were motivated by the grand questions. Why not here? Why not now? And if not us, then who?

AA: Together as poets and avid listeners of poetry podcasts, we notice an absence of programs that depart from formalist analyses, and that access the human experience of poetry making: the labor, the love, the stories at the foundation of composition, and the narratives that are revealed through publication.

We invited five contemporary BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ poets: Zaina Alsous, Rajiv Mohabir, Hala Alyan, Douglas Kearney, and Josè Olivarez. We spoke with them about their creative process, and they told us about the making of their most treasured poems, their motivations for writing them, and explained choices about craft and kinship with the audiences that they hoped to reach.

DV: As scholars, editors and poets, we know to rely on literary analyses and paratexts to understand poetry, but this time we want it to get back to the very makers, the very sources of creative work—hence the name, The Source. We tell the story of the poem from root, to seed, to bloom. 

AA: Welcome! We invite you to join us on The Source.

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AA: Welcome to the second episode of The Source.

Our guest today is Zaina Alsous. She is a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora, a prison abolitionist and a movement worker in South Florida. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The New Inquiry, Adroit, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Lemon Effigies, won the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize and was published by Anhinga Press. Her first full length collection, a triumph, A Theory of Birds, won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in the fall of 2019.

DV: And today we’re gathering around a poem by Zaina titled “Exorcism”. The poem’s title refers to what many of us think of as a practice of removing a demon from the body of a possessed person, ridding them of a power that has grabbed hold of their agency, suffocating them from within. Exorcism draws this possession out—we imagine, through the mouth, through the breath, through the voice. Its kinship with poetry is, thus, intuited by most poets—but what is being exorcized in Zaina’s poem? To what body then does the first, or the original, spirit return?

We travel far from home in this poem, through nations, to the surface of Mars, plunging into the Earth’s magma, all while remembering the flowers on a mother’s hijab, framing her face. And through the long, swift, rocketing ride of Zaina’s poem, we can hear what is exorcised, drawn up, dispelled, and let out when the speaker wants to be freed. It is set in an elaborate masquerade required to keep the ravages of capitalism hidden, and we see the speaker find their breath, their scream, their breakout from being possessed by these logics, which the poem presents as a kind of spiritual incarceration.

The poem is a vociferous escalation, a peaking that begins at the peak and peaks even further, to probe how anger progresses—how far is too far for a person to be pushed by the forces of global capitalism and other violences? So, Zaina, welcome, we would love it if you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your relationship with this poem.

Zaina Alsous (ZA): Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really humbled and grateful to be having this conversation with you all. And thank you for the generous introduction. Perhaps I think it’s helpful to share a little bit about what was happening before and around the poem, I think, in my life and in the world, to then get towards the hope, I think, for the poem in practice.

In 2015-2016, I actually began writing poetry a bit more seriously. I was living in North Carolina, you know, surrounded by political community, which has been my primary form of community since I was a teenager—leftists, queers, queer Muslims, who are very much part of my beloved community. This was also the time of Trump’s election. This was the time of my first visit to Cuba, which was very formative for me. And this was also a time of reading quite a bit of Amiri Baraka, June Jordan. And then in the fall of 2016, reading the work for the first time of Marwa Helal, when she won the BOMB poetry prize at that that year, judged by Bhanu Kapil, another poetic hero of mine, and something about the combination of all of those things— and reading Helal in particular, I do want to offer credit where it is due: an Arab writer writing where I am, right? In the imperial core, in the belly of the beast, writing so fearlessly—I think it really broke something open for me, as did the work of Jordan, of Baraka.

And so I did want an opportunity to write through despair and desire and longing that is not necessarily penetrable in a practical sense, in terms of having a movement solution that is within reach. But where poetry, I think, offers an outlet, a window, a meditative space for all of the accumulated resentments, and alienations. Yeah, I think this poem was one offering or meditative space for some of those memories and moments that were happening simultaneously in my life, and also over the course of many years of course.

AA: Can we invite you to read the poem for us, Zaina?

ZA: Absolutely.

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Exorcism

I can no longer pretend the flowers are enough,
flowers in ink, flowers on plates, flowers in my shoe
laces, candied flowers, 1-800 FLOWERS, balloon,
birthday, funeral flowers, marshmallow flowers staining
the milk pink. Flowers in my mother’s hijab frame the smile
lines grown deeper; the long term health effects of appearing
gentle in a hostile setting. Have you read the instructions on tigers?
They may attack the unfamiliar. Remain calm, move slowly,
adapt as the tremor of leaves. To survive is to convince
the predator you are not really there.
I can no longer pretend slowly alive, kneeling in the soil
is enough. A nation of neon plastic straws, machines
on the surface of Mars, reminds its citizens to be patient.
Slowly, when the bill passes, slowly through diversity
training, slowly through handshake and t-shirt and apology
and apology and apology and apology and apology. I take a knife
to the dam, bathing in the leaks. There are teeth
in my laughter. Imagine a life of tectonic distortion: gaping, wet,
magma, colliding with, really there.
I scream my name in the pool, it is almost enough to hear the terror
I can be. Remember when discovering fire,
the heat of progress pairs a leather palm with new
ways to eat and be eaten.

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AA: Thank you so much. That was beautiful. Could you set the scene for the labor of this poem? How did it begin, where were you, do you remember the weather, what you were wearing, where you were when you wrote it?

ZA: My process of writing is almost always—if not, always—in conversation with reading. It’s impossible for me to write without writing as a way of speaking with who I’m reading. And so for me, this poem is of everywhere and nowhere, in that it’s not perfectly situated; though I will say I think I tried to write from a point of view of someone living as a U.S. citizen, living as a part of a diaspora but very much living with the responsibility of responding to the U.S. Empire.

You know, I was born and raised in the United States. And so while this poem touches on, you know, racism and discrimination experienced by Muslim communities—which of course has shaped the life that I’ve led, and how I’ve come to understand the world and my place within it—I think, for me, part of the conversation that I was hoping to have in this poem was also around the maintenance of empire. And a part of imperial maintenance, that I absolutely am culpable in as well, is this sort of orientation towards time and convenience. 

So how do we make violence more palatable, but distant, not experienced directly or viscerally, and when it is, concealed, justified? And it’s interesting now, thinking about this poem being written, you know, eight years ago or something like that, to see a figure like in Elon Musk right now who’s become so central in our lives and our understanding of global capitalism today, who has this direct role in thinking about the colonization of Mars, while also being a white supremacist?

And so I think, for me, I was really hoping for those different threads of analysis, of ideology, which has been my window into the world, my way of feeling more human in my writing. I wanted to connect, ideology, self reflection, and then also as I spoke to earlier, something like a fantasy of what it would be like if I could exit. If I could exit the maintenance, the culpability, the instrumentality or instrumentalizing, of my labor and my language in the service of empire. What would it be like to be in total antagonism to that maintenance, which for many of us, I think that fantasy of total antagonism may only exist in a poem. Which is in itself a problem, right?

And so definitely a lot of reading, a lot of thinking with others, a lot of drawing from the language of others, some of whom I named earlier. And then, I think sitting down to write—I tend to be a poet who’s not very precious about craft, which I completely respect those poets who are. I think craft can be an incredible tool. But for me, I think I wanted a kind of freedom that sometimes, for me at least, comes with just getting a chance to write and make those connections on the page.

DV: I’m moved by so many things you’re saying, particularly by this idea of writing as a way of speaking with those who are reading. And also the place of poetry in trying to perform and enact this impossible exit from being, you know, the kind of maintenance workers for empire.

So I would love for you to talk a little bit about whether you see early drafts of this poem as having readers, of like, when does it enter the conversation with others? When does it enter the conversation with early readers? And what kind of care and labor did that community of readers offer you when you were tending to it at sort of a sapling stage. And I’m particularly wondering if that community also then supports you in maintaining that necessary fantasy of enactment and performance in the work, right? Are they part of the sort of co-antagonists of maintenance?

ZA: So I’ll say a couple of things. One: I think, like many of us, if not all of us, the work would not exist without a community of people who love and support me, and encouraged me. I think, for me, something I feel lucky about, actually, is I haven’t necessarily ever found myself in a community of people exclusively devoted to writing, to literature, to, you know, hoping to be published. For me, my community has always been, primarily, those who identify with a political way of being. A way of being in the world in opposition to racism and capitalism and empire.

And of course, that includes people who make art. Sometimes in their free time, off the job. Sometimes, you know, when their kids are sleeping. Sometimes more full-time. But I think, for me, having that kind of community has enabled much more generosity and experimentation, because it’s not as if we’re necessarily workshopping each other’s work.

But there is a sense of, if you want to write, you should write. You know, if you want to be an artist, be an artist. And maybe we won’t workshop your work, but we will… make you dinner. You know? And so I think that’s the kind of community I had when I was living in Durham, North Carolina, people who I, to this day, love very dearly.

And this might be a little bit controversial. And so, to the listeners, please forgive me for this. I’ve never been a big fan of workshopping poetry with others. I know it’s incredibly helpful for many others, but for me, I always found it a little bit like when people give you relationship advice. And it’s like, some people are like, treat your man like a king every day. And some people are like, be with someone who loves you more than you love them. And it’s always a little bit like, that’s… I mean, okay, thank you? I’m not sure if that’s exactly what I need, but I appreciate it.

And so, I think for me I always felt like it was okay to let the poem be what it is. Even if later on you’re like, oh, actually, I wish I had changed that line. I think that’s okay, because I think no matter what, no matter how many times you workshop a poem, at least in my experience, I still have that feeling anyways, because I’m not the same person I was eight years ago.

I actually don’t really write at this point very much about visible symbols of Islam, for example, whereas earlier on that was much more common in my writing. I try very hard, actually, to avoid visibility and sometimes cliches in my writing. Just because I think, not to get on a tangent, but I do think sometimes there’s too much incentive for us, those of us of diaspora, to speak so directly and often about the markers of our diaspora. And it’s like yes, my mother wears a hijab, and she’s an amazing woman, and I was raised Muslim.

And I also, you know, a part of the working class, and I’m also, you know, someone who’s navigating many political realities at once and, you know, order from Amazon sometimes. You know [laughs] I think all of these things are actually really important to interrogate. Whereas I think sometimes the fixation on accessible symbols, I think can sometimes be more encouraged, than maybe the more difficult excavation and interrogation of our identities.

And so all of that to say… No offense to those who love workshop. [Laughs]

DV: Oh, I am so glad you spoke about these aspects together. And I think one of the reasons Ashna and I wanted to do this is to oppose some of the workshop logics that we see passively being handed down through generations of writers.

And, you know, so much of what you say, Zaina, about the accessible, marketable symbols of diversity and diaspora, is for me, so connected to images of the ideal poem, which are reified in the workshop. You know, these ways of becoming legible to unmarked audiences are at the heart of what we’re trying to present a kind of opposition towards in this podcast as well. So I’m really glad you’re bringing this up.

And I appreciate what you’re saying about community being a source of generosity and permission for experimentation, but also an affirmation of desire, like just do it because you want to do it, rather than do it if it becomes perfect, or if it becomes legible to others. 

AA: I’m glad you brought up permission, Divya. I was thinking about that a lot while you were speaking and I’m really grateful to listen to you talk about the evolution of your style over time and what motivated the changes that you’ve made over time.

One of the reasons I was excited to listen to you talk about this poem, in particular, is in fact because it’s older and has had an afterlife. And your work has evolved significantly since—the visibility of your work has also changed since—we’re in a moment where all eyes are very much on Palestinian writers and writers of Palestinian descent that puts a particular kind of pressure on the work It changes the context of interpretation as work circulates over time. And I was hoping you could speak to how your relationship with this poem and with this stage of your style has evolved over time, and what the afterlives of this poem have been for you. Especially given our current contexts and the kinds of pressures of interpretation that places on work current and prior.

ZA: It’s a question that weighs heavily on me and I want to be honest about that. Since the beginning of the escalated siege and genocide on Gaza, I have not… not only not been able to write, but honestly have not had a desire to.

I think this totalizing, excruciating, political violence—for me at least, and I’m sure many others feel this way—it causes a lot of tension in the identities I hold as someone who believes in poetry and poetic analysis, but as a political worker, first and foremost, as an organizer, as someone who believes in the necessity and the responsibility of our communities to be organized and part of organization. Something I share with other poet-organizers, June Jordan being, for me, always the model. Because there are serious and severe limitations to what poetry and what all written work can do in moments of totalizing political violence. Which is not to say that poetic work should not happen within genocide, because of course it does. And those, everyday living in Gaza and the West Bank, wondering about their lives and the lives of their families, include such poets.

I have not felt personally like it is my role, in this moment, nor do I feel like what I would contribute is of more significance or urgent necessity than doing whatever we can to amplify the voices of those who are defending their lives.

What I do think is our responsibility in this moment is multiple: one, doing a deep processing and analysis of: How did we get to this point? Why is it that our communities do not have the power that we need to draw back the arm of empire and its collusion with this genocide? What can we slow down and interrupt in this moment, which thousands and thousands are engaging with on a daily basis. There is real resistance. 

And some of those people write, you know, and use writing as a tool. But I think deep, profound analysis of how we got to this moment, and what it will take to prevent this from happening in the future. Cause I do think part of my role as a political worker and as a writer is to be a participant in analysis of the world around us. And I’m not alone in assessing that we are at a moment in the development of capitalist society, in which we will see more examples of this kind of totalizing violence, authoritarianism, genocide.

And so I tried to be very careful about what I lend my voice to, and I tried to be very intentional, to say: I will always speak as a Palestinian, I only exist because of my people, I owe everything to them, and to all of those who’ve been in solidarity with my people, because without them I would also not exist.

I think what is named and shared in community, in political space, and what is shared publicly, of course, are also very different in character. And so I will say, I think for me public commentary is something that I have not engaged in and I give much respect to those who have taken on that labor of sharing, publicly, analysis and and offering commentary while our people are being annihilated. So some of what that shows up for me, right, as an organizer in my arena, is how can I share my analysis and my experience in a way that I hope will be useful to others in my community who are trying to engage in this analysis and resistance?

I also think it’s important, for anyone who needs to hear this, to say I know that those of us who survived, who have survived, who are still alive for no reason other than luck, if we’re being honest, feel an enormous guilt, and sometimes shame, when we think about our people and what they’re enduring. And this is not unique to Palestinians. I do not want us to feel that despair and desperation as a pressure to always need to offer visible public commentary and analysis.

I believe this is a reactionary tendency that is very common in the United States. We are socialized towards it, and it’s something that gives me a lot of pain and pause. It is actually the reason why, over the last month, I’ve taken a break from social media, not only because of the deluge of horrific images—which I understand why people feel the need to share as a form of solidarity and truth telling—but apart from that, I think this commentary and this pressure people feel to offer commentary, especially those living in the United States, very distant from the daily violence that our people are experiencing, for me sometimes I find quite disturbing, if I’m being honest. Because I think, again, it’s coming from a place of desperation and despair, and not necessarily grounded analysis, which we need, and we need quite badly in this moment.

And that takes time. It’s not something, unfortunately, that I think can be rushed and churned out. It takes a lot of time and takes a lot of conversations with others, conversations with our histories. And so I think, for me, the pressure of moments of crisis and totalizing violence I think can sometimes shift us away from practices that, while rooted in a desire to be useful, sometimes are not. And I think that’s a difficult conversation for those of us who love language to have.

AA: I can’t thank you enough for pointing out the pressure on production, and production of commentary, and constant publicness. Because I do think that somewhere along the line, it seems like there’s a loss of the thread of what it takes to really understand enough to have genuine solidarity. It can’t be limited to sharing and resharing things on social media as personality and as public statement. It doesn’t have a function in relation to those actually in need of substantive understanding and support. There is a place for a certain kind of studious silence that I think is under-discussed.

DV: So let’s make some room for that studious silence and the longer histories of analysis, Zaina, perhaps in your practice. You’ve spoken, of course, about your role as a political organizer and as a poet, so now, I think it might be useful for us to hear about the longer history of how these practices have coexisted, or counter-existed for you.

And I’m particularly eager to hear how, for you, poetry composition, reading other poets has served you, helped you in that long processing of history of the arm of empire, whether writing and revision has taught you about that slow glacial analytical work, that studiousness that we’re talking about.

ZA: I think, at certain lucky moments, I have been able to see analogues and parallels of how, for me at least, the poetic space has been an opportunity to synthesize all the different voices that I would be reading, or have been shaped by, as an analytic, and I know many others have spoken to this. And the same is true in my political work: my organizing is wholly informed by years and years and years of conversations and practice, and reading, also, many organizers who came before me, and their experiences and practices.

And so I think, for me, the synthesis is always what is paramount, because synthesis, for me, is actually the highest form of solidarity. Because for me, solidarity means I cannot exist without you. So, how do we internalize, so deeply, that core sentiment, I think, aside from, to put it into direct practice. For it to shift who we are in the world, and how we show up. Which is different from, I think, an attempt to perform or offer a kind of pressured action or activity that has not fundamentally shifted our practice.

I also think it gets blurry, because ultimately, we’re also human beings who are trying, you know? And so I think, for some people, sharing things or just showing up for them, sometimes, is an entry point, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think, until we are transformed and shift our practice, I think that stage of development is really, really key. And it’s really, really key for our transformation. 

And again, this goes to writing and to political practice. And so I think, with writing, what I hope, right, for those of us who are seeking to write as a way of being transformed and transforming the world around us… so much of it is the space to really internalize all the different meanings and what we want to say, what our contribution is. And then with political work, in my experience, I think at a certain point, you realize, oh, I can’t only speak to those who already agree with me. I actually have to find a way, a language, that makes what I’m trying to accomplish, what I hope for, what I hope to see, accessible to a group of other people who have lived a completely different life than I.

And so I think, inevitably, to be successful in that, one has to transform. And one has to find a thread of connection between you and strangers. For me, reading, right, for writing is a way of threading connection to strangers, that then inevitably, really shape me and my work and my writing and my language. And then the same in my political work, and I hope that both are in the service of the greater “we.” The “we” that contains all of our solidarities. 

AA: I really appreciate the underlining of the necessity to speak to those who do not necessarily agree with us. The practice of writing, so often, is one in which we are trying to contribute, hoping to be heard, demanding to be heard. And hoping to connect and show that synthesis and express that solidarity, as an act of love.

When you are writing, who are you writing to? Or whose hands do you hope your work falls into, either to be transformed or to transform with you? Does that change between the stage of writing the poem and when it is released into the world? What are the “we’s” that circulate through that process for you?

ZA: I think when writing poetry—which is very different from my political work that I spoke a little bit about in terms of, you know, how do I connect with as many people as possible who do not share my experience, which I think is a very intentional choice around strategy and scale; to be effective, we need to reach as many people as possible and bring them in and find forms of connection. 

For me, what I think has been interesting within my poetry—though, I do identify everything I do as a social practice, because we are social beings, we rely on others in order to exist and do everything that we do—there’s also been an element of privacy and intimacy for me as a writer, where more often than not, the poems feel like I’m having a conversation with all the thinkers and believers and practitioners that have shaped me.

But what’s interesting is I don’t think a ton about audience, which is not to say that I think, like I mentioned, how important reading is for me—I always feel honored when people read my work, and I feel even more honored when people feel like it’s been useful for them. But I think for me in order to prevent writing that attempts to appease or convince—because for me, poetry and writing to convince are quite different. I do a lot of writing to convince or to educate in my work. It’s a very different medium. 

But for me, poetry I think has been a space more, I think of that kind of silent-studious, that you were sharing earlier. I thought that was so beautifully put. I think it’s more for me a space of analysis. And so I think when people read my work, I feel like they’re my study partners… my study buddies. And they’re like, oh, I’m reading this too! How fun, that you also like this work and see what I see.

Poetry for me is a space, a laboratory, a space for nerds, a place where we had to experiment with language. And for me, at least, I’ve needed to feel that free about it, in order to have space to see what language can do, especially because I’m working in English, which I think has so many violences, it’s so loaded, right? And so I think, taking a page out of the books of [Édouard] Glissant, of Kamau Brathwaite, of [Amiri] Baraka, of [Mahmoud] Darwish, of francine j. harris, of you all—I mean, the list goes on and on.

I just, I love this space and terrain of experimental poetry. I love the space of where theory and poetry meet. I don’t expect that to be everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s okay. I would say the lab for nerds is more how I relate to poetry. Come one, come all, anyone is welcome.

DV: Well, it’s certainly our cup of tea, so thank you for letting us sit from this shared cup. I really appreciate, Zaina, what you’re introducing into the binary of reactionary outpouring on one hand, and total paralysis on the other hand, and that you’re introducing into this wedging space, this radiant wedging space of study. It’s slowness, it’s necessary failing, and sort of picking back up, which to me, takes us right back to what you’ve said about divesting from the mechanical reproduction of accessible images in workshop, for folks like us, who are also divesting from so many kinds of chauvinisms that do emerge from various diasporic fears and traumas as well.

And, as we think about what we want to push away from us and what we’re stepping away from, I do want us to also think about what we’re pouring into, now, as we wrap this episode. When we named The Source Ashna and I thought a lot about what fertilities, what soils, we write from: our earth, our ground, where we take a stand and where we can rest, where we will be buried, what makes our ideas germinate right now. So answer this question, however you please: at this very moment, what is in your soil?

ZA: Beautiful question. What’s in my soil right now? I would say… the pedagogy of letters between friends. This week, actually, I celebrated a birthday, and one of my dearest friends was in the archives, reading letters between Alice Walker and June Jordan, and it was… exhilarating to hear so many of the same tensions, contradictions, sorrows, hopes that I am, you know, grappling with with those that I love. Those of us who believe that another society is necessary, it’s possible. That we have a role in making it come to reality. But also just the level of kindness.

And then I found a letter from another dear friend that she had written to me years and years ago that I just love so much. Would it be okay if I read a quote from it? She ends the letter: “May you begin forever beginning, again and again, relentless as you are. I love you.”

DV: I think that is a beautiful way to end to be reminded about the need to begin again and again, which is really the work of soil and replenishing it. Zaina, thank you so much for your radiant, oppositional diligence, and for reminding us that to return to history as a student is perhaps the most necessary thing now. I’m really, really grateful that you made time for us today.

AA: I think it’s really important, certainly for me listening to you speak and hopefully for our viewers and listeners, the reminder that we have permission to enter into conversation in the privacy of our minds. And that that permission is, in fact, at the heart of learning to connect properly and deeply with other people in the world. I don’t think that reminder could be any more crucial than it is now. So, thank you for bringing that into the space and casting a light on it. It’s an honor to have you.

This interview, which took place on March 15, 2024, has been edited for length and clarity.

“Exorcism” by Zaina Alsous was originally published in The Margins’ Poetry Tuesday column on May 2, 2017.