Breaking the Silence

Transcript of episode

Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

SPEAKERS
Camille Rankine and Solmaz Sharif

COLD OPEN (Solmaz Sharif speaking)
She would say make audible the inaudible and visible the invisible, right, as in, again, there's a microphone here in front of me, what do I do with the microphone? What do I speak about? And also, what is your responsibility? What is it your responsibility to know and to kind of, like, get messy around, you know?

Music starts

Camille Rankine
Welcome to the Glimpse. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Camille

Poet Solmaz Sharif isn’t afraid to use her microphone. She’s the author of the books Customs and Look. She received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the N.E.A.,and Stanford University among others and her work has appeared in Harper’s, Poetry, The Paris Review, and the New York Times. Solmaz Sharif is our guest today on The Glimpse
(music ends)

Camille Rankine
In Solmaz Sharif's poetry no words are wasted. It's a work of precision, careful attention to language and the lies language can tell if we let it. Her latest book, Customs, carves through silence in a lyric that is spare and unsparing, exact and exacting, resolute and tender at the same time. The poems consider the grief of exile, examining the performances American society demands of those who must contend with its borders and revealing the quiet absurdities and cruelties of American life. Welcome, Solmaz. Thanks for being here.

Solmaz Sharif
Thanks so much, Camille. Thanks. It's an honor to be here and a joy to be here with you in particular. So thank you.

Camille
I love your work. So I'm very excited about our conversation.

Solmaz
Thank you.

Camille
I wanted to ask you about silence, actually, I mentioned it in my intro. And I often think about your work as contending with silence, like through whitespace, or through its interrogation of euphemism, and the things that kind of lurk beneath our speech. So I wanted to ask about your relationship to silence.

Solmaz
Yeah, I think my relationship to silence started from a very contentious place in thinking in terms of those who are silenced, narratives that are silenced, lives that are silenced, the very silences in literature, in English, and how to kind of fill them with the idea of, like Audre Lorde's idea of “your silence will not protect you,” will not save you, you know, and that there's just a limited amount of time that we have with each other, where we have to speak with each other, and what it means to break those silences and make use of that time. And I think the more I've stayed with poetry and devoted my life to poetry, I've also come to appreciate a very particular kind of silence that can happen within it. Yes, it can diagnose and interrupt and replicate or rewrite the silences of state-sponsored violence and language. And also, it can invite and require a particular kind of silence that settles in between words, and after the reading of a poem: it’s just a very different quality to me. And so, the idea of writing with silence, as well as against it, has been a more recent kind of evolution, I think.

Camille
Do you feel like that's a recent evolution in your own work or in poetry in general?

Solmaz
Yes, no, in my own work, for sure. Yeah. I mean, silence was a bad word for me. You know, it was not the thing that was supposed to exist. I grew up around people who very literally put their lives on the line, you know, talking and acting. It's a part of a human's, a person's responsibility to break the silences.

Camille
Right.

Solmaz
But then something happens when you stay in the poem and you realize that it's the silence that's making the music. And of course, there are different silences, and there's, like, a very particular power to sitting in silence with someone.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely. I think about the Quakers, I think the Quakers do that. I don't know much about Quakers. (Laughs.) But I do know that's a part of their practice, which I think is really interesting. And then to speak out in that silence to say something that they need to say or are moved to say in the moment, which I think is an interesting thing to think about, like in terms of poetry as well, how maybe like you were saying, like: staying in the poem, moving through silence to the next thing, is a part of the practice as well. I find that compelling.

Solmaz
I totally agree and just the idea of like, if you're not moved to say something, it's okay to not say it, right.

Camille
I think people should remember that. (They laugh.) You don't have to say everything.

Solmaz
We really don't.

Camille
I think it kind of leads to an economy of language. And also because of that contrast against silence, there's a sort of power that language can have, when you feel or see, or that silence becomes like a presence, you know? Then the language cutting through it, there's a power in that movement through the silence: that's like something that poetry can do. I think that other kinds of texts can do it too. But poetry can do it in a way that I think is unique to poetry.

Solmaz
I agree. I think often of the experience of being with somebody and trying to remember a joke. And you both know the joke, right? And that moment where you're trying to find, “wait, what was the punchline? What was the story?” You know, but you're, you're both also experiencing the joke. There's something to that feeling that feels akin to poetry to me, which is that the poem is actually not so much the act of the saying of it, but the resonance that exists just before the saying of it. And the poem actually kind of kills it, you know, like it ends it. So that the joke is never better than that experience of trying to find the joke or remember the joke again. So I'm always trying to actually chase something that is like, pre-language, you know, but through language, which just feels obviously impossible. But like a very, yeah, enjoyable impossibility for me.

Camille
Yeah, I like that idea of the anticipation of something that you know is coming but don't have the language for yet. And that just sitting in that moment just before, and then the language coming in there, like, you know, it's satisfying, but also sort of like, well, that moment, that moment's over.

Solmaz
Yeah, the moment’s gone. And the moment will forever be changed by its naming, you know, and so every time you return to it, it's kind of different, but yeah.

Camille
Hm. Yeah. So let's turn toward your poem. Do you want to introduce it? You can just jump right in to read it if you'd like.

Solmaz Sharif
I'll introduce it by saying what I'm about to read is a part of a longer poem that appears in Customs called “An Otherwise”; it's the closing section of Customs. And I'll just read it now. This, this, this little bit.

What did you leave behind?
We answered:

A pool
lined

with evergreens,
needles falling

into water,
its floor

painted milky
jade. A car

in the driveway.
A mother.

Another mother.
A cockatiel

in the hallway
squawking

next to the plastic
slippers.

Glass
after beveled glass.

Secret
after beveled secret.

Letters
from a first

crush
now dead.

Killed.
We wanted

to be asked
of these things.

To tell of them
was to live

again. We spent
much of our lives

Imagining.
We rathered

and rathered,
scraping the soft

moss
off

the gravestones
of our early

curiosities.

"What did you leave behind?" from Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022).

Camille
Thank you. It's a beautiful poem, or section of a poem, really.

Solmaz
Thank you.

Camille
So I was thinking about the images you open the poem with, you have this sort of list of objects that are kind of a sketch of a life that was, and I wondered how you made the choices of what to include there, those images that you include.


Solmaz
Yeah, it's, it's hard to know, I mean—they're not really from my own life, actually. Or some of them are, and some of them aren't. I can say that I am not a particularly imaginative poet. So if there's a detail in a poem, it tends to have been something I saw and like a little raccoon, scavenger, you know, energy around images, and just bringing them and putting them in places that they don't necessarily belong.

Camille
Yeah. I like that you say that you're not imaginative. I feel better hearing that because I feel like I'm not either. (She laughs.)

Solmaz
Yeah.

Camille Rankine
I feel like my imagination is—I'm so practical.

Solmaz
Yeah.

Camille
I'm thinking about that moment in the poem where you say, "We wanted / to be asked / of these things. To tell [of] them / was to live again." And I was interested in that because it's as if, in that moment, life is something that happened before. And it's like, there's an ending. And I'm thinking about this too in terms of the notion of or the narrative we have around immigration, arriving in America, and America wants the story to be that you get here and your life starts. You know, it's just sort of a reversal of that. Like, I'm thinking about that idea of, of that backward looking, thinking about that being a space of possibility and curiosity and life that's over. And we don't really have a picture of life now in that moment in the poem.

Solmaz
Mmhm. Yeah, I think there's a kind of nostalgic melancholy that is often a part of stories of exile, and I was thinking about this kind of long arc of loss and the fantasies that one keeps kind of circling and this kind of frozen moment that one tends to return to. And I think I selected this poem—it's been months now, right? And this morning, I was like, why did I? But I think what it was, was in the moment, I was, you know, I was thinking about Palestine. And it was November, maybe, you know, and I was already thinking about the long arc of return and not even like the continued genocide or spectacular moment of, of the present. And now it feels even more useless, you know, so to speak, but I think so much of my work is invested in, yeah, continuing to name the private and long duration of the impacts of violence and kind of state-sponsored aggression in our lives.

And, you know, usually I don't talk about anecdotes that are related to images here. But the moment here of the cockatiels in the hallway—there was a particular mother whose son had been imprisoned for political activity, and this was in the 80s. And she had tried to go and visit him, and she said they wouldn't let her in, so she started hitting her head against the prison wall. And then she said she's had the same headache since, you know, I mean, that is the poem, right? I mean, that's done, like she said the poem. And I always wonder about what to bring in and what to leave out. But I wanted to break the silence of the prison wall and the prisoners and I wanted to name the story of this woman, for example. And she's never made it into a poem, except for this one fragment that nobody will know has this backstory to it.

Camille
Right.

Solmaz
But what if we approached each image like that? Right?

Camille
Mmhm. I mean, I think that's interesting. The idea that that narrative, that story, is appearing in the way that it guides the way that you tell other stories, or the way that you craft other poems. And yeah, maybe that's a way of breaking through the prison wall, breaking through a silence. Even if you're the only one that recognizes that direct connection.

Solmaz
Or maybe it's me hitting my head against it. I'm not sure.

Camille
I don't know. Yeah. But I guess as long as that story is still a part of what guides you, maybe it's, you're hitting your head against it, but maybe you won't always be, you know, if it's still carrying you forward in your work. That's just me being hopeful.

Solmaz
Yeah.

Camille
Well, on that note, let's take a little break.

BREAK

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(Classical music plays)

We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways. Through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening.

Camille
We're back. Solmaz, you're going to share a poem that has inspired you.

Solmaz
Yes!

Camille
Would you like to introduce it? Tell us a little bit about what you've brought to share?

Solmaz
So it's a poem by June Jordan and it's from her collection entitled Living Room. And the poem kind of introduces itself, so I'll just read it. The title is “Moving Towards Home.” It opens with an epigraph which reads,

Moving Towards Home
By June Jordan

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
—The New York Times, 9/20/1982

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved
her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that the others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning

because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten to
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.


“Moving Towards Home” by June Jordan from Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan, Copper Canyon Press © Christopher D. Meyer, 2007. Aired by permission of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Camille
Thank you for bringing this. I've read this poem before and every time I read it I feel more affected by it. What is it about this poem that draws you to it?

Solmaz
I first encountered this poem when I was an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley. June Jordan had started a program called Poetry for the People that I was a part of. She died the summer I first took the course so I never actually got a chance to work with her. But I worked with the students who had worked with her, and she was kind of one of my first teachers in turning toward the language of the state and the ways that violence is premeditated in language itself, kind of the role of the poet around a caretaking of language. So there was that.

There was also the fact that she is so boldly and brazenly naming a bodily solidarity with Palestinians. That very construction of “I am become,” as opposed to “I am like” or “I become,” or, you know…there's a grammar of solidarity, of, like, withness, you know, that is pointing to someone who is in it and is in it to stay.

And in fact, the first time she read this poem, it was a part of a reading that she had put together in 1982. This is the Israeli incursion and war in Lebanon and on Lebanon and in particular massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila. And in light of these events, she attempted in 1982, along with two other poets, Kathy Engle and Sara Miles, to put together a reading that featured Israeli poets alongside American poets alongside Arab poets. Notably, Mahmoud Darwish was supposed to attend, but his visa was denied, so he was not there. There were a number of Israeli poets, and June herself read, Etel Adnan read. But in the end, really no, no Palestinian poets, other than one as a translator, and it was a fundraiser for UNICEF, for children, for the children of Lebanon. She—upon reading this poem, many in the audience were upset. One of the Israeli poets present said that “that Black woman over there should die in the green fire” is the quote she…yeah.

Camille
It's interesting that she had to, like…that person had to name “Black woman.”

Solmaz
Yeah. Exactly.

Camille
It's telling.

Solmaz
She felt, and I felt as a young poet, too, an immediate understanding that this cost her a lot in her career. You know, after this poem and this book, she's not published and she's not reviewed in the New York Times until she dies.

Camille
Wow.

Solmaz
It's not a great review either. And she certainly wasn't invited to read at the 92nd Y, and that was always a question for her. So, for me, this poem has always been a central touchstone through a number of ways in terms of, like, laying bare, for example, the kind of political underpinnings of how form and craft are taught. Because I've been taught anaphora, for example, and I have never been taught a poem like this. I haven't been taught a poem about my rights in that context.

Camille
Right.

Solmaz
So you know, all the ways that work like this gets marginalized or pushed aside, and then all the danger and risk that it kind of brought to her and the friendships that it cost in what was a very lonely time.

Camille
It's pretty incredible to think about what it cost and how much of a risk it was, looking at the poem and thinking about, like, what she says here and what she doesn't say. I mean, for example, she doesn't name Israel or the IDF in this poem at all. I wonder what you think about the fact that they aren't named, they aren't present here. Like, what do you make of that?

Solmaz
I…(she laughs). That's an interesting choice to bring up because there are poems where she, I mean, she names the FBI, CIA, [inaudible]. And really other than Abu Fadi, right, which could be any number of people, you know, certainly, but it's not until the appearance of the word “Palestinian” that we even get a kind of context. And so, to me, the more animating thing is, like, I don't need it to be here, and it also makes the anger against the poem that much more.

Camille
Right? That’s what I'm thinking. Like, “you're so mad, but she didn't even say your name.”

Solmaz
Yes.

Camille
You know? And I think that was a choice.

Solmaz
Yes. She said, “people who say ‘beasts with two legs,’” and you're mad, you know? And she said “Palestinian,” and you're mad.

Camille
Right? It's like, you saw yourself?


Solmaz
Yes.


Camille
And also having read the article that's quoted here, and knowing where a lot of this, not all of this language, but there's a lot of language and image from that article that is present here. You know, I think that's one of the things that's interesting is that… Thinking about what you're saying about language and the language of the state, and how this is like one of the models for you for how that can be deployed in a poem, and reworked and kind of used in another direction to make visible how the state contorts language and uses language as a weapon. Thinking about that, it's so interesting that she just so frequently uses their own language, right? Puts it in the poem, doesn't attach it to a source, and then there's so much rage about that. And she just said what you said.


Solmaz
Yeah.


Camille
She just said what you said. And then she said the word “Palestinian.”


Solmaz
She just quoted.


Camille
Yeah. And I think that's so interesting.


Solmaz
And she said “I am a Black woman and I am become a Palestinian.”

Camille
All of those things. It's just so fascinating to me to think about the power of that. The power of just stating what happened and how strange it is that that can be controversial and dangerous. It's interesting to me that the poem begins with so much negation of what we're not going to do, like, “here's what we're not going to do.” But at the same time, even in her refusal to make it the subject, she still brings it into the space of the poem. Like that violence, that imagery, is still with us, even though she's not asking us to look at that right now. I think that's an interesting sort of, maybe, sleight of hand, but also a way of sort of refusing that spectacle. Like she's not asking us to be spectators in that way; she's asking us to imagine something else.

Solmaz
Yeah. And I think, too, there's this sense of turning toward something out of urgency and a kind of calling or duty and laying it bare without hyperbole. That's something I've learned from the context of just writing about Palestine in general, of just like, facts in the basic sense, yes, are enough. We don't need simile. We don't need hyperbole; it is hyperbolic. Like it is, it is, you know, and let the "is" itself do the work that it will do, right, rather than have the poem make it into a thing. And the provocation in the end. It's the reader, you, you decide, like, is this your language or not? You know, like, is this your language or not? Is the word and identity and the self “Palestinian” so dangerous and threatening and despised to you that it incites such a reaction or not, you know.

Camille
When I hear about the reaction, I just want to say like, “what are you mad about?” Tell me, like, where's the lie? Are we speaking a different language? I guess maybe we are.

Solmaz
Yeah, we are.

Camille
We are. I don't understand sometimes how I'm looking at this fact and you're looking at that fact, and we're getting two different pictures. I just think it's so…it's a little bit disorienting, you know. So looking at this poem and its ending and thinking “what,” like, “how, why? Why is your reaction like this Black woman needs to go die.”

Solmaz
Mmhm. It is absurd. Yeah.

Camille
But I'm thinking about the loved ones and you know, who is she calling in that moment? Do you think, like…what do you think about that invitation or that question and who would even know we're talking about, like, is this your language? Is that also a moment of calling out to the reader and asking?

Solmaz
Absolutely.

Camille
Are we her loved ones as well, you know?

Solmaz Sharif
Absolutely. And I do think the invitation is that broad, too, you know? And we see that, kind of, between identity and positionality. Like, it matters. It's… we're naming and we're not pretending these things don't exist or that one abandons one's self as a Black woman, or abandons oneself as a Palestinian, or needs to become, or not. But what does it mean, to identify oneself as a loved one? And what kinds of requirements does that then place on us? Right? I mean, we're talking about the cost of her career, and all those things, but I think for June, and for poets that I really admire and respect, in the end, it really is about your life. Like, it is not just your livelihood, but it's like, I would put my life on the line, you know? Like, I would, like… that's it, you know? And I think this is one of those places of kind of invitation and what it means, what sorts of self transformations and honorings will allow us to be in what she called, you know, and what, like, Martin Luther King, Jr., called, beloved community with each other.

Camille
Yeah.

Solmaz
She would say “make audible the inaudible and visible the invisible,” right, like as in again, there's a microphone here in front of me, what do I do with the microphone? What do I speak about? What do I, you know? And also, what is your responsibility? What is it your responsibility to know and to kind of, like, get messy around? She was somebody who insisted that we move toward those difficult connections and spaces,

Camille
I wonder if there is a “we” that can exist…maybe not, maybe the answer is just no. But I want to ask about one more thing with this poem, and that's that phrase “living room,” and what you make of that. It's just those two words together repeated and I wonder what it stands for, like, what is it for you, that phrase?

Solmaz
Yeah, I think a living room, like the idea of a domestic space where people gather where guests are also invited. It's not the bedroom, it’s not the kitchen, it's receptive and also where one conceivably would spend a lot of one's time at home. And then also just, like, room to live, you know, what it means to—especially with writing a book that is about Lebanon, but in particular about, you know, settler-colonialism and Israel in Palestine and on Palestine—what it means to create for oneself and insist on the room to live, you know. So I think it's both of those things.

Camille
I like that just the removal of that one article, we’re pushed into that space of conceptualizing what this might mean, the idea of just a shared space for living for that…something that you share with loved ones that is just about life and whatever that might contain. But life and not death and not cruelty, you know? I'm really happy to have spent such close time with this poem for this and to be thinking about it in those terms. So thank you, thank you for bringing it to the attention of this podcast and the listeners.

Solmaz
Thank you so much, Camille. Yeah. Thank you.

Camille
And I want to ask you, what are you up to? What’s your next project look like, if it exists in your mind?

Solmaz
Yeah, um, I'm writing. I'm always writing. It's hard to say. It's really hard to think about anything. I would say most of my heart and attention is, like, turned toward a free Palestine right now, and it's coming, it's coming in my work, but I don't know what a project is anymore, you know.

Camille
Yeah. I think It's a strange time to be writing.

Solmaz
Bless the ones that are bringing about the change.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely.

Solmaz
Okay.

Camille
Thank you for being here, surreal as it may be. Thanks for talking with me.

Solmaz
Thanks, Camille.

Camille
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Solmaz’s poem "What did you leave behind?" from her book Customs, published in 2022, was used with permission from Graywolf Press.

June Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home” is from Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan, published by Copper Canyon Press, copyright Christopher D. Meyer, 2007. It was aired with the permission of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Join us next week for a frank discussion with guest Omotara James on apocalypses, body shaming and recognizing love and tenderness in the face of death.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.

The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I am your host, Camille Rankine.

Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive Director and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening.