Naming Exile: an interview with Kaveh Bassiri

 

Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited. – Kaveh Bassiri

This year’s winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry prize is Kaveh Bassiri, for the chapbook “99 Names of Exile,” to be published by Newfound in Summer 2019. It was a pleasure to talk to Bassiri about the sound of language, issues of translation, culture, and more:

Laura Eppinger: The opening dedication of this chapbook is lines from “La Cantatrice Chauve” by Eugène Ionesco:
“He’s not English. He’s only been naturalized.
And naturalized citizens have the right to have houses,
but not the right to have them put out if they’re burning.”
This absurdist play is all about slips of the tongue, mistaken identity, miscommunications, and the limits of language in expressing ourselves. Are these themes you explore in your work?

Kaveh Bassiri: Yes, all those issues—such as “miscommunication” and “the limits of language”—are found in the chapbook. I am interested in the power and limitation of words. We try to harness the vitality of language, as it slips away and writes us. I am interested in how we find ourselves in language, how language defines us and determines our opportunities.

When you live in different languages, when you cross languages and cultures, these issues become even more obvious. Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited.

Ionesco wrote “The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve)” while trying to learn English. As I understand it, he used an English primer for French speakers, L’anglais sans peine (“English without pain or toil”) put out by the French company Assimil (as in “assimilation”). He first considered L’anglais sans peine as the title for the piece. English primers inform my work—the role learning English plays in becoming an American, with all its implications.

The quote from “The Bald Soprano” is both funny and dark. The play isn’t about assimilation or immigrants, but as a French playwright writing English characters, those themes found their way into the work. In our current climate, the quote seems especially apt for what many immigrants are experiencing.

Eppinger: The poems are evocative and no doubt sound beautiful when read aloud. Still, the shape of each poem on the page is striking—“Mihrab,” “Peeling the Seed (Part 2)” and the title poem come to mind right away. When drafting a poem, do you have a vision of how it will look on paper? Or is the sound of the words more important at first?

Bassiri: The form of the poem is very important to me. It is like the meter. You can’t avoid it, so why not consider it seriously? I am always searching for the proper container. Like many poets, I cast the poem in different forms to see what happens. For example, the prose poems in the chapbook were once lines of verse. “Majnun” was once a sonnet in fourteen lines.

For me, traditional forms like sonnets and more experimental forms like concrete poems have a lot in common. They are both containers that limit and shape the words. The container can be visual or aural. For example, with “Peeling the Seed” I wanted to have the visual sense of two different peelings, as if you are peeling the orange first (part 1), and then the seed (with the erasure in part 2). At one point, the original shape of the poem resembled an orange.

Sound also provides a container. I love soundscapes like anaphora. The poem “How to Build a Bomb,” for example, used the anaphora “Say …” In the end, I took most of them out. But the original directive formed the container that made the poem possible.

Eppinger:  I have this hunch that the alignment of the text in “Mihrab” is meant to evoke a prone posture of prayer. Am I right about that? Are the words of this poem praying?

Bassiri: Actually, with “Mihrab,” I was thinking more literally of the niche in the mosque wall that indicates the direction of Mecca. The wall is the page, and the direction is East. Persian is also written from right to left.

But, yes, it is supposed to evoke a prayer, with every two syllables being like the prayer beads of a Muslim tasbih—itself a form of zikr, a repetition of short utterances. Words are the mihrab.

Eppinger: That titular poem, “99 Names of Exile,” strikes me every time I read it. Racial epithets and concepts like “Dirty” and “Forsaken” are listed as three columns of text, ostensibly defining “Exile.” Both “Villain” and “Victim” appear on the list, one of many contradictions. Also listed: “Unspeakable, Unthinkable, Untouchable.” Back to the Ionesco—can exile be named?

Bassiri: It is impossible to limit the scope of what exile means or who a person in exile is. Exile encompasses many things.

We can do the same thing with the word “immigrant.” What do these words conjure in our mind? How have they been manipulated to limit or define immigrants and their experiences? I am hoping the use of alliterations like “dis” and “un” reinforces the absence, the undoing of the names, the exile that happens inside the words by pinning a label like “un.”

The inspiration for the poem comes from the 99 names of God in Islam. The names work as labels and attributes, encompassing a much broader range of words than one may imagine. We have “most merciful” and “most kind,” “the first” and “the last,” as well as “the avenger” and “the destroyer.” God is, of course, beyond any specific attribute. The best we can do is to produce a field of words for our idea of god.

Eppinger: I’ve read and reread “Invention of I” several times, drawn to both its power and its playfulness. The poem is broken into two sections, seemingly comparing one language to another.
Part 1 is set up like:
“In Farsi, if you take bread from a verb, you make history.

In English, for a perfect past, it isn’t enough to exist, you must have things.”

Part 2 takes this form:

“In English, we capture with an army of nouns.

In Persian, we guard them with the veil of adjectives.”

Clearly there is a lot more going on here than the feel of a language—culture, history, religion, geopolitical power and more are wrapped up into speaking a language in a specific time and place. Is it difficult to capture all these other forces that bubble up when learning or speaking different languages?

Bassiri: I do hope the poem conjures different possibilities in the minds of the readers. I don’t expect them to come up with the exact references, though usually I have specific things in mind.

A number of sentences start with a play on grammar. For instance, the Part 2 example you mentioned has to do with the use of adjectives in Persian and the emphasis on nouns in English. I remember one of my issues when I first started to write papers in English was the overuse of adjectives, as if I didn’t trust the nouns. I am always amazed by how many nouns there are in the English language. But the reference goes beyond just nouns and adjectives. In Iran there are many veils in our customs, not just the women’s hijab. For example, Iranians also use a complex web of civility, called taarof, that produces another layer in conversations.

One more thing I should mention is that the poem begins with “in Farsi” because it evokes the time I grew up in Iran and was learning English. The Iranian language is called “Farsi” in Iran.

The second part is a reflection of my life in America, where English is my main language and the Iranian language is called Persian. The debate over whether we should call my native tongue Persian or Farsi has been going on for a while. Many of my friends insist that we should use “Persian” because that is the name in English, the way we use German and not Deutsch.

But I’m not making any specific point about this politicized topic. My use is more a reflection of my personal experience of this change and the role the languages played in my life.

Eppinger: The speaker in your poem “Alarm” describes living in California while many of his family members are in Tehran, including a sister who has gone missing. It contains the line, “We contain no message, are no messenger.” What a devastating sentiment—to be exiled from the ability to decipher language, or from sense of purpose. Are grief and exile necessarily the same thing, or are they different?

Bassiri: Being an immigrant means different things to different people. Immigrants cope with the experience of exile in their own ways. For Iranian-Americans, the experience is determined by such socio-political events as the Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War (one of modern history’s longest conventional wars), September 11, the sanctions against Iran, the Muslim ban. My own experience has been shaped by all of these events, whether I’m talking about my sister going to jail as a political prisoner when I was young or about my wife not being able to join me because of the travel ban now.

Eppinger: I am wondering if you could talk about the influences you drew from while creating the poems of this chapbook.

Bassiri: For a long time, I didn’t want to write anything about my heritage as an Iranian or about being an Iranian-American. Maybe because I didn’t want to be reminded of or to engage with the negative media coverage. I also didn’t want to be an immigrant poet or to be labeled as one. I wanted to write like the great American poets I admired, such as Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, Plath, Ashbery, etc. I remember (to my embarrassment now) during a workshop with Merwin, he was trying to encourage me to study and learn from the great classical Persian poets like Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. I told him that I wanted to write like him and that I left Persian culture behind a long time ago and had no interest to go back.

It was during my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College that I decided to write about my experience as an Iranian-American, though I was uncomfortable. I am still uncomfortable. I don’t want to write what is expected. I don’t want to repeat the same clichés, be a spokesman for Iran or Iranians, or try to gain empathy or publication because of political circumstances. However, I also don’t want to deny my heritage or to avoid writing about something that matters to me. I need to write responsibly.

To write these poems, I experimented and found inspiration in many immigrant writers: Charles Simic, Li-Young Lee, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Etel Adnan. Gloria Anzaldúa is also a hero. African-American poets are among my greatest models—how so many expand the language while addressing important issues of identity and the socio-political condition in America. They are a great foundation for American poetry. I read widely and am influenced by many different styles, but reading poets of color gave me the courage to write the poems in this chapbook.

I have to say that, in the past few years, we have a lot of amazing young poets who are doing great work. I think they are redefining the shape of American poetry. I am in awe of all the talent. It is a very exciting time.

Eppinger: I agree! Finally, what are you working on now and how can we see more of your work?

Bassiri: First, I want to thank you for the interview and the thoughtful questions, Laura.

After working on the chapbook, I started to put together a manuscript built on the same themes. I am also working on another chapbook. My most recent poems are based on my visits to Iran in the past few years. I am not sure where they are taking me. For this year, I am focusing more on translation, however, including translating the poetry of a contemporary Iranian woman writer, Roya Zarrin, for which I got a 2019 fellowship from the NEA.

 

 

Laura Eppinger is the Managing Editor at Newfound Journal.

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash