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“Sorry about the fuel queues! It was the same in Lebanon last summer,” was Zeina Hashem Beck’s response to my email written after I returned home from waiting in the serpentine queues with my aging father, to fill up our car at a petrol pump in one of the affluent suburbs of Colombo city.
Amidst a catastrophic financial meltdown that is slowly bringing Sri Lanka to a halt, I knew there was one thing I could rely on for some salve: poetry. More pivotal to finding strength in a time of inflaming frustration, rage, and hopelessness, Hashem Beck’s stupendous new poetry collection, O, affirms artistic craft and universality are in fact greater than borders. This latest offering also bears witness to her staunch resistance through recovery and remembrance.
In the maelstrom of the Lebanese-born poet striving so conscientiously to open up “a good window” into her world, I have found myself identifying in every respect with the poet’s disjuncture from her homeland assailed by one predicament after another.
Hashem Beck’s lyrical language, capable of mastering a tumultuous life on the page, is deeply relevant today for many of us—who are being pushed into an unknowable future that our bodies will have to risk and, at some point, the visceral bond and life-giving solidarity are at the core of what can be acknowledged as a collective movement.
Skirting the very edge of grace and petrifying violence, O refuses to back down. It is concurrently a tangible reminder bespeaking the extent of ourselves turning inward and perhaps, how far one can go to instill humanity in grief-stricken realms akin to one’s own. Hashem Beck unwinds more of this in our recent interview.
Rushda Rafeek
Can we start with why you titled this collection O?
Zeina Hashem Beck
For some time, my working title was “ode to the afternoon,” after one of the poems in the collection. I liked it because of the praise in the word “ode” and the symbolism of the afternoon for me: a time of the day that made me feel uneasy since childhood and a time that came to represent liminality, strangeness, and also what is typically called “middle age.” But one day, I was staring at the title and decided to only keep the O. O for the vowel in the words wonder, love, ode, god, mother, body, loss, joy, and home. An O of lyricism and daily astonishment. An O that could be opening, abyss, infinity.
Rushda Rafeek
I’ve never got the chance to visit Beirut. So, I try to get a glimpse of it in its truest form through your poems. And as I read, I noticed you focus on the city as symbols of trauma; of odes that ache a “childhood house,” the inadequacy of a country that reminds “the poet’s love for balconies,” “bathed in broken light,” “the distance between continents,” and how “airports scar” you. Another issue that comes with it is immigrant identity—can you talk about that?
Zeina Hashem Beck
Not just trauma but love, too, yes. I’ve only recently immigrated to the U.S., so I can’t talk and wasn’t thinking about this while writing O (and I’m generally resistant to categorization). When I lived in the Gulf, which is where I was before coming to the U.S., I felt I hadn’t really left, and that I’d be going back to Lebanon soon. I’ve only just begun to experience a vaster distance and a deeper alienation. For a long time, my feeling has been that of forced departure, though I did also want to leave Lebanon. It’s a perpetual simultaneity of longing to be there and relief I’m not there. I want to add that, as I was writing this collection, I wanted to “avoid” Beirut and focus on internal worlds, but that’s impossible because our cities live in our bodies. I do feel, however, that O makes a more inward shift, compared to previous books.
Rushda Rafeek
I’d say adversity doesn’t have to be hyperbolic is why your poems have a way of drawing in the reader quickly so we can reflect upon them for as long as we do. Would you agree that the use of plain language in poetry warrants sincerity or let’s say poignancy?
Zeina Hashem Beck
I like for a poem to contain both difficulty and accessibility. You’re trying to reach people, after all. I use plain language because it’s how I think and speak, what comes naturally to me. In Arabic, we have an expression that goes “السهل الممتنع”—something along the lines of “easy yet inimitable.” That’s always been my favorite kind of art, the unpretentious and meditative.
Rushda Rafeek
Your poems have a lot of bread in them. Was this decision intentional? If yes, why?
Zeina Hashem Beck
No, it wasn’t! Thank you for noticing this.
Rushda Rafeek
It’s interesting how the physical body in the book confronts maternity while giving us a view of what it has gone through resulting from suffering—personally and politically. How would you define the relationship you had with your mother growing up and now with your daughters as a mother yourself?
Zeina Hashem Beck
Poetry resists definitions, so I hope my writing/thinking about motherhood does that. I’m interested in what is inherited, what cycles are broken, what is unsaid, what is against the mother myth, what is contradictory, and what is (as you point out) political. The crown of sonnets that opens the second section of the book attempts this, spanning generations of mothers. My mother encouraged seeing the ordinary in a different light and challenging the received. She understood the importance of vulnerability long before it became such a widespread concept; she didn’t hide who she was and made sure we understood “mother” wasn’t her only role. She’s the one who told me I would be a writer. And she sings, all the time, though she’s been through a lot of grief. I try to convey such complexity of experience to my daughters, and most of all, I hope they feel loved.
Rushda Rafeek
Let’s talk about the numerous references to God, Islam, and Christianity including the Sufi saint Rabia al-Adawiyya, though you “dislike organized religion.” Also, elsewhere, you’ve mentioned how you had to travel to Cyprus for your marriage. In what ways does that sort of religious bias or differences affect you as a person from the Levant?
Zeina Hashem Beck
I don’t want to flatten an entire region and reduce it to my personal experience, an experience that’s informed by many factors, including social class, region, sexual orientation, etc.
The intersection of faiths you’re referring to in my poetry is in part there because I’m where I’m from, a region that mainstream media prefers to portray without complexity. That’s not to say there’s no sectarianism in Lebanon—as you mention, I got married in Cyprus because the law doesn’t allow for civil marriage inside the country. But did I not grow up with a fluid definition of faith, in a secular environment? Yes, I did. Is my experience that of everyone in Lebanon? No, it isn’t. Did I face resistance to my interfaith marriage? Yes, I did. Was I encouraged to go through my interfaith marriage? Yes, I was. If some readers are surprised that I write against a one-dimensional way of looking at faith, then the real question is, why are they? What does this say about their assumptions about where I come from?
Rushda Rafeek
Certainly something to ponder over! Besides, how do you deal with the inner worlds you create? I am referring to the note by poet Asmaa Azaizeh in your book where she claims your poetry is “skillful at trying to portray the unseen; it is skillful at destruction—and, I want to say, the destruction of her own temples. Everything can fall apart and be liberated from these temples.” Is it like a ritual to emancipation?
Zeina Hashem Beck
It’s a ritual of subversion because subversion has agency.
Rushda Rafeek
And on isolating politics from literature, do you think it’s even possible?
Zeina Hashem Beck
Not for me, no. But this doesn’t mean all poems display the political in a direct or overt manner.
Rushda Rafeek
Is balancing three languages (English, Arabic, French) with writing poetry a challenge? Are you inspired by language or not?—with your own experience as a translator and a podcaster?
Zeina Hashem Beck
Existing between languages is always a challenge and an inspiration. I’m glad you mention podcasting! Farah Chamma and I started Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry, in an attempt to engage more with the language and its poetry, and it’s been such a joy because it feels like a return to something familiar, necessary, and exigent. We are currently finishing up season two, which we’ve been recording across continents (her being in the UAE and I in California).
Rushda Rafeek
Excellent! Finally, in my last question, I want to explore the role that fashion plays for someone ever ready to party (thanks to your Instagram feed!). Given how you express yourself—whether it is a new haircut, lipstick, or a unique jewelry piece even your poems have a transgressive lilt to them. So, please do share your thoughts on how you prepare the body for the social world associated with aging—while I quote from the poem Ghazal-Ode for My Body: “I am afraid of mirrors.”
Zeina Hashem Beck
Ah, mirrors. For as long as I remember, I disliked my body for not being thin enough, or small enough. Now, there are more days I love my body than days I don’t, and the poem you quote also has lines like “recite the broken ode in my body.” I now realize I don’t owe anyone being a certain weight, being “feminine,” and I want to move through the world taking up as much space as I want to. That’s one of the blessings of getting older—you just give a lot less fucks. When people sometimes say, “Ah! To be twenty again!” I immediately think, “Why on earth would I want to be twenty again? I’m so much better in my skin now. No, thank you.”
Thank you for mentioning fashion; I love my accessories, my bright lipsticks, and dancing with friends! These are ways to take care of and delight in your body, and taking the time to do all this is essential! O!
POETRY
by Zeina Hashem Beck
Penguin Books
Published on July 05, 2022
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