NA: I just finished reading your book of poetry, House of Fact, House of Ruin, and your essay collection, The Land Between Two Rivers, and I am, quite simply, in awe. I don’t know where to begin. There is so much to love in these books. I assume you wrote them together?
TS: I wrote The Land Between Two Rivers over a decade, and House of Fact, House of Ruin over the past three or four years. But if you go back to when the first essay was written in 2007, I was also writing the poems that appear in Army Cats. So you might call Army Cats the first installment in an unofficial poetic trilogy about war, refugees, and state violence. The second part would be Station Zed, which focuses on Somali refugees in Somalia and Kenya, and on a trip to Iraq just as ISIL was beginning to establish its so-called "caliphate." But I didn't consciously set out to do this: the "music of what happens," to quote Seamus Heaney, had as much to do with it as any intention on my part.
NA: In both collections you begin in war zones, or rather, countries that are in the shadow of wars. When I reflect on your poems and essays, my mind keeps returning to the image of the lizard in the opening poem of House of Fact, House of Ruin, a lizard with “eyes expressionless, giving and withholding nothing.” I would love to hear you say a few words both about that opening poem.
TS: I had the poems of Tomas Tranströmer in mind when I wrote that poem. I know that sounds odd, but as I was traveling with a militia in Libya just before the country came apart in 2014, I kept seeing lizards when our little convoy would stop at evening. At a certain point in our trip, we were travelling over sand tracks in open desert country so it wasn't safe to drive at night. If we were sleeping outdoors, we'd set up camp at a watering hole where a few families might be living as herdsmen, but also running a restaurant for travellers like us. I remember watching the lizards come out in the cool of evening and feeling such admiration for them: how tough they were to be able to survive out here, how agile and quick! Plus, they were completely indifferent to human beings, and went about their business, hunting, copulating, bearing young. But they were also just a bit spooky: little dragons, you might say, who could vanish into even the smallest cracks in a cinderblock wall. And they began to take on this quality of the uncanny about them, what the Beowulf poet in Old English calls "the wyrd." And just as the poems of Tranströmer often project an air of menace and transcendence—menace as transcendence—so the lizards, at least as I remembered them when I was writing the poem, were like spirit animals who could survive anywhere—infinitely tougher than human beings. Living in close proximity to us, they've seen us in our worst moments—our wars, our public and private despairs. But they've also seen us at moments of more hopeful possibility: I remember how, in a maternity ward in Nairobi, a group of pregnant Somali women in a little cinderblock hospital would watch the lizards dashing up and down the seams of the bundled up mosquito nets that at night would canopy their beds. And so the lizards seemed to inhabit a parallel world to ours, but a world that would go on eon after eon—while our world, of course, is desperate and fragile and always ending.
NA: Were you able to actually write poetry when you were in Libya? Mogadishu? Or did you take notes and photographs and write later?
TS: No, not really. When I'm writing these pieces I'm totally focused on taking notes on anything and everything NOT ME. I have almost no thoughts or feelings that don't relate to what's going on outside of me. I love the release of not having to worry about being "Tom." I'm trying to record everything I'm seeing in as precise detail and with as much fidelity to the complexity of the situation as I can. Again, Seamus Heaney has a beautiful phrase for this state of being completely absorbed in the outside world, in which all your attention is devoted to recording "the primal reach into the physical." And as to photographs, I almost never take them. I have a very good memory for physical detail and for conversation. The poems come after I return, after I've had a little while to come down. I'm in a very heightened state of alertness when I'm doing these essays, partly because I don't go in with a fixed idea about "the story." There's a lot of chance and serendipity and sheer dumb luck in how my stories come to me.
NA: You were invited to visit Lebanon by a Syrian and a Lebanese writer in order to see the Palestinian situation, and write poems? Are poets more respected in the Middle East?
TS: The reason I was asked to go to Lebanon was not because I was a journalist but, as you say, because I was a poet. As a matter of fact, before that trip in 2007, I'd never written anything remotely like the essays in The Land Between Two Rivers. Like a lot of writers, I'd done a good deal of highbrow literary essays and reviews, but I thought of myself as a poet. Amira al-Zein and Munir Akash asked me along because that's what they wanted—a poet's response to the Palestinians we'd meet, not another journalistic foray. However, while I did write poems, I'd also been asked by Virginia Quarterly Review to write an essay. I had no idea what I would write about, but the moment I arrived, the worst violence since the 15 year civil war broke out. I'd never been in a quasi-war zone before, in which people were being shot or blown up in car bombs. And as the violence unfolded and got worse, I suspected that eventually I would have to write about it.
As to the status of poets in the Middle East, I'm not qualified to answer that. What I do know is that in Dadaab refugee camp, which I visited several times over several years in Kenya, that the oral tradition of Somali poetry seemed to be thriving. I listened to an old Somali poet make up a poem on the spot and sing it to me: the poem, as it was translated to me, was asking why Americans didn't do more to help Somalis—a sentiment that I profoundly share. But since orality tends to lose ground to literacy, I wouldn't be surprised if that tradition begins to weaken.
NA: And you were also invited to teach poetry in Iraq? Did you ever hesitate before saying yes to such offers? And you wrote that teaching in Iraq renewed your faith in creative writing classes?
TS: Yes, that was a trip that Chris Merrill, who runs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, sponsored. I should say right now that Chris taught me literally everything I know about journalism. We were in Lebanon together, and because Chris was a seasoned reporter, and had covered the war in Bosnia, I simply imitated Chris: whenever he was taking notes, I took out my notebook and started taking notes. Chris was kind enough with my pretentions to even tell me how to do it: Don't take full notes, Tom, just jot down details that will jog your memory. You'll come across your own shorthand eventually. I watched Chris taking notes on literally everything, no matter how irrelevant that "everything" might seem. And so it was simply a case of monkey see, monkey do.
As to hesitating, no. I'd go anywhere with Chris. I had a few jitters, but when I'm in the situation, I rarely feel afraid. I'm too busy to feel much of anything other than a sense of urgency about getting to my next interview or appointment. And besides, fear wouldn't help me do my job.
As to the third part of your question, you have to understand: when Chris and I were in Iraq, it was an extremely violent moment in the country's history. People were being blown up in suicide bombings, in IEDs, and in drive-by shootings and executions that seemed to have a political motivation, but might just as well have been criminal activity. The two sort of melded for a while. The students we were dealing with, who wrote in both English and Arabic, whichever they were comfortable in, had never been asked to write about their experiences before. So Chris and I would ask them to follow Joe Brainard's example in Brainard's I remember poems: I'd lead them through a little exercise in which they'd shut their eyes and think back to their childhoods, to their room, say, to what was in their room, a favorite toy or game. I'd ask them to think about what the light was like, to describe what the furniture was like, if they had a brother and sister, what they're parents might be doing, but all the while keeping the focus on that childhood room. And then we'd ask them to write I remember for each new memory. And at a certain point, we'd ask them to change the formula, and write, I don't want to remember. And that's when they began, almost inevitably, to write about war: after all, their generation had grown up knowing nothing but war, either with Iran, with the United States, or with each other. And one young woman wrote the most beautiful, haunting account of her brother—her brother who, as it turned out, had blown himself up in a car. She described how gentle he had been as a brother, always asking his little sister if he could get her something special at the market. That gentleness and his suicide bombing were such a contradiction: and yet both of them were true. I can't imagine that she and the other students would ever have told us about their lives in such a direct and passionate way in ordinary conversation. And if you define poetry as the entrance into another world that you'd ordinarily be debarred from, by cultural circumstance, by politics, by history, then yes, what she and the other students wrote restored my faith that literature is more than just a game of words, or ambition, or the self-righteous cant peddled by the left and the right. I'm not so much interested in political convictions, but in political emotions—what happens when a political conviction collides with a real life situation. What I felt, say, when Colonel Gadaffi was overthrown—something my political convictions told me was a good thing—and how that feeling got a lot more complicated when I watched Gadaffi in a YouTube video being beaten to death on the hood of a truck.
NA: What was it like to come back to New York City and teach again?
TS: Disorienting. Awful at times. I experienced a lot of sadness, anger. I had a hard time adjusting back to concerns here in the US. Over in East Africa, Somalis were starving by the hundreds of thousands in a famine. So in one half of my brain, I'd see Somali refugees coming in to Dadaab camp in truly terrible shape, knowing that many of them would die, and in the other half, I'd be hassling with Verizon over how to pay my internet bill by Direct Pay. I felt my daily concerns were often weirdly to the side of my real life, which was back in Mogadishu or Dadaab or Baghdad. Of course, it's unfair to think that these perceptions are anything but one's own. I don't want to generalize beyond my own experience. The fact is, I live a split-screen existence: in the evening, I'll read the Daily Star, the English language newspaper in Beirut, before I'll even think about glancing at the New York Times.
NA: You write a lot about the process of writing about refugees, wars, and war zones, and you have strong feelings about how one might best write about these subjects?
TS: It's probably fairly clear by now how I think about these things. I'll simply say that I'm interested in the small picture, rather than the Big Picture, the geopolitical "anaylses" of the self-styled experts and pundits. The style of haircut that young Iraqi men think is hip (rams wool curls on top, with long sideburns razored close to the head) is as interesting to me as what Saul Bellow once called, thinking of the news media, "crisis chatter." So I try as hard as I can to avoid broad strokes in favor of the local details and intimate truths that make up daily life. As I said, it can take me several years, and several visits, before I feel like a place has imprinted on my nervous system. And I try to build into the piece my own muddle and confusion, cultural, political, spiritual, rather than try to neaten that up. Above all, I want to be up front about my status as a cultural outsider and the limits of what I do and don't know.
NA: I love the poem, “Dream.” I love how—in the poem, you’re having a bad dream, and it’s your mother’s voice that stops the nightmare by saying, “This dream is done.” Your mother was a major force in your life?
TS: Without my ma, I would never have become a writer. She gave me the words and she taught me early on how to use them. When I was a very young child, we did phonics together. Later, when I wrote essays for grade school, junior high, and high school, she went through them with me word by word, sentence by sentence, and I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again. She was a very tough high school English teacher herself, legendary in whatever school district she taught in because of her intelligence, her extravagance (she once had a student throw a cream pie in her face to make a point about how each person's version of an event is different, and sometimes radically different, even though her class had all witnessed the same pie), and for her insistence (amounting to a principle, almost) on clear, nuanced thought in speaking and writing.
But when I wrote that poem, I was thinking of a Libyan friend of mine, Mohammed al-Faqeeh, who had spent ten years in Abu Salim Prison and narrowly escaped being murdered during a massacre in 1996 in which Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,270 prisoners were shot. One morning as we were walking in a grove of date palms, he told me about pat down, in which you raised your arms and the guards frisked you before you went into your cell. I had twice been in jail for brief periods of time and so I knew that ritual. When you lifted your arms, you smelled your own smell—and that led me to imagining a prisoner who might achieve a moment of imaginative release at the instant that his own smell reminded him of his mother's body.
NA: I also love the essay, “Momma’s Boy.” In fact I think I love every moment in these books where your mother appears. But I was stunned and horrified by the images of her receiving shock treatments and by some of your adolescent experiences described in the essay. Reading it, I wondered if your childhood might have prepared you to become the kind of journalist you are now?
TS: I've never thought of that, but I think it's such a provocative and interesting statement. I can't help but think you're right: as a boy, I became accustomed to a certain level of intensity, and of being hyper-alert when my mother was in one of her "moods." So perhaps you could say that was early training for the kind of journalism that I've been interested in doing.
But I don't want to reduce my mother to a set of symptoms. She's always possessed nobility of mind, even when her mind was at times not quite sound. She's a brilliant and big-hearted woman, and very courageous: as a teacher, she was a one-woman renaissance in a deeply conservative Mormon town in Utah, and she paid a price for it. Her example may have instilled in me an impatience with cant, with high-minded abstraction, with moralists of all stripes, right wing or left. The Mormons tried to shove religious dogma down her students' throats and she wouldn't stand for it.
I suppose I inherited that skepticism, as well as the need to see things for myself. And not at a remove, but to put my body in a place like Dadaab or Baghdad so I could directly experience what it was like to be physically there. Before I began my journalism, I felt like I lived in a hell of abstractions, of media images, of jabbering, competing ideologies. But now when I think about Iraq, I know what the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers look like. Those sorts of details make me feel grounded. So I think I learned from my mother's suffering that you have to walk some of the same ground if you're going to say something meaningful about it. She taught me that there aren't any short cuts to first-hand experience, no matter what it costs you.
NA: In the poignant, closing essay of The Land Between Two Rivers, you talk about your relationship with Seamus Heaney, and at one point, you describe how you thought of him when you were in the desert and saw an image of a gazelle on stone, a gazelle drinking from a spring pool. I’d love to hear you say a few words about that moment and about Seamus Heaney’s influence on your work
When I was in Libya with a militia, we'd been driving all day through the Libyan desert and we stopped to look at a paleolithic engraving of a gazelle. And I couldn't help but think of how Seamus had once told me that Gadaffi was one of the main suppliers of Semtex to the IRA. So the atrocities he lived through and that so shaped his life were strangely linked to Libya. And now here I was face to face with a 10,000 year old engraving of a gazelle: and it seemed to be eyeing me with the same wary stare that came into Seamus's eyes whenever he met new people, particularly in a formal or official setting. I've written an elegy for Seamus that brings together his wariness, the gazelle, his death, a bomb scare we went through together in Boston, and the waters of the spring pool you mention. I suppose it'll be in my next book (knock on wood).
I met Seamus shortly after I published my first book, over 30 thirty years ago. He was teaching at Harvard in those days, and he was barely known in this country. That quickly changed of course, but what never changed was Seamus's gift for friendship and his devotion to his friends. Once he was your friend, he stuck with you for life. The first time I met him, I was acutely aware of passing through a kind of spiritual and intellectual metal detector—only "metal" would be spelled as "mettle." But once the scan switched off, Seamus offered younger people immediate terms of equality. He never stood on ceremony or played the literary lion or the eminence grise. Just being in his company made you feel happier, smarter, and more vitally alive. There was such joy to be had in talking with Seamus: he was full of roguish good humor, and his conversation was a brilliant and inspired mix of learning, flyting, joke-telling, and self-mockery! I learned a lot about how to conduct myself in the world because of his example. He suffered fools, he had the time of day for everyone, he never condescended to anyone or put on airs. There are lots of narcissists and prima donnas and divas of both sexes in the arts, and he completely eschewed that kind of frippery. He was kind and lenient and cut everyone a lot of slack—but when aroused, he had a tongue that could cut steel.
As to my work, he taught me that the bar was very high. He was always restless in his aspirations for what his work could become. He constantly imagined himself more broadly as a poet, and he had the dedication and passion and intelligence to embody that imagining. All that I learned from him. Most of all, I suppose I learned how his care for people was consistent with his care for language.
NA: I’d love to close with a short excerpt or poem from one of these books.
TS: Here's a poem called "Before Rain." In homage to Seamus, who loved Yeats (but wasn't blind to Yeats's shortcomings as both a man and a poet), the poem lifts a refrain line from Yeats's last poem, "The Black Tower."
Before Rain
Whatever you do, there are rockets falling,
and after the rockets, smoke climbing
up through walls that are exploding.
Trees grow up where there once were people, weeds
take over beds of lettuces and coddled flowers,
uprearing mole hills unpopulate the fields.
The bricked-in hours of the human have all been knocked down
No one lingers at lipstick counters, no one
stares into a screen to escape the digital mayhem
of heroes hurdling over the heads of monsters.
The old bones on the mountain that stand upright
and shake when winds blow up from the shore,
old bones that shake when the winds roar
now dangle in the void of an unknown dimension.
Forget all this, says Earth to the stars.
Tom Sleigh's many books include Station Zed, Army Cats (John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Award). He teaches at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. A book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, and of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin, were published by Graywolf in Feb. 2018. Sleigh has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, VQR, APR, Poetry, Threepenny, and elsewhere, as well being widely anthologized in publications such as The Best of the Best American Poetry, the Best American Poetry, and the Best American Travel Writing.
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