Isabelle: Hi Hauwa! It’s lovely to be speaking with you. First of all, how are you? And how are you handling life during COVID? Are you writing at all?
Hauwa: Hi Isabelle! I’m delighted to be having this conversation with you. How am I? Right now, I am well. I am lying on my back after a long day, listening to Safia Elhillo singing poems on YouTube. It’s nightfall and the world is passing slowly outside my window, and all is well and peaceful. The pandemic has yanked me – and indeed the entire world – away from the teeth of normalcy. I had been away at law school but when schools in Nigeria were forced to close down in March, I had to return home. I wouldn’t say life is now back to normal, but I am able to now find a semblance of normalcy.
At the beginning, I couldn’t really write. It felt as though the world was in the middle of so much chaos and my whole body was saddled with the responsibility of parsing all that. It was a lot. But I’m great now and back to writing.
How about you, Isabelle? How are you?
Isabelle: I’m so sorry to hear that you had to leave law school. I hope you’re able to get back there soon, but also in the safest possible way.
I’m good, thanks. Yes, it’s such a strange time to live in, and I’ve also tried to adjust over the past few months. These days, my mind is often preoccupied with the BLM protests taking place globally. The world is shifting and breaking apart in so many irrevocable ways, but as much we’re feeling and witnessing so much anger and sadness, I think there’s also some semblance of hope, and the possibility of a better future. At the moment, there’s this growing sense of accountability, which I hope continues and creates lasting change, and not just a wave of initiatives and public statements.
To kick-start our creative conversation, I’d love to talk about several of your poems, where it seems like community, witness, and belonging are common themes. For instance, the poem “and she glides and glides” depicts an arresting encounter between two strangers:
a woman sways her body to
the dark song playing from her bones.
i know because right now, we belong
to the same wind.
The phrase “we belong/ to the same wind” is so powerful, and in “silent, treacherous,” you write about two neighbours, who each enact violence on the speaker; one through his molestation, and the other (as a bystander) through her lack of intervention. In some of your essays, you also explore identification, understanding and care, in really tender ways. Such ideas are especially pertinent at a time when people feel disconnected. And so, I would love to ask – who do you consider to be your “community”?
Hauwa: This is a question I love so much because I feel like so much of who I am, or what I do, or try to do is underlined or linked to the people I come from and am headed towards. In the ways that people’s sense of self is linked to geography and familial name or lineage, my sense of self comes from my people, my community. When asked “where are you from?” my mind interprets it as “whom and whom do you come from?” I immediately begin to think about the people I am a product of.
These are mostly comprised of people who don’t even know me, ha ha. People whose writing or lives I have found to be in conversation with mine, or questions about mine. I find my people all around me – these fantastic friends who have surrounded me and held me in places I didn’t know I needed to be held, at times I didn’t know I needed to be held – but also a stranger on Twitter tweeting about their personal struggles with anxiety, or in trying to memorize a part of the Qur’an. Or the girl I met at a car park in Kano, who sat weeping silently and trying to cover her face so people wouldn’t be able to tell that she’d been crying, who when I asked if she was okay, looked at me through liquid eyes and said, “No.” Or writers whose writing has provided shade and given permission for mine to exist, think Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Alycia Pirmohamed.
These are my people.
And it’s interesting that you ask this question because I find these themes in your work too, especially in the context of family and ancestry: mothers, aunts, these are recurring figures in your writing, case in point is your poem “In My Mother’s House,” where a mother, niece, and aunt are seen weaving metaphors out of the simpleness of food, in a manner that strikes the senses acutely. There is also the part of ancestry,
Other mothers pass on hands or hips,
tender lips, tilted eyes, votive habits, vivid dreams.
Mine fold memories into dough, plait legends into loaves
I am particularly struck by the fact that your metaphors in these lines are situated within food not as something edible, but as an instrument of the eye, visual and full. It contains the very essence of this lifelong devotion to language that we have embarked upon as writers. But circling back to the themes you explore in the poem and a few others, do you think community or family informs or influences the kind of writing that you do?
Isabelle: I love the idea that “where” and “who” we come from are two sides of the same coin.
Also, I completely agree with your point about literary heritage. Every poet writing today is doing so in the shadow of every poet who has come before us – and some of those shadows are pretty big! I’m thinking about poets from previous generations – like Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kamau Brathwaite, and Czesław Miłosz – who broke open the form and conceptual frameworks of poetry in pivotal ways. But I’m thinking also about contemporary pioneers like Dionne Brand, Don Mee Choi, Nuar Alsadir, and Canisia Lubrin; poets whose works are really adventurous and exciting.
Yes, I suppose that I write about family and heritage quite a bit. Of course, family plays a huge role in how we turn out, and the older I get, the more I realize how much I have learned (and had to unlearn) due to my earliest experiences and relationships. But also, for me, having grown up in the UK, a place that has never completely felt like home, I am always trying to “find my way back” in a sense. And all of that is compounded by the fact that both of my parents were/are pretty elusive when it comes to talking about their pasts, and so I know a lot less than I would like, and I’m always trying to connect with my ancestral homes through fragments of stories and my imagination.
On that note, I would love to explore the concept of “home” in your work a little deeper. In your poem “fatimatu,” published in Volume 2 of the 20.35 Africa anthology, you write about home as a place that one not only carries with them, but also flees from. The speaker says “actually, it is me who’s/ the aftermath of war,” and that “my hands, too, are an aftermath of leaving.” In some of your other poems, we also see the body as a kind of archive; bearing witness and keeping record of people, places, significant moments. In “(tenderness being a name),” you write: “this body is robed in the weight of/ things i cannot say,” and indeed throughout this poem, as well as “the body as destructive tool,” “a brief history,” “belief,” and “fatimatu,” the body is a place where lovers take residence, thoughts and feelings battle for dominance, people pour themselves into each other, henna and hair forge links between strangers, and memories elicit their own physical ache.
I would be curious to know about your own experience of inhabiting a body, and how it has shaped your understanding of the world, and your approach to writing. Essentially, what does your body remember, or hold? What stories is your body telling, through your poems?
Hauwa: I am eternally in awe of the ability of the human body – of my body, at least – to store memories for all of eternity in a way that even consciousness cannot make room for. The body remembers. Even long after the mind has forgotten. It’s why nostalgia exists, why deja vu exists, why we have concepts like PTSD. For months after I graduated from university, I would wake up with a panic attack every Tuesday. And for a long time, I could not even figure out that it happened every Tuesday, and when I did, it took me another stretch of time to figure out the reason, which was that while I was still in school and being sexually harassed by a man who had power over my grades, I was subjected to seeing him every Tuesday because he taught us on those days. And I would wake up knowing that it was going to be a horrible day, that he was going to harass me in class. And so, months after I had escaped, had graduated, my body still remembered and responded.
But the body is not only a vessel for trauma, it is also a site of love and wonder; it stretches and contracts and responds to kindness, to tenderness. I can literally feel my body soften when someone has done or said something kind or tender to me. My body makes landmarks out of certain phrases and ascribes them to people, and then calls them forth in certain situations I find myself. It is in the body that a fusion of geography and language takes place.
I am also thinking of the body as a separate individual entity from the human and the mind. I am thinking of this in relation to these striking lines from your poem, “Endomorphosis,” in petrichor:
we weigh ourselves and all
that we will carry. wonder
what to lay down, what to keep.
what we should bear on our
backs, our brows, our buttocks.
what feasts to hide in breasts or
hollow places in our teeth.
These lines offer such an interesting perspective to the body, and so i would love to ask you: do you think of the body as medium or as warehouse?
Isabelle: Hauwa, thank you for being so open about your experiences, and for speaking so eloquently about your journey of confronting your trauma, reclaiming your agency, and rediscovering its beauty and strength. As we’ve discovered through the #MeToo movement, harassment and assault are sadly very common, but by addressing it through your work –not to mention your incredible activism – you empower others to process their experiences and move forward with dignity and hope.
In terms of the body as a medium or warehouse… What an interesting question! Hmm… I’d have to go with option C, and say both.
On the one hand, the body (my body) is undoubtedly a warehouse. Genetically, it bears traces of every ancestor, every creature, every molecular form of life that preceded me and led up to my existence. It’s the original melting pot for everything that has resulted in my being here, and in addition to that, it is peppered with scars and blemishes which remind me of all my struggles, joys, and mistakes. The poem “Endomorphosis” explores my frustration over a very specific kind of storage: essentially a lifelong, complex relationship with my weight, as my body is all too inclined to hoard whatever I consume. It’s a biology that, at various times, I’ve given in to, resisted, attempted to manipulate, and so on. But ultimately, I’m so thankful to that poem, because through writing it, I came to realize that everything my body has ever done, from its first cell division, to its first breath, to the fact I can feel it shelving the slice of cheesecake I just finished – everything has been to keep me alive. And in a world that has not always cared about that, and in contrast with a mind that has not always wanted that, I’m humbled and grateful for its faithfulness. That realization allowed me to exorcise a lot of negative feelings about my body, and in the past few months, I have begun to focus more on the mind.
Of course, I’m not a dualist. Our bodies don’t just contain us; they form our understanding of the physical world. But at this point in my life, I often feel like I’m at a crossroads, and I’m learning the vital importance of the choices and value systems that guide me. And the more I weigh my choices and desires, the deeper I think about who I am and what my existence means.
There is so much more that could be said on that topic, but at this point, I’d love to return to the “fusion of geography and language,” as you mentioned earlier. In several of your poems, the body is a broad terrain with its own elusive language. In “confessions,” the speaker confides, “my heart has become an immigrant in the city of his name,” and later that same body is a territory consecrated to a lover’s praise:
[…] i wear him
like a locket. and a dialect. and kohl/once, i had a woman tattoo the
first letter of his name on my neck with henna
Meanwhile, in “(tenderness being a name)” the utterance of that name forms a bridge between the body’s thirst and the heart’s desire:
yesterday, a lady wanted knowledge of
my favorite drink
i went into the night of me
searched for your name
– for its softest version –
then gave it to her
The concept of naming runs through a lot of your work, and yet in several of your poems –and even the aptly titled essay, “Naming” – speakers often find themselves unable to name the things they’re feeling. I would love to know your thoughts on names, naming, and the philosophical/psychological significance of definition. Essentially: how far does our ability to name a thing determine our understanding and experience of it?
Hauwa: You are so kind, Isabelle. Thank you for your affirming words.
I am completely floored by what you said about coming to terms with weight and becoming comfortable with your body precisely because everything it has done and continues to do has been to keep you alive. Just powerful. I have always wondered why the human body, especially the physical female body, is expected to have such ridiculous and illogical standards: a flat stomach for example, when the stomach is quite literally the part that stores food; an abdomen that doesn’t bulge, even if it houses a uterus; or a slim body, or a thick body that isn’t “too fat”; or a tiny waist. Our bodies are constantly being policed, the goalpost always changing. When I was a child, I used to hate my voice so much because it wasn’t girly. I thought it was too manly. Actually, in retrospect, I didn’t hate it. I loved it. I just hated that people didn’t like it, that people often said my voice was too deep, too manly, too loud.
You can imagine my shock and confusion when I grew up and went out into the world and realized the world had now decided that it was in fact sexy and beautiful. The goalpost is ever changing.
About naming. Hmm. All my life I have always run from naming. There’s a kind of clarity that it brings that makes things so stark, so permanent. And what’s wrong with permanence, some might ask? I think it’s the irrevocableness that scares me. And yet, it is only when we’ve named a thing that we are effectively able to do what is right by it, and by ourselves.
Namelessness has its uses; I have heard people say that it affords them the freedom to not function within a tight box. What are your views on this?
I think that we can imagine that path, because our work as writers is essentially the work of imagination. Which is a great task indeed. It is only after a path has been imagined, that it can exist, that it can spring into life. And perhaps that imagination is a form of illumination.
– Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu
Isabelle: Oh my goodness – YES to everything you said about unrealistic beauty standards. So often (largely thanks to mass media and patriarchal value systems) we forget that our bodies have functions and purposes that have nothing to do with inciting desire, and so the pressure we feel/put on ourselves in order to be desirable is so frivolous. For instance, in my early teens, I used to wish I had a bigger chest, and then one day it dawned on me that the purpose of breasts is breastfeeding, and that unless I became a mother, it wouldn’t really matter how big my chest was. (And also, that if I did get pregnant, my body would change and basically figure itself out.)
I love what you said about learning to love your voice, or rather, learning to stop caring what other people thought of it. Loudness in little girls is such a special thing, that sadly too many people want to snuff out. And if I may add my two cents, I agree that you definitely have a gorgeous voice!
In terms of naming, you make a good point about names bringing a definiteness that often betrays the fact that a thing may be complex. Sometimes, the name we give something captures just one aspect of it, at the expense of many others. The fact that the Ancient Greeks had so many words for “love” is a great example of that.
Roland Barthes said, “What I can name cannot really prick me,” and I think that the desire to contain and dominate things with words is so typically human. For instance, diseases are often named after the person who discovered them. And there is so much to be said about how definitions are used to control and marginalize people; how formulated definitions of race, or shifting definitions of “us” and the “other” impact our behavior towards people that we otherwise would not see as different from ourselves. For instance, imagine if there was a word for people who have large ears, or a wide set eyes, or a ski jump nose (and thank God there isn’t!). The world would be divided in all these arbitrary ways, simply because the vocabulary existed to define people by these characteristics.
But names have their use. The desire to articulate the ineffable is probably one of the things that drives us as writers.
Another thing that I’ve always found fascinating about names – as in the names of people – is that they’re often eerily prophetic. The definition of a person’s name often correlates quite strongly with their character, or maybe even the events in their life.
In October 2020, the #EndSARS movement began in Nigeria, leading to a surge in mass protests against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a police-affiliated unit notorious for its human rights abuses and brutality against Nigerian youths in particular. Due to Hauwa’s proximity to the movement, the conversation was put on hold until both felt ready to resume.
Isabelle: Hauwa, it’s been three months since we last wrote, and in that time, so much has happened – both in Nigeria and around the world. The entire world watched as Nigeria’s youth led protests against SARS; demanding change, calling for justice, and bravely speaking out in the face of continued violence. Through our emails, I’m aware that you have a personal connection to the protests, and so I hope you’re feeling safe and well, and I’m grateful that you’ve decided to continue this conversation. At this point, I’m simply wondering: how are you? How are your loved ones? How are things in your city and the rest of the country? How does the future look to you at this point?
Also, as writers we don’t exist in a vacuum. Everything we write is in response to our engagements with the world, and so I’d be curious to know whether your poetics engage with your politics (and if so, how). How far do you feel you have a responsibility to address political issues, including injustice? Or rather – do you think that it’s the poet’s job to illuminate the path toward change? And are we even equipped to do that?
Hauwa: Thank you, Isabelle. It has been a historic time, and while people have talked about how exciting it feels to live through a time that has never quite existed before, very little has been said about the amount of trauma that people have to internalize and live through as a consequence. Generational trauma is truly a thing. Wow. Wow. October was such a packed month for us in Nigeria. While we protested against SARS, we also protested against bad governance by implication, because the state and the police are so often the same. I live in a relatively small town, and our protests during the #EndSARS – as small as they were – posed great security concerns for us. Most of my team members kept receiving anonymous threatening phone calls. And I kept thinking, how much more for people protesting in large states and in greater numbers?
It was such an honor, though, to find myself existing in a time like this, I still recall events that happened during the two weeks of protests and I just shiver. It all seemed like a horrible, horrible, but also powerful, dream. I am glad that those two weeks happened. I am so glad. Even though most of our spirits were squashed after the Lekki tollgate shootings on 20th October 2020, it did not succeed in diminishing the work that had been done during the preceding two weeks. I am terrified of, and excited about the future, because it will be something we have not seen before. Something is broken, something bad is broken, and it can only give way for greater things to come.
Are we equipped to illuminate the path towards change? I think that we can imagine that path, because our work as writers is essentially the work of imagination. Which is a great task indeed. It is only after a path has been imagined, that it can exist, that it can spring into life. And perhaps that imagination is a form of illumination. So perhaps we do have the will to do that. But I am also thinking of the more tender sort of imagination – a tender, personal introspection into the private world of the mind: how it has processed and is processing these happenings, how these happenings translate to other aspects of private life, such as relationships, desire or the lack thereof, appetite, and mental health in general.
And now that we are talking of tenderness and the body’s processing of events, I would really love to speak to you about your recently released poetry pamphlet Ripe which does approach writing with tenderness from our conversations about it. Congratulations! The process of putting a book together is a deeply tasking one and you have gone ahead and done it. It is inspiring and beautiful. Can you talk to me about what the process was like for you?
Isabelle: “Imagination [as] a form of illumination” is such a great way of putting it, and I definitely agree that our imagination is our greatest asset and weapon. Even when our writing is not overtly political, the work of encouraging empathy and opening up the bounds of what’s possible can be so transformative for the writer as well as the reader.
Also, thank you for sharing your experience about the protests. Yes, it does seem like the echoes of the shooting, and in fact the entire unrest, will reverberate for years to come. But I’m glad that you’re remaining hopeful and determined, and I also hope that Nigeria’s people get the justice and change they deserve.
As for my pamphlet, that was such a rewarding experience. Many of the poems came out of different projects, programs, and prompts, and so when I wrote them I wasn’t thinking about how to bring them together. It wasn’t until I was deciding what to send that I noticed a thread running through many of the poems; this thread of “hunger,” which seemed to be held at either end by desire and devouring. And as I was putting the pamphlet together, it became quite clear that – at least in the world of my poems – one could not exist without the other. And so for me, editing was this scary but also adventurous experience of creating a space in which various manifestations of desire and destruction were constantly interwoven, and where I could delve into the strongest urges and most life-changing moments and encounters of my life, in order to explore what drove me there, what they meant, and how far I or others were willing to go in order to be “satisfied.” In many of my early drafts, I had merely scratched the surface, but editing the pamphlet really encouraged me to be bold.
At times, the process was also quite intense. Of course, I wanted to make sure that the poems were exactly right, or as close to it as possible, and some of them were terrifying to write, or difficult to articulate, or they required precise formatting or formulation. Thankfully, I was able to get lots of feedback from poets I trust and/or admire. Also, I had a very supportive editor who helped me gain new perspective on the poems, and who would see the redeeming qualities in a draft whenever I emailed him in a panic in the middle of the night, and said I wanted to scrap something completely!
But how about you? Your chapbook is coming out later this year as part of the latest New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set. Amazing, congratulations! How has the process been for you so far, and how are the poems in your chapbook bringing together/building upon your previously published work? Also, since we’ve talked so much about naming, does your chapbook have a title yet?
Hauwa: That sounds wonderful, Isabelle. I am intrigued by the mechanisms of hunger, desire and devouring; how the human body responds and reacts to desire. It is quite a wonder. So glad too that you had the right people around you as you wrote and worked on the book. It takes a village, they say. It reminds me of the process of putting my own chapbook together for submission. It had been an intense two weeks because at the time the call for submissions came, I did not exactly have a manuscript together. I only knew that I had a bunch of poems I certainly did not want to share, scattered around my phone and laptop and notes. But then my friend, Daisy, convinced me that the poems were not only good enough, but important and needed to be shared. I had written them because I needed help processing what I was going through. My poems could possibly go on to help others process/navigate similar emotions. And so I put them together. My friends helped read through and offered such helpful insights, again and again, tirelessly.
And when the acceptance mail came and one of my friends said, “Wow, Hauwa, you did that!” my feeling was, “Nah, my friends did.” Because they truly did.
In the first instance, it was titled “Like a gift unto Ourselves,” but I have now changed it to “Sister.” Because I wrote the book in my capacity as a sister. It was written to and about my brother.
Isabelle: That sounds amazing, Hauwa. Thank you so much for “speaking” with me, and all the very best with your chapbook!
Hauwa: Thank you so much, Isabelle. This has been so wonderful.
Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu is a poet and essayist from Nigeria, whose work has appeared on Popula, Ake Review, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa, Jalada Africa, After the Pause journal, The Republic, The Rising Phoenix, and elsewhere. She has been shortlisted twice for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize in the past. She’s a 2018 fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency, holds a law degree and is now at the Nigerian Law School. She writes from Minna.
Isabelle Baafi is a writer and poet from London. Her debut pamphlet, Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), was the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2021. She was the winner of the 2019 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the 2020 Bridport Prize for Poetry, and the 2019 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Magma, Anthropocene, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and a Board Member at Magma. She is currently writing her debut poetry collection.