Jarred Thompson: Hello Khadija, I am so excited to continue this conversation with you. I read some of your poetry and have really enjoyed what I could find online. I am thinking we begin this conversation with your poem “the tiger’s bride.”

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber: Hi Jarred, lovely to be in conversation with you again. I am pleased you chose “the tiger’s bride.” Some poems feel like a door. I can write a lot of poetry, or used to be able to, and every now and then there is a few that feel like “I can touch this poem, it’s real.” “The tiger’s bride” reminds me of being in the same intentional and mystical creative space I was in when I wrote poems like “hājar in the house of rust and other poems” published in Enkare Review. These are narrative poems, each with its specific narrator. I was asking myself a question, I who is so wary and strict when it comes to making concessions: What would it be like to attack the romantic fantasy of a fairy tale, and what would this be like for the characters in the fairy tale? Like those women in stories who get captured by beasts and make the decision to soften and be loved, what is it like to negotiate not only with the enemy but oneself? To sing to calm oneself, even though the “wild beasts” inside are adamantly furious with the situation? What is it like to give up the gun? The selling point of a fairy tale is its romantic fantasy, but I wanted the voice of the narrator to be conscious of it all: the truth and the patterns by which these stories have been told to her, beyond just some romantic retelling. I’ve always been interested in the way we betray ourselves, how it is that we can betray ourselves. Is it always a betrayal? Is it necessarily defeat? In school we’d study classic plays, and it was always the traitors that fascinated me most. So, in this situation I wanted to know how much of this, choosing to love, is betrayal but also adapting; what it is like to choose softness and how much of that softness is self-preservation and about survival; how much of it is simply wanting to be soft, to rest. I was curious about the girls from those fairy tales where they transition from being firebrand heroines to captives, then realising that they are neither and choosing rest. Where they go, “Ok. It is what it is. Is that terrible? Am I terrible? Is this peace? Defeat? What is this nameless thing?” If I knew how to talk about these things better or more concisely I sure as hell wouldn’t have needed to write poetry even once in my life. Those last lines are a sigh but not a lament: “The wounds of my body are angry with me, / they drink me until I’m brand new.” You get to this point and it’s not defeat, but it’s no victory either. It’s not a terrible thing, it’s a new place to be at emotionally, faintly haunted by the reality of the past. But will it always be haunted? We miss our ghosts even when they’re angry with us, but things also always change, some ghosts fade eventually – I don’t know!

Anyway, my apologies for being lost. I guess we could also begin with how are you, Jarred? Where are you? What are you up to? Like normal people, if that’s what we’re going for.

Jarred Thompson: I love what you say about poems feeling like a door. There is nothing more liberating than sitting down to write a poem and having something open inside of you, whether it is stoked by an image, an experience, or a turn of phrase. The reading and writing of poetry often ask us to open ourselves up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it is challenging, sometimes where the poem is asking you to go is not yet clear and you feel like you have to wait, listen, take your foot off the pedal, for something to move through you (or you through it). I suppose that is where the mystical aspect of poetry sometimes come from. When you are really listening, all the sides of life that don’t normally get to speak take centre stage.

Softening, letting, opening. So often, as in “tiger’s bride,” women are asked to make concessions and be loved by another who is harder and, perhaps, beastly. So many mythical associations of softness and fragility are placed on women and those of fem orientations; it is no wonder the beasts in life are stunned when those same group of people turn around and begin to fight for better circumstances, exhausted by the imposition to be soft and to make concessions all the time.

In another sense, love, no matter where it comes from, does ask us to soften our rougher edges, to sing our anxieties into calm, trusting that the beast will hold them dear. Does giving up the gun limit an individual who has reconciled themselves to softening for the beast who loves them? Or does it ask the individual to battle in different ways, with different weapons? I find that women in patriarchal settings often innovate new ways to influence and take control of their lives without guns or overt fighting, but through more subtle subversions, carving out places of agency for themselves, however partial that may be in the overarching dominion of a beast whose strength comes explicitly from the physical.

Perhaps giving up the gun is a different kind of strength, something the beast may find more taxing than anything they have experienced before. What does someone who has lived their life through physical strength do when they are asked to give up that strength for a new kind that is totally foreign to them? Of course, there is something about being in relation, especially intimate relations, that opens up parts of ourselves in which betrayal, or the possibility of it, definitely creeps in. I think this speaks to the fact that we do not really know ourselves until we experience intimate and challenging relationships – until we are surprised by how much we are actually willing to give up to become “the tiger’s bride.” I find it funny when people say “you have to find yourself” when, really, the finding is always in process, that there is no full stop to it, until maybe when we die. Even then, no one knows how many other full stops lie beyond this mortal coil.

I wonder about these lines of yours, “the wounds of my body are angry with me, / they drink me until I’m brand new.” Are they angry wounds because the speaker is ignoring them? Is their drinking a part of this anger or a moving beyond it? Is newness/renewal a kind of psychic growing around the wound? I do believe our movement through time and space inadvertently picks up ghosts. Some are our friends, others are our enemies. But even enemies can be useful. They tell us who we aren’t, confirm to us what we think and believe, what we are willing to do or let happen to defeat them, or be defeated by them.

You don’t have to apologise for being lost. How else do surprises happen, how else do adventures take place, without taking up the provocation to lose one’s coordinates and see what the horizon presents?

Khadija: The thing about getting within someone’s guard is that it puts them within yours. It is not as simple as the idea of a mutual destruction. It is not also the Persephone-Hades complex retold and retold until it is stripped of any of its intended meaning and becomes an empowerment story. Victims in stories still teach us, and victims are not just victims. This is not about her triumph over her husband. It is within her power to destroy him; she still possesses the means and knows how to use them. Whether or not he welcomes it, he would not able to stop her. She makes a choice, in the end, because she chooses herself as much as she chooses him. How much of the war is her identity? – and to leave it behind now, that fascinates me. I feel that we carry our grievances in us, whether we mean to or not, and to let those go can mean dismantling one’s ideas, one’s self. I think she expected a more hateful war within her, for it to be harder to change or want to. But there is no shackle she can bruise her wrists on. Where’s my fight at? She is changing over time, all the time, and she is still blindsided by it. As free to pick up the knife as she is to put it down, no one tells her that, she knows it. So those grievances she carry and foster, they are like, What about us? We’re you, we’re you, we’re you. Wounds can be grievances, it can be the people or selves we are meant to avenge, all those graveyards. You can’t betray what you have never loved. And she is turned away from it, knowing they are there – but one day she will look back, and one of them will have changed, her or her wounds. And she can still hear them for now, even as she chooses herself. So, she has decided, they will drink her – yes, but until she is brand new. She will be brand new.

I really like the idea of questioning one’s self, and how there is not an end to finding the self. It used to torment me because I felt like everyone else has found their “shape,” everyone knows themselves, except me. It took me years to stop associating change with fickleness, shifts in thinking with hypocrisy – I was afraid, and doing myself a disservice. I am learning myself every day and I don’t think I am becoming different so much as deepening myself. I still surprise and fail me, and there is still so much I don’t know, only this doesn’t torment me anymore. I am more selfish with myself, and when I say the truth, it is done without care for whether it is believed. There are things I would like to correct and things I want to strengthen, but you can’t realise your way to a complete and finished self. Because it is never finished, is it?

I don’t know what the horizon is presenting right now. To be honest the things I am shedding are more tenacious this time. I am hoping November and (Trigger Warning for NaNoWriMo) NaNoWriMo can give me something to wrestle with, at least creatively. I am still smarting from a six-month fight with a short story idea that beat the hell out of me. This week I had to admit the draft was incoherent and set it aside – it felt like the kind of story that might take years for me to be ready to write; it needs more skill, more thought, more something-something from me. Short stories are hard to do for me. I am not one to get too precious about process and stuff being incomplete, but giving up on this one hurt, considering how much time I had put into it. What do you do when a story is not story-ing? Do you just come back later and be patient? Do you have any incomplete drafts not because of your ability as a writer but because there is some growing you have yet to do? And how often does that happen, if it does? When do you say this is for a possible Future Jarred to tackle, Present Jarred has not become the one yet?

Jarred: Thinking about victims, I think everyone is a victim of something, on macro and micro scales. As creatures tethered to our environment, we are victims of extractive capitalism, and I fear that state of victimhood is bound to increase. On a micro-scale, we are victims of our past pain but also, strangely, can make ourselves even more of a victim in the same breath that we try to salve those old wounds. But, you are right, we are not just victims. Perhaps perpetrators too. Perhaps lovers. Mostly dreamers, certainly. We are creatures able to endure a certain ratio of change versus stability. I think the adage is true, we do crave stability as we grow older and maybe that is because we have more to lose, having invested more life in this world, and having solidified connections to others, places, and objects that signal to us the ever-present “more” of life.

You had me thinking a lot about my old wounds and grievances, thinking about where they have gone, why they have been so quiet of late. When the equation of life seems to add up to some sort of “good” it seems those wounds don’t itch as often. They scab. But, like volcanoes, an eruption is always a possibility and often it is thanks to your relationships with others that you can see sides of yourself that you are “still blindsided by.” I was discussing the evolution of music tastes with my boyfriend recently and we were disagreeing about the audience’s desire for that 90s kind of Tamia’esque R’n’B sound. The content of the discussion is not important; what is important is how heated the conversation became, right up to me becoming flustered for not being able to get my point across. Needless to say, the banal conversation was reduced to a rather tense and awkward ride home. Upon reflection, I realized that the way the conversation unfolded – my desire to “win” a rather inconsequential discourse – pointed to something within me that I had to grapple with. Where did that desire to be heard stem from? Why were my buttons “pressed” at that moment?

I think being “in relation” is the most valuable thing for any person, let alone a writer. People, because they can be blindsided and surprised by themselves, tend to blindside and surprise others with provocations that they themselves don’t even view as provocations to begin with. When we are “in relation” we often don’t know the deep scaffolding of our inner worlds. This can sometimes rock the boat and in rocking the boat get things dislodged from their hiding places. It really is a game of hide-and-seek with the self sometimes. I think falling in love is that burning need for a specific person to “find you,” where you hide in all your messiness. And, yes, we might betray the ones we love or they might betray us, but how much of the “betrayal” is really those fantastical idealisations of the other being debrided for a new image of the beloved: a truer, raw image that, though it may frighten us, needs to be held and comforted too?

What do I do when a story is not story-ing? Sometimes I turn to read other things like poetry, fiction or interesting articles on science or philosophy, having the story in the back of my mind for anything worthwhile that might jump out at me. I do have stories that I have started and did not finish because there was something wrong with the style or angle of my approach. I am not sure if I will ever return to finish them. Sometimes when I leave a story alone for long enough, it seems to grow dry and flaky and requires a lot of “juice” to get it moving and breathing again. Do I feel bad or guilty about that? Not so much. It is better to see writing as an experiment on the page, I find. You are trying something out: a way of speaking, a set of images, a point of view. You are seeing if this idea can endure your prodding and pricking, your asking multiple questions of it. Sometimes the idea is just a local excitation that doesn’t hold for longer than a few days before it dissipates. We are all susceptible to fads or the seduction of “interesting facts.” It is on the page where I get to see if the vision I have inside can be brought to the page. If I am truly fond of the idea, I will give it a good effort. If not, I think it is okay to let them go. Do you find that the more you write the more the act of writing asks of you? Not just in terms of being present on the page but also present and engaged in the world?

I wanted to know how much of this, choosing to love, is betrayal but also adapting; what it is like to choose softness and how much of that softness is self-preservation and about survival; how much of it is simply wanting to be soft, to rest.

– Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

Khadija: That stupefied feeling of being in a car with someone who knows you and somehow loves you, having lost an argument that was really about nothing but was clearly dancing on the headstones of something. When the hurt in that moment points to a “scabbed” wound that we sort of understand how it ought to behave, or wounds adding to a sort of good as you have put it, those itch less. That is a lovely way to make sense of things. And being “in relation,” and what falling in love could mean too. These are the questions that have been on my mind not just creatively but personally. In The House of Rust, the idea of love was very much tied in with the idea of protecting the freedom of those you love – love, freedom, dignity; the love you have talked about, when the boat rocks and things get dislodged and someone can still “find” you; and love where we don’t want to be saved, forgiven, or endured but to be able to see each other with humanity. We don’t need to know everything about someone to understand them, or to understand them a 100% to love them. (The idea of a “finished” human being is terrifying as you have said).  Nor is love absolute or eternal: love can last as long as it is meant to, and there are all sorts of it. It all boils down to this idea you have put here, of being “in relation” to something. And you are right, it is valuable beyond its importance to us as writers, as people who need to remember that we are people. 

I hate to lob a “how did you fare during the pandemic” question your way. I don’t ask it to be predictable or polite. Writers seemed to have gotten new life during that time, with or without parts of that life falling apart. It challenged everyone’s ability to compartmentalise, hence why everything is coming together to be listened to now after putting them off. I had never felt the world so lonely and so loud at the same time. How immediate and connected things could be and how just as easily they could be taken apart. I had a little more of a positive outlook at first. The pandemic really changed a lot about the way things are done, in both good and scary ways. I will not prod and demand you talk to me about loss, you can tell me if you wish to, but what did it all mean to you – personally and writing-wise?

During the pandemic, I bought a pineapple yellow ukulele. Plastic. Cheap-looking. Tuneable. I live with my parents who don’t really care for that kind of nonsense. Initially, they didn’t notice it! When they finally did, they didn’t care! They were like, “Is this a child’s toy?” Then they picked it up, played with the strings for three seconds, before dropping it. They were only coming in to check on me and connect with me. I realised then how often I say no to myself for no reason. I am more at ease now with the things that seemed to be so daunting. I never said that to anyone before; some of the things that matter to us would bore others. I got the ukulele because I have never had fine motor skills and this lack of coordination when it comes to learning hand movements or footwork, has sometimes frustrated me to tears. So, I thought, maybe I could pick up something I’d never had the chance to do (play an instrument!). See how much of that was slowness and how much was just me needing training, not putting too much pressure on myself or being so precious.

Writers are not always just writing, but I don’t want to talk about things only when their insignificance is titanic enough to interest others; I guess I want to know what everyone’s pineapple ukulele during the pandemic. What was yours?

Jarred: I enjoyed what you said about “dancing on the headstones.” The phrase made me think of how much history our bodies occupy – all these different territories of feeling that we shift between. It also made me think that, to salve uncomfortable feelings, we can sometimes curate comforting idioms of explanation very similar to what is seen on a headstone: She was too beautiful for this world. He is celebrating with the angels. 

Feeling the world as both “lonely and loud” is such an apt way to describe the pandemic experience. I have said this to some people that I think introverts thrived in the pandemic. I turned to meditation and yoga and my own little 21-day poetry challenge that I shared online with others. It was a strangely creative time, probably because of all the new information being spewed from every corner of the globe (the strange occurrences of animals taking over cities and neighbourhoods was my personal favourite). In terms of doing yoga, I started a 30-day yoga challenge with my mother. It was a rather comforting routine to enter into with her and we both felt our bodies grow a bit more flexible during the time. I even had moments where I teared up during a practice (testament to the tense times we were all living in, I think). After the newness of the pandemic settled, I did feel a stifling of creative energy. I had started to miss being out in the world with people, being surprised by people and social interactions. I realised that my writing life needs the right amount of alone time and social “in the world” time. I cannot be at the page all day. The creative well, as Julia Cameron says, needs to be refilled. 

So, you could say yoga was one of my ways of making do with what was at hand. That and singing at my loudest while riding my spinning bike in our spare room back home. I had forgotten the pleasure of belting out nostalgic songs that can both sadden or enliven you. Who knew singing off-key could feel that good. Aside from the loss that period inflicted, it also revealed an essential need for people to have space for “play time.” Whether that means playing a ukulele or trying out a crow’s pose for the first time. You are right when you say that sometimes personal revelations can seem quite banal to others although I am not sure why that is. Maybe it is that odd feeling of being the only one in your skin, the only one who knows what it feels like to be you, the only one with the responsibility to put it in words for others to understand. Writers seem to take on that responsibility not just for themselves but for their characters too. 

Thinking about it now, I suppose the kind of radical freedom in love which you speak about is a concern in The Institute for Creative Dying, although not at first glance. The basic speculative proposition that started the whole story was: Are there better ways to die? If there are what might they look like? Can you love someone enough to give them the freedom to die the way they want to, however strange? Can we allow ourselves freedom of choice in the dying process and in the methods of burial we would like? What hampers that freedom? Why might people want to curtail that freedom? All these questions circulate in the novel and, for those who follow different religions, it may come off as controversial. But religion and mystical experiences did offer a lot of resources for my thinking of the dissolution of self. One tidbit of research in this domain was discovering India’s Holy City of the Dead, Veranasi. Hindu pilgrims come here to prepare for death and the “death hotels” are often fully booked. Some people are not even sickly or dying but stay in these hotels as a reminder of what is to come. Here, people cremate their dead on pyres by a sacred river and death is everywhere present in the atmosphere. Children play in between all of these too; the barrier between life and death feels most porous in the various descriptions and documentaries I have come across of this city. In Veranasi, cremations take place 24 hours a day as part of the central activity. It may sound outlandishly morbid but there is a beauty to it if one was to look at the scene from a different angle. It points to this idea of everything in flux, of this sense that becoming is the only constant. I would like to visit the city one day.

Khadija: I have been feeling genuine lightness after a long time. I have been working on my life and only a little on my creative work, and that is alright. I was sick as a dog, now I am better. We have got newborn kittens in the house, and my elderly cat has been dying for a while now, but I am taking care of her and the newborns. She has been with me since year five. She is not as much sick but rather old. I take her to the vet every few weeks to make sure she is not in the kind of pain that would be cruel to keep her living through.

I have been getting my life in order, setting boundaries, planning my future, talking to people, getting spiritually centred, and being more honest with myself.  It is not always going to be calm and quiet or easy like this, but I am happier and better equipped because I have made decisions about what I want my life to look like. A lot of that also involves moving my body again. I see the people who do yoga really gain positively from it; I have done yoga a few times but more workout focused than mindful yoga. How did you start teaching yoga? The idea of you and your mother doing this together and getting closer is heart-warming. How are you doing? Speaking of your mom, how does she feel about your creative pursuits? Are there other writers/creatives in your family or community? What has existing as a creative and storyteller/writer, not just among writers or creatives, but outside of that been like? And who do you go to for creative or constructive criticism?

Someone told me that some writers hide secrets in their stories, asked if I did, and I said if anyone does, why would they say they had? Anyway, there are no secrets so much as there are things in my work that I feel comfortable being the only one that knows, of which I don’t feel the need to indicate or explain. Is there anything you have hidden in any of your stories, or in The Institute of Creative Dying? It was a fun (nosy) question to be asked, so I thought I ought to honour you with it as well.

What’re you reading right now, or what media have you been enjoying recently? I am still reading about Ibn Battutah and I am two-thirds through reading Ayesha Harruna Attah’s phenomenal The Hundred Wells of Salaga.

Jarred: It has been a tornado on my side. But a good tornado, if there can be such a thing (this phrasing reminds me of Jordan Peele’s Nope where one character asks about “bad miracles”). I am glad to read that things have been lighter for you and that the intrusions of the world have been, for the most part, welcoming and nourishing. 

I had a nice chuckle when you spoke about secrets in novels and why a writer would tell anyone if there were a few in their work. I think there are secrets in my novel. Some I have placed, some I don’t even know are there. I have shared some with those close to me and they seem to take pleasure in trying to decipher “who is who” in the novel. It is an interesting desire people have. I have never read stories to decipher the author, but perhaps this comes with having access to someone who has written a work of fiction. We are all collages of many things, so I don’t feel that taking some part of that collage and transplanting it somewhere else immediately spawns the same, original whole. Things always exist in a context, in an environment, and the environment of a book, no matter the inspiration it is drawn from, always changes the inspirational fragments you bring to it. I am the only person in my family who is a creative and I enjoy listening to their experiences of my work. In some ways, they too offer criticism that is worthwhile. I take interesting viewpoints wherever I get them. It is always a case of asking if someone’s view benefits the creative work or is not what you intended. I am lucky to have met other young writers who I have built relationships with, and I can see myself drawing insight from them or a second eye on a WIP. My mom and dad have both expressed their pride in the work I am doing too. Both remind me to stay grounded, advice I never get tired of hearing because it keeps me in a “beginner’s mindset,” something I value. How has your family reacted to your work? 

Currently, I am reading for my PhD in English. I am reading a lot about happiness, emotion, good feeling and social politics in South Africa. One book I am rereading is Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, a book that has really influenced the way I think and talk about emotion as well as characters. It is a work of critical theory so the language can sometimes be obtuse but once you are past that, there are some gems I feel will be valuable for my own research. The book asks what happens when the thing you thought allowed you to flourish in life is actually your obstacle to flourishing and attaining the “good life.” The PhD has taken up a lot of my reading, but I am aching to go into a bookstore and pick up some new poetry collections. Poetry has always been a staple pleasure of mine and it is time to reward myself. I recently enjoyed Ada Limon’s The Carrying. One poem in particular, “Trying,” gave me all the feels. Here is the ending:

Even now, I don’t know much
about happiness. I still worry
and want an endless stream of more, 
but some days I can see the point
in growing something, even if
it’s just to say I cared enough. 

There is something about how Ada weaves domestic happenings with questions of caring enough in the world to do something that resonates; this is something I want to think about in my poetry. 

I have recently recovered from a two-week flu. Exercising after a recovery always feels like starting out at ground zero and building up one’s health and fitness again. Sickness, when it is not too serious, can sometimes force us to hit the reset button and slow down. I think I have been so busy in the last couple of weeks that getting sick was a blessing in that all I needed to do was get better and even that was not up to “thinking-speaking” me but up to the “breathing-pulsing” me. I am trying to recalibrate my relation to exercise and view it more as “movement medicine” which yoga is a part of too. I am not yet a yoga instructor but I would seriously like to get training for it. Perhaps in the future.

I do hope that the calm you mentioned earlier has sustained itself till now. We have been talking for the better part of a year and it has honestly felt like conversing both with myself and with you. It has occupied this in-between of being a series of journal entries and a sharing of many facets of our individual lives. I think this speaks to how I have grown comfortable with you. Thank you for that and for sharing so generously. I hope that the “movement medicine” and all other tonics, both literal and figurative, continue to sustain your openness to the world, your boundaries of safety and comfort, and most of all, your dream-walk into worlds I am excited to read about. 

Khadija: “Even if it’s just to say I cared enough.” That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing this and so much more with me. Your musings on freedom and death and choice have enriched me. Your question about radical freedom, if we are capable of it when it comes to our loved ones choosing “better ways to die,” and if we can love someone enough to do that, opened up something real in me, and new ways of thinking about what I thought I already understood. Now, this matter will never be far from my mind. I enjoyed your thoughtful kindness, wisdom and openness. I am glad you’re feeling better! I am glad your family has been so supportive and yet grounds you. I am grateful for mine, they have been there for me and talked me through things and tried to convince me to believe in myself and my work as much as they do. Thank you for these recommendations. You have sold me on Cruel Optimism with how it helped you think about characters and emotions. I am interested in that.

I think of when we started this conversation (A year ago?), how we found in each other long letter writers essentially, which has been a pleasure. So much has changed since then, I am sure in your life as well, and I hope it has been nourishing. This conversation has been generative, and not just creatively. I have been lucky to speak to writers, to learn how they feel and think things out, and what they find beautiful. It has been wonderful. We are all “collages” you say, and brushing up against that, seeing that in the person and the work, has been a great gift. Thank you, 20.35 Africa, for creating this space for us, and thank you Jarred, for this gift.

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Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Kenyan writer and the author of The House of Rust which was awarded the Graywolf Press Africa Prize and The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. You can find her work at Enkare Review, A Long House, Lolwe, and Down River Road among others.

Jarred Thompson is a literary and cultural studies researcher and educator and works as a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pretoria. He was the winner of the 2020 Afritondo Prize and the runner-up in the 2021 Dream Foundry Prize. His debut novel, The Institute for Creative Dying, is published through Picador Africa and Afritondo UK