Fahad Al-Amoudi: As I’m writing this email, I’ve just put down Ricardo Romero’s The President’s Room, so in the spirit of that I wanted to ask what was the last thing you read that transformed how you think about your creative practice or your own work more broadly? Is there a writer, musician, or artist who you go back to again and again for inspiration?
Thato Angela Chuma: I recently revisited Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet given the peculiar times we are in. This was probably sparked by the “otherworldliness” I encountered when I first read it. It may seem that the creative voice, not only mine but collectively, is going through a metamorphosis that Rilke encourages – the kind he said can only be met in our solitude. The pandemic forcefully took us through this encountering of ourselves, and I’m interested in seeing how it is texturizing our works.
It’s when he says: “Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?” that I ponder how conditions of the world influence where our writing takes us. He also incites us into finding out “what commands us to write.” What would you mention as your reason(s) for writing poetry?
Fahad Al-Amoudi: I’m latching onto the word “otherworldliness.” The mundane is strange and I’m drawn to writers who find the surreal in banalities – Calvino, Marquez, Marechera, and so on. I keep a book of Daniil Kharms’ micro-fiction by my bed and dip in and out when I can’t sleep so I can sit in that liminal space. I think that’s part of the reason why I write – I want to honour the inner child, who is constantly questioning the nature of reality. My work tends to begin in images, things I’ve seen that I’m haunted by, that defy answering the journalistic “who,” “what,” and “why.” Writing is my way of celebrating the unknowable.
The pandemic has definitely forced all of us to look inward, despite the available technologies for distraction, but I’m not sure there is a correlation so far between the poetry that has come out of the period. I’m definitely encouraged by things I’ve seen. Last year we had Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet which, among many things, explored Black interiority from a broadly lyric tradition. We don’t have many collections doing that here in the UK so I hope that the book inspires more work like it!
The point Rilke makes about metamorphosis rings true with my own practice. Do you find that there’s a tension between the pressure for poetry to be urgent and the necessity of time in the creative process?
Thato Angela Chuma: I love your reference to the inner child because I believe in our writing that is who we are trying to recall or become once again – that boundless wonder which creates fearlessly.
I do sometimes feel there’s a great push to be reflectors of the world through our works. There’s that subtle sense of duty, and it can hurry the way we ought to be more at ease with our creative process. Great things don’t fear time, but our humanness and creative self exist in this fear, so we create out of that compulsion and are driven by it. This tension also silences parts of ourselves that are not enduring, or suffering, or endlessly loving or even angry. I’m intrigued by that silence and what we can pull from it. I think it’s more authentic. Sometimes it’s enough to just be in that grand design of possible things, even if it never becomes the poems you want to take to the world.
As the great South African poet Don Mattera put it, “a time will come, Beloved/ when we will remember/ dreaming was never free.” Duty is an integral part of our gifts. It’s a blessing and a curse.
When you say your work begins in images, in this I see the ways in which poets constantly dream new worlds through their explorations, especially worlds that are much more nurturing than the one we have collectively constructed. I’ve also seen that the extensive use of realism and being “reflectors” either drowns a poet in despair or inspires them out of that suffering.
Through your eyes, what do you think makes a poet memorable?
Fahad: I know I keep obsessing over individual words but what you said about “duty” has come up in a few conversations I’ve had this week. Camus has a series of lectures called “Create Dangerously” where he explores formalism, realism, urgency, and how political ideology can often impoverish artistic works, making them “subordinated to the values of revolutionary action.” On the other side of the argument, I recently read an article talking about the role of “the creative” as a “cultural worker” whose labour is one half of a political struggle (there were a lot of Maoist references, which I think lacked the critical reading necessary in this kind of discussion). A lot of writing is about self-questioning – who are we writing for? what is our responsibility? to ourselves? to an idea? is it even helpful to think of these questions as having static answers?
Camus concludes that great art is a thin ridge between the chasms of propaganda and frivolity, and that “Art lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself; it dies of all others. Conversely, if it does not constrain itself, it indulges in ravings and becomes a slave to mere shadows.” In the past couple of years, I found this a really helpful starting point when thinking about time and purpose in my own work, although maybe I’m just trying to absolve myself of any guilt!
The poets that I love are memorable for different reasons. There are some who make me do that Leo di Caprio meme where I’m pointing at the tv and going “yes, yes, I’ve seen that! I know exactly what you’re talking about!” There are others whose courage and inventive uses of language completely transform me. I remember being in a workshop and reading a Jay Wright poem, “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” for the first time and being blown away. Beauty is also something that’s important to me. As I’m writing this, I’m looking up at an Ishion Hutchinson poem I have stuck to the wall above my desk called “Phaeton.” From my reading, that poem is one of the most beautiful elegies to a lost friend I’ve ever read. It’s almost as if he finds a new consciousness.
Going back to Camus, in those lectures he also talks about the dilemma of the artist being understood. I wonder if you’ve ever had anxieties about your work being understood or received in a certain way.
Thato: When I came across Roy Adzak saying “Real art is not what looks good, but what changes us,” this softened my approach to creativity in general. Beauty is important, but not in the ways we have limited it, especially in poetry. Beauty is much more complex and also “unrefined.”
The self-questioning you highlight is what makes writing have a mirroring effect on where we are and where we ought to take our imagination. The anxieties around the work I do lean on whether my words are becoming the textures I am wielding them into, and this isn’t as paralyzing because then being understood doesn’t quite preoccupy my process. I don’t dwell on it even though I’m aware of the impulse to be. It’s more about if I’m writing what I truly want to harness through words and if I am being true to the issue that has “possessed” me. There’s an obscurity that must be maintained in poetry, be it in its simple or complex forms. I am not sure if we sit with things long enough (anymore) for them to tell us what they are, given this culture that requires works to be churned out in a particular way. It’s more like one’s creativity is proportional to the consumption of it, which is a devastating feeling that folds us into paths or outlooks that are not for us. It pushes us into some sense of sameness.
Toni Morrison said she tries to “clean the language up and give words their original meaning.” At some point I believe one must be true to their origins of creating, even in the midst of prescriptives and suggestions that we are told make great writers.
Would you say you struggle when your works are rejected?
There’s that subtle sense of duty, and it can hurry the way we ought to be more at ease with our creative process. Great things don’t fear time, but our humanness and creative self exist in this fear, so we create out of that compulsion and are driven by it.
– Thato Angela Chuma
Fahad: I love that you’ve brought in the idea of writing, or art more broadly, as something that is transformative. When I’ve read a poem in the past that I’ve loved, I can’t say that I’m the same person as before I read it. I’m also glad you brought up Adzak because I needed to find a nice transition to ask you about being a multi-disciplinary artist. How does your reading, listening, viewing, (insert other verb), influence how you create and how you decide things like form and expression? In what ways do your disciplines overlap?
As I’m writing this, I keep mulling over the word “obscurity” – obscurity as something concealed and mystifying, but also as something on the margins. Do you feel that as a multi-disciplinary artist your work is on the margins of each art form?
On the point of rejection, I think it depends on who’s rejecting it. I’ve been in workshops filled with blank faces and that’s concerning because to hear that your work is alienating everyone in the room, or is completely opaque, isn’t very affirming. That being said, I don’t write to impress people in a workshop. Yes, poetry has the unique and irritating problem that the practitioners are the readers and critics but I’m hoping that changes. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten down about a rejection letter from a magazine or press because my default attitude is to go in expecting rejection. I’ve been lucky in the sense that as soon as I started writing, I’ve had rigorous editors who have challenged me. I would often have my most creative bouts when I was told I needed to head back to the drawing board and start again. But it’s a law of diminishing returns. There’s only so many times I can start again before I wonder if I should really be doing this. And then we’re in the territory of self-rejection which, to answer your question, is where I struggle most.
Thato: As a multi-disciplinarian, I feel as if the forms weave into each other. The poetry ignites the lyricism and the singing informs the tones of writing. At times it overlaps. It can be daunting to exist in them simultaneously because of the grand notion of having to master one format of expression in order to be “taken seriously.” However, I see this as a box that closes us off from the fluidity of creativity, so doing more than one thing is probably an answer to myself – that we are inherently borderless when we create.
I love to question the margins of each form to see how far they can stretch. It’s like a mosaic that fits well because you have taken the risk of breaking something first. That is how I overcome my fear of moulding “differently.” I honour courage in works, and I feel you can always sense it. When you highlight self-rejection, it’s truly what isolates us from doing and undoing and seeing it as the refinement aspect of the process. We turn to fold at the first “unfortunately your poem doesn’t fit with us.”
What has been your favourite thing about your journey with words?
Fahad: I’ve just come back from seeing the two people who I started writing with just over five years ago at university. The nights we spent draped in fairy lights in the basement of a student flat with a cursed fridge and faulty electricity writing until 2 in the morning remain my favourite part of this journey of writing. That core friendship is my support network, they help me keep going and they push me creatively.
What about you? Do you get a rush from performance? Is your thrill in the research, the writing, collaboration? Thinking about my practice, I realise that there isn’t much space for joy unless I’m with close friends.
I hear what you’re saying about forms weaving together and reinforcing each other. I’m currently reading The White Book by Han Kang, which pushes lyric non-fiction writing into the realm of the prose poem. Anne Carson is another author who effortlessly softens the lines between modes of writing with the way she makes language move.
Thato: The thrill comes in waves and I feel it most when writing. Performance almost always feels like an afterthought of that. There’s something peculiarly life giving about allowing yourself to create something and oftentimes I find it soothing to be in that space as much as I can because the other aspects of ourselves are often imbued with “responsibilities.” My writing really is an exploration of the inner realms of our humanness and how they mould our states of being in this world.
It’s one thing to be given the opportunity to make something but when you give it yourself, it’s quite magnificent, even with the fears and unsureness that come with it. We give ourselves these poems before we give them to others.
In Rilke’s words, “…your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
Fahad: Generosity towards the self! I think that’s a beautiful way of summing up a lot of what we’ve talked about and coming to a close on Rilke feels right.
It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you about writing Angela, thank you for your generosity and insight. These conversations we’ve been having over the past few weeks have seeped into conversations I’ve been having with others and they’ve sparked endless avenues of thought! I know we’ve dodged the bigger questions of what it means to be an “African poet” or the question of “African poetics,” as this conversation series is named after, but I wanted to end things on a question of language. Do you write predominantly in English, only in English, or in other languages? I’m re-reading The House of Hunger at the moment and a significant theme in the book is Marechera grappling with writing in English and what that means for his relationship to his Zimbabwean identity.
Thato: This has been one of my favourite conversations in a long time, as we weaved through the aspects of this work. I have come to realize that even the impressions of what we consider African poetry are morphing into various voices, and not one is more important than the other. I honour our diversity, and when it shines through our work, the better.
I write in English; however, I notice how I see the words in my mother tongue first. So, it is almost like transposing it because there are meanings that can’t be crafted within English as the first form. I consider English somewhat decapitated. It’s not fully alive. The gift that comes with multilingualism is that you feel like you are creating a new language. I loved The House of Hunger, because I felt what I just described as I paced through it. Language has music, undoubtedly, and I truly believe that our main work is listening. It’s really listening.
Thank you so much for your time and your grace. I’m looking forward to coming across more of your amazing works.
Fahad: English as “decapitated!” You’ve made my day. Recently I’ve been very interested in the functionality of language. What are the particular “characters” of certain languages? Why do certain conversations feel right for one language but feel deficient in another? Writing in English feels like a compromise because I’m unable to write in the many languages my family speak, but also on the level you’re speaking about with English being such a strange mix of romantic and Germanic languages. There’s a muted or fossilised tension in English that is hard to grapple with, almost infidelity. Sometimes I feel that my writing is an unfaithful translation.
I look forward to reading more of your work but also hopefully meeting in person one day so we can continue this.
Fahad Al-Amoudi is a writer and editor of Ethiopian and Yemeni heritage based in London. His work is published in The Poetry Review, Wasafiri, The London Magazine, Mizna and 20:35 Africa. He is the winner of the White Review Poet’s Prize 2022 and has been shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poets Prize 2022 and Pat Kavanagh Prize 2023.
Thato Angela Chuma is a Motswana creative entrepreneur, singer, award-winning curator, writer and poet. Over the past 8 years, she has had her poems published in various literary magazines across the globe such as Strange Horizons(US), Brittle Paper(UK), Words Dance Publishing, The Machinery India, Praxis Magazine, Olongo Africa and 20:35 Africa. She also founded Bold Poetry Sessions in 2020 – an online curated platform for Batswana poets.