The Vulnerable Coupling of Languages: A Dialogue with Rabha Ashry

Nkateko: ‘I want my English readers to feel like they missed a step.’ I love this. When I started writing, I would italicize every word that was in my home language, Xitsonga. I even had a detailed glossary of Tsonga words at the end of my first chapbook. All of this makes me cringe now, but at the time I thought that this was standard. I believed that it was the best way to make my writing accessible to everyone. A few years ago, I was a panelist at the book launch of Serurubele, a poetry collection by fellow writer  Katleho Kano Shoro in South Africa and I shared what a revelation it was when I read one of the poems in which she personifies her mother tongue, Sesotho, by saying that she too, next to English, will have her back up straight. This rebuked me for my years of using italics to bend my mother tongue into subservience next to English. It is true that the world outside of English is vast and beautiful, yet sometimes it takes the work of another writer to remind us of what we know but often fail to see. Is there anything that you lose sight of now and then, that the work of fellow writers or your writing community reminds you to do, or not to do? 

Rabha: I used to spend a lot of time worrying about accessibility, about pleasing my audience, making my experiences easily digestible. I write a lot about trauma, and I’m realizing that it’s not my responsibility to appease all of my readers, my only responsibility is towards myself and doing justice to my experiences in my writing. 

I used to use transliteration so that my Arabic would still be readable, but that became a compromise I wasn’t willing to make. Safia Elhillo’s The January Children was the first time I came across Arabic used in poetry so frankly and unapologetically. It inspired me to do the same thing with my poetry, and that is one way that the writing community helped me to understand my work better.

 I’m now working on becoming a more active member of the Chicago poetry scene. Of course, with everything that is going on, that has been put on hold. I’m trying to gain more confidence in my abilities as a performer. With the support of various artist collectives based in Chicago; Second Draft Press, Holly and the Neighbors, and Black Widow Books, I am giving myself the space to conceive of my writing as more performative and visual. I find this evolution in my art practice to be very exciting. 

Nkateko: That is very exciting. Do you think that there are poems that only belong on the page, or that all poems can be adapted into performance pieces? 

Rabha: I think some poems are more urgently performative than others. More specifically, poems that have Arabic in them, as performing them give the language more context. I don’t necessarily believe that all my poems can be performed. Poems where I’m experimenting with white space on the page tend to stay there. 

Nkateko: In an essay titled ‘Functional White: Crafting Space & Silence’, Orlando White writes that the white space is just as important as the text in a poem and that it can be used to “express a silence.” I did not fully understand this until I started reading the work of poets who use white space intentionally, to carve out an image or to imitate the pauses we make in speech; wide gaps for long pauses, small gaps for short pauses. At that time I was beginning to experiment with form, writing pantoums with no punctuation, using caesurae instead of punctuation in some poems, learning the importance of a line break. All my high school knowledge of poetry told me that a new stanza is like a new paragraph and is preceded by a long silence. I then came across run-on lines that crossed stanzas and I learnt to feel my way through each poem, to read the text out loud and decide where it feels comfortable to insert a pause. What are you learning in your own experimenting that perhaps contradicts what you believed poetry could be, or what it could do? In the midst of this global pandemic, we are forced into a type of silence, a sort of white space taking over where we previously had interactions with others. Where do you find community during this time, especially since you mentioned that you were working on becoming a more active member of a poetry community? Have you been able to move some of those interactions online? 

Rabha: I used to be of the opinion that a poem could only exist as a column on the left side of the page. A very traditional conceptualizing of a poem. It was through the encouragement of my professors in grad school that I started moving the words around on the page. I think of white space as room to breathe, to make the reader slow down. I don’t really partake in visual arts at all, so this is my version of visual art; a poem that is not only a poem but a drawing, an interpretation of what space can do. 

A lot of the people organizing in the poetry scene have moved their work online. Aywa, an organization that seeks to bring SWANA queer voices to the front, have been putting together online open mics. Second Draft Press have been putting forth daily writing prompts. Black Widow Books and Holly and the Neighbors have been holding online residencies on Instagram. While it’s challenging to organize in this current atmosphere, the poetry scene has been mobilizing and creating space for poetry enthusiasts around Chicago. 

Nkateko: ‘…a poem that is not only a poem but a drawing, an interpretation of what space can do.’ This is beautiful. Is there a poetic form that you like working with, one allows you to explore white space in the way that you are attempting to? 

Rabha: Concrete poetry is always fun to play with when thinking about white space.

Nkateko: It is indeed a challenge to organize in these difficult times but it is also very encouraging to know that the creative work has not stopped altogether. A sense of community is important and I am glad that there are platforms creating space for poets to share their words. Thank you so much for speaking with me, Rabha. I truly appreciate the time that you have taken to answer these questions. Congratulations once again on winning the prize. I wish you the very best with your writing as well as any other endeavours that you will be pursuing this year and beyond.

Rabha: Thank you so much for taking the time to interview me!