CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Ayeesha Raees and Josh Wagner

By: Josh Wagner

“[We arrive] when we consent not to be a single being,” says Edouard Glissant in an interview with Manthia Diawara. Glissant’s flexible phrase gestures at one of the central themes that unfolds across Ayesha Raees’ hybrid body of work, spanning videography, photography, and poetry. Nothing is ever as simple, or singular, as it seems. Her debut collection, Coining A Wishing Tower, won the 2020 Broken River Prize and is due out with Platypus Press in 2022.

Raees’ prolific poetry is about the linguistic construction of the self, the failure of language to describe our minds adequately, our private selves, the self we create on the New York subway. To borrow Claudia Rankine’s phrase, her poetry meets you “when [we] are alone and too tired even to turn on any of our devices” and directs our attention inwards. Raees poetry recovers the complex depths and turns of our everyday consciousness, recreating anxieties, fears, and displacements in poetic time.

Her work, appearing in Gulf Coast, SAND, and The Fourth River (to name a few among many), traverses the ephemeral and private as she confronts a diasporic American landscape. She runs a marathon against God or struggles to summon the words to speak. Each poem presents a form that allows her to unlock multifarious aspects of herself. Struggling against its own existence, her poetry narrates an effortful attempt to remain present amid a time of panic, loss, and confusion.

Entangled with that serious edge, I detected that hopeful tone. Her questions never shy away from the harsh truth of existence. But, one senses that she believes in, that she actually imagines, a better reality.

Josh Wagner: What is a hybrid poem?

Ayesha Raees: I have always been drawn to multiplicity. In art school, I was taught to focus on one genre to the exclusion of all others. I was attracted to poetry’s versatility, but I also realized how connected it is to my lineage: my grandmother and my mother both dwelled in poetry. My great grandmother was illiterate, but my mother told me all these stories about how she was a poet. She used to sing ghazals while cooking dinner in the kitchen. She couldn't read or write, but she was still a poet in her community. When I started out, I decided that hybrid forms need to exist for hybrid people. Conventional modes of expression are just not compatible with marginalized communities and creatives. Being forced to choose just one form is impossible because I don’t really fit into a singular box. I cannot truly express myself in a sonnet unless I twist the sonnet to represent my hybridity. I’m always trying to explore how to make those creations jump off of the page––for anyone––and still be called poetry. 

JW: Part of this hybrid poetics is a desire to give expression to sensations and ideas that don’t quite map onto language. How do you find the language for the non-verbal?

AR: Exactly! That's why one poem can never do justice to a sentiment. Most of a writer’s work is basically the two or three themes they always return to. Their whole body of work becomes a singular work. It’s not that our work doesn’t have anything new to say. Rather, poets are trying to ask open questions and find answers. I don’t think that any one word or poem has been able to deal with my own queries and struggles with life and how to be as a hybrid person in the American landscape––in between the diaspora. Each one is a step in the right direction.

Nothing is ever complete. You can write a 1,000 poems by the time you die, but none of them could be considered complete. I think that is like a lifelong struggle of any creative to go back and edit and say something in a slightly different way.

JW: What are those questions you keep returning to?

AR: For many years, I struggled with the idea of choosing just one path. In my mind, I could only have one creative identity tied to my name. The pressure to choose one identity resulted in a lot of depression and digression. I ping-ponged between film and photography and poetry. I had such a deep love-hate relationship with poetry that I wanted to do anything else; I was considering doing an MBA, just to escape. Since I started writing more and reflecting on why I’m so obsessed with poetry, it has become the center of everything.

This is an ongoing struggle I have about my own identity and politics (which don’t always cohere) as a Pakistani Muslim woman. When I look back on my poetry, I see that my formal questions are tied to my political being. For example, why do I feel so unsettled in settlement? 

Through my poetry, I am able to find myself and ask about surviving as a political person, about the future, and about my writing practice. I don't care as much for fame or in the literary landscape as I do about staying attentive to my voice and what I want to say––however weird it is, however hybrid it is. As long as I’m able to stay true and attend to my practice, that's what is important to me as a poet. Everything else matters, but it comes second. 

JW: At first glance, your poetry is not explicitly political. Why turn to poetry as a form of political protest in 2021, a year of violence, pandemic, and aggression?

AR: I feel like poetry, as defined by the world at large, is limited. In practice, anything can be a poem. Everyone opens up their Notes app once in a while and writes words. You can choose to identify it as just a note, or as the makings of a poem. The power of poetry lies in the fact that it is precise, it is short, and it says more with less. In this technological world, where everything is so fast and people don't really have time to read a 4000 word manifesto, poetry is the perfect form for activism. 

I find poetry present in every single political landscape that we are in. Especially during the pandemic, I find poetry as a way of togetherness. In 2018, which seems like thousands of years ago, I hosted this poetry salon at the Asian American Writers Workshop where 15 Asian-identifying strangers created a single poem together. Against the individual notion of poetry, these 15 people built upon one another and found commonality in their identities. The center was a poem, but also what that poem held: a collective experience of living as hybrid identities, as Asian Americans, as othered. At the same time, we are American, but also never American enough because we don’t fulfill the convention category of “American.”

In my own poetry, I try to write through the lens of the personal which inevitably becomes political. I might be walking down the street in New York, and I'm having a bad day. But there is always an underlying othering and class system dynamic. Why am I feeling like a piece of shit, walking in Midtown? It’s because my landscape does not look like me. But, I'm not just a brown body. I have a much more personal side too. I love my music. I like to eat. I think a lot of activists, if they are colored or not a man, suffer from only having a political identity. That kind of image can be very painful because the activist is a human being.

JW: One thing I appreciate about your poetry is its refusal of wholeness as a means of capturing ephemeral experiences: “When the snow falls, I think of souls. Wispy. Fragmented. Temporal moments of architectural marveling growths. Giving in to heat and glow.” How do these occur in your own life? 

AR: Those moments come out of my fixation on singular aspects of the world around me. When I pause to allow myself to feel the feeling I’m having and get in touch with my body and soul. Why did I stop in the middle of this very busy New York intersection after buying groceries to admire the scene of falling snow? I try to take moments out of my daily routine to actually absorb that moment and realize its beauty. Life only happens in those very few moments over the course of  a day, week, or year. I’ve lived on the East Coast for seven years, so it’s not every day that I admire snow, or find that kind of meaning in that kind of nature. 

There’s a reason that the body or the soul is feeling a certain way, and then it’s up to you to find the trigger. For me, most of it is dissociation, these fragments where the mundane and routine becomes anything else. I am able to give attention to something bizarre that happened, even though that's bizarre: to somebody else, that’s just snow falling or a phone call. If I didn't give meaning to those things, it will just be a part of the routine. There's something that surges out of the mundane that becomes a strong moment in your perception. That's why I think my poems are so fragmented and full of images with a specific time, place, person, and character; it’s a way of processing an autobiographical way of existing.

JW: One particular moment of ephemerality comes in your photopoem, “Finding a God in a Hollowed City,” you draw this whirlwind on top of a building in the background. How do you incorporate these non-textual elements into your poetry?

AR: I made “Finding a God in a Hollowed  City” in 2018, and when I look at the series now, I am reminded that nothing is linear. It’s like a game; that series is about searching, discovering, and interrogating little moments of the senses that only make sense to the reader. In the whirlwind image, “Balancing on a Dirty Picture” there are two females smoking and just being in the foreground. The cityscape is towering over them, and they’re both acknowledging and ignoring it. There’s something happening in the background, and something happening in the foreground. The subconscious nature of that interplay is also found in the round form of the tornado. You’re caught up in the chaos, but also making sense of it and finding balance in the city.

That balance is a very intimate moment, navigating peaceful, beautiful, intimate, and friendly elements against the crazy aggression of the city. I wanted to give attention to that contrast. The tornado questions how you read. Once you read  then you’re able to read all of the other texts around you. In the end, even the tornado and the whole work is a kind of language. Even though it’s non-linear, you can still read single words––upwards or sideways. How do you read a whirlwind of language? Is it a series of ‘o’s or an image? If you're drawn to that little space, I think it's more a reflection of the reader and what they want to see. For me, it's both an ‘o’ and the absence of a word, what words can trigger inside of you. 

JW: How do you change when you look back on your work, especially with your long-term book project?

AR: Coining A Wishing Tower is about life and the afterlife. But, it deals with the question of what happens to us when we die. What is the meaning of death? Can we die several times in a lifetime, when we end one chapter and move forward to another chapter of our existence? And which memories stick with us? The book is hybrid too; it’s all prose poems told through the perspectives of real characters.

I finished the manuscript and revised it. I have so many drafts of this! The ones that the editors have right now is what I believed was the final version. But, with my editors’ help, I’m going through revision again. The editors mainly give me grammar and line edits––never word or artistic choices. Reading their edits, I couldn’t believe that this was the same manuscript that I had turned in because I felt like it could be better. That's where time and place and improving as a writer come in. After I turned it in, my practice changed, so what I thought was final is not that way anymore. I'm lucky that I have time to go through this first book process in such a luxurious way. I'm actually enjoying the process, because time is a gift in that way. 

I started making edits in a totally different document. I've made so many changes already that I'm realizing that this is going to be a really hard process. If you pick up a poem from five years ago, that's a reflection of that moment, of that you. It's not wrong, it's not right. Of course, it's gonna feel a little awkward, because that was five years ago.

I’m wondering if I should just acknowledge and give respect to that process that I called complete a year ago? Because the work is a reflection of that me. The idea of “better” is just a narrative; it’s just my idea of better in this moment which will continue to evolve. When it comes out, I think I’ll accept the work as complete. But even with my other poems, I wish I could go back and change word choices, line breaks, and images. I try not to read too deeply. Well, that’s impossible for me.