This is the eighth in a series of long-form interviews by Patron Makhosazana Xaba to be hosted on The JRB, which focus on contemporary collections by Black women and non-binary poets. The others can be read here: Maneo Refiloe Mohale, Katleho Kano Shoro, Sarah Lubala, vangile gantsho, danai mupotsa, Busisiwe Mahlangu, and Tariro Ndoro.
In opening up a space for wide-ranging, erudite and graceful conversations, Xaba aims to correct the misdeeds of the past by engaging black women and non-binary poets seriously on their ideas and on their work.
Two previous long-form interviews, with Mthunzikazi A Mbungwana on her isiXhosa volume Unam Wena, and with Athambile Masola on her debut collection Ilifa, were published in New Coin in 2022.
Makhosazana Xaba (MX): ‘Hope you enjoy these lines.’ Do you remember writing that when you signed my copy of your book ZIKR? Well, I can confirm that I enjoyed the lines and learned a lot from them, and in this conversation I will share some of the lessons. Let’s begin with the cover, which features a photograph that you took. I have read the story, but please share with the readers how you arrived at this as a cover of your debut collection.
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee (SIB): I do remember! I will make a confession here, I have a few stock dedications, but I never know which one I’ll feel inclined to write down until the person is in front of me. I am pleased that the work was well received. I love telling the story of that cover because it is in so many ways a metaphor for the work in its entirety. My publisher, Nick Mulgrew from uHlanga Press, asked me to send him a few images that could potentially make the cover. I looked through my archives and found a few abstract pieces I liked. He selected an image I took of a paper cut I’d once done. The design speaks to the repetition inherent in the act of Zikr (which, when translated, is a recurring meditative remembrance of the Almighty). Paper-cutting takes a fair amount of time and patience, as does poem-writing. And my photographing the piece in that particular way is akin to reflecting and engaging with the work. It’s so meta, if I say so myself!
MX: In 2020, ZIKR won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for debut poetry, congratulations! How did you learn about this win and how did you receive the award? Are there any specific unexpected events in your life that you attribute to ZIKR winning this prestigious prize?
SIB: Thank you! Nick sent me an email telling me the book had been shortlisted, along with other uHlanga writers (he’s a great publisher with keen eyes and ears). I didn’t expect that, let alone going on to win it. Of course, I was absolutely thrilled, and yet, still somewhat surprised that those poems resonated so much. It’s not that I don’t see the value in my work or the relevance of it, just that they are simple works that speak to my lived experience. I felt really humbled at the recognition.
I was thinking about specific events that could have led directly to the win. There was a kind of trajectory; if it weren’t for a friend telling me about a part-time creative writing MA, I would never have sent in an application, I’d have never done the work of bringing certain poems into the world, I’d have never submitted to journals, I’d have never gathered the courage to answer a publisher’s call for collections, and on and on and on. But even before that friend, if it weren’t for a teacher in standard one who said I wrote a good line, I’d have never been prompted to write and read more lines.
MX: ZIKR is a collection of forty-one poems, and was published in 2018. How would you summarise the six-year biography of ZIKR?
SIB: It’s been six years of trying for a second child but being content with how the first one is doing in the world.
MX: This response invites a follow-up question. I am curious about your journey of ‘trying’—how would you describe it? In my experience, for instance, there is an eleven-year gap between my second and third poetry collection. I realise, as I look back to those years, that I needed to focus on publishing in other genres. I still wrote poetry, but publishing was not the goal.
SIB: This makes me think back to the 2020 Tuin van Digters festival in Wellington. There was a session titled ‘Ingrid Jonker-Prys: Grendel, slot of sleutel (Latch, lock or key), which asked the question, does a prize like the Ingrid Jonker act as an encouragement or an obstacle for debut writers? Does it open or close doors? I hope I’m correct in my recollection (Covid Brain did us all a dirty), but in a brief conversation with the writer Ronel de Goede, we spoke about how she hasn’t put out another collection since winning the Eugène Marais Prize (I’m not sure if that has changed since then). I wonder now if I’ve put myself into restraints. There’s always the fear that the new work won’t be good enough, a sense of ‘having peaked’. I have been trying, in the sense that one must always write, because I know that when I don’t, I am at my most miserable. I’ve been working on a fiction project intermittently. It is still very far from complete. At this point, I could probably put out a collection of half-starts and hiccups.
MX: The first lesson I received from your book was on the meaning of ZIKR: ‘the remembrance of God’, as you share in the glossary. Could you share your process of arriving at this title?
SIB: The initial title I had in mind was, ‘Camphored Zikr, Tasbeeh Tongue’. It’s a line taken from the poem ‘Boxing Day’ (included in the collection). Nick felt it read a bit long and settled on ZIKR. I liked how one word encapsulated the entire collection, for these were repetitions, recollections, remembrances. I did have some concerns that it would come across as a kind of religious tract, but I also knew that there would be a curiosity around the title that would lead to people wanting to pick it up.
MX: On your website, ‘Poems, Pictures and Prose’, you say you are ‘a food photographer by calling’. What made you arrive at understanding food photography as your calling?
SIB: Simply, it was the marrying of two passions; photography and food, getting to have your cake and eat it (forgive me). Food is so loaded; culturally, socially, politically, it’s the one true unifier and divisor (I think of how certain colonisers lay claim to cuisines as their own). I’m also interested in our approaches to food from a biological and lifestyle perspective. As someone who’s only recently embraced a more wholesome and sustainable way of eating, I am fascinated by the moral and value judgements we place on the things we put into our mouths. I feel compelled to document these things. And in the right light, all food is photogenic. It’s easier to shoot an apple in the shadows than it is to write a poem about that supermarket-bought apple with one leaf attached to its stem, as if it’s holding on to the memory of what it was like in the orchard.
MX: The dance between photography and poetry is a beautiful one, I imagine. Looking at the images on your website really whet my appetite. How would you describe this dance between photography and poetry. Do you ever write poems inspired by your and others’ photography?
SIB: I value good imagery and how it can impact mood and behaviour. And so I strive to create good imagery, textually and visually. They’re so interconnected for me. It’s part of my writing process to assign tangible things to an abstract feeling—kind of like creating an A is for Apple picture reference book in my head. I have written a poem (or rather part of a poem) about a photograph. In ‘I, the Divine’, I talk about shaping paper clips to form figures that look like they’re in prayer. I shot the image first. The words came later. I am keen on exploring more ekphrastic poetry, it’s a great way to prompt you when you’re feeling a bit stuck to create.
MX: Oh yes, I remember reading that stanza and being pleasantly surprised by the images and the message they delivered. Let us insert it here:
I take the wire from three paper clips
and shape them to look like
abstract forms in prayer.
As their pliancy moulds
into poses of submission,
so I sculpt the acceptance
of my form.
SIB: I love how art informs art informs life informs art. It’s a beautiful interplay.
MX: You mention your friends in the Acknowledgements of the book: ‘for sharing, commenting on, liking and cheerleading every single piece I’ve ever put out there’. I am curious about the comments that led you to write poems differently.
SIB: I can’t recall specific comments, but the feedback I received on my work during the peer review sessions that formed part of my MA in creative writing was really valuable. I was able to edit the work in a way that made its meaning more impactful without losing the strength of my intent. Once, a teacher made the comment that he just didn’t ‘get the poem’. Of course, my first reaction was to go find a bucket to dissolve into, but I soon realised I had to unpack his statement. What was it about the work that he didn’t get? Had I fallen into a poetry trope where everything suburban was underpinned by the call of the hadeda (a kind of equivalent to Africa and acacias)? Was I so enamoured by an image that I’d lost what I was trying to make it represent? In the end, I packed the poem away for a little while and used some of its lines elsewhere.
MX: It is not surprising to see so much food, spices and drinks in a collection by a food photographer. Here is the list in alphabetical sequence: ant (eaten like food in the poem ‘Comings of age’) banana, beans, biryani, biscuits (specifically muskaana biscuits, ‘hot from the oven’), caramel, cloves, croutons, dates, fishcakes, inkomazi (with sugar), jam, omelette (egg white), onions, oyster, pilchards (canned), pumpkin, red velvet, rosewater, soup, tea and watermelon. Commentators have pointed out that your poems take on the ordinariness of life. I enjoyed that too. Please write a poem about the labour of planning or preparing a meal, including the role of recipes.
SIB:
Mise en place
Don’t ask my mother for recipes
you will be writing down
the sound butter makes
measures of waves of hand
a pinch of the air some
puréed tomato don’t ever forget
cumin and lots of garlic and lemon juice
you’ll know when you know
how can anyone tell you how
to make something out of what you’re given
that’s the family secret
in the Indian Delights there’s a recipe
for biryani that’ll feed 800 people.
MX: I came across some of your published articles on your website, under the section ‘Commissioned Writing’, while I was looking for commissioned poetry, and I enjoyed reading them. Have you ever been commissioned to write poetry?
SIB: Does writing poems for your nieces’ and little cousins’ homework count? I enjoy that, because I get to be a little silly and young-hearted. I once offered love letter-writing services in primary school, but no one ever took me up on that. I ended up selling stickers instead. So no, I’ve never been commissioned to write poetry. I wouldn’t reject the opportunity, unless the brief is too heavily dictated and I have no latitude to explore as I wish. I also don’t think I’d write for politicians or brands, they have speech writers and copywriters for that.
MX: ZIKR’s opening poem, ‘My grandmother breaks her hip’, is so impactful. I found myself reading it out loud just so I could hear it. That fourth line of the first stanza, ‘We give her pills for our pain’, lives with me. You have a way with painful topics, your writing is like an analgesic. Are you deliberate about giving pain a soft landing?
SIB: I think it’s easier to write pain heavily, because that is what pain is—it is pressing and it dominates. I am deliberate about being light, perhaps it is a coping mechanism, a kind of therapy. But I am softening the blow without stripping it of its significance.
MX: I also read aloud the second poem, ‘My father finds a tumour’, for a different reason: the marriage of humour and pain—this meeting point. The second line in the second stanza: ‘So on went the pumpkin and the chemotherapy.’ The humour in your work is gentle and sometimes unexpected. I am curious about how intentional you are with it, because I know that sometimes life presents humour to us, and we can choose to embrace it.
SIB: If we don’t laugh, we cry, right? Sometimes, I’m not that intentional. Perhaps it’s a quirk I’ve developed. I know it helps me get through the days. I remember something the late Chris van Wyk said at an event at Wits, when someone asked how he could write such a warm, almost happy book set during apartheid while JM Coetzee wrote so differently, and he said, ‘We definitely weren’t happy because of it, we had to be happy despite it.’
MX: The poem ‘I cannot eat dates without wondering’ blessed me with another lesson. I approached a friend, Najibha Deshmukh, and sent her the poem asking for an explanation of this Muslim funeral ritual. After explaining it all, Najibha said reading the poem ‘was so surreal… you know, this is us’. She was very excited, and went on to explain how the practice has evolved over time. And now I fully understand and embrace the intensity of these closing lines:
And those date pits we saved
to tally our missives to the dead, and to God,
return to their plastic buckets.
Najibha’s response speaks to the lines in the poem ‘Boxing Day’:
I once told someone when I write
it’s not mine any more.
How do you deal with feedback from readers that may be far removed (sometimes ridiculously so) from the message or intentions of your poems?
SIB: You just have to learn to let go. Develop that skin. This is the maxim that guides all my interactions: ‘I hold no dominion over your actions. I am only sovereign to myself.’ Once I’ve written something and put it out, it separates from me. I give up control. It just makes life so much easier to navigate.
MX: The poem ‘Kind regards’ makes me laugh each time I read it. What inspired it?
SIB: Death. It informs so much of my work. I feel very much acquainted, having lost so many close to me over this lifetime. Some people die and they leave us grappling with the tensions of their legacy. In this one instance, I just didn’t know how to parse the bereavement, and this poem happened. It gave me a much-needed pause.
MX: When I first read ZIKR, ‘In this soft caramel season’ found a home in my heart. Each time I returned to the book, the poem welcomed me with its hush, every word a glisten.
we are in the thick of love.
Under secrets held by the rain, atop murmuring moss,
my meaty tongue curls under your watch. I pull
kitten skin from your neck, lick must from your mouth—
Everything a glisten, everywhere a growl.
Listen for it: the shift, the clumping earth,
the slack of trees, the tense of muscle.
These softly evocative words pulse with an admirable, gentle rhythm that called me to listen. Surprisingly, with some readings the punctuation marks spoke louder than the words. What was your process of writing this poem?
SIB: Interestingly, I used a free association exercise to help me craft this poem. I had an online generator issue random words and I linked them to form a somewhat coherent text with a theme that developed as the first sentences emerged. The whole poem hinged on the line ‘we are in the thick of love’. It’s a little more abstract than what I’m accustomed to, but I loved the sheer texture of it. The first draft didn’t have much punctuation. I added that in the edits to enhance the rhythm and mood of the piece.
MX: ‘Whenever I hear people talk about compromise in marriage, I think about mushrooms.’ This line opens the essay ‘Ways to the Heart: Food in Our Marriage’ in the book Saffron: A Collection of Personal Narratives by Muslim Women. Please write a poem on your love for mushrooms.
SIB:
I like a fun guy
I feel wolfish
ungoverned by a moon
I seek the meek
I will swallow the earth
coat my throat with a rich film
I feel for something meaty
for teeth to gnash bloodless
liquored and savoury
My mouth wants the forest
and all of its drippings
the wood and the wet beneath
each rock and rotting log
gamy musk skittering, something alive
with shiny eyes blinking through the trees
I find my prey wearing pretty names
maitake puffball
porcini morel
enoki lion’s mane
shiitake chanterelle
portobello oyster
chicken of the woods
MX: Humour, again! People seem to be drawn to the humour in your poetry. I like how softly and unexpectedly it lands inside a poem. Take us through your intentionality in writing in such subtly humorous and playful ways. Or is it just who you are?
SIB: It’s my personality. I love puns, dirty jokes and word games. If you’re into the notion of stars and planets aligning at our births to provide a blueprint of our personhood, then it’s the Gemini Sun, Mars and Mercury in me. Although I also tend to lament that I write too many sad poems, and have made more than a few friends cry at my readings. But I like levity as much as I do brevity. I enjoy reading poets like Billy Collins and I try to channel some of that light hand in my writing.
MX: I was first introduced to Billy Collins by a friend, who gave me their 2001 collection Sailing Alone Around the Room, and then about two years later another friend gave me their 2005 collection The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. I enjoy just how gentle Collins’s poetry is. Which poems of his are most memorable to you?
SIB: There is, as you say, a remarkable gentleness in his poems, and such keen observation. ‘Aimless Love’ is a favourite; the soft romance, that little bit of silliness and self-deprecation, the tinge of melancholy, I always smile when I read it. Also ‘I Go Back to the House for a Book’, I am always intrigued by how the small choices we make can sometimes be the catalysts for bigger things down the line.
MX: Oh no, those two poems are not in my two Collins collections. I will look for them. I remember being pleasantly surprised by the poem ‘The Trouble with Poetry’, it resonated with me.
In an interview once, you made the point that ‘poetry builds bridges’. Whose poetry has built a bridge for you? Can you share three examples and describe the type of bridge that each poem built?
SIB: I mentioned Billy Collins. His poem ‘Litany’ is a charming look at love and building lives together, it speaks to my own sense of comfort in choosing a partner to share in the sweetness of domesticity.
Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ informed my poem ‘The good life’. That bridge was the performance of womanhood and its expectations.
I’ve been reading some Fatimah Asghar recently. I can relate to the sense of disconnection and identity-making that comes from being part of a diaspora.
MX: In another interview, you talked about your aesthetic, saying that you strive for a balance between poetry that can be digested easily without being simplistic. Are there instances where you struggled to achieve this? Did any of them end up in ZIKR?
SIB: Too many, and they’re all still sitting in drafts. I revisit them every once in a while, to prune a word or add a whole sentence. I was lucky with ZIKR in that the initial draft was almost like a ‘best of’ compilation that just needed some shuffling of the playlist.
MX: You describe yourself as a ‘visual raconteur; excited by what makes an everyday extraordinary’ Which poems in ZIKR would you say make the everyday extraordinary?
SIB: I’d love to say all of them! I think the ones with food themes are successful, of course, that is my bias.
MX: How do you participate in the Gauteng poetry scene?
SIB: Pre-Covid, I would attend the poetry readings in Maboneng and Melville to listen (I’m not much of a performance poet). I’m a bit out of touch now, I don’t know where the cool places are any more.
MX: The poems ‘We are building your house’, ‘Blighted ovum’, ‘After a miscarriage’, ‘My world today’, ‘Our house is not child-friendly’, and ‘Ectopic’ reminded me of Malika Ndlovu’s poetic memoir Invisible Earthquake: A Woman’s Journal Through Still Birth. It excites me to no end that these topics are continuing to show up in poetry. These poems are bridge-builders for such experiences. I imagine that women have given you feedback. Are there a few examples you can share?
SIB: Yes. I’ve had people email and DM me about how they feel less lonely (and more seen) after reading those specific poems. It also surprises me how common PCOS is as a diagnosis. I know so many writers and readers living with it. In writing these poems, I am placing myself in this collective, and it helps make my own experiences more manageable.
MX: The poem ‘I, the divine’, which has the dedication ‘after Rabih Alameddine’, ends with the words:
It is a godly act
to bend
I am not sure why this line has stayed with me. I keep seeing images of large groups of men on their knees bending in unison each time I return to the poem. I suppose that’s what good writing does: it evokes concrete images. I didn’t know Rabih Alameddine, thank you for this introduction.
SIB: The title of that poem is taken directly from his work I, The Divine, a novel written entirely in first chapters as the protagonist attempts to write their memoirs, only getting as far as the openings each time. I found that concept so novel. A whole life was told that way. And when you talk about images, I love the idea of one image being enough to convey all meaning. One day, with enough writing and life behind me, I’d like to write one phrase, of even just two words, that will tell you everything you need to know about that one thing.
MX: ‘ZIKR is a testament to poetic restraint, steady hands, and gentle eyes—three rare and powerful things in these times.’ Your publisher, Nick Mulgrew, wrote this. Can you think of a poet whose writing you could describe by listing their attributes and use those final words for: ‘three rare and powerful things in these times’?
SIB: ‘Refaat Alareer: the purest love of life, unwavering hope, a way of centring humanity in a time of dehumanisation—three rare and powerful things in these times.’
MX: Refaat Alareer, another new name. Thank you, I will go searching. The poem ‘Secret’ made me so curious, yet I realise I cannot ask a question about it because it is a secret. So, I will share the poignant final two lines of the first stanza and the final two-line stanza:
But there is always the struggle of clay expanding in moist conditions.
What doesn’t slip down the throat swells up in the mouth.
It wasn’t our shame to carry in our fists.
It was the monster’s, from the caffee we never went back to.
SIB: In writing that, I did tell a bit. But then again, all poetry is confession. It’s only a secret when it’s between you, me, the Devil and God. And even in that, there are too many participants.
MX: You did your MA in creative writing at Rhodes University. What unforgettable lessons did you take away from that experience?
SIB: Apart from the great connections and friendships I made with the other participants and our supervisors—especially my supervisor Robert Berold, whose insight truly helped guide my approach to my work—I really appreciated learning just how key editing is to writing poetry. I know it may seem an obvious part of the process, but before the MA, my writing was unschooled. It felt a bit too loose, like clothes that needed tailoring. I would’ve continued wearing blazers that drooped at the shoulders had it not been for the MA, and I doubt ZIKR would’ve been. I also learnt how to receive criticism for what it is; to take what’s useful and to discard anything that changes the spirit of the work. It’s important to recognise when someone is criticising based on their own aesthetic and, counter to that, to be cognisant of my own tastes as a reader.
MX: When I learned that you grew up in the small town of Azaadville, my brain started jumping backwards (Ahmed Timol’s death), forwards (Chris van Wyk’s poem ‘In Detention’) and sideways (what are the connections?), as I tried to recall what I knew of Azaadville. So, I asked Google for help. Let us approach the end with you writing a poem that has ‘Azaadville’ in the title.
SIB:
There are two roads out of Azaadville
You know one small town to know all small towns.
Four mosques. A church. Two temples.
If you know one God, you know all God and Gods.
There are two roads out of this place.
One goes farther west, the other east and bends to the north.
You have to leave just before the sun to miss traffic.
Sometimes you leave to miss it all.
Four muezzins at dusk.
Rollerblading in the middle of the road where it’s the smoothest.
Finding rain-frilled notebooks in the alley behind Ruwaida’s Salon
filled with cursive lines about boys with brown eyes, boys with blue.
Safiyya pulling up on a Friday night, with twenty rand petrol
enough to spin between the old area and the new.
Which aunty can really see us in the dark.
Windows all the way down, smoke ringing, careful to ash outside.
Ashanti and Ja Rule loud on the mix cd. We switch it off
passing the mosque and the cemetery, remembering how
the boys in this town tend to die in car accidents.
MX: Oh ‘Azaadville’! Thank you. As a way of exiting this interview, please share a definition of poetry that resonates with you and let us know whose it is. And lastly, please share your own definition of poetry.
SIB: I read that Leonard Cohen said, ‘Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.’ I like the idea that the words we commit to the page are a kind of witness, even if it is a somewhat unreliable one. Also, this notion of a life burnt well, come what may, it’s all material. There’s something very stoic, pragmatic and comforting in that.
Poetry has always been a way for me to process life, a kind of mechanism to parse a lived reality, especially when it proves too unwieldy for conventional therapies.
MX: Thank you for taking time to engage in this conversation.
~~~
- Makhosazana Xaba is a Patron. Xaba is an author, translator, and poet. She has written four poetry collections, these hands, Tongues of their Mothers, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water and The Art of Waiting for Tales. Her debut short story collection, Running and other stories, was a joint winner of the 2014 South African Literary Awards and Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Xaba has edited several books, including Our Word, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2015, Queer Africa: Selected Stories (with Karen Martin) and Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home (with Athambile Masola). Her latest book is Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, an isiZulu translation of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
