I really enjoy writing as testaments to places: A Conversation with Maya Salameh

Editor’s note: you can find the audio conversation between Maya and Summer here.

Maya is a poet who I feel I’ve always been circling. I’ve felt that subtle spark of kinship with nearly every Arab American poet I’ve had the pleasure of encountering; whether it be distant and strange as I sit in the audience at a reading and a stranger with a familiar name steps up to the mic, the sense of we should be aligned, right?; or the instant bestfriendification of two writers seeking community, that spark grows and grows as you learn more about each other outside of that regional affinity; or a spark that fizzles, because proximity isn’t always community. My interest in Maya’s work was furthered by layers and layers of regional affinity; shami, shami Christians, shami Christians from California, shami Christians from Southern California who went to college in the Bay Area, both coming up in spoken word/slam spaces; there are cities across this state that have housed both of us and our writing. I thought about these affinities, these localities, these sparks of connection so often as I made my way through Maya’s debut full-length collection. The winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan poetry prize, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave is a book of cities; it is a book of friendship; it is a book of growing into yourself. The achievement of this book is in its ability to hold so much yet remain playful; Maya balances this abundance through invented forms, epigraphs that help the reader locate a political center, and just plainly really fucking good poems. They are alive on the page, accessible in language but so intricate they beg to be returned to. [delete after reading] We have a link for purchase available in the interview description. Thank you for listening! You can do just that by purchasing a copy here. 

SUMMER FARAH: To start off, I loved this book. You know, I’ve read all the books in the Etel Adnan series. I’m a big fan of it and I look forward to it every year. 
MAYA SALAMEH: Me too.

It’s special and it’s important! I was really excited to see you join this series because I think having spoken word backgrounds is something that’s really special, especially thinking about the series starting with Jess Rizkallah. And in a lot of ways, I feel like she started such an important trend in Arab American and SWANA poetry. It feels like good legacy-building and the series feels really strong. I’m really happy to see your book join it!
Thank you.

So, thinking of the series, I was so excited to see the foreword by Mohja Kahf, and I was wondering how that came about and what those conversations were like with Fady and Hayan? 
It was really cool to work with Fady and Hayan for that first part of going through the book and figuring out the way I wanted the co llection to feel. The collection actually went through a good amount of reordering because I wanted it to feel like a thorough and cohesive body of work. And so some of the poems ended up singing better being in closer neighborhoods with other ones, so I moved a lot of them around. I had, I think, two or three quotes from Mohja Kahf and a poem inspired by her collection, so they ended up saying, you know, “Would you want her to write your foreword?” And I was like, “Um, yes! I would love for her to write my foreword!” So they reached out to her, and all credit for that goes to Fady and Hayan because I didn’t even, like, conceptualize that she would be interested or excited about doing it. And it was really cool to get to talk to her and have my work get read by her, too.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful introduction. I think there’s a part that, like, made me cry. “Maya, your voice is in my clothes now. Teach me the algorithms of diaspora and write what the Earth will look like in the decades after my death.” My God! How beautiful that is!
It made me so happy! 

So I guess that brings me to my next question. I am so interested in your relationship to extraneous material like epigraphs and footnotes and images. Could you talk a little about the choice to include those things alongside the poems and how they feel like poems to you?
Yeah, I think I was definitely inspired putting this collection together by Vanessa Villarreal’s insane, amazing, gorgeous collection, Beast Meridian. And, especially as a former psychology student, the way that she explored, like… I think a lot of social science fields are very interested in diversity for multiple reasons and histories. And the way they approach studies of, for instance, I think she cited a study of educational outcomes and wellbeing among Latinx adolescents or something. And although that in itself is a research finding and an addition to science, it’s also a statement about the ways we are seeking to measure people in different ways (psychologically, technologically, spiritually). I'm especially interested in the way that academic writing can sometimes euphemize very real experiences of pain. T hese visceral traumas become parts of clinical  diagnostic criteria or case studies. When we use other words to describe blood and sweat and hurt, it can be useful, but oftentimes it can be a little insidious. I think I’m also thinking a lot about Solmaz Sharif’s work and the way she explored, you know, when we say “drone strike,” when we say “casualties,” or “bystander,” or “consequences,” we mean bodies breaking and people’s lives. When I think about opening up less traditional epigraph sourcings to being part of my poetry dictionary and lexicon, I think that breaks down the unassailability of science. Or what we deem as the unassailability of science and technology, that they are open sources of knowledge that can’t be commodified or made pedestrian by involvement in poetry. Which, you know, is the land of feelings, and therefore, isn’t as “scientifically valid,” maybe. I think moving away from that Western ontology of knowledge and that tyranny of knowing and measuring… I don’t know, I really enjoy defiling science, sometimes.

That’s incredible, my goodness. I would love to know more about your science background and the spaces that you’ve been in and pushed against.
So, I just graduated with my B.A. in Psychology and my Master’s in Sociology, and I’ve had a good amount of academic training in my time in university and in high school. I found it very interesting, in college, the way people talked about their academic experiences, even coming into college. I went to Stanford which is a very “CS-y school,” and I think it was so interesting, you know, especially because so many of my classmates came from pretty fancy private schools where they received extensive certifiable training and learning that they were proud of. And I was coming from, I mean, I went to an IB school but it felt like public school.

But more normal.
Yeah, and it came with all the resource constraints and frustrations and lack of mentorship or guidance to college. And so it felt like a lot of my learning in high school was self-directed, especially because I was curious about things that it felt like not a lot of people around me were curious about or that there just weren’t textbooks written about. I remember being in the seventh grade and being like, [searching on computer] “Arab American Poetry.” Just reading stuff that I could find because I wanted to know what other people thought about things, like me. Yeah, so when I went to college and learned all the vocabulary of“intersectionality,” and “intergenerational trauma” and what have you, these were just vocabularies for things I had already lived. So, although it’s useful to have words for it and to get clinical or scientific or collegial validation about those words and to have a recognizable vocabulary for them, it felt like I already had a vocabulary for my experiences in my body and in all four of the languages I have made homes in. So, I think I feel very grateful to my education, especially my college education, for giving me a better grasp of theory and words and terms. And I also remain equally as proud of the education I made for myself and that I continue to fashion for myself. 

Yeah, that’s wonderful. You use a lot of language like, “making a home for yourself,” or you called sections in the book “neighborhoods,” and then the cover is topography. I’m so interested in the cities that shaped this book. We share a few, like San Diego and the Bay Area, things like that, but I would love to hear more about your relationship to space and cities and where are you when you are writing these poems?
I love that question, thank you. So, some of the main, kind of, cities and daughters of my writing, maybe mothers of my writing, relatives, cousins, are San Diego, of course, my hometown. Stanford and Palo Alto, as cursed of an environment and gentrified as it may be. I spent a summer in Boston for a little bit. Not even a summer, like three weeks. But for some reason, I feel a deep kinship with that place because it was at a really important juncture in my life. Damascus and Trablos, obviously. And although those are relationships mediated by time and distance, I still feel those cities in my blood. Of course, there is all the classic diaspora angst about “maybe California is my only true country,” and I try to lean as much as I can to like, not being an annoying diaspora poet and claiming things that maybe I shouldn’t claim. But I think I do still have a relation and a love for the cities of my parents’ birth. Yeah, I think those are really the main cities I feel especially drawn to at this point in my life and especially I’ve lived in important junctures at. I wrote the majority of the book at Stanford during quarantine, actually. Pretty much between March and September of 2020, like, it was just a very quiet period. It felt like I had all this time, like, the luxury of time, finally. And like, no noise. To sit down and do my little online classes, it was a very low movement life. As it is still. But do my classes, and then from 7pm to 11pm, I would just be screwing around on the Google Doc. But it was fun! It felt like travel. I think in my poems… Because I grew up witnessing the Syrian War on television and going to sleep wondering—you know, I watched bodies that looked like mine pile up on T.V. and not just from the Syrian conflict. There was the Iraqi conflict, there was just conflict. I remember being a child and wondering, “Hmm, I wonder how many Syrian people died today.” And I remember that being such a visceral knowledge in my body. I remember, when I began to write, wanting to write to get away and to come home. And although those are oxymoronic, I think it felt like if I could put some of those cities and those memories to paper, that they wouldn’t be denied. Or they couldn’t be forgotten. And, you know, everyone writes to fight forgetting. I guess I really enjoy writing as testaments to places. I don’t think my writing has to be The Statement on whatever that city is, or that it even knows anything about that city. But it’s a testament to my living of the city at that point. And for that, it feels like a small artifact and it can only be precious to me, and that’s fine, you know?

I resonate with that so much. You know, I have a similar relationship to California, of, like, this is my state and I feel weird about that in a lot of ways because I’m a settler here. But it’s the climate, it’s the mediterranean, the fruits that our parents had growing up can grow here. And it feels like home up and down the coast of it, and then there’s that extra layer of the recreated violences of me being here watching people back home, all of that. So I totally feel that. 
Yeah, and with the settler piece, I think a lot about, like, how do we cope? Especially wanting to move towards pro-Indigenous and pro-Black movements in a country founded on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence, while also being like, my family didn’t come here on the Mayflower, and we didn’t really want to be here either. We’re kind of here because of America, but there’s still work to be done.”

It is really interesting and every month that I learn more and more about present Arab-American history in this country and the longevity of it, it’s more elucidating. I feel more secure in the sense of - there is a responsibility to give back to the land that we’re on, you know? The more implications you learn, the more you’re like, “Yeah, yeah. We’re fucked up.” So I wanted to ask about form. Your range is crazy! Like, oh my goodness.
Thank you!

I had seen your Punnett Square poems and I’d seen some of the algorithm poems, and you know, the title of the book itself I was very much like, “Alright, yeah, this is gonna be kinda weird, I’m excited for it.” I was so impressed with your prose poems, as well. And you just have such incredible control over form and language. Everything feels so earned and exciting. I would love to hear about your relationship to form, because, I mean, you’ve created forms, and what that process is like, what it feels like, what precedents are you pulling from? 
I appreciate the mention of the prose poems. The prose poems, specifically, the biggest shout-out is to Khadijah Queen because her brain is so juicy and crazy. And I remain obsessed with I’m So Fine. I really enjoyed Black Peculiar as well, but I think I’m So Fine is probably one of my all time favorite poetry books. And the way that she controls breath, spacing, and that deep, visceral, womanly knowledge of the body—or like the enforced and surveilled knowledge of the body. And the constant repetition of, “Here’s something that happened to me, and I was wearing this, and my sister was wearing this.” Because there’s straight consequences to the innocuous, or supposedly innocuous phrase, “And I was wearing this.” I think something about that is so heartbreaking and true, that it really informed my own prose pieces in the book. Especially as I thought about the ways in which my body has been surveilled across cities and places. In terms of other forms, I think from a really young age I’ve loved, like, tearing at stuff. Or being like, “This is just a square right now. But what else could it be?” And I remember an early teacher of mine, and I had formatted something in a weird, fucked up way for no reason, and he was like, “Why did you do this?” and I was like, “I don’t know!” And in some of the forms, especially more of the square forms, the Punnett Square and logarithm fourteen, also a kinda boxy one, that was part of my interest in measurement and shape, and the way that, again, clinical and measuring urges, and when we want to talk about violence in a validable and headlinable way. How do those formatting shapes, the length of an article, how does that constrain the experience of pain or the summation of pain? Also, the Punnett Square thing, I don’t remember how it came to me, but I was thinking a lot about how I’m thoroughly not a STEM girlie, but I remain very interested in their forms. One of my best friends was a computer science major, and I took the very least of computer science, the most easy computer science class I could possibly take, because it’s not exactly one of my strengths. But it’s so interesting to me that they literally call C++ and Java and Python languages because they literally are languages that you can learn. And something about that is really interesting. And being able to go into my Studio Code and type some random stuff and something else comes out, that is literally a generative form. Something about that feels very tangible and mechanical. The algorithm is a computer’s most vulnerable state, that’s literally the computer’s entrails, it’s beneath its skin. And when we think about computers and our smartphones, we think of them as invincible devices, but the algorithm is literally pointing you to the fact that actually they are just bodies with faults and they need repair just like ours. So when we think about these devices that are watching over us, collecting all our health data, collecting our sad little notes app poems, they also have organs. And something about that is, I think, very intimate, and revelatory, and I think, hopefully, even a little destabilizing to the techno-industrial regime we enter and live in. 

That’s amazing. Okay, so, I didn’t realize you didn’t have a firm STEM background. I did, like, one computer science class and it was, you know, havoc on my soul and my body and my life, but I was so invested in the idea of recursion, which comes up in a few of your poems as well. And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s the poets’ code, recursion.”
Because something about that is so… We love repetition in poems and that’s literally the computer repeating itself. 

Yeah, it’s so interesting. Like, the repetition towards achievement? Oh, it’s crazy. 
Mhmm, there were points where I would just be like [imitates searching], “Computer vocabulary. What the fuck is a loop?” Because sometimes I would just hear words and be like, “That is so delicious.” Like, I had a friend in pre-med and the word “thoracotomy” is like a  throat-opening surgery. But I’m like, “What is that word?” 

That’s awesome. I would love to hear about your creative community in terms of, you know, like, straight up poets and artists, but also friends that you share work with and the generative conversations you have. 
My very first, any kind of poetry community was my sister. My younger sister, Nina, she’s two years younger than me, and you know, when I was young and writing these little rhyming couplets or whatever I thought was hot back then, she would sit through and listen to me for an hour or two. And she would laugh at me and she would be like, “You’re corny,” or whatever, but she was sitting there and witnessing my work. And being a ten-year-old kid with no real concept of what poetry could/should be, that was really valuable. And even now, if I’m not sure about something, you know a sister will always give you honest, ruthless feedback. That’s why I send her my Instagram pictures before I post them, and that’s why I send her my poems, because she’ll tell me the truth. In terms of intentional poetry community and other poets that I love talking to, I’ve been really lucky at Stanford to be involved with the Spoken Word Collective, which is like our poetry club at school. Keith Wilson has also been, I met him in high school through a mentorship program, and he’s still someone I can just text random, awkward, professional development questions, like, “How do you promote a book? How do you write an artist bio?” Because no one really tells you that stuff.

No.
No! In terms of my civilian, non-poet friends, I have a lot of people who I feel really lucky to share work with. Sometimes I think non-poets will be like, “It’s just good! Please don’t ask me any more, I don’t know! I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like!” But I find that, especially because, somehow, a lot of my friends are like, STEM-y—I mean, I have STEM-y and artsy friends, whatever. But a lot of being able to talk to my STEM-y friends, supposedly more scientific people, about poems and realizing that a lot of people have secret poets in them. I was talking to a friend of mine and she was like, “Maybe your body is your country.” And I was like, “What did you say to me? What?” Especially Huong Nguyen, my best friend from college, is a C.S. major and they were especially the ones that I would be like, “Does this, like, look kinda like something, like kind of a code? Or did I just completely make that up?” And being able to send them just weird little sad prose blocks and be like, “I don’t know what this is, but I wrote it, here you go.” They were like, “No, like, this makes sense. I get it. Me too.” Something about that feels really precious. I also feel lucky to be in dialogue with artists across mediums. My best friend Victoria Chiek is a singer as well as a writer, and her singing, I would say, is a big inspiration of mine, you know? The way she puts… Like I can see and feel her whole story just in a cover of an Ariana Grande song. It’s not just an Ariana Grande song anymore in her hands, you know? Another friend of mine, Benny, is a mixed media artist and they also once made a zine with prose poetry, kind of, and it was one of the most beautiful collections I’ve read. And this was their first official writing project, and I was like, “Where have you been hiding this?” So I really enjoy getting surprised by my friends, not just other poets or other different medium artists, but just being informed by my friends and citing my friends.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that with me. I can feel so much of that warmth in your book. Something that I think is… You really nail this excellent tone of warm and playful, but there is the kind of serious undercurrent. There is bodily pain, there is emotional pain, and I think there’s this really great, I don’t know, relief for the reader, and it feels very intimate. It makes it an easy book to kind of, like, sit with in one sitting but want to go back to because of the kind of complexities that exist, and ugh it’s wonderful. And one of the things that really drives that for me, I love a weird long title, and so I would love to hear about, just, I don’t know, crafting titles. 
Thank you. And I definitely wanna shout out Hanif Abdurraqib for his amazing title-brain! I just think the way he packs an entire little mini story, or like pregame story, in the title and then you enter the poem, yeah, genius. But in terms of the way I kind of approach title crafting, it’s kind of like a motley process. I have, like, this Google Doc and if I think of something, like, “Only When I’m Starving,” and I’m like, “That’s gonna go somewhere!” And I’ll just put it at the bottom of the doc under a title section. I love organizing Google Docs. I’m a Virgo. So I have, like, a title section, a random quotes section. Sometimes I’ll be watching even a Marvel movie, sometimes they be saying deep shit, and I’ll put it down and that’s a quote—maybe I’ll want to use it for something. And then, on the top of that, is the, “random things that I just said.” Like a line or two stanzas. Every so often, I’ll be like, “I wonder what Frankenstein I’m trying to make today.” Sometimes the title will bring on a poem, too. But I don’t know if I’ve always been  a, “sit down and just produce a poem” writer. 

Yeah.
I really believe in texting myself, because I will forget. I especially love being informed by my environment, too, in terms of titles. I’m sure you’ll find some random shit at a grocery store, and it’s like, phrased super eloquently for no reason. And I like that absurdity. I try to make my poems as honest as they can be, and I think part of that is being honest about pain, and another part of that is being honest about playfulness.

What are you hoping for with the book, or just anything else that you would really love people to know about it? 
I wrote this book for and about Arab girls and all the other mislanguaged girls who grew up like me. And I really hope that someone who reads this finds, hopefully, some familiarity, a little bit of home, and also permission to play and to try. And to make a poem that someone could be afraid of, because that’s probably a very lovely poem.

Awesome! Okay, I would love if you could read a poem for us to close out. 
Yeah!

Would you read “Bronchitis is a Beautiful Name for a Girl”?
Definitely. Alright. This is, “Bronchitis is a Beautiful Name for a Girl.” 

California is kindling again. it’s been six brush fires & I’m nobody’s daughter,
calculating venials on the hood of a Buick. my brother tugs his sleeves & his

lungs stream. we scratch the secondhand Commodores album & he smiles
mundane & lovely like a grocery list, nail polish carabiner Advil fruit. I’m calling

because the city is filled with pollutants, because the duplex with the red roof
is falling apart. we argue like tonsils, swollen & stubborn. we watch the In-N-Out

cashier wash his gloves off in the sink & my shirt makes me look fertile. we laugh
about used biology books, the Disney movie about the dragon boy. we make

the sky bloom. we split the scrambled runes in our stomach. I have an
aching letter in my mouth the insurance won’t cover but I’m really afflicted with

wanting, the smell of pavement after rain. I’m calling because I have no aunts
in this country to call for condoms or advice but I walk around with prose jammed

between my legs. I’ve never loved the same mistake twice. my brother dances.
the song roams throats until it finds mine. in a dream the algorithm broke the 

windows of it’s Massachusetts. I’m a magnesium-deficient miracle who only
shaves on Thursdays, he’s got new Skechers, we make calligraphy with our shoes

walking back from school. rash of coffee shops in El Cajon, the dilapidated Vons
on Medford Street. I’m calling because California is kindling again & he refuses

medicine like I used to. we found the generic for Sudafed & it tasted green. I
still bow my head in churches. my survival instinct is too strong.

Ah! It’s so good! Thank you so much! Oh my goodness.
Thank you. ◆

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American poet, editor, and critic who organizes with the Radius of Arab American Writers. She is a 22-23 NBCC Emerging Critic Fellow and a columnist at Palette Poetry, writing POETRY DOUBLE FEATURES. Her chapbook I could die today & live again is forthcoming from GameOverBooks. Her work has been published in Mizna, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Read more at summerfarah.com.

Maya Salameh is the winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, through which her debut collection, HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, will be published this October (University of Arkansas Press, 2022). She is also the author of the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Her poems have found homes in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, AGNI, ANMLY, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is a poet fellow of the William Male Foundation and a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets.

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