What Does a Country Mean?: A Conversation with Zein Sa'dedin
Collage by Jade.
Editor’s note: you may also listen to the audio conversation between Summer and Zein here.
I was introduced to Zein through her curatorial work; Issue 5 of The Scores had an Arab writers feature, filled with names both new and familiar to me. I was impressed with the enormity of it, the care of her introduction giving space to both visibility and the revolutionary poetic potential of work coming from the margins. staircase, I think, carries both aspects of this ethos; Zein's work visibilizes Amman in an English language imagination, building out its streets and staircases, simultaneously building a poetic that is so rich with knowledge and reference, with reverence. Listening to her speak about her approaches to writing felt novel from my own but got the gears turning in my brain all the same. The opening poem of staircase, "isharit al nisser", feels like a car song. The poet carries us through the city via the awareness of how life pulses around you even when moving with unnatural speed and highlights the reconstruction of environments through that notice: "i roll my window down and witness / the present carry on like birds / beyond the blurring." It is apt to begin the collection with such a movement—the word Zein often used to describe the work. We experience many different physicalities in these staircases, each topped off with a different flavor of the ethereal. Experience more of Amman through Zein's eyes by getting a copy of staircase here.
SUMMER FARAH: So we’re talking about staircase, your pamphlet, which is coming out with ignitionpress in two weeks—or maybe depending on when someone is [reading or] listening to this, it's already out, who knows? I wanted to ask you off the bat to tell us about putting together the chapbook—or pamphlet—the poems, how you conceived of it, how it came about?
ZEIN SA’DEDIN: It’s funny that you keep saying ‘chapbook’, because my first instinct is to say ‘chapbook’, too. But then I have to remember that ignitionpress is a British publisher, so they always call it a ‘pamphlet’. When they first reached out to me, I was like, “How long is a pamphlet?!” I had no idea.
Most of these poems I wrote while I was in my MFA in St Andrews. I think there are a few that I wrote even before that, so these are quite old poems—a lot of them—that I've been revisiting alongside my editor, and reworking, and really diving in deep with them. But they're all about Amman, the city where I’m from, the city where I live, right now. It's like a tour throughout it for the most part, and then towards the end, it leaves the city, and goes to a more metaphoric place. It leaves that geographical journey and tries to go on more of a philosophical journey of, like, “Okay, what does a country even mean? What does a country even look like?”
The poems are really personal, I feel really close to these poems probably more than anything else, because trying to write them was so difficult and introspective. The thing about Amman—I say this all the time, but there's this really common thing about the big literary cities in Southwest Asia. It's: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads—Amman is always left out of the equation.
At one point I was talking to another poet who’s got a personal relationship with Amman—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who also wrote the blurb for my pamphlet, which was incredible. It's such an honor, I can't believe she agreed to do that! So I told her about it, and she’s like, “Yeah, Amman doesn’t really exist in the literary imagination in the same way, at least not in English. A little bit in Arabic, but even still.” A lot about it is like a migratory space, in Arabic, and a lot of the people who write about Amman are actually from the Palestinian diaspora. It felt like there's more to the city that hasn't been explored yet in poems, or literature in general. I really wanted to do that, so I went on a mission and I started writing them. Then I set those poems aside completely, started working on something else for about two years, and then ignitionpress reached out to me and they were like, “Send us poems, we’ll see if they work.”
The other thing that I had in the works was like 60 pages long—no way could it be a small pamphlet, but I sent them a few staircases and they loved it, and it's been so wonderful working with them. I worked with Les Robinson, he's my editor, and he's just been wonderful and so supportive. Like, Summer you've seen, there are no translations, there are no contexts, and that's very deliberate. It was a point of contention in the beginning, because ignitionpress is a British press, so they were like, “No one really knows what these areas are,” and I was like, “Well, when I read Frank O'Hara, I don't know what the areas are either, so no one explained them to me.”
I think I explained it to him once in that way, and he was on board immediately and fought for leaving the poems to speak for themselves, which has been really nice. So the assembling has been looking back at old material and reworking it, which has been really productive and fun.
That's awesome. I didn't realize that you had written a lot of these poems when you were abroad. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship of writing them abroad, but editing and compiling them back home?
I think this has to do with my writing style, in general. I find it really hard to write about something when I'm in the thick of it—now I'm going to have that TikTok song stuck in my head—but it's really hard for me when I'm in the eye of the storm to look around me and be able to conceptualize it. When it comes to Amman, I think I had to leave it for a while. By the time I started writing the meat of this pamphlet, I'd been away for about three years. I would come to visit for a few weeks, but I wasn't living there at all.
Once I left it, I was able to see my relationship with the city for what it actually is, because I wasn't experienced—I wasn't living in it. I wasn't experiencing the city in that same all-encompassing way. I just find that is generally my writing style; I need distance from something to be able to conceptualize it, which is really frustrating now that I want to write about Amman more, but I'm in it. I needed to miss Amman, because if you ask anyone who lives in Amman, all they talk about is wanting to leave it. Which is really sad, but it's not an easy place to live.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's really healthy to have distance from things when you’re writing about them. I am a big fan of telling people to not write. I mean, living in a city isn't necessarily a traumatic experience or anything, but I'm a big fan of telling people, “Don't write through things. Feel things and then come back to it later.”
Yeah, do what you need to do to survive, and live and experience, and then you can reflect on it. I'm always partly shocked by, and also in awe of people who, whenever something big, globally happens, are able to write about it and release something immediately. Like, how? I need two-to-five years.
No, same, I think everything I've written in the throes of something doesn't feel as intellectually honest as I want it to be, as things are, later. I've had poems that I wrote in the throes of it and then came back two years later, and I'm like, “Now, I feel ready to look at this.” I think processing is good. I know poetry is building something from a moment, but that moment can pass, it's okay.
Oh yeah, definitely.
So you briefly mentioned your full-length manuscript that is a book-length poem—if any publisher is reading this/listening to this, you should take it. It's really, really good, I love it so much.
Oh yeah! I forgot that you’ve read it.
It’s great! I think that I was super interested in the fact that both of the projects that I've read from you have been really cohesive. Like staircase, and then the book-length poem—everything is so connected to each other. These poems exist so well together. Do you generally approach projects, or book projects, folios, anything, as: these poems are connected by ideas, or they can't exist without each other? What's your approach in general?
When it comes to writing, I am a very obsessive person. It can't be something specific because I'll exhaust that really quickly, but a general idea, I will chase after it for months and months on end. I find that to be the most generative, whereas if I sit down to just write, I don't actually ever write anything. I might write three lines and get bored and move on, but if I have a thing that I want to explore, I just really focus on it.
I think that really comes through with staircase, because what I was focusing on was Amman. The thing about Amman is that I was really interested in its landscapes; in it geographically; in movement through the city. It's not a pedestrian-friendly city at all. Everyone pretty much either drives, or takes the bus, or taxis, or Ubers. But there is one element, which is the staircase, that really is found everywhere throughout—at least the Old City and the older areas. Amman is built on hilltops and valleys, so going up and down the stairs is the easiest way of travel, and they punctuate the city everywhere. I found that really interesting as a mode of movement, and a way to explore the city. It started with just me finding them really pretty and taking tons of pictures, and then when I went back to St Andrews, where I did my MFA, I was just looking through these pictures, and I was like, “Alright, I want to write a staircase about every single area that I can think of.” Some of the staircases aren't even in Amman—for me, it's a conceptual staircase. The idea of movement, of looking at something, like having a view of the landscape in front of you, I think, is really generative.
With the longer project that I have: It's called landscape of the southernmost extremes, or at least it is currently—might change it at one point, title-wise. It started off as a reader-response to Etel Adnan; I was reading a lot of Etel Adnan, which comes through in the work itself. I was in a state of mind where all I could do was read Etel Adnan, and then I just kept having things I wanted to say back, so I'd write in the margins, and this went on for about a year. That large poem-project started off as the chunk of my MFA thesis, but it wasn't never intended to be that, so for the long part of that thesis-year, I was just writing in the margins and in notes. My thesis was supposed to be something totally different, something closer to what the pamphlet is now. Then I remember sitting down one moment, being like, “What if I looked at all of these together, all of these notes,” and I typed them all up, and it was 25 pages’ worth. I was like, “Alright, so I think I have something here!”
That's how my brain works: it'll start off very scattered but focused on one thing, and then eventually it'll all come together. I don't really know how, and I'm really happy that you say it feels cohesive, because I'm always worried that it's only cohesive to me in my brain. I don't like the idea of waiting for inspiration or waiting for a muse. I think it's just about looking until I find something to obsess over.
That makes sense, I think something that feels really rich and present in your work is the influence or what you're responding to, and there's this wealth of care and thought in your images and the way your work is revolving around itself. So that makes a lot of sense that that's your process. I guess that kind of question goes to my next one, which is: What would you say are the mentor texts that you held as you were producing this pamphlet? You have a lot of music in the text, so what are things that you held while you were writing?
I think I'm always reading a lot of Frank O'Hara, and I was fascinated with how he chronicles his movement through New York, sometimes even Chicago or Madrid. Any city he’s in, he’s always writing about. Whether he's writing about them while he's there or otherwise, it doesn't really matter, but the work still moves through them. I was also reading a lot of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Zeina Hashem Beck; I was trying to find as many Arab writers who are writing about the places where I’m from, in a non-orientalist way, which is actually kind of harder than I thought it would be! Just because I think it's what the publishing industry tends to like, unfortunately, but digging and trying to work through poets and writers, who really care about these cities and wanting to portray them in a way that has nothing to do with colonialism—I mean not nothing to do with it, but isn't angled towards it, isn't centered on it—and is centered on the city as a whole.
In this pamphlet, like you said, there's a lot of music. That's something that is a literary legacy that I think everyone carries, especially when you think of poetry. It’s like an oral form. And definitely in Arabic, where poetry was more often sung than anything—Fairouz, Umm Kulthoum, Abdelhalim, they all sang poems. Their biggest songs are poems. I think there's a relationship there, that I wouldn't feel right trying to describe the place that I'm from, the place that I live, without music.
Oh! I was also reading a lot of Safia Elhillo when the idea of fixating on a cultural icon came about, so I'm in so much debt to her, because her work on Abdelhalim Hafez sort of was like, “Oh, this makes sense!” I think I read an interview of hers where—I could be wrong, this isn't word for word, by any means—but she was saying something about using Abdelhalim as a standpoint. As a lens, as a projection—something that couldn't answer back, but through which she could go through all of these other issues that she explores. (Which are very different from what I'm exploring.) Definitely go read Safia Elhillo’s work if you're listening to this, shoutout to her, what a poet!
When I was trying to conceive of ways that I could do that with Amman and was really struggling—this was in baby-Zein-as-a-poet years, so I was still in university, trying to find what I wanted to write about. I was like, “Alright, I'm just going to talk to Fairouz,” and that still carries on. The pamphlet has (spoiler alert!) Amr Diab in there a few times—not in the titles, so you'll have to read through and find them. I don't believe in anything called originality. I think if someone tells you they write in an ‘original way’, they haven't done enough self-reflection. And I think everyone has inheritances in their work. We inherit things from the writers before us, the musicians, the art, the landscape, and so many of those things. It's not shameful to admit that. If anything, it can be really artistically productive. I like to honor that in my work and admit when I'm in dialogue with someone, when I'm trying to talk to another writer. To actually say, “Etel Adnan,” to say, “Frank O'Hara,” to say all of these things, as opposed to sneak them in and just, “Hmm, will anyone notice?” It can be fun as a game, but I think it's more productive to actually name and have that discussion out there. I know when I first started writing, there's so much pressure to try and write something that wasn't written before. Everyone said everything in some way, shape, or form, it's just about finding your own lens.
I had an exercise once where I had a teacher or professor tell us to draw our writer-family tree. That changed my life in the way that I think of it, like who influences you? Not who you enjoy and who you like, but who do you see in your own work? That changes for me all the time—I do this exercise once a year now, because it's always so different. I think that's something probably every writer should do at one point. It's such an interesting thing to explore about yourself, and it could take weeks and months to really realize all of the influences on your own work, but once you do, you really get to play with it and approach language in a much more playful way.
Plagiarism discourse pops up every once in a while, and I think that there are so many different ways you can honor who came before you, or who you're writing after and through. I think citational practice is awesome! I like to do it in my every day and say, “This person said this,” even if it's inconsequential. You're right, we shouldn't be ashamed of who comes through in our work. I want to jump back a little bit and ask about self-orientalizing and how you resist that—or how do you catch yourself? What are things you might find yourself doing or wanting to resist?
That's kind of a hard question, because I don't think I can fully escape self-orientalizing when I'm trying to write, especially because writing at the end of the day is a reductive practice; you're reducing the thing you want to write about into words, and words can only do so much. You can write speculatively, but I think the real world is always more complex than a piece of writing that describes it. When thinking of that reduction, it's kind of hard, especially when so much has been written about us, or about the cities in Southwest Asia, North Africa, or generally the Global South. So much language has been produced about that area, not by the people it’s from. And so, we tend to—in the back of our minds—carry that language, because we read it, we've been exposed to it, this is how we think.
When I was researching for the longer poem-project, I was trying to find as much information as I could about Wadi Rum, and all of it was either tourist information or about Lawrence of Arabia. It was the bane of my existence! So in that longer poem, there are Lawrence of Arabia erasures from his actual book, because I was so frustrated with how much was written—not from the actual Bedouins who lived in Wadi Rum and continue to shape its landscape and take tourists through it to produce that knowledge. All the books you can find are about, like, I Lived with a Bedouin for a Year, or I Lived in a Tent. I don’t care, no offense. I want to know what they have to say!
I think that's something I'm always concerned about, and I don't think I escape it all the time. Something that I focus on is ‘who am I writing for?’ and I think it really helps. I don't remember why I was thinking this the other day, but I remember thinking, “I don't care what readers think of my work,” but that's not entirely true, because I do care I care about what specific readers think. I care about what my friends will think. I'm lucky enough to have friendships in my life that will call me out—or call me in—if I do something. So I think, “Okay, if I write this will my friends be like, errr—what are you doing?” They're not really poets, they look at a poem in a slightly different way than a poet would—who gets so focused on the minutiae; they’d see the bigger image, the bigger description. I like to write for my friends in a way that they will read and think, “Oh yeah, okay, I get it.” They don't have to get everything, because they're not super into poetry all the time. I don't care what a random person, who I've never met, in Oklahoma will think of my work. I care about what a random person in Jabal Amman would think of my work, someone who I could inhabit that space with. Also poems that I would like to read—I'm really critical of poems that I read, especially when it comes to this sort of thing, because it is such a big frustration in my life—which comes across in the pamphlet! There's one that explicitly deals with tourism and gentrification in Amman. So I always think, “Am I writing for those people or am I writing for my friends and people like me?” I think that really helps with the idea of the Oriental lens and how to avoid it.
I'm not writing to be published—I'm beyond grateful that ignitionpress has picked this up and is supporting it in this way, but I'm not writing these poems to be published. I don't necessarily care if they have a wide readership or anything like that. Obviously, it's nice [and] I will send out poems to journals later in the future, but that's never the intention behind writing them. I think that's also something that helps me deal with that idea of self-orientalizing, because I'm not writing them for any other purpose other than to write them and externalize these thoughts and explore Amman. I don't need to orientalize for myself. I think that's something that's really helpful.
I think you're one of the only people I've heard describe writing as a reductive practice, which I'm super interested in! You're totally right, though. When you said that, I was like, “No, it's not!” But no, that makes a lot of sense. The world is much richer than we can describe, and I'm really drawn to speculative writing, because I think we can do so much with language and there's so much we can recreate the world in. But there is the other side of it: what are we distilling into a moment, and what environments are we creating? So, I guess I wanted to ask, what do you get from writing?
Honestly, it depends on the day. If you asked me a week ago, I might’ve probably said ‘nothing’. I think the greatest thing that poetry has given me is a sense of community. It's introduced me to people that I probably never would have met otherwise, in such a global way. It also really helped me with the way that I see the world. When I'm in a writing zone—I haven't been in one in a while, but when I am actively writing, I’m so observant of everything around me. My attention to the world is so heightened, and I miss that when I'm not actively writing. It trains me to be consistently observant of the world around me, because when you can notice the sounds and all of these other things, it makes me appreciate it so much more. I also love sharing my work—I mean, yes, obviously being published is great, but I love it when my friends or the people I know on Twitter read my poems. It brings me so much joy that someone else relates to that experience and is able to find pleasure in the poem. Pleasure doesn’t always have to be a positive experience, it's not like happiness or joy, but in the way a phrase sounds—I'm thinking of Chen Chen’s Twitter thread on pleasure and poems. Writing in general makes me critical. It forces me to look into things and really try and find the reasons behind different phenomena. When I started writing staircases and the longer poem-project—because they were happening around the same time—I got really interested in Islamic mythology. If I wasn't writing those poems, I probably wouldn't have gone into as much depth in the research. I might have had an, “Oh, that's interesting!” [moment] and then moved on, but because I was writing about it, because I was so interested in it, I spent nights going in rabbit holes about pre-Islamic gods, the different things in Islam, and reading the Quran. I was pushing myself to try and find things, which I'm so grateful for, because now, I have little tidbits in my brain that I probably wouldn't have had before.
I think that I'm a thoroughly unobservant person of the world around me, and I do think that writing helps that a lot. I think reading helps that a lot for me, too. There are certain poets, who, when I think about their active attention, I'm like, “Right, I should be paying more attention.” How does your writing inform your editorial practice?
That's a good question, I've never actually thought of that connection! I think my editorial practice has recently come back into the game. Now that I’ve gotten into BAHR, it's been taking up most of my time, so I think in a practical sense, it competes with writing quite a lot. I just don't have the time to focus on both things as much as I want to, so there are sacrifices that have to be made. What I love about editing, about being able to publish and share other people's work through a platform that I’ve built, is I'm a really curious person, so I love when people send me their writing. I think having a platform like that lets me get as many submissions as possible—it's quite selfish, but I just love reading them! They are often from people that I haven't read before; I wouldn't have been able to find [them] without this platform. I think that definitely informs my writing, because it adds to it. If we're thinking of writing as a collective, constantly taking in the world in as much writing as possible, and in as many varying styles and different approaches to writing, it’s really helpful. In general, knowing the frustrations of being a poet who has submissions out has really helped me in the way that I approach the practicalities of editing. I remember I had one submission for a journal that was on ‘received’ for over a year on Submittable, and I was like, “This is ridiculous!” Now I make it my mission to make sure BAHR doesn't have a longer response time than a month and a half or two months maximum—and that's even too much, but I'm only one person, so maybe in the future.
It’s stuff like that, where I really try and take care of the work that I get. It's such an honor to get any work in general, and I know how nerve-wracking it can be to send out work that's really personal. I try to be aware of that, and I think being a poet has really helped.
I respect the hope to have a quick turnaround time. I think two months is okay, you are one person. When I edit or read people's work, I think that one of the things that I value the most or I prioritize is making sure people feel respected. Would you be down to read one of the poems from the pamphlet? Would you read the dead sea staircase?
Oh yeah, I don't think anyone's ever asked me to read, so this will be a Sumou exclusive!
I don't know why, that last line [sighs]. Every time I read it, I’m just like, “Fuck!” Some of my favorite things is when poets—Jess Rizkallah does this very well, too—have this incredible intrinsic use of language and there's these beautiful moments, but then there's also a gentle humor and a reminder that, “I'm having fun with this. I am seeing the world through my beautiful poet eyes, I'm in love with the moon,” all of these things, but also, like, “I'm just a cool girl!” I love that poem so much. Thank you so much for talking with me, this is so wonderful.
Oh no, thank you, Summer!
We'll make sure that people can order your pamphlet and check out your other work.
This has been so nice, so wonderful! ◆
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is the outreach coordinator for the Radius of Arab American writers. Summer is currently a reviewer at Vagabond City Lit and co-writes the biweekly newsletter Letters to Summer. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Mizna, LitHub, The Rumpus, and other places. Twitter and website.
Zein Sa'dedin is a poet, editor, and educator from and currently based in Amman, Jordan. She is the founding editor-in-chief of BAHR // بحر and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Her work has appeared in The Shuruq Festival, Zarf Poetry, Third Coast Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, and others. Her pamphlet staircase is out with ignitionpress in August 2021.
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