Off the Shelf Reflections

Writing, publishing, other miscellaneous rituals of humiliation.

A window into the sea, from the Old Fort in the town where I wrote chunks of Bad Diaspora Poems.

This time, let me preface things with two new-ish poems, one in The Poetry Review, and another in bathmagg. Summer’s been especially productive, or chaotic, for me. Of course, there’s been the release of my poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems, which you can get from most places. If you still subscribe to this newsletter, I’m assuming you’re not too sick of my poems, so I would suggest getting a copy for yourself or a friend. It’s been a long time coming.

In the wake of a hectic book release, here are a few reminders. Mostly for myself, but also for anyone else in the grip of similar doubts. 

• I write because I want to redistribute my burdens. 

• In writing, I wilfully free fall. Poetry is my chosen imbalance. I am seeking the confrontations I often avoid in daily life. I am intentionally making things harder for myself.  

• I want to write myself into a corner. The desperation of a cornered animal can be a life-saving energy.

• Trodding the path of most resistance isn’t always a choice. It’s a path many of us are compelled to take, despite the discomfort. 

• On a balcony in Hammamet, I catastrophised about the whims and wiles of publishing culture to a bewildered friend. M, I will always appreciate you for telling me to stop pretending to not want the things I want. 

• Bad Diaspora Poems was finished in one summer, published in the next. Reconstitution and disintegration are cyclical, in tandem and togetherness.  

• My best poems arrive like visitations. They are erratic symptoms of the dormant. I resisted calling myself a poet for a long time. One reason for this disavowal was the fear of such energy and what it activated beyond me. 

• Poetry is weaponised sensitization. 

• Your peers include the dead. 

• “Great pain is great purification”, May Ziadeh wrote. I am trying to purify my intentions, my niyyah. Nefer, or zero, the hieroglyphic symbol for this intentionality being a heart connected to a trachea.

• Writing is a calculus of sacrifice. What have you given up for the gifts it has to offer? How much is too much? How have you arranged the shape of your life to find the time and stamina needed to prioritize a practice so thankless, so devalued? 

• Loss is an integral part of this equation. Honour what you have lost for the sake of writing, but don’t be haunted by it.

• In losing your mask, you will also lose your face. Prepare to become unrecognizable to yourself. 

• There was no way for me to earn money saying what I wanted to say the way I thought I wanted it said. Writing poems, therefore, became an act of self-defense, economic futility, and relentless resentment. Wanda Coleman reporting from 20th century Los Angeles could be anyone, anywhere. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

• I’ve never written from a position of security, cohesion, or unadulterated triumph. I refuse to romanticize this, but can also admit that it’s been a strength.  

• Stealth is a useful tool in a writer’s arsenal. Those who foreground their identities as writers, whose entire life-worlds and social orbits revolve around being a writer among other writers, quickly lose sight of this.

• Alternatively, I don’t think I will ever get over the deeply embarrassing ritual of introducing one’s self as a writer. I treat it as an impediment I can only divulge if I’ve known you long enough. 

• Self-promotion isn’t the first display of rampant ego. Writing is. 

• To be published is to be condemned.

• An author's first duty is to let down his country. A Brendan Behan bar. I will continue to let down many, refusing passive allegiance/s to varied territories and their disputed claims over my mind and spirit. The family, the tribe, the “community”, the hood, the scene, the institution, the market, the received wisdoms of whatever chosen flock I momentarily seek shelter in. 

• Most writers are only as “brave” as they are allowed to be.

• Steve Biko died while I was blind drunk in London. Soweto burned while I was sunk in deep thought about an editor’s rejection slip. I borrowed these words from Dambudzo Marechera for an epigraph to a poem. I have accepted that most of my writing struggles with the irreconcilable, the individual, the indivisible.

• Writing is like patience. Life will force it out of you.