An Interview with Farnaz Fatemi on Sister Tongue زبان خواهر — June 21, 2022
Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet, editor and writing teacher in Santa Cruz, CA. Her debut book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith) and is forthcoming from the Kent State University Press. She is a member and cofounder of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. Her poetry and prose appears in Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review,Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z.org, and several anthologies (including, most recently, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora, My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices of the Iranian Diaspora, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me).
Christopher Nelson:Congratulations on the publication of Sister Tongue زبان خواهرand for being part of the prestigious Wick Poetry Series. I first learned of your work when editing the anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora. In your poems I was immediately taken in by a sensitivity to the interior experience of being of a diasporic family. Can you tell us about the circumstances that motivate these poems?
Farnaz Fatemi:Thank you, especially, for this chance to answer these questions and think again about Sister Tongue زبان خواهر .
Being a sister, and being a twin, is how I learned to be in the world. How I am a poet emerges from how I learned to be a sister who is a twin. Even if I’m thinking about or writing a poem from a point of view that’s not explicitly mine, I can’t extract that lens from the writing. To talk specifically, all the poems in Sister Tongue زبان خواهر are born from the experience of being of a diaspora. Of course you and I are both referring to the larger historical one that encompasses the movement of Iranians around the world throughout the 20th century. My particular family arrived in suburban California prior to the Iranian Revolution, but who they are and what our experiences were at that particular time made me someone who is thinking about liminality: liminality in the sense of being next to, being near but perhaps not of. Sometimes that means marginalized and sometimes it doesn’t. The title phrase, sister tongue, I think reflects that liminality. The poems in the book all come from an attempt to find language to reflect my experiences: as a twin sister, as a bisexual/queer woman, as an Iranian American in Southern California during the hostage crisis in the 70s, as a girl raised to behave, as someone who heard two languages at home. When I began sharing many of these poems, and people called some of them beautiful, I was startled. The poems come from so much sadness, from loneliness, a sense of not belonging (or a confusion about where I do belong). Not all of the poems, but some of the poems in this book are about making art in order to change my interior life—and thus change the way I experience the world. It shouldn’t have surprised me that readers found beauty there, but it did.
Nelson:There is a wonderful formal balance to Sister Tongue زبان خواهر. The majority of the poems are short lyrics, but throughout the book are longer, essay-like vignettes or prose poems—imagistic and pointed. What was your experience with these two modes?
Fatemi:I specifically want to address the longer mode, the prose poetry in the book. It’s probably relevant that for the first part of my adult life I read more fiction than poetry, even though I was working on poems and trying to become a poet. I did read poets, too—and I read poets’ longer work, like Audre Lorde’s Zami and Anzaldua’s Borderlands (both of which I think unconsciously helped me trust myself when I tried to let myself writing longer). But I did not consciously feel I needed to write longer. And I never consciously thought, “I need to write something hybrid.” But I am just really lucky that a few years ago the editor and poet Cassandra Cleghorn invited me to submit to Tupelo Quarterly what she called a lyric essay about my relationship to Iran. That became the first of many pieces that are now the skeleton inside this book. I did not know that actually I did need that mode. I needed to ponder, I needed to move between lyric and narrative within the prose, I needed to both show and explain, and I needed space to move across time. Probably more important than anything is the way that the longer work allows many years to be included in the arc of the book. The book turned into a conversation, into conversations within a conversation. Between my many selves—the women I have been and the women I have become—and also the young girls and women who are both inside my family and also on the streets of Tehran, and in houses and workplaces and relationships which aren’t mine but are next to mine. Moving back-and-forth between the short poems and the longer work gave me structure and permission to imagine all these connections, without needing to (always) flesh them out. The combination gave me a container, and it also feels capacious and reflects my desire to really look at a bigger picture while also reminding myself that the filter through which I made this book is my own daughter-of-immigrants, California-raised experience.
Nelson: You said “my many selves,” which makes me think of two of my favorite lines in the book: “I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.” I admire what I read in your book as a persistent quest for self-understanding. Does that resonate with you? And did writing these poems help you make sense of the complexities of identity?
Fatemi: Thank you! And thank you for pointing out those lines—writing those lines was one of those epiphanic moments as a writer when you realize what a poem is trying to tell you. I also learned something crucial about the project of the book as a whole. What feels more accurate to me about the book (how I think about a quest, now that it’s a book) is that perhaps I’m interested less in self-understanding and more in asking “What can I encompass? How can the self be porous? How does the ground beneath my feet change me? What happens to me as a woman when I consider the life I could have lived had my parents never left Iran? What is the relationship between who I am now and who I was when I was a girl during the Revolution in California?" These are just some examples of what I mean. I guess it’s true that writing poems has always reminded me how complex any of our interior lives are, though I am not sure I can say I’ve really made any sense of that complexity!
I want to try answering this one other way. Poetry is a place where I can sit inside mystery—the mystery of being human—and think not just about my own self but others’ sense of being human. Your question makes me think about one of the first poems that made me want to write poems, “Emplumada” by Lorna Dee Cervantes, which begins with a woman’s sadness about summer ending; some of her favorite flowers are disappearing. “She hated and she hated to see them go.” The reader follows her gaze to an unforgettable image of hummingbirds “stuck to each other...in grim determination.” They turn out to be warriors for peace. It’s all quite beautiful to me, even when everything disappears at the end of the poem (“they contain the wind and are gone”)! What I personally continue to find in that poem is what I’m trying to articulate about the porousness of the self…being in the mystery. In midlife now, I imagine I will always feel that to be true. Maybe I won’t. If it changes it will certainly be because of writing more poems.
Nelson: I love that: “being in the mystery.” For me, poetry is the best medium for conveying that state. Are there poets you turn to for that sense of being in mystery?
Fatemi: Honestly, so many poets provide that—as a reader it’s the thing that plugs the electricity into the socket. It’s what feeds the addiction. I think of all the poets in my immediate circle—there is a fabulous writing community in Santa Cruz, CA, where I live, and I’m lucky to be part of a couple of very good poetry groups. Brenda Shaughnessy and Aracelis Girmay make my whole being hum. And also the poets I’ve already mentioned, and Jane Hirshfield, Anne Sexton, Forough Farrokhzad—poets who are speaking into the ineffable. So many.
Nelson: I think of your travels to Iran as a kind of pilgrimage on that quest for self-understanding—to expand the compass. Do the U.S. and Iran exist in your mind dichotomously, or have you stitched the two of them together some—the physical and cultural distances less overwhelming, no longer insurmountable?
Fatemi: Thank you for your attention to what’s in this book. This question makes me think about something Natalie Diaz said about one of the poems in her first book, and now I have to find it so I get it right. She said, “‘Hand-Me-Down Halloween’ was almost the title poem of my first book. It has no epigraph, but if it did, it would have one of the following: 1. This really happened. —Me. 2. None of this happened. —Me.” Beginning my answer to your question with this nod to mash-up of memory, truth, and art is not an attempt to be irreverent. It’s to resist thinking (only) autobiographically about the travels as they might be represented between the covers. Yes, they were born from a deep curiosity I had about what I, as an adult, would find in my parents’ and ancestors’ home places. I think the travels were a pilgrimage for others, too. I don’t mean I traveled out of some kind of obligation to others, but I was acutely frustrated, before my first trip in 2001 (pre-9/11), with the simplified way Iran was perceived by all kinds of people I knew and loved (and didn’t know and didn’t love). These perceptions felt insurmountable for me personally without going there myself. To be honest, the distances you mention are still overwhelming. So many people who simply want to visit or return, and so many people who might share my curiosity can’t go. And many of my family members have no desire to go (or go back). At the same time, yes, being in Iran for long periods of time changed the way the blood in my veins feels. I am not the same person I used to be. Iran is inside me in a way it never was before. I am sorry these feel like oblique responses to your question. These are all true things.
Nelson: No, don’t apologize; I appreciate your thoughtful answers. You’ve taken on difficult subjects, which is one of the strengths of the book. And like all good lyric poetry, yours is also about love, loss, and the passage of time. I love the organization of the book, the four sections, and the narrative arc. The ending feels like a beginning: there’s imperfection and the embrace of imperfection.
Fatemi: Yes! I can’t overstate how gratified I am to hear you say that because that’s the feeling I have. At first I didn’t trust it; I thought, that’s too much like my inner life, that’s not how a book should end! What a crazy thing to feel, right? I’ve done all this personal work to validate that inner life and my appreciation for imperfection is one of my favorite traits! Anyway, trusting in the organization of this book in this version was a journey. I know this is an age-old challenge for poets, but it really was. The book as you are reading it has a sequence I feel resonates for me—part of it is to express my grappling with self and the ways the self is reflected and not reflected in the world. But I also knew it wouldn’t be the book I wanted it to be if it didn’t open outward to other women, how the boundaries sometimes blur—how that is also something I want to embrace. One of the ways I hope that is accomplished is the way the prose pieces serve as a scaffold for the other poems. I had a dear poet friend, Ingrid LaRiviere, who is one of the best editors I’ve ever met—she’s really a genius. Very late in the process of my working on this manuscript, we sat with my pages and pulled them apart and rather joyfully experimented with what happened. I’m indebted to that invitation—that’s what it was, an invitation for me to keep listening to the poems. Every book needs its friends.
