Please tell us about the making of “Ibis.”
Ever since reading the history of how the dodo bird was named and renamed by European settlers on the island of Mauritius, decimated into extinction within 100 years of the Dutch establishing a prison colony on the island, and then essentially blamed for its own extinction by the same apparatus that named and exterminated its species, I’ve become fairly obsessed with the relationship between colonial naming/categorization and ecological violence, with a special emphasis on birds. I’m part of the Palestinian diaspora; my family was expelled from the land by settlers in 1948, but I was also born and raised as a U.S. citizen (settler) on the stolen indigenous land First Nations people refer to as Turtle Island. One of the ways I’ve attempted to examine this identity and its contradictions through a poetics is by tracing origin stories of colonial extraction and knowledge formation. One example of this is some of the same cartographic tools that were used by Napoleon’s army to analyze and classify while occupying and plundering Egypt were also used by Lewis and Clark during their commissioned “discovery” expedition in the U.S. following the Louisiana Purchase. I wrote “Ibis” while reading different texts by French naturalists and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution as an attempt to unsettle colonial logics and contextualize “discovery” and “scientific naming” as both gendered and ecological violences.
If you were to trace your poetic lineage, which two poets are you directly descended from?
Etel Adnan and Claudia Jones.
Do you prefer writing poems individually or in a series? Why?
I prefer writing within a series or as part of a larger collaborative project because it allows more room for experimentation. It also takes a longer amount of time which encourages me to research, meditate, and process more on the subjects I’m interrogating and my language use.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I decided I want to start painting this year. I have a Pisces Sun, Aquarius Moon, Gemini Ascendant, which is my astrological receipts way of saying I have no allegiances to genre or medium. To me, literacy is not limited to reading or writing but encompasses however you articulate a positionality within history. I like to think we should all attempt with different tools towards what make us feel more free.
Do you have any poems in mind that you would like to write, but you know they are not ready to be written yet?
Lately I’ve been taking a lot of photos of windows and putting them together in a series tentatively called “Window Study.” Eventually I want to write some kind of hybrid text about the relationship between women and windows that creates more of a dialectic between initiating/receiving gaze that isn’t so conscripted to a dynamic or binary similar to that of “artist” looking at or through the “muse” object. I trust the language will come when it is time to.
Ever since reading the history of how the dodo bird was named and renamed by European settlers on the island of Mauritius, decimated into extinction within 100 years of the Dutch establishing a prison colony on the island, and then essentially blamed for its own extinction by the same apparatus that named and exterminated its species, I’ve become fairly obsessed with the relationship between colonial naming/categorization and ecological violence, with a special emphasis on birds. I’m part of the Palestinian diaspora; my family was expelled from the land by settlers in 1948, but I was also born and raised as a U.S. citizen (settler) on the stolen indigenous land First Nations people refer to as Turtle Island. One of the ways I’ve attempted to examine this identity and its contradictions through a poetics is by tracing origin stories of colonial extraction and knowledge formation. One example of this is some of the same cartographic tools that were used by Napoleon’s army to analyze and classify while occupying and plundering Egypt were also used by Lewis and Clark during their commissioned “discovery” expedition in the U.S. following the Louisiana Purchase. I wrote “Ibis” while reading different texts by French naturalists and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution as an attempt to unsettle colonial logics and contextualize “discovery” and “scientific naming” as both gendered and ecological violences.
If you were to trace your poetic lineage, which two poets are you directly descended from?
Etel Adnan and Claudia Jones.
Do you prefer writing poems individually or in a series? Why?
I prefer writing within a series or as part of a larger collaborative project because it allows more room for experimentation. It also takes a longer amount of time which encourages me to research, meditate, and process more on the subjects I’m interrogating and my language use.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I decided I want to start painting this year. I have a Pisces Sun, Aquarius Moon, Gemini Ascendant, which is my astrological receipts way of saying I have no allegiances to genre or medium. To me, literacy is not limited to reading or writing but encompasses however you articulate a positionality within history. I like to think we should all attempt with different tools towards what make us feel more free.
Do you have any poems in mind that you would like to write, but you know they are not ready to be written yet?
Lately I’ve been taking a lot of photos of windows and putting them together in a series tentatively called “Window Study.” Eventually I want to write some kind of hybrid text about the relationship between women and windows that creates more of a dialectic between initiating/receiving gaze that isn’t so conscripted to a dynamic or binary similar to that of “artist” looking at or through the “muse” object. I trust the language will come when it is time to.