Helli Fang, Kundiman's Fall/Spring 2019-2020 Communications Intern, interviewed Adeeba Shahid Talukder on her poetry collection Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, the winner of the 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize, which will be published on March 1st, 2020 by Tupelo Press.
Shahr-e-jaanaan sets out to recreate the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition. As the speaker maps her romances onto legends, directing their characters perform her own tragedy, their fantastical metaphors easily lend themselves to her fluctuating mental state. Cycling between delirious grandeur and wretched despair, she is torn between two selves— the pitiable lover continually rejected, and the cruel, unattainable beloved comparable in her exaltation to a god.
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In this collection, the speaker’s personal life and struggles are conveyed within the worlds of Urdu and Persian poetic traditions––what is described in the preface as “lenses and mirrors for the speaker’s reality.” Your first collection, What is Not Beautiful, similarly incorporates Urdu literary traditions into its poems to reflect more personal themes of marriage, family, and womanhood. What are your intentions in bringing these two worlds together, and how has writing about these realities through this lens affected or informed your perception of your own life?
It wasn’t intentional at first—some years ago, I regularly attended a gathering in which we read and interpreted Mirza Ghalib’s poetry. That group was both my literary and social life back then. It was a nerdy sort of thing—Ghalib used many difficult Persian phrases and constructions in his ghazals, and it felt like we were solving puzzles. My friends who attended the group would jokingly assign the tropes to members of the group—our professor, Frances Pritchett, was the Beloved (mashuq), the student she favored was the Rival (raqeeb), and we, of course, were the hopeless Lovers (ushaaq). During that time, these legends and their worlds were where my imagination lived, and the realm from which I wrote. It lent my life a grandiosity and romance I craved.
The line separating this world from reality would dissolve almost wholly in the grandiosity I experienced through mania—everything in the ghazal world would become literal, become alive. I composed some of the poems in Shahr-e-jaanaan while manic, and those poems especially came out of this disintegration. But this state of mind is so wild and so dangerous that it spills into all my writing, even after the episode itself has passed. I’ve tried to summon this spell, this feeling of delirious grandeur with a sort of desperation, perhaps to convince myself it happened at all.
After some time, I did become more intentional in trying to bring the traditions together. Urdu and English have never quite conversed on equal terms, with English tradition dominant and Urdu tradition either exoticized or wholly dismissed. As someone who writes in English but whose writing is profoundly influenced by Urdu and Persian tradition, my writing, too, was often dismissed and written off as “inaccessible.” It was difficult not to get dispirited by the comments, but over time, I began to understand it as an issue of translation. Most English speakers didn’t live in the world of Laila Majnoon, Shirin Farhad, and Mansur al-Hallaj. They did not know the ghazal universe, with its cast of characters, tropes, and metaphors, nor the Sufi concept of fanaa, or what it was to annihilate oneself in love. So part of my intention in writing Shahr-e-jaanaan was to gather as many pieces of this world I knew and translate them into English in order to create space for this understanding.
In addition to the direct translations that are incorporated in the language of this collection, there are also a number of poems that draw from traditional stories, legends, and mythologies, such as “Fanaa: End of Self” and its reference to the Arab legend of Laila Majnoon. In these translations and retellings, are there any restrictions to remain as objective and as close to the original language and narratives as possible? In other words, how much personal liberty do you take in your direct translations and retellings of these stories?
A lot. I use legend to guide me but cannot restrain my imagination. I try to keep the direct translations as literal as possible, though I cannot pretend they are objectively true to the original. I would feel more comfortable referring to both the more direct translations and the more creative interpretations as within the realm of transcreation—a space where I engage with the texts rather than seek to convey their absolute meaning. And as someone who has translated works on commission, and with greater intention of literality and faithfulness, I know that this is merely an ideal—and as with any representation, can only exist asymptotically.
One thing I loved about this collection is how recurring themes, such as water, the moon, wrists, jewelry, transform across the expansive universe of this collection. For example, the opening poem of the collection, which writes, “I pushed / bangles upon bangles / onto my wrists, rubbing / my hands raw with metal and glass…” is revisited later in the collection, opening with the second stanza of the original: “Each time a bangle broke, / I watched the blood at my veins…” How have you personally transformed throughout the process of writing these poems, and what do you hope readers will take away from reading this collection?
A lot of the images you mention have to do, in my mind, with beauty, adornment, and spectacle: in Urdu ghazal poetry, the faces of beautiful women are compared to the full moon, and in my own imagination, water is a mirror. The wrist, in its delicateness, is culturally a symbol of woman’s slightness and grace. In films I grew up with, for a man to hold a woman by the wrist was an act of domination but, once again, beautiful, because this power dynamic is a symbol and manifestation of love and desire. I’ve long understood the power these ideas have over me, but it is frightening to learn the depth of this entanglement each time they manifest in my psychosis. The poem with these lines is one of the few poems in my book where I speak plainly rather than from metaphor. When I write of feeling beautiful when glass bangles break at my wrists, I want to talk about the terror of this desire for beauty, the violence of this spectacle.
Some of the final few poems I wrote for this collection—On Beauty and the title poem Shahr-e-jaanaan—chronicle the falling of this facade, the exposure of all this metaphor as insubstantial and vulnerable to collapse. In the grandiosity of mania, each thought becomes larger, more exaggerated. I think, in this glorification of beauty’s martyrdom, readers will recognize something of the absurd. That they will see the end of this line of thinking and understand its danger, realize the ways in which we are hurting ourselves for beauty’s sake. Over the decade it’s taken me to write this book, I have come a little closer to this clarity. It could take a lifetime, though, to truly rid myself of the instinct to perform beauty.
As a neurodiverse person, I inhabit not only two literary worlds but also two modes of existence, and my goal in writing many of these poems was to communicate what it means to have bipolar disorder, how terrifying it is to be in the throes of mania and depression. I want to translate this world, too, to those who are not from it—its intensity, its capacity for destruction. And maybe part of it is a hope to turn some of the stigma into compassion: as a bipolar person, I’ve lost so much. The discrimination I’ve received, from strangers and close friends alike, has been shattering. If my poems can help someone understand or approach a bipolar person with kindness, it will mean everything to me.
Continuing on with this idea of transformation and growth, what are you working on now, and what are you looking forward to?
For much of my life, I’ve dreamt of becoming a ghazal singer. Growing up, though, I faced a lot of discouragement from my family, both due to religious strictures and associations of moral decadence with the profession. This forced me to push music to the background and focus on writing, which was my other love, and less objectionable. All the while, though, I felt my expression of spirit to be incomplete.
Fortunately, circumstances have changed. I have much more support now from those around me and have been able to start training in classical singing. My teacher, Ustad Salamat Ali, is a true master, and a student of the legendary Mehdi Hassan himself. I’ve been learning to sing ghazals by some of my favorite poets—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Parveen Shakir, Murtaza Birlas—it has been a dream. I think it is in this marriage between poetry and song that my soul resides, where I find my self to be whole.
I’ve fallen in love with a song about the legend of Sohni and Mahiwal—a story about a married woman who crosses the Chenab River every night to her lover’s hut, holding onto a baked earthen pot to keep her afloat. One night, when her sister-in-law replaces her pot with an unbaked one, it dissolves in the water and Sohni drowns. Sohni has made an appearance in a few poems already, and I imagine she will find her way into more. Here is a bit from my poem “Sohni, to her earthen pot”:
The night is cold,
rising—
a dome,
& then a world.
Hold me,
the water surges
like a flame;
when I leapt,
my mind woke
to my eyes’ madness,
my color
scattering into dark,
& marveled.
I am also trying to find a translation of Waris Shah’s story of Heer and Ranjha, and perhaps some poems will emerge from there. It seems I cannot separate myself from the world of legend.
A second book also seems to be shaping up, and I truly am so excited about it! It doesn’t have a title yet, but an order is starting to develop, and themes are starting to emerge. Despite my excitement and impatience, I want to let myself sit with the poems longer and consider whether I truly want to pursue their permanence. Both Shahr-e-jaanaan and What Is Not Beautiful hold poems that have required me to be brave. I need to ask myself whether these are poems I am willing to be brave for.
Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.
Helli Fang is the author of the chapbook Village of Knives (Driftwood Press). An undergraduate student at Bard College, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, The Margins, Salt Hill, The Adroit Journal, DIALOGIST, Columbia Journal, Blueshift Journal, Wildness, and more, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Columbia College of Chicago, and Bennington College. She has also participated in programs such as Iowa Young Writer’s Workshop, The Adroit Mentorship Program, and The Speakeasy Project. When Helli is not writing, she enjoys playing the violin and climbing trees.