Rabha Ashry’s debut chapbook loving the alien is a project in articulation that swallows readers into the interstice of playing foreigner. Ashry writes in her poet’s note, “My favorite verse of the Quran, roughly translated, is a prayer imploring Allah to ‘ease my path, open up my chest, untie the knot of my tongue, so that I may be articulate.’” As a reader, I felt this yearning and release viscerally: the ache lodged in a tightened chest, the stifled attempts at opening up, and the triumph of articulation.

Taking the time to speak with me over Zoom, the Chicago-based 2020 Brunel International African Poetry Prize winner elaborated on the questions she confronted in writing this chapbook as well as her experience working with Black Sunflowers, the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press. In press founder Amanda Holiday’s words, Black Sunflowers is “particularly interested in diasporic, migratory experiences” and focuses on “women poets, Black poets, minority poets, poets who are saying something different - edgier poets.” The press has a mission of “centering the edge” when it comes to publishing writing that explores the shifting, “melding” dynamics of being insiders and outsiders. “Ashry represented exactly what we were looking for,” Holiday shares. “Sometimes a manuscript drops into the inbox and we think ‘Wow!’ this is such an unusual way of seeing the world. Just so fresh, pure like a musical note. A singular voice really. That’s what we’re looking for.”

The voice that Ashry brings to the press is one that embraces singularity, with the title of her chapbook being inspired by the David Bowie song of the same name. “I'm such a big fan of that title,” Ashry shares, “specifically because I think of myself as an alien in so many different ways: an alien like a foreigner, like someone who's strange, like someone who doesn't necessarily always live up to the expectations or fit within the script. I've always felt like such an alien back home, people treated me weird, looked at me weird because of my tattoos and piercings and growing up, [that] that was not an okay thing to have in the Emirates. I kind of just decided that I was going to look a certain way and everyone was just gonna have to follow suit.”

In writing from a state of alienness, Ashry is guided by her philosophy in poetry tattooed on her arm: “I write to erase the silence.” Thinking about the representation she needed — but failed to see — growing up, Ashry reflects, “It just felt like there was this silence when it came to stories like mine and voices like mine. I just kept thinking about writing to erase that kind of silence...writing to erase silence surrounding things that are taboo, things that are stigma[tized]. I wrote a lot about being queer and you don't do that where I grew up.” Affirming the value of her work now, Ashry is able to say with confidence: “My voice deserves to be heard...my poetry deserves to be put out there in the world. And people, you know, should see writing like mine and hear about experiences like mine.” The more I write, the more I value this kind of confidence. Taking my work seriously acts as a self-affirmation that the lived experiences I write from are valid. With this attitude, I also approach sharing my work with an inherent belief in its worth.”

Make it stand out

*Black Sunflowers press is the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press, and the publisher of Ashry’s chapbook*

The ways in which I myself question my ability to articulate my experiences - as an Indian-born woman raised in the Philippines and now living in Abu Dhabi - are different to Ashry, who writes from her own set of intersections “growing up as a queer Egyptian girl in the United Arab Emirates to very religious parents.” Rather than flatly equating different forms of alienhood, Ashry’s poetry is compelling in the way it is rooted in her own experiences. She remarks, “Queer girls growing up in the Emirates with strict religious parents who immigrate to the states or to the west, my immigration process, my asylum seeking process, figuring out how to stay here and build a home here, these are all narratives that that already exist and my way into them is through the small personal details.”

Excerpt from “mornings in dubai”:

انا عملت ایھ عشان استھل القرف ده؟

I forget the particular shrillness of her voice first thing in the morning.

it grates. my jaw is sore from grinding my teeth in my sleep. my

shoulders are tense even when I’m lying down. I rest my hand on my

belly and coach myself to breathe in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 hold 1 2 3 4 breathe

out 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and I swear I swear it works. or it's supposed

to.

and I have to be careful, because if she knows I’m awake she’s going

to suck me into her little martyr play.

استغفر الله العظیم یا رب! اصحي من النوم یا ابني! ھتتأخر على المدرسة!

These details shine through in poems such as “mornings in dubai” where the speaker’s mental count to ten creates a guilt-ridden rhythm that cuts through the sound of the Quran playing and a mother screaming. Another striking poem in the chapbook is “pray” in which the speaker is transfixed by the ankles of the woman praying in front of her. Ashry reflects: “[This poem is] thinking about modesty and religion and sin. Am I sinning by looking at their bodies when I'm supposed to be praying? That was my way into this conversation about modesty and sin and how to present yourself, how to be godly and pious.” In crafting her own intervention into these large-scale conversations, the impact of Rabha’s poetry thus lies in a keen, intimate grounding in particulars.

This approach resists the pressure to perform an air of grandeur in speaking to collective experiences. In my work, I am hyper aware of writing about my cultures in a way that plays into the clichés of travel brochures. When writing a surreal poem rooted in my mother’s stories of her childhood, I remember fixating on the detail of children eating a mango. I first included the image of a mango seed, because it was authentic to my mother’s memories, but I became more and more critical of it with each revision. Did it even matter that it was a true detail that I fleshed out through my language? Or was any impact of that overshadowed by the “Incredible India” tourism jingle that the image evoked? For me, navigating uncomfortable dynamics between authenticity and performing cliché representations of my cultures manifest in details as small as this.

Ashry is also on a journey of writing while acknowledging the expectation to “act as a representation...for a certain kind of experience, the queer immigrant, queer Muslim immigrant experience.” Upon moving to the U.S. to pursue her MFA in Writing at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, Ashry remembers “the pressure to perform this air of newness, to be the Egyptian girl writing her Egyptian girl poetry...I was called to answer for my people.” She shares the following conviction: “I need to make it, keep it personal even while I'm performing this, whether I want to or not. It's a performance either way, and it goes out there in the world.”

Excerpt from “when playing foreigner I”:

bond with Arab uber drivers

how long have you been here?

7 months

a year and a half

a decade

too long

play hide and seek with Arabs at Topshop

we favor the places we frequent back

home

I find them still hiding a game I play

I want to say السلام عليكم

I want them to be surprised

when playing foreigner I find home in Sephora

One technique that Ashry relies on throughout loving the alien is using the second-person narrative perspective. “I feel like I've gone from trying to be part of this bigger conversation to starting my own little intimate conversation [with] myself, my readers. Usually when I'm writing a poem in second-person I'm thinking of the specific person that I'm writing to. Sometimes it's someone that is a good friend, or that I just started dating, sometimes it's a family member, [such as] my mom, who I think is in the chapbook quite a bit too.” This approach of taking readers inside the folds of such acute conversations remains a consistent appeal in the chapbook. The poem “when playing foreigner I,” for instance, explores “Arabness” through moments of recognition between the speaker and Arab Uber drivers and playing a game of “hide and seek with Arabs at Topshop,” culminating in finding “home in Sephora.” These magnified moments within glossy Western exteriors challenge the exoticizing rhetoric of Arabness and reframes them in more playful ways. This strikes me as a useful way to trace how notions of being an insider and an outsider intermingle.

Critical to Ashry’s articulation of her experiences is the way she moves between Arabic and English. “I want my readers to settle into their discomfort, to acknowledge the Arabic as a world they might not be able to enter but would be able to understand from context,” she notes. “I want the Arabic to feel like a secret between me and my Arabic speaking audience. I want to hold on to the language in this way.” As a reader who does not speak Arabic, Ashry’s writing calls me to interrogate my own reaction to encountering the alien. For instance, the poem “why we can only switch code for and to Mayada, my little sister (inspired by Gloria Anzaldua)” moves between English and Arabic in a way that performs the frustration of articulating clearly, cursing “this flimsy excuse for a whole tongue” as the poem moves from a beginning that contains some playfulness (“a secret language”) and arrives at a more urgent conclusion (“we know how to survive”). This resonated with me deeply as an illustration of how code switching can include both the giddiness of having access to a secret, shared language as well as the threat and instability of outsider status that language entails.

When initially asked to translate the Arabic in the manuscript, Ashry remembers that it “felt all wrong. It felt like stripping away the authenticity and the heart. I didn't want to do that. I figured that truly dedicated readers are going to take the time to Google Translate. I'm just not going to do that for them.” She recalls the influence that Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” from the anthology This Bridge Called My Back had on her as a writer. “The poems that are within the chapbook are very much me struggling with the idea of translation, mistranslation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. I don't know if my writing right now is as much about these things as it was, but for a period of time, that was really my biggest concern. I was thinking about how my experience here [Chicago] is so full of translation — me translating my name, me translating my experiences, my language, my culture, my backgrounds, my history, my people, just constantly.” Explaining the connection between this impetus towards translation and the performance it entails, Ashry once again returns to the project of articulation. “I always felt such a push for myself in art and in translating to really figure out how to articulate my experiences in a way that is fair, that doesn't embellish, but brings the gravity of my situation to the forefront without it being really dramatic or just all about trauma.”

For Ashry, this push towards articulation is one that necessitates a confrontation of not only what is externally silenced but also what is internally silenced and evaded. “I've always been very frank in my writing and I'm very persistent in sharing. I feel like writing is the space for me to really just be honest and to the point, and not hide anything for myself or anyone else…[To] just get at the truth, whatever that may be. If I'm hiding something from myself, if I'm trying not to deal with something, I can't write. And if I do write, it's not going to be very good.” I find this to be true in my writing as well, with my revisions often stripping away at the evasiveness to build the courage to approach the truth. In this way, articulation is a journey of overcoming both external and internal chokeholds.

loving the alien is a potent display of Ashry’s skill to shapeshift the alien on the page, both exploring her own discomfort and making that tactile and compelling for readers. I look forward to reading more from her as a writer who makes me question the ways in which I translate and articulate the alien in me.

Images courtesy of Black Sunflowers press

Poet Rabha Ashry on ‘loving the alien’, Black Sunflowers, and Playing Foreigner

two thousand and twenty

The Anatomy of Perception | تشريح الإدراك الفكري