Hajjar Baban is the author of the chapbooks Relative to Blood (Penmanship Books, 2018) and What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019). A Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet, she is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a current MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Virginia. Hajjar has work appearing in The Adroit Journal, Wildness, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. She spends most of her time avoiding running from herself. You can find her work here: hajjarbaban.com.
Your chapbook of poems, WHAT I KNOW OF THE MOUNTAINS, explores the intersections between geography, culture, religion, and identity. To the readers, you present both a familiarity and an unknown, an audacity to challenge. Can you talk about how this chapbook came to be, and what message you hope to convey through your collection.
My chapbook, WHAT I KNOW OF THE MOUNTAINS came out of a very dense thematic and formal obsession. At the time, it was the only way that I knew to speak of my relationship to my father, and my father’s Kurdistan. Those underlying intersections you’ve noted, of religion and identity that are threaded within, could only have been done through the abstracted image of my father at the time. I had written many of the poems within the course of a semester in undergrad, and my true understanding of the project didn’t fully reach realization until I recently began to write and rewrite through some of the same themes.
More than most poets, you seem to allude to family in almost every poem, whether it be the mother figure, a child, and everyone else in between. What role does your family play in and outside of your writing, and how do you reconcile their identities through your words?
I have a pretty big family, eight siblings. It’s always been something I’m aware is shocking and weird to others as well as something I’ve never personally let affect me, the attempted shame placed on me by others. I grew up not apologizing for my family, whether to childhood friends, or to adults reading my poems now. Despite this, my own reckonings with the family unit as a whole, and the understanding of the self through siblings, through sisterhood, are things that eventually make their way into my poetry because my parents, my siblings, they were what I was born looking at, my loves, my violence, my aloneness, my God, my homelands.
On that note, what cultural background were you raised in? How has that contributed to your perspectives as a poet and person?
I was raised in Dearborn, Michigan home to the largest Muslim population in the United States. I was raised by an Afghan mother and a Kurdish father, with Dari as the language of my household. I was raised alongside other immigrants, other families of refugees, so many with histories hidden. It’s important to my perspectives as a poet because I’ve spent a life learning to find a room in which everything about me can be true, which has allowed me to respect every poem I’ve written— as attempts toward understanding lacks in self, in written history, in language.
One of the first poems of yours I came across was “Ghazal Forcing the Man” in Wildness Journal. You articulate how “[t]he page refuses my inheriting” in a crude but defiant way, almost like an act of rebellion. Can you tell me where this poem originated, and why you chose to use the form of a ghazal?
I wrote a few father-ghazals, a fascination that came about under the teaching of poet Oliver Baez Bendorf, who I continue to learn from. The ghazal form allowed me to run a thread through so many aspects of aforementioned lacks in my understanding of the family unit. Through repetition of inheritance I could speak on so many things that at the time, I had been exhausted by: one male figure, one idea of a country with no concrete evidence of my belonging, an idea in which the history of my uncle lives on, my father’s relationship with Islam could one day be revealed, the story of my parents’ meeting can breathe, my taken in aloneness. It’s a lot, which is why I was attached to the ghazal form to support me, to put in tiny repetitive couplets my struggle with what I’ve been handed.
Is there anything that people often overlook in your poems?
I believe in people’s ability to see what I can’t see in my work, so I don’t think anything’s lost in the reading of my poems by others. However, even when I’m writing about my relationship with language, people have a weird desire to strap me inside of ‘correct English’ it’s not my desire to make sense in syntax, and there will always be some things only for me to understand.
I’d love to know a little more about your writing process. Where do you seek inspiration from?
There isn’t a specific ‘inspiration’ from which I write. Though I do think that my writing process is very intuitive. This year, after having written my undergraduate thesis of poetry I took a summer long break before entering graduate school. I know that may not sound like a lot of time to some people and to others it may seem like so long to avoid the poem, but I didn’t pressure myself to write and I thank my past self for it. I listen to my body in many things, but writing is definitely a force that I either feel or I don’t, though it doesn’t leave for too long. And in any case, I’m always writing in some form, whether it’s a dream journal, a daily journal, or letters to my ladies.
You’ve had your poems published in many admirable literary journals. What gave you the push to share your work?
I’m lucky to have had mentors, professors, and close friends that support me in my decision and journey to publishing my work. The force to share, however, comes out of a desire to release. Had I kept myself from writing some things, I wouldn’t be honest with myself. Where I am. Where I’ve been. Where I want to run. I’m not intimidated by rejection and I don’t get too stressed over it, I feel more personal toward poetry acceptance, having been seen and in some way, understood through the poem. If I had to share every poem or chapbook that has been rejected, it would take up ten times the space of my poetry acceptances, so I don’t pay too much mind to it.
Do you have any advice for fellow writers?
Don’t be afraid of yourself.
Last but not least, could you share any upcoming projects you are working on, writing or otherwise?
I’m currently in the process of submitting my first full length book of poems, SINGULAR WRECKINGS.
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.