10 Questions for Hayan Charara
- By Danielle Brown and Amal Zaman
"When you were in her womb, your mother
used and sold herself, and after you were pulled out
she didn't stop. For a minute or more
you did not breathe; and from the drugs she took
(now in you) your skinny arms and legs shook. . ."
—from "Bad Things" which appears in the Summer 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 2).
Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
I vaguely remember the first poem I wrote—I was six years old. The poem was about a dream I’d had, I know that, and I tried mimicking Shakespeare’s sonnets because that’s what I thought a poem should be—we had the complete works of Shakespeare in our house, and I remember that the look of the sonnets struck me as unusual and worthwhile. I’m still taken by the look of a poem. Sometimes, the typographical more than anything else dictates for me when I break a line or make a stanza.
Jump twelve, thirteen years forward, to college. That’s when I really started writing and reading poems seriously. One of the first poems I wrote in this “serious” mode is called “As a Child in Detroit I Could Believe Anything” and it deals with the violence I knew as a child, in particular a series of events: the death of two young neighborhood men, Arab men, who were killed in a house explosion that turned out to be intentional; the attack and rape of a next door neighbor; and the large scale violence in my family’s homeland, Lebanon, which was ravaged by civil war during all of my childhood (in fact, the war only officially ended just months before I wrote “As A Child in Detroit I Could Believe Anything”).
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Philip Levine influenced my poetry more than anyone else. I came across his poems when I was young (while a student at Wayne State University, which is where Levine had also gone to college decades before). To put it plain, Levine’s poems knocked me on my ass every time I read them. Their narratives, I understood perfectly well—I knew people, places, highs and lows like those in his poems, many of which were set in Detroit, the hometown we shared. I recognized the places in the poems, had been to many of them, and the lives of the people in his poems looked a lot like those of my family, friends, and neighbors. More importantly, Levine’s poems helped me see something that I didn’t easily recognize in my own version of life in Detroit—dignity.
His rhythms were startling, too. Combine that with the narratives and the beautiful lyricism of his work, and I would get lost in his poems. It wasn’t unusual for me to pick up one of his books, and an hour later find myself in something like a stupor. In fact, my first experience with Levine’s poetry went that way. It was at Wayne State, and I was waiting on a chemistry experiment. To kill time, I hit the bookstore. I picked up Levine’s New Selected Poems (1991), and next thing I know, I’d forgotten all about my chemistry experiment, which was ruined. Not much later, I decided to become a poet.
That all happened twenty-five years ago, and Levine’s poetry still influences me. The rhythms and sounds of poetry that I heard in his work—those still matters to me. The dignity he brought to the people and places of his poems, to the everyday reality of their lives—that matters to me, both as a poet and a human being.
There are other poets, obviously, who shape my own thinking and writing. Fady Joudah and Phil Metres have been pretty steady inspirations and guides for the past several years. Joudah’s Textu and Metres’ Sand Opera should be required reading for understanding what it means to be an American in the beginning of the 21st century. Russel Swenens’s first book length collection, The Magic Kingdom, is a startling, killer book of poems that I’ve had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form and now that it’s out as a book, I’ve been devouring. Glenn Shaheen’s poetry deserves a lot of attention; his is a unique voice and sensibility, which helps me to shape and direct my own. And I keep returning to Lawrence Joseph and Naomi Shihab Nye’s work—along with Levine’s poems, Larry and Naomi’s poetry set me on the road I’m on now. And their new poems are just as significant as their earlier works.
What did/do you want to be when you grow up?
Early on, I wanted to be a doctor, or a scientist of some kind. I took almost as many courses in biology, chemistry, and physics as I had in literature and writing. But I went with poetry, and at the time I felt that I needed to drop the sciences in order to pursue writing—that was probably not at all true. I wouldn’t call it a mistake (that I decided not to pursue a life in science or medicine, which was the original goal), but I just don’t know if I would have been happier or not either way. I’m happy doing what I do now (I teach literature and interdisciplinary courses at the Honors College at the University of Houston). But who’s to say I wouldn’t have enjoyed being a doctor?
For a long time, I did woodworking. I made fine furniture: tables, cabinets, beds, and so on. I stopped doing woodwork just over five years ago, when our first child came to us. Then, when life as a new parent eased up a bit, we moved to a house without the space needed to have a woodshop. And the situation hasn’t changed. I still have all my woodworking tools, though, and one of these days, sooner rather than later, I hope, I’d like to get back to making things with wood.
What inspired you to write this piece?
My sons, who we adopted at birth, are biological brothers. Their birth mother was using when she was pregnant with them, and that’s how she lost the child who became our first son; she was still using (but trying not to) when she became pregnant again; that child, now our second son, she had asked us if we wanted to adopt, and we did.
The story of how our boys became ours is one we’ve told them—they’re still young (4 and 5 years old), so the way we tell the stories keeps evolving, but the truth of it hasn’t changed one bit since the first time we told them about their birth, and their birth parents. They’ve known their history their whole lives.
In any case, “Bad Things” is about my oldest, the now five-year-old, and he can’t read just yet, though the poem is addressed to him, and it’s me telling him, again, the story he already knows but in a language, and in a way, that I haven’t yet.
I realized this, too: for me, the story may seem really complicated, and hard to grapple with, and difficult to tell (so much so that I chose a form—the sonnet—to tell it and as a way of not allowing my emotions to overwhelm the poem), but for my kids, especially because we’ve been telling them their stories from the beginning, it’s not as hard, not as complicated. It will be: one day, they will grapple with this in ways they don’t know yet. But we’ve prepared them as much as possible. We’ve been honest with them, even when it hurts to be so. “Bad Things” certainly hurt to write, and maybe it hurts to read. My children, at least, will be more ready than not to confront that pain.
Are you particular about your workspace or can you write anywhere?
Not anymore. I used to have a dedicated space (a small room, with wall-to-wall books, the door closed, the writing table facing a window), and a few trappings (a full pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a cup of coffee). Now, I can write almost anywhere: at home, at my office at the university, at a coffee shop, even when I’m working out (I’ll take a break and type into my iPhone). Usually, if I’m at home, and my kids are asleep or else not asking me to do this, that, or the other, I sit at the table where we eat and work in as many minutes as possible (gone for now are the days when I used to work for hours at a time). I stopped smoking over ten years ago, so that’s out. But I still drink coffee when I write—I make a cappuccino.
What other professions have you worked in?
Professions, none. Jobs, plenty. In chronological order: mopped floors and stocked shelves at my father’s grocery store; shoveled snow in winter, mowed lawns in summer; cleaned bathrooms at a public pool; got a promotion at the pool job and worked the entrance, admitting patrons; washed dishes at a diner; waited tables at a few restaurants, and then at a blues bar that used to be a brothel back at the turn of the century; tutored writing students in college; sold Christmas trees outside Central Park in New York; rang up sales at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, and promptly got fired for telling the manager to shove his work schedule up his ass (he got agitated and demanded I come back to work when I took a few days off to attend my mother’s funeral—I still have the pink slip mailed to me for insubordination); and after a few other jobs that paid hardly anything, I started teaching college—actually, that still pays hardly anything, too.
What is a city or place that influences your writing?
The deep connection I have to Detroit still exists, but not as strongly as it was when I was younger. I left Detroit over twenty years ago. Another way to put this: I’ve lived somewhere else longer than I did in Detroit. My connection now to the city, at least in terms of poetry, is mostly through memory; it’s a connection mostly to the past. But the influence of my Detroit past is also diminished.
These days, I’m more interested in what is going on in the world (my smaller version of it, yes, but also the larger and larger worlds that extend outside of me). In this way, wherever I am, or wherever I’m looking, those places matter more to me now.
Of course, there are all the immeasurable ways that a place imprints itself onto a person’s mind. Maybe, no matter where I live, where I write from, or where I look to when I write and think and create, Detroit is there—and by Detroit, I mean the houses I grew up, the places I worked, the people and ideas and experiences that shaped me. The same, I guess, can be said of New York City, where I spent a decade of my life and where a lot of significant things took place (my mother died when I was living in New York; I got married there; I got divorced there, and so on). Detroit does hold a special place, though. I may never escape it. My poem “Thinking American” sums it up:
Listen,
when I say Detroit, I mean any place.
By thinking American, I mean made.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
When I used to smoke, I smoked before, during, and after writing. Now, I just sit down and write.
What is your favorite food and/or drink to have while writing?
Just coffee.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I have a handful of “first-readers”—I use quotes because, more often than not, by the time anyone who is not me gets to see a poem, it’s gone through a few dozen revisions. So they aren’t really seeing a first draft. The real first readers are all the different critics in my head. I’ve got a whole host of them, many with competing ideas of what does and does not work in a poem. Yes, one says, you can be a little bit sentimental. Don’t you dare, another interrupts. This is probably a major reason for why I go through so many revisions before I think a poem is finished.
Hayan Charara is the author of three poetry books, most recently Something Sinster. He edited an anthology of contemporary Arab-American poetry, Inclined to Speak, and his children's book The Three Lucys received the New Voices Award Honor. He teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.
