AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Charif Shanahan and Adrian Matejka on the shifting of identity, oneness, and centering love

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon’”)

To speak at all
I must occupy a position

in a system whose positions
I appear not to occupy.

Adrian Matejka: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Adrian Matejka, editor of Poetry magazine. This week, I have the great honor of sitting down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan. We hear poems from his new book, Trace Evidence, and talk about how Charif gracefully centers love while excavating the violence of our colonial past. His poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the United States and abroad. Charif, welcome to the podcast.

Charif Shanahan: Thank you. Thank you for having me, I’m really happy to be here.

Adrian Matejka: I’m so excited for the three issues that you’re going to be doing. It’s going to be the May, June, and July/August issue of the magazine. And do you want to talk a little bit about your editorial perspective, what you bring to our team? And, you know, I can just say it’s been a real joy to have you in the editorial room already.

Charif Shanahan: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been, it’s been a total pleasure. I think for me, as guest editor, it’s important that the issues not seem or read like poems that Charif likes. (LAUGHS) Or poems that Charif would turn to in his private reading life. You know, I think the role as an editor is very different than how I feel, you know, the kind of work that I feel drawn to as an individual reader, you know? And so they’re kind of two ways that I’ve been thinking about the issues, you know, maximum inclusivity. And I mean that beyond aesthetic, you know, but also across national borders, right. So there are going to be two translation folios in two of the issues. And to think historically. You know, we are participating in an ancient global art form that has existed in every language and culture we can remember, and there’s so much amazing work that’s being written today, you know, in a contemporary context, that we can almost stay there. And just inhabit and live in the present moment, which is so rich and alive and exciting and amazing, without looking behind us at the poet’s who’ve made what we’re doing possible. And so I hope to treat, within these three issues, those two, those two elements.

Adrian Matejka: I keep asking questions about you as an editor, but I’m wondering, in your own poetic lineage, there were a lot of people who have inspired you and supported your work. But if you had to pick one, who do you think is the poet who has had the most profound influence on you?

Charif Shanahan: I’d have to say Linda Gregg. I was a student of Linda’s in my undergraduate at Princeton, I was a student of hers my sophomore year. I had the great fortune of taking a workshop with Yusef Komunyakaa the semester before Linda. And that was revelatory. And (LAUGHS) listeners can’t see the way that you’re shaking your head.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS) Like I just can’t, I just can’t even imagine, you know, like, that’s, that’s too much for one poetry lifetime.

Charif Shanahan: Right. I felt, I felt really, really lucky, really blessed. And you know, what I learned from Yusef was really editorial, and, you know, on the poem level. You know, he has such a razor sharp editorial eye, you know, rethink these words, the diction in line seven, a new title. And of course, he was always right. And it was amazing to see. And so I’m grateful for that. But I identify Linda, or I isolate Linda because it was from her that I really learned about the spirit of poetry, and what poetry was a space for, you know? What it could be a space for. We barely talked about craft. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: The entire semester, we barely talked about craft. We regularly talked about the soul and the spirit, and what poetry could be a conduit for, what kind of discoveries poetry could enable or engender, you know? And it was so clearly a spiritual practice for Linda, the making of poems, you know? And it had anchored her life in ways that she shared with us that, at that time in my life, I think at probably about 19, was really, really important for me to hear, and to see. I think I became a poet in that room. A commitment was born in that room. And what’s funny about that class, though, is that I actually tried to drop it. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: I went the first week, and Linda was super eccentric, on a wavelength of her own, and I did not know what to do with my discomfort. (LAUGHS) I felt really uncomfortable that first class and, you know, she asked a question something like, “How many are you? They told me that I need to tell them how many people in the room and I don’t really do numbers.” And we were like seven or eight students, you know.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: So it was just like, what is happening? And I left the class and had decided that I was going to try to get into a different section. And so I went to James Richardson’s section the next week, and I had my 10 poems, you know, 10 copies of my poem, and I said, “I need to be in this section. I attended the Tuesday section last week, and I really need to be in the Wednesday section because there’s a scheduling issue.” And he said, “I’m so sorry, if you want to continue taking the class, you’re gonna have to stay in the section you’re in.” So I went to the bookstore, the Princeton bookstore, and I went to the poetry shelf, and picked up Chosen by the Lion, which I think was Linda’s third or fourth book, and opened it at random to a poem called “Asking for Directions,” which was devastatingly beautiful to me. And it was an experience that was emotional, intellectual, physical. I mean, I really felt it with my whole being. And when I closed the book, I just thought, “Whatever that is, I need to continue to pursue. I don’t know what just happened to me. I know that’s a poem, but, you know, what?”

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: It was just a full, it was just a full body experience. And you know, all hyperbole aside, I think it was, it changed me, I think that moment changed me, something began to shift. And so I went back to Linda that week, and we had a friendship for, you know, close to a decade after I graduated. So it really is Linda who opened me to all this. And of course, later there were folks who were very important to me and continue to be very important to me, but it was Linda who, who started this for me.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Charif, can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Charif Shanahan: I’d be happy to. It’s called Trace Evidence. And it’s a triptych. And the second section of the book is really a long meditation on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. And its occasion is this bus accident. I was on an overnight bus in Morocco that crashed while I was in Morocco conducting genealogical research. And I was medevaced to Zurich, Switzerland, where I lived with my ex-partner, and had three surgeries, long convalescence, it was a huge ordeal. And there were a lot of questions inside that experience. Specifically, how on earth could it happen that a year I believed I would spend in my ancestral homeland turned out to be mostly spent in my childhood bedroom? What does that mean? And that’s the second section. And the first and third sections take up questions of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, all of which is in orbit of love, which I think is the most essential aspect that the book tries to touch.

Adrian Matejka: I cannot wait for these poems to be in the world. Now you were born in the Bronx though, right?

Charif Shanahan: Sure was.

Adrian Matejka: Your father was Irish American?

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Adrian Matejka: And then your mother was Moroccan. What do you remember about growing up in the Bronx?

Charif Shanahan: You know, what I remember about the Bronx was placelessness. You know, we were, we were a blended family. We also came from communities that were not around us. And so, especially from my mother, who was, is from Morocco, Arab, Muslim, my father being Irish American from New York. But we were raised, my brothers and I were raised in a predominantly Puerto Rican community. And we stood out, right, it’s this, like, hypervisibility invisibility thing, right? Where there’s a lot of attention and no attention. Or there’s a lot of attention and no comprehension or understanding. And what I remember of the Bronx, too, was leaving the Bronx. (LAUGHS) You know, we often left. We lived in a part of the Bronx called Kingsbridge, and my brothers and I went to primary school in Riverdale, which was about three miles north of where we grew up. And we went to high school in Westchester, in New Rochelle. And when I got my first job and started working that was happening in Manhattan. I worked at Armani Exchange in retail on 51st and 5th Avenue. And so it was always a question of, of where we were going, where life was going to happen away from where we lived.

Adrian Matejka: Mm.

Charif Shanahan: And the amount of othering that took place in each of these destinations. The, you know, Jesuit brother-run high school in New Rochelle, the Catholic primary school in Riverdale, you know, midtown Manhattan, wherever it was, there were ways in which I myself and my family were othered for racial reasons, geographic reasons, cultural reasons.

Adrian Matejka: Is your experience of that othering different in the US from outside of it?

Charif Shanahan: Oh my goodness, completely. It was, it was incredible. It was just incredible to see how the operative terms of identity shifted when I moved to Europe. And so, when I, when I started my time in Europe, in London, I was working in financial sales and consulting, right out of college, trying to figure out how to be a poet in the world, but needing a j-o-b,

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: and some money, because there was debt, and you know. And so I got this job, and I’m working in midtown Manhattan, and it’s a multinational—I studied literature in foreign languages in college, so I was able to use Italian and a little bit of Spanish, and it was exciting and global. And I somehow managed to convince the director of my department to transfer me to the London office, where the team that worked with Italian clients was based. And so, it took me about four to six months, but I made it happen. And as soon as I got to London, the identity markers of race in a US American context, or of queerness, which were the first two kind of vehicles of identification and understanding those around you, fell to the wayside, and I was the American guy.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: I was the American guy on the team with the person to my right, who was from Paris, the person to my left, who was from Milan, the person in front of me, who was from Dublin. And so it was international in a way that was very different from the kind of international experience that I had had in New York, which, of course, is an extremely international diverse place. There was a lot of folks who were born and raised elsewhere who arrived for their professional life. You know, so they went to the Bocconi and then they, they came to London for their first job. And so, fitting into that kind of rubric, you know, or that conception of one another, you know, meant that I was the American first, maybe the guy from New York, maybe the gay guy from New York, but race was sort of less, less operative. And that was really fascinating, because when I returned to New York about five years later, to pursue the MFA at NYU, it was kind of a reverse culture shock, in a way, you know. There were ways that I had to relearn my culture of origin, and particularly around race. It was a little bit of—not that I had ever forgotten the challenges and the questions that were so central to my early life, but it was a little bit like, oh, right, that conversation.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: Right, that thing. There was xenophobia and a load of it in Europe, it wasn’t that, you know, I don’t mean to romanticize or idealize the experiences that I had in London, Zurich, and Milan, which were the primary cities that I lived in while I was abroad. But there’s a particular energy and centrality to US American racial politics that sucked me right back in.

Adrian Matejka: That’s really wonderfully said. I’m glad you’re back, and I’m sorry. (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: It’s all good.

Adrian Matejka: That you had that reentry when you first got here, because I know it’s just a different lifestyle. And you brought all of that globalism back with you. And it’s in the poems, too, which is one of the reasons I’d hoped we’d get to talk about it.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Charif, would you please share “Wound” with us?

Charif Shanahan: I would be happy to.

(READS POEM)

“Wound”

It has taken me years to begin this poem.
    I have not known from where to speak.

Because I had not been positioned,
    I have not positioned myself to speak.

In this way, it has taken me years
    To begin not only this poem but being

A person at all, which is required
    For speaking, it turns out, which is

Frankly speaking, the thing I have most
    Wanted, most needed to do,

Not for my ego, not exactly, but
    To clear what had positioned me

    In the first place, in no place.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: And then we talked a little bit about the globalism of your work and the influences that have guided the poems over the years. And your new book starts out with a quote from the great philosopher Frantz Fanon: “I believe in the possibility of love. That is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.” I love that quote. I’d never heard it before until I read the book, so. And how have you, you know, as a poet, endeavored to trace love’s imperfections and perversions?

Charif Shanahan: That has been the kind of unknown to me, unbeknownst to me, guiding light or engine. And it was something that I came to see in graduate school, I think as I was putting the first book together, that, as much as the work seems to be on the surface level about “identity,” quote-unquote, right? Like, these are poems that explore mixed-race identity. These are poems that explore Blackness in the Arab world. That really the thing that I’m after, the lament inside the meditations is the separateness of our species. It just has always seemed to me as plain as day that we are so obviously all the same thing. And yet, here we are, in the social world. Here we are having to navigate the terms of the world that we have constructed. And for me as an individual, who is not really accounted for by those terms, that has put me in a place that makes the reality of oneness, of human oneness, irrefutable. And in some respect, the truest thing available to me.

Adrian Matejka: Mm.

Charif Shanahan: The thing that is there for me, as someone who is racialized differently, depending on who’s looking, who’s queer identity comes to the surface in this room, and then racial identity falls to the background, it’s—the dynamic nature of identity is that we are who we are, and then in certain contexts, certain identities that we carry or inhabit come to the fore. You know, and even within that, as a mixed person, as light-skinned Black person, as a North African, right, there are all these assumptions that my body and my experience are met with by the individuals around me who presume to know. And whatever it is they think they know, what is happening almost certainly is divisiveness, is separateness, even if what is happening in the interpretation of me and my body is to unify. Say, you know, another Black person embracing me as Black and we are Black together, that still, which is powerful, and welcome, and sustaining on a spiritual or soul level, it’s still, in some respect, is a division or distancing, you know? Anytime an identity forms, or a group of individuals unify around an identity, there is another distinct but related identity that forms as a consequence of that, right, that there’s a line that’s drawn about us around us, which makes a them, which makes a they over there. And so, it’s not that I want to flatten our differences. It’s not that I feel persecuted by my circumstances, as a mixed person. It’s not most of the assumptions that people have (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: Right.

Charif Shanahan: about, about the reality of my experience. It’s about the way that all of this was made. And in that, in its constructedess, necessarily, therefore, there is a lived point at which the constructiveness reveals itself and it dissolves, it falls apart. And I’m interested in that. I’m interested in that moment, because I was born into that moment. I, in some ways, I exist there.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: I think the second piece of that, you know, for me as a literary artist, is the way that those circumstances, which I feel are what was here waiting for me, affect language and affect our ability to communicate with one another. And to circle back to the Fanon, to love one another. To really love one another, to really see one another. And how do we, how do we do that? And the question is maybe a little more pointed or charged or contentious for someone who within a particular social context is illegible, because, how do you love an individual who, in a way, doesn’t even really exist within a given social context? Right, like, how does one do that? Right?

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: And love in all its expressions, you know, romantic sexual love, familial love, maternal love, right? Self-love, all of it. Right? That love is the thing at stake, it seems to me, inside these compartmentalizations and separations and divisions. And so, you know, on the point of placelessness or, you know, not really having a position and language, speaking, communication, there’s a poem that opens up the first section that maybe I could read.

Adrian Matejka: Yeah, that’d be great.

Charif Shanahan: It’s, I should say that the two words in the title are in quotation marks. I don’t want to explain away the poem, but that—I’m really trying to kind of foreground that the object of inquiry is language and name, naming. So this is called “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon.’”

(READS POEM)

I want to tell you what for me it has been like.

To speak at all
I must occupy a position

In a system whose positions
I appear not to occupy.

Though some say such non-position is
My position—

Speak from that placeless place outside the system etc
Some would say and have said—

If the placeless place is created by terms
Of the system     then it must be
Within the system     even if it appears

Otherwise. And so

It may be that the position
Presumed to be of body

Might better be regarded as
A position of thought or

A receptivity to possible experience
As conceived by the still
Implausible eye

Of a man who defined
The flimsy self he carried

Against those whom he did not
Understand or know or in any real sense

See—

And if the possible vision
Of that implausible eye

Accounted for you
In name only

Then filed you under
Consequence—Side effect

It is not that the system fails
To position you

It positions you actively
And specifically nowhere

So that you appear on the outside
But remain within

Or you appear within
But remain on the outside

Which is to say in other words
A part and apart—

And so

If to speak in a particular social world I must

Occupy a position and that world consists

Of positions that are clear but none

Of which clearly I occupy

Then it may be that I cannot        even if I want to

Tell you what for me it has been like
                                                                              And so

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Thank you for reading that poem, Charif. I needed to take a minute to collect my thoughts, because it’s just so powerful, both in intentionality, but also your syntax has a kind of musicality that just I really respond to in a way that’s visceral, and unexpected. So I loved reading the poem this morning, but I was even more knocked out by it when you just shared it.

Charif Shanahan: Thank you.

Adrian Matejka: And it reminded me that, you know, this whole book, I mean, I don’t want to generalize, but so much of the book is, is interrogating this absence of or resistance to definition. And I wonder if that doesn’t have something to do—I mean, there’s cultural identity, but you’ve also got your, your national identities, you’ve also got your identities as a poet who studied to be a financier.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: You’ve also got your identities being back in the US, you know, there are all these layers to that, that somehow, you know, the archive of your life, the archive of who you are, you know, is at the center of the book, even if it’s not being said. So maybe, if you could talk a little bit more about, about that, because I’m so fascinated. I mean, when you told me that you’d worked in finance, I was like, what? Most poets I know, you know, it’s not that they can’t, but they don’t want to.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: Because numbers aren’t words, you know.

Charif Shanahan: I didn’t want to either. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: I did it for three years, begrudgingly. It was available to me. And I should say too that I was a Comparative Literature and Creative Writing major as an undergraduate. I’m not exactly sure how I managed to get a job in finance and consulting after college, you know, but it was what was available to me. You know, I really appreciate the sensitivity of your question. And you know, what I haven’t had the opportunity to say, in my capacity as guest editor working with you, or now during this conversation is how meaningful it is to me to know that a poet I admire as much as you find something in my work that they respond to. You know, so thank you for the generosity inside what you just said, even if it didn’t feel like a generosity to you. You know, with that first poem, the poem that I just read, you know, I think, or I love thinking about the way that individual poems come together to form a section or collection.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: It’s exhilarating to me. I love it. I love thinking about it. There are so many possibilities. It’s so exciting. And the opening poem establishes the geography, which was important to me, because part of the question of my life, which is what I hear inside your question, you know, saying that it feels like an archive of, of my history, of my personal history, is the ways in which my family, and really my generation, my and my brothers’ generation, necessarily have to navigate a kind of dual legacy of the Moroccan heritage of which we emerge, from which we emerge, but also, the kind of contemporary happenings and political circumstances, which are of the place where we now are, the geography where we are now. Which, of course, is informed and even dictated by US American history. And so, you know, I think a reviewer of the first book talked about, called it the super imposition of Morocco’s multiple colonial legacies on top of US American racial politics. And that’s exactly it, you know. And that’s part of the complication of it, right, is that I am a mixed individual with a white parent and a Black parent. But what does that mean? Right, like, to use that language is to not acknowledge national origin or cultural context, right? And those pieces are what make this family story so particular, or what I believe make this story so particular, which is, questions of identity in the North of Africa are really complicated. When we think of the colonial history in the North of Africa, people typically think of French occupation, which is the most recent, but the Arab presence in the North of Africa is itself a colonial history. And so what you have in the North of Africa are our Arabized ethnic groups of various phenotypic expression. And so it’s, it’s what makes possible a dark-skinned North African who identifies as Arab and does not identify with Africa or Blackness at all.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: And so my mother would be, you know, the speaker’s mother would be one of those individuals, right. And so what then happens when that individual immigrates to the United States of all places, right, which has the relentless, persistent, unavoidable, pathological racialization of one another internalized so deeply that we don’t even know that it’s happening. It’s so automatic. You know, there’s a line in one of the poems, a poem called “Self-Determination with the Question of Race” that says, “Some of us don’t even see how we see.”

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: And so what, what of that individual’s experience? You know. The identity markers that are germane to my mother’s experience are Muslim, woman, Moroccan, Arab, eventually, mother, right, these are the ways that she understands herself and that she names herself. And then there’s this question of Blackness that is thrust upon her when she comes to the United States. And so, it’s not that I think an individual in her circumstances must revise their self-concept. It becomes important to consider those circumstances when children are involved. When there is a first generation Black American experience that is happening outside of Black American identity in the way that that phrase is typically used, right?

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Charif Shanahan: So, which is to say, not a descendant of enslaved Africans in the United States. So I think that this is sort of like the, the origin point, really, it’s like, all of this emerges from that set of circumstances, you know? And I think the inclination for a lot of people is to flatten the complexity. So I think when I, when I kind of trace out those circumstances, and, you know, how my cultural inheritance and by extension, my identities are informed by those circumstances, what I’m not reaching for is a simple, irrefutable answer. I’m not even really reaching for an answer. I am generating questions, you know? These are the circumstances, right. Nobody asked for them. Nobody alive created them. But here they are. And here we are having to navigate them. Right? That’s part of what I believe I can do. One of the things I feel that I can do as, as an artist.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Mm. Oh, Charif. That is well said, man, thank you so much for joining us today

Charif Shanahan: Thank you.

Adrian Matejka: on the podcast, and I look forward to the book. Trace Evidence comes out in March 2023.

Charif Shanahan: Thank you so much for having me, Adrian.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: A big thanks to Charif Shanahan. Shanahan’s second collection, Trace Evidence, will be out from Tin House Books next month. He’s an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and the guest editor for the summer 2023 issues of Poetry magazine. You can read three poems from Trace Evidence in the December 2022 issue of Poetry, available in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. That’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thank you so much for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)