AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Omar Sakr and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Queer Use, Cynicism, and Falling in Love

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

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Omar Sakr: (READS POEM)

I slip into my insolence, sleek as an eel.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I'm Cindy Juyoung Ok, feeling hopeful about connecting a bit of poetry and poetics to you today. This week I have the true treat of speaking with Omar Sakr, who joins us from Sydney, Australia. Omar tends to the in between, writing prose and poetry, moving between poetic and political urges. A cultural practitioner of queer and diasporic experiences, he writes very generous poems. They grieve loudly, they celebrate kindly. And we'll get to spend time with the sequence featured in the June issue of Poetry. The poems come from Omar's newest collection, Non-Essential Work, just out from University of Queensland Press in April 2023. Omar, welcome to the podcast.

Omar Sakr: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thanks for being here. We're going to be talking about work from your third collection, Non-Essential Work. So I wanted to start with some essential questions. How are you sleeping and eating lately?

Omar Sakr: I am, you know, I'm doing OK, relatively speaking. The relative referring to having an 11-month-old child and the difficulties and joys that brings into your life. The thing is, he's doing great.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Great.

Omar Sakr: We're not. But as long as he's doing great, it's fine.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Are you feeling like you might do anything for the 12 month?

Omar Sakr: Yeah. We are going to do a birthday. I always thought that that was like a weird nonsense thing people did, you know? Like, why?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Omar Sakr:  They're one. They’re a baby. They don't know anything. Like, “How do you have so much money?”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Omar Sakr: … kind of questions will run through my mind. (LAUGHS) And like, now we're here and it's like, oh. Yeah, we should. Like why not? He's a baby. We love him.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Things shift.

Omar Sakr: Also, people should come and give us food and things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Omar Sakr: And, you know, (LAUGHS) any excuse to have people come and like nod sympathetically at us and say soothing things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. Gather the people. Yeah, Koreans actually do a big 100-day party and a big year party because people used to die, you know? Like kids used to die. And so people will literally fly to, for a one-year party and not to a wedding or something. It's so hilarious.

Omar Sakr: Wow.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But there's a great thing that they do where you spread out different objects—just giving you party ideas—and the baby kind of reaches. And whatever they reach for represents what they'll have, like what will be prosperous. So if you reach for string that is a long life or if you reach for money that is, you know, wealthy life, things like that.

Omar Sakr: Wow. That's so cool. Definitely going to culturally appropriate that tradition

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Yes, please. Lay it all out …

Omar Sakr: And get cancelled. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And have the baby crawl to whatever is there.

Omar Sakr: But that tradition makes so much more sense, actually, you know, in the context that you just explained, like as opposed to weddings. Why go to all that effort?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHHS) I know.

Omar Sakr: Really?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. All the days, super long.

Omar Sakr: It's two adults like you guys are fine. You know what I mean?

Both: (LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You guys are fine. Yeah, exactly. Well, speaking of celebrations, your three poems, I think, and this book is such a cause for celebration, this newer book. And I wanted to ask about the sequence which addresses Canto 28 of Dante's Inferno, which, of course, describes torture and is part of this well-known canon and lineage, and also addresses, you know, the prophet. So how do you sort of position yourself amid and between these, this literary description of violence and then these sort of affirmations of faith and mentions?

Omar Sakr: It was a strange one coming to it, having known something of it. I mean, this is actually somewhat similar, I think, to the process of coming to religion as an adult, as something that you have heard about for most of your life or seen referenced, kind of reproduced in some manner. And then you get older and you actually read the text, you actually read the Bible or the Quran and you're like, wait a minute, this is very different. There's so much here you do not talk about that, you have left out of the conversation. And so that was kind of what occurred when I read The Inferno and came to that scene. And yeah, it's literary and it's all the rest of it. I wasn't really focused so much on that as much as I was the depiction of the Prophet (PBUH) and then his positioning in the text as well, being like so close to the devil. Like this is how reviled he was in that time. And then how much is he reviled today that that scene is not mentioned? It's not worthy of mention.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right

Omar Sakr: And so I wanted to write about it. And then there's all this connectivity, I guess, between how I'm seen by my family and culture as a sinner, as someone who I'm sure many believe will go to hell. And it's just so weird and interesting to encounter the prophet in this depiction of hell as well.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. You've often discussed the paradoxes and estrangements of being bi and Muslim and an Arab poet and the kind of difficulties that that can bring with inclusion or alienation in different ways or from different people. I wonder if writing and being a reader of literatures, including Western literatures, is a part of that too. Are there paradoxes that come up for you that feel at odds with experiences or identities outside of these histories, like of Dante's Inferno?

Omar Sakr: The first thing that comes to my mind straight away is the way in which writing and poetry is seen as elite and is discussed as prestigious, as evidence of humanity’s like greatness. And then, paradoxically, the contempt we display for the people who make it, for poets, the lack of support that the arts gets generally. That paradox is obviously something that I explore in this book and something that I rub up against a lot in my life because I grew up in a poor family and I am working class and it's a lot of authors at these festivals that I go to are not. So that thing of class and notions of prestige, which I find to be utterly hollow and almost always just code for money. I, you know, I struggle with a lot in a way that I feel others do not within this field. And one of the other aspects as well is the idea of poetry having a utility or not. That sense of futility is something that I wrestle with a great deal and I'm often quite evangelical about poetry. I think a lot of poems are, you know, will say things like, it saved our lives. And that will be true. But then at the same time, we can write and we do write great poetry about various struggles and continue a tradition of great poetry, about great struggles without seeing change. It's hard. It's hard when you're working in this space and you're desiring so much that kind of impact to not see it immediately. And so that's something that I think about a lot.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What you said about use and utility reminds me of the academic and writer Sara Ahmed has a book called What's the Use? On the Uses of Use. And it's all about that idea of use of utility is this colonial part of structural persecution. And she proposes this idea of queer use. And I know how much birds show up in your writing, so I think you'll really appreciate this because the cover of the book is actually an image of a red postbox, and it has a note on the outside. It says, “Birds nesting. Please do not use this box. Many thanks.” And I mean, it's so sweet because, you know, it's about this idea of things being used in a new way. It's a recent book and she has a newer project about complaint.

Omar Sakr: Yes. I've read some of them.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, you have. Great.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. No, no. I know of her work, but I have not read the book on use. And now I need to very much.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. She spoke with someone for the complaint book about getting her needs met in an institution after returning I think from long-term sick leave, who said it feels like a little bird scratching and not having an effect. I think we have her response. We can play for you actually.

Sara Ahmed: (AUDIO CLIP PLAYS) So when I heard the little birds in his story, my queer ears picked up. In my book On the Uses of Use, What's the Use? I use this image as an image of queer use, how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. So the birds turn a postbox into a nest. I can see that this is a rather happy and hopeful image. Perhaps not a typical image for a killjoy to show. Usually, when we turn up in the institutions not built for us, we are told, “Get back in your own box. Go back.” Or, “Go home.”

Omar Sakr: Hmm. I love that idea. Or at least, you know, just allowing for the fact that even what we do can have a different function than what we imagined, can provoke things we did not imagine. And it doesn't necessarily need to be as political as you hoped. It could be quite personal or vice versa.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Even thinking about the many festivals that you do, the many events that you do, those being set up for a certain purpose, but then there being room to subvert the original purposes and to create new versions of community building as new people come in, or even with the English language the way that it can be, this postbox that's used for something wasn't meant for by people who weren't meant to use it in that way. I think that your poetry is doing a lot of that, is switching, questioning, moving.

Omar Sakr: I had this moment yesterday. I was performing for New South Wales Treasury. My state government had invited me to do an event for them for IDAHOBIT (International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia). And it was fucking weird. Can I swear on this podcast?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah (LAUGHS SOFTLY)

Omar Sakr: Yeah. Australian, so swearing happens. Yeah. OK. Um, it was profoundly weird. And like being in that building and being in that space was alienating. The people who had organized it were queer women of color. One of them was a queer Muslim as well. But a lot of what we talked about was how this space was not intended for us and not intended for these kinds of conversations. And in fact, this kind of conversation had not occurred there before. There was also a little bit of like, “You're going to say the things that we can't say now in this space because we work here and we're employees. And we’ve like ushered you in for this reason.” And I was like, “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Thanks for telling me that as I'm about to speak in the microphone. That's awesome.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No pressure.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. But what I'm struggling with, I think, is really just cynicism. My own sense of are we kidding ourselves by saying we're being subversive within the structure? So I don't have a neat way to end this thought.

(BOTH LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, it's not a neat thought. There's hostility and there's hope and there's I think the important question of what is the individual responsibility or complicity? And I tend to feel … I find it easier to just err on the side of it's fucked and I'm a part of it. Even when I was a public school teacher, I would think about the person signing my checks and you know, what I was really doing to these students in, you know, this architecture of like almost like a prison and teaching creative writing at the university level. Sometimes I feel like this is a Ponzi scheme, you know? These students all, now they want to get MFAs. Like, what are we? How's everyone going to ...

Omar Sakr: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. So I tend to kind of feel like I'm in it now. It's not good.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. How much of it is a product of self-loathing? How much of it is a kind of reckless giving into this cynicism which we've attached a value to, I feel, in public discourse, because it signifies that you're aware.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Yeah. There's a feeling that if you're sincere, you must be missing something. You must not understand some aspect of what's happening.

Omar Sakr: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think that's very true.

Omar Sakr: I think a lot about, um, Tony Soprano.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah? (LAUGHS)

Omar Sakr: I I've been thinking about Soprano a lot in recent months because the end of that storyline is one in which you become aware. There's that scene of his therapist with other therapists talking about new research that shows being self-aware is one of the tricks that sociopaths and master criminals use

Cindy Juyoung Ok: WOW.

Omar Sakr: … to differentiate themselves from everyone else doing the crimes. And I see that a lot maybe in kind of how we talk about the evils of the day, as if the talking is enough.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Omar Sakr: And the awareness is enough because that means we're not like the others unthinkingly doing. Whereas in my mind, it makes you more fucked. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Inverse. It's actually you're aware and continuing.

(BOTH LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: OK. Yeah. It's so true, though, that people confuse acknowledgment with action.

Omar Sakr: Yes. Again, not something I have a neat, hopeful pivot from. Just going to drop that in here and, you know, make a queer use of it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Let's make a queer use of a sincere interaction.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Omar Sakr: One of the things that helps me is stepping back from the previous grandiose ideas I had about what I was doing and what poetry could do, and stop looking at it as though I'm going to create structural changes with a poem and really start looking at it as making personal changes possible. I'm in the work of changing someone's world, not the world. And that's something that becomes really obvious in moments like my event yesterday where there were a couple of people whose hearts were just on fire with light and love that I was there and able to speak to the things that they wanted so much to talk about and to hear and who loved my work and who found it so meaningful. And in the midst of like largely indifference and a huge concentration of power that we were all aware of and could do little about. So I try to focus on those little moments.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: One thing I think I find difficult to read about and write about is falling in love. I think it's just difficult for people to write about its frailty and rarity and specialness in a way that is interesting or feels original to them. And the world sort of opens up through that feeling. It's an important feeling, but it also is like more narrowing and it's more specific and you're concentrating on a single person, but your work often makes that available and has love energizing and changing thought and even sort of personhood. Has it, and does it continue to, affect your process – the way that you think about the finished poems?

Omar Sakr: Thank you for that. Yeah. Love is just the most extraordinary force in the world. It's funny, because prior to meeting my wife, I didn't believe in love, and I thought it was romantic nonsense. And then, obviously, she changed that. And now I live in it. And it is just a new way of moving through the world such that I don't worry about saying things like, love is the most powerful force in the world, which previously I might have cringed at or felt some kind of way because masculinity is just a dismal, shitty fucking framework for seeing the world and all the rest of it. So, and now I'm in love and of course, it just changes how you see yourself. It changes how you see everything. And I don't know that it's necessarily changing how I see finished poems or affecting the level of the line, at least not yet. I do still see my work as a separate sphere where I can enact things that I certainly, and create things that I certainly wouldn't in the context of our relationship. And what I mean by that is I explore thoughts and feelings in my work that are not thoughts and feelings that I hold in my life. I think, you know, it would be so limiting if I only explored the thoughts and feelings that I hold. And I'm making a distinction between what I hold and what just passes through me. This is something I had to think about and then discuss with my wife so that if there are darker thoughts and feelings that are, you know, a flickering thought that came and went, it's important to be able to say, this is not real and this is real.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Distinguishing for yourself what's real and lasting or flickering and passing, is that something you know immediately, or is it once you can see the poem outside yourself?

Omar Sakr: It's a great question. I think I'm aware in the moment. Yeah. I'm aware in the moment that this is not something that I hold. I'm actually aware straight away when I have the thought,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

Omar Sakr: and I'll be like, A, that's not me, and B, I'm going to write about that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Omar Sakr: Because I'm drawn to a certain ugliness which is called “certainty.” Because I'm so anxious—I have an anxiety disorder and ADHD—and everything in my life is uncertain or fluid in some manner and on a ridiculous level, like I'm half Turkish, half Lebanese, you know what I mean? I'm bisexual, so I'm straight desires, quote-unquote, and queer desires, quote-unquote. And I write in multiple forms and so many different communities see me or reject me on the basis of these things. And I have been subject to the negative authority of language all my life. And that is coming out of the public spheres of political spheres, trying to pin words to my body, trying to pin meanings to my body and to my community. And so I love declarative sentences. I love the absurdity of a line that has the audacity to say, “This is what a thing is,” you know? It registers to me as insane and I love it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS SOFTLY)

Omar Sakr: I love it because I can use it in so many different ways to paper over uncertainties. Yeah. I do find it ugly, but I also find it extraordinary. There's something addictive to it. There's something that I can't quite explain, but that's why I write poetry. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your most recent book has nine poems that are titled in the same way, a sequence that repeats throughout the book in different intervals, and each poem seems to reflect on Canto 28 of Dante's Inferno, where we have this eighth level of hell and the Prophet is depicted being tortured and in doing so depicts a kind of aggression against Islam. I think it would be great to hear one of these poems. Would you mind reading maybe the one that starts, “I slip into my insolence”?

Omar Sakr: Yeah.

(READS POEM)

“On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno’”

I slip into my insolence, sleek as an eel.
I have walked so many ways around God I can tell you
Holiness is a roundaboutWith a thousand exit points labeled doubt;
Like the boy who unzipped my pants
In my sleep, who broke the zipper of my sleep
So I have lost the measure of rest since;
Like my father leaving before I knew him or could speak;
My body forever unkneeling to pray
Unless there’s a zipper in front of me, a boy in front
Of me a ghost a beckoning a gate where, perhaps,
If I open wide enough I will be able to wake,
Again, and still, soaked as I am in shame—still
I care about my Prophet’s name.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You read that poem with such a gentleness, but also such a depth. And the metaphor of the zipper of sleep and the rest that is lost to the memory of fear that repeats feels very curious to hear out loud, almost inviting in its openness. One thing that comes up for me is just, you know, sometimes queer writers find it more difficult to talk about queer violence. And I'm curious what it was like to bring this poem into its making from that perspective.

Omar Sakr: Mmm. Well, it's always easier for me to write about it than to speak about it. So that's one of the things that comes up a lot when people ask me questions about the vulnerability I'm experiencing or letting them into when I read poems. And part of me wants to say, well, I wrote the poem so we didn't speak about it personally, like you and I right now, because I could break in this moment in a way where I don't necessarily know if you'll be able to catch or hold me. So that's the trickiness. I have, of course, been doing this for some years now, so I am able to talk about it. And the reason I do so is simply because silence is far harder to bear than talking about it. And silence will kill you in a way that talking about it will not. And sometimes when you're in the moment, rather gripped by a trauma, you can be convinced that to speak about it will be the end of you. And that's because illnesses like this, mental illnesses. I talk about them a little bit as if they have a will of their own.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: They can.

Omar Sakr: Which is that they don't want you to heal. When you're in that moment, when you're in the grip of it is a part of you does not want you to heal, is afraid very much of what it means to articulate something and then be seen as something because of it. So what I have learned is that the people who don't talk about these things are the ones who do not survive. Are the ones who are unable to break the cycle of damage and are enacting harm still on themselves and their loved ones. So, that’s why I talk about it, and that’s why I write about it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I once went to a talk with alQaws, this Palestinian organization that focuses on decolonizing queering and trying to see sexuality as not extricable from everything else. The talk I heard had a big focus on conversation between members of the community. Meeting people where they are without judgment. I found it really moving and true and I think that's maybe what you're bringing up is that the power of just holding space for a certain type of talk and maybe your books are a part of such an understanding for you and for others.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. I definitely want to create a space in literature in which my past selves would feel safe in or seen in or able to speak in. And a lot of the time what I'm hearing from readers is, I didn't know I had permission to talk about this. I didn't know that other people were feeling this or going through this.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It reminds me what you were talking about, about having an anxiety disorder, because I also have diagnoses, and I know that there are a lot of problems with diagnoses and there are so many issues historically with these books and who creates them. But I remember feeling so relieved to learn that there was a name for something that I had and that I was matching it perfectly. Like to find out that I was sort of like almost a textbook case of something made me feel like, well, I'm not making it up then, right? Like, there's this sense that the language gives it some kind of, I don't know, history.

Omar Sakr: Yeah, I think for me, I understand exactly what you're saying and it's something that's been on my mind again recently. So last year I was diagnosed with autism and that sense of, I've always suspected I am X, Y, Z, right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

Omar Sakr: That these particular behaviors might mean something other than this is just how I am. Like maybe other people are like this too. Maybe this is something I can work on, work with. The feeling that comes from a diagnosis is validation. But more importantly, diagnosis is invested with that authority. What I mentioned earlier, the negative authority of language, something that is loaded with power, that comes from a social acceptance of it. This is to say that people respond very differently when you tell them, I have a diagnosis of [INTENTIONAL PAUSE]. Yes. They accept it because it comes with an authority. Yeah. And I don't know if it's a product of my own, if it's just me, but like when I do go through the process of getting diagnosed or therapeutic processes where I'm reading about all of the kind of symptoms or traits that people exhibit, I then look around myself at the people and I'm like, I see it in you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmmm.

Omar Sakr: You know what I mean? I see it in you and I see it in you and I see it in you. And I just again, like, I don't know if it's because I'm maybe subconsciously looking for it or projecting it, but my general feeling is that it's a lot more common,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh yes.

Omar Sakr: than people assume.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: These questions about the language and the connection with others and the recognition of the self and others connects well to a question we have for you that is for a new segment called “Question into the Void,” where poets who were interviewed offer up a question and they don't know who the question's going to because we haven't booked the guests yet. But the next poet gets to kind of hear it and respond to it. And we have one for you if you'd like to hear it.

Omar Sakr: Yeah, of course.

Tishani Doshi: Hello. My name is Tishani Doshi and this is my Question into the Void, which has to do with innerness and outerness, something I think a lot about in my own work. But I'm wondering as a poet, whether that is something important to you and how this reckoning maybe has changed over your poetic career. And also, if you are not in a phase of writing poems or you're struggling to write poems, are there processes or are there modes by which you can fine-tune as if like an instrument or find your way back to make this reckoning between one's innerness and the outer world?

Omar Sakr: First of all, yay Tishani! I love her [LAUGHS] and have met her and she's wonderful. So that's really nice that I get this question from someone I know. Innerness and outerness is important, but it's not something that I keep distinct. I am most interested in where my body meets the world, where my spirit meets my body, and the ways in which we travel between these spaces. So the impacts I guess at those thresholds. I have been drawn from the beginning and I am still drawn very much to witnessing, to what is happening around me. So one of the things that has been true throughout my life is that I disassociate frequently. I am not present in my body often and as a result of traumas, as a result of autism, or ADHD, and I don't know exactly, I can't pinpoint the origin of them. But suffice to say that I am told often how oblivious I am. [MUSIC QUIETLY COMES IN] And there are holes in my days and there are holes in my life. And writing for me is a way of reclaiming that space and anchoring myself to the world. And what I have found is that the I, myself, is somewhat immaterial. That even though I don't remember a great deal, my body remembers. And when I'm writing, I can access that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You know, speaking of innerness and outerness, let's hear a poem where you're having a domestic scene and we're getting a sense of the ins and the outs, including this door, which I think is that kind of hinge between in and out for a lot of us.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. This is called, well, you know what it's called.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: [LAUGHS]

Omar Sakr: It's “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno’”

A lover undresses, with permission.
Picture the body becoming real.

                      I picture becoming real intimate.
It is strange to think of legs as closed.

                        I open my legs for strangers. I widen,
stretch. What belongs here? Don’t say a door.

Instead of belonging, I eat the door,
                 make an animal flap for the four-legged.

I’m on all fours. Ass slapped. An animal flap.
            Violence begets. Love circumvents. I swallow

                my would-be begottens. Love, this violence.
        To all doormen I say ahlan wa sahlan.

Man, this door shudders. Familiarly, easy.
     I undress permission with splintered hands.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There are so many moments where we have something questions. The hands are splintered, the doorman becomes man, becomes an exclamation, where these hinges of the duplex form create this lilting, almost play. And you also use sestinas and sonnets and writing right to left like Arabic. And I'm curious how poetic forms provide containers for your writing and also maybe what they limit.

Omar Sakr: Yeah. It's actually not something that I typically do. It's something new to this book. And I think that's a product of grief, which is that it drove me a little bit mad and I kept writing version after version after version of a poem, which is unusual for me. I don't typically do that. I would edit a poem but rarely reshape, relineate, to the degree that I was doing. I was like really rewriting them and rewriting them over and over and over again. And so I started using forms because the constraints were really helpful. And I love the duplex form particularly. I adore Jericho Brown. He's a genius and the duplex allows you to play with that certainty of a line, to subvert that certainty immediately. And that slipperiness just contains extraordinary potential. And I find it so generative, particularly for subjects or moments that are already haunting.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. So the duplex form takes the last line of each couplet and repeats it in the first line of the next stanza. But you've created a version of it where the words can become a different part of speech. They can be split up and brought back together, and that repetition is not exact, and it offers this sense of recognition that is questioned and that's added to.

Omar Sakr: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I think sometimes grief does need a container that the fact that almost everybody has these rituals of how many days are you wearing this or going here and waiting for the bath. And all these things actually help the people who are grieving because there's a system and there's a way that it's done. Um, I wanted to say I'm so sorry about the death of your grandmother, and to whom you had such a special relationship it seemed, before she passed this year. And I feel connected to your mourning as well, because my grandmother, my mother's mother died, this year as well of Covid.

Omar Sakr: I'm sorry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And yeah, I'm so curious about the relationship you had, the kind of immediacy you had as grandmother and grandson, and what that relationship was like.

Omar Sakr: Mmm. Um, thank you. I moved to hear to know that someone else is connected to my mourning. I think it's a special thing. I adored my grandmother and I think partly the intensity of that love, which was reciprocated, comes from the fact that we were separated for most of our lives. So I met her for the first time as a teenager and then not again until I was in my twenties and able to have a relationship with her of my own free will. And then I would go to her unit every Sunday and have breakfast with her. And there was this, yeah, 20 years of not being able to love, 20 years of love just built up inside us. And I was there for her last breaths. I came into the room and I held her hand and I said, It's OK. And she closed her eyes and was able to leave. I think that sense of comfort is really important. A lot of people think, in grief anyway, that they're the ones going through the most or struggling the hardest. And it's like, no, I think the act of dying is the hardest thing. And I have a somewhat maybe strange relationship to grief because I do feel like I live in it and I have lived in it for so long that I'm more comfortable within it than perhaps other people are. But then also, I have such a strong sense that she's with me and I have such a strong sense that my father is with me. And that my uncle is with me. One of the more difficult things is knowing that other people won't be able to meet the people who have passed. It's knowing that my son won't have conscious memories of her. But I have photographs and I have videos and I'll be able to show him and maybe help him connect to what is imprinted in his skin and in his mind, which was knowing her.

[SOMBER MUSIC PLAYS]

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much for sharing and I'm grateful to get to know a bit of what she was like through your work and appreciate the relationship that you had and acknowledge it.

Omar Sakr: Thank you so, so much really for the whole conversation, which was generous and receptive, but also for holding space for my mournings and connecting them to your own.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Omar Sakr: You may hear my baby in the background of that, though. Just so you know, my wife's looking at me like...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's baby time.

Omar Sakr: I got a baby. She just got home. He's now marching towards me.

[BABY COOS IN THE BACKGOUND]

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Hi, sweetie.

Omar Sakr: I gotta go. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Getting ready for the day.

Omar Sakr: When he shakes his head that means he's excited.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Beautiful.

Omar Sakr: Do a pod, poets with kids podcast? Is that a thing? Alright.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much.

Omar Sakr: Thank you. Bye.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Bye. [MUSIC FADES AND NEW MUSIC PLAYS] Big thanks to Omar Sakr and to his wife, Hannah Donnelly, for helping to make this podcast possible. Omar is an award-winning poet with three collections, including most recently Non-Essential Work out from University of Queensland Press in 2023 and a novel, Son of Sin, from Affirm Press last year. You can read three poems by Omar in the June 2023 issue of Poetry in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Reservoir, Alabaster de Plume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, with gratitude for the griefs and for the parties. Thanks for listening.