week 6: What will you write without exile?

lecture transcripts about poetry of the third space

I’m teaching this semester, a poetry class within an anthro department, looking at writers and writing that work in different “Englishes” shaped by their intersecting identities. Each week, we read a packet of poems and essays, and I deliver a short lecture at the beginning of class. And I’m sharing those lectures here! This one was from March 4th. The packet included an excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish’s “In the Presence of Absence,” “Dear Jenni, Dear Marcelo” by Marcelo Hernández Castillo, and the poems “Self-Portrait as Mango” by Tarfia Faizullah, “I Walk Into Every Room and Yell Where the Mexicans At” by José Olivarez, “Schrecken/Terror” by Aria Aber, and “The White Poet Wants to Know Why I Don’t Write More Arab Poems” by Leila Chatti.

---

the poem "African american literature" by Nate Marshall

What will you write without exile?

March 18, 2025

Tarfia Faizullah’s poem Self-Portrait as Mango was, for a period that lasted a few weeks, the subject of outrage and discourse around “diaspora literature,” and some of its alternate names, including “mango diaspora poetry.” Literature written in diaspora is of course a large and varied category of work but it, on occasion, when taken as a whole, can be guilty of over-reliance on stereotypes and tropes, can be guilty of self-essentializing, of boiling down entire cultures to a series of recurring images, and more often than not, the mango is one of those images. Self-Portrait as Mango is written in the ghazal form, whose primary identifying feature is the repeated end word, and takes as its end-word that loaded, charged, discourse-baiting word and image: the mango, and repeats the word twelve times across the sixteen lines of the poem—thirteen times if you include the title. A quick glance at the page reveals a poem swarming with the word: mango, mango, mango. When asked in an interview about her intentions behind the poem, Faizullah explained:

It came from what someone said about how all South Asians write about is saris and mangoes or something like that. I had yet to write a poem that had a mango in it. I had written and published a whole book of poetry without necessarily highlighting the mango! I wanted to write a cheeky response to that idea. I wanted to say mango over and over and over again, just to be a little punk about it. To be like, oh, you think all we write about is mangoes? The poem I do write about mangoes is going to exhaust that word.

The pieces in this week’s packet all engage with the question of what writers of certain identities are “supposed” to write about, responding to a long history of treating the writing of authors from marginalized backgrounds as anthropological, rather than creative or literary. The speaker in Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence is asked: “What will you write without exile?” as if it is only that speaker’s condition of being oppressed that makes him interesting, that qualifies him to write anything at all. The question of qualifying, of authenticity, of authority, is also one that comes up often in discussions of work by authors who aren’t of the dominant culture. As if the role of those authors, be they poets or playwrights or novelists, is to report on the conditions of their “people,” their “lived experience,” rather than getting to do the work of the imagination and the senses that other writers get to make without being questioned. The poet Hanif Abdurraqib has a series of poems, all with the title How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, whose title is a direct overheard quote. On the origin of that series, he says:

I was at a reading shortly after the election, and the poet (who was black) was reading gorgeous poems, which had some consistent and exciting flower imagery. A woman (who was white) behind me—who thought she was whispering to her neighbor—said ‘How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?’ I thought it was so absurd in a way that didn’t make me angry but made me curious. What is the black poet to be writing about ‘at a time like this’ if not to dissect the attractiveness of a flower—that which can arrive beautiful and then slowly die right before our eyes? I thought flowers were the exact thing to write about at a time like this, so I began this series of poems, all with the same title. I thought it was much better to grasp a handful of different flowers, put them in a glass box, and see how many angles I could find in our shared eventual demise.

How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this, meanwhile, as the speaker in Aria Aber’s Schrecken / Terror points out, “Didn’t Rilke live through a war? Didn’t he see Europe fall to ruins? / Didn’t he, instead, write about the soul inside a bowl of rotten fruit? // Didn’t he ignore?” Rilke, an Austrian poet who wrote in German, who was conscripted into military service during World War I, who wrote instead about the “soul inside a bowl of rotten fruit.” Or the speaker in Leila Chatti’s The White Poet Wants to Know Why I Don’t Write More Arab Poems, who says: “Because every time I open my mouth / I am an Arab opening my mouth // and the poem is, and isn’t, responsible.” What is the responsibility of a poem? Does that responsibility change across identities? Should it? Or is the goal to always and only write about fruit and flowers?

There is a connection to be drawn here between the kinds of writing that is most celebrated from writers of color by dominant-culture readers and industry, and the popular and frustrating idea that reading is intended to make a reader understand something about the culture and identity of the author of a text. In How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo expresses frustration with this kind of reading:

the way our reading culture pats itself on the back for producing “important” and “relevant” stories that often ultimately reduce communities of color to their most traumatic episodes, thus creating a dynamic in which predominantly white American readers expect books by writers of color to “teach” them specific lessons—about historical trauma, far-flung wars, their own sins—while the work of predominantly white writers gets to float, palely, in the culture, unnamed, unmarked, universal as oxygen.

She continues the argument by saying that this

leav[es] writers of color to be positioned…as heroic saviors, as direly important educators, […] as vessels of sensational trauma—but rarely as artists due the same depth and breadth of critical engagement as their white colleagues; rarely as artists whose works are approached not just as sources of history or educational potential but specific and sublime sensual immersion: sites of wonder, laughter, opulence, precision.

Because none of these readings account for craft, the understanding that everything on the page was an intentional choice made by the author—choices around syntax, diction, grammar, form. The breathlessness of the prose block in José Olivarez’s I Walk Into Every Room and Yell Where the Mexicans At. The interplay between couplets and monostich in Leila Chatti’s The White Poet Wants to Know Why I Don’t Write More Arab Poems. Self-Portrait as Mango, as if in direct response to those less interesting kinds of reading, is a ghazal, an ancient poetic form with origins in Southwest Asia. But rather than leaning into any kind of essentialism that can be ascribed to the choice of form, Faizullah breaks the form while simultaneously adhering to its most recognizable criteria: the repeated end word that closes each couplet—again, mango, mango, mango. But for anyone familiar with the form, the poem’s unruliness within the container is immediately apparent. In a classical ghazal, each stanza is a self-contained sort of room, neatly contained. In this poem, the clauses spill across multiple lines, multiple stanzas, harnessing expectation with the use of the inherited form as a way to draw attention to that expectation, to look the reader in the eye while subverting it. I always pair this poem in my mind with a poem by

Nate Marshall

called “African american literature” which repeats, for the first 13 lines, the phrase “i like your poems because they seem so real,” an incessant refrain to mimic the incessant experience of being read in this way, before closing with the line “f’sho, good look, this also a sonnet.” The joke it contains is that of the reader so obsessed with “realness” and “rawness” and “authenticity” in the work of the Black poet that they completely miss the fact that the poem is a sonnet, complete with the classic volta at the end in the turn and reveal of the last line. And here the joke deepens—the last line is only a volta, is only a turn, for the reader that is surprised that this poem is a sonnet, that this poet has written a sonnet.

This is not to say that working in inherited forms is the only way for authors of color to prove their “mastery” or literary merit—mostly it just makes for a really funny joke, using classical old forms to poke fun at that kind of misreading.

---

I’ll keep these un-paywalled for the first week after posting! Next week’s unit is called Strange Cartographies.

xoxo

S