Mary Magazine

Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali possesses many layers; he is an artist at once disconnected and connected to the world. On his Facebook page, under his photograph, in the space titled, “Write Something About Yourself," something that I have yet to do myself, he writes, "A Book in 35 Words: I was born on April 6, 1971 in Croydon, England, sandwiched between two momentous events in New York City—early that morning Igor Stravinsky passed away and later that afternoon Alice Coltrane recorded 'Universal Consciousness.'"

Initially, I was unable to meet Kazim in person, because we each occupied a separate region—he in Ohio and I in California—we met through our respective computers. I, wanting to know the sound behind his letters, had cheated and heard his voice read a few of his poems online. Upon our initial email introduction I told him that he is a vibrant reader; there is a beautiful balance in him. When I received his reply, he thanked me for my thoughts on his reading and went on to write about performance—the performance of his poem—and poetry in general—in time and space—and how it is important to him to understand sound as more having to do with space than time, justifying it, in a way, with his never having become a musician. Arguably, I think we are all regulated by space. Kazim’s poetry exemplifies space; there is a sense of location and orientation throughout his work, an understanding of where we are and how we decide upon the next chapter in our individual destinations. We had discussed family histories and he had inquired about my mother; he wondered about her ancestry before informing me that his is Egyptian, Iraqi and Persian—all by way of South Asia where, he wrote, “my family’s been since at least the early nineteenth century.” He then added, “the Persian's the most distant but also the purest: my paternal grandmother's maternal grandfather was Iranian, from Kerman. All my other grandparents and great-grandparents are mixed families from various ancestries."

I’ve always found it difficult to separate myself from my heritage; I know that that is not something one should do, but, when you’ve grown up on three different continents you begin to transfer your identity into, say, continental slots. I told Kazim that I am Persian, but that I left Iran when I was three and spent nine years in Germany before immigrating to California. Kazim’s poetry, as if aware of my past, seems to look into me; it asks me to question myself—challenge my identity in order to better understand its roots. There is an idea of “lostness” within most of us. However, what Kazim’s poetry offers is an interconnectedness of everything. There is an end—a direction—where, as readers, we find ourselves bound as well to that everything of which we have always been a part, but, for some reason, have neglected to recognize. I told him that I agree that sound relates more to space than to time, because even the spoken word is printed on some invisible field where our breath and our selective rhythms guide our words toward their respective places on that often undetectable landscape between the speaker and the listener. I then, perhaps to balance my two cents with my more commonly accepted obsequiousness, added an endearing suffix to his first name—a norm amongst Persians—“jon” (pronounced jaan), which simply means “dear.”

Nima Najafi – Kianfar
April 2009
Walnut Creek, California

Nima Najafi-Kianfar: Kazim, when you’re writing, do you think of Islam as a place or a setting? Or do you use Islam as a representation for something else?

Kazim Ali: Actually writing towards or about Islam has never been a conscious move in my writing. It’s taken me a long time to see the connections I have made between things we are given in Islam and how those things affect me spiritually. For example, during Prophet Mohammad’s night-journey to Heaven he was given many new instructions, one of the most important was the changing of the qibla or direction of prayer from The Far Mosque in Jerusalem to The Near Mosque, the Kaaba in Mecca. So on the one hand you are supposed to worship what’s close to you and not what’s far away. But why exactly is the Kaaba holy? Is it because it was built by Abraham on the site of Hagar’s exile? The house itself is empty inside and no one is allowed to enter except once a year someone goes in to sweep the interior. So at the center of worship is emptiness? But on the other hand, when the Prophet got on the winged horse that was supposed to bear him to Heaven it launched in the air and first landed on the rock in Jerusalem and then launched itself from there into Heaven. So though you maybe are supposed to worship the near thing, it’s the thing that is far away that is the actual route to Heaven. Too, there has been historical disagreement about the actual location of the so-called Far Mosque. Rumi dispensed with the controversy by declaring “The farthest mosque is the one within you.” If you take this in light of the statements above it comes very close to the Vedanta and yoga philosophies of the Hindu Vedas. So where does that leave you? Wrote Irani poet Sohreb Sepehri, “I am a Muslim/the rose is my qibla,/the wind is my black stone.”

NNK: In your essay, “The Architecture of Loneliness,” you incorporate and draw from Cristina Peri Rossi’s book State of Exile and you mention that, perhaps, the poems themselves were her “key to the house in Toledo,” referencing, in a way, the Jewish Diaspora. Can poetry be our home? Can poetry be our homeland?

KA: One wants to say that language is the only homeland. We do carry it into exile along with clothes, customs, food. Communities in exile tend to hold on desperately to what existed at the moment of separation. The version of Spanish spoken by Ladino communities (Spanish Jews exiled in the fifteenth century) bears much more relationship to the Spanish of that age than to modern Spanish. I think the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, about whom I also wrote in that essay, has done more than any other writer to bring the condition, punishments, and prizes of exile into poetry, both in terms of its form and language. What appeals to me immensely about Peri Rossi’s book is that it is so purely personal and not sociological at all. She writes in a couple of places about larger themes, but mostly it is about coffee, a dog in the street, things her mother used to warn her about…

NNK: Okay, let’s take that purely personal—the coffee, a dog, and the things her mother used to warn her about—and connect it to the far mosque with Sohreb Sepehri in mind. Is the ultimate journey, as is reminiscent of Rumi, the one we take within ourselves—is the ultimate destination simply inside of us? For instance, how do you challenge what is around you in order to reach and discover what is within you?

KA: Well, I think what’s inside and what’s outside is the same material. Certainly the same physical and spiritual struggles as they relate to the external environment of the planet exist in relation to the internal environment of the body. We’re each as individual bodies governed by the various “bodies” of external control—the corporation (body of capital), the government (body politic), organized religion. I think what Sepehri was getting at was that there is a purely internal and individual experience with the transcendent (whether money, god, or power, all of which transcend the individual human body and its small concerns) that is untouchable and unquantifiable.

NNK: In “The Architecture of Loneliness,” the self constructs our loneliness. You write, after looking at Mahmoud Darwish’s “A Poetry Stanza/The Southerner’s House,” about how Darwish wishes to transcend the “alienation and the barriers between objects and people.” Later, you add, “nations and even languages are mere fictions.” I’m wondering: can people transcend that alienation especially when everything around us is fiction?

KA: We have been given this life to try.

NNK: In your book, The Fortieth Day, there is a poem that I am drawn to that is titled “The Art of Breathing.” This poem deals with that transcendence from the alienation that separates us from ourselves as well as our world, but it also unites us by giving us a scene from the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna debates whether or not to attack Karna, his cousin and kin. First, what made you decide upon the Bhagavad Gita in your poem/poetry? Second, is there a statement of unity here? Is there a statement of some kind of unity throughout your poetry? And, finally, how can writers destroy their own alienation—as you quote Krishna telling Arjuna that by shooting Karna he will destroy his own alienation?

KA: Well, at least part of that poem’s subject is whether one should want to destroy one’s own alienation. One’s alienation (or anger, or sadness, or selfishness) is part of one, yes? It is a hard, hard choice for Arjun to make and I am not sure I am utterly convinced by Krishna. So perhaps I am condemned to countless more lives in which to work it out, but that too is a form of a gift I suppose.

The poem itself came when I was writing an essay about the poet Reetika Vazirani. She had, herself written an essay years earlier called “The Art of Breathing,” which was ostensibly about her relationship to yoga (it has been anthologized in a collection of essays about yoga) but which I found to be truly fixated on the fact of her father’s suicide. Vazirani, later that summer, also committed suicide and so I found myself in this really vexed position of trying to think about yoga and why it could not save these people from literal self-annihilation, compounded by the fact that a lot of yoga philosophy is about a metaphorical act of “cessation of identification with the mind’s fluctuations.” Those “fluctuations of the mind” are what we westerners commonly think of as the “self” but yoga is trying to teach you that those are not the self at all. In yoga the mind, or sense-making organ, is not the self but only another organ (different from the actual physical tissue of the brain).

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KAZIM ALI is is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, and The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008). He is also the author of the novel Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of "The Best Books of 2005" by Chronogram magazine, The Disappearance of Seth (Etruscan Press, 2009), and Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009).

NIMA NAJAFI-KIANFAR will one day live as Nima Kian. He is a Persian-Iranian who only spent the first three years of his life in Iran; he grew up in Germany. After relocating to Los Angeles when he was 12, he lived submerged in films, eventually starting work as an intern in a film production company and worked his way through miscellaneous productions and a rewarding place alongside Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. But Iran is always a part of his direction. He remains connected to his people and, once in a while, will write a piece or do an interview on the up-and-comers within the Iranian community.