encounters: Chris Abani

When I read Chris Abani’s new book of poetry, Sanctificum, on a train, It was all I could do to stay in my seat, my inside on fire. As a person who navigates multiple cultures, the female body, and spirituality in an often brutal world, this book spoke directly to my obsessions. As the Library Journal wrote, “Abani . . . explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination. . . [he] enters the wound with a boldness that avoids nothing.” I contacted Abani about doing an interview at AWP in Denver, and he graciously took time out of his busy schedule there to chat with me on April 10, 2010.

MARIE ELIZABETH MALI: Thank you for meeting with me. Let’s begin with the structure and title of Sanctificum.

CHRIS ABANI: It has to do with the way the book was born. It was born in San Francisco. I had done a reading with Peter Orner, who’s a really amazing writer, at San Francisco’s poetry archive place. We had an amazing conversation. Then Peter had a party and everyone left around 1 am. I didn’t want to sleep so Peter, Matthew Shinoda and I hung around talking. And as we continued talking all night, I kept writing down lines, so between 2 am and 6 am when Matthew took me to the airport, I already had about 20 pages of notes. For about a year I kept collecting lines and filled several notebooks with them. I had hundreds of pages of lines and typed them all up. Then I started to think about them, because they were just lines, but they would juxtapose. There was an unconscious attempt to make sense of things. I had trained to be a Catholic priest and I realized that was the whole point of the Catholic mass. In the old days, the church controlled the market, which was held in the square in front of the church. In the evening, the monks used to circle the square saying the rosary, re-consecrating the square after the market was over. I started to imagine a square, which also ties in to Igbo, my father’s people, and the Yoruba mythologies about the creation of the world, where the square is the manifest universe and the circle is the womb of existence. It became clear that I wanted to use the Catholic order of mass, the Latin high mass. How the sacred is created is this way in which the sublime and the mundane butt up against each other in day-to-day existence, and how the sacred often comes out of the contradiction of two ugly things. That led to the title, Sanctificum, in Latin means to sanctify, which is what mass is. Once I had that, I began to organize them based on the movements of what each section of the mass are supposed to do.

MEM: So are those section titles literal parts of a mass?

CA: No. Well, Sacrament and Recessional are literal names for things that happen during the mass, but Pilgrimage is a holy title. The reason Om is called Om is that there is no Catholic equivalent for the seed syllable. That’s how the book is organized. The first thing you do when you come into a Catholic church is you put your fingers in the holy water, which is shaped as a bowl, which is a womb. It also became about ideas of how masculinity is worked out in ancient Yoruba traditions of manhood rights where you become a man by being given a symbolic womb. Once I had that in place it became easy to edit lines. And then I began to create the music of it. It was set up in my mind as a series of movements. I had tried that with Daphne’s Lot and it hadn’t gone so well, in terms of readership not being fully able to follow a long poem, so I was looking for music for it that could contain it. Bach symphonies have a kind of contained chaos, so I used the structure of two or three Bach symphonies that I jumbled together to create the music for it. The book is written as a musical score. Since I play the saxophone, that wasn’t so hard for me. Once that structure was in place, it became easy to go in and see, if I was playing this sheet music, what would be the direction to the musician. So that’s how I began to break them into sections and name them. Each section name creates a certain reader intent, or musical expectation, so if you were to play it you’d play soft, hard, etc. That’s the basic structure of it. The book took two and a half to three years to come together.

MEM: This is one of those instances where it reads so effortlessly and has such a sense of flow after having been worked on so hard.

CA: That’s what flow is. Think of nature and how long a river’s been cutting through a rock in order to create flow. It has spent centuries refining its path. And we happen upon it, and because we’re humans our ego precedes us, so everything exists when we see it.

MEM: [Can] you talk about those leaps you make, those juxtapositions of elevated holy moments and violent, bloody moments?

CA: That’s the Catholic order of mass. That’s what ritual is. The animal is killed, the blood is spilled for the elevation of consciousness. All sacrifice is for the elevation of consciousness. Whether you do it in a literal sense or a figurative sense, the idea that Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, whether he does or not, whether this was an old Jewish explanation for why they stopped sacrificing humans and started sacrificing animals. The confrontation at that moment is the elevation of consciousness that an individual elevates beyond the concerns of an easy morality. Sacrifice is supposed to make you relinquish your attachment to morality. As an artist, you cannot be attached to morality. That’s the quote of Nietzsche that everyone misuses, that the artist is above morality. It doesn’t mean that you get to be an asshole and cheat on your wife and drink because you’re an artist, it means that you have to be able to see beyond the limitations of your time, that you have to be able to articulate a higher hope, a higher ideal. And that means you have to let go of your need to control, your need to be right, your need to think about how the world should be, and in many ways, surrender. That’s what the elevation of consciousness is, surrendering to something that is beyond you. This isn’t religion I’m talking about here, I’m talking about how art is made. You surrender to something beyond you but it still has to be organized, controlled within a matrix of craft. Craft is the sacrifice. Craft is what you kill in order to achieve this other thing. Nothing can be achieved without violence. There’s a line towards the end of the book that says, “Something must die for something to live.” It’s the constant conundrum of being in a human body. But also there’s this idea of God as benevolent. The universe is benevolent but the universe is also pure power. Pure power does not recognize kindness or not kindness. What it proves to us is that to really be human, to achieve humanity, we have to be able to look that pure abyss in the face and still hold on to what is good, to the things we value. That’s not a given. That’s a negotiation that happens every day. That’s why the book is always juxtaposing the sublime with the mundane or grotesque. So poetry is threatening in many ways because it’s not easy. It’s difficult in America when you use spiritual or religious references because they’re so charged and the views so narrow. Like when you talk with creative writers about theory, or like Derrida, they conflate the bad professor who taught them theory with the theory itself. This is what the book is struggling with. How can you find a language for this stuff?

MEM: For the sacred?

CA: For anything. How do you stitch meaning?

MEM: When I read the book, the way it ranges so broadly between different experiences, it really felt like it was coming from more of a non-dual perspective, though you’re here in duality putting language to things. Do you consider yourself a non-dual person?

CA: I don’t think that’s possible. I think we can momentarily touch that space. It’s what happens at the opera, or a good dance performance. It’s what happens when you’re on the right road trip with the right people, eating the right amount of Cheetos, and Bruce Springsteen comes on at the right time

MEM: and you disappear.

CA: Right, so it’s a combination of all of these really simple things. I don’t think I was consciously trying to come from a place of non-duality but I think what happens is that the art of poetry, or even painting, is the attempt to articulate something that can never be articulated. That’s the whole point, whether the juxtaposition is between lines or between content and the end of a line, that we’re trying to reach into the ineffable and it can never be done. So what you want to do as a writer, as an artist, is, as best you can, approximate the limited space. Once you do that, people who read the work, or encounter a visual moment with it, fall off into the ineffable. So what’s really important is not the words, but rather the words themselves block the limitations we try to bring to them. They’re literally like bouncers in a nightclub, trying to keep us away from our usual perception of things, even for the writers themselves. When the right combination of that happens, the ineffability comes. This is why, when you read a poem like The Panther by Rilke, just a simple poem like that about a panther pacing in a cage, it can speak through time. A 14 year-old who thinks the whole world doesn’t get him can embody that poem as can the president of a country. That’s what we’re trying to do, and that’s really what happened in this book is that sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s also that negotiation between it working and not working that makes it happen, because if it works all the time, then it stops working. It’s like if you pick up a pebble and you put it down, there’s no memory of the pebble. But if you pick up a stone from the street that has jagged edges and you squeeze it tight before putting it down, then the memory of it stays, with imprints, you feel a little sting. That’s really what good art tries to do. The craft is to control where the jagged edges are so that it’s not occasional and it’s not unintentional. Craft comes from the word, techne, which in the old days, in Italy, comes from the time when astronomers had to grind their own lenses for their telescopes. Techne comes from the ability to grind your own lens. If you grind a bad lens, you don’t see anything through the telescope.

MEM: So much about being human is about grinding your lens.

CA: And being able to see and accept all of these contradictions. But in that split-second way that happens intuitively to everyone every day. That’s why, often people say to you when they read a work or see a piece of art, “Well I could have done that.” Well, yeah, because you felt it intuitively like everyone else, but the truth is that if you could have, you would have. Even when I think I’ve done that with a book, I write the next book and realize the last book didn’t even approximate anything. It’s a constant negotiation with your own ego, all the time.

MEM: That brings me to the line, “There are stories that can kill you.” Tell me more about that.

CA: Well, there are stories that can kill you.

MEM: Do you mean the stories you create about your experience or do you mean your [actual] experience?

CA: Both. It’s hard to explain, but literally, stories will kill us. You hear about people whose wives die after they were married for 30-40 years and they die a week after. That story killed them. Everything is story. I can try to capture the viscerality and transfer it to you, but you can only interpret it if you’re willing to bring the terms of your own viscerality to it. That’s what Baldwin means when he says your suffering means something only in so much as another person can attach their suffering to yours. That’s what empathy and sympathy and compassion are. This is what the negotiation is. But, literally, there are stories that can kill you. Someone says to you, your father just died, and you haven’t spoken to your father for twelve years, that’s a story that will kill you. We live in a culture of information that is mistaken for intimacy, because we know intimacy can kill us. You can be in a line in Starbucks and overhear a woman behind you tell the person next to her that her father used to abuse her as a child, loudly, so everyone can hear. At first, when I got here, I thought, “This is amazing, these people are so intimate with each other.” But the same person will give you a phone number and say, “Call me,” and if you do, they’re like, “Why are you calling me?” I began to realize that intimacy is the actual texture of experience but information is not. It’s not the content I’m talking about, it’s the motive, the impetus that tells us we have to tell our truth and never the truth around us. You are bringing somebody else’s intimacy out without their permission, and framing it without any difficulty, thereby exonerating your participation in these events. So, intimacy has been replaced by this information. That’s also what this work is trying to play with. By the juxtaposition of banal information with a sudden lyric dip, you create intimacy.

MEM: This feels like the most intimate of your poetry books that I’ve read so far.

CA: It is, in a way, but it’s also not necessarily about me. It’s about whether we can really speak to each other and what does that mean. So even the moments we choose to hold back, like in the scene I describe in the book where I’m sitting in a café in Sienna, in Italy, and these Eastern Europeans are begging for food and money in the Piazza de la Campo. The Italian writer that I’m sitting with tells me, “I love your work, it’s really human, it deals with poverty and difficulty. Here in Italy, we have no such problems,” and meanwhile he’s ignoring all those people around him. He’s trying to say, “I do not know how to speak of these things in a culture that wants to erase them.” That’s what he’s really saying, but he doesn’t know how, so he says it in this way. So intimacy is also listening. To speak our truth is much more complicated than we’ve been led to believe.

MEM: You explore gender in the book. Like these devastating lines after the description of your genitally mutilated cousin, “But I remain a man you see. The knife is firmly in my hand.” You don’t separate yourself from what other men do, which makes the work land so powerfully.

CA: Part of it is the culture I come from. I think that most people’s access to Africa, or African thought, sadly, is through Things Fall Apart only. It’s only one perspective, written by a 28 year-old man at that time. Gender in Africa is way more complicated than people can ever begin to understand, and culturally, traditionally, we built in ways to handle the complication. In all traditional ritual, none of the ritual can happen without the say-so of the women. Even the ancestor worship, the masking of the dead that allows the dead to re-emerge is an entirely male society, but the actual masking is done by the women because they own the masks. We have to get their permission. There’s a constant structural negotiation that happens throughout. So, even within a culture that is still patriarchal, there is a deep struggle to try and understand how power can work, how power can be shared, how power cannot be shared, where collaborations are happening, that I find doesn’t happen here. Everyone tries to pretend how not sexist America is and talk about the long-suffering women in Africa. For me, it’s a difficult thing. Then, I was raised by a woman who would never have thought of herself as a feminist. My mother was a white English woman from Oxford, from a working-class family moving up to the middle class. And was deeply Catholic. But she did things that I talk about in the book, like taking me to translate the Billings Ovulation Method to women. I was a nine-year old boy talking to women about their vaginas and wombs. My mother thought there was nothing unusual about this. This is just how it should be. I was taught to sew, to knit, to crochet, to cook by the time I was ten. I had to wash my own school uniforms, iron them, not with a nice electric iron, but a coal iron on a string. You can imagine how many times I got burned. And cooking on wood fires. There were four boys and one girl. We’re more domesticated than she is. We’re very self-reliant. My mother didn’t set out to create this. It also brings up the issue about how women complain about sexist men, but men are raised by women. So, what it is in the book is this complex negotiation. And this will apply to race, too, is that we know there’s something fundamentally flawed in the relationships of men with women, of patriarchy, of power. It’s one thing to say, “I see the problem.” It’s another thing to relinquish the privilege. Because, to be truly non-sexist, it means a man has to relinquish complete privilege. It’s impossible for a man to do. No one relinquishes privilege, that’s why there are revolutions, why people die.

MEM: It’s like white privilege.

CA: We can talk about all the problems of racism, and we can generally, as individuals, see the problem, but we will not relinquish our privilege. And the thing about privilege is that it’s invisible, everyone carries it. Whether you’re poor, black, white, you carry it to different degrees and can use it at different times. So, as a man, as I get older, it’s important for me to figure out where I stand in all of this. I have to go back into difficult memories, like I talk in the book about my cousin having this odd shuffle, and for years we thought she was just stupid, not realizing the trauma she had gone through. But we knew. It was a big deal in the town when my father wouldn’t allow my sister to be circumcised. To know that this was happening and it was a word that doesn’t mean anything to a man, it’s a word. And suddenly you realize—we also use words and language in these ways in America—that it’s mutilation. Circumcision sounds like a wonderful thing, but it’s mutilation. It’s also the mutilation of someone’s soul because it involves the removal of a clitoris. You’re taking away someone’s right to their own pleasure. Every sexual act is going to be an act of pain so that you’re constantly dominating them. If you call a thing what it is you can’t walk away from it anymore. And we do the same thing when we talk about insurgents, but we’re killing people. That’s what we’re doing. We’re killing people because we want control, wealth, uninterrupted power, all of these things. The whole book is also an indictment of my own humanity. It’s not an indictment of anyone else’s. That people are even willing to come on this journey with me, with all my books, always surprises me, because I’m on trial here. No one else is. And it’s not a public trial. That’s why those lines happen. It’s not enough to say this is a problem. And even the recognition is not enough, which is probably why most of us still see therapists. A therapist helps you see the pattern, and we’re all well versed in what’s wrong with us, but we don’t know how to fix it. So then how do you take this knowledge into something that is actionable. I don’t know the answers.

Om*

1
The hills of my childhood are purple with dusk and wings—
guinea fowl launched like a prayer to the still forming moon.
I hold Bean’s shell to my ear. There is no sea. But only sea.
By my bed, in an empty chair, my shirt unwinds.
I remember my aunt counting the dead in the newspaper.
I never told anyone that every sliver of orange I ate
was preceded by words from high mass.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Spit out pit. Amen.
Juice. Amen. Flesh.

2
A full moon leaning on a skyscraper. The taste:
qat and sweets on a tropical afternoon.
The dog’s black tongue was more terrifying than its teeth.
The gravestone rising out of the puddle was more sinister
than the body we discovered as children swinging
in the summer-hot orchard.

3
The old woman singing a dirge has a voice of dust.
Sorrow lodged like a splintered bullet next to the heart.
A man once asked me in the street:
Do you own your own bones?
She likes the home I come in, I say to Cristina
as we drive toward the Golden Gate.
Bean, I repeat.
She loves the home I come in
and I am alive with fire and scars.
Here is my body, I say, eat it, do this,
remember me—

MEM: My mind keeps returning to the line, “I’m a zealot for optimism.” I want to hear more about where that line comes from, given what you just said about the book being an indictment of your own humanity.

CA: (laughs) The work I choose to write, anyway, it’s a back and forth thing. You choose the work, the work chooses you. I think that all cultures share one thing in common, that the very point of culture is to tell beneficial lies so that we can all get along… People often think my work is depressing. Well, yeah, because we’re conditioned in America to reject anything that’s upsetting without realizing that upsetting is what transforms. This is a thing that people often misunderstand about my work. If you write poetry, if you really believe enough to write poetry, you cannot be a pessimist, you’re an optimist.

MEM: Would you say you write because you care?

CA: You write because you cannot not write. If you cannot not do something, you’re not a pessimist, you’re a zealot for that thing. That’s what it is to be a fanatic. That’s what it takes to strap a bomb to yourself and walk into a building. I cannot not do this. This is what I do. The line says, “I drink tea, I read poetry all day long, I’m a zealot for optimism.” I believe that literature does create change, not in this grand, messianic way, but in the way that one individual encounters text and gets transformed, be it a fragment of The Book of the Dead, be it growing up in Nigeria and reading Baldwin, or the X-Men. Even comic books transform. [That’s] how the sacred is always operating. All that is needed is attention and intentionality. That’s what I bring to everything I do. I’m a zealot for it. It would be easier to sell cars, trust me. I’d make more money, I’m that good a salesman.

CHRIS ABANI’S prose includes Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun – Collected Long Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He holds a BA in English (Nigeria), an MA in Gender and Culture (Birkbeck College, University of London), an MA in English and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing (University of Southern California). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize & a Guggenheim Award. www.chrisabani.com

MARIE ELIZABETH MALI lives in New York City. She is a co-curator of louderARTS: the Reading Series at Bar 13 Lounge and Page Meets Stage at the Bowery Poetry Club and is a poetry editor for TIFERET: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. Before receiving her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, she practiced Traditional Chinese Medicine. Her work has appeared in Calyx, MiPOesias, and RATTLE, among others. www.memali.com

* Excerpt from Om from the collection Sanctificum, Copper Canyon Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the author.