SOLMAZ SHARIF: I was recently reminded of a story of a political prisoner—I don’t know if I want to share this. . . This political prisoner, who had been convicted and was facing the death penalty, was in a large cell with about twenty other political prisoners. Periodically, the guards would come and call one of their names and take that person out to be executed. When this political prisoner’s name was called, the prisoner stood up and started singing “The Internationale.” The whole cell sang along, and that was their farewell. But when the prisoner went into the hallway, the guards told them that they weren’t going to the gallows. They were being transferred to a different prison. The guards took them to the latrine, and while the prisoner was in there, they realized they wouldn’t have wanted “The Internationale” to be their last song, and started reciting a poem by, I believe, Hafez from memory.
For me, the why of poetry has become the reason revolution must happen to begin with. It’s no longer the conditions that make revolution inevitable, but what’s waiting for us on the other side of it. That required me to be more vulnerable—removing the conceptual frame was an act of that allowed vulnerability. . .
ALINA STEFANESCU: That reminds me of how my parents made me memorize poetry. They said: If you find yourself in prison, if you lose your home, family, livelihood, everything, the poems you remember will keep you whole. At the end of the day, alone in a cell, no one can steal the stanzas you remembered. The recitation itself is a radical act of refusal. Maybe poems sustain the hope and selfhood that carceral systems aim to extinguish.
SOLMAZ SHARIF: I love that. I was reminded of poetry’s capacities at the beginning of the pandemic. When lockdown started, some of my artist friends who work in other mediums suddenly couldn’t do any work. I remembered, for readers a poem is something you can carry with you anywhere, and for poets, writing a poem is an action that you can undertake anywhere. You don’t need physical materials. I hadn’t decided to turn my attention toward those qualities, however; I was forced to. My idea of poetry is tied inextricably to my early understanding of carcerality and war—both of which evaporate all that seems solid. And poetry seems especially able to survive these things. I bristle at the word hope, but the poem’s scrappy thereness is enough for me. In an interview late in his life, Mahmoud Darwish says, “poetry changes only the poet.” Some people understand that statement as pessimistic or cynical or jaded. Or maybe see it in line with Auden’s choppily quoted “poetry makes nothing happen”—a quote betrayed in the two words that follow: “it survives.” Auden is often quoted to fall neatly into that neoliberal ethical bypass of so much American literature. But I see the Darwish quote as honoring that even when a poem can’t be anything else, that it will be enough. I’m surprised by this turn in my own work, but the lived practice of poetry in my life made it inevitable.
— Solmaz Sharif and Alina Stefanescu, in conversation for BOMB Magazine
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