5 Questions with Hasib Hourani
Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney.
His work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry and Cordite, among others. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance.
His debut book rock flight is now out with Giramondo.
No.1
Hasib, you are such a skilled poet. I remember reading about you saying you initially wanted to pursue printmaking. How and when did you find poetry as a vehicle for sharing your identity and words with the world?
I used to write terrible generic poetry that I would post on an anonymous Twitter back when I was eighteen or nineteen. No one really followed it or engaged with it besides an old friend from high school who also wrote and read poetry and even then, I think she was only liking the tweets to mock me? I don’t know. This is probably not the smartest answer to give, because I want to come across as the ‘skilled poet’, as you say. But I think it’s also important to remember that in the beginning, I wasn’t a natural and my poetry was quite contrived.
I have a distinct memory of being out at a seaside restaurant in Beirut one summer evening and having my notebook with me, and instead of drawing, like I usually would, I started writing. A poem about the ashtray on the table filled with turmus shells and cigarette butts. The poem itself was awful. But the reason I chose to write in that moment was because there were fifteen other people at the table with me and writing felt private. My handwriting is messy and no one could look over my shoulder and see what I was doing, the way they could’ve had I been sketching. I was eighteen, I think. I talked to my dad about it afterwards like it was a revelation. I was like, ‘I have a secret now … no one knows what I was working on …’ Of course the irony is that now that I’m actually publishing my writing, it feels a lot more vulnerable and exposing than visual art ever did. Because it’s so explicit.
No.2
I love the name of your book, rock flight. The poem is, of course, a very rock-propelled one, but it’s great that you give the potential reader that imagery before they even enter the work. There’s such a buoyant, bracing tone to it, an arc towards liberation. How did you land upon the name?
The title came right at the end. And I’m glad you read it as a motion towards liberation because that definitely is the intention. An earlier working title similarly engaged with the imagery of the book, but it didn’t carry the call to action that ‘rock flight’ currently holds. It was lethargic, sinking, and that was the issue. For a book that is so much about action, I needed to ensure that the title propelled the work, the reader, myself, and the movement. So, ‘flight’.
‘Rock’ is a noun, and a prominent one in the book for sure. The two words are an explicit nod to guerilla warfare and resistance. But ‘rock’ is also a verb—to shake, to disrupt. That dual action satisfies my intention for the work in a way no other title could. I tried so many, and none of them landed quite as heavy as the flinging of a rock.
No.3
There are imperative voices throughout the poem, but only sometimes, when you begin to give various ‘How-To’ instructions. Can you speak to the instructional mode in poetry?
I started writing rock flight with the objective of recruiting the reader into the Palestinian struggle. Ideally, they would join willingly but if not, I would utilise whatever force was afforded to me within the confines of poetry and printed text.
The imperative refrain of ‘HOW TO’ that appears throughout the book is me playing around with that objective. I’m making the reader join the movement, and I’m making it so easy; I provide instructions! What more could a person need? All the poetic devices in the book show that I’m using everything in my arsenal to get the reader to care about us. As well as the imperative voice, there are numbered lists, tables of data, external references, and despite my publisher warning that it was gratuitous, an afterword that functions like a manifesto. If someone reads rock flight and comes out the other end still ambivalent about Palestinian liberation, there’s nothing more I can do. I feel comforted knowing that.
No.4
Who do you consider your literary influences, especially when you were writing rock flight?
I remember reading Jasleen Kaur’s Be Like Teflon in the beginning of 2020 and feeling inspired about what a book could look like. And that was around the same time I was revisiting Etel Adnan’s poetry and visual art which had a similar effect on me.
Ellen van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen and Kim Hyesoon were all poets that sparked my strategy around poetry and politic. I was also reading a lot of nonfiction around that time, which makes sense because I think of rock flight as a version of creative nonfiction. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, for example. I was listening to a lot of Bill Calahan as well; the pace at which he strings words together was a nice reminder not to rush—I was allowed to get the words out in my own time.
No.5
There is a sense of hope that runs throughout rock flight, and a sense of subversion too, especially when you use the language of colonialism and imperialism in an effort to combat them. What does hope look like to you?
Hope is having somewhere to move towards. The opposite, I suppose, of the entrapment that rock flight begins with. It’s why I chose to end the book with notions of home and return—although I won’t give away any more than that.
I think of hope in the same way I think of utopia: it’s not a fixed position, its very essence comes from the fact that we are always striving for better. Right now, what’s better is a liberated Palestine for all Palestinians, where we finally achieve the right of return. And after that? We’ll work towards the next thing.
(Credit: Leah Jing McIntosh)
Find out more
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
Get it from Giramondo here.