Interview #193 — Hasib Hourani

by Danny Silva Soberano

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, and arts worker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Their practice disrupts expectations of place, archive, and the relationship between the two.

Hasib is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and is currently working on a book of poetry about suffocation and the occupation of Palestine.

Hasib spoke to Danny Silva Soberano about the shelf life of writing, home-making, and embodiment.

During this month of November, there is a sibling theme to the LIMINAL interviews. It is fitting, too, that I have the honour of interviewing you. I very much consider you to be my twin brother. Right now I am writing out questions for you and it is a Sunday evening. I have spent today eating too many pastries and finishing Season 3 of Sex Education. I am thinking about how difficult it is to ask you specific questions when I already have so many answers. So I thought why not start simply: where are you? What have you been up to?

I’m on my couch at 8.43AM. It rained last night and I live right beside the Citylink, so the asphalt is damp and the cars sound like wind. My windows are pretty air-tight and on dry days the house is silent, it feels like I’m in a vacuum. I like that my space changes a lot with the weather. I’ve been sitting in and with that most mornings and evenings.

That sounds gorgeous, precise. These days I am finding that it's getting hard to talk about writing. How are you feeling about writing, about work?

I’ve been trying, for a year now, to see myself as a writer not because of what I make but because of how and what I read. Essentially, the way I see things is what makes my craft. But I’m not seeing much right now, and I’m not thinking much either. That means there’s nothing to write about. I try to write about that, but it’s such an obvious option.

I’m also currently going through quite a radical metamorphosis, mentally. I’ll keep things vague, but I’ve had to confront, and then eventually reject, a lot of my core understandings and behaviours. That’s made my headspace a whole new place to be in. How and what I read is really different to where I was a year ago. I don’t know what that means for my writing. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t. But either way I’m in flux, and haven’t been able to write about it just yet.

I know that writing wasn't your first career in art. Can I ask you what kind of art you were interested in before writing, how you came to writing, and why?

It’s interesting, actually, I was really restraining myself in answering that last question. I could have gone on for much longer but was conscious of straying into off-topic territory. I wanted to start talking about writing and how I’m nervous of its shelf-life as a craft for me personally. How much I miss working with my hands and the inarticulability of visual art.

Up until I was twenty, I thought my art career would be a visual art career. I’d done all this work to facilitate that future for myself—as much as you can do as a teenager, I guess. But I didn’t get into the art school I wanted, and I was very stubborn, and a perfectionist, so I thought, “If I can't have this my way, I won’t have it at all.”

I know this feeling well, too—and perfectionism truly is an art-killer.

I wanted to study printmaking and textile. That was my arts practice. Printmaking because I loved the process of carving away and eroding as an act of production. I found that paradox really cool. Textile because culturally, I had always been exposed to it as an artform. I really liked the idea of making it conceptual, fragmenting traditional weaves and stitches. Leaning into textile as a narrative tool but also completely abstracting what that could look like. Textile has also always been pretty low down in the hierarchy of disciplines, particularly in the West. It’s a woman’s craft, it’s a homeware craft. That also made me really angry. I was very much a Feminist in the traditional sense. I was like, “Just because this is a woman’s craft, that doesn’t mean it’s any less valid! Domestic crafts are still high art!” which I do still believe. I’m just not a woman, and I’m not the person to fight these narratives of womanhood.

I remember being in Chicago with my very good friend from high school, who did, in fact, go on to study art, and does do a lot of textile work. She took me to the Art Institute, and the Islamic Art exhibition was underground, dimly lit, it was clean but something about it still felt grotty. It was all so poorly considered, just installed in chunks with no thought or nuance like, “Here! Take it!” That collection was almost all textile. There’s a lot of orientalism tied up with textile that I think, if I were to start producing work for consumption again, that’s what I’d be addressing.

I don't think it's a bad thing for writing, or poetry, to have a shelf-life as a craft. It is very much the same for me. Have you seen that Ocean Vuong came out with a new book recently? In his Fantastic Man interview, he has said it may be his last poetry collection because he feels happy about what he's made; he's finished. How do you know when you're reaching the last of the string of poetry for yourself? What would you be exploring/what else do you need to say?

I am so inspired by Ocean Vuong’s relationship to craft. He’s really conscious of pace, and limit. For me, resolution of a piece or an idea is unpredictable, and it makes producing large bodies of work quite risky. Like I am gambling. I don’t ever really feel finished with a theme but I have noticed lately that I can be finished with certain emotions. For two years I was writing rage, and frustration, and in fact that’s the emotion that my current manuscript embodies. I’m writing about Palestine and that rage is very much integral to both the work and the history that informs it. The book includes overt references to the illegal torture methods employed by the Israeli Occupation Forces and the General Security Services. I needed rage to write that, and I needed to write that.

But I’ve recently experienced a lot of grief, and a lot of fear, the kinds that don’t leave much room for anger or frustration. I’m settled. I’m somber. That’s how I know that my manuscript is reaching its end-point. I want the reader to make it to the end of my book without having had their resolution. I want them to be frustrated, too. I don’t want my settledness to be present and I fear that if I keep adding things into the book at this point, that will end up happening. I’ll always write Palestine. I’ll always write omens, Islam, technology, my body, but each iteration will take a different shape.

Lots of poets are asked this question. I never get tired of hearing an answer because they vary so widely from poet to poet: what can poetry do, if anything?

Did you see that tweet recently about how poets are the only ones reading poetry? That made me so angry. I know that there’s a bias to that anger. Yes because I’m a poet but more because I’m Muslim and because I’m Arab. Poetry is history, it is contemporary politics, it is religion, and it is popular culture. To me, poetry has always been the people’s literature. My dad used to participate in poetry competitions at school where they would memorise famous lines of poetry and try to finish each other’s sentences by matching words or letters. He’s not a writer, my dad works in IT and he still grew up with poetry, and he still reads it. The Quran is a book of poetry, so practicing Muslims read poetry every single day. And poetry is still being recited and chanted at protests and revolutions in the Arab world. So it’s not necessarily about what poetry can do, but what it is. Poetry is action. If a poem makes people, non-poets, act, then that’s effective poetry.

I haven't seen the tweet, but I am now also angry. It's a stance that, yes, locks poetry into a tower. Saying that 'only poets read poetry' turns poetry into a product that must look a certain way to be valued. It ignores the poetry that is spoken, or passed down with oral traditions. It is a thoroughly ignorant thing to say. Poetry can also be integrated into one's life, or found without the need to record, to write. The poem is not just the poem.

I found the tweet unbearably white, to put it plainly.

Unbearably white. Do you want to talk about your book a little bit more? Is it the right time to talk about it publicly?

I don’t know if I can just yet. But I really am itching to! I think it’s a direct manifestation of my answer to your question, ‘What can poetry do, if anything?’. It’s very active poetry. I’m writing about the settler-colonisation of Palestine, about Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions. About boxes, suffocation, travel. Of course, there’s also the running crux of birds (as is my trademark right now, haha!) that informs the whole manuscript. It’s one long-form poem that sprawls across a hundred or so pages and asks the reader to overtly engage with my words and commands. Some of these details might shift between now and the time of publication, but that’s the gist.

One of the biggest draws to your work, for me, is that your writing offers the gift of revealing your associations. There are separate ideas that don't make sense alone, but because of your penchant for proximity, you make them work. You write in service of your obsessions. It is a precise way to write—and to live. How do you practice such precision?

I love the way you talk about my practice. You speak to it with so much more confidence and introspection than I could. But yes, that’s it exactly. When I think about my favourite pieces to read, they’re ones that make me feel clever. Not necessarily because they speak to intricate or difficult topics, but because they provide me, as a reader, with an “a-ha” moment (or several, even) alongside the writer. Like I’m reconciling something really slippery. But I’m not doing that unguided; the writer has facilitated it for me, which then makes us both really clever. I hate to reference George Saunders but he says it best when he describes the story as a black box that the reader enters in one state of mind and exits in another. I’m trying to facilitate that metamorphosis for my reader, which I do by experiencing it myself in real time on the page.

When I look back on my archive of revelations, they’re never just one moment. There’s an accrual of little things—sights, experiences, thoughts—that form a nebulous, and that nebulous is the revelation. I wrote a poem recently and in the process of getting it finalised for publication, I emailed the editor a breakdown of my nebulous. A demarcation of the four major themes and underneath each heading, a bullet-pointed list of the images that narrativise each one. A lot of the bullet-points were repeated across two or three of the headings. The images and themes are inextricably tied up in one another. It was funny to see it all written out like that. All the objects I’ve been gathering and stitching together. My mechanism for constellation.

In many ways you treat your home-making as an artform—would you agree? You like to cook, your apartment is beautifully decorated, you relish having visitors. What are your favourite items in your home?

Ohh, I love this question. And I actually said those exact words out loud to my house a couple weeks ago, “home-making is my art form.” I have made at least one textile work during each of Victoria’s six lockdowns, and my favourite home item at the moment is one of those textile objects. A tapestry from Lockdown 4. It’s a homage to my grandparents. I made it while my paternal grandmother—my last remaining grandparent—was really sick. I used two different thobs for the fabric. Hand-me-downs from a family friend. I cut them up and stitched them back together. I realised last year that my four grandparents have matching names. Ali (elevated) and Inaam (blessing), and Saad (happiness) and Ibtisam (smile). I ended up with the Arabic phrase, highest blessing, happiest smile (which sounds a lot more poetic in Arabic, of course), and have wanted to do something with it since then. I embroidered those words into the fabric, and used the tatreez from the thobs as hanging loops. I finished that tapestry, put it up in my living room, and my teita Inaam died a few weeks later. I’m still sitting in that grief.

I want to create a shrine to absorb that grief as my next home object. It’ll be made up of two different drinking cups that shattered to bookend the beginning and end of some Hourani family misfortune. We’ve had a rolling series of devastating events since February this year, ending with teita Inaam’s passing and foretold by a coffee reading of mine. I really want to make this shrine and install it underneath the tapestry, I just need to source some chicken wire.

I think that's such a beautiful, embodied idea, and gives me inspiration—I similarly need a place to put my grief that I've kept delaying—thank you. Your poems are often embodied. You often write in a register that is similar to your speaking voice, for example. The shapes of your poems also require the reader to tune into a sense of embodiment. What importance do you think that the body plays in your work?

I have been asked this question a few times, and I never quite know how to answer. Let me give this a go… What I said earlier about effective poetry being poetry that makes non-poets act, to me, the body needs to be involved in order for that to happen. Thinking about it now, you could say that there are two necessary steps: I first need to situate my own body in a work, and only then can I ask the reader to do the same. Even when I’m angry, and I’m demanding something from the reader, bossing them around, I’m still conscious of the author/reader power dynamic. When I ask the reader for vulnerability, I don’t want it to feel like I’m pushing them into a pit. I’m already in there. I’m reaching out my hand and telling them, “Join me.”

Perhaps I’ve moved too far away from your question. The simple answer would be, poetry that goes only as far as thought is just the act of looking, sometimes pointing, and I don’t think that’s enough.

Poetry is history, it is contemporary politics, it is religion, and it is popular culture. To me, poetry has always been the people’s literature.

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?

This is strange to answer, because I’m still an emerging writer myself. Maybe it’s that your craft is only as strong as your community. Especially if you’re writing non-fiction. You have to have the space to talk about a piece before and while writing it. That, to me, is a crucial part of the editing process. I think of good literature as a conversation with the reader, and you have to first figure out how to have that conversation in-person before you can put it on the page.

Who are you inspired by?

Etel Adnan. My friends. God. My queer Arab elders, particularly those who turned to art to reconcile their identities, who created without self-sensationalising.

What are you listening to?

Lots of slow instrumentals that feature the clarinet. Lots of Khaleeji music, which I used to really dislike as a teenager, so maybe this is a manifestation of my homesickness.

What are you reading?

I’m reading two or three books a week right now. Which I’m really proud of because I took a four-month break from reading anything except the news, and have only just found my way out of it. I just didn’t have the stamina. The first book I read on the other end of that four-month break was Ishiguro’s new title, Klara and the Sun. I think it was the perfect work for re-engaging me in reading. He has such a consciousness of how much information to give the reader, and at what pace. I started the book, truly, with a blank imagination like just a blank white space in my head. I couldn’t visualise a thing. I was really struggling. And then slowly I was being drip-fed details and incrementally forming images and landscapes and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is what reading feels like, I remember why I like to do this.’ It sounds a bit naive for me to word it like that, but I can’t remember the last time I felt that wonder from a book. It was like I was reading for the first time in my life.

How do you practice self-care?

Spending time with myself, and not answering to anyone. When my time is entirely my own there’s a new clarity around what I want to do with it. Sometimes that’s trash TV, sometimes it’s sitting on the couch for three hours and reading, sometimes it’s making a very elaborate meal.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

Well, I’m Australian by virtue of my passport, which I wasn’t born with. And I’m Asian by virtue of continental borders, which I don’t really believe in because they’re inherently colonial. In all honesty the only nationality I truly identify with is my Palestinian one, and that’s because it’s so dangerously under threat every day. Otherwise I’m pretty anti-nationalist. I’m from the Levant. I’m indigenous to Greater Syria but I’ve been expelled by civil war and settler colonialism.