Laila Malik’s debut poetry collection, archipelago (Book*hug Press, 2023) was named one of the CBC’s Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2023. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, longlisted for five different creative nonfiction and poetry contests, and published in Canadian and international literary journals.
Laila Malik reads in Ottawa on Thursday, March 21, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.
Manahil Bandukwala: Generational connections appear across poems in Archipelago, from the grandmothers to gods. For you, how does poetry allow for conversations with ancestors and elders across time and geographical distance?
Lalia Malik: Like many other children of multi-generational migration, there has been significant rupture of documentation and oral transmission in my ancestral lines. Add to that the protective patriarchies of privacy, where the experiences and stories of some genders are held even tighter, and risk greater loss across generations.
Perhaps ironically, I was able to use that training in privacy to my advantage. By circumstance or design, I have avoided public poetic engagement and exposure for most of my life, gifting myself a seclusion that gave me space to hear more clearly all the infinite possibility across time and space.
Others will disagree ferociously with my imagined conversations. That doesn’t make their projected pasts any more authentic than mine. I have described my poetic writing as an act of loving sedition. I’m here for it.
MB: Speaking of geographical distance, the word “archipelago” evokes a sense of distance, and in some ways, a distance to be traversed. Would you consider the poems in the collection the individual islands, or the paths used to travel between the islands?
LM: I would say they’re both, depending on how you look at it. In the same way that an inverted photo can show you one reality from two contrasting perspectives, the point of the archipelago, for me, is the indisputable reality of microcosms that are interconnected – ecologically, spiritually and experientially.
MB: The question of “Pakistaniness” comes up in a number of poems in Archipelago, such as “cutlery,” “kafala,” and “crooked elbows.” For myself, I find when writing about diaspora, the amount of time and space required to articulate the nuances and intricacies of a specific diaspora can be a huge challenge. How do you approach this “challenge” in your writing?
LM: I love the open way you framed this question.
For better or worse, my daily grind has always involved a lot of different types of writing, where technical inaccuracies have immediate and tangible consequences. While I respect and celebrate nuance and intricacy, with poetry I refuse to be beholden to anyone’s truth but my own.
In my life and in my ancestral lines, while there have been specificities of experience, the diasporas are not discrete. They are porous and fluid, as much as we try to force them into false permanencies. I’m not Pakistani – I’m Pakistani-adjacent. So I reject the idea of being true to ‘a specific diaspora’. Instead, I think of the nuance and intricacy as a type of biodiversity, in the sense that our ecologies in all their wild splendour couldn’t care less which fictitious national category we pretend defines us.
MB: Pakistani folktales have a very particular exploration of grief and love, and often culminate in death. In your poem “majnun,” you repeat the line “she did not die,” in reference to Laila in the folktale. What does it mean for you to have conversations and contradictions with folktales that are steeped in such a long cultural tradition and significance?
LM: For diaspora in particular, where our lived storylines are disjointed and rejointed in ways that sometimes break from the traditional or dominant modes of transmission of more sedentary peoples, folktales (as well as religio-spiritual traditions) can sometimes assume a slightly coercive narrative framework of authentic possibility in our lives. This can offer familiar emotional goalposts in the uncharted chaos of new times and lands. It can also amount to a stifling, self-imposed reassertion of ideas and ways of being that do not best serve us. Histories of colonization muddle things further – when we’ve had aspects of our cultural practice forbidden or stolen, we can become fixated with preserving or reclaiming all things, or the things we determine – in a state of reactive opposition – to be purest or most authentic.
The Laila-Majnun folktale is familiar across most of West and South and some of Central Asia. At a surface level, it is an almost pedestrian story of star-crossed lovers, found in almost every culture in the world. Clearly it resonates though, because there are a million interpretations, many related to spiritual yearning.
Grief, love and death are all important parts of life, but my contention with this defining narrative of love was that Laila is eternally positioned as object, muse and victim, with no agency and no distinguishing features beyond her participation in an infatuation, which ultimately ends her existence. This is the “bloodsucking seduction” in the poem, the “the bad metaphors, sealed sacred/with untouchable folktruths”.
But as a literal ‘Laila’ – and generally, as a human – I know experientially that we each are more than one thing. Do we have to keep dying for our bold risks and for infatuations? Must we eternally choose to be governed by the intoxication of romantic tragedy? Can we never be the subjects, the agents of our own destinies? I’m concerned with the hidden power, interests, and agendas that lie within dominant regurgitations of these folktales. If we’re going to use our cultural inheritance to inform our current lives, we had damn well better seek and claim its rich complexity so it serves us.
MB: I can hear/read the influence of a tradition of Urdu poetry in your work. Could you speak more about that influence, and also how you sustain connections to Urdu poetry living in so-called Canada?
LM: That’s lovely to hear, and in some ways surprising. While I speak Urdu, and have been exposed to Urdu poetry since I can remember, I am in no way technically versed in the art. So the influence is only semi-conscious, and in the past, I have had a somewhat bratty and completely indefensible irritation with dominant forms like the ghazal, which felt restrictive, ornate, wooden and patriarchal to me. With that said, in my youth I searched for ‘home’ in the works of Pakistani women poets, and more recently I was curious about rekhti and its rebellious foray into the feminine prosaic – until I learned that it was largely written by men in a feminine voice (although possibly there may be some historical misgendering in this description). I was, however, curious about a woman rekhti poet named Naubahar with the takhallus ‘Zalil’ (shameless).
On a related note, I’ve written in an essay on my relationship with Urdu about how the language is only a recent addition to my linguistic lineage, arriving in my parents’ generation on the heels of Punjabi and Kashmiri before that. So in some ways my ongoing interest in Urdu is almost just because it’s there, a placeholder for some other way of knowing that came before, that eternal diasporic quest for elusive answers from a past that we pedestalize.
Manahil
Bandukwala
is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022) and Heliotropia (Brick
Books 2024), and the co-author of Women Wide Awake (Mawenzi House 2023).
See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.