Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
Manahil Bandukwala reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.
rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?
Manahil Bandukwala: In some ways, ever since I can remember. But more seriously, around my first/second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa. I formed strong writing connections, both within the English department and in Ottawa’s poetry community. This helped me improve my craft, publish my work in journals and magazines and such—leading to now, with my second poetry collection, Heliotropia, out with Brick Books.
rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?
MB: My early work was modelled on what I was reading and hearing at open mics. I think, like many people, my impressions of poetry revolved around Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and generally this very white, British, masculine space. I’m fortunate that I arrived to poetry at a time when the big Canadian poets include ones like Dionne Brand, and on a local level, the wealth of poetry we have here in Ottawa. Writing involved trial and error, figuring out what my poetic “voice” was, and understanding what I wanted my work to look like as a recent immigrant teen (at the time) threading an in-between space of Pakistan and Canada.
rm: How did that, as you call it, “in-between space” begin to make itself known in your work? What were you attempting to articulate from or even through that particular space?
MB: Back then, a sense of loneliness, confusion, and rupture. Almost a decade on from that time, I’m more grounded in where I write from, although my work certainly is still interested in liminal spaces. The geographies, locations, and imagery that appears across my poetry tends to fall back towards this theme, whether through the presence of ghosts/spirits, spacetime, or a feeling of uncertainty.
rm: Had you any models for that kind of work? Between then and now, what writers or works have provided examples of those kinds of explorations?
MB: My MA at UWaterloo really modelled that, especially through courses I did with Professors Veronica Austen and Mariam Pirbhai. I studied ghostliness and haunting in the South Asian Canadian literary imagination. So the work of Farzana Doctor, Soraya Peerbaye, and Shani Mootoo has always been influential. From a poetry side, lots of South Asian and Arab writers like Sheniz Janmohamed, Sanna Wani, Natasha Ramoutar, and natalie hanna, to name a few. I especially appreciate work that isn’t like my own, as that’s where I learn about poetic forms, styles, and voice. I love that poetry is always changing, always in a state of growth.
rm: Do you think you have influences that anyone familiar with your writing might be surprised by?
MB: This is a really good question...and has stumped me. I’m certain there are surprising influences. I asked my partner, Liam Burke, for help with this question, and he said what appears in my writing feels like a natural extension of the influences of my life—but he’s also familiar with the plethora of writing influences. I do remember with MONUMENT, including a poem about the video game Animal Crossing was surprising. I’m sure there’s similar in Heliotropia, and I have to say, I’m keen to find out what that surprise is!
rm: You mention moving to Ottawa for your undergrad: what was the experience of first encountering writers in the city? Were there any particular writers or exchanges that shifted your thinking around writing?
MB: It was intimidating, partly because I was eighteen and meeting published writers for the first time. Probably every conversation has shifted my thinking about writing in some way. Recently, I spoke with Dave Currie about how, almost a decade ago, he came to my first-year English class to talk about writing, and careers you can have with an English degree. And now, recently, we’ve been speaking about poetry submissions, compiling manuscripts, and more. Lots of music/sound-focused writers, like Liam Burke, nina jane drystek, and Conyer Clayton have helped me think about the sonic qualities of poetry. Poets like Sandra Ridley, natalie hanna, and Christine McNair helped me think about manuscripts more conceptually, and how to thoughtfully think through the overarching flow of a collection.
rm: I know you published a handful of chapbooks prior to the release of your full-length debut. How did you get from individual poems to chapbook-length manuscripts? Did your approach shift through attempting to cohere poems together within the boundaries of a chapbook? What did you see as the result of publishing chapbooks?
MB: All sort of by accident. My very first chapbook was just me realizing I had enough poems to fit a chapbook-length manuscript. More recent chapbooks have been more intentional in making, but that is also in part because these have been collaborative projects—you have to define the parameters when you’re working with another person. Publishing chapbooks really helped me with poem sequences—I have two 20ish page poems in Heliotropia. It was an understanding of long poems, a surprising realization that I could write them, and an insight into how to edit a poem that spans multiple pages.
rm: Your first full-length collection, MONUMENT, is very much constructed as a single unit. What were the origins of this particular work? How did it begin?
MB: When I started MONUMENT, it was meant to be a single poem that sought to highlight obscured Mughal women in history. As I researched, I found out more, and the poem became longer and longer. I had just started publishing chapbooks then, and thought the poem could be a chapbook. But then it outgrew that length too. Really what solidified the poem into a collection was submitting Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants, and receiving a very kind note from Alayna Munce at Brick Books, saying the press was interested in seeing the full-length collection.
In my second year of university, I took a poetry workshop with Amal El-Mohtar, where she talked to us about long poems. I was amazed to learn that poems could go on for pages and pages—and then that’s exactly what I did.
rm: I’m curious about
how MONUMENT developed, being so specifically project-based. Had you a
shape in mind for the collection, or did it shape itself more organically.
MB: It’s difficult to find a shape for a project you’re so closely
entangled with—this is where outside eyes come into play. A lot of the shaping
happened in my editorial process, with Cecily Nicholson, who advised me on
how the manuscript could come together more cohesively. I also swapped
manuscripts with my friend Sanna Wani, who suggested a lot of the order of the
book as it exists now. So the ideas were there, but the flow of the poems from
one to the other took many hands.
rm: With the amount
of writing and publishing you’d done prior to the appearance of your
full-length debut, were there poems you had to set aside in the process of
putting together manuscripts? If so, might these pieces fall into another
project down the road, or are they, at this point, too far behind you?
MB: When putting together Heliotropia’s manuscript, I took out a number of poems that weren’t quite the right fit. I thought they might go in another manuscript, but truthfully during editing realized that the deleted poems were simply repeats of themes that had already been explored in much stronger ways in the actual book. So no, these pieces likely won’t appear in another project down the road.
There was one poem, written as a point-and-click adventure game, that I took out of Heliotropia, that will probably appear in a collaborative manuscript I’m (theoretically) working on with Liam Burke, but that will appear more as form rather than the same content.
rm: You’ve been exploring collaboration for some time. What do you feel collaboration allows in your work that might not otherwise be possible? And do you approach collaboration differently with each different collaborator?
MB: Collaboration gets me out of my head and into a process that is both more intuitive and more methodological. I have existing relationships with the people I collaborate with, whether that’s a sibling or friend or partner. Having a prior connection is what really allows for the collaboration to flourish, as we have knowledge of each other’s artistic practices, and trust in the creation. Sometimes we know what the end product will look like, other times it’s a matter of playing and finding out together. But I learn so much about my own practice, and in turn my solo work changes and becomes stronger.
rm: You’ve published two chapbooks so far as part of the collaborative group vii. How did the group come together, and how does a collaboration between so many individuals manage and maintain such a coherence? Has the group anything currently in the works, or plans for further publications ahead?
MB: In 2020, during the first lockdown, Helen Robertson messaged a few of us asking if we’d be interested in collaborating on an exquisite corpse poem. We all knew each other prior, but this was the first time really working together to create something. We edited a lot after writing to bring a coherent voice to our poems, but embracing the chaos was also part of the final poems. Truthfully, our last chapbook, Holy Disorder of Being, was the last time we really did collaborative writing. As lockdowns lifted and we got back to our “normal lives,” we didn’t have time in the same way to write together, even asynchronously. But our group chat is always buzzing. We meet up, show up for each other’s events, and provide feedback on work. And we haven’t put aside the idea of working on more poems together—if only to find the time!
rm: Tell me about Reth aur Reghistan. How did that begin?
MB: From a place of play, and of realizing that stories from Pakistani folklore weren’t easily accessible in English in North America. The title means “sand and desert,” and speaks to the geographical landscape of the province of Sindh, where Karachi is located. It’s a project started in collaboration with my sister, Nimra, when both of us were coming up as artists in our respective fields. Going back to the question on collaboration, I think that sense of playing together has always been a part of my life, and so naturally extends to being a part of my practice.
Actually seeing the project through has been something else entirely. We took it slow, applying for grants to make it happen piece by piece. And really, there were a lot of people who believed in us, in the importance of sharing cultural stories, and the fun of interdisciplinary arts practices.
rm: Beyond obvious elements of subject matter, how do you feel this new collection, Heliotropia, is different from MONUMENT? Do you see your work moving towards a particular as-yet-distant point, or are you working purely from poem to poem, manuscript to manuscript?
MB: The quality of the poetry is better, more lyrical. Although there are quite a few long poems in Heliotropia, the individual pieces, for the most part, stand on their own. Although in editing with Sonnet, we did discuss an overall “arc,” so there is a sense of almost science fiction and futurism as you get into the last section of the book.
In terms of the movement of my work, I can never tell where it’s going until I’m past it. I realize my published works are often in the form of projects, but I don’t really set out to undertake a project until I’m well into it. Oftentimes a project takes shape because I’m writing a grant application, for example.
Right now I’m working short story to short story, a project that blossomed into a manuscript as I realized my pieces circled a similar set of themes. And these stories do continue from the themes explored in Heliotropia in a way. They’re speculative, introducing elements of magic into the real world. I approach writing fiction the same way I do poetry, with just writing and letting the story elements figure themselves out along the way.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [knitted hat by Dawn Macdonald] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
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