Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), is a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.
Revolutions is described as being about shame and pleasure, and how they intersect. In particular, I resonated with the instances of hiding and deflecting, and how that’s held in fraught tension with the relationships we hold dear. How does putting the book out to a public audience respond, in a meta-textual way, to this hiding?
I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought enough about what would happen once the work became public. When I was writing it, I was so focused on remaining “true” to my experience at the time, I hadn’t really thought about future Hajer reading the poems in front of an audience. Of course, I had considered certain levels of censorship and protection. It’s why I introduced the character “xxxxxxx”. When writing the book, I had recorded conversations with young women in my community about shame and pleasure. Their identities are all concealed, they all appear as xxxxxxx to both keep them anonymous and to portray the collectivity of their stories. Beyond that, I didn’t really consider concealing myself. I think the book very obviously reads as auto-biographical (I even use my own name at one point). It definitely has been exposing and vulnerable having the book out in public and doing events. The most difficult part is perhaps the reception by my mom. But I think it helped us have good conversations and a better understanding of each other. Overall, I think she is supportive of me as a writer. She was interviewed for the book as well, so she is deeply embedded in it.
I do love though that the publication of the book does what I could not do while writing it, which is to explode the system of shame of suppression, to get out of the circle. I’m writing about being trapped, and in writing, I escape the trap. I did an event last summer for the Cross-Pollination series by the League of Canadian Poets (in which they pair a poet with a health care worker) with my cousin, the psychotherapist Zainib Abdullah and she talked about how the antidote to shame is courage. I think it was courageous of me to write and publish this book, to expose myself in this way. It helped me heal and work through a lot of the shame I felt growing up. It’s especially fulfilling when I do a reading and a woman comes up to me after and says, I had the same experiences. I can’t believe you’re writing so openly about sex and masturbating. How are you doing it? I think I just had to do it. I had to get these things out and share them. None of us should carry all our shame alone. The more we share with each other, the lighter the load we each have to carry.
That being said, I am definitely thinking about how to better protect myself with my next book, which will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions and a deeper exploration of shame that gets more into childhood trauma. How do I create a bit more distance between myself as the subject and as the poet? I am now considering future Hajer who will read those poems in front of an audience and may have to reveal certain things that happened to her. I’m considering ways in which I can write about my life without writing in first-person. I want to remove the “I” completely.
I’m curious about your extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s work, especially given a photograph of the piece appears in the book! Had you expected that outcome when putting the manuscript together?
When I first wrote Revolutions in 2019 for my MFA thesis, I got in contact with Mona Hatoum’s studio and told them what I was working on. Later, when I was working with my publisher, Talonbooks, we contacted her studio again to get permission to use a photo of + and –. They gave us permission for the photo and said Hatoum was interested in receiving a copy of the book when it came out, but I was never in contact with her directly. Maybe one day – you never know!
One interesting thing that happened is in the original manuscript, I had multiple photos of the sculpture at different points in its revolution that didn’t make it into the final book. I had taken the photos myself when I saw the piece in Barcelona. They weren’t good quality and we couldn’t get Hatoum’s team to redo them, so my copy editor, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and I thought of other ways to represent the sculpture. We ended up with the “clock” concrete poems (“her hand at one / her hand at seven”, etc.). They represent the two arms of + and – moving around the sand, and they also capture the themes of time and waiting that run throughout the book. It was a bit of a frustrating editorial issue that ended up leading to creative problem solving that I think is stronger and adds another layer of meaning that the original photos may not have been able to convey.
The “clock” concrete poems were one of many things I loved about the book. They featured as a constant grounding in the poetry and the words. I began to look forward to seeing how you were going to play with the word and page space. It’s fascinating hearing that this form evolved after the fact. Were there other aspects of the book that took form in the editorial process?
At the line level, the final book is relatively similar to the original manuscript I sent to Talon. I did however add two additional poems. The first was Ramadan Record which I had written in 2019 and removed from the manuscript because it didn’t seem to fit in cohesively with the rest of the book. Then I started to miss it and through it might work well in terms of amplifying the theme of time and providing another type of form in the middle of the book. I see it now as a kind of hinge point.
The second poem was Sift which is a new poem I wrote while working with my substantive editor, Rahat Kurd. She and I talked about whether I was doing the mother figure enough justice and thought it would make sense to have more of her perspective, to soften and lend more empathy to her. With Sift being the last poem in Revolutions, and written from the mother’s point of view, I see it as an addendum or commentary on the rest of the book.
I actually had to pull back a lot while editing to prevent myself from changing the integrity of the book. I was editing it five years after I had written it, so I had changed quite a bit as a person and as a poet. At the risk of publishing certain poems that I may now find underdeveloped or cringey, I’m glad I honoured Revolutions for what it is – a time capsule of what I was dealing with at that time.
Could you talk about incorporating the Arabic texting code into your poems?
The first poem I wrote for the book, before I really knew it was going to be this book, was 3aib, which means shame in Arabic. I had to use the word 3aib without translating it because 3aib holds so much weight and context. It means shame, but it doesn’t feel the same. Then I realized there is no other way to write 3aib so I have to introduce the texting code.
I should clarify here that I did not invent this code – it’s how Arabic-speaking people write to each other when transliterating to English. The numbers represent letters in Arabic with sounds that don’t exist in English. Some words, like habibi (my love) can be written as habibi or 7abibi. The 7 is the Arabic letter ح which is a hard h (kind of like the sound you’d make when warming up your hands). H works well enough but 7 is more accurate. But with the word 3aib, the 3 is the Arabic letter ع which is a guttural throaty sound, and there’s nothing like it in English. Writing just aib or eib would make no sense.
So for the 3aib poem, I figured that if I had to use the texting code for that word, why not use it for every transliterated word? I loved how the numbers looked on the page, so weird and computational. It was accurate to the language and also created a little secret between me and other Arabic-speaking people who would read the book (though this wasn’t my main motivator). I actually overuse the code to the point that it may even become complicated for Arabic-speaking people to translate. But I think a secret code is a perfect literary device for a book about secret lives and identities and hiding and censorship. Also, numbers are just really cool.
I loved your choice to include the code for all transliterated words! The numbers in the code worked so well visually with the clock concrete poems. You’ve mentioned your next book will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions. Do you envision the book having the same level of visual and linguistic experimentation, with the concreteness and the code?
Before writing Revolutions, I was strictly a lyric poet and it was in working with Margaret Christakos during my MFA that she introduced me to experimental feminist poetry and I began playing in that tradition. I love both styles of poetry so much and I think the next book while be somewhere in the middle. I know I want to challenge my diction a lot (it’s a weak spot for me) and I definitely imagine there will still be some visual experimentation. I’m writing and thinking a lot now about deeply rooted shame and trauma and repressed memories, so I am always asking myself what it means to write through the body. I don’t think lyric poetry alone is enough to answer that question.
I’m not sure what the shape will be exactly, but I do want to carry forward some of the procedures I began with Revolutions, particularly the research work of interviewing people. I love the idea of writing that’s created in community, sharing language with the people around me. It helps me expand my view and my vocabulary, and it also helps me feel less isolated while writing. I trust that as I work on the next book, the poems will help tell me what form they need to be in, and any experimental elements will come out organically.
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