rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Manahil Bandukwala

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.

Manahil Bandukwala : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Laila Malik

 

 

 

 

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Monument, by Manahil Bandukwala

MONUMENT, Manahil Bandukwala
Brick Books, 2022

 

 

 

 

The fall of an empire is not the end of a life. A life is unique, unplanned in its specificity, infinite in its possibilities, to be cherished, so that it never runs out of new experiences. While lives are shortened, ended, their brightness dimmed through external factors perhaps, empires are prone to decay and inevitably fall through their own destructive logic. And in this fall, they take more lives with them, consuming themselves and those caught in their repetition of retaliation. Empires amass death, glorifying it, making retaliation for (real or imagined, imputed) wrongs they bring into the lives they rob of their time.

Laying out this compelling view of empire, in Monument – whose title also reads as Moment – Manahil Bandukwala holds up the life of Arjumand Banu against the span of the empire built by her husband, the Emperor Shah Jahan. She excavates the person, the body, the life from the rubble that began to cover her long before her death, thus rendering the beauty of living that Arjumand was denied. The building of the Taj Mahal, and of the empire itself, in her name – not her name but her ascribed name, Mumtaz Mahal –, is the background for the book, where all poems are concerned with (and for) her figure. As befits a reappropriation in someone’s name, all characters in her story, even the author telling it, are related back to her, giving her, more than a role, even a leading one, a depth, a duration. In “Rest” Bandukwala describes her offering in light, airy prose, with a steady hand:

Rest now, Arjumand, in a place
                     to surpass a God’s house. A home built

          beyond layers of atmosphere–perhaps lush fields, or
a fresh start wading in a shallow riverbank. A place not built

          by twenty-thousand labourers. A place
that does not rest

on the back of an empire. (15)

The breaths and caesuras in this poem reopen possibilities in a life that has long been delineated. “A place not built / by twenty-thousand labourers” suggests a version of history in which these labourers might have actively not built this place, as well as the existence of another place; “A place / that does not rest” undoes the infinite weight of the monument, brings movement back into a life, liberates the figure the marble hides.

Bandukwala uses poetry to speak Arjumand Banu alive (37). The collection is sharp, precise, concise. It resists the temptation to elevate a monument to a life and instead makes itself a moment of its continuation. It depends on the monument – history cannot so easily be changed – but also contributes to erode it. It does so notably in drawings of a crumbling upside-down Taj Mahal that evokes destruction as well as a hourglass, counting down the time of the moment of the myth that replaced the life, as well as the time a life is allowed. But it also avoids the temptation to place blame and shift the focus. The tenderness of the poems contrasts against the undermining of the empire, repairing the harm it ceaselessly caused, acknowledging the imperfect love and the (misguided) “Love language/as architecture” (17) that led to the building of the immense monument.

Bandukwala’s feminist approach is subtle and focused. The poem “Unravel,” which floats across the higher parts of six pages, best describes the poet’s attachment to the figure she has chosen as well as a desire for a self-determined, uninterrupted life. The poems in “Love Letters” develop a voice for Arjumand Banu, as do the erasure poems based on her reported last words which give them new meaning. From the particulars of Arjumand’s life, she holds up our duty to celebrate other lives, not to drown them in other lives, and to let love be its own production. This is especially true of a woman’s life, ended in a fourteenth childbirth when one ought to have sufficed, when refusals were ignored: “In the literature // you shrugged off being / a bad mother, knew one son was enough, // wrote what women did but kept hidden. / The real you set those steps to follow.” (16) But it is also true of the twenty thousand labourers who worked on the Taj Mahal and whose hands were severed for symbolic reasons (at least according to the popular story), whose wholeness the poet also returns.

Monuments, like empires, are built to last. A book has a capacity to stay, and stay with, rather than last, and with this book Manahil Bandukwala allows something of her life and Arjumand Banu’s to remain with the reader (although the book itself as a physical object, in the beauty of the type and the careful aesthetics of word placements and title layout, certainly leaves an impression and sets a mood of its own). Against the infinity of monuments and empires that is built upon destruction, upon the transsubstantiation of matter and lives, Manahil Bandukwala privileges the moment, delves into it, holds up fragments to the light without polishing them, so that they may shine in their own manner.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.