All of us carry wounds in one form or another. Sometimes those wounds are visible to the people around us; sometimes they stay concealed. And sometimes the wound itself is a painful reflection of how one is seen or unseen, all the ways that one’s identity might be fitted and forced into a particular frame.
Charif Shanahan’s poem “Wound,” from his brilliant new collection Trace Evidence, explores what it means to speak from a position that is “simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible.” His poetry examines how mixed racial identities take shape in the collective imagination, alongside the reality of their frequent erasure. With a lyrical voice that’s at once pointed and poised, Shanahan holds up a mirror to reveal the errors of society’s seeing.
Before we spoke, Shanahan asked if there was a particular poem of his I’d like to discuss. I suggested we could look at this one, a favorite of mine. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was looking at a broken sonnet, a poem concealing a wound of its own.
– Ben Purkert for Guernica
Guernica: Talk to me about where this poem came from.
Shanahan: All of my poems typically come from the same place: the ruminations of my day-to-day life, the unanswerable questions I’m pondering. Usually, when the language of the poem comes out of me, writing a poem is the furthest thing from my mind. It’s not conscious making, at first; it’s thinking. I just let the language pour out into my Notes app or a Word document, then throw something like a title, but not a title, at the top. It’s more like a summary note. An entrance or a door back into the language, in time.
Guernica: I’m interested in this poem’s opening (“It has taken me years to begin this poem”). It’s such a fascinating entrance, as you say. Usually I talk with writers about the revision process that takes place after a first draft is written, but now you’ve got me thinking about what happens prior to putting pen to paper.
Shanahan: The process of beginning before we even arrive at the page?
Guernica: As a kind of revision, yes.
Shanahan: I think that’s really astute. One of the questions I’ve had to think about a lot in my own life is how an identity position (presumed or actual) is verbal prior to a person speaking; there are immediate limitations and dictates on how an individual can communicate, given the identity positions they inhabit or defy, within a social context that depends on those positions to exist. Not in terms of the actual language a person uses, of course, but how categories pressurize expression, specifically for those who are unnamed or illegible within that context. In other words, what is possible to “language,” and what is not possible to “language,” from a particular social position? I take up that question in an early poem in the book, “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon.’” It’s related to the question of readership for me, too, in the sense that I often try to imagine who might be receiving these poems; what implicit bias they might carry; what beliefs they might have about racial identity, mixed-race identity, Arab identity, Blackness in the Arab world. What they presume to know, or assume about me, prior to my saying a word.
Guernica: On the subject of positioning, I’m intrigued by how the poem is making use of space and form. Can you talk about your decision to break the poem into couplets?
Shanahan: In the initial “draft,” formal considerations were less present. It was really just about articulating the thing that was inside me, that was nagging at me, and then the shaping came later.
When I decided on the couplet form, I was thinking about the couplet’s historical associations: ideas about love and pairings that felt relevant, not just to this poem, but to a bunch of poems in the collection.
Guernica: And yet the poem’s last line doesn’t live within a couplet; it looks a bit lonely, set off on its own.
Shanahan: I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes, that was the standalone thirteenth line of the poem. And as I was finalizing the manuscript with my terrific Tin House editor, Alyssa Ogi, I came to see that I could leave a blank line in that thirteenth slot and move down the poem’s final line. And as soon as I did that, the poem became a broken sonnet of sorts, almost as if the lyric were trying to be a thing that it couldn’t quite be.
Guernica: That’s fascinating. I hadn’t noticed that at first, but now that you’re saying it, it makes perfect sense. You can see the ghost of what’s missing, or maybe a kind of wound, even.
Shanahan: Right. And what is the wound, exactly? It’s placelessness, it’s the exilic position, it’s feeling or being nowhere, it’s being simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible. And so, in that final moment of the poem, when the wound is stated as explicitly as it can be, the form of the poem enacts its subject, denying the placement we expect of the final line, so that the poem somehow fails to be what it already is and thereby becomes something else, which it also isn’t quite.
Guernica: Can you talk about why you revised the title from “Existential Wound” to simply “Wound”?
Shanahan: It felt redundant to me. It’s already clear that we’re talking about a constitutive wounding.
Guernica: It’s also interesting how, when you strip the adjective away, suddenly “Wound” can serve as a verb as well as a noun. It becomes more dimensional, more active.
Shanahan: I love that.
Guernica: I’d like to spend a moment looking at your use of punctuation. Your poems have a way of taking their time that feels highly considered and yet no less urgent. Could you speak a little about your approach there?
Shanahan: If the medium of poetry is breath, a poem consists of rhythms of speech, of course, but on some level is closer to our breathing than our speaking.
As a poet, my relationship to — and use of — punctuation has evolved. I used to be very faithful to certain conventions. For example, if a sentence required a comma at the place where the line broke, well, I was dead set on including a comma! Then I learned to stop doing that. I learned to trust in the line’s ability to add or modulate breath. And the form’s.
Guernica: How did you come to navigate breath in the way you do? Was it something you absorbed from reading other poets? Your use of syntax, for example, reminds me a lot of Carl Phillips.
Shanahan: I blush whenever anyone compares that element of my work to Carl’s, because he’s such an astonishing poet. I’m not sure that there’s a singular influence I could name, but I can tell you where my interest in language and syntax really began.
Guernica: Oh?
Shanahan: Yes! My sixth-grade English class was taught by someone who was pretty uninterested in teaching. And so we were made to simply diagram sentences, on our own, every class. Truly, the majority of that year we spent diagramming sentences and identifying verb tenses and labeling parts of speech and such on handouts that the teacher never even collected. But I found it exhilarating. I fell in love with all the different ways that language can come together.
As I began to analyze language more and map out all the different categories and functions that govern it, I started to see its relationship to the social organization of society, and the ways in which I’d find myself categorized. Being of mixed descent, yes, but also how my identities shifted with their contexts. The asterisk that’s attached to who I am.
Guernica: Can you say more?
Shanahan: I’ll try. Irish American father, Moroccan mother. My people on my mom’s side are Arab, but also clearly African-descended people who have been Arabized, and the testimony of that is on our bodies, right? Which is to say that we are Black Arabs on my mother’s side. That concept alone is challenging for many US Americans, because Africa, in a US-American imagination, is conceived of in a bifurcated way: you have North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, with Blackness starting at the desert. But that isn’t historically true, or true now…
What is true in the north is that there is a colorism I find very intense, and a commitment, it seems, to asserting northern difference from sub-Sahara. Not only culturally or nationally, but in terms of embodiment and proximity/distance to Blackness, even when no embodied difference is apparent. That commitment can read as an internalized anti-Blackness, and in some respects, it is, though it’s more complicated than that….Now imagine a phenotypically Black Arab woman from the north of Africa who sees herself not as African, but as Arab, and who carries the influence of French occupation and is francophone. Imagine that individual emigrating to the United States, with the traumatic racial history that it has, the current racial dynamics. And that individual is perceived as — and is racialized as — Black, but herself does not identify as such. That’s the asterisk. Or one of them.
Guernica: I’m grateful that you shared that. Given that our series focuses on revision, I’m curious if your own sense of identity has revised or evolved at all.
Shanahan: Yes and no. I’ve come into greater consciousness around what I’ve inherited culturally and how that informs the identities I inhabit and move through. I wouldn’t say that I was one thing in life, then became another; I’d say that I came into who I had always already been.
Guernica: Can you talk about putting your latest collection Trace Evidence together? What’s that process been like?
Shanahan: It’s been a joy, honestly. The book is a triptych, and the second section revolves around a bus accident that I survived in Morocco. I left my job and apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright. Then, two months in, I was on an overnight bus that crashed; I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I had lived with my ex-partner who’s Swiss. I was in the hospital for two months and had three surgeries. It was a fucking nightmare. Then I ended up in my childhood bedroom in the Bronx convalescing for six or seven months. And to think — a journey to my ancestral homeland took me “home,” quite literally! It was like, “Okay, God. I’m listening.”
Guernica: I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine.
Shanahan: Anyway, after that whole ordeal, I ended up in California for the Stegner, and I experienced a kind of rebirth as a person, having survived this devastating accident and having rehabilitated physically and psychologically. One of the gifts of my time there was working with Louise Glück. I don’t want to sing her praises, because she’d hate that, I think. But her instruction challenged me in fundamental ways and, ironically, deepened my commitment to my chosen subjects, though with a new perspective on them. I began writing the poems in Trace Evidence around then.
Although Louise helped me shape many of the poems, it was her orientation to poetry — her devotion to it — that I needed to be close to. It reminded me a bit of Linda Gregg, who was one of my first teachers. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that poetry was in Linda’s bones. It was inside everything she did. She showed me that you could pursue a life in poetry and make meaning of an otherwise meaningless existence. For me, the process of this book was really about that very thing, about finding and assembling an existence. The Charif that was on that bus died, and I had to reintegrate the pieces of my “self” that gradually returned. That is what this book became.
