Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s Tel Aviv landed in my mailbox a few weeks into the pandemic. When the universe sends me important messages, it does so through invisible rays piercing clouds—not sure why! This is somewhat similar to what relishing in the electric vibrations of Zenia’s incredible writing is like, hitting direct and clear as day. Their voice is turned up and wrenched, or strangely relaxed—it's a lot of collisions, fields of color, the tactility of words and the spill-over from dream/nightmare. Tel Aviv was a gift of texture and force when I really needed it. In their new book, James Baldwin’s Lungs in the 80s, out soon on Chat Rooms press, the gift lives on, but kind of more stuck in the ground, bouncing off the city’s walls, confronting time and place as the culmination(s) of a history. Here, we speak origin stories, recent developments in the feel of American politics, urbanity, poetry of course, and more. —MV
Morgan Võ: I was thinking about James Baldwin’s Lungs in the 80s in relation to Tel Aviv, where in Tel Aviv cities are these kind of poles that offer, between them, a sense of what the world around them is made up of. Traveling between Tel Aviv and New York in that first book gives me a sense of the parameters of movement in general. But in James Baldwin, I feel like there’s a little bit more of stasis, and engagement with cities directly, not so much from afar or from this kind of imagined perspective. So, what’s your experience of cities? Where have you lived, and how does urban life impact your experience?
Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim: I’ve lived in Seattle, Philadelphia, Oakland, and here in New York, and the first three of those were in more rapid succession, in my early 20s. Minus Seattle, which I had lived in at one point, and then lived very close to during my childhood, spent a lot of time there, so I guess that was my first experience of a city. And Seattle’s a unique city, compared to Midwestern or even East Coast cities, which are much more modeled after each other, whereas Seattle and Portland are vastly different geographically.
But yeah, in terms of the kind of engagement thing you picked up, Tel Aviv is much more an accumulation of me having been traveling up until the year I was living in New York, versus James Baldwin which I wrote almost a decade after I wrote Tel Aviv, and is much more a reflection of me having lived in New York much longer than I have lived in any other city in my adult life.
MV: Have you experienced poetry scenes in other places?
MZSYI: I was engaged in the art scene in Seattle, but most of my friends that wrote were novelists. We definitely shared books and stuff like that, and even worked on a zine, but it feels less like the poetry community here. And writing was an aspect of our friendship but also, probably owing to us being very young at the time, we were also just living and getting drunk all the time [laughs]. There was less intentionality than I think there is in New York, where there is just a super vibrant scene that is about each other’s works, and isn’t really competitive or anything. At least what I’ve found, it’s more just supportive and people being interested in it.
Kind of was in the Bay Area poetry scene, but I didn’t super get into it. That was a period of time when San Francisco was getting rapidly gentrified, and that had pretty major consequences for the longstanding Bay Area poetry scene. I was kind of coming in the middle of this thing that I didn’t totally understand, around the North Beach. ‘Cause I lived in Oakland, I didn’t even really know where North Beach was. It was at one point a huge focal point of that scene, and I think it was in the middle of a lot of people moving there.
MV: I’ve only ever written poetry here in New York, and in general art in New York is very segregated by medium. Which in some sense is amazing, because there is that sense of support and community and linkage, and being surrounded in a really direct way by poetry specifically offers something for the practice. But I’m curious, when you were in Seattle and everybody’s writing something different from you, how did you start to build what you think of as your poetry?
MZSYI: [Laughs] I realized I was not that great of a musician! To be perfectly honest. And deeper than that, I also realized that, as I was reading more poetry and other works, thinking about more of the concrete things you can do with language in terms of world-building, fragmentation, visual poetry, I thought, you actually can’t do this in a song. Or even explore different topics—at least, I’m not good enough as a songwriter—to explore deeper topics of identity, or different cities, or different things that I could explore in Tel Aviv, it being written, that I just couldn’t translate to any other mediums that I did. I think that was a big part of it.
I’ve always been into writing, and I think even in my early 20s doing other art stuff was kind of like a self-rebellion against the inevitable fate that I would be a writer [laughs]. ‘Cause I was like, This is the least paid and the least sexy of all the other things. Especially in Seattle, where being a musician is so cool, and being a writer, people are like, Eh. So yeah, I think that was the big thing, being decent at it, understanding it.
MV: Something I noticed in Tel Aviv, but is maybe more on the surface in James Baldwin, is the presence of poetry figures as people who invigorate landscapes, or invigorate your writing process. Like the passing mentions of someone like Archibald Macleish, or the extended engagements with someone like Rodrigo Lira. I’m curious, when did you start pulling in other writers like that as material in your poems?
MZSYI: Actually, my first poems were extremely reference-heavy, and then my friend who was a fiction writer looked over the first chapbook I had and gave me really extensive notes—unasked [laughs]! But one of the things he critiqued the most was, he was like, These references are really obscure, and no one understands them. He was like, I would HIGHLY suggest not using them! So for a while, like with Tel Aviv, I kind of tried to consciously pull back on that.
This was 2013, I want to say. Then I wrote part one of Tel Aviv in 2014, part three in 2015, and part two in 2017, so they also kind of reflected the changes in style that I was going through at those times. But also, with James Baldwin’s Lungs, I consciously tried to bring in other writers. Because an idea I had writing poems for the book was, how do we as poets interact with chaotic—to say the least—political times? Like, we could be on the precipice of America being boring and shitty, or we could be on the collapse of the empire, and that’s an insane thing to live and work through. And then like, especially with poetry being the most minimized it’s ever been, but also it’s most important, in terms of it’s political capabilities, I just wanted to evoke that tradition, evoke writers that had been through that. Especially with Lira, whose poetry I think is some of the best of political writing that is not overtly political, but is very engaged with a period of immense political turmoil. He was, I think, 24 when Pinochet came to power, and then killed himself in the mid-80s or something? During maybe the waning days of Pinochet’s power, but Lira had experienced the worst of his coup.
MV: Neo-Nazism, and American fascism, and gun-toting teenage boys, are all so present in this book. Sometimes it feels cartoonish, other times it feels frightening. Part of the chaos is that it’s all so on the surface, like at this moment people’s alt-Right vocabularies are so straightforward, and the Right seems to desire to be seen warts and all, but then what do you do with that, how does one handle it? How do you think pulling in that kind of material shaped your work?
MZSYI: I think it was honestly a way for me to exorcise my own deep paranoia in that period of time. It was pandemic, after 2020. I was revved up about the political capabilities of a stronger Left, but also, like, the Armies of Night are coming for my door right now! Some of the cartooniness is like, I have a dark sense of humor. And I think that’s kind of a reflection of the politics of Afro-pessimism, of almost an I told you so kind of thing. But also probably a reflection of seeing everything, because it was the pandemic, through the prism of the internet. Much of the alt-Right stuff, especially vis-a-vis the internet, is so cartoonish. As it’s oftentimes said, satire is dead in this period of time, ‘cause like, Ishmael Reed could not make a more cartoonish figure than Nick Fuentes, down to his name, his very weird optics, him wearing Yeezys. It’s just absurd.
I feel like as much as the characterization of the Left is that it doesn’t revolve around logic, doesn’t like materialism, that’s sort of not true. And I think that’s the hardest thing the Left actually has to overcome in contextualizing the Right in this new iteration, is that the Right is devolved of any material logic or basis, from party platform—which, in 2020, revolved frighteningly around QAnon, which is impossible to explain without laughing! [Laughs] ‘Cause it’s just like, JFK, Jr., for some reason is this messianic savior? Like, why? It’s just like this weird thing where like, on one hand you have the Democratics, who have become increasingly more conservative and boring, and very much a return to… not even a perceived normality of the 50s or the 60s or the Great Society, but just like: the 90s. Or even just: before Trump. So it’s like, this very unimaginative future on the one hand, and then this extremely imaginative but nightmarish future on the other hand that, like, doesn’t make any sense.
The Right weirdly targets these nebulous points, is not really antagonistic to any superstructure or the empire as is. Like, this weird obsession with the 1619 Project, and banning it, and banning other books based off it, when the 1619 Project is not that crazy radical. It’s main thesis is not even that different than what, like, Howard Zinn said 40 years ago [laughs]. Like, if you’re even somewhat aware of academia, and a history of Black studies, it’s like, This is not really that controversial of a take! It’s actually a more mild take. And same with Critical Race Theory, it’s actually extremely mild, in its political context. Which is also the thing, these kind of more institutional things have created these weird bedfellows of leftists and more institutional-bound liberals having to protect these more fundamentally important things, if that makes sense? Like, books shouldn’t be banned, but I don’t think Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem is going to create the next Che or something [laughs]. It just doesn’t fit with any logic, but then you’re forced to protect it because that’s such a fundamental value. There’s this elusiveness, but then it’s also so fundamentally dangerous.
MV: There are other poets referenced in the book like Lira or Paul Laurence Dunbar, but the spectrum of contemporary poets is weirdly simplified in the book between Gorman and Billy Collins, and I’m curious about that. But maybe a broader way to approach that is, I feel like when James Baldwin’s Lungs speaks to a poetry scene, or a poetry environment, it understands poetry to be white space, and for Blackness in that space to feel uncomfortable, to say the least.
MZSYI: Yeah, it’s just something that I find as a poet impossible to not grapple with. And I think that like, all Black or non-white poets grapple with this, because poetry by itself, you’re a lot of times in spaces with very privileged white people who have never really interacted with people of color. And because everyone’s focused on poetry, there’s somewhat of an erasure there. But it also can be odd, or not fun [laughs]. So like, that’s kind of where that comes from.
I mean, with Gorman and Collins, that’s like… I actually think most poets are extremely benign, and I kind of think some of the stuff around privilege in the poetry world is a little self-involved. It’s like, ten thousand people, and almost all of us have MFAs. I don’t, and don’t actually come from a privileged background, but it just doesn’t bother me. If you live in New York City and are doing art, that’s just something you’re going to come across. So I think that those are sometimes not my biggest concerns, in the scheme of things. Like, someone being a poetry professor, and maybe getting lucky enough to get tenure, I don’t think that they’re actively doing harm. That’s just to say, I didn’t want to attack anybody for whom I somewhat like their work. I mean, I tried to not make it about Amanda Gorman, who I think… she’s fine. She’s making her money, she’ll definitely be finer than all of us, and that’s part of it. But more of just the reaction to her poetry, and the idea that it was kind of shockingly, among a lot of poets who I do respect, seen as this, like, Come up to read poetry for an inauguration for the state. And to me personally, that’s anathema to my idea of poetry in terms of, like, what are the social obligations of a poet?
And then I just think Billy Collins is hilarious, and heard many stories about him making passes at people’s moms [laughs].
[A strange bug lands on MV’s shoulder.]
MV: Look at that.
MZSYI: Oh, whoa.
MV: I can’t believe how many insects there are that I’ve never seen before.
MZSYI: I know. I’m like, What even is that? Going into my bad science brain, I’m like, Okay, six legs... [Laughs] Where’s the abdomen?
MV: It just feels like fantasy, like I’m imagining this.
MZSYI: I love the color. That splash of orange is really beautiful.
MV: Totally. Speaking of science and bugs, are there other areas of knowledge besides writing and philosophy that really get into you?
MZSYI: History. I’m a really big history nerd. I really like how history complicates things. Often a historical event is actually an instance of human incompetence or error, that then creates these larger seismic issues. And I think there’s something deeply poetic about that. There’s a weird comfort that these events aren’t so pre-designed, they’re the result of one move that could have been another move, and then history would have been vastly different.
MV: In reading this book, there are multiple instances where you bring up the time scale of a century, or multiple centuries. That frame for me is kind of characteristic of your work, the scale of the repercussions of events, a connective tissue that you establish between events now and those a hundred years in the past.
MZSYI: I definitely think every moment’s a kind of culmination of all the previous moments. Especially being Black, and living in America, I very much understand that much of my day-to-day actions are a reflection of a vast and generally terrible history. I think that’s what, in the first place, attracted me to history, because also like, being an immigrant here, there’s just something deeply wrong. Like, what the fuck happened?
With this particular time—with the election of Trump, especially—it’s brought up this fundamental question for leftists, which is really good, of like, Was this inevitable, or was this a detour or a shift? I mean, I personally think it was inevitable, and we’ve been lucky to avoid it for as long as we did [laughs]. But, yeah, I think with that comes an awareness of… I don’t want to say “alternative history,” because that sounds fake, but of a history not normally taught. Like, Trump seems like an aberration, but now that people are more aware of slavery and the effects of Jim Crow, and how actually omnipresent white supremacy was in American society until just a few decades ago, I think that that does make people better aware that, yes, this does seem like an inevitability.
