Summer Farah: TERROR COUNTER is dedicated to Palestinians and those who love us. In your show, My Father, My Martyr, and Me, the pursuit of love is woven throughout the narrative; these strings of love tie together, ultimately, into self-love through love from others. I wanted to know what makes you feel loved as a Palestinian.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: That dedication emerges from a decision I made in response to this question we get as artists: who is your work for? What I arrived at was: my work is for Palestinians, those who love us, and the people that we love. It’s interesting that you bring up the show, too, something that I haven’t performed for a few years, and I don’t know if I will again. It is, as you said, in pursuit of a particular kind of love from strangers, from audience members who I don’t know and whose political commitments and ethical commitments I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m interested in that anymore. To come back to the end of your question, which is what makes me feel loved as a Palestinian—the real answer is risk and commitment. That doesn’t always end up being public. I don’t really feel loved when someone issues a statement. Do you know what I mean?
SF: Yeah.
FNT: It comes through as a kind of trust—I don’t have to ask for love almost, right? What does it mean for the contours of someone’s love for Palestinians, or any marginalized community, to be wholly inclusive of the obligations that come with that love. I think love comes with obligations. Particularly for Palestinians, it comes with obligations that make the person who is committing to love us dangerous. In specific ways, I feel loved when someone cooks for me. Or, when I can not talk about things with someone—when there’s not a pressure to be reactive to the kind of dailiness of brutality that does require a constant analysis and response. Having spaces where I can just trust that someone already knows those things and shares the commitments that I have. And then we can just be silent together.
SF: Can you tell me about the opening epigraph, from USA v. Abaji? “In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to carry out its objects, the following overt acts, among others, were committed.” I’m compelled by the way it frames the book—with the legalese of “conspiracy” and “overt acts.”
FNT: In [My Father, My Martyr, and Me], I [worked] with the text of a particular legal [document]—the text of my father’s indictment. I was really interested in the ways that language functions in that context. It feels like a useful intervention to remind us of the material impacts that language has when particular people wield it. I think that’s a really crucial component of how I try to work with texts—when I intervene in the text of a legal case, it doesn’t mean anything. Or what I should say is, it doesn’t have material impact. Because I, as a figure, do not have the power to accomplish those impacts. So then, working with these kinds of texts is an opportunity to simultaneously point at my powerlessness, and almost enjoy playing around in that space, to kind of ride the language in ways that are a little bit freer because I’m not pretending I’m doing things that I’m not doing. That epigraph in particular—I was thinking about fugitivity, poking in and outside of legal structures, and wanting to tie that idea of language being infused with particular forms of power. I was thinking about conspiracy and the larger constructions of criminality.
SF: I’m thinking about poets like Solmaz Sharif, Andrea Abi-Karam, Mohammed El-Kurd—the way that they play with the futility of poetry, considering its power or lack thereof in their work. You’re someone who does this as well—where do you see power in poetry? I’m trying to use “power” as neutrally as possible.
FNT: There’s two answers to that, I think. I see power in poetry in the economic circulation of poetry as a system. I see it in the way that publishing houses are funded and awards are funded and grants are given out. I see it in the social and political capital that particular people can accumulate through poetry, like becoming the Poet Laureate of the United States. Or the Poet Laureate of any place. A neighborhood, you know? Poetry is a very small economic ecosystem. There’s not a lot of money there, but there is money there. What that means is there are forms of power being exchanged and accumulated via poetry. That then impacts and is impacted by the language that poetry uses, basically. That’s one way that I see power skating along the surface of poetry, in ways that are often considered gauche to talk about in the larger arts ecosystem.
The other thing I see is that poetry is not really taken seriously. To me, that’s an opportunity to smuggle [in] more dangerous ideas. [Poetry] has this interesting space between fiction and nonfiction, right? Between something that someone is saying, but something that you can also reasonably say, well, it’s just a poem, right? It’s a performance. To me, that is a kind of slippery space through which one can thread ideas or rhetoric that might be a lot harder or riskier to place in other forms of writing. People don’t take poetry seriously—when I say people, I mean those who hold levers of power. They very rarely take it seriously, and particularly in this contemporary moment.
There have been times in the history of this country that poets have had very long FBI files. That feels a little less likely to happen because of the ways that poetry has been, as an industry, “defanged,” right? To borrow a word from Mohammed El-Kurd’s framing in Perfect Victims. There are ways that the field of poetry has taken on a more political lens, which almost paradoxically means that it’s been digested into an acceptable form of saying those things. And what that basically means is that the FBI agents aren’t quite looking as hard.
SF: I want to return to that later. Now, I want to move to the first section of the book, titled “Imperial Poetics LTD.” That opening poem, “Of,”—that’s born of your collaboration with George Abraham, right? I'm interested in your relationship to classics, and how you find those conversations or influences, aversions and attachments, oscillating in your work.
FNT: “Of” is riffing a little bit on the opening of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is a text that George Abraham and I have been working on together for several years now. I think that is a really useful entry point into this question, because there’s several answers, one of which is that I grew up with classic literature, and I love it very much, for the most part.
So my relationship, then, to classic texts is exemplified in George’s and my relationship to Paradise Lost—which is that we both love it. Our approach is to break it into pieces and borrow what feels useful. Part of that is also investing back into these canonical texts, the political context that we [sometimes] assume isn’t there. It’s a little bit of what Edward Said would call “contrapuntal reading”: to read a text alongside the obscured political and economic context inside of the text, and to let that be part of the meaning making we invest around the text. Said famously talks about reading Jane Austen novels, and understanding that a lot of these characters’ wealth is built on colonial plantations in the West Indies in the British context. So what does that do to our enjoyment of a Jane Austen novel? Not necessarily a lot, right? You can still invest in her own political critiques and economic critiques, and the pure romance of those books, but bearing in mind that historical context also makes it a richer object to understand and work with.
With Paradise Lost, for example, it does have a loose revolutionary context in that John Milton was an anti-monarchist and was involved in the struggle to depose and eventually behead the monarch of England.
SF: Nice.
FNT: That doesn’t necessarily make it a liberatory text for us now. Partially, because it’s a little bit of what he was concerned with when writing it, but not really, right? But to me, and to George, [it opens up] our ability to break it apart, or shatter it, and borrow some of the pieces to do things that we are interested in doing. Things that the author would not have agreed with, probably. It’s almost a way of re-infusing the text of these classical works with the political and social context that was part of their making. And then giving them a completely new context. That's interesting to me.
SF: I see this resurrection of political complexity in your two poems titled “Palestinian Love Poem.” I’m curious about that relationship of expectation when crafting a work, especially with perhaps “defanged” genres, like the love poem.
FNT: A lot of the way that I write poetry starts with titles.
SF: Awesome.
FNT: I’ll often come up with something that would be interesting as a container. A lot of that has to do with setting up expectations. The Palestinian love poems is this idea I’ve been toying around with for many years. I like that it makes a big claim, right? The idea that this is “The” Palestinian love poem. That sets up a series of expectations that really fit very specifically within the first section of this book—which is a section that is invested in a kind of cynicism, the sense of no escape, particularly, within the realm of poetry or the realm of expression and writing in English.
I’m interested in antagonizing readers who would pick up a book by a Palestinian and find something called Palestinian love poem, and be like, aha, they are going to teach me about this thing! They’re going to express to me the archetypal Palestinian love poem. [There is an] expectation that we’re tragic, but beautifully human figures who exist in the world to be a repository for feelings of empathy and sadness. And so what I was really interested in is setting up those expectations and doing something that was very different.
I really wanted those poems to not be beautiful—love is deeply entwined with feelings of despair and ugly, ugly feelings. A lot of this first section is about [making] space for my hatred, my despair, and my sense that shit is fucked and horrible beyond repair. I don’t want to make any of it beautiful.
What I love about starting with titles is that it gives me the chance to do a kind of rug pull from under a reader. In particular, over the last year and a half, [I’ve wanted] to develop and be intentional about antagonistic relationships to readers. I want to be able to make a space [where] the people [for] whom the book is dedicated might feel like it resonates in terms of, yes, I have felt this too, right? I also feel ugly feelings. For someone else who I don’t know, I don’t know their commitments, that is going to make them feel destabilized. That might then be a space of possibility and reflection. But also, if not, I don’t really give a shit. If you just feel bad after you read one of these, cool. That’s fine by me. Now you feel how I feel.
SF: I actually really like feeling bad after engaging with a work of art.
FNT: It’s one of the most important things that art can do. Something I feel invested in with the way these poems move is—part of understanding and loving Palestinians is having to reckon with the depth that’s really, really bleak and sad and fucked up. There’s an inability on the part of a lot of audience members to accept that part of understanding and loving Palestinians as full complex human beings is that we might just be broken by this. There are many other ways that we continue to survive and to resist and to struggle. But, it’s absurd to expect for a Palestinian artist or subject to constantly be giving you tenderness and joy and beauty.
SF: That makes sense. I do want to say that, despite all of this, I do find a lot of tenderness in your work.
FNT: Well, you can’t have one without the other. It goes back to this question of, what does it mean to be loved as a Palestinian? And it’s to understand that those things are always happening at the same time, right? That the tenderness is possible because of trying to understand the brutality.
SF: One of the points of destabilization and opposition I admire is the run of “Olive Tree Pastoral,” “Olive Tree Necropastoral,” and “The Dream of Anti-Ekphrasis”; I was thinking about those three poems alongside the work that’s done in “An American writes a poem,” which stays in a higher, hypothetical space until the lines “that will later cause the child, / my cousin Muhyee, to die. // This is the place analysis ends.” I was wondering how you navigate the potential for exploitation in the building of an image.
FNT: With the two olive tree poems in particular, there’s a set of images in Palestinian writing or expression or art-making that have become legible to Western viewership or a larger contemporary discourse. These things are olive trees, checkpoints, tatreez, the kuffiyeh, etc. That is another form of expectation. One thing that I was trying to navigate—maybe anticipating an exploitation of the image and trying to dance away from it—with “An American writes a poem,” is, I’m also an American writing a poem. I am not separate from the affective and material economy that I’m describing in that poem. An important part of this, not in the way of being we’re all complicit, you know, because there’s some value in that framing, but there’s also not very much value in that framing—
SF: Sometimes that escapes responsibility.
FNT: It flattens our ability to target people who are directly responsible for the things that we’re all assuming we’re complicit in. Because the particular focus I have in that sequence of poems you described is commodifying and aestheticizing particular elements of Palestinian experience, it felt useful to [communicate] the flattening needs of the market that are going to ask you to write a poem like the beginning of “Olive Tree Pastoral,” which was a fun exercise in imagining what I would write if I was a really annoying diaspora writer. But that also paradoxically might be something that is like, again, part of those legible set of symbols—what legible really means is sellable.
SF: Awesome. I wrote down the prompt, “What would you write if you were annoying?”
FNT: Sometimes it’s a good exercise. It does clarify things.
SF: Returning to poetry as a potential space to be dangerous, in “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” you write: “Craft success is contingent upon ethical and political failure. This is what Craft does to our writing: pressures and pressures until what matters, what we need to say, gets pushed to the margins or disappeared entirely.” I am thinking about it as I read the entire collection, but in particular alongside the poem “Craft Talk”; I am reminded of Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight in that last stanza: “The state is / crueler / than your poem / ever could be, / I make the poem / make my father say.” As in her collection, we have the voice of a loved one who communicates an aphoristic, pithy political lesson, as placed into their mouth by the poem. I am also cognizant of the way the line is shorter as words are “spoken” by the father—a visual pressure on the poem itself, as it ekes out something to say.
I’m thinking about the abundance of failures we must contend with—a failure to stop the genocide in Gaza, a failure to protect each other, the Earth, and on and on. I’m curious about how failures, both on the interpersonal, sociopolitical level, as well as within the space of art, manifest in your practice.
FNT: Yeah, thank you. That’s a really, really thoughtful question. Something I think about in particular in “Craft Talk,” is that every failure is also a success. What I mean by that is the ethical and political failures that I’m demonstrating in that poem are also me, or the speaker, being a successful poet. Our collective failure to stop the genocide of Palestinians is also our success at being neoliberal subjects. The understanding of the world’s foundation being contingent on the brutality against Palestinians means that every time we don't stop it, we are being good citizens. I feel the same way about the idea of ethical failures in writing. More often than not, [that] means we are successful writers. We are good “literary citizens,” for example, a phrase that I find truly repulsive, but actually useful. It comes with all the violence that a citizenship contains. To think about failure more generally, it’s a space that I’m very interested in. Part of that has to do with ugly feelings. Failure is an ugly thing. It’s something that we don’t like to spend time on. Partially, it’s because failure sort of necessitates trying again, so that you can succeed. There’s an obligation to rectify that failure, but it doesn’t erase the fact that that failure is there, and that the space of failure can sometimes tell us things, right?
To me, failure is similar to despair, which gets a bad rap. In our sloganeering, we say, there’s no time for despair. In the same way, we might say it’s not an option to fail. The reality is, there is failure. It would be absurd, to me, to not feel despair. It might offer things that we’re not taking the time to experience or to be curious about. Despair offers us a slap in the face to say, what you are trying doesn’t work. You can keep doing it. But you’re going to stay in this place of futility. And it has to do with the frameworks by which we are trying to measure success. That can be something like, I wrote a book of poems and it didn’t save anybody, therefore, I have failed. But it’s because I think poems can save anybody. The same thing is applicable to our disruption strategies and the ideas of protests and mass rallies. They’re not changing anybody’s mind. They’re not exerting pressure. And so despair is what happens when the failure of those strategies leads you to just try those strategies again, but more.
SF: Also in “Craft talk,” you write, “The poem is a space to rehearse for the future.” The line that it’s connected to is not a super hot future: “my own body stripped and hung by my fingers.” I find this grounding so early in the book, especially because of the romanticized way we might discuss the future. Later, we have the long-poem, “PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM”—as someone who’s also a diasporic Palestinian, who’s in direct community with you, I feel very energized by the sequence. What I’m interested in is the poem as a “rehearsal space for the future,” and if you find conversation between these two potential futures.
FNT: The idea of rehearsal is important to me [for] art-making. It comes from—I truly bring this up in every interview or piece of writing I’ve ever done—the Brazilian theater maker Augusto Boal, who created something called Theater of the Oppressed. [His idea] is that a performance is not going to solve a problem, unless you make it a way to solve a problem. Part of that means abandoning the ideas we have that witnessing art is a direct road to change. Instead, understanding that art is a set of tools that we can use. As theater makers, we know how to rehearse and improvise in a set of given circumstances. So we can bring those tools to people facing a specific problem, to peasants who are attempting to overthrow their exploitative landlord, and say, what are you going to do tomorrow? Let’s rehearse it right now. We’re going to find a range of options, and a lot of them are going to be failures—that is vital.
People will often say, liberation is a certainty, because it feels nice to say that. In some ways, it’s valuable to hold that, but it can very easily lead to an abdication of our responsibility to work for that future. The tension of these two notions of futurity is really important because these are not guarantees. I am averse to the idea that thinking about the future necessarily means thinking about utopia as much as I’m averse to the idea that it necessarily means thinking about dystopia. It just means we’re thinking about something that hasn’t happened yet.
SF: With the “Gazan Tunnels” series, the poem is a visual representation of how resistance cuts—as you noted at the top of our conversation—through violences codified through documents with material consequences. How was that put together?
FNT: It’s not pretty in terms of the process. The soil, for lack of a better term, that’s being tunneled through is made with a tool on a website called Language is a Virus. You input a text and then when you drag your mouse across the screen, it just paints with that text.
SF: Awesome.
FNT: The reason I like the form is [because it is an image that] is threatening, in a way. The tunnels that people in Gaza have created as a network of life and resistance are one of the most miraculous things that I’ve ever encountered in my life. And so I really wanted to honor [this] form of resistance and survival. I hope it does that. I hope it does that.
SF: What I find notable about them—there’s a sort of shying from direct forms of resistance in the legible spaces we’ve spoken about. And if there is not a shying, I think instead, the sensationalizing is responded to with humor—which I don’t think is necessarily wrong, but I do wonder why do we move so quickly from honoring this form of resistance to jokes. This distance skips over exactly what you’re saying—how miraculous it is.
FNT: Again, part of loving and trying to be committed to Palestinian survival and freedom is to acknowledge the ways that it has been accomplished. It felt important and kind of moving to me, to consider that an inspiration for art-making.
SF: The last section, RITHA’ AL-NAFS, has an epigraph from Sirhan Sirhan’s diary. Where does your interest in him come from?
FNT: When I was younger, I was obsessed with Robert Kennedy. I read books about him. I performed in a one-person show about him in high school. Part of my political education and consciousness was arriving at the shadow of Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968, trying to understand why I had never placed any attention on him. I would argue [that he is the] very beginning of the designation and understanding, in an American context, of what the word terrorist means. He’s notable in that it was the first time that specifically Palestinian militancy made its way into the fabric of American political life, in a distinct and recognizable [way]. That has very much been erased in the historical archive of who he was and what his life meant. It would probably surprise a lot of people nowadays to learn that the person who killed RFK was Palestinian, and to learn that the reason he assassinated RFK was because of the then-senator’s support for Israel during the 1967 Naksa. He’s interesting because of how he’s been flattened and erased by historiography. This opened up a lot of models [for] what I would need to do to narrate his life in a way that felt true, and that opened up doing that for myself, and for my father, as well. The way he has been transformed into an American historical figure [flattens and simplifies] his own political and personal context, which is that he was a survivor of the Nakba, a refugee who grew up in America, and faced all of the constrictions [of that experience]. His act of political violence became contextless in American history. It’s just a part of the Kennedy-assassination-thing.
There’s a level at which a lot of my investment in the figure of Sirhan Sirhan is intellectual, but it’s also a kind of love, too. We haven’t extended him [love] in the same way we’ve extended [it] to other figures of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It felt necessary [for me] to make him someone who might be cited and understood and advocated for. He’s still in prison after being granted parole a few years ago—that parole was denied by the governor of California. Within the figure of Sirhan Sirhan [are] larger political [concerns] that are important to me, and important to many people, like abolition, a commitment to Palestinian liberation by any means necessary and resistance by any means necessary, and an understanding of the ways that the legal and political structures of the United States make possible the legal and political structures of Israel, and the brutality upon which it is founded.
SF: Who are you writing after, alongside, or to, with this collection?
FNT: The most formative poet for me is Solmaz Sharif—reading her first book was a demonstration that poetry could do something that I had not been aware it could do. I treasure her as a model for how to be a poet, what it might mean or could mean to be a poet, what it doesn’t mean to be a poet. [Also], a generation of Palestinian liberation poets. One of the epigraphs in the book is from Samih Al-Qassim, whose work I really value. It’s politically and ideologically sharp, but also funny and antagonistic. Certainly, I think Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse, [with] the way that book is using its formal approach to do its political work. That was really interesting [and] unlocked a lot [for me]. When I read Zaina Alsous’s collection A Theory of Birds, I was like, oh, there’s a bunch of things that I have been trying to write and someone else already wrote them. Great. Her Third Worldist approach to poetry is really valuable to me.
SF: Is there anything else that you want to say about the book? You want to talk about Muppets?
FNT: Well, in Mad Men, season four, episode seven…