Sofia Samatar found a way to get free.
While reading Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life (Soft Skull Press, 2024), I experienced a profound sense of recognition. Many of us who wish to exist in the world as writers feel coerced into the kind of visibility that threatens to make us illegible as thinkers and makers. In her latest book, Samatar declines to be “deprived of philosophy.” Collapsing contrasts between porosity and imperviousness, between intimacy and reserve, and between longing and refusal, Opacities is a portal into a more expansive way of thinking about “the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.”
In creating a commonplace book of quotes from Édouard Glissant, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other writers she references with supple ease, Samatar alchemizes the ancient art of copying, which here becomes the transcendent task of metabolizing wisdom.
Woven throughout those citations are shimmering meditations as well as piercing excerpts from her correspondence with Kate Zambreno, with whom she co-authored Tone. Repudiating the publishing industry’s “fetishistic, brutal” extractions from Black women, Samatar is “less interested in ‘what happened to you’ than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, yet untethered emotion.”
After writing the memoir The White Mosque, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, as well as the World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria and its companion The Winged Histories, Samatar has faceted a moment of abstraction for all who seek relief from hypervigilance. Opacities is a gem for your mind’s delight.
Ross Gay said it best: “Opacities is simply one of the most beautiful books about writing, about being a writer, that I’ve ever read.” When Samatar and I spoke over Zoom, we turned off our cameras and conversed through dark screens, which felt right for Opacities.
***
The Rumpus: Let’s start with craft. Can you talk to me about compression? How do you achieve the decanted quality of these prose pieces?
Sofia Samatar: In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes about the practice of quoting. He was a voracious, industrious quoter of others. He imagines a book that would be all relationship, all quotes. For me, there was something powerful about that way of thinking: seeing citation as a relationship.
This gave me a way to approach a type of book I’ve always dreamed of, a commonplace book packed with favorite quotes. The commonplace book can feel very circular and personal in a closed way, but I wanted a book that was extremely personal and extremely open at the same time. That was where I found the idea of quotes as a manifestation of relationship so useful. It led me to the compression in Opacities, switching almost line by line to a different voice, whether it’s the voice of the writer, the voice of the writer’s correspondent, or a quotation from a book.
Rumpus: It feels like a spiderweb strung with dew. But Opacities also actively and deliberately and subversively resists distillation as a text. How was its writing responsive to what you call “the diversity sideshow”?
Samatar: When you compress voices together, you get a book about writing that actually feels like writing. It’s opposed to the idea of a singular identity on which our ideas of diversity are totally dependent.
When I’m writing, I’m a vector for all these different voices and influences. They’re from everywhere. They don’t restrict themselves to, say, people who have the same ethnic background as I do. That’s why when I use this flippant, tongue-in-cheek phrase, “the diversity sideshow,” I am also super seriously calling it that. It’s false to the nature of the thing we’re talking about, which is writing.
Rumpus: Do you consider a certain amount of opacity around your identity and intention to be necessary to preserve your intimacy with your work?
Samatar: On the one hand, I want to say, “Yes, absolutely.” But how do you get opacity? If it’s relational, how would I create opacity around myself? I’m not on social media at the moment, but I have been in the past, and I have a website. I’ve been publishing for ten years. What control over my level of opacity do I have? I don’t know. Can you say what you think about this?
Rumpus: Within the text, there are no proclamations of who you exactly are, but your consciousness is everywhere. It’s the cloudy sky, the lofty sky. It is you, absolutely, and yet also the all-encompassing sky that sheds a pearly light on everything. It’s opaque in that you can’t say from this text that you’re a Somali American who’s also of Swiss German and Mennonite descent. But the workings of your mind feel very translucent.
Samatar: That’s beautiful. Thank you. Certainly, in this book, the voice of the speaker needs to have that type of opacity. And I’m also trying to grant that same measure of opacity to all the writers entering this book. When I talk about these writers, describing them traveling or eating or reading, all of that is taken from their written work, from their letters, from their fiction. So sometimes there is a real blurring between author and character, which, for me, echoes the feeling of tapping into the opaque space of writing.
I love that you compare my consciousness to the cloudy, lofty sky. That’s from Opacities, and it’s Roland Barthes quoting Rousseau!
Rumpus: What is the project of nothing, and why do you believe it’s necessary for those who say “us”?
Samatar: The project of nothing was a wild comment I threw out in a letter to Kate Zambreno, who’s my good friend and interlocutor. The letters quoted in the book are our letters to each other. I imagined it as a writing project that would be able to sidestep demands for a transparent, legible self. A project without a thesis, a goal, or even a clearly articulated author. And then, in the course of writing Opacities, the project of nothing came around in a circle to the idea of a project of everything, a work so open it would absorb everything that strayed across its path.
Why is it especially important for those who say “us”? Well, because those who are under the label of a group identity are the ones who say “us,” the ones for whom it is fraught to just say “I,” to just say “me,” whose selfhood is always in question, who are seen as representatives of a group rather than these searching random particles of consciousness.
For such a person, there are always areas of culture that appear to be proscribed. You’re supposed to talk about this, you’re not supposed to talk about that. You’re supposed to pay heed to the “us” and stay within the group. And that’s where the project of nothing or everything becomes essential.
I want to bring in Kevin Quashie’s book Black Aliveness here because he writes so beautifully about the first person as he studies writers like Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde. He says, “I am interested . . . in seizing these lyric renderings as instances of the personal-impersonal inherent in first-personness.” That is so deep! In many ways, that’s what I’m searching for in Opacities: a recognition of what is both personal and impersonal about saying “I.”
So often, we see a dichotomy between the community and the individual, as if the idea of community immediately poses the individual as its opposite. That structure can really hamper thought because it makes it look like any use of the first person is now like, oh, you’ve distanced yourself from community.
Opacities, with its intense relationality of being, its voice composed of other voices, is absolutely not doing that. But it is trying to get at what Quashie is gesturing toward with this personal-impersonal that is inherent in the first person.
Rumpus: With this book, you have escaped the tyranny of identity, and with it certainly comes this frustration with the hypervigilance required to have a representational body. I wondered what kind of strategies you’ve needed to resist the commodification of being an exemplar.
Samatar: It’s almost more of an instinct than a strategy. I’m drawn to thinking big. As a speculative fiction writer, I’m interested in worldbuilding, how worlds are made, and thinking at that very large level can be a way to shift the focus of a conversation away from a reductive focus on a singular body. Because when you think about all the connections between that body and all these other bodies and voices and thoughts and languages and images, when you start thinking about those connections, then you start expanding. It’s a way of turning thinking outward.
Rumpus: You quote Glissant and Lispector and Rilke, among many others; your range of reference is so capacious, so beautiful. Do you consider their work to be the ancestors or kin of Opacities?
Samatar: I do. Everyone I quote in the book is somebody I was reading during this period of time, maybe three years, when I drew the material of Opacities from letters, my own journals, and my reading. It’s everything that leapt out at me. I do see those writers as precursors, as guides, as constellations by which I’m navigating my way.
Rumpus: How do you know when you’ve encountered a companion text?
Samatar: I love what A.E. Housman said about how, if he’s shaving, he has to be careful about letting lines of poetry go through his head because it makes his hair stand on end and complicates the process. That’s how I know when I’ve found what I’m looking for. It’s a physical response to the line.
Rumpus: I also make commonplace books. I do it obsessively. That’s why I loved your meditations on copyists. It feels like I’m taking it in through the marrow, like I’m moving it through my own mind. I’ve told myself all kinds of things about why I have to do it.
Samatar: I always feel like it’s the height of bliss, taking notes. And then you’re sitting with all these notebooks, and you’re like, “Oh, I should probably do something with these.”
Rumpus: There are emails, index cards, notebooks, and a cardboard box. How did you work with those materials to form this multipart text, which became Opacities?
Samatar: When I was physically putting it together, I had a big notebook, which I used like a filing cabinet. I photocopied my journals in order to get all the quotes; I printed letters between Kate and myself; and then I cut everything up and collaged the pieces together.
It was actually really fun. I highly recommend it. It’s a great feeling to take these notes gathered over the years and put them together in a way that feels lively, feels like, “Oh yeah, I could go back to this.” Now I’m not going to lose it. I’m not going to forget what this meant to me.
Rumpus: At some point, you seem to imply that Opacities took the place of another book that you intended to write. Did you find peace with that?
Samatar: You have to, because every book takes the place of the book you really wanted to write. Every book is a consolation prize. “Well, I had this dream, and then I got this.”
Rumpus: Do you think that art exists to subvert its creator?
Samatar: I cannot give a reason why art exists. I like that idea, though. But it feels a little too instrumental to me. I feel like art exists to be something rather than do something.
Rumpus: The novelist Kathleen Alcalá admires your essay “Skin Feeling,” which deals with the unbearable visibility of the performer. She wanted to know if inaudibility, or perhaps illegibility to borrow a term from Christina Sharpe, accompanies mandatory visibility.
Samatar: This question of visibility and inaudibility or illegibility . . . These things are intimately related. In the “Skin Feeling” essay, I quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the narrator says he appears to others as just background, or themselves, or figments of their imagination—everything except himself. This shows how the visibility of race is the invisibility of the person. Those things are the same thing. The visibility is the illegibility.
This idea plays in an interesting way with Glissant’s concept of opacity, which is also about being incompletely seen, but as part of a genuine process of relation. To me, the difference between invisibility and opacity is the difference between being misread and being granted a quality of privacy that is a fundamental part of being a human among other humans.
Rumpus: As an extension of that, does the critical reception of your work foreclose the freedom that you found in its making? Like the way that it kind of closes down around you and tries to contain what you had worked so hard to make expansive?
Samatar: Yes and no. There are many different things that happen around a published work. Some are reductive. But as a critic myself, I’m all for criticism. I have been delighted by things I’ve read that uncover elements of my work I’d never noticed. That’s totally generative and exciting. I don’t think the apparatus surrounding a published work is monolithic.
There’s also a sense in which once a work is published, it’s already dead for the writer. Hopefully, it comes alive for readers. That’s where it has to live now. But for the writer, once it’s no longer being written, it’s over.
Rumpus: I feel that hard, especially because of the gap between when it obsessed you, when you could think of nothing else, when it overtook your thoughts upon waking, and then when you have to talk about it with everybody else, two to five years later.
Samatar: The difficult, saddening experience that Opacities explores is when the critical activities, the interviews and all those things, not only make you talk about some dead thing but also limit the discussion to a very narrow ground. When it’s strictly identity-based, even questions like “How did you do it? How did you physically put it together?”—those questions don’t get asked. Instead, you get questions like, “How did you grow up and where?” Or “What is your program for solving this massive social problem?” That, to me, is the extra sadness.
The whole marketing machine is often very startling, especially for debut writers who’ve been all alone doing their work. You’ve had dreams of writing community, right? Like, when I publish this, I’ll meet all these people, and I’m going to be able to talk to other writers. And those things do happen, but very often, there is also a first heavy shock of, “Oh wait, this doesn’t feel good.” This feels bad. This feels like what it is, which is that I’m being commodified.
Rumpus: Yes. And you also face the expectation that you’ll perform gratitude for being included based on this limited notion of who you are.
Samatar: Barthes has this great line about how a journalist interviewing a writer is basically a cop, but a cop who wants the best for you because he’s opening up celebrity for you.
Rumpus: How did you peel off the web of gratitude? That performative gratitude or feeling that you should be grateful for experiences that leave you feeling less than the capacious being you are.
Samatar: Well, the main thing was to identify what was happening, to identify the role of gratitude, and then to tell myself, “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t need this. This is actually hampering me, and it’s putting me in this space of being very docile and playing along.” Then you recognize it’s not helping you. So okay, let’s not do that. We can turn things down if we don’t want to do them. We can be selective. There’s that feeling often, especially when you’re starting out, that if anyone looks at you, if someone sends you an email, you have to jump up and do all the things. No, you don’t have to. You can think about it in a different way. Like, who is this person? What’s happening? Is this somebody I would like to be in conversation with? And then how can we make that conversation be what we want—two people speaking together without needing to fit a predetermined shape or be functional in a certain way? There are lots of ways to play once you get rid of that frantic, grateful feeling. Being a woman doesn’t help here, right? You’re very socialized to be like, “Somebody paid attention to me, and I have to be extra super nice in return.” Let’s just be people who are interested. Let’s get into it.
Rumpus: You wrote about searching for a writing method that was “less like writing and more like living.” Opacities reflects that beautifully. How has the writing of Opacities changed the way that you’re composing your next work?
Samatar: I think of Opacities together with the other book I published this year, a science fiction novella called The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain. I’m always writing fiction and nonfiction at the same time, and this year is particularly intense.
Publishing these two works in the same year makes me suspect that I’m reaching a crisis point with this ridiculousness I’ve been doing, writing in these different genres, and that I’m on the cusp of finding my true genre. Wish me luck. If I’m right, I’ll be able to concentrate and write in my genre, which has yet to be named, but will have to involve the processes I used in Opacities, which are so dear and so central to me—the main one being the citational process of quotation and allusion and reference. The kind of writing that is not just a book but a library.
***
Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
