In her debut poetry collection, Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024)Saba Keramati charts a search for self and home through the lens of a speaker living in the aftermath of her parents’ migrations to the United States. Parsing an image of her speaker’s selfhood as it is refracted through and around the “insurmountable sense of otherness” inflicted upon her by the American empire, Keramati considers multiraciality, belonging, and the weight of inherited displacement. The collection was selected by Patricia Smith for publication in the Miller Williams Poetry Series.
Probing myths, mirrors, dreamscapes, and tricks of the light, Self-Mythology considers how mythologizing one’s life might simultaneously be a way to lose and locate oneself. Through Keramati’s poems, the idea of self-mythology appears to shapeshift; in one poem, it is a response to loss. In another, it is a prayer for the speaker’s future self. In another, mythology is likened to sin. Keramati writes relatably in “Chimera”: the line “I am / obsessed with / myself. How / monstrous . How / alive.”
Saba Keramati, a Chinese Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, is the poetry editor at Sundog Lit. Through a series of emails, we spoke about ghosts, trick mirrors, shapeshifting matrilineal relationships, hunger, and the desire to be haunted.
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The Rumpus: I’d love to hear how the idea of self-mythology emerged as the center of this work. Do you think it’s possible to separate our selvesfrom our self-mythologies?
Saba Keramati: I knew, for a long time, that the narrative I’d spent so much of my life crafting day-to-day—the work I had done to understand myself, my cultures, and the act of that learning—was going to be the content for this book. The soul of this collection was all coming together before its title.
A myth is a story. A self is also a construction, often made by the telling of our own stories. This book is really about a speaker coming to understand herself. Once I settled on the title “Self-Mythology” for the poem within the book, I realized, for this book with only one speaker, every poem within this collection could be considered [to be] a mythologizing of the self. I guess this is my way of saying that I personally don’t think I’m capable of separating my self from my self-mythologies. As a reader, I’m a fan of books that lean into such thinking. I love reading memoirs. While Self-Mythology is not a memoir, nor does it rely on fact in the same way, its narrative and arc are [both] learned from such writing.
I feared, for a long time, that this book would have no readers—that it was too close to my own life experience, too solitary and self-absorbed, for its narrative to interest anyone else. But I’ve learned over time and from other artists how to commit to the conceit of self-mythology. To create art is to share one’s own mythologies with the larger world.
Rumpus: As the speaker contends with the loneliness and power of her own self-mythologizing, she is also inevitably mythologized—often violently—by others. In “The Act,” for example, she is fetishized as a “half-breed, a combo / you’ve never seen before.” Elsewhere, she suffers from pain manufactured and romanticized by Western beauty standards; “When my stomach growls, / I imagine it is eating itself, it is eating me / it will make me thin like my mother,” you write in “Self Portrait Alone in the Kitchen.” What was it like to contend with these more violent mythologies?
Keramati: “The body,” as a subject, is an important thread because so much of the book is internal and cerebral. The speaker often finds her way to poetry through moments of noticing or remembering herself. The body both tethers that and challenges what “self” is: a vessel for the self, or part of it? When there is violence inflicted upon the body, it harms the self. When there is violence on the self, it manifests within the body. Myths are often used to explain phenomena that we can’t quite understand. So, the conjunction of myth and violence opens the door to more questions. Why has this happened to me? And how has it changed me?
In my current life, I’m trying to focus on somatic healing. I’m trying to feel more and think less. Looking back on Self-Mythology now that it’s published, I find myself noticing more moments like the one you picked out, where a bodily feeling leads into something more cerebral. I’m eager to see how my written relationship to the body changes as my personal one does.
Rumpus: Several of your speaker’s attempts to connect with herself and her lineage are mediated through the internet. In one poem, she burns rue seeds incorrectly and notes, “This is not what the Internet said / would happen.” In “Haibun for Learning 中文 on Duolingo,” she struggles to learn Chinese while the app nags at her pace. Often, the internet appears to promise the speaker access to her ancestral languages and traditions but usually just leads her closer to dissociation instead. How does the internet operate in your speaker’s self-mythology?
Keramati: I actually struggled with including Duolingo [the app] in this book. I thought its brand name would place it in too exact a moment—I also don’t love the idea of doing free advertising—but the haiku at the end of that poem doesn’t work without the context and knowledge of the app.
Overall, the speaker’s distance from her familial cultures is juxtaposed by her access to the internet. In “World War 3 is Trending on Twitter,” Twitter becomes a metonym for the internet, which in turn is a reflection of society’s sentiments. Again and again, the internet highlights what is and isn’t possible for the speaker. “You can learn things about your culture,” it tells her, “But that doesn’t mean it’s really part of you.” It’s sort of a tease, a reminder of the contexts she’s living in.
As a writer who is also admittedly interested in things like beauty, confession, and love, I had to get over the idea that some subjects are not worthy of belonging in poetry. I say that not as a critique of others who write deeply, consciously, or critically about such subjects but as a critique of the limitations I imposed on myself as a writer. As I came to understand my book as living in the confessional mode, I realized it would be dishonest not to include the internet as part of my speaker’s journey, which involves confronting what is decidedly unromantic about her existence.
Rumpus: Along the lines of language-learning, language—or the absence of it—recurs as a theme in the book. “I have to write this poem in English,” your speaker mourns in the frontispiece. You examine your speaker’s American inheritance as another kind of violence, or “a shield I never wanted to carry.” Although Chinese and Farsi both appear occasionally in poems, English is the primary material you mold them from. How did you relate to language while writing this?
Keramati: Unfortunately, there’s no getting away from English for me. It’s my most natural language and the language I fell in love with as a writer. But of course, the history of the colonizer includes the violent forcing of language onto the colonized, as well as the erasure of many Native languages. The English language in America has this history, and one of my duties as a poet writing in English is to contend with that.
Rumpus: The poem, “Ghosts,” takes place in a graveyard, where your speaker is singing to her great-grandmother’s apparition, “begging to be haunted.” In this piece, the speaker’s overwhelming isolation seems to render haunting a desirable intimacy. A ghost is not something to run away from but toward. What do ghosts and the idea of haunting mean to you?
Keramati: I think ghosts are, at their core, memories. They can be perceived but are not fully present. When I think about ancestral memories and what can or can’t be passed down through diaspora and immigration, it becomes natural to think of them as ghosts. A desire to reconnect with such memories becomes a desire to be haunted. The speaker in Self-Mythology is often lonely and filled with deep longing. The image of ghosts and, by extension, the themes of haunting and memory, became a way for me to highlight that loneliness. Can a memory ever be rendered completely accurately? Can we ever fully know the ghosts of our ancestors?
I love your phrasing of “a desirable intimacy.” That is, in essence, so much of what the speaker of Self-Mythology is looking for from the people around her. It is only natural that that desire would extend toward people who exist beyond the living realm. I think, too, that the inability to communicate with her living ancestors, due to the language barrier, is echoed in the speaker’s inability to communicate with the dead.
The idea of a ghost also sort of suggests that one can never really be alone. The ghosts are the cultural connections to the speaker’s heritage, a chorus of voices that ring on another plane of existence. In another poem, the speaker confronts an artifact of her countries’ and says, “All my life I have been looking for something to corroborate my existence.” To think there are so many corroborations that have existed in a life before her own is beautiful, but it is also painful because it can’t quite be accessed.
Rumpus: Your speaker seems to contend often with what can’t be accessed, particularly in her search for a homeland, or “a country that doesn’t exist,” as she calls it. In “Inside the Museum, a Remnant,” though, she finds a bowl made of Iranian materials with Chinese patterns. “For the first time, I feel less impossible,” she says. In “Self Portrait as a Bowl of Persimmons,” she is “looking for words, but why? / The persimmons are right there.” What are these moments representing?
Keramati: The question of representation is an interesting one to me. Culturally, I think we’re living in a time where the idea of seeing someone who looks like you on television, or in power, is represented as a notion of progress. I’ve seen countless narratives of children of marginalized identities having an awakening moment when they see themselves represented in wider culture for the first time. There were some moments of my life where I felt individual identities represented in popular culture, certainly Chinese and Iranian representation separately but never together, in one person, like myself. I saw many multiracial people represented as well, but many of them had one white American parent rather than two immigrant parents, and so it all felt somewhat halved, broken. There’s a moment in the book where the speaker acknowledges this brokenness and wonders if her daughter will also feel this loss of awakening.
I wanted moments of awakening in this book, for the speaker to see versions of herself in existence. I hope these moments accomplish something similar to the desire to be haunted: to feel less alone in the world.
Rumpus: In the three iterations of “The Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets,” you use cento as a form to collage other voices into a patchwork. Do these moments suggest the speaker doesn’t exist in isolation?
Keramati: Poetry, as an artform, becomes a thread in the speaker’s discovery. Her lineage of poetry is collaged throughout the collection. The centos, of course, make this the most obvious, but there are other patchwork forms: the haibun, the self-erasure, the poem “Ars Poetica Ghazal,” and a handful of Shakespearean sonnets.
Other poets referenced in the book are Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Anne Carson. In a book that did often feel solipsistic by design, influenced by the very Western/Americanized idea of selfhood that it’s contextualized in, it felt important for the act of writing poetry to engage with lineage that was of the speaker’s active choosing, rather than only the ones she was born with.
Rumpus: The collection begins and ends with images that reference hunger. In one of the opening poems, “Hollowed,” you write: “When I could eat again, / my mother said, Don’t.” Invocations of disordered eating continue throughout the collection, but in the last poem, something seems to shift. The speaker admits to her own hunger without seeming to resist it. How does the final poem speak to the first?
Keramati: These poem bookends are one of my personal favorite features of the book. If a poetry collection can be a bildungsroman, then I think mine qualifies. I always felt a narrative arc in this book, and the speaker’s relationship to food—and, by extension, her body—is certainly part of the narrative. It starts as something inflicted upon her and is eventually understood as an essential part of her life and futurity, which she can reclaim. The first and final poems feature memories of the speaker with her mother. The relationship between these two characters is part of what heals the speaker’s sense of self-fracturedness. I hope that, when read in conjunction, “Hollowed” and “Feast” become a tiny summary of that healing on their own.
Hunger has many meanings, and in a capitalist empire, has dangerous subtexts. Hunger is both political and used as a tool for conformity. Fatphobia, diet culture, and eating disorders are all politicized, and our society assigns people value based on their perceived relationship to hunger and food. Food is also stigmatized, and food scarcity is a government-manufactured problem.
For a long time, we have been witness to a genocide in Palestine. As bombs fall and drones strike, starvation settles into the Palestinian community. So, hunger, too, is a tactic of empire and genocide. There are some who use hunger in protest of this and enact hunger strikes, refusing food and nutrients because it’s necessary for survival. Hunger shows us stakes.
Hunger, as well, can move beyond food. So much of what we crave in a capitalist society will never be given to us. This, too, is critiqued in Self-Mythology as the speaker hungers for—longs for—a life she can understand as full.
Rumpus: In the poem “Chimera,” you quote a Florence and the Machine lyric that says, “Woman is a changeling, always shifting shape.” Throughout the collection, shapeshifting matrilineal relationships recur, including one poem, where the speaker observes her own mother giving birth to her. How do female relationships inform the self-myth? Is a self-myth always a creation story? What, in this context, is a mother?
Keramati: I think the question “What is a mother?” will be one I am answering forever. In Self-Mythology, specifically, a mother is a god, a creator of life, a lineage. A mother begins the mythology that will dictate how a child starts to think of themselves. “The Mother” is all at once the speaker’s mother, the mother the speaker is pressured to become, the mother she wants to become, and the speaker herself as she mothers her poems into the world.
I am fascinated by the biology of women birthing women. This is only one kind of motherhood, but, in the context of Self-Mythology, [it] becomes vital to the speaker understanding her lineage and generational trauma. The creation of the uterus and its eggs is a process that feels deeply magical to me in its science. Each birthing uterus creates ovaries that are filled with all the eggs one will have in its lifetime. Essentially, it is the creation of three generations at once. Which means my mother lived in her grandmother’s body and I in mine. Which means that some of what has been experienced generations and generations ago has made itself into my own body. When my speaker considers bearing children, she is forced to consider all else that will be passed down generations down the line.
I think what I can say about motherhood is that it is a responsibility, however one may come into the role, despite whatever biology is or isn’t present. As Self-Mythology considers the past alongside the body, it must also contend with the future.
Rumpus: The cover image of Self-Mythology features a girl looking at her reflection in a mirror. How do mirrors operate in your poems?
Keramati: I’m now asking myself whether the mirrors in my own life can ever be freeing. For example, I don’t keep a scale in my house because I know that I can so easily give in to the temptation to track my weight and become obsessed with that number. I also tend to avoid magnifying mirrors for similar reasons. Is it the reflection itself that becomes a trap? Or is it my own inability to truly live into the concepts of body neutrality? These are questions of our daily life, not just of literary symbolism.
We live in a looks-obsessed society, and capitalist corporations keep inventing new things for us to be self-conscious about in order to sell us products. Narcissus fell obsessed with his own reflection, and I wonder whether anybody today could look into a mirror and perceive only their beauty rather than their “flaws” as dictated by social value.
Self-Mythology lives somewhat in the Lacanian mirror stage. The “I” is simultaneously the speaker as she perceives herself and the speaker as a body that feels separated and disconnected from the self. In part, the book asks how one might observe oneself while simultaneously feeling embodied. The mirror sometimes allows for this, but it also presents the danger—that one could obsess so deeply on the self as other that one’s knowing of the self moves beyond the bounds of possibility.
The mirror twins the self. It becomes difficult to distinguish which is the real self: the one being observed, or the one doing the observing? It’s a trick, one that is critiqued as vanity. I hope that the mirrors in Self-Mythology also reflect something more complicated and genuine: a woman trying her best to see who she is, both inside and outside of her own body.
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Author photograph courtesy of Saba Keramati
