The summer I met Maya Salameh, the temperatures at night dipped. Most of us wore sweaters, if not to keep warm, then to stave off the bugs. This ritual of ducking into our clothing was one Salameh was immune to. While we shielded ourselves, she emerged. Salameh wore long skirts and tank tops, a mix of costume and heirloom fantastical jewelry, and her hair never frizzed in the humidity. I felt an immediate kinship to her. Sure, we were both brown women in the arts with professional science backgrounds, but it was not these facts that drew me to her. It was that she inhabited a space that seemed distant from our own, where the rules were of her becoming, transforming her into a radiant creature.
Her poetry collection, Mermaid Theory, deftly weaves together myth, science, and politics into a syntax as smooth as the lyrics to your favorite song. It’s a collection imbued with sonic fluidity that is at once profoundly intelligent and accessible. Salameh writes about shame, exile, and violence as breathtakingly as she writes about beauty, sensuality, and friendship, making for a collection that is singular in its vision of reimagining what Arab identity in diaspora means.
I was delighted to talk with Maya Salameh over instant messaging and email about myth-making within poetry, the role of archive and the erotic in poetry, and writing during a genocide. Through talking with her, I have come to understand that a fact is merely a hypothesis, that requires proof from lived experience. Take this collection as an artistic proof of the facts of violence, colonial betrayal, and cultural inheritance—rendered into a myth and a song of its own.
The Rumpus: You wield language with a sonic precision that resonates throughout Mermaid Theory. How do song, poetry, and myth relate in your work?
Maya Salameh: I came up in slam, and I am eternally grateful to that experience for developing my facility with music, sound, and the way words live off the page. It’s important to me that my poems exist audibly, especially because I see the recitation of poetry as an extension of my spiritual practice, one which also has a long tradition in the Levant (zajal).
As for myths: myths are just rumors we share in conversation with the people we love. They’re often audible wishes, or prayers, things we tell ourselves in the dark so we can sleep. And the act of recitation is, always, not only spiritual, but communal. My stories belong to all my beloveds; they are given light and meaning in their shaping. Song, myth, poetry, prayer—in my work, they are often sisters. I don’t want them to be separable.
Rumpus: Water and myths around water envelop your collection How did water inform the structure of your book, both on the level of the poem and the collection itself?
Salameh: I grew up ten minutes from the Pacific, and I learned how to swim in the Mediterranean. Water has never been abstract for me; it’s personal and also catastrophic. The Mediterranean is the world’s deadliest migration path. Israeli bombing just south of Beirut has seeped 15,000 tons of oil into it, the largest-ever oil spill in the already polluted and dying Mediterranean. So water, for me, is life and it is grave; it reflects the empires surrounding it.
Mermaid Theory ebbs and flows the way water does because in many of these poems, joy and grief neighbor each other. It’s an attempt to reflect what it feels like to live as an Arab in the imperial core of the United States: a litany of private happinesses alongside institutional devastations. Water felt like the right structural logic for that emotional disjunction. It’s temperamental, it stains you, though that staining is impermanent; it can keep you alive and it can take you. That disjointedness felt true to this book.
Rumpus: Your poems dynamically use white space—sometimes mischievous, sometimes holy, and always powerful. In particular, there is the white space of rivers running through “Estuary Ghazal (American)” and “Estuary Ghazal (Arab).” What is your sensibility of architecture on the blank page?
Salameh: The estuary poems specifically were built to honor the bodies of water I grew up next to, but also to hold what language can’t carry. The American ghazal talks about the here—the here of witnessing. The Arab one talks about the there—the there which is also witnessed from afar, and which also acknowledges that “my telling of this story is never / innocent.”
In poems like “To2borne,” the white space is crafted to represent grief without spectacle. It’s also in conversation with the work of Khaled Barakeh, whose series of photographs called the Untitled Images depicts photographs of Syrian brothers and fathers who have undergone that worst of losses, the death of a child. In those images, Barakeh cuts and peels away at the photographic skin of those who have passed; the child’s absence becomes the marker, though it refuses the viewer their presence as spectacle. As I witness the systemic eradication of children in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, I think about spectacle. We have had the spectacle of their bodies more than enough times. I wanted to honor their absence, rather than commodify the gore of it. White space became a grammar for that small refusal.
Rumpus: You write the poem, “To2borne (May You Bury Me)”, using white space as part of the language. You also write this poem with Arabic characters while publishing with an English-language press. How might Glissant’s concept of “strategic opacity” inform how you approach what a reader is owed on the page?
Salameh: The Western world’s entitlement to a kind of right to understand is something I’ve been in conversation with for a long time. I was torn about whether to include the translation in the title of the poem, but I kept returning to the second-generation Arab-American experience, which can include the person who is fully fluent in Arabic, or maybe doesn’t speak a word, or who is somewhere in the middle, like me. And because “to2borne” is such a culturally inflected idiom in the Lebanese dialect, even a raw translation wouldn’t carry the visceral, expressive weight it has for those who grew up in Lebanon and Syria and who felt what it meant when the women who loved them said it. Some things are lived, and I don’t think everything lived has to be made available.
Rumpus: What does archive mean to your work?
Salameh: My poems are riddled with archives because I feel a responsibility to carry what the world is actively trying to make us forget. My dad calls me the family historian. You can see that in the way the collection is itself filled with citations and quotes; I owe so much of my thinking to the people I love and to the writers who came before me. Archive, for me, means keeping the pieces, even when the pieces are only fragments. It’s imperfect, and it’s what I have.
Rumpus: In “Ritual Ethnography,” the narrator says, “I said I’m my longest poem” and “I refuse to be brief.” “Haggling the Shami Way” is over six pages long, dancing between poetry, prose poetry, and essay. What does taking up space mean to you?
Salameh: “Haggling the Shami Way” began as a series of choppy prose blocks about my family’s trip to Syria the summer after my college graduation. Eventually, I noticed all of them kept circling the same question, which at its bottom was about longing. How do I reckon with my longing for Damascus, my own experience of that city, and my positionality as an American writer who hasn’t lived there, though I spent every summer there until I was eleven? I was also reading Etel Adnan’s Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) around this time—a series of these long, beautifully imagistic letters, written from her travels to a cluster of cities across the Arab world and the Mediterranean. In her letter from Murcia, in the south of Spain, she writes, “No ocean, however tumultuous it may be, can give us an idea more exact (and moving) of water than does the smallest little stream in the gardens of Damascus.” I loved how she consecrated such a small part of the landscape; the idea of honoring a small and individual place inside a nation that has become, so often, a broad and blurred abstraction. As I started interrogating my own narration, and then the act of interrogating, the form began to sprawl in a similar way, circuitous and refusing efficiency. In taking a longer road than my usual poem, I tried to take the space to communicate my own experience of corners of the city, and also to question the reliability of my own narration.
Rumpus: Throughout your collection, there are constant reclamations—of IRB protocols, of lists, of sermons, of imperial units, of mythology. How does poetry reconstitute the language of the places as you reclaim them? Is there a possibility of reconstituting a place of violence into a place of refuge through language?
Salameh: I think the places in this book (especially Damascus and San Diego) are reconstituted in that they are mangled in my recitation of them, and I allow them their mangledness. By insisting on the presence of Arabic on the page, minute as it might be, I attempt to represent the experience of being raised in Arabic in a country that wanted that language to disappear.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt even more viscerally than I did as a child how much language matters. When I think about my religious traditions, of Maronite Catholicism, complicated as my relationship to it is, my first thought is: “Who am I to deny the only God I have in Arabic?” And in a moment when the Arab and Arab-looking person is increasingly vulnerable to random violence, the language that marks us, which carries so much of the racial terror affiliated with us, begins to feel like a very powerful piece of how I was made. And so I refuse to forget it or abandon it, even in its limited and mangled form.
Rumpus: Your manuscript evokes all sorts of artists, poets, and theorists: Edward Said, June Jordan, Fady Joudah, Etel Adnan, Doechii, Solange… just to name a few. Your gratitude section includes a link to the playlist that informed this book. You quote many of them within the pages of your book. Where do these artists and thinkers show up ambiently and between the lines?
Salameh: Much of the most impactful theory I’ve encountered has been outside of what I’ve been assigned in classrooms. I’ve tried to build my own intellectual curriculum and to read theorists who represent my reality. We live in a lost, insane, irrational world. Reading reminds me that I am not alone in seeing that. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks writes: “I had rationalized the world, and the world had rejected me in the name of color prejudice. Since there was no way we could agree on the basis of reason, I resorted to irrationality. […] here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Irrational up to my neck.” Edward Said in his memoir similarly says: “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.” I see my strangeness, my disjointedness, reflected in the theorists who came before me. I also see it in artists like Doechii and Solange—people who refuse singular expressions, who allow themselves contradictions and nuance, who hold in Solange’s words, “too many parts, too many manifestations.”
Rumpus: Your collection emphasizes the intimacy of beauty rituals. Many of the moments set closest to the narrator’s present experience have to do with beauty rituals within friendship and family. In “Girl Reviews a Party Dress,” the narrator writes, “the light kissed me so well that night / I wasn’t a girl anymore.” In “Dream Sequence 0000000101001000,” the narrator writes, “I’m in an indigo dress & the polyester / kisses me just fine.” What does a kiss mean in your book?
Salameh: I see my existence as deeply political. In many ways, my living in the United States is a clerical error. From that I’ve developed a focus, an admittedly rather selfish desire, to be useful, to “winnow my rage into something of use.” But in the middle of that justified rage, you do have to find time to care for the body you live in, or you will literally develop autoimmune conditions. Part of what makes this world more endurable for me is reminding myself that I look the way thousands of women in my family look. I look like the women who came before me, and I like to think they take some joy from my freedom. Beauty, for me, is a testament to lasting.
This book is also so much about the creaturehood of the Arab woman, about the body rendered killable, so often and so publicly. And what it means to care for that body here, to refuse the beauty standards of people who don’t look like me, to come to peace with my nose, my brows, the way my jaw is set, and to tell myself it is beautiful and worthy. To be kissed by something as simple as a dress, or a light, is to be held without condition. For me, those are the purest moments of intimacy; being held without condition.
Rumpus: Your poems queer the mythologies they are in conversation with. In “How Love Was Invented,” “a girl meets a girl” and “they make an elegy” and then “all the horses nearby can smell it.” How do you see sensuality and the erotic as necessary to the politics of this collection?
Salameh: In Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic,” eros is not solely about pleasure (though I think desire is one of the most holy experiences available to us). I think eros is generative; it’s a creative force beyond the sexual. When you want something deeply, you begin to move toward it. I see that force necessarily as political. Billy-Ray Belcourt affirms in his gorgeous book, A History of My Brief Body that “an enormous desire is a climate whose logics elude anthropological explanation.” Desire refuses the shapes it’s assigned. This can be a world-shifting force when applied to the right ends.
Rumpus: You’re writing and publishing this book in a time of genocide, when the lands and people you write about are being targeted by the settler-colonial projects of Israel and the United States. How does this inform your relationship to your work, and how does it inform what you’re thinking of doing next?
Salameh: This is something I think about all the time. My first book, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022) , was focused on the more macro conditions of surveillance and digitization: on what it means for a girl to grow up watching Arab bodies pile up on her television screens from the moment of her birth, whether it was the Iraq War, the Gulf War, the Syrian war, and now the Palestinian genocide. I can’t help but see this as the product of a long wave of imperial extermination that has long ravaged the Middle East, and especially the Levant, and especially Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon specifically.
Mermaid Theory works to be a bit more self-implicating; to interrogate my own positionality in the diaspora; my privileges, commitments, and responsibilities. More generally, in this time of genocide, I often think poetry is useless, and yet poetry has saved lives, has saved my life. This is the fundamental contradiction I will always live in.
Danez Smith tells us in “anti poetica” that “there is no poem greater than feeding someone.” As of late, my relationship to my work has shifted in that I’ve been focused less on writing poetry and more on using my hands. I’ve tried to spend more of my time on mutual aid for the Palestinian families who are living this on the ground. I’m also focusing my professional career on civil rights litigation because I think an Arab American lawyer will be of more use to the movement I seek to be a part of than an Arab American poet.
I see the greatest utility of my poetry specifically as providing familiarity to fellow Arabs in the diaspora—of reminding them, and maybe a wider audience (though that is less my concern), of the urgency of implicating ourselves here, now, today. In the titular poem, “Mermaid Theory,” I say: “listen 〜 this brackish page is crowded 〜 listen 〜 where will you go after this poem”?
That is my hope for the poems—that they don’t let anyone off the hook (especially not myself)that they take someone else further into the work of being here, and awake, and implicated in our world.
Lately, I’ve been writing towards making better accounts of the ways the military-industrial complex has insinuated itself into America’s civilian institutions, especially the university. For me, it’s another entry point to explore my usual questions, which are what our responsibilities are as Americans, what we owe each other, and what we’re willing to do about it.
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