Sadia Hassan is a Somali-American essayist, poet, and MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, and the Fine Arts Work Center. A 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize, she has appeared in Longreads, Seventh Wave Mag, the Chattahoochie Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, “Enumeration” appears in the New Generation African Poets chapbook set Saba published by Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund.
Q&A
Tell us about your poetry submission.
The three poems included in “Black Girl Prayer Poems” were separate attempts at making sense of loss. In one, a chorus of girls demand a kind of justice, in another a young woman reflects on what it means to wake up one day having survived what she once had no language for, and in the last a speaker elegizes about autumn. When I submitted these poems, I had just moved from across the country and the move unsettled something in me. I missed home. I missed friends. I missed the ocean. But I was also met with so much that served as a continuum into past lives. I found that the trees and chatter of birds and insects felt exactly in Mississippi as they had in other moments in my life which meant that I could go trail running, bird-watching, and listen for bullfrogs without being afraid. I had been here before. I submitted a suite of poems in which each speaker’s voice is strengthened by the other, where each considers the contours of personal tragedy without being lonely in their experience.
Honestly, I had left Oakland in the middle of a summer which felt redolent of Fall only to arrive in Oxford, Mississippi at the precipice of a Fall which felt exactly as a summer should. If anything, these poems were inspired by a sense of feeling out of step with time and nature. “Elegy for Autumn” especially tries to embody that disorientation by arranging and re-arranging what emerges in the wake of a community’s loss into a single story. What comes out is this obsession with futuretime, how a single moment can fracture, loop, collapse space. I was lucky that just as I had arrived in this new place, my workshop leader was an accomplished and attentive poet, January Gill O’Neil, who encouraged us to both get outside and find our way back inside our stories so that we could write what needed to be written. I felt less afraid, in a way, to be sentimental, to genuinely mourn in my poems the way I needed to.
Tell us about your journey as a poet.
I came to poetry through my oldest sister who was the first poet I ever knew. She was my entire world. She commanded every room in such a way that I began to think of poetry as a deeply private thing you did to better articulate yourself in the world. She would buy these journals with black pages and write her poems in gel ink and I just thought that was so powerful. She wanted every word illuminated. And I imagine, for her, the act of writing was as much an art practice as it was a writing practice. When she finally moved out, as sisters do, I kept my own journals and relied on poetry as a way to safeguard the parts of myself that were the most earnest and tender and easily upset.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to enjoy poetry for what it can do, both to us and for us. My favorite poems are those that testify against us, poems whose moments of clarity explode our small worlds. I love poems that move effortlessly across genre. A writer and friend I deeply admire, Mehreen Sohail, has a fiction story titled “Places My Mother is Old” that I swear is a poem. Another, Jamila Osman, writes essays that read like lyric epics. My spiritmate Teni Ayo-Ariyo writes poems that feel like life-rafts in a world constantly spinning away from us. I came to poetry through sisterhood and continue to be sustained in sisterhood. This means I have a duty to not only write courageously about what terrifies me but to also enumerate what leaves me breathless, to seek refuge in the sublime and ordinary.
Is there someone whose writing style influences you?
Absolutely. I have always admired the steely-eyed self-possession of Vievee Francis’ poems. Hers is a poetics driven by lush and unconventional language, hard-fisted-line endings and a heady lyricism. I look to Francis’ poetry when I need to bravely tend to what she describes as the “interior wilderness,” the thicket of memories, dreams, past lives that demand further examination. At many difficult junctures, I felt seen by the Black and female speakers in Francis’ poems who had the gumption and the vision to begin again where others may have abandoned living all together. She reframed for me what I thought I knew about eco-poetry and made forms like the elegy, nocturne and pastoral feel accessible. Similarly, Dorothy Allison’s lyrical acuity has taught me to listen for music at the sentence level. I return to this Allison quote often: “In the world as I remake it, everything is possible. Nothing is forbidden.” It reminds me that there is room for shame and disgust and redemption in poetry. Of course there is, because poetry should be prayerful. It should reflect light, throw open doors and windows into many afterworlds. I appreciate Francis and Allison both because their work has done that for me.
Are there books you return to when thinking about craft?
Absolutely. One of the things that helps me make sense of why a book is so dang good is to think about the questions it leaves me with in regards to my own work. For example, when I read Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live, I wonder: how can I subvert my reader’s expectations? How can I use brevity to distill emotion and create momentum at the sentence level? When I read Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I know For Sure, I think: dang, how can I be more brave? Where am I quieting the impulse to be honest? Vievee Francis’ Forest Primeval makes me think, wait, who is at the centers of the stories I have been told? Am I the villain or the hero of my own story? Ladan Osman’s Exiles of Eden makes me slow down. I ask: how can I be more reverent in my craft? Who have I forgotten in my recounting? Arcelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia forces me to reconsider to who or what have I sworn fidelity. What am I not seeing? I love that asking a question can lead to technical mastery of one small thing at a time. The more questions you ask, the more questions unearth.
What does it mean to be a poet during a global crisis? Has your writing life or your work been affected or influenced by the events of 2020?
I think it’s a time to be reparatively imaginative. Pre-pandemic I would have said be recklessly so, but I think consequences for our actions and imaginations matter more now than they’ve ever mattered before. I’ll speak for myself here, but looking to stillness and play as an alternate fuel source as I sit with difficult news or material has made all the difference in my mental health. Trying to train my attention towards a different kind of possibility and endurance than I’ve known in the past has become a source of peace for me. There was a period in the beginning where I couldn’t settle my nerves long enough to read or write in any sustainable way. Leading a workshop of incredibly talented and tender black girls this summer really turned things around for me. Making art with youth really is an act of reparative imagining because kids are always visioning a world of play and curiosity that we would be lucky to live in. I laughed more in those two weeks than I had done the past four months prior. That energy sustained me and has been sustaining me for months after. As far as writing, it helps that I’m in a graduate writing program with colleagues I admire. The goal has always been to create something beautiful to share in community. In order to do that, I get up grumpy and try to revise a poem before I can start my class work and even if I just get a few lines pinned down or end up spinning my wheels on an ending that goes nowhere, I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
As far as what it means to be a poet right now.
What advice would you give aspiring poets?
Please keep writing. The most helpful piece of advice I’ve gotten from a mentor has been to keep writing even when your anxious. There’s a lot to be anxious about right now and I would just encourage you to keep writing. Ask for help and keep writing. It’s literally the only way any kind of writing gets done. In the meantime, love on your folks and stay grounded. Your work is worthy and valuable regardless.
Enumeration
By Sadia Hassan
I wake up one day in a city
I’ve lonelied with my leaving
noting the newness of my life.
I deadhead marigolds
arrange the flowers
in a drinking glass
spit the shells
of sunflower seeds
into a pale blue bowl
blink at the clink
of contact
I cannot
tell you how
or I can.
I did not die
from the shame
that’s how.
I memorized
my responsibilities,
paid my bills.
But it is hard
on the days I leave home
in a hurry
when at the sight of sun, a flash
of teeth from a stranger’s curved face,
a column of wind bellows out of me.
Did you know?
A woman’s body can be cleaved
fresh as torn earth and no one
not even her mother can put it back
right.
Did you know?
Men think they can take
what they like as if no
one will miss it
but I have always missed
what was taken from me
without permission.
I wake some mornings bloated
with missing.
I root for it in the cupboard,
the missing, and I root for it
in the dirt my hair
the men, their hands,
the missed and the missing
being all that remains
for lifetimes after.