Art Is + Ayesha Raees

"Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive, Geraldine Kang, Paula Mendoza, Zining Mok, JinJin Xu, Leonard Yang, Monique Truong, Noorlinah Mohamed, Vithya Subramaniam, Khairulddin Wahab, Jenny Qi, and Jennifer Huang.

Ayesha Raees identifies as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop's The Margins. She has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Lahore, Pakistan, Raees is a graduate of Bennington College, and lives in New York City and Miami. 

Ayesha Raees’s Coining A Wishing Tower, selected by Kaveh Akbar for the 2020 Broken River Prize, shows Raees to be a poet of deep questioning. Her work wanders through imaginative explorations of what is “real” in a voice both songlike and full of wonder. Kaveh Akbar praises Coining for its “fearless reckoning with unprecedented experience spoken in a singular, deeply and importantly strange lyric voice.” As described by Emily Yoon, Coining “formally illustrates the various enclosures that serve to both trap and liberate [the book’s] figures.” It speaks to the ability of allegory to escape realism.– Janelle Tan

I was introduced to the term “hybrid” through Bhabha’s work, and through it, I discovered a language of belonging. I had finally found a term that felt compatible with what I felt was missing in my life of movement, displacement, and systemic difference.

Janelle Tan: I like to start by asking: what is a poem to you?

Ayesha Raees: This has varied for me greatly. My relationship with poetry has grown and changed and transformed as I have, as one does when invested in spiritual growth. Currently, for me, a poem is an anchoring point for all the major aspects of my way of being and seeing in this world. It is also a place I can return to. Lately, my poems are becoming more and more tender and soft in my inquiry into love. Which is a drastic transformation from my poetry a couple of years ago, which was often depressive and dysfunctional. At that time, a poem for me was a place to cope with life. Now it is a place of healing and love and belonging.  

JT: You identify as “a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms.” What does “hybrid” mean to you? When trying to find a container for your work, do you engage with hybridity as thinkers such as Homi Bhaba and Gayatri Spivak have defined it?

AR: I am extremely influenced and inspired by postcolonial theories of hybridity. Most of my more research-focused work revolves around Homi Bhabha’s concepts of third and interstitial spaces, and I find in his writing a hilarity often found in poetry: we don’t really know exactly what is being said; however, there is so much in it the more time you spend with it. 

I was introduced to the term “hybrid” through Bhabha’s work, and through it, I discovered a language of belonging. I had finally found a term that felt compatible with what I felt was missing in my life of movement, displacement, and systemic difference. Bhabha, in this way, had provided me with a bridge, a realization that I was allowed to exist in many different facets of identity, and also of my creative work, which was an extremely significant consolation to me. 

As someone who interrogates form and mediums and the how of creative expression, my work always comes into shape through different interdisciplinary visual, textual, theatrical, and collaborative modes. I have creatively explored my hybrid work through film, photo, animation, theater, paint, and so on. In this encompassment, I find consolation that my dialogue, my poetry, is not bound to just text, but poses the possibility of many forms, just like, I believe, a person’s time in the world.  

Rodel Tapaya - The Land of the Promise (2016), acrylic on canvas
Image description: A surrealist painting consisting of vivid, saturated colors and patterns. Upon closer inspection, some of these patterns consist of distorted figures hidden among the tropical plants. In the middle of the painting is a figure of flames with a red face and one hand raised, brandishing a kris*. Some other surreal imagery includes a trio of blue men rowing a boat with red oars that end in fish bones; a dark-green woman with a head encased in a tree stump and a body made up of breasts, breastfeeding a gray baby; and a tree surrounded with skulls at its roots and intertwined with the skeleton of a creature that has a bull-like head and the body of a bird. 
*kris: a 19th-century sword that originates from Southeast Asia

When a visual image is introduced into a poem, one often feels its presence to be foreign; however, it never is. In the first place, a poem has to be visualized in order to be read.

JT: When you think about the relationship between a word and an image, what questions do you find yourself exploring and answering?

AR: A word is just an image we have learned to recognize into meaning while an image can also be read as a language that is not coherently singular. I find in this relationship profound prospects for what poetry can be: a forever-expanding array of possibilities in language recognizable yet not always coherently singular. In this relationship, I find myself most at ease, for it provides a tolerance for being. When a visual image is introduced into a poem, one often feels its presence to be foreign; however, it never is. In the first place, a poem has to be visualized in order to be read.

The same with an image. Just like in poetry traditions where prose or concrete poetry is considered low art, art with text, like graffiti, is also considered a form of low art. Of course, these views are changing positively, mostly because more and more hybrid identities are coming into the creative and artistic fields and breaking conventions that were placed there by white and male supremacist cultures. 

JT: What strikes me about seeing that part of your practice is how you’ve made the poems a part of the painting’s process – it’s like the Frank O’Hara poem “Why I Am Not a Painter,” where he talks about the painting with the word SARDINES on the canvas. How important is it, as both a poet and visual artist, to make your process part of the work?

AR: This is a wonderful question and thank you for bringing SARDINES into the conversation. “Why I Am Not a Painter” is indeed an ekphrastic dialogue that connects the word and the image in a way that’s more on the textual end, but requires us to look at the painting by Mike Goldberg. In SARDINES, the painting holds clear text, such as the words “Exit” and “Sardines,” but also text that is more integrated into the painting, that opens up to a viewer/reader over time. I say this for both poetry and painting, patterns in a composition are important. How one leans into craft and technique can bring out something more in a work. 

Process, in this way, is extremely important to me. It is one of the largest aspects of my practice. I have more process-based works, and as I spend more and more time in the world, they are becoming more and more precious to me than something product- or goal-oriented. I think, three or so years ago, when I freshly graduated from Bennington and took up my Margins fellowship at AAWW, I was writing and creating work with more goals in mind: manuscripts, art shows, publications, etc.. However, now the pressure I put on myself has eased, mostly because I have wisely unconditioned myself to not be so anxiously mechanically productive, as if my achievements present a measure of life or worth. 

My work has become personal, caring, and aimed at healing, where the process of creating something together is important, or finding joy in the observation is significant. I invite community into my art-making: we may write a poem together, or paint together. I think, in those moments, my process feels more precious than the end product. The end of the process suddenly seems like it no longer belongs to me, it belongs to the world. The finished poem leaves the nest.  

JT: I remember the first time I read Coining A Wishing Tower, and on re-reading it now, I am struck by how visual its explorations are, and how uninhibited by genre it is. I think of it, and the rest of your work, as both genre-less and inhabiting every genre. Do you think it’s possible for work to be genre-less? How do you define “genre” in this manuscript?

AR: I think it’s absolutely possible for work to be genre-less. Unfortunately we exist in a world where creative work needs to be categorized into a certain genre in order to be understood, to be discussed, and to be rewarded by the more traditional literary and visual dialogues set up by the ‘fathers’ of the forms. This is why it is absolutely vital for me to work in forms that are hard to categorize, difficult to decipher, and can be of many genres at once while not being of any. In this way, I enjoy almost not giving a genre to Coining A Wishing Tower because I want to keep it open for readers to decipher. Yet, because I identify as a poet, and a hybrid one, everything I do and write will have the anchoring definition of poetry. Therefore, the manuscript definitely rests in that realm. However, it is also of fragments, it is of narrative, it holds characters, motifs, dialogues. 

Rodel Tapaya - Mother (2019), acrylic on canvas
Image description: A collage-based painting showing a multi-faceted composition of a house and its environs. A red hooded figure stands in the middle of the painting, facing left, with one hand holding onto a neon orange pole.

Most urban spaces in the modern world have different faces but similar veins. Suburbs are often different, with their own inward-looking cultures.

JT: I’m interested in the dislocation and displacement in much of your work. Coining A Wishing Tower finds itself in a variety of fictional and real locations, both urban and suburban. Some of the physical locations: Mecca, Lahore, New York City, and New London, Connecticut. Do you think of your work as inhabiting a liminal locality? 

AR: Certainly. Liminality is a state of the great in-between that I am curious about as a poet and a person. Displacement is a big theme in my life, and how often willing or unwilling movement can influence one’s being in this world. I have moved a lot in my life. I was born in a city where my family did not live but drove to specifically for my delivery. My father was in the military, so changing houses, schools, landscapes, cultures, and people was my experience of growing up. I didn’t have much of a sense of permanence and had to deduce it on my own. 

Global urban cultures, however, have the same fundamentals: infrastructure that poses as modern and accessible; many languages but only one commonly used; globalized cuisines that pride themselves as fusion, etc.. Most urban spaces in the modern world have different faces but similar veins. Suburbs are often different, with their own inward-looking cultures. I have lived in both these spaces, and yet I find myself most myself in spaces of in-between, of movement. In cars. In trains. In airplanes. Before arriving. After departure. 

My work inhabits these aspects greatly, both as critique and embracement. Coining A Wishing Tower presents real and unreal locations to create space for its inhabitants who are moving around. Makkah, where the family travel to in Saudi Arabia, is a sacred place of transformation through spiritual and personal lament, but it is also engaged with love, family, and memory. It is a transient place made permanent because of family. 

The tower, from the title of my book, is a location both physical and metaphorical, which goes through its own transformation, from posing as a service to grant wishes to losing all purpose, to finding some end that is like death, a questionable end, but also some kind of liberation from its service. The tower, in this way, is not static like the other localities in the book, but one that changes. I think that’s the biggest loss one experiences in life, when a physical place, a home, a city, changes, and when one returns to it, one feels the stark contrast. 

JT: Coining A Wishing Tower is also about rituals – House Mouse performs rituals, and the speaker prays and performs other religious rituals – there’s a reverence for G/god in every pore of the manuscript. What fascinates you about the pursuit of the holy? How does that work its way into your work?

AR: Thank you for asking this question. A lot of times talk of religion makes people feel uncomfortable, as though it is something one should not ask, talk about, or comment on. To some degree, knowing how to skillfully talk about the holy is a language one must work towards developing—a language that is full of tolerance and openness and compassion. When it comes to subjects that have a strong standing in our world, I often step away from making big statements. And this is why I must also not make big statements for spirituality, or the relationship with the holy, for it is something personal, intimate and shifting for everyone. I encourage everyone to explore their own relationship with the holy as it relates to themselves.

Having said that, I don’t intend for Coining A Wishing Tower to ponder over Islam as much as hold dialogue with the unknown, with the human experience of life and death, and the spirit. When I say this, I want to say that G/god can pose as a singular entity, as a support system, but it also can have the face of the universe, or an energy that gives one hope or consolation at a difficult time. These concepts for me are philosophical, and poetry in this way is my medium to explore them. Poetry allows me to find answers to what is confusingly abstract, to explore, like Agha Shahid Ali, Omar Khayyam, or Etel Adnan, something of an energy that moves through nature, something spiritual. Coining A Wishing Tower, in this case, deals with death in all its facets. It embodies the afterlife in order to question it, to discover it, to care for it, and to find some answers to the question: What happens to all of us when we are no longer here? Where do we go? 

I think in this way, exploring the holy was inevitable. I believe it helped me get in touch with my Muslim roots—growing up in Pakistan in a social culture where most of us have a third parent, which is God. In this regard, Islam is as much a part of my cultural identity as being brown, South Asian, and Pakistani. In Coining, I embody all of this and interrogate the holy to find answers to the personal experiences of loss and grief. 

JT: Your manuscript is deeply allegorical and symbolic in its explorations—what freedom do you find in using allegory, in using the symbolic and metaphorical?

AR: Yes! It shamelessly holds elements of craft and technique, and I borrow devices as strength rather than an inconvenience. In Coining A Wishing Tower, I borrowed the strength of symbolism and allegory to tell a narrative that’s personal yet philosophical, to help build characters fetched from real experiences and churn them into motifs that go through their own discoveries and transformations. I was able to have the freedom to not tell or explain, but merely express what I wished to express. I had the freedom to claim and deny statements, and show a reader what intertwining language and context can do for language, by the lack of an absolute. 

I think it was also important for me to write this book in this way for, like I said, I try not to make big statements on larger matters, but to find a way to aid others on their own journeys towards an understanding. When you talk and write about death and afterlife, how can you represent just one aspect of it? Many people have not grown up with religion. Everyone has their own understanding of life, love, living, and dying. Therefore, it was only through the use of literary devices, such as metaphors and symbolism, that I was able to feel liberated enough to interrogate these philosophies, and also write an ode to my own relationship with death and the afterlife. As somebody who experienced many losses of loved ones in her young twenties, writing this book helped me in my journey towards healing. All my writing does. 

Even though the book contains real and unreal realms, deals with illusion and truth, and has characters that are both made-up and based on my family and myself, these threads are all connected by the centering oneness of the poet, which is me.

JT: When the “I” finds its way into Coining A Wishing Tower’s interwoven narrative, we start to see the center from which all the threads of diaspora, religion, childhood, the afterlife, and memory radiate. When putting together the manuscript, did you think of the manuscript as radiating from your own experiences? What do you feel is the emotional center of the manuscript?

AR: All my work is autobiographical, or holds elements of it. House Mouse, the cat, the Godfish… they are all characters that are inspired by my real life. Everything I experience in the world, and how I experience it, are the foundational building blocks of all my creative work. I do not think anything in the book is its own isolated element. Even though the book contains real and unreal realms, deals with illusion and truth, and has characters that are both made-up and based on my family and myself, these threads are all connected by the centering oneness of the poet, which is me. Every fragment in the book has its own respective emotive charge—even though time can be linear in some aspects, life and its accompanying milestones are often only linear in respect to societal norms. The emotive charge in the manuscript works throughout the book and releases at points when the strings begin to intertwine, before finding its final release at the end. 

I think giving ode to my own life experiences makes this work my most authentic. There are moments when I truly feel that I don’t think I could write anything else as authentic to myself. I think maybe this is why Coining A Wishing Tower feels so full of light to me. In some ways, Coining has become its own place. 

JT: I’m such a great admirer of your work for Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s magazine The Margins. How do you think about your editorial practice? What dialogues are you looking to be a part of? What shapes your practice?

AR: Thank you! It has been nothing but a joy for me to be a part of The Margins editorial team with the editor Emily Yoon, who has been nothing but an enamoring example and kind mentor to me. I am not sure if I have a manifesto behind my editorial practice, and I don’t wish at the current moment to lean towards one, mostly because editorial visions shift with time and also with the magazine’s mission. 

Personally, I celebrate openness and care and strive towards an actively inclusive way of choosing work. I am often attracted to craft elements at play, and how they work towards embracing their context. Regardless of context, a successful poem is full of wit, surprise, and intelligence. Being a part the of The Margins also allows me to grow away from the traditional ideas of how a poem is made. Often, these are established by white literary traditions, and moving away from those ideas of craft pulls me towards an important and significant discourse among the world’s, and America’s, Asian landscapes. Violence against women, mental health, and giving ode to family without erasing the self, are all important themes we get in our submissions. Our poems highlight an important time in America and the world for Asian identities.

At The Margins, we publish a poem/poems every Tuesday. We don’t really have a particular number of poems we pick per submission period. I think this gives us a lot more freedom in choosing and uplifting emerging and established poets. We’ve published many poets who have never been published before. Personally, I love the poems that many school poets or emerging writers submit, because they are working with a refreshing take on form, narrative, and language, and in their rawness, breaking traditions. 

There have been many times when Emily and I have personally worked with some poets, and given them the space or the opportunity to revise their work and submit different drafts. This often happens when we both have fallen in love with a poem, but we see a moment in the poem that may not be working in a significant way. Often, this is something that is singular. We call this a ‘conditional’ acceptance, and give the poet ample space and time to revise if they see fit. Even though these moments are rare, I love that I am a part of this space with a team member who also extends effort and care in an editorial dialogue. There hasn’t been a moment when the poet hasn’t accepted the chance to revise their pieces and email us back, but if that should happen, we would respect that fully and encourage them to submit a new packet again. 

Rodel Tapaya - Dry Spell (2017), acrylic on canvas
Image description: A surrealist painting of a mountainous, desert landscape with cerulean blue skies. The painting consists of several large tropical plants intertwined with one another. Near the top of the painting, a large ratlike creature with a human face and ears is nestled among these oversized plants. Its long tail trails downwards to a red-faced woman in a large straw hat, white headscarf, baro’t saya*, and dark pinafore. Behind her are armed soldiers positioned behind a pile of sandbags, with a couple of rats sniffing at the sandbags. At the bottom right of the painting, a skinny, white dog drinks water from a bowl. On the right of the painting, in the background, a house sits in front of the mountains, a flock of headless birds flying past it. 
*baro’t saya: a traditional dress ensemble worn by women in the Philippines

To create space for diverse voices is to create space for the diverse possibilities a poem can take.

JT: You and Emily [Yoon] choose such a wide range of poems for The Margins. What are some of the most important things you’ve learned by uplifting other writers’ work?

AR: To create space for diverse voices is to create space for the diverse possibilities a poem can take. The Asian American identity is also a diverse identity, and to highlight that diversity, and give it allowance, reflects the space that the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is constantly building. It has been nothing but a gratifying process for me, one that has been both educational and enlightening. I believe that with every poem I read, I grow towards an understanding of the many facets of what it means to be Asian American, and how each poet’s voice is singular, yet connected in a way that debunks isolation, and creates, unconsciously, communion. 

JT: Do you think a condition of diaspora is to always be writing about displacement?

AR: I love this question. Thank you so much for it. I don’t think the question about displacement is only attached to the diaspora. I feel that attaching it to the conditions of diaspora is dangerous because it not only distracts the reader from a narrative that is not of displacement, but focuses on destiny, or being, or settlement, or forward movement, or ownership, so on. As someone who explores the theme of displacement, I find dislocation in other realms of the human experience, such as in one’s psyche. It is a liminal space that many hold emotionally and mentally, particularly where there is constant leaving and arriving, and a lot is put into a lack of permanence. 

I do want to end this interview with a real story. Because this work is so hybrid, I queried a lot of agents with it, packaging it as an experimental novel or creative non-fiction—a memoir of sorts. Many of the agents responded favorably but, because the manuscript is short, asked me to expand on the parts of the book that revolve around my family and my experiences of being a young Muslim woman. They were apparently confused by my multiple identities and wanted me to flesh my experience in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and America out. But, for me, the book comes to life because it holds the magic of characters such as House Mouse. From the agents’ response, I knew that the book was being looked at not with an eye to what literary dialogue could do, but as a piece where identity could be commoditized in the market. 

I don’t think there is anything wrong in those writers who wish for this. Identity is everything to me. However, I do think it is important to give allowance, celebration, and care to emerging writers of color, to give them the liberty to dwell on the more personal aspects of their identity and not on the current political categories only. I would rather be seen as a poet who is named Ayesha Raees than a poet who writes Pakistani or Asian American literature. Just by being Ayesha Raees, I am both Asian American and Pakistani, and so is my work. It’s inevitable.

Because I feel this strongly, I always encourage everyone, including myself, to keep pressing on despite stereotypes or disparities. Stories have many facets. Poems are of many kinds. Some belong in the world. Some are just for your loved ones. Or yourself. There is agency in everything if you give it.Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, No Tokens, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches poetry in Brooklyn.

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Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, No Tokens, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches poetry in Brooklyn.

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Rodel Tapaya is a contemporary Filipino artist. His paintings are characterized by visionary narrative tableaus, melding folklore, historical and personal references into painterly figurations. Born in 1980, in Montalban, the Philippines, Tapaya was a student at the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, where he won the Nokia Art Prize in 2001, which gave him a grant to study at the Parsons School of Design and the University of Helsinki. After a successful series of exhibitions, he moved his home and studio to Bulacan, the Philippines, in 2006 where he currently lives with his wife, the painter Marina Cruz-Garcia, and their three children. Tapaya was awarded the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2012 and was the inaugural winner of the Asia-Pacific Breweries Signature Art Prize in 2011. He is currently represented by A3 Arndt Art Agency.

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