Momtaza Mehri and Zoé Samudzi: March 13, 2021

Momtaza Mehri introduces her latest poetic project, around "the miasma of nostalgia and nationalism, and a lens with which...to reckon with family and the familial" —a work, in her words, that's both "deeply personal with a capital P" and which "requires an interrogation of my own delusion." She begins by reading "The Plural Possible," and then follows that poem from manuscript with "A Fluke By Any Other Name Is a Flight Number," from her book Doing the Most with the Least.

Zoé Samudzi, indicating that, as she is not a poet she'll read others' poems [and prose], reads: "Death Fugue" by Paul Celan (translated by Michael Hamburger); from "Emptied Hearts" by Dambudzo Marechera, from his Cemetery of Mind; an excerpt from Elaine Scarry's 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World; the poem "lazarus" by Lucille Clifton; and closes with the poem "Limpopo Blues" by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, from Beating the Graves (2017).

alex cruse opens the conversation, inviting the writers to ask questions of one another. Zoé Samudzi begins by asking Momtaza Mehri about a line from one of her poems — that "the census bestows the unwanted gift of legibility"; "legibility to what?" asks Samudzi, "legibility to whom?" This leads to Mehri voicing her concerns about ethno-nationalism among major and minor clans in Somalia, and her experience with "toxic nostalgia" for "the golden years" among her parents' generation. Samudzi points to contradictions in the ethnic liberation struggle and construction of the Zimbabwean nation state, and the specifics of historical colonial genocide.

Mehri asks about Samudzi's choice of reading a poem by Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera, who embodies "the exile as a deeply unromantic figure." Samudzi says she reads him for the difficulty of his work, his check on romantic notions of the liberation struggle, his position opposed to the nation state, and his view of the horrors of coloniality. Mehri notes he's the opposite of the "trademarked" diasporan poet, with Samudzi adding that he and others are not here now, to see "how we've failed...with the projects they tried to leave for us."

Mehri notes her distrust of the grounding of "nation" in the family. They further explore questions of failure, generational differences within the African diaspora, attitudes toward return, the difficulty of speaking of "political despair and political heartbreak," shared desire, photography and commemoration, trauma and the possibility (without honest acknowledgement of recent history and "the present condition") for "radical repair" — "a repair that is not driven by nostalgia" for a "golden age" of liberatory struggle. Mehri speaks of needing to learn, poetically, "how to be an African outside of African." 

alex cruse airs a question from the audience regarding events on the African continent today, which Mehri addresses, taking into account "the living legacy of neocolonialism" and ongoing involvement of European powers. "Acts of solidarity," she says, include seriously "educating oneself...to understand where we, as Africans in diaspora, can apply pressure." Samudzi points to a need for studying and understanding "the far-reaching tendrils of American imperialism" and trusting that people on the African continent know more than we can.