Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist working across mediums, from poetry and translation to net art, film, theory, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and phenomenology, with a particular focus on the vacillating potential of the internet as a public and personal space, equal parts diary and mechanism of empire. I first encountered her work in Algavarias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão. Gharavi renders Salomão’s “poems of ideal architecture” in all their immense complexity, as humorous as they are solemn, as splintered as they are universal.
Serena Solin (SS): Something that intrigued me throughout Algaravias: Echo Chamber was the fragmentation of image. I’m thinking particularly of this quote from the poem “CARIOCA STREET 1993”: “clippings, replicas, reshowings, free samples, clots without blood, prostheses of the fantasmagoric Soap Street.” Virtual realities and “handycams” are also represented. As a contemporary artist, is fragmentation or reflection across multiple screens something you think about? Do you believe there is now, or ever was, an unbroken space for art?
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (MMG): I think that Waly Salomão was certainly ahead of his time in writing that poem in the early nineties. Naming a poem “.doc” before we had AOL and Hotmail accounts is especially interesting for an artist in South America who was attuned to the burgeoning virtuality of how we see each other and ourselves.
One of the things I’ve been doing under quarantine is watching period dramas. If I were just living my ordinary, non-quarantine life, I wouldn’t be watching Vanity Fair and The Age of Innocence, but it’s fascinating to think about the idea that there was ever a time when the whole could be contained. We have a fantasy of ourselves as contemporaries, being post-everything, and to some extent there may be truth to that; our tools have shaped us to be different than Martin Scorcese’s characters. But watching period dramas and experiencing a different visual repertoire from my own, I’m struck by how much virtuality and narrativizing of lives and selves there was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe we as contemporaries are so hungry for control that we have an impulse to find containers for everything. I think control is part of the artistic impulse, as well as a directive under quarantine—to not lose your mind, to think about the very few things within your control. I don’t know that I can draw a ready line to virtuality, but often our tools give us that sense of control. At the same time they are not just tools; they shape us.
SS: With regard to period dramas, I thought quarantine might be a good time to read Anna Karenina for the first time, and I was enthralled by the way the plot is reflected through characters who weren’t actually present for an event but heard about it from someone else—in other words, gossip as narrative style. Perhaps the conclusion is that there’s nothing new under the sun—not virtuality, not narrative fragmentation.
MMG: Anna Karenina was actually on TV the other day, dubbed into Portuguese, a real experience. Postmodernism is maybe the most boring topic ever, but the first thing to be given that word in literary theory was that moment in Mrs. Dalloway when multiple spectators are watching an airplane. That refractory self and the breakdown of representative, directive viewership is where postmodernism starts to exist historically. But I think we can go further back, and wider culturally.
At the same time, I think we are living something different. I live in the time of Uber. It’s significant that we know the technology we rely on is working when it’s most erased, which is profoundly interesting and understudied—we would have to give more attention to that to fully understand ourselves.
SS: A word that I often came across while reading about your work is “hybridity.” It’s a complicated word in the time that we live and work—like “fragmentation,” “hybridity” is ubiquitous, but it’s not so easy to say what it means, or what its implications are. Your book with Mirene Arsanios, Dictionary of Night, utilizes many modes, including collaborative practice, the indexing impulse, critical essay, and personal writing, to explore one fundamental concept: night. Do you find hybridity to be a useful way of thinking about your work or do you approach it more holistically?
MMG: “Hybridity” is one of those funny words that people assign to you. I don’t think I’ve ever used it in my entire life. The word feels a bit stuck because it assumes a “center” and a positioning that is off-center. I have a vision of someone mixing something in a big bowl—I have a very Iranian impulse to be mixing something in a bowl at all times—and that’s the poetic allusion I get from it. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt a part of, or entitled to, the center. My subconscious positioning would certainly count as hybrid because I’m displaced or disbelonged in various ways; that’s just a fact, not necessarily a psychological disbelonging, though I’ve felt that too.
Then I wonder, what would the un-hybrid be? I think about form very deliberately, even the form of the interview. There’s an automatic hybridity to the form of the interview. I don’t know what it would mean to be of the center and have an entitled positioning to the center. To the extent that I live and work from a position of decentering, I suppose it’s hybrid.
The other word that gets used is “identity,” which is dehistoricized in an interesting way. I’m okay with “hybridity” and “identity” in the sense that they are procedural, but not to the extent that they are arrivals and conclusions.
SS: Do you remember any of the poems from Echo Chamber being particularly laborious or difficult to translate?
MMG: I remember the time and place of that book being very solitudinal. I think I’ve described it before as graduate student basements—being in unglamorous circumstances working with poems for which I have enormous, intense respect, poems I’m awestruck by. There are certain passages and words that Salomão uses which are neither dictionary words, nor words that your Brazilian friend would know if you called them up. These are words that are so specific in their vernacular reality. In a way this ties back to hybridity: the words are not hybrid though they might appear so, they’re very specific. There are a couple of nordeste terms that he uses and I have little familiarity with the Northeastern region of Brazil. Those specific allusions were encyclopedic. I felt like I was going through a wormhole to try to understand why, for example, the name of a certain waterfall was used.
There are also other languages that exist in this book besides Portuguese—some I have familiarity with, like French and Spanish and Italian, and some I don’t, like Yoruba. Whether they were worlds I knew well or worlds that I knew only obliquely, it was still a question of how to carry them over into English. Salomão is such a wily poet that I felt a great deal of love and devotion to translating that work while slipping on banana peels at the same time.
SS: A poem I found especially moving from Algavarias was this one:
MY HAPPINESS
my happiness remains underground for eternities
and only rises to the surface
through alchemic tubes
and not from natural causality.
it is the bastard child of detour and disgrace,
my happiness:
a diamond procured from combustion,
like the final dousing of fire.
Does your happiness arise from alchemical tubes or natural causality? I realize that’s a personal question, so maybe instead I should ask how your writing arises.
MMG: At least in the way that Salomão presented himself publicly, even in salons in Rio de Janeiro, he’s known for being a happy person despite living his entire life under a military regime until 1984 and being imprisoned in an infamous carceral institution in Brazil. Despite exile, he’s known as a happy, spontaneously grinning person. I don’t know myself to have that disposition. For me, happiness does spring from the ground and alchemical tubes, a possible outcome among other outcomes. Salomão is a good reminder for us to not downplay the necessity of our own joy, even to live life publicly, joyously. I don’t know that I’ve often felt welcome to do that. There’s a seriousness that our world invites. He broke through that, through and through.
SS: I wonder whether one can appear as a “happy woman” in artistic and academic contexts or if, as you said, one must espouse that certain seriousness.
MMG: Whether you can appear as a “happy woman” while also being self-aware! I think Salomão was an incredibly self-attuned poet, lyricist, father, partner, cultural figure, and intellectual. He also belonged to a culture in which happiness has a different valence. Yellow and green, the colors of the flag of Brazil, are happy colors.
It’s a tricky thing to try and publicize your own disposition; I’ve been lucky that in the times I have known depression, I’ve been fairly aware of it. I’ve been aware of knowing melancholy, sorrow, and sadness. I’ve just dug out of a period of that here. This isolation became as close to unbearable as I think it could have been. Something I’ve experienced recently is homesickness. I’m adaptable and assimilable to a fault, but in the past two weeks I started experiencing homesickness for the first time that I can remember, and that doesn’t make for a lot of happy dispositional attitudes. But I happen to be in a country whose most famous samba song translates to “sadness has no end, happiness does.” I think that says everything! Brazilian samba is wiser than me.
SS: Wiser than me as well.
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Her translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse) earned a nomination for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Other publications include The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX), Alphabet of an Unknown City (Belladonna*), Bio (Inventory Press), and Secret Catalan Poem (The Elephants). She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from Bard College.
Serena Solin is a writer living in Maspeth, NY.
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