Aaron Schneider Interviews Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi
Aaron Schneider: Where did this book come from? When did the idea for it emerge? How did it grow and evolve?
Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi: I remember first seeing Klara read from her debut Ekke at Pivot Reading Series in Toronto. I was absolutely taken by Klara’s movements between languages, and very specifically how it differed from most multilingual readings I had been to beforehand. Klara met the audience at a familiar place and consistently took them to uncharted territory and as a listener I remember feeling welcomed into Afrikaans by the poem. From here began a long few years of admiration and offers of “collaboration,” but since every time I approached Klara, I had done so with maximum enthusiasm and minimal planning, it never ended up working out. That is all UNTIL the beginning of the pandemic, where both of us had time to both think, conceptualize, and write. I approached Klara with the idea that we should write about the voiceless velar fricative X (Kh in persian, G in Afrikaans) which both our mother tongues (Persian and Afrikaans) use extensively. We wrote 4 pages overnight and about 20 over a week. I sent Klara a message saying, “we should make a chapbook from this,” to which Klara responded quite sternly, “I see a full book.” And voila, here we are 3 years and some change later. AS: This book is a collaboration, so, as well as asking about the origins of the book, I want to ask about that collaboration. When did you start working together? Did that relationship change as you worked on the book, and, if so, how? Klara du Plessis: We started writing together very early during the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the book happened during an intense writing spurt of one or at most two months. At the time I was midway through my doctoral studies and so had to slow down the writing at some point to concentrate on my special field exam or something like that. During the writing period, though, Kess would often compose during the night. I would wake up and open the google document in the morning to find many new pages of poetry. The energy was palpable! Really inspiring. I write quite fast, but Kess even more so, and between the two of us, the manuscript developed really quickly and organically, feeding off of the dynamic dialogue between our respective contributions. We had a second spurt of composition for the final set of poems, late 2022, called “Speech.” At this point, the project had rested for a while and so also clarified itself, in the sense that we understood the book as being about the intimate interrelations and sharing of language, and the production of sound as meaning. The manuscript needed a further evolution towards voice itself and so “Speech” was composed first spoken, then transcribed onto the page. KM: A small part I’d add to that is that in the beginning (and I swear I cannot explain how I achieved this; it is still a mystery to me), I compiled a series of 100+ words at the intersection of often-creative Persian romanization, Afrikaans, and English. This list was a compilation of either homonyms, homophones, or often both! I’d say this list helped set the beginning explorations of our respective mother tongues into motion! It was very fun! KdP: Oh yes! I’d almost forgotten about that. You created this marvelous compendium of trilingual words. I hope we still have that somewhere. AS: Do you have any advice for poets who want to work on a collaborative project? KM: Hmmm… I’d personally say for me collaboration is such a similar process to translation. In my daily practice of reading and writing, if I often feel drained of my drive to write my own poems (or to put it more crudely, to “Write From Scratch!”), I just start translating, since working OFF of someone else’s previously written work provides such a perfect headspace for creativity. I’d say collaborative projects are the same for me. They provide such a launchpad, since half the thinking is done for you, and you have to simply “Yes And…” your way through your poems. It’s a perfect way to write during a writing block, since it somewhat halves the burden of thinking up poems from a nebulous, infinite groupthink. But, I’d say something quite cliche about “advice” when approaching a collaborative project, which is to “always approach it with an open mind,” since all decisions are going to be doubly complicated. KdP: Haha yes, in collaborative writing you receive a lot of energy from the other person, but you also have to cede some agency to the collective project. In order for that to work, you need to have some kind of baseline overlap of interest and perspective. You don’t have to have identical poetics, but you have to admire the other person’s way of thinking and doing and be excited by how they might take over and expand upon your work. I don’t think it’s possible to be playful and explorative in a creative environment if you don’t trust the other person. AS: This book is strikingly unique. I can’t think of another book of poetry that is quite like it. Can you talk about the books that influenced this one and how? Did you bring different influences to it? And how did you situate this book as you were writing it? KdP: Kess and I often cite Sarah Dowling’s scholarly study Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism when we talk about G. We are also both very into Mirene Arsanios’ Notes on Mother Tongues and The Autobiography of a Language. We’re both very invested in multilingual, translingual, and translational writing as a practice of working with language across the artificial demarcations of English or Afrikaans or Persian or whatever, to consider language as one big field in which semantic meaning and understanding are just one element of much broader relevance. This theoretical reading precedes or follows G, though. We never sat down with the intention of applying our intellectual interests to poetry. The tenets of such a theoretical intervention is much more visceral anyway. I’ll talk for myself here (but I think this is true for Kess too): I exist in, between, through, and in relation to multiple languages. Writing translingually is a reflection of the way I think and live. KM: Exactly, exactly, couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ll just add that, as always, Erín Moure’s decades-long work in the field of poetics across linguistic and national borders influences us both as well. AS: Although this book is unique, at the same time, it feels very much like a natural extension of the work you have both been doing on your own. How does this project relate to your writing as individual poets? Is it, in fact, an extension of it or an offshoot of it? KdP: Absolutely. As you already know, my debut collection Ekke functions translingually between English and Afrikaans. G is a continuation, for sure, but also an expansion. Collaboratively it expands into Persian through Kess’ invitation of me into the language. But even in the way that I approached G, there is a fuller playfulness brought about by the expanded field of my poetics intersecting with Kess’ way of doing. The meeting point of our poetries felt permissive of a lot more experimentation. I let anything happen that I wanted to do in the moment. The poetry didn’t feel as pinned down by the definition of who Klara du Plessis and her work is, and so ironically G let me be more me. Before G was released I expected it to feel like an interim book of sorts, something temporally between Hell Light Flesh and my forthcoming collection Post-Mortem of the Event. Instead it very much feels like my book, our book yes, but our book in a way that doesn’t distinguish it from the books that I’ve authored alone. Kess has done other collaborative writing before. I hadn’t written poetry in this way before, but I have collaborated with other visual artists and musicians. I’m very open to working with other people. I think it often strengthens what one is able to do alone. KM: I’d just say that on a broader level, outside of direct influences of writers outside ourselves, for ME this was a project that I got to make with my poetry hero and mentor, Klara, so for me, as much as Klara is a collaborator here and a central voice, her previous work Ekke is very loud in how I write in this book. Klara’s voice is the GENESIS of my multilingual voice and therefore Klara is both a writer AND a major influence on this book, if that makes any sense haha. AS: This book is, at least in part, about language, about the way it moves, morphs, about the connections between, in and through languages. Can you talk about the understanding of language that you brought to this book? Did it shift and evolve over the course of the writing? KM: Well, one interesting thing is that our manuscript did not undergo a rigorous line editing process, HOWEVER, our editor Jim Johnstone made a complete overhaul in the flow of the manuscript based on the chronology of the poems. As Klara said the manuscript was mostly composed during summer 2020, but by the time we began editing in 2022, we saw a pattern that we had not noticed before. We had begun the manuscript with what I’d call the “play half” and had ended on a “discussion half.” The beginning of the collaboration was just the two of us in a constant state of play with words, sounds, and language, while by the end it had morphed into inquiry into the depths of language itself. The major overhaul was that in the beginning, the “play” was somewhat bookended (literally hah), but after the edit the book began on ideological discussions of language and ended on a whole lot of play. That’s when we decided to compose “SPEECH,” just so we could have a section AFTER “play,” to once again bookend the book in genuine inquiry into language. By composing “SPEECH” we ended up inadvertently creating a flow from WRITTEN LANGUAGE > SOUND PLAY > SPEECH which we’re so delighted with. AS: The first poem in the book ends with the line “relax into the hospitality of meaning,” and there seems to be an openness to the writing, a willingness to embrace possibilities as they arrive. What kind of discoveries did you make as you worked on these poems? Did you come to them with set ideas that you worked out, or did that grow and evolve as you wrote them? KdP: I’ll jump in here as the quotation is my line. Initially, it read “relax into the conspiracy of meaning.” I intended to invoke a sense of the false belief in meaning, how we all pretend to understand words and sentences when their meaning can almost infinitely be deferred if we just start scratching at it a little. I didn’t think about it too much, but then our editor, Jim Johnstone, suggested titling the whole book as The Conspiracy of Meaning and I really hated the conniving complicity implied by the word “conspiracy.” I realized that I want to emphasize the openness to possibility instead, as you rightly picked up from the poems, and “hospitality” felt like a better choice. Kess and I also performed hospitality into our respective languages. Kess invited me to use Persian words as mediated by their knowledge of the language, and I welcomed Kess into Afrikaans. AS: I’m interested in the granular details of craft. Can you pick a line or a stanza that you particularly like or that you had to struggle with, and walk through the process of composing it? Where did it start? How did you change and develop it? Because of the unique composition of this book, could you each do this for one of the poems that you composed on your own, and then do it together for one of the poems that was composed collaboratively? KdP: I’m finding this question difficult to approach. I don’t intend this to sound grandiose at all, but at a granular level, I can’t say that I “struggle.” For me, writing tends to happen in a very embodied state. There is a feeling and during that feeling writing flows. Also due to the strong momentum of Kess’ contributions driving me forward, poems just seemed to drop out of me. The struggle happened more during the editorial phase. As Kess mentioned earlier, Jim moved poems around so that the book starts with the poem on page 9 rather than the poem on page 21, which was the original order. I loved this shift; however, the original order of the book’s central section, what Kess calls the “play half,” didn’t work for me. It felt too playful, too messy, too cluttered. This was about a month before we needed to hand in the final manuscript and I remember being extremely stressed, partially because I was also completing both my doctoral dissertation and I’mpossible collab for a similar deadline, and partially because I felt like my editorial intervention might go against what Kess would want. I was in Cape Town at the time. All the poems were on the floor and I was cutting ruthlessly. I probably cut 40 pages or so, and drastically transformed the page flow into how the book now appears in print. What seems like an organic progression of poems in G is actually a re-curation of all the raw materials we produced in the first massive writing spurt. For example, the poem of page 26 that ends “exploding / into / binary / fractals” didn’t precede the poem on page 27 that starts “The binary is a tactile shade.” That continuity was created later. But yeah, my lines “Did I ever tell you that I am the curtain? / fluttering and fluctuating with my one single wing” would never have existed without Kess’ “Did I ever tell you we were roommates with a curtain as a divide? / Did I ever tell you you can peek through no matter what I’m doing on the other side.” There are these wondrous moments of poetry that slide vectors of energy between my writing and Kess’ writing and vice versa. G’s intensity is collective and collaborative. KM: I have a great memory when it comes to language. I remember quite accurately when I first read/ heard or wrote every 1 percenter word, and remember pretty much 90 percent of first encounters with most 20 percenter words. Of course I don’t remember my first encounters with words as simple as “house”, but I remember exactly where, how and from whom I heard the term “demagogue” or when I first wrote down the phrase “Divorced from reality” and which line of thought resulted in that neuron ladder firing towards that specific net of words firing in proximity of each other. What I’m trying to say, however painstakingly slow, is that I actually remember a little bit too much of the granular, molecular structure of my poems, but I’ll try to focus on something more specifically interesting. for example I remember while writing the piece below:
I was reading Bataille’s Erotism, whose introduction ends with the sentence “Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.” on a day where I had to replace my health card, lining up for 1 hour and 45 minutes at an Etobicoke strip mall where I spent half my time reading Bataille and the other half staring at the bodies, abstracted in their marble reflections.
I can go on endlessly. I’ll leave it here for now. AS: What question haven’t you been asked about this book that you would like to be asked? And can you answer it? KdP: In a South African context, there is a political dimension to G which I think gets eclipsed by its playfulness and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E dimension in North America. The guttural g sound so prevalent in Afrikaans is very frequently denigrated as sonically unaesthetic. English speakers can’t even seem to make the sound. Afrikaans has a history of oppression over local languages and peoples in South Africa, and it simultaneously exists within a lineage of conflict with English. There is an inherent tension to using Afrikaans and English together. Differently phrased, placing g central, both as the collection’s title and as the structuring principle of the collaboration, G celebrates and returns agency to a central frisson of the language’s production. As a result, I think, G is doing really well in South Africa. I performed at the Tuin van Digters festival last year and made an appearance on the television series Fiësta; G received a full page review in the national newspaper Die Burger and serves as partial inspiration for a virtual conference hosted by UNISA, “Talking Cultural Diversities. Translingual Poetics and Multilingual Poetries.” And yet, G is not currently distributed in South Africa. I’d be curious to hear Kess talk about the Iranian community’s reception of G. KM: Iranians don’t like G for a simple reason: g isn’t the corresponding consonant for the voiceless velar fricative X in ANY of the standardized or non-standardized romanizations. The ONLY reason I picked g as replacement for the usual kh was to create a meeting place for our languages, a space for the “hospitality” that we spoke about. (Let me remind you that my name Khashayar starts with that fricative! So BELIEVE ME I KNOW). Most Iranians who approach the book don’t even engage with it over this very simple fact, but the point is that when there is “play,” there are also “parameters for play” and we’ve rigorously defined our parameters. Dear Iranians! Just Let Us Play!!! Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, 2022’s Arc Poem of the year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript "G" is out with Palimpsest press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems "Daffod*ls" is out with Pamenar Press. Their Translation of Ghazal Mosadeq’s “Andarzname” is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse Fall 2025. Their fifth poetry manuscript “Book of Interruptions” is forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn Fall 2025.
Klara du Plessis is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, literary curator, and poet. Her most recent publications include G, translingual poetry composed in collaboration with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, and I’mpossible collab, a collection of literary essays. Post-mortem of the event is forthcoming fall 2024 from Palimpsest Press.
Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books) is his first novel.
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