I met poet and teacher Shahé Mankerian for the first time through Zoom, eight months into the pandemic. We were part of a small team of poets reviewing submissions for the Tennessee-based journal Rockvale Review. As we gathered virtually from locations across the country, it was Shahé’s voice through the computer that I remember most distinctly—low and soft, his voice was gravel and honey.
Shahé’s most recent collection of poetry—History of Forgetfulness (Fly on the Wall Press, October 2021)—is a study in opposites. Through delicate and concise poems, he writes of his experience growing up in Lebanon in 1975, just as the tentacles of civil war begin to take hold. The world is bleak, and still there is the sweetness of rose water and pomegranate paste.
I gravitated towards Shahé’s work, recognizing themes of the Middle East I saw surface in my own poetry that chronicled my parents’ immigration to the U.S. and Canada from Egypt in the 1970s.
In a Q&A email exchange in November 2022, we learned that our stories are vastly different, and still one similarity holds firm like a kernel at both our centers—we write so that we may not forget.
Yasmin Kloth: Shahé, when I read your collection, I was struck by the way your words manage to reveal our insides—what it means to be human. In the same way someone steps away from a painting in a museum still thinking about the artwork, what do you hope readers will take with them as they close your book?
SM: I believe one of the many jobs of any artist is to provide a reader, a listener, or a viewer with unforgettable images. In my early 20s, my first formal poetry class happened to be at Pasadena City College. The instructor, Ron Koertge, was an established poet and a young adult fiction writer. As we workshopped our poems, he advised us to make each line of our poems filmable. He said, “If the camera eye cannot capture each line of your poem, then don’t write it.” I took that advice to heart. Each poem in History of Forgetfulness could be a short film. Whether I’m describing someone’s inner turmoil or the outer chaos of war, I wrote with the descriptive honesty of a camera. So, what do I hope readers will take with them as they close my book? I want the reader to experience a war through the point of view of a child. No special effects. No judgement. No sectarian finger pointing. It’s the slow disintegration of innocence seen through the distant filter of being an adult in America.
Speaking of an observer who is distant from the land of her origins, Yasmin, you have employed a similar approach with your journey. Within your phenomenal collection, Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation (Kelsay Books, August 2022), the adult Yasmin (or the poet) tries to make meaning of a family history that came before and questions what lurks ahead. As you took me on this contemplative, picturesque journey, I realized we write because we want to make meaning of our past, the present, and the future. Like archeologists, we want to remove layers of glitter in order to touch the painful beauty of the past. I recognized this exercise of “meaning-making” in your collection. As you crafted these poems, what were some of the aha moments or layers of interesting discoveries?
YK: I think perhaps the biggest “aha moment” for me has been that there is still so much about my family, and where they come from, that I don’t understand. While on one level my collection of poems aims to bring me closer to my Middle Eastern heritage, at its core it asks the same questions of identity repeatedly throughout—what does it mean to be from here. As I try and uncover answers, the poems become more firmly rooted in memory and also in worlds imagined—the lives my 99- and 95-year-old grandmothers lived in Cairo and Alexandria; the thoughts my mother had when buying a rug at the souk; the questions my eight-year-old daughter will have about where she comes from. And because I lost my mother when I was twenty-seven, there is this sense of searching throughout—searching for the one person who could give me all the answers I’m looking for. Much like the archeologist, I ask and I imagine because I’m not really quite sure what I will find.
In the same way, Shahé, I see how memory, location, and geography play leading roles in your collection, oftentimes intersecting and overlapping within the same poem. A tooth is lost in Aleppo; a map outlines America; Beirut is a city of “water pipes, bridges, milk trucks, / and wounded hospitals”; a mother’s faulty memory “forgets to swallow / her blood pressure pills,” but “when she closes her eyes / she remembers everything.” For you, are memory and identity intertwined? When you reflect on what home means to you, what comes to mind?
SM: For a long time, our lives as immigrants in America felt a bit bipolar. We were bound by the tormented memories of our beloved Beirut, but we welcomed the sizzling hamburgers at Bob’s Big Boy. In 1979, while standing in line at Baskin-Robbins, I would daydream about the mulberry ice cream in Beirut. Thankfully, the only Armenian-American grocery in Pasadena belonged to my uncle. We made grilled cheese sandwiches in pita bread. Five times a day, like a prayer, Mama cleansed the harshness of Turkish coffee with See’s candy. My apologies to the gods for calling Armenian coffee, “Turkish.” Father eventually opened the second Armenian-American grocery in Pasadena and situated jars of rose water next to bottles of pancake syrup. We spread a tattered Persian carpet over the parquet floor. Every evening, we waited to see if Walter Cronkite would mention Lebanon in his nightly report. We were homesick, but the backseat of our new Chevrolet Caprice sure felt like heaven.
Yasmin, you have divided your book in three sections: “Grandmothers,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters.” Within these chapters, you are sharing the stories of generations of women. Yet, one cannot dismiss the subtitle of your collection is Poems of a Lost Generation. I am perfectly aware that your testament of these women is a way to prevent the loss. It reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s command in the last stanza of “One Art” where she proclaims: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Can you talk about the power of “writing it” and the prevention of loss?
YK: I wrote the early poems of this collection fast and furiously, as if I needed to put the words down so I wouldn’t lose the memories. Then, over time, I realized it became more of an exercise in capturing these stories for my daughter. If I can capture the “chocolate wafers in her cupboard / and glass bottles of Pepsi in the fridge” of my paternal grandmother’s Cairene apartment, then it exists forever and it exists for the next generation. That’s one way I view it. But in many ways, I think the act of writing about loss—loss of memory, loss of country, loss of mother, loss of time—was never to prevent it but instead to make it something real and tangible; to turn it into one of the many characters in my family’s story.
Shahé, your poems hold their own quiet power. Your words document the unspeakable through the senses: smell of mildew and urine; sound of explosions and the impending silence; sight of bloody shoe and threadbare sock; taste of glass shards. And yet gentle and soft observances in the everyday persist—
a jar of grape leaves, pomegranate paste,
a bottle of rose water.
Why was it important to strike a balance between what is broken and what is beautiful?
SM: A child living through war artificially becomes resilient to the daily atrocities and develops warped coping mechanisms. As a child, my subconscious must have gravitated toward the beautiful-mundane of Beirut in order to sedate the visual onslaught. I had to push the horrors to the backseat of my mind in order to create room for Mozart, the mosque, the dance of the mosquitos. As a poet, many years later, the balance of the broken and the beautiful eased naturally into my writing. If I wanted to make war palatable, the pomegranate paste had to coexist with the discarded bloody shoe of a child.
Yasmin, your book also dabbles in the realm of discovering a balance. As I read your poems, they reminded me of the weighing scales on the spice counters of Beirut, where I watched grocers practice the art of finding the precise balance. A similar artistry exists in your poems, particularly in the last poem of your book. In “Little Things,” you write: “Something about Los Angeles / reminds me of Cairo.” Being from Los Angeles, I immediately recognize the dichotomy of here and there. Since this is the last poem of the book, the last line—a question—resonates one of the major themes of your book perfectly: “Is it strange a palm tree here / looks like a palm tree there / and when they bend / like a bridge toward the sun / never seem to want the rain?” As immigrants, we are constantly battling with the brittleness of this balance. Can you talk about the importance of building secure bridges between the old and the new while maintaining a healthy balance?
YK: I often felt like my upbringing—an American-born kid to parents from Cairo, Egypt—was a balance between worlds. Inside our home, much looked like and felt like the Middle East—the food my mother prepared, the languages my parents spoke, the family they welcomed over, the music they played—it all invoked the feelings of somewhere over here. And then I’d step out the door and the world shifted into my American culture where I went to my American schools and spent time with my American friends. I think for a long time these worlds were separate—but as you point out, maintaining channels between the two are necessary because we are not all one, or all the other. For a time—and I can date the start of this feeling to when my mother passed away—I felt like I lost a strong and tangible connection to the Middle East. And as a result, I lost track of a part of myself. Writing this collection helped me to reengage with not only where my family comes from, but with the memories I had delicately tucked away for many years.
Like many poets, Shahé, you have a full-time job on top of your passion and talent for writing. As a principal of an Armenian preschool – 8th grade private school in Pasadena, CA, what surprises you most about your students and how they understand, think about, and write poetry?
SM: I live the duality of my existence daily. I am confident that an Armenian or an English poem is being read in one of the classrooms at least every school hour and we have continued the tradition of memorizing and reciting poetry both in English and in Armenian. We write together; we struggle as writers. I pass on the mantra, “Write poems that are filmable.” I make them write at least 100 words a day, a practice that is easy to sustain for the rest of their lives. I usually start the year with the famous poem “so you want to be a writer?” by Charles Bukowski. We discuss the lines: “unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket, / unless being still would / drive you to madness or / suicide or murder, / don’t do it. / unless the sun inside you is / burning your gut, / don’t do it. / when it is truly time, / and if you have been chosen, / it will do it by / itself and it will keep on doing it / until you die or it dies in you. / there is no other way. / and there never was.” Those lines capture my year-long journey with them. Yet, Bukowski does not impress them as much as the leftover scars on each hand, the surgically removed traces of my 11th and 12th fingers.
I know time is our biggest enemy. Being a parent, a spouse, and managing a full-time job, when do you find time to write? Do you have rituals or disciplines? Do share. I might steal some of your routines.
YK: I was going to turn to you for this advice! I wish I had more best practices to impart as I am a very undisciplined writer. I often feel as if I squeeze writing opportunities in when my husband and daughter are asleep—either late at night or I’ll wake up early. But I do also try to share the practice with my daughter, who likes to carry around a journal and a pen. I’ll set up my computer at the kitchen table and she’ll sit next to me. Her small pieces of writing—the pure, clear thoughts of what she sees and thinks about—are always poems in their own right.
To close Shahé, what does your next project look like?
SM: I am working on my next book of poetry. The working title is The Boy with Twelve Fingers. Like the poet Lucille Clifton, I was also born with 12 fingers. From the title of the collection, one might predict it’s the awkward immigrant story of a Lebanese-Armenian boy trying to fit in. It’s a coming-of-age story that encapsulates most of my middle school and high school years in Pasadena, CA.
And in the same vein, Yasmin, what does your next project look like?
YK: I thought after writing Ancestry Unfinished I would be done writing about the Middle East, but the stories seem to have hung on and continue to pour out. I’m starting to see a series form around the use of language and the beauty in vocabulary—these are poems that explore the meanings of words in both English and Arabic. I’m not quite sure yet what the collection looks like, but there is something very newly emerging.
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Yasmin Mariam Kloth’s writing explores love, loss, place, and space with a focus on her Middle Eastern heritage. Yasmin’s work has appeared in various outlets, including JuxtaProse, Rockvale Review, and LA Times. Her first collection of poetry, Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation, is available from Kelsay Books.
Poet Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School. He is on the board of International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). His debut poetry collection, History of Forgetfulness, was published by the Fly on the Wall Press in October of 2021.