Jenna Lanzaro
An Interview with Nuar Alsadir
Nuar Alsadir is fascinated by the mind. Her 2017 Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press) buzzes with lyrical impulse while reckoning with lyric’s limitations: there is no “now,” “because it takes our brains eight milliseconds to process any data into a conscious thought,” and “self” is a convenient generalization for something more multitudinous and complex.
One of the many magics of Alsadir is her ability to create both an intellectual and a felt experience. Of her forthcoming Animal Joy (Graywolf Press), her editors write, “An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints.”
Below, Alsadir and I discuss writing within and through constraint, and how to honor “the full dimensionality of experience.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Fourth Person Singular, you write, “What works intellectually doesn’t always work in the gut and vice versa . . . ” How do intellect and gut interact, cooperate, and/or oppose one another for you?
NUAR ALSADIR: Different parts of the brain control logical thinking and emotional experience. When you’re in a strong emotional state, your rational brain often goes offline, whereas rigorous intellectual ideas don’t always account for emotional experience. As I see it, poetry engages both modes of processing in a way that is different from other kinds of writing. The frequent demand that poems deliver meaning seems misguided to me. Why write poetry if your aim is to communicate a logical idea?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In “The Craft of Writing Empathy,” you detail ways of knowing and being known. In my own work, I’ve found I discover things about myself after they’ve moved from my mind to the page, when I regard them with distance. To what degree does writing act as exposure or self-discovery?
NUAR ALSADIR: I think writing reveals the self you are—or were—in the space-time you occupied while writing. I discuss in Fourth Person Singular the idea that there is no “now” because it takes our brains eight milliseconds to process any data into a conscious thought. By the time our perception of ourselves registers, we have already moved on (however slightly) from a particular self and are looking back at a distance (however minuscule) so that the perceived I becomes a not-I. The idea of a singular, unified self is perhaps a kind of generalization across our many selves that we create for convenience. Maybe the sense of discovery you are describing occurs when a singular, momentary self seems to step out of the flux and is apprehended in all its specificity.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In a talk at NYU, you discussed how all writing is heavily filtered through our own experiences, memories, consumed media, biases, et cetera, whether the writing acknowledges it or not. Fourth Person Singular directly names its influences, with quotes, diagrams, and extensive notes. Is this practice for you one of transparency? Ethics? Craft?
NUAR ALSADIR: I would say all the above. The boundaries we think of as existing around ourselves are illusory. On the first day of biology class in college, the professor informed us that what we think of as our interior is really part of the external world. He used the example of our digestive system, which, replete with bacteria, is arguably the external environment housed within our bodies with two openings at either end. I later became fixated on a parallel metaphoric boundary we place around the mind. There is no region in the body you can point to containing it—the mind is within our bodies and relational, encompasses our perception of experiences and those experiences themselves, what we feel and what fires when we witness the feeling of others. The mind is everywhere, spread across our bodies and beyond, in quantum entanglement with the universe around us. To separate my thoughts and feelings from the thoughts and feelings of those around me, as well as the cultural and historical moment I occupy and all that encompasses, would be like blocking out the full dimensionality of my experience.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Some portions of Fourth Person Singular are redacted. Are these places where language fails? Can language fail?
NUAR ALSADIR: I suppose you would have to explain what you think of as failure and success. If the goal is to communicate an idea that other people have been trained to approach and understand logically, I think language is very successful. Whereas, if you want to use language to accurately express what is inside you without calibrating it to others, you need to use it in a way that communicates more than logic. Rhythm, music, sounds that target the body communicate other kinds of meaning that can be layered with the meanings offered by words. Poetry, to me, is all about this kind of layering of different levels and modes of communication.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How is Fourth Person Singular organized/ordered? What role does non-sequitur play in the text?
NUAR ALSADIR: There is no sense of time in the unconscious and because Fourth Person Singular tries to communicate meaning at multiple levels I did not foreground linear, logical thinking. What you are calling “non-sequitur” I would call associative thinking. Psychoanalysis is all about free association, following the mind, its patterns of thought and meaning. If you follow the mind closely enough for long enough, trusting, resisting the urge to guide it toward recognizable meaning, you will likely land at revelation. I’m always interested in what gets revealed when a person steps out of their own way, stops trying to make meaning for others and explores what is inside them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’re a practicing psychoanalyst as well as a writer. How do those two things interact? How does a writing practice fit within your life?
NUAR ALSADIR: Both poetry and psychoanalysis try to understand multiple levels of experience, the mind and the body, reality and fantasy thought, our internal structure and how external rules and constraints influence it. With both, the focus is not simply on what happens but how we experience that happening, how it changes us, makes us who we are. At least momentarily. For me, psychoanalysis and poetry also both trust the associative paths the mind takes. For this reason, I am kind to myself during phases when I’m not producing much because I’m able to remind myself that whatever it is I am doing will likely reveal itself to have been part of the work in ways I may not yet see.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Tell me about your new project, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation.
NUAR ALSADIR: Animal Joy is a book of creative nonfiction written in the associative way I was just talking about. I think of it as the book I wrote while trying to write a book about laughter. It’s hard for me to describe the final result, but I had a lot of fun writing it.