Sara Elkamel on Surrealism, Myth, and Gender in “Field of No Justice”

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Elkamel's poems have appeared in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, The Boiler, Memorious, wildness, Nimrod International Journal, The Rumpus, Jet Fuel Review, etc.

Her work has also been featured as part of the anthologies Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me, and 20.35 Africa: Vol. 2. She was named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, and a finalist in Narrative Magazine's 30 Below Contest in the same year. Elkamel’s debut chapbook “Field of No Justice” will be published by the African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books in 2021.

WSR: Thank you for sitting down to do this. I loved the book, and I loved reading it. Throughout the whole book, I was really fascinated by the relationship between the devoted and the devotee, in particular, how it’s explored in the poem titled, “I Don't Want to Call You God so I Ask You to Call Me God,” published in The Common as “The Battle of the Camel.” Could you talk about what informs your thinking on this dynamic? 

Sara Elkamel: I think this poem is very much about masculinity. I feel like I'm always writing about the relationship of the male and female bodies to the larger political context in Egypt where there are just so many different weights to the body, and ways of using the body, and spaces where the body is allowed and not allowed to exist. Violence is also applied differently to the different genders. In this poem, I was writing from the perspective of a woman speaker who’s experimenting with stepping into the shoes of a man (both figuratively and literally), in this case, her lover. 

In the title, when I say, “I don't want to call you God, so I ask you to call me God,” I think I'm, in a way, equating the beloved, a man, with God, to explore the scale of masculinity. Also, in the Arabic language (and the Quran), God is always referred to as a Him. Language is much more gendered in Arabic than in English, I feel, and because it's my mother tongue, it informs a lot of my perception of what words mean and signify. 

This poem specifically was inspired by Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I was really moved by his use of personal narratives and characters to talk about a situation, a calamity, that is collective and political. I think I was trying to do something similar.

WSR: I see your use of personal narrative and characters throughout the book. I see a lot of surrealism as well. Sometimes, the things we're presented with are not actually the things we're presented with, they change later on in the poem, whether it be the objects or characters, or the activities these characters engage in, they're all quite surreal. I'm thinking of all the dolls being beaten in “Buried at Sea,” and things like that. It is also described in a very, very beautiful high lyric.

The question I have is twofold: one being, what initially drew you to the lyric, and what influences your desire to change the environment in that way?

SE: That's a great question. I have a deep desire to talk about subjects like violence, revolution, and gender. But I also feel like doing it in a strictly documentary way doesn't necessarily serve my purposes, so I stray towards the surreal. 

When surrealism started in Europe, it was a reaction to fascism; artists had this desire to lean on imagination, likely as a way to resist being confined to a political dictation of how life should be, especially if it's unjust and xenophobic and horrible. 

In Egypt, there was also a parallel surrealist movement, established in the late ‘30s, called the Art and Liberty Group. Founded by the artist Georges Henein, the group sought to spotlight the struggles of the masses, including poverty, oppression, and colonialism. The Egyptian surrealists insisted that imagination was a key revolutionary force; it was the only way to dream up a better life.

I know that we’re living in a completely different context right now, but I think my own attraction to surrealism can also be traced back to this impulse to respond to the injustices that I've witnessed over the past 10 years, specifically in the Egyptian revolution, but also within various other contexts around the world. 

For now, I just don't know how to engage with oppression in any other way than creating these surreal landscapes because it's too difficult to look at as fact. But also, looking back, I think the dreams that we had for our country were tragically surreal, as in, unattainable and utopic. So, it just makes sense to me, I think, to stay within that surreal realm, in a way preserving the energy of this hope for a better future. 

Another way in which I try to escape looking at difficult realities dead on is through engaging with mythology. I'm very inspired by Anne Carson, as you know. In her work, I feel like mythology is not divorced from the contemporary; she finds a way to combine both. In a way, I think that's what I'm trying to do. 

I'm also very interested in objects and their symbolism, as well as their performative potential. I took this performance studies class at NYU called Theories of the Fetish, with Barbara Browning, which helped me think through how objects can, and do, make things happen. We looked specifically at minkisi, central African object-poems, or spirit-inhabited charms, often used in a healing context. Metaphors were typically worked into the minkisi, and that was assumed to make them “work”—hence the relationship between poetry and objects. 

WSR: Yes, I did notice that your poems are so populated with objects and these are, again, surreal objects. I'm looking at “The Most Unlikely of Passages” now, talking about the Museum of Mothers and the friend who carries around a bag of needles. 

In this poem, there are sculptures that are not sculptures, but trees. There are so many objects and they're so layered in their meaning. I think that's a really unique aspect of your work.

SE: So, in “The Most Unlikely of Passages,” the character Rheim is actually inspired by the Iraqi American artist Rheim Alkadhi. I met her a few years ago at Spring Sessions, a 45-day artist residency during which we walked as a group from the north to the south of Jordan. 

When we stopped at Wadi Rum, Rheim held a workshop where she gave each of us a needle and instructed us to thread grains of sand through its eye, and also asked us to look through its narrow eye at the surrounding landscape. I kept thinking about our interaction with the needles for months, and then I learned that in 2013, Rheim had exhibited a number of objects she collected through some form of exchange with their original keepers, including a set of needles she bought from Iraqi women. 

Like Rheim, I feel like my work is a collage of the people I meet, the things I read, the places I go, and what kind of things stay in me and with me. I also try to incorporate objects in my poems that would symbolize something for the reader. For me, the bag of needles is kind of bizarre, but also tender. I think a lot about texture, and I think of the weight of things in my hands. Ultimately, I feel like I furnish my poems with objects that would match the overall landscape or tone that I am going for. 

WSR: If one were to write an academic paper about your poems, I think that would be a really interesting subject—to track the objects throughout it. I definitely see them throughout the work.

I'm really moved by what you said about the lyric and the surreal as being a place where the dream seems real. I see a lot of Carl Phillips in your work, as well. Could you speak about his influence on your work? Or of any other influences on your work that lead you to this point?

SE: Carl Phillips is one of the first poets I read, and definitely one of my favorite poets. When I first encountered his work, I think I was so enchanted by it because I found it inaccessible. I think it has something to do with his syntax and the ability of his speakers to move between registers, from recounting a memory to making really earnest observations about love or the way the world works. I think his poems sometimes cross the line into philosophy, but at the same time, they’re very much rooted in storytelling and narrative. 

I learned to write by copying other poets, which is something I got from painting. I learned to paint by copying the artists I was obsessed with. So, when I was starting out as a poet, I would take a poem of Carl Phillips’, and try to mimic the form and structure—how it moved from beginning, middle, and end. I also experimented with the transition from lyric to narrative philosophical musing. 

WSR: Returning to the question I asked you about the devoted and the devotee, I see the push and the pull between those two things in your work a lot. I think it's similar to how he can push and pull in his work between two things, between the desiring and the desired. But I also think your work is distinctly different, both in terms of its subject matter, but then also in terms of how I locate myself. It's almost like being introduced to your world, which is a very beautiful, interesting, and specific world.

In terms of the chapbook as a whole, I love the progression throughout, from “Search and Rescue” to “Heaven” at the end. First off, in terms of titles, that's a great opening and great ending; it really comes full circle. Can you talk about the ordering and the progression? 

SE: Yes. So, I can't take credit for that. One of the really great things about being published by the African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic, is that we get to work with either Kwame Dawes or Chris Abani on our manuscripts. So, I worked with Kwame on “Field of No Justice,” and with his guidance, it changed and went through many versions to arrive at this final form. 

Our vision for an arc was basically to begin with poems of origin and self-discovery of gender, and move through themes of political resistance to finally arrive at the exploration of the personal and political. Kwame’s support was invaluable in making this arc more clear and coherent. 

Throughout the book, there is this thread of mythology, and I feel like there is a parallel body or spirit to the chapbook. I hope that as the reader goes through the collection, they kind of become accustomed to its strangeness, and that every time they encounter an object or a speaker that is out of the ordinary, they grow to accept and befriend them.

WSR: That's definitely what happened as I was reading. Because like I said, there's a disorientation that happens. You think of disorientation as a negative thing. I think it's quite hard to do it in a dreaming or a positive, almost hopeful perspective. So, I was really moved by that. 

I loved the end poem “[Heaven],” that I'm looking at right now. I think it really embodies what you were speaking about with moving to the political. It really sort of encapsulates the book in that, there's no heaven, or there is heaven, but it's just these bodies becoming something else and the way we're grounded in the physical, which we are throughout these poems. We are very much grounded in the physical and in the sensory, even if the sensory is what's being perceived as changing. What do you see the role of the sensory as being?

SE: I wrote “Heaven” two years ago in Sinai, just as the sun was setting. I always set these bizarre timeframes for myself to work within, and for “Heaven”, it was, “I will start this poem in the golden hour, and it has to be done by the time the sun sets.” I often make up crazy stakes to fully inhabit the constraint. In this case, I convinced myself that “I will not see in the dark,” so the poem had to be done before it was night.

I had just been in the desert in Jordan for 10 days before I went to Sinai. I don't think I got in a car for various weeks. I think something about the sensory overload that's a part of my life in Cairo or in New York was absent. A layer had been shaved off.  

The poem did come from this place of stillness. The Red Sea was right in front of me, and I could see Saudi Arabia’s mountains behind it. Something about that stillness felt like the end of the world but not in a painful way. I do think the poem is kind of depressing; to suggest heaven as “only the future,” no grand reveal. I sometimes feel like there's an angst, or even anger, in my work.  

Going back to the beginning, and our discussion about surrealism, I think sometimes I could be using surrealism out of a place of being fed up with reality. My poetics could basically be described as: This sucks. I'm leaving. But also, I’m carrying around the sense that there is no leaving, we’re kind of trapped here, so the joke is on me.

WSR: Yeah, when I said joyful, I don't think your political purpose is lost in that. I'm not saying, you know, at the end it was all flowers and roses. It's whatever joy comes from, I think, like witnessing beauty, which is a complicated feeling. At least for me. 

I think that poem is elegiac, but I also think it's so beautiful. Ending with “maybe I could bury our bodies in sugar,” just that “maybe I could” is really doing so much in espousing a type of possibility. I mean, that's a type of dream to have, and it's a dream of physicality and the body. It’s very beautiful.