AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Before We Turn to Dust

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Before We Turn to Dust.

In 2008, a man in Italy, in a small village outside Venice, shot and killed his sleeping wife, then put the gun to his own head. When the local newspaper ran the story, they found a psychiatrist who explained what happened (a guy, by the way, who had never even met the couple). The woman had suffered from Alzheimer’s, he said, for a decade and a half, so the man, in an act of “extreme love,” euthanized her, his wife of 50 years, after which he was so bereft at finding himself without the love of his life, that he shot himself, too. The psychiatrist asked the readers to have empathy for the loving husband: “Imagine the atrocious inner conflict he must have endured.”

In reality, the “loving husband” was a lifelong fascist who kept a bust of Mussolini locked away in a closet, and who physically and psychologically abused his wife throughout their marriage, as well as their two daughters, disappointed, as he was, that his wife had not given him a male heir.

Finally, this male heir did come along, in the form of a grandson. The idea was that the grandson would continue the lineage of his clan that had been in Venice almost a thousand years.

But that did not happen. When the grandson was seven years old, he moved away, together with his Italian mother and Iranian father, to Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, where almost everyone is foreign. And he grew up speaking Italian, French, English and Arabic. He has been moving ever since. Today, the poet, essayist and translator André Naffis-Sahely lives in California, to which he dedicated many of the poems in his latest collection, titled High Desert. Here’s our conversation.

Helena de Groot: The ways in which you led your life, it makes me feel like you’re as far away from your grandfather as can be. You know, like, you grew up in this country where nine out of 10 people are foreign. You know, you grew up speaking four languages, I think.

André Naffis-Sahely: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And then since then, you’ve also moved so often that, you know, you couldn’t glorify your, quote-unquote heimat if your life depended on it.

André Naffis-Sahely: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Helena de Groot: But you also lived in a place where, let me see, like, despite the fact that there were nine out of 10 people were foreigners, it was hardly, you know, a cosmopolitan paradise, because of this system called kafala. So can you give me a bit of a primer on what it is and how it affected your family in particular?

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah. So my father’s been working in the UAE on and off since 1980. So he really saw the transformation of the country from essentially a postcolonial backwater with very little infrastructure into the first class welfare state that it is today. And he was part of this generation that essentially built the place from scratch. One among millions, it has to be said. And under that system, essentially, there’s no such thing as the civic kind of right to belong. It doesn’t matter how long you stay in that country. Could be 10 years, it could be 20, it could be 30. You never acquire citizenship. You can never acquire, for example, like the US version of the green card where you’re not a citizen but you are a permanent resident, and all the civic rights, however limited, that come with that. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been there for 30 years, you’re still someone who’s just passing through. And that means that there’s also this idea that people shouldn’t mix. So the Emirates very much keep themselves, they have their own communities. And even within the foreign community, you’ll find that there are neighborhoods just for Indian people or just for Arabs or just for Europeans. And so it was an intensely segregated place.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And can you just tell me a little bit more about, like, what the practical implications are of not being a citizen, you know, when it comes to, like, healthcare and legal protections or education or like any number of things.

André Naffis-Sahely: Absolutely. I mean, the implications are, as you can imagine, endless, really. You know, recently I’ve been having trouble with my leg again because about 20 years ago, I had an accident in Abu Dhabi, and I’ve got a metal plate in my leg. And part of the reason I’m still having medical issues in that regard is because the healthcare that I got in Abu Dhabi was atrocious. I mean, essentially, I was sent to a hospital where workers were sent to die. And it’s something that I witnessed firsthand, unfortunately. This was when I was 16.

Helena de Groot: Whoa.

André Naffis-Sahely: And I think the experience has haunted me ever since. But I still consider myself immensely lucky because I survived.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: And I think that when it comes to the separation between the Emirati locals and the foreigners of whatever stripe is that there’s no habeas corpus, for example, so that there are no legal rights that one can rely on. Workers, especially coming from South Asia, their passports get confiscated by employers, and essentially under the kafala system, you are essentially living a life of indentured servitude, because employers tend to not just confiscate your passport, but they are your employment providers. They are also, within that system, your housing providers, and they are also your visa sponsors. So there’s just no such thing as jiving off at work because that immediately threatens not just your position, but your housing and your ability to remain within the country. One of the reasons that I left at the age of 18 was because I actually ran out of my father’s visa. Because my father was able to sponsor his children under his own visa up until the age of 18. And so when that clock ran out, I had two very simple choices. Either I left the UAE and made my fortune elsewhere, or I would remain in the UAE, find myself a job, and then with that job would come the offer of visa sponsorship and housing, because they’re usually quite closely related.

Helena de Groot: Hm.

André Naffis-Sahely: I think the case of a lot of, let’s say, more privileged Westerners, there can be a slight degree of separation where your employer is not necessarily also your visa sponsor or your landlord, but that’s limited to a very small section of the people there.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah. And so the majority have to live under that system. And there’s some offshoots that I think that were, of that practice that I think were truly terrifying. I mean, Emirati women, for example, who for the most part have been discouraged from entering working life, were nonetheless—and this was seen as a way in which they could earn some money independently of their male relatives. They were given the right to sponsor up to three taxi drivers under their own sort of personal citizenship, let’s say.

Helena de Groot: And what do you mean that that was an alternative to make or like a possibility for them to make money? What was in it for them? Did they make money off that?

André Naffis-Sahely: Well, yes, because it’s a business. So they were able to sponsor visas, meaning they were then entitled to a percentage of said taxi driver’s earnings. So these taxi drivers were essentially being tived. And quite often they would also help provide accommodation, which then meant, you know, making additional income. So essentially, they’re—immigrants in the UAE, I think, were very much seen as just money-making instruments rather than real people. And there was also this idea, and I think this is something that the Emiratis don’t often like to talk about, but there’s this idea running through their recent history whereby they saw immigration as a necessary evil in order to essentially benefit from the vast natural resources they possess, chiefly oil and gas. But that at the same time, this taint of immigration would eventually be wiped clean, and they would go back to an ethnically pure society where they could thrive just amongst each other. And that legacy, those, you know, 40, 50 years where essentially their country was built up from scratch, none of the so-called temporary people would remain. They wouldn’t intermarry either. I mean, I remember when I was in my early to mid teens, one of my closest friends was Emirati. His father was Emirati and belonged to quite a prominent family, actually. And around the time that we were 14, he was temporarily stripped of his citizenship because he had an American mother. And there was this policy that no, actually, you have to be a full-blooded Emirati in order to maintain your citizenship. I think that was reversed precisely because his father belonged to an influential family. But that is something that a lot of people would not have been able to do. And it’s something that’s also been quite frowned upon.

Helena de Groot: Mm, wow.

André Naffis-Sahely: So it was an intensely ironic situation, you know, because essentially they had almost overnight created this very cosmopolitan society that then they spent most of their time trying to evade and trying to run away from. And again, there’s this idea that you could just wipe the slate clean at some point and go back to the way things were.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: Which is, of course, ridiculous in the sense that even if they’d never had the need to import foreigners in order to build up this country, the fact that they went from a nomadic society where, you know, in the summer, they would settle by the sea and go diving for pearls, and in the winter they would go back to their oasis towns in the desert and farm. That way of life was completely destroyed by the advent of oil and by the decisions they made. So there is no going back. And, you know, to loop this back to the legacy of fascism, I think that in many ways that’s—and I wouldn’t necessarily describe the Emirati government as fascist, but there’s definitely overlap in the sense that fascism is built on this idea that former glories can be recaptured so long as you’re manly and strong enough to actually single handedly rescue humanity from the so-called mistakes that it made, that you can press the rewind button, the reset button.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

André Naffis-Sahely: And that’s just not something that we’ve seen at any point in civilization. Change isn’t arrestable.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a poem from High Desert. It’s the one on page 13, “The Other Side of Nowhere.”

André Naffis-Sahely: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: But before you read it, can you give me a little bit of context about what happened to your father?

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah, my father was briefly put in prison. And again, this is partly the, if not entirely the result of the fact that immigrants there have no legal recourse whatsoever. He was working for a real estate company and money went missing. Eventually it turned out to be the mismanagement of a senior official at that company. But essentially, until they could figure out what was going on, they decided to jail the majority of people working in that office. Essentially, the idea was, put everyone in jail and then we’ll figure out who’s actually guilty or not. So he wound up spending about four months in prison while the authorities sorted out exactly who was at fault. And I think one of the most grievous injuries done to him as well is, he was only allowed out at the time on the condition of him signing a document that said that he would never sue the government or the company itself for wrongful imprisonment, which I always found darkly humorous in many ways because of the fact that he never needed to sign that document in the first place, because as an immigrant, he didn’t really have the right to sue the government. So it felt like unnecessary insurance that the government took out.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, almost like humiliation or something.

André Naffis-Sahely: Essentially, yes. And I think the worst part of it for him was after spending four months in prison completely unjustly, he then went back to work for that company. And the reason he went back to work for that company is because, especially once you’ve been in prison, it’s very difficult to find employment elsewhere, you know?

Helena de Groot: Wow.

André Naffis-Sahely: And I would love to sit here and tell you that this was an unusual situation. Unfortunately, from a very young age, I always knew that there was a chance that something like that might happen. Purely because you would see it happen to other people. And part of me always thought, and, you know, I’m not going to pretend that I had this innate, you know, predictive powers. But I think because I’d seen horrific things happen to people who didn’t really deserve it, I mean, I remember someone who worked with my father ended up having a heart attack on a construction site because when you’re working in 50 degrees Celsius temperatures, you’re going to eventually have one. And he was then fired from the company he was working from because he’d taken medical leave, essentially, because he’d had a heart attack at work. So when you see things happen that are like that, it would be very presumptuous to think that it’s never going to affect you or people that you care about. And so, we always felt that we were living on the edge of a precipice, where something like this could just easily push you over like the wind.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. And then in the poem you talk about bankruptcy and homelessness. Like, how—was that a result of this imprisonment? Or what was that?

André Naffis-Sahely: Largely, yes. When it happened, my mother had to empty out the entire house and sell every piece of furniture, personal items that she had, in order to pay for the legal defense, which, again, was another layer of humiliation in the sense that it was almost, in a sense, wasted money. Because the fact that no, no brilliant defense could have gotten him out of prison. It was just determined by the people in power who put him in that position. But I think one of the stipulations of going to court was the fact that you had to be represented by a lawyer. And lawyers aren’t cheap. Yeah. And so that was the background to the poem. And I think this was, this is a poem that was based on an experience that happened about a year later when I went to Italy, where my parents kept a few things in storage. And it was the very few last things that they had in their possession. And essentially I had to, to rescue a few prized family heirlooms and throw out the rest, because they couldn’t afford the storage fees at that point.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, yeah, so, take it away.

André Naffis-Sahely:

(READS POEM)

The Other Side of Nowhere

Thirty feet above the ground, in a warehouse

in the industrial outskirts

of a city we’d never lived in,

I knelt inside the near-empty container

to contemplate our nomadic misery:

mismatched chairs, kitchen appliances

older than me, baby clothes,

framed diplomas, books in a language

my father never taught me (it would

have stunted my assimilation)

and in my head, an email from my mother

that read, ‘we’re doomed, save what you can’.

So there I was, on the other

side of nowhere in sunny Italy … Despite

the technological changes around us,

disasters still travel in telegrams: Bankrupt. STOP.

Sorry. STOP. Homeless. STOP …

Remember, brother,

when our parents calling us

‘global citizens’ inspired great hope?

But the world proved too tribal for us

and so your suitcase shall be your only friend

while Shi Huang’s fantasy of a Godly Wall

proliferates across the planet.

Weeks ago, two cops in Catania

stung a sixteen-year-old boy from Darfur

with cattle-prods to impart the following lesson,

‘whatever the government says,

you’re not welcome here.’

As if one needed the reminder …

All across the boot, the green-

shirted faithful lift their pitchforks

to chase the monster of Otherness,

so don’t ask me why I love

to leave and hate returning.

(Is the answer somewhere inside this container?

It isn’t … but remember Cicero’s saying,

there’s no cure for exile except to love

every city as you would your own,

but the past is always easier …)

When I was young, I fancied

myself Indiana Jones; later,

with erudition, came realer idols:

Petrie, Schliemann, Carter, Kenyon—

but you cannot rescue history from dust—

all you save one day will crumble

in your hand. ‘Trash or burn the rest’

I told the warehouse worker

as we rode the forklift back to earth.

Damn whoever said

that hell was down below;

they clearly never went there.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

André Naffis-Sahely: Thank you.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. There’s such casual heartbreak in your poems. Like the tone that you hit is, like you’re not melodramatic in any way. I wouldn’t call it jaded either. You know, it’s like you strike that rare balance between, like, yeah, I’m not shocked anymore, but the heartbreak is still there.

André Naffis-Sahely: I think that’s the inheritance of the promised land, you know, in many ways, where it’s like I was saying earlier, the fact that we always lived on the edge of the precipice, we always knew that something like this might happen. So I think the casual heartbreak is probably rooted in that, in the fact that I think before I saw this play out in my own family, I’d seen it play out in the families of others. It was a place where people arrived all of a sudden and vanished all of a sudden, and everything always felt quite precarious.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, I was also interested in, you know, that quote by Cicero, you know, that you include in this poem who says, you know, that there’s “no cure for exile except to love every city as you would your own.” And since you’ve moved quite a bit, what do you do in each place that eventually may allow you to come to love it?

André Naffis-Sahely: So one of the ways that I’ve bonded myself to places really has been through their history. Through talking to people and listening to these fantastic stories of family heritage and communities that once were and how they’ve changed over the years and how different they are today from what they used to be. And seeing the same old patterns that we see in a lot of societies around the world. Partly because with history, I think we can unearth a lot of the universalities that really bind us together despite the different places where we’ve been raised or where we live. You know, I mean, earlier that poem mentioned Shi Huang and the completion of the Great Wall of China. It’s not, you know, that wasn’t the first decided to come up with walls. Unfortunately, so long as there have been people, we’ve had walls to keep them out. Or keep them in, frankly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: So I think history can be a healthy reminder that the course that we’re currently on has been built over an endless pile of bones. In fact, before I wanted to be a poet, I wanted to be an archeologist.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

André Naffis-Sahely: There was something about the craft of digging history from the soil that really appealed to me. You know, the British poet Anthony Thwaite had this marvelous quote where he said, you know, essentially poetry is the archeology of memory.

Helena de Groot: Hm.

André Naffis-Sahely: And I remember reading that very early on and thinking, yes, that’s exactly what it, what it feels like to me, at least. And I know, you know, a poem can be a million different things, but I think that’s one of the things that it is to me, the archeology of memory, the ability to resurrect a moment that people can situate themselves in without necessarily belonging to a place.

Helena de Groot: Okay. So is that the sense in which I should understand that? Like there’s no cure for exile, except to love every city as you would your own, is it sort of like in a darker sense? You know, not like love love, but basically, you know, investigate every new city as we go on. Like read up on the history of it, see in which ways it is like the other places that you’ve known. Is that what you mean, like that its darkness is your darkness? Something like that.

André Naffis-Sahely: I think it’s the meaning that I’ve drawn from it most often in the sense that to seek to understand—never to understand, because we never get there—but to seek to understand is to take the first steps in love. And one of the things that I was reminded of over the years as well is that, whenever I’ve felt a certain level of resentment about the places that I’ve linked to, you know, essentially I resent Italy, where I spent part of my early youth. I resent Abu Dhabi because of the things that it did to my family. There’s, there’s no hate without love. It’s always rooted in that equation. It’s a thwarted love in many ways.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, though, because especially in the United States, I mean, especially as we just mentioned, in lots of other places, too. But, you know, since I live here, you know, history is very contentious here right now. Right? I mean, like you have people who basically want a fantasy, like a kind of glorification myth, you know, of the US as this exceptional nation and kind of gloss over all the bad things. And then you have other people who are like, no, you know, we cannot be a country with a future unless we face the past. And I’m so interested in, you know, the fact that you bring love into that. Like, can you tell me how that works for you? You know, how is there a connection between looking at the absolute most abysmal parts of history and then feeling love?

André Naffis-Sahely: Well, that’s well, that’s the, the seeking to understand that I was referring to earlier. I think there’s this need to gain that perspective before you can really, I think, approach anything resembling love. I think when it comes to finding the beauty in the midst of all this bleakness and horror, that seems like the only accurate way to write about life for me anyway, in the sense that the good and the bad have always mixed quite evenly. In my experience, in the places where I’ve lived, where there’s been much to be happy about and also enough to break your heart.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: You know, something that really comes to mind, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, put out the series of ads aimed at people in Texas and Florida where he said, you know, “Join us in California, where we still believe in in freedom.” And I think, “Yes. All right. But, you know, I’d like to see a California that also believes in housing rights, that also believes in funding education and healthcare, that also believes in the police not having the right to bulldoze shantytowns just because they feel like it.” And so, it was interesting to try and put myself in an opposition to a place that I essentially love, because right now I feel deeply grateful for the fact that I’m able to live there. I feel deeply happy about it. It’s a place where I’ve, I’ve rooted myself, I think, both emotionally and intellectually. But it’s still a place that I want to see critically, because I think that there’s—love does not equate to unquestioning loyalty. And here we go, looping back again, I think, to the legacy of fascism.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: Right. Because I think that that’s, that’s the beating heart of fascism: what we are is so pure and so good that any kind of so-called bastardization or hybridization or change innately threatens that state of being.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

And so in order to be loyal to the place that you are genetically bound to, you, you must have this vision of it that is undiluted by anything else that you may have experienced in life. And that, to me, seems to be the greatest folly of all.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to a poem, the title poem, actually, of your collection, “High Desert”. And it’s a poem about you driving around the kind of desert around L.A. And I was just wondering, like, can you tell me a little bit about that trip or those trips? I don’t know if it was like one big trip. Like, where did you go and what made you interested?

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah. So “High Desert”, the poem specifically, is set mostly in the High Desert of Los Angeles by Mojave. But the genesis of High Desert, essentially the book in general, was the fact that my partner and I recently moved to Davdison, the north of the state. But we spent 5 or 6 years living in Los Angeles. And what we would do is whenever we had some time off or some money, we would go off on road trips all over primarily the Southwest. So we visited California extensively, primarily the south and the center of the states. But then we also took trips to Arizona, to New Mexico, to Utah. And various different parts of the book were written in those states. So it’s really this ode to the Southwest in many ways. And I think it was, it was an effort to, to try and understand the place that I felt had been such a gift to me. You know, there’s this quote in the book which was, “I did not choose California, it was given to me” by the great Czeslaw Milosz. And I remember when I read that, I felt, “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. I need to put that quote in in the book,”

Helena de Groot: Yes.

André Naffis-Sahely: because I felt that in many ways, California lifted the weight of a lot of the personal baggage that I was carrying at the time, enough for me to start thinking about my place in the world, I think, more cogently than I had before.

Helena de Groot: Why? Because seriously I’m, I don’t want to, like, accuse you of anything, you know? But I lived in L.A. for a few years, too, and I’ve never felt so uprooted anywhere.

André Naffis-Sahely: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Helena de Groot: What is it about that place specifically that made you feel, you know, released from some of the baggage?

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah. No, that’s I think an incredibly pertinent question. I mean, I think that L.A., that’s exactly the right feeling to have in L.A. I think it’s a city where it’s incredibly difficult to feel rooted. And that was kind of part of the point for me. I think what helped there, in a sense was, you know, when it came to Italy, I had this incredibly dark inheritance from my mother’s side of the family, embodied really in this almost villainous figure of the grandfather. My connection to Iran was always very tenuous because of the fact that my father had been exiled. Essentially, he was given a choice: you know, either we put you in front of the firing squad or you leave. And so he left. And we’re banned from returning because of his political activities. So it’s not a place I really got to know. And I then went to England to go to university, essentially. But England, while it may have felt liberating in some ways, it was also, I mean, I was under no illusions in the sense that the UAE was a former British colony. So I think like a lot of writers, what I’d done was gravitate towards the heart of Empire.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

André Naffis-Sahely: (LAUGHING) It’s a story, it’s a story as old as, as old as literature itself, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yes.

André Naffis-Sahely: Whether for writers born in the Caribbean or various parts of Africa or East Asia or any parts of the former empire, when things don’t work out where you’re presently situated, you can always catch a boat to the heart of Empire and see if things might work out there

Helena de Groot: Right.

André Naffis-Sahely: And so it’s not a place where I was ever able to escape any of this, any of the personal inheritance that I’d wound up with. I mean, I remember in the days living in London, the Emirati government financed the creation of a part of the underground network. And so I saw maps bearing the title, you know, “Emirates Line” on the London Underground.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: So it’s not, it’s not a place where I was able to really stop thinking about the Emirates. Whereas California, you know, essentially I moved to the US to be with my partner. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made, primarily because I got to be with her. But California was something that neither of us had really seen coming. So it was, it was neutral ground for both of us in many ways. And I think it was somewhere where I finally felt at ease with my impermanence, with my rootlessness.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it’s beautiful. And it sort of answers like my puzzlement, right? Like, well, the reason that you felt rooted there was because rootlessness was at the heart of the place, you know? So.

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah. And I think, you know, there’s partly something about the landscape there where there’s something, because I find the desert innately beautiful, I think, obviously I’m biased. I’ve lived in deserts for, I would say, a great deal of my life, whether it’s in California or in the UAE. There’s something about that landscape that almost erases human presence far quicker than one would imagine. You know, it’s hard for the machinations of humanity to survive the harshness of the heat and the friction of the sand. And the desert really swallows up a lot that’s human. And so there was something about the impermanence of artificial structures within the desert that also led me to, yeah, to feel at one with this impermanence, I think.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Do you want to read the poem?

André Naffis-Sahely: Sure.

Helena de Groot: It’s on page 50.

André Naffis-Sahely:

(READS POEM)

High Desert

Time to listen to my bones, to seek a stillness

known only to deserts. Pause,

traveler, and behold

this empire of absences: the snowy salt beds

of vanished lakes, the outlines of decommissioned railroads,

the petroglyphs of people

murdered long ago, and, all around

nearly limitless stretches

of cottonwood, willow and mesquite tufting out

of the sand. All day

I drive along mummified freeways

from Amboy to Zxyzx and zip past Cadiz, Baghdad

and Siberia in under an hour’s time; the ghost towns

of America’s Main Street,

an unbroken montage

of smokestacks, silhouettes of sidewalks,

the boarded remains of small businesses …

There is no better backdrop

for the mirage

of permanent boom times than the desert,

a landscape, where despite claims to the contrary,

no town was too tough to die.

Once genocide

had cleared the country,

and extractionist lust was unleashed on the West,

the blunt simplicity

of place-names a shrine

to these seekers’ obsessions.

COPPEROPOLIS, OROVILLE, PETROLIA…

Spartan mockeries

of morals and models

left behind and forgotten, towns where Sheriffs

robbed trains at gunpoint, or smuggled liquor

across the border,

only to blame it on the Mexicans …

Next to no sign now of the old tribes,

the trappers, the pioneers, yet no shortage

of jackrabbit, meth labs,

tin cans, rusted lawn-chairs,

gas stations and faux-

Fifties diners … dead or alive, each one of them greets me

with the same sign, the same

four planks of wood:

Name, Date of Establishment,

Elevation and Population, the latter always in the single

or double digits.

Exhausted, I lie down

on the sand and warm my feet by the embers

of this final frontier and consider how strange

it is that it’s here,

where, after decades of rootlessness,

I abandon all cravings for permanence …

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, that ending is so beautiful. I mean, you’ve already explained it now, but yeah,

Exhausted, I lie down

on the sand and warm my feet by the embers

of this final frontier and consider how strange

it is that it’s here,

where, after decades of rootlessness,

I abandon all cravings for permanence …

It’s also a beautiful way to put it, you know, it’s like, you’re not really saying, “I now feel rooted here.” You say, “I abandon all cravings for permanence.” You know, there’s like a slight nuance there.

André Naffis-Sahely: Because it is a natural craving, you know, I think that it’s, it’s something that we’re all we’re all born with, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: I think the need to belong. But I think there’s such beauty to be gained in realizing that you can belong in a variety of places. We’ve always fought against that idea. I think—again, going back to fascism, part of what it seeks to do is to negate that idea, to prove that it’s unworkable. Frankly, I think because if people were able to belong in multiple different places, then it’d be far more difficult to control them, essentially. If you keep everyone inside the wall, then you can control them. If there’s no such thing as walls, then power sort of just evaporates.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

André Naffis-Sahely: And so there’s a vested interest in keeping those walls up, in telling people that you can only belong to one city in one country, and if you try to be anything else, then you’re deviating from so-called natural path.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, the natural path is so creepy already, you know. (LAUGHS)

André Naffis-Sahely: (LAUGHS) It is. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I’m also so interested in what you were saying about the way the, the desert almost rejects human settlement in any kind of permanent way. Because the sand erodes whatever you put in there, you know, as you say in this poem, tin cans, rusted lawn chairs. Yeah. Like within seemingly minutes, the place is reduced to what archeologists would find after centuries somewhere else, you know? And, yeah, I’m just so interested in, like, your long fascination with the desert. And in that first poem that we read, the one about the storage container, you write, “You cannot rescue history from dust.” But I also feel like that is the project of your work, trying to rescue history from dust.

André Naffis-Sahely: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Helena de Groot: Whether that’s in your poems or it’s in your translations, where you make a real effort to find writers that have been forgotten by history.

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Also in your editorial work, you know, you’re the editor of Poetry London, and there, too, you seem to always put in the effort to find poets that, unless someone would like sort of find them and put them on this bigger platform, they could very easily be forgotten before they’re even, I mean, like, you know, instead of being forgotten, they could very easily be never known.

André Naffis-Sahely: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so yeah, I’m just curious about that contradiction. On the one hand, you say you cannot rescue history from dust.

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: On the other hand, that’s all you’re basically trying to do.

André Naffis-Sahely: Oh, absolutely. And it’s, and you’re absolutely right. I think for me, in many ways, everything revolves around entropy. And I think the desert came in quite neatly into that, in the sense that I remember, I was about 12 at the time, my father’s an architect, and the reason that he found himself in the Emirates is because there was plenty of work for architects at the time. Like I said, they had

Helena de Groot: Right.

André Naffis-Sahely: they had a whole country to build and they wanted it built quickly, too. So there was lots of work for him and for people like him. And I remember one of the things that he would always talk about when he would come home is that he would face difficulty in convincing his employers to use more durable, i.e. more expensive materials. Because of the fact that the twin forces of desert heat mixing with the sand and also the seawater, because it was it’s a city built on an island, would coalesce and essentially eat buildings away in an incredibly short amount of time. So the average lifespan of a building that was being constructed in the Emirates in my youth, we’re talking 10 years.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

André Naffis-Sahely: And then they would be so broken down that they would find it easier to tear them down and build a new one in its place than to actually maintain it or upkeep it. So there I was in the Emirates, seeing that—not just, I wasn’t just in a community of temporary people, but I was also situated in a city of temporary structures. And everything was always breaking down around me, whether it was the school bus that took us to school or the buildings that we lived in or people’s lives, essentially. And as dramatic as that sounds, I think it’s quite an accurate description of the place. And so, witnessing this kind of centrifuge of entropy in the UAE I think created this fascination to find it elsewhere. And lo and behold, I have found that everywhere else that I’ve gone. Because again, we’re all governed by the laws of the same physical world that we happen to live in.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

And so there’s going to be these similarities that come across in whichever culture, whichever continent you’re in, whichever languages are spoken. The words that we use to describe these changes differ, but the root meaning hardly ever differs.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

André Naffis-Sahely: So, I think you’re right. There is this contradiction that on the one hand, I say, you cannot rescue history from dust, but on the other, I try to maintain this historical knowledge, the experiences that can be learned from poems. And I think primarily that was because when I was younger and reading poems, it was wanting to find the answers on how to live a life that meant something. And I think I was always drawn to the poets that really tried to answer those questions. You never answer them fully, but you try to answer those questions.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, I was wondering if we can read one last poem

André Naffis-Sahely: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: that, I think is sort of about leaving traces, however fleeting, in the dust. It’s actually like one of your, you know, quote-unquote, found poems or, you know, documentary poems or however you want to describe them. It’s the one called “John Samuelson” on page 65.

André Naffis-Sahely: Great. Really glad you like that one, actually, because it was one of the very first that I wrote for that series. And I remember it was one of the found poems, because, yeah, essentially it’s a documentary sequence composed of found poems. You know, where all the words are drawn from the documents left behind by the historical figures I’m discussing. So whether it’s letters or autobiographies and it was the first one that made me think, I can really try to tell the history of California as I’ve learned it, but escaping the lyric “I”. Escaping my own perspective in a sense, because I didn’t want the entire book to be California’s history as told by André Naffis-Sahely.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

André Naffis-Sahely: Like, I felt that there was, there was definitely a limit to that. And I think part of the problem that we’ve had as well in recent decades was, we’ve had such a proliferation of information technology that we’re drowning in it. And I think that it’s hard to keep a lot of the people who’ve lived and their texts in mind. And so I think a large part of the job for intellectuals is to, again, rescue these people from oblivion. And so, yeah, I wrote that poem wanting to essentially hand the mic over to someone else and have them have their say.

Helena de Groot: And who was John Samuelson?

André Naffis-Sahely: Well, that’s, well, that’s a question that’s still unanswered in many ways. The man is shrouded in mystery. So, as far as we know, he was a Swedish immigrant to the US. He was born in Sweden sometime, some say in the 1870s, some say in the 1880s, who immigrated to the US, traveled quite a bit within the US and then found himself in the High Desert of Los Angeles. This was the 1920s, essentially right after World War I, where there was a minor gold rush in the High Desert and things didn’t work out for him. Like a lot of the gold rushes, they were just, they didn’t lead to anywhere and in fact, ruined more lives than they improved. But he found himself there. And the utter misery of not being able to strike it rich and also finding himself removed from his homeland led him to etching these completely warped kind of Moses style commandments and half poems and twisted through some political statements onto these large slabs of rock, which now, you know, stand as a monument to him in the Mojave Desert, not far from the mine where he used to try and find his gold. So there’s these 11 slabs of rock where you can go visit them today and see all these ramblings, essentially, of this deluded immigrant who wasn’t able to strike it rich. And I ended up piecing together various parts of statements found on these slabs of rock into the poems. So that was the origin. In terms of his end, that also is shrouded in mystery. Some say that he went to a logging camp and then died under mysterious circumstances. There was also talk of him murdering someone in Compton. The record does seem to mostly agree on the fact that he died in some sanatorium some time in the 1950s. But almost nothing is known of his life. And I felt that in a way that it was partly all these unresolved question marks that really drew me to the person and also what he represented, you know. There’s this sense in which he almost stands as a monument for the lives of immigrants that were drawn to that part of the state around that time. But yeah, so.

(READS POEM)

John Samuelson

Miner & Homesteader

‘Wake up, you tax and bond slaves,

God made man, but Henry Ford

put wheels under him … The key

to life is contact … Hell is here

on earth and nowhere else—we

have made most of it ourselves.

The milk of human kindness ain’t got

thick cream on it for all of us.

Ask Hoover … Judge Ben Lindsey

understands humanity. Nature is God.

Study nature … neither money’s

laws nor armies can stop

the human mind. With time, the oceans

grind the hardest granite into

sand … Nothing proven after death.’

So that’s John Samuelson. Who, yeah, like I said, I think, you know, these slabs of rock, which do feel very biblical for obvious reasons,

Helena de Groot: Yeah!

André Naffis-Sahely: I think were full of these, you know, half-baked political statements. He clearly didn’t like Herbert Hoover. But then again, who did at the time? And I just love these aphoristic kind of quality to some of his lines, like, “the milk of human kindness ain’t got cream on it for all of us.”

Helena de Groot: Amazing.

André Naffis-Sahely: That was, when I remember reading that, I remember thinking, yes, you know. I mean, this is someone who finds himself in the utter desolation of the desert. You know, I think one of the other quotes I put in the book to preface the section was by one of my favorite writers, the Libyan writer, Ibrahim Akoni, where he says, you know, “Only in the desert can you visit death and come back alive.” And I think that’s exactly what happened to John Samuelson. He reached the end of his journey there, knew that he wasn’t going to strike it rich, and under the heat of the sun, he starts to go a little crazy, but he also makes sense in a way that I think many people can relate to. And again, I think we go back to the mixture of the good and bad. The constant pull towards entropy, but then the need to rescue history back. To pull it back in a direction where we can make something of it, right. Because it’s our legacy. It’s our human legacy. If we don’t remember, who will?

Helena de Groot: Yeah! And I also think it’s like so profoundly moving that this man who was a miner and a pretty lonely migrant, probably, you know, I mean, “the key to life is contact” is something that he writes, probably because he didn’t have a lot of it, you know?

André Naffis-Sahely: Exactly. That’s exactly it.

Helena de Groot: And yeah, what I find so beautiful is that this very unmoored man still had this, like, urge to, like, leave his legacy, you know, like or leave traces of his existence and his thoughts and his insides by carving them in rocks, you know, I think it’s really moving.

André Naffis-Sahely: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, again, you know, so little survives of that moment in history where essentially, you know, you go out to this particular part of the Mojave Desert and you find these slabs of rock, you might find some rusting wooden frames from the old mineshafts. And that’s really about it. Maybe like a bucket lying around, an old rusted bucket. But that’s, that’s really it. And, you know, go back in 100 years and even those won’t be left. Apart from the slabs of rock, and perhaps by then the sand and wind will have eroded most of the words away and made them illegible.

Helena de Groot: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have one last question. Because like, you know, the way you engage with history, knowing that history ultimately will prevail in the sense that we will all become history. But then also like this continuous effort to save every shard we can. What drives you to keep on engaging with history? Like, what’s—to put it really sort of ungenerously, like, what’s in it for you? What do you get out of it?

André Naffis-Sahely: Mm. Yeah, that’s a good question. Hm. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Let me think on that for a second. Um, you know, earlier we were just talking about finding the beauty amidst the horror. And I think that that’s quite possibly what’s in it for me, in the sense that, you’re right, we’re all going to become history at some point. And the mission really is to catalog the beauty of humanity fighting against that physical inevitability. I think that’s the neatest way I can put it, you know? Because it’s almost like, it’s a case of beautiful failure, isn’t it? And I think it’s, it’s, it’s if poetry isn’t interested in beautiful failure, then what is it possibly interested in? You know? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

André Naffis-Sahely: (MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two poetry collections, The Promised Land, which came out in 2018, and High Desert, which just came out this summer. He also edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature. He has translated over 20 poetry collections, novels, and travelogs, and he has written numerous essays. Today, he splits his time between California, where he is a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and London, where he is the editor of Poetry London.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.