Episode 42: Mahmoud Ababneh interviews Anahita Jamali Rad

Introduction:
In this interview, Anahita Jamali Rad discusses their poetry in relation to the vampiric elements of capitalism, the disposability of bodies, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified both. Rad also treats us to a reading of poems from their collection, still, and a discussion of resistance in political movements and mobilization, intertextuality, and subjectivity.

BIOS:

Mahmoud Ababneh is pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory. His research centers around trans-Indigenous and postcolonial literatures, decolonization, and settler-colonialism. Mahmoud is currently teaching a at Bow Valley College. His work appeared in the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies.

Anahita Jamali Rad was born in Iran and currently based in Tio’tia:ke (Joh-jaw-gay) on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Ga-niyen-ge-HAA-ga). Informed by anti-imperialist materialist theory, Jamali Rad’s work explores materiality, history, affect, ideology, violence, class, collectivity, desire, place, and displacement. They have published many chapbooks, and two full-length books of poetry, for love and autonomy (Talonbooks 2016) and still (Talonbooks 2021). With Danielle LaFrance, they co-edited the journal About a Bicycle, of which there were 5 issues. Anahita Jamali Rad is currently designing and co-editing a new small press called House House Press with David Bradford.

Show Notes:

3:41 – Mahmoud and Anahita discuss the excitement and pains of moving to a new city

4:50 – Anahita discusses their experience with the publishing world and working as a writer during COVID-19 including the difference in energy between in-person and online literary events

8:43 – Mahmoud references the article, “Persian-Canadian Writers You’ve Got to Read” published by 49^th Shelf

9:27 – Anahita discusses how they situates theirself as an Iranian writer

10:44 – Mahmoud brings up Anahita Jamali Rad’s book, still

10:54 – Anahita discusses the multiplicity of the word “still” and why they selected it as a title for their book

13:18 – Anahita discusses how they designed the cover for still

14:36 – Anahita discusses how stillness is a reaction and a movement in of itself

15:37 – Mahmoud references Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism

16:14 – Anahita discusses the “I” and the “We” and the “This” and the “Beyond”

17:45 – Anahita discusses resistance and how to make political movements possible at all

19:46 – Anahita discusses the disposability of the body in the imaginary of technology

20:56 – Anahita reads “Log 1,” “Log 2,” and “Log 3” from still

26:53 – Anahita discusses how their poetry is trying to find ways to be a wrench in the cogs of the machine of capitalistic land extraction

28:55 – Mahmoud references Lou Reed’s song, “Perfect Day”

29:31 – Anahita discusses how they seek opposites in intertextual references that could be construed to mean the same thing as their work, but still offer contradiction

31:23 – Mahmoud references Lauren Berlant’s “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, and Lateral Agency”

31:32 – Anahita discusses how the things we desire could be driving us into a slow death and how they seeks to complicate the gaze

33:15 – Mamhoud references Vladimir Lenin’s “Lessons of the Crisis”

33:43 – Anahita discusses how societal contradiction can act and can come about

35:50 – Anahita reads “Unconcerned Compulsions,” “The Body Dislodged, Thick with Nothing but Presence,” and “When Hands Must Handle” from still

39:43 – Anahita discusses how the forms change throughout their book as they play with materiality and the experience of materiality

40:42 – Mahmoud references Theodore W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia

41:06 – Anahita discusses ceasing to exist as not necessarily a negative in our current capitalist society