“How do [your spiritual] beliefs and practices intersect with political and social issues?” This is the question Abriana Jetté asked poet and professor Kazim Ali in an interview in Stay Thirsty Magazine.
Ali answered, “The body is not the opposite of the spirit, nor are physical matters oppositional to abstract ideas of the spirit. Even without considering the way that communities’ spiritual and religious beliefs and practices govern their politics, we have to confront the way that we in our ordinary lives embody a whole set of spiritual beliefs whether we know it or we don’t. It’s worse when we don’t realize or critically engage with why [we] believe what we do, or even realize that we do have codes we have processed and created on subterranean levels. I suppose in my poetry I aim to uncover and engage these streams of thought and feeling.”
This approach holds true in his most recent collection of poems, Sukun. Published in 2023, this collection includes thirty-five new poems alongside selected pieces that seek to share a sense of calm in the midst of what can feel like tumultuous times. In fact, the book’s publisher even translates the title, “Sukun,” from Arabic to mean calm or serenity. Together the compilation achieves a winding meditation on the obsession he’s become known for: the intersection between the physical and the spiritual, the personal and the universal.
Ali’s linguistic agility is perhaps most eloquently encompassed in one of his new poems, “Mulberry,” which begins:
Down near Mott Street I wonder what is the actual border
between Little Italy and Chinatown, and if it doesn’t exist then
what about and map’s delineation, the name of that mountain,
or this border line?
That one-hundred degree New York summer sent me in memory
back across years and time zones and oceans. July. Ramallah.
I carry home watermelon and salty cheese and white mulberries
in a crate marked “Israel.” What is Chinatown anyhow?
As early as the title, which alludes to both Mulberry Street in New York City and the fruit which the speaker carries in another time and place, “Mulberry” manages to hold two things at once. Ali infuses a political current early in the poem, asking, “if it doesn’t exist then / what about any map’s delineation, the name of that mountain / or this border line?” This series of questions interrogates the origins of our social norms and cultural practices, and is especially poignant in a place like New York, where European settlers would have renamed Native lands.
When he resumes his line of questioning later, he asks, “What would it mean to not know the endings of things the way / in Palestine during Ramadan one doesn’t know what to eat / or not eat and I couldn’t find enough food to assuage the void / that being far from home opens up.” Here, the speaker of the poem juxtaposes a potentially political distaste for national borders against a deeply personal experience of going hungry in a place where the local religious traditions are admittedly unfamiliar.
He repeats this telescopic movement, zooming into the physical landscapes wherein one can locate the body and out among more nebulous, philosophical ideas of boundaries, again and again to disorient our understanding of what we know to be “real.” He makes social commentary, sure, but he does so while being deeply rooted in the feel of the climate and scent of the flora—”the perfume of the qarub” as he saunters “toward Houston”—all the things that tell a person exactly how near or far one may be from the community they call home.
These themes of placing the individual body into the collective context are ones Ali returns to again and again throughout his bibliography, especially in his sixth poetry collection, Inquisition, and his essay collection, Resident Alien: On Border-Crossing and the Undocumented Divine. In both he raises his own questions about where one belongs in a social world and contemplates the ways in which our global politics impact personal, everyday life. He relentlessly reflects on the relationships between breath and body, life and God, politics and poetry, and he does so as overtly as he does subtly—sometimes even simultaneously.
After reading “Mulberry” at his book launch, Ali expressed his love of wordplay and alliteration, making the playfulness with which he approaches his poems, even some of the most heartbreaking ones, more evident. Knowing his obsession with linguistics and sound makes reading “Prayer for Chasm,” the opening poem in Sukun, all the more rich.
While the poem begins, “What you ask for / Hold me whole / New moon wants you /Unseen unctuous / Willing to go to any length / To rise,” Ali shows off his appreciation for sonic wordplay well before this. Starting again with the title, Ali uses Chasm as a homophone for Kazim, and carries the suggestion of an immeasurable depth all the way through with heavy and frequent consonance. The lines “Hold me whole” hint at another definition of chasm that means “a marked division, separation, or difference,” implying that the speaker has perhaps felt fractured, unwhole, or maybe even unholy, in some way.
Toward the end, Ali circles back to “Asking how deep this hole,” extending his verbal experiment and exposing his philosophical inquiries against our social standards until he can “un- / Ravel solar threads to spin / In gold squares a new / Narrative of normal.” Unlike “Mulberry,” what makes this poem political in nature is not necessarily its content. It’s not outwardly about land or dispossession, but it is about individual identity and belonging. The poem pokes at the feelings of alterity one might experience moving through the world, and especially through the U.S., in a brown, queer body (as Ali himself describes it). Through the poem we can see clearly how those characteristics have made someone who identifies as such feel something other than “normal.”
By the end, the speaker sort of resolves, or hopes to, “stop answering” and “stop asking” questions that pertain to his right to exist exactly as he is. Writing, “you do not / Cross are not afraid / The chasm is a thought / Who is thinking / I will live,” Ali may be quietly admitting that the speaker no longer feels the need to close the gap, to cross the chasm, between who he is and what society expects him to be. “Prayer for Chasm” is, in essence, a self-portrait as deep ravine—one who feels vastly separate and un-knowable, in part because “none can spell” its name and who longs to be (what my own therapist calls) “apparently normal” enough to keep atop of everyday chores like laundry.
As a multilingual and transnational American poet, novelist, essayist, and professor, Ali has made his own case for political ubiquity since his first publication in 2004. Though he’ll be the first to tell you he often blurs the lines between genres, much of his work focuses on identity, spirituality, migration, and, yes, politics. And just as he does with genre, he slips between the personal and the political with such ease and grace, one is never quite sure which is which.
In a Split this Rock interview, Ali went on to say, “We have all of us always been ‘political,’ or functioned in a political and social context (...) I write about the body, I write about the spirit, I write about music, art and dance, but none of these things, none, are separate for me from one another or from this vague term ‘politics.’ Politics means how we live in the world.”
Over and over again, Ali proves poetry’s ability to hold inquiry alone as more valuable than any definition. His work is the kind we can read more than once and still come away from with new meaning every time. It is the kind that brings us closer to understanding ourselves and each other in the midst of the space and the differences between us. His is the kind of work that can convince a reader that politics are kinda like miracles: either nothing is or everything is.
Annelise Schoups is a multinational poet who laughs at her own jokes and writes about things that are mostly not funny. Her work appears in the San Diego Poetry Annual, Silly Goose Press, and december. You can find her playing NYT Games with her partner, Justin, or on Instagram @anneliseschoups.