{"id":164546,"date":"2023-06-07T11:49:25","date_gmt":"2023-06-07T15:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164546"},"modified":"2023-06-08T11:28:42","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T15:28:42","slug":"the-action-of-love-a-conversation-with-charif-shanahan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/06\/07\/the-action-of-love-a-conversation-with-charif-shanahan\/","title":{"rendered":"The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker. Photographs by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.<\/p><\/div>\n

I read\u00a0Charif Shanahan\u2019s <\/em>Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of\u00a0introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book \u201cfeels like a birth,\u201d and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates\u00a0<\/em>Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan\u2019s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Morgan Parker<\/em><\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

I love the last line of \u201cTrace Evidence,\u201d the book\u2019s titular poem: \u201cFor us here now I will be the first of our line.\u201d It\u2019s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

It is only we who get to tell others who we are, even when\u2014and perhaps especially when\u2014we are inside a system that empowers those around us to tell us who we are. Put another way, choice and agency are questions I\u2019m thinking about in this book. I think the agency here, inside that pronouncement, is in moving deeply into what had already been waiting for me. One could call it an acceptance, but it required first a clearing of the fog such that I could see this reality and not exactly choose it, but choose to name it and step into it and inhabit it. One of the things you and I have talked about a lot is how layered my family story is as regards race. It wasn\u2019t just white parent, Black parent; it wasn\u2019t just light-skinned, dark-skinned; it wasn\u2019t just American Blackness, non-American Blackness; it was all these things at once. That was part of what was so challenging while growing up. But it\u2019s also the beauty of how my family holds race. For me to be able to say that it is beautiful is, I think, a mark of tremendous evolution and growth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much in your first book and in Trace Evidence<\/em> about passing publicly\u2014passing to white people and passing to Black people. But underlying that is the passing or not-passing that you have done in your family. Can you tell me a little more about those family dynamics?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

Well, as you know, I was born to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother. In simplistic terms, we\u2019re a mixed, Black-white family. However, for many reasons to do with the layers of empire in the North of Africa, my mother identities as an Arab, and not as African or Black, though she is perceived as both. And so my brothers and I\u2014and I should speak for myself \u2026 I wasn\u2019t exactly caught between \u201cwhiteness\u201d and \u201cBlackness,\u201d growing up, but between whiteness and a Blackness that didn\u2019t recognize itself as such. Many of the poems emerge from that dissonance, and I think it\u2019s important to be vocal about that racialized experience, despite the privilege I possess. Privilege is where the narrative ends for a lot of people. People might say, \u201cYou\u2019re light enough to pass, so what are you talking about?\u201d But I want to put forward a narrative like that in Trace Evidence<\/em> because racialized experience is so much more complicated than we seem to think. If you have a body, you are racialized. Everybody is having a racialized experience. There are trends within those experiences, of course. Primary narratives. And if Black people are being tried and killed in the street, that obviously needs our urgent examination and action. But I think we can most effectively reckon with race if as many narratives are on the table as possible. Take, for example, the racial violence I\u2019ve experienced in my life. Folks might think, \u201cWho\u2019s going to profile you? What kind of violence are you experiencing?\u201d But it\u2019s a disservice to the complexity of the conversation to assume that violence is only, or even primarily, bodily, or that it comes only when race is optically perceived.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

So are we talking about racial individuality? The importance of the individual experience within what is usually regarded as collective, categorical experience?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

Yes\u2014and about how an individual\u2019s pathology is shaped around race, not only in terms of implicit bias and the associations one is conditioned into believing, but also in terms of what one recognizes as belonging within a racial category in the first place. I was Zooming with a white mentor of mine whom I help with her poems\u2014she\u2019s a critic by training and is writing poems about her whiteness and very movingly working at decolonizing her mind, at more than seventy. It\u2019s amazing to witness. I\u2019m honored. It\u2019s holy. I raised with her one day the fact that race has no basis in biological or scientific fact, even though it firstly is about the body and the way that the body presents. As I put language to this point, Morgan, I am acutely aware of you. While I think of us as two Black people, it\u2019s also true that each of us is having very different racialized experiences, due not only to phenotype, but to other aspects of embodiment and selfhood, and I\u2019m sensitive to the differences \u2026 But what I had wanted to explore with my mentor is the idea that we are taught to see in a way that is particular to our cultural context, such that it\u2019s possible for somebody to look at me and say, \u201cThat is a Black man, period\u201d and for somebody else to look at me and see something else. Of course, I am who I am, to myself, in every room I enter, so I have had to learn how to hold both me<\/em>s at once\u2014who I know myself to be and the self I become in another\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Can you tell me about how you use metaphor in this book? How do you think it connects with the content?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

The way I think about metaphor, about figuration in general, is less about equation than about seeing how far apart the two things can be while still having a tether, still having some connective tissue. At its most compressed, narrative can function as metaphor. The opening poem, \u201cColonialism,\u201d for example, comes from memory, and its narrative is unresolved. It ends with the mother\u2019s question\u2014\u201cElesh, mon fils? Why \/\/ Would you do that to me?\u2014<\/em>\u201d\u2014which might appear to be the exact question a mother would ask in that situation, but because the title demands that you read the scene in relationship to, or within, a colonial or a postcolonial context, the question deepens. The narrative becomes a metaphor, a conceit even.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

I would also point to the poem \u201cIn the Basement of Sears & Roebuck When for the First Time I Pulled My Hand from Her Hand and Fled,\u201d where the metaphor doesn\u2019t appear on the line level but on the poem level. It\u2019s the narrative. The child running away from his mother and hiding, as that poem\u2019s literal scene, is emblematic of the adult-child\u2019s individuation around core identity questions\u2014which I think has to do with how philosophical your poetic voice is. How does your intellectual self jut up against your experience, when you write a poem?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m trying to do is identify, distill, and reimagine experiences that may represent a particular set of existential or social circumstances so as to foreground the speaker\u2019s interiority in a way that is inseparable from those circumstances. And I\u2019m writing as a way to work against our separateness, by demonstrating the effects of that separateness. I believe the lyric poem can take you to languagelessness\u2014that, ideally, is where it would leave you\u2014and that we can be unified in or even by that \u201csilence.\u201d The paradox of the lyric poem is that the medium is language or breath, but it takes you to a place that we can\u2019t exactly language. I believe that in my bones.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Is that state bodiless?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

It\u2019s egoless. In the encounter of the poem and the reader, who brings their own history and imagination to the text, a connection is formed. The reader plugs into an experience that is born out of a subjectivity that is not their own, which might be completely different from what they know. And yet, if the poem does its work and takes you to that place where you are without language but inside feeling, then there\u2019s some kind of merging or bridging that\u2019s happened. That feels important to me, both as a poet and as a reader of poetry. I look for poems that can give me, or take me to, that experience. It\u2019s like that Anne Sexton poem that we\u2019ve talked about \u2026<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Truth the Dead Know\u201d?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

Yes! There\u2019s a phrase\u2014<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

\u201cGone, I say!\u201d I can\u2019t believe I don\u2019t have that tattooed yet.<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the next one. But there\u2019s another line in that poem, \u201cand when we touch \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 we enter touch entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

Exactly. That\u2019s what happens, right? Or can. Entering your feeling, your experience\u2014I am entering yours, and then we are there together as one somehow. And it\u2019s brief, it\u2019s fleeting. Then we walk away from the poem and return to our ego and our self and our life\u2014to the dishes, or the emails. For me, this experience is powerful, but particularly because the subjects that I\u2019m exploring exist to divide. The very function of race was to separate, to classify, to hierarchize in the service of capital\u2014I don\u2019t mean to be reductive, but it all depended on a compartmentalization of the species, right? So how can poems, especially poems that emerge from our separateness, manage to bring us back to that sense of connectivity and oneness? That they can and do seems miraculous to me.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Do you see that as part of a purpose of not just your poems but your life?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

I do believe that talking about these nuanced dimensions of race is part of my life purpose. At least that\u2019s what I believe right now. I don\u2019t mean to say that no one else is doing that, but it\u2019s part of what I can do in this life, in this body. I\u2019m working on a nonfiction book to extend the work that I\u2019m doing in the poems, through prose, with hopes of reaching a wider audience.<\/p>\n

Thinking about purpose, there\u2019s a poem in the book, \u201cThirty-Fifth Year\u201d\u2014the one that starts, \u201cDread remains. I keep looking \/ for a thing I can\u2019t name, though I try \/ \u2018purpose,\u2019 \u2018meaning,\u2019 \u2018presence.\u2019\u201d Purpose is the first item on that list. What else are you going to do with all this but try to make it meaningful by making it known to people outside of your particular experience? I remember at one of the Cave Canem retreats\u2014during my first year actually, when I was writing some of my first poems about these themes, which went into my first book\u2014I read that poem \u201cClean Slate.\u201d<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

I was there. I remember sitting on the bench and feelings were occurring!<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

\u00a0Yes! And afterward Toi Derricotte came up to me by the food table. She looked at me plainly and said, \u201cBaby, you were extraordinary.\u201d And I was like, \u201cThank you, Toi. Oh my God, that means so much!\u201d Then she gets real, Toi. She turns into the Oracle, takes my hand, leans in and says, \u201cAnd what else are you going to do with all that pain, baby? What else are you going to do with all that pain?\u201d And walked away. And I was so open and porous and unapologetic about my healing and where I was in my life that I fully received her words. Even as the work was never exclusively motivated by pain and isn\u2019t at all anymore.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Thinking about Toi and our Cave Canem brethren and sistren, a lot of what we shared was, \u201cI already have this pain. Let me show it to you so that maybe you can see yours in a different kind of way.\u201d And that, especially in the context of race in the U.S. and what it has done to us interpersonally, is all we can do. You know what I mean?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

I do. I will never forget the opening circle that first time I was at the Cave Canem retreat with you. Everybody was going around, introducing themselves, and when you introduced yourself, you said, \u201cI\u2019m just trying to get out from under.\u201d Twice. And that stayed with me because what you were saying\u2014or what I heard\u2014was, This poetry thing, this practice, is part of something larger, part of a healing that is pursued and expressed, holistically, in different avenues of my life. And this is just one piece.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Generally, that is what it is\u2014so let\u2019s find the avenues in which to do that. No one can say more than me about how only therapy is therapy. I haven\u2019t written a poem in a while, but I\u2019m doubling up on the therapy. The idea of writing saving you as you\u2019re going through something I don’t believe in at all. Even though Trace Evidence<\/em> is such an accomplishment of so much physical and intellectual and spiritual struggle and pain, I don\u2019t think that you would say that the writing of these poems was what got you through, would you?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

No. You know what got me through? Love. And love is the thing I believe I\u2019m trying to touch, walk us around, in my poems. Love in various expressions. Maternal love. Love of self. Love of community. Love of culture. Even country, potentially, in the case of the mother figure, who has fidelity to her country of origin. Love got me through that bus accident, the surgeries, the months of convalescence. It was astounding to see: the way that Black poets from the Cave Canem community all over the globe rallied around me; the way that my ex-partner, Nik, and his mom and friends in Zurich took turns visiting me in the hospital; the way that my buddy, Alan, flew his ass from Brooklyn to Zurich to hold my hand at the fucking hospital bed. That.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to say these are poems of identity. But for me, what\u2019s inside that\u2014and it\u2019s related to the lyric poem being able to bring us to one another\u2014is that love is the cost. The cost of our separateness is the loss of love.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking that all this was born out of incredible trauma.<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

Yes, the occasion of that rallying around me in love was my nearly dying. But tomorrow\u2019s Monday, and what\u2019s stopping us all from doing that for one another again? What is in the way? In-it-togetherness is a core value for me. And I think it extends from the ways I experienced a kind of psychological exile in early life, as if I were nowhere and no one. There\u2019s that short poem in the first section of the book, called \u201cExile,\u201d in which I write, \u201cYou think I take from you? I do not take from you, I am you.\u201d I couldn\u2019t believe that more powerfully or more deeply.<\/p>\n

Let me just say one last thing about purpose as it relates to love. When I was on that bus and it lifted onto its two left wheels, and I thought I was at the end of my life \u2026 The first thought I had\u2014and this is in the long poem \u201cOn the Overnight from Agadir\u201d\u2014the first thought I had was, \u201cMy work. I haven\u2019t done my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

No flash before your eyes?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

None. I was like, wait, my contribution! And maybe that\u2019s love. In the form of books, friendship, mentorship, partnership, ordinary empathy and compassion\u2014all the forms it can take. There is something specific and particular that I have to do here and I haven\u2019t done it yet.<\/p>\n

PARKER<\/p>\n

Maybe purpose, then, is the action of love?<\/p>\n

SHANAHAN<\/p>\n

I like that a lot.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Charif Shanahan\u00a0is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently<\/em> Trace Evidence. The recipient of\u00a0a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to Morocco, he lives<\/span> in Chicago, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.<\/em><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Morgan Parker is the author of the young adult novel<\/em>\u00a0Who Put This Song On?\u00a0and the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>Other People\u2019s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night,<\/em> There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonc\u00e9, and<\/em>\u00a0Magical Negro,<\/em> which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award.\u00a0Parker lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe idea of writing saving you as you\u2019re going through something I don’t believe in at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[52133,67827,21343,165],"class_list":["post-164546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-charif-shanahan","tag-featured","tag-morgan-parker","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan by Morgan Parker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 7, 2023 \u2013 \u201cThe idea of writing saving you as you\u2019re going through something I don't believe in at all.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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