RR: Great question, Amrita! I was looking for a title that would be a plea to be loved. I wanted to delineate the awkward positioning of the migrant and capture a productive tension between wanting to fit in, to be accepted, while retaining a core sense of self. Along with that, I wanted to choose an idiom of belonging that extended beyond fulfilling one’s basic needs – food, shelter, clothing – and ventured into those other territories. I wanted to climb up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and mention the desire for friendship, connection, or tenure, demands that would be viewed as less urgent. I thought “love” came closest to underscoring those more invisible, but nevertheless important needs. Many of my poems touch upon those other needs and desires. Your angle is interesting too, about how immigrants are expected to be “model” citizens while dealing with such “unloving” contexts, and that is very much a running theme in the book.

AG: I have many favorites in this rich collection of poetry. But one of the most startling poems in this book is “Adjunct.” Those of us in academia painstakingly know the feeling of being Adjuncts, the labor, the inner and outer circles. The poem seems to be a critique of the academic rigmarole and system and the haunting lines, “There comes a point when our wanting is simply too much. Obscene.” There is this critique of academia, but also a situatedness in the poem in framing it in Europe. Can you tell me about the two frames in the haunting poem?

RR: You got to the heart of it, Amrita. That makes me happy. I think I touch upon this a bit in my last response, but basically, I wanted to articulate desires that might be considered “too much”, and have immigrants labeled as ingrates. I wanted to represent a kind of immigrant glass ceiling, that beyond having a certain number of desires, and wishes fulfilled, wanting anything outside of the ambit of that is considered greedy, and our wanting becomes “obscene.” I wanted, through the verse form, to dig into the limits of acceptable wanting and the point at which wanting becomes unjustified. The double framing certainly applies to this specific poem which thematizes how the need to have a stable, non-precarious position within academia, to have a connection, friendship, belonging, or upward social mobility within the European context, these desires are viewed as inappropriate wanting. The kinds of desires that are not survival-centered, and might put us ahead or at par with white European peers. 

AG: My other personal favorites are “Medusa Ghosted” and “Flaneuse” and there seems to be a larger focus on themes and questions of belonging, gender, search for identity and unsettling and radical moments of crossings of various kinds—as a poet you move through various positionalities, experiences, borders and boundaries in these poems. How hard was it to construct a voice in various subjective positions as a woman, immigrant, academic, poet coming together in these poems?

RR: Wonderful question, and I expect nothing less of you. Medusa ghosted is a critique of the patriarchy, and how it pushes us into little boxes, expecting us to be subservient and controllable certainly, but also pretty in highly specific ways, appealing, likable, romantically open, and all the other metrics, big, and small, that women are expected to abide by. Flaneuse too is related to those themes but explores women’s citizenship, or lack thereof, within public spaces, and how, for an array of reasons, walking down the street in certain cities as a woman remains the most dangerous thing that one can do. Walking through public space is such a basic entitlement as a human, and yet, inaccessible for so many women across the world. I am thinking of Lahore here, but also, looking at what is happening in Iran, considering different European metropolises as well where as women of color we are made to feel unwelcome, or unsafe in the city. I find the narrative code-switching between different subject positions easy because those voices are interrelated (at least in my head) even if they are different. But I did worry about the demands that I place on the reader to code-switch between identities and different spaces with me, and they work their way through the poems, but I think that is part of the appeal of the collection hopefully.

AG: The publisher’s blurb mentions the book is an “angry love letter”—One can note various affects of anguish, anger and even rage in different registers in the poems, but why “love letter”—why was the collection intended as a love letter specifically?

RR: My thinking was that underneath rage, and anguish lies love, or a desire to be loved. That true anger comes from a place of unfilled need, the gap between expectation and reality. Where there is no love, no expectation, there is no a relationship. I was trying to flesh out a relationship between parts of continental Europe and its South Asian and Muslim citizenry, and depict it as a failed love affair – one in which acts of appeasement as a model minority – don’t seem to work. 

AG: In the book, there is also some superb art work, doodles, curious page orientations that beg us to rethink how to “see” and implicate readers in the act of reading, seeing and creating new visions. Tell us how the form of the book itself performs a specific kind of resistance for you? Did you yourself create the art works in the book?

RR: I worked with a very talented illustrator, Reena Makwana, who produced all the artwork and the motifs inside the book that mention. And my publisher, Emma Wright, was also a creative collaborator in the process. I knew I wanted a door on the cover, a large, unwieldly door that you have sometimes in old, European buildings, particularly university buildings, and to capture how those doors are not build for small, brown, female bodies, but probably for white, able-bodied men. I thought the door would work on a symbolic level too, as an image of academic gatekeeping. Given that architecture is central to some of the poems and to the cover art, we as a team thought that reproducing motifs from old European buildings and including them with poems, and between them would be a sound, aesthetic choice. The motifs and drawings bring that structural sense of belonging forward - if the continent were imagined as a building, which rooms would the lyrical I or the reader, have access to? The visual elements create pauses, silences, between the poems, to let the words echo in the rooms that are opening or not opening. The differently oriented poems are also an attempt at creating tactile, structural physicality and pulling the reader into the text in different ways.

AG: My final question is about your incredible shift in journey— tell us about your transformation from the academic with a fantastic book on new literatures from Kashmir to a poet. How different were these voices and what do you enjoy being more?

RR: Fantastic question, and a hard one to answer. I have written poetry my whole life, most of it quite bad and unpublishable probably. The poem as a medium, is able to capture fragments, shards, fleeting things and is not as bulky as a memoir, or as indulgent as a novel. I like that. I have used it as a tool to archive my conflicting identities, and experiences of motherhood, moving, migration, academia, love, nostalgia, and loss, and it has, above all, helped me get through challenging times in my life. I think it fits alongside my other pursuits and does not feel like an imposition. I have realized that the “voice” with which I speak in scholarship is often terse-sounding and disembodied, and I want to work on that. I personally feel that literary criticism should be accessible, draw upon lived experience, and speak in a relatable, human voice. That is why I enjoy the works of Sara Ahmed and bell hooks so much because I think they’re able to do that, blend the personal, the bodily, with the scholarly and the critical, seamlessly. I aspire to speak like that, to bring the poetic together with the scholarly. That would be enjoyable. I don’t think I have figured that balance out yet.

Full disclosure though, I no longer work in academia which is a choice I made a few years back for my emotional health. This means that I do not actively publish literary criticism/scholarship on a regimented schedule under a deadline but it also means working on the fray, and having little to no access to research resources. That is something I have been grappling with recently: how to continue to produce scholarship as an independent scholar (terrible term, I know) on the fray, while making use of open-access resources and navigating various institutional barriers and paywalls.

Thanks so much for speaking with me, Amrita! Loved the chance to introspect with you.