“Language as a Threshold” I.S. Jones on SPELLS OF MY NAME
wust el-balad #2
Lacking the breathing room the span of a full-length collection of poems may provide, the best chapbooks often thrive by embracing the opportunity their shortness grants to sprint. I sat down to read Spells of My Name, poet and essayist I.S. Jones’ newest chapbook, and literally could not get up until I was done. “It’s exhausting to live as a mistranslation,” her speaker writes, and I felt at once electrified and knocked right out.
In the five years since I’ve encountered Itiola’s work, I’ve only known it to be as generous in its honesty and vulnerability as it is unrelenting in its vigor and energy. I don’t think every good chapbook has to compel you to finish it in one sitting, but many of the best often do. They demand, as is their right, to be the object of your attention, to not be perceived as a mere mini-collection. And, god, do the poems in Spells live on their own. Poems of heritage, pain, survival—poems about language itself—blending together effortlessly to deliver a poignant and bold portrait of the artist.
Of course, the best portraits are often a kind of mirror. The poem “Self-Portrait as Itiola” begins with the lines: “i tell myself i’m above capitalism, / but curse when my package / isn’t delivered on time.” I had to stop and stare into space after that one. Spells made me reflect deeply, in ways that were often frightening in their revelatory quality, about my own relationship with form, family, and translation, and I had the pleasure to discuss the resultant thoughts with the author. The following is a condensed and edited version of that conversation.
HAZEM: I love asking chapbook authors on their view of the chapbook itself. Do you see it as a tiny full-length [collection], or is it its own thing?
ITIOLA: I see it as its own thing. I always imagine collections as fields; a full-length is a larger field and a chapbook is a smaller one. Spells is a very self-contained thing. But I do like people seeing the chapbook as kin to future collections. There is certainly overlap.
H: Do you see them as siblings, or are they more like cousins?
I: Cousins, for sure. The governing motif of Spells is a black fawn running through a forest trying to evade all these hunters chasing after it. The second book will be more focused on self-portraits and the urgent, animalistic need to survive. But I haven’t completely figured it out yet. It’s still so far away.
I do know for sure that I want to further explore the self-portrait, though. A lot of my own are inspired by the Latinx photographer Laura Aguilar who used her body in a series of triptych self-portraits to combat her complicated relationship with her body and her violent depression. Her approach really put into perspective what self-portraits are capable of: translation—the ability to render yourself again and again in these different ways. I want to be brave like her.
H: At this point, the self-portrait poem doesn’t really have rules or codified norms, but it does have an increasingly growing, dynamic body of work. Do you think of it as a kind of form?
I: Yeah, I would say that it is in the same way the aubade or the epithalamion are. In all three cases, there are pillars that govern without necessitating restraints. In my own self-portraits, it’s important that the speaker confront something about this reimagined self, whether it’s sexuality, a fraught relationship with family history, colonialism, etc. That’s really where the form takes place for me. In Spells, I wanted to play with imagining the versions of myself who’d been misnamed by people. It was really important for me to translate that on the page.
H: The act of naming in general plays such a pivotal role in the book.
I: Right. There’s the naming of a lot of violence; what my father inflicted on me and my own, my coming to terms with my own sexual assault, different forms of violence that I experienced at the hands of men, etc. But it was also important for me to name my mother’s hurt, her pain of reckoning with Nigeria being a home that she could never return to—her attempt at finding language for a home that no longer exist.
My focus on misnaming in particular, though, has to do with my belief that to be misnamed is a kind of erasure. My actual name doesn’t appear anywhere in the chapbook, and that’s not by accident. In being misnamed, or renamed, I disappear—every time. I wanted to name the people who had wounded me, not so much to shame or make them feel “bad,” but more so I can take back what was taken from me. In that, I was also able to name the disconnect I feel from my country of origin, and what it means to be forced into this American sphere.
So as much as this chapbook was about me reconciling with these wounds, it was not about naming my father as a terrible person or a “bad” man. I don’t think that would have been good or useful writing, let alone conducive to my healing. Instead, I thought that if I could get to the root of my father’s anguish then that would help me heal. Ultimately, the reason I am not angry with him, and do not hate him, is because I understand that my father does not have language for his own suffering. So much of this chapbook was about creating language where language didn’t exist. I genuinely think his inability to name his grief eroded his health. And in a weird, circuitous way, when I learned to create compassion for my father’s suffering, when I learned to create language for it, it helped me heal it and put down a lot of the resentment.
I’d workshopped a poem about my father in a writing retreat and someone told me that the poem was not working because I needed to also turn the light on myself. Of course, I can only speak for myself when I say this, but I don’t think it’s useful or good writing to simply blame other people. What exactly does blame do? I don’t know.
I wish I had more foresight to understand this earlier. I knew I was hurting, but then I learned to understand that my dad was hurting, too. But the only thing he knew how to do was walk with his wounds first. That realization doesn’t make it okay, but it has helped me a lot in terms of letting go of resentment. I now understand that this is a man who was born into civil war, who had to do a lot of very difficult and painful work just to become an American. This book did really help me create language for a lot of the pain that has persisted in my family.
H: Throughout the book, whenever the speaker articulates their binational identity, the slash is often used as opposed to the more conventional hyphen—“American / Nigerian” vs. “Nigerian-American.” Do you think the slash does work the hyphen can’t?
I: Absolutely. For a long time, I did not actively claim or acknowledge that I was Nigerian. Then there was a moment in my life where I started feeling very strongly that this, too, was my heritage. I was raised by two immigrants from there, and I am very proud of that. I am always looking for a way to honor that, but I think it’ll also always be such that my identity is cut in half. I’ve only ever been able to go to Nigeria twice, and one of the times was when I was a very young child, which barely counts.
I could see the hyphen as a thread that binds both of these identities together, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that for me at the moment. If we were to think of it as percentages, I’d say I’m 70% American and 30% Nigerian, but I hope to make it 50:50 someday. The slash feels right, for now, but that might change in the future.
H: How does your Yoruba come to you in your work? What role would you say it plays in your English?
I: Yoruba is a very tonal language. The way that you say a word can change its meaning. I think of language as something we are continually crossing, and when you pass through a door, you leave something behind. That’s kind of what translation in my work does. Sometimes you have to take with you something that you can’t actually take with you. And this feeling is compounded by Yoruba being a threshold that I haven’t fully mastered yet.
Yoruba is also the language through which I understand the divine. It’s the language I first learned how to pray in, so I think of it as the language of angels. In terms of how I think about its role in my writing, I also have to give a very special shout-out to Marwa Helal, who is the only teacher I’ve ever had who actively pushed me to write in English and Yoruba at the same time. She was very militant about making sure I do not italicize the Yoruba in my writing.
I’ve come to agree with that sentiment. Italicizing the non-English language in such a space makes it seem slanted, a kind of admission of subjugation to English. The italics do this subtle thing of making the “other” language, by default, secondary to English. The more I thought about it like that, the more I worked to make these two languages coexist. I really began to see what Marwa was trying to get at, and tried to make sure that my language has as much space as English does—especially because English takes up space wherever it goes. I’m still very much learning how to do that work.
H: You are also an essayist, and that often shows in some of the stunning prose poems in the chapbook. As someone who’s also a poet and a critic, I think there’s a really intimate relationship between those two mediums. What does that relationship look like for you?
I: People can get very touchy about prose poems, and I don’t know where that comes from! I think that they can do really fantastic work on the page, especially if you want to put a lot in a very confined space. For me, the prose poem is a way to put a narrative in a small field. Breaking a poem by couplets or what have you certainly does labor the prose poem couldn’t do, but I was really militant about making sure the chapbook was guided by prose poems.
Looking back now, that’s probably why it got rejected by a lot of places. But, in a way, they did me a favor because Newfound [Press] turned out to be the home that I didn’t think I would ever find. They’ve been so good, and so generous to me—just so supportive of the very meticulous and specific choices that I make.
H: In a lot of these poems, “the night” isn’t simply a time of day, but seems to take on its own weight and gravitas. What does that language, the usage of “the night” as opposed to a simple “nighttime,” mean to you?
I: One aspect of my fascination with poems that take place at night has to do with the influence of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The other has to do with how, growing up, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without my father’s permission. My mother would also often say things like: “respectable women don’t go out at night.” Eventually, I started thinking: “well, mom, I’m not a respectable woman!”
My attraction to the setting really has to do with how I was raised to believe the night was inherently taboo. If anything, the reverse was true for me. The night felt sacred. The world is asleep, and I could work more quietly. No one interrupts me, and no one cares what I’m doing. I feel the most alive during that time—the most myself. The poems written then come alive because there are certain ways in which the world moves and shifts differently under the veil of darkness. I wanted to capture the negotiation of wonder, fear, and frenzy that I feel then.
H: In thinking of the title, what is the relationship between spelling and spells (magic, conjuring) to you?
I: My grandmother was actually a practicing witch when she was alive. That was something I wanted to put in the chapbook, but there was no realistic place for it. Otherwise, I like the idea of naming things being a kind of conjuring in itself. In that sense, when you misspell something, you’re still conjuring it, but I imagine it as a kind of fracturing. Every time I was misspelled, I imagined myself being conjured incorrectly, again and again. There’s a parallel between that feeling and my own immigrant experience. What does it mean to be rendered in a place that’s not yours?
H: Like being summoned by a bad magician.
I: Yeah. Spells and mythmaking were always in the background of this book, especially in a poem like “Esperanza,” which is my grandmother’s name. I wanted to think through how to live into that lineage. The idea of spelling being an act of magic was also the idea of me reimagining myself in multiple lives that I never lived.
H: And the title really gives all these complex themes a cohesive connective tissue.
I: Precisely. I’ve had to learn that writing a manuscript isn’t just about putting a bunch of poems next to each other. When poems actually speak to one another, they become one single body, one single entity. I now understand what was missing in the original iteration of Spells: there was no sense of that connective tissue. I had not yet figured out the reason why this fawn kept coming back up. I had not understood why my father kept coming up as a hunter. That understanding is what was missing from the manuscript. It was what helped me better grasp what I was actually trying to translate with this book.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. She is the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound.
Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. You can find his work here and follow him on social media here.
Spells of My Name is out now by Newfound Press. You can find it here, as well as in local bookstores and libraries across the US.