"Writing Helps to Keep Me Awake": Interview with Bahar Orang
Bahar Orang is a writer and physician resident. Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty is her first book.
Bahar and guest interviewer Conyer Clayton spoke over email over a period of several months. The patience and gentleness of this exchange, along with the extreme thoughtfulness of Bahar’s responses, are indicative of why Conyer was eager to interview Bahar in the first place. In this interview, they discuss Bahar’s experience publishing her debut book, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty (Book*hug, 2020), how notions of beauty, home, ruin, and love interact and play off one another, and how she relates to her roles as both physician and writer.
To learn more about Bahar, follow her on Twitter @bharohh.
Conyer: Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me, Bahar. Your book, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty, continued ringing in my mind long after I finished it. There were two themes in particular I found myself reflecting on:
1) the practice of attending to and noticing beauty in our day to day lives, something our capitalistic culture of productivity can make very difficult.
Is our dedication to daily efficiency a death for beauty?
2) the notion of home, "the home-note as the only note played again and again” (39), and of beauty being home itself. "Facing homeward, our perpetual orientation" (88).
Is daily attentiveness to beauty a way to create home, to create more beauty, to resist capitalist culture?
Bahar: Thank you so much for your questions and reflections.
The idea of home has many problems. Home is a contested possibility. Home can be overly sentimentalized, overly nostalgic, commodified, and wrapped up in property, nation-state, the violence of borders, the violence of origins. It is so difficult to speak of home without falling into these clichés, without reproducing the state’s home or the patriarch’s home.
And yet. I still believe in home. Mahmoud Darwish has a poem, "I Belong There” and the last lines are, “I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a/ single word: Home.” Darwish is writing here in exile and writing towards a Palestine free from colonial occupation (which has everything to do with thinking seriously about home). And to dismantle all the words, and to then draw from that dismantling the word “home” – this is beauty’s practice. Transfiguration, rearticulation, reimagination, return, resistance, rearrangements of words towards rearrangements of life. I think home is where there is freedom and safety, and home might be made and remade through practices of beauty.
Conyer: The notion of home being wrung from a dismantling of language is so potent. I love that.
This makes me think of a moment from your book, wherein you say, "beauty is where language fails." Shortly after, you write, "And yet, there is language and poetry as beautiful as ocean or flower, there have been writings so particular, so impossibly beautiful. Could it be that it's the moment of touch — that kingdom of touching – where the finitude of language touches the transcendent, maybe that is the place I want to know better, and it's not a question of beauty at all, but a journey to coordinates where the writing in the air creates a real, material elsewhere." (56)
Language failing beauty, being dismantled, these dismantled pieces touching, creating that kingdom of touching…maybe gesturing homewards? Can this "elsewhere" you refer to be home? Can writing itself manifest a new home-note to ring out?
Bahar: The “kingdom of touching” comes from Aracelis Girmay’s poem Elegy, where she writes:
Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
And I think about the kingdom of touching, and I think it’s a place we can think of, maybe, as home. And in the poem the kingdom is here (here in the poem, here in the present, already here, in “the touching of strangers and parrots,” where “you touch the young branch”), but it’s also elsewhere, an entire kingdom of it elsewhere. So, there are these glimpses in the present of such a kingdom, but really those glimpses open us, or redirect us, or guide us, to the possibility of another kingdom, a whole kingdom of touching, and by touching I imagine caring, interdependency, radical vulnerability met with radical intimacy and loving. So another meaning for home then: Girmay’s kingdom of touching.
And where is writing’s role in all this? I think just as you’ve suggested, things falling apart (dismantling), ‘these dismantled pieces touching.’ Which is poetry’s work, like in Elegy.
At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize poetry, or all of poetry, to idealize it or purify it. It’s not all poems that dismantle; it’s not all poems that recreate or reconfigure or undo. Some poems do just the opposite – they stabilize and reify. Some poems only insist on this life, this order of the world, and caring attentiveness probably encompasses critical attentiveness too.
Conyer: That is a very good point, as it can be quite tempting to idealize and over-generalize poetry and artistic practice. As I reflect on topics that are often idealized, I would include romance and love in that category. I think because of that, I've always found myself a bit off put by overly tender or sappy love poetry, and struggle to write it even when that is the truth of my current feeling. I find myself uncomfortable in it, despite knowing its value and beauty, because I feel I am not capturing the full picture (as though capturing the "full" picture of anything at any given time is even possible).
In your book, you write beautifully about romance and companionship, but near the end say: "You know, despite everything I've said, I find myself wary of wasting words on love" (106), Your book made me try to figure through that seeming contradiction through another idea you present: the aesthetic of ruination.
Can you speak to how the tenderness of love poetry and an aesthetic of ruination (the body cut open, in fragments) can co-exist so naturally within your work?
Bahar: Ruins undo notions of propriety, ruins emphasize contingency and negotiation, ruins resist easy assimilation into coherent frameworks of meaning or knowledge, ruins open many other and alternative ways of connecting to the past (that is not passed). So when it comes to poems about love or love poetry, thinking through and with ruins helped me to suspend all sorts of commonplace (and ultimately normative and violent) judgments or assumptions about love and intimacy. In a broken world, loving is a practice of cobbling together new meanings from inside ruins.
All that being said, I was also writing with so much apprehension about falling into all the clichés of love poetry. And I probably did fall after all. Which is just another risk of vulnerability that we take as writers, I guess, even though our failures can feel very acute as they seem so statically printed on the page (over and over). (I was not very prepared for that part of publishing).
Conyer: I completely relate to the feeling of looking at ones (perceived) mistakes cemented for eternity (?) in book form, but your book, read from an outside perspective, felt as though everything belonged just as it should. Part of what I was trying to express in my previous question is that the way you stitch your love poetry together from "inside ruin" felt as though it escaped certain overused conventions, and thus appealed to me much more than many love poems I've read in the past.
To switch gears a bit here — I really wanted to ask you about your experience as both a poet and a doctor. Large swaths of your book are about being in medical school. I am curious how, in practicing medicine, these things inform one another in a practical sense. Does the time spent with one inform the other? Do you find them growing and moving together, converging? If so, is this convergence conscious or unconscious? Or are these practices kept relatively separate for you beyond the philosophical musings and writings?
Bahar: I know other physician-writers who say they are a doctor first and a writer second, but I really feel the opposite way. It happens less often now (after being a trainee for 6 years), but I still do have the experience of being in the hospital or the clinic and looking around me and wondering what I’m doing here and how I ended up here. Some mentors have called that experience a kind of imposter syndrome, but I’m not so sure. I feel essentially most at home, or most myself, writing, thinking about writing, being with art, talking with others about writing and art. My path to medical school was sort of unanticipated, I frankly didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and in the years since I’ve gone between regret and surprise and resignation quite often.
Of course, it’s amazing, and painful, and incredible, and difficult, and I am so grateful, to be able to be with people when they are most vulnerable. It’s those moments of profound and singular intimacy that I cherish in medicine. But those encounters often feel like stolen moments. For the most part, the medical establishment is shaped by violent ongoing histories, rigid practices, unfair hierarchies, and as a result produces immense disparity. Writing helps to keep me awake to all that, and to maintain a vision of what it could mean, and what it could look like, to return care to health care.
Conyer: I sincerely hope you are able to continue having those moments of intimacy, and that they become more plentiful as you work to maintain that vision.
Let's keep you where feel most at home then, speaking about writing, for my final question:
Earlier in the interview you mention not feeling prepared for seeing your "failures" "statically printed on the page." Are there other aspects you've been surprised by? How have you found the experience of publishing your first book overall?
Bahar: It’s been a good experience! I’ve loved connecting with other writers like yourself, encountering another person’s reading of the book, and learning all the strange and unexpected places that the book has fallen into. It’s really frankly amazing (sometimes a bit scary, but still amazing) how a book is released into the world to have its own life, its own relationships, its own particular agency. I’ve known that to be true as a reader. But as a writer, it sort of fills you with humility and awe. It makes you ask, you know, to whom does a book belong? Not really, or not quite, to the writer. And not only, or not totally, to the reader. I suppose people have always asked these questions, but I’ve been thinking them anew for myself, wondering after a book-making project that is wildly truer to the essentially porous and shifting but deep and affected relationships we have to works of writing.
Conyer: Thank you so much for being willing to chat with me, and for your incredibly thoughtful responses. I’ve so enjoyed connecting with you as well.
Conyer Clayton is a writer, editor, musician, and gymnastics coach. Her debut full-length collection is We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (2020, Guernica Editions).