Spotlight series #121 : Hajer Mirwali

The one hundred and twenty-first (the tenth anniversary of this series!) in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Toronto-based Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit, Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon, Kingston poet Jason Heroux, Vancouver poet Scott Inniss and Lethbridge-based Brazil-born poet Carlos A. Pittella!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

VERSeFest / Factory Reading Series : Lydia Unsworth and Nada Gordon,

In case you hadn't caught, The Factory Lecture Series returns to VERSeFest this year, with lectures by Manchester poet Lydia Unsworth and Brooklyn, New York poet Nada Gordon, on Sunday, March 29! A free event! Both poets also read that same evening alongside Jumoke Verissimo! Check out the full schedule and ticket information for this year's sixteenth annual VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival (with some events, as we're able, live-streamed in a pay-what-you-can donation, for those unable to make in-person). Also, there are a bunch of interviews with poets coming to this year's festival up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, including with Lydia Unsworth, Nada Gordon, Gwen Aube, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Paul Vermeersch, Hajer Mirwali and Isabella Wang--and more to come next week!

Hajer Mirwali, Revolutions

 

January 22

In 1994 Mama gave birth to me in Amman on
her way from Baghdad to Richmond Hill and
Mona with wood sand metal electric motor
transported us to the first home we were
exiled from. Two daughters of a revolutionary
split. Two mothers of a contracting uterus
waiting to be Palestinian again. 

Past noon. Shadows cast by a swinging
mobile are longer, higher. 

Repetitive sounds mimic Mona’s repletion:
whirring projector light, needle hitting
copper thread. Mama held my slippery body
to her chest. Mama’s slippery body on my
chest. She asks if I have ever listened to
+ and –. Grains of sand flowing through one
another. Every daughter grain resorbs her
mother grain as first foreign body. Lives her
whole life with that inside her. 

I later fix “Mona’s repletion” to repetition to
repletion. Mona so near bursting every line she
erases reconfigures its genes to another line. 

Every time Mama asks what I am writing
I only say + and –.

The full-length poetry debut by Hajer Mirwali, “a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto,” is Revolutions (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that the back cover writes “sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities.” Composed as a book-length suite, this collections weaves and interleaves such wonderful structural variety, offering a myriad of threads that swirl around a collision of cultures, and a poetics that draws from artists and writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Naseer Shamma and Nicole Brossard, writing tales of mothers and daughters; and how one self-edits, keeps hidden, and also provides comfort, solidarity. “Yes,” Mirwali writes, as part of the poem “January 23,” “a very good daughter who loves / her motherlands and her God. // A daughter more or less. // A daughter + and –. // Never the same twice.”

Structured as a book-length sequence of eleven poem-sections, each of which are set as individual poem-clusters—“3AIB,” “CYCLE GENERATOR,” “MEETING + AND –,” “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” “OPEN GUIDE OF PALESTINE,” “BORDER TONGUE,””OUD INTERRUPTED,” “RAMADAN RECORD,” “GROOVES OF ONE OR MANY XXXXXXX’S,” “REVOLUTIONS” and “SIFT”—weaving through conversations with her mother, swirls of text, erasures, ekphrasis, visual poems and first person description and reportage: “Waiting for the long Baghdad night to fall // down the mountain fold / fragments of rock for riverbed // between our homes he shields / his body over mine // storms of earth not rooted enough / eyes of sand and red sky // after it settles we sweep / a new day or the same long night // rub against other nights making / grains more and more circular [.]”

In the “NOTES” at the back of the collection, Mirwali clarifies how the collection, as well, exists in conversation with and response to a specific work by British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum: “Much of Revolutions is a response to Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, which I first encountered online in March 2016 and in person January 2019 at the exhibition Open Works. Art in Movement, 1955-1975 at Le Pedrera in Barcelona.” As the Museum of Modern Art website writes, this particular piece (1994-2004) by Hatoum “is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.” Through Hatoum’s piece, the cycle of creation and erasure exists on an endless loop, without anything new created or gained, set in a single moment of yin and yang. And yet, whatever else might be swirling through these poems, this is a collection that is also centred around that core of mothers and daughters, and how one navigates such a relationship to emerge as an individual self separate yet connected and interconnected; with all else, one might offer, as a means through which that articulation might best be explored, from meditation to conversation, citation and direct quotation. “Heaven lies beneath a mother’s feet.” she writes. “What is at her centre?”

What becomes fascinating is in how all of these moments that Mirwali articulates connect across distances, moving from collage into coherence, writing the interconnectedness between each of these disparate narrative threads. As she writes as part of the section “BORDER TONGUE”: “Sand in an hourglass falls in concentric circles until the space is filled then reaches back to where it fell from. I take photos of the camera’s small screen send them to Baba in Iraq.” She writes of multiple points of departure and relationships to people, to individuals, to geographies and geopolitical crises; she writes of home, of hearth. She writes of the contradictions of where the heart may go and how one connects to the world, seeking solace and urgency, a connection to where part of her might always remain, as the sequence “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” a poem subtitled “(twenty-minute poems to be read in two directions),” offers:

Have I stopped caring about Palestine?

I want to go skating

Want to eat hand-pulled noodles

To live alone

I want to be a mother

Again I want to listen to the oud

Naseer Shamma would not have written “Layl Baghdad” if it weren’t for the mirage