AB: I also love the humour that saturates your work. Can you say something about humour in your work and your aesthetics?
HS: I think what I like about humour is that it can be deadly serious, it can be a way of pinpointing an important issue, or making a statement about something, without labouring it. And it can be quite subversive. It can move you away from the lyric tradition and all the baggage that comes with that, the enduring influence of romantic, pre-modernist poetry. Humour is also a way of bringing people together: at a poetry reading, when people laugh there is a feeling of community.
I admire poets such as Joanne Burns in Australia or Matthew Welton in the UK or Charles Bernstein in the US who use humour, but their humour is not frivolous, it comments in a serious way on the excesses, blindspots and injustices of contemporary society. In their work the satirical and the surreal are often closely connected, which gives the work a lot of edge. But some people, including some critics, are not fully at ease with humour in poetry because they think it is frivolous.
I find humour extends my aesthetic and emotional range because it is often more conventional for a poet to look at the world in a sad rather than a cheerful way, to stress tragedy rather than comedy. It’s good to invert these norms, give them a bit of a shake-up.
AB: In ecliptical we also see a number of re-appraisals of historical women arts practitioners, such as Fanny Mendelssohn and Lee Krasner. Can you say something about the importance of this practice to you as a poet and a woman?
HS: My main interest in writing about Fanny Mendelssohn and Lee Krasner was in highlighting artists who were overshadowed by their male counterparts. For a long time Lee Krasner wasn’t really recognised as the great painter she is, and that was because she was married to Jackson Pollock. Matters were not helped by the fact that her style was incredibly diverse so it was difficult for critics to pigeon-hole her work or art dealers to commercialise it. Fanny Mendlessohn was an even more extreme case of eclipse by a male counterpart. She was the sister of the well-known composer Felix but she lived in the 19th century and there were many prohibitions on her having a career or performing in public. Nevertheless, some musicologists consider her relatively unknown work to be more daring and experimental than the work of her brother.
The way men have often overshadowed high-achieving women is a topic I have been interested in more broadly: recently I wrote a poem about the scientist Roslyn Franklin whose important role in the discovery of the structure of DNA was underplayed by Watson and Crick. I grew up in an era that was rife with sexist attitudes and sexist belittling, and where opportunities for women were much less than they were for men. And historically the situation was so much worse: prior to the 20th century freedom for women was extremely limited. But sexism is still alive and well today, we haven’t moved on as much as we should have done.
AB: This book, like your previous book, Word Migrants, is informed – often elliptically – by your family’s diasporic Jewish history. I see this in the book’s thematics of migration, displacement and intersection. It seems to me that your Jewish heritage makes you sensitive to issues relating to political violence and intergenerational trauma as they are played out in a range of global contexts.
HS: My Jewish heritage and the themes of migration, displacement and intersection, political violence and intergenerational trauma, do hover over my work, though I think they are more marked in Word Migrants, and other previous work, than in ecliptical. It is difficult as a Jew to see footage of the holocaust and not identify with it. I’m also well aware that the persecution and displacement of Jews stretches way back into history and that the holocaust is only the most recent large-scale example. Being Jewish has brought home to me with great force that an ethnic identity, even if it is not something you consciously cultivate, can be a death sentence, and that a diasporic existence is fundamentally unsafe for many people. In ecliptical the poem ‘Silent Photos’ is about the kind of intergenerational trauma you mention because it suggests that the offspring of holocaust survivors are implicated in, and cannot totally escape from, what has happened to their parents. Whether my Jewishness has made me sensitive to these issues in other contexts I don’t know, I certainly hope so.
I have a complex relationship with being Jewish that has involved embracing it but also, especially earlier in my life, pushing it away. I’m always interested in how people position themselves with regard to being Jewish, whether they welcome that identity, or turn away from it, because I have done a bit of both. I am an atheist, and I am not religiously inclined, and I also don’t necessarily want to identify with only one group. Sometimes when I was younger I felt very closed in by my Jewish background and by some of the prohibitions and restrictions it brought with it. These prohibitions were to do with family pressure to identify as Jewish, a pressure that presumably partly came out of the trauma that Jews had historically endured and the insecurity – the need to stick together – it spawned. Some of those prohibitions – such as the idea that you must marry someone Jewish – could have ruined my life so I had to rebel against them. As a young person, I sometimes felt that I didn’t want to have anything to do with being Jewish because it was too enclosed, though I don’t feel that now at all. Repression is a central theme in my writing and my work is full of images of claustrophic spaces, which are a metaphor for this sense of unwanted enclosure. These images include prisons, cages, stone structures (the prehistoric Nuraghe in Sardinia) and windowless rooms. They are spaces from which it is difficult to escape. This focus on repression consists of a double-bind that stems from my Jewish background: my awareness of the repression of minority ethnic groups but also my conviction that forcing someone to inhabit a proscribed ethnic identity is itself a repressive act.
I don’t see myself necessarily as a Jewish writer. I see myself as a cosmopolitan writer. By that I mean that I don’t totally identify with one culture, or write only about it, but see myself as leaning towards and drawing on many different cultures. I like to think my work is shaped and influenced by diverse cultural and stylistic contexts. I was originally from the UK, now I live in Australia. I have travelled a lot in Europe and Asia and have lived for short periods in different places from Paris to Tokyo to New York. So I don’t write solely as a British writer or an Australian writer or a Jewish writer. When I am writing, I sometimes find a Jewish historical example, or include a personal memory that fits with the topic, but it is often entangled with examples from other contexts and cultures. For example, in the poem ‘Faking It’, I posit a historical example from the fifteenth century of how Jews were persecuted because of fake news about them. But this is welded together with many other examples of fake news, fake items or fake behaviours that are not specifically Jewish. I am certainly interested in Jewish history and the suffering that was part of that, but I also want to address the suffering of other people round the world. In ecliptical ‘The Lips are Different’ is about the racism endured by Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Somali woman who migrates to Canada and is a Canadian citizen. Mohamud visits Kenya but when she tries to return to Canada airport officials won’t let her board the plane because they say she doesn’t look like her passport photo and won’t believe she is who she says she is.
Similarly, I am very engaged by the issue of political violence, way beyond how it manifests itself in the holocaust. I am fascinated by the ethical debates to do with the right of nations to intervene in other nations’ military conflicts, which I rehearse in the poem ‘Blow-up’ in Word Migrants. And I find the issues about the violence that can arise from political activism challenging because although I would never condone violence, I also realise it is sometimes imperative to act. These issues about passivity and activism are fundamental to ‘Days of Rage’ a poem that is about David Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground in the US, who was incarcerated for forty years for being involved with an armed robbery. The robbery was carried out, on his part at least, in the name of socialist ideals and to raise funds for their realisation. Tragically, it resulted in killings that he did not carry out (and probably didn’t condone) but in which he was inevitably implicated.
