Interview with Yusuf Saadi

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 Canadian Griffin
Poetry Prize for your debut collection Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions). A searching quality runs through these poems, as if home may be searched for in language. Can you talk about how this book came to be?

Yusuf Saadi: Thank you! It was a compilation of poems I’d written in my early 20’s until now. I certainly was looking for something resembling “home” at that time, whatever that fuzzy word meant to me, and I think I still am now, though I’m also perhaps realizing there may be no home in the way I once anticipated. I once thought family could be home. It hasn’t been for me. Traditions could be home. I feel estranged from them. Language could be home. Even English feels strange for me—lack of knowledge in Latin, Greek make me feel unconfident in it, and also of course knowledge of it as the colonial language. I feel like in interviews I put pressure on myself to know answers, but I really don’t have many. I think I’m still in the process of searching, maybe just slightly less naïve about it. Perhaps there are different kinds of homes. There are tangible ones, ones I could build with a partner and feel physically and emotionally secure. Conceptual ones, the ideas I hold that keep me above water. Emotional ones, artworks that I feel an affinity to. Being at home with myself? At this moment, I can’t think of there being for me in the world that we live in a singular “home” anymore that would simply be a static time/place/concept where I would feel at peace.

CG: ‘Why can’t we harness sound for energy.’ Yes to that powerful line from your poem “Amperage.” Perhaps that’s what poets do—harness sound through form and content. Can you talk about the importance of sound in your work?

YS: I think that’s largely what I appreciate in others’ poems. I enjoy the kind of writing which reminds us how language can speak to the body rather than just our rational capacity for ideas. How an atmosphere can be conveyed through rhythm, tone; how time can overlap through rhyme, assonance. Those are the elements that often really move me, and I suspect it’s because it’s reaching into the sensuousness of my body rather than a fragmented part of it and to a fuller sense of the connectedness of time.

CG: It seems to me there’s a fine line between ‘word’ and ‘world’ in your poems that in turn, carves out a route, a road map for the imagination. The searching creates as it unfolds through language—sound, image, meaning and rhythm—where making and meaning meet. Can you tell us about your process? What did writing this book teach you?

YS: I don’t think I’ve learned anything for certain about the imagination, but I do, like I would think most writers do, have an intuition that the imagination cannot simply be reduced to paltry fantasy. It seems to me imagination is somewhere between being real and unreal, and maybe poetry has something to do with opening up that space, of rejigging that relationship. A poet cannot simply utter a word and bring something into flesh as a God would, but maybe there’s a glimmer of that capacity as well as a desire to do so.

CG: There’s a timeless quality embedded in your poems that coincides with the modern. A meeting place where old meets new. Your poetry funnels inward and outward as it moves across time. I wonder if you could talk about this yoking.

YS: I imagine these are probably just tensions within me, and within most of us. A desire for introspection to better understand myself as an individual, but also to better understand the historical factors that shaped me. I also think many texts and images I allude to have the timeless quality, and perhaps that echoes through my own writing? Certain texts, religious texts for example, are just endlessly mysterious and ambiguous. Perhaps that’s what gives it the timelessness, because it’s going back to questions that are inherently unsolvable yet demand one take a stance on them and use styles that resist closure due to their ambiguity.

CG: How did the title come into being?

YS: I knew I wanted something short, and that was one of the options that popped into my head.

CG: Form is part of your poetics, particularly sonnets. Have you always been drawn to the sonnet? Do you start with form first? Or does writing the poem lead you to the form?

YS: I just find them not too short, not too long, but just right to frame a poem containing internal tensions. There’s breadth enough to pursue any idea, no matter how philosophical I am capable of exploring, but also short enough that I think it pressures me into condensing and layering my languages, ideas, and imagery.

CG: When / how did poetry enter your life? Was there a poem or poet that opened this portal for you and made you want to create?

YS: I always wanted to write fiction, but somehow landed on poetry.

CG: What’s next for Yusuf Saadi?

YS: I will continue juggling different aspects of my life. Hopefully reading and writing things that don’t simply repeat what I’ve done; I’m working on a novella and have a few new poems coming out in journals. Dealing with my insecurities. Trying to overcome faults. Trying to form new meaningful relationships. Trying to atone for mistakes. Trying to make change to the world. I recently wrote a poem that ends “I’ll never know its language perfectly, / but wordlessly I’ll consecrate this life / to salvage Bengal’s beauty—and this / is how I’ll love my mother’s country.” Things are looking grim with capitalism and the climate crisis. My ancestors’ home, prior to colonization, was the wealthiest in the world before the British plundered 45 trillion dollars from it, and now its literal existence is in danger because we’ve destabilized the climate to such an extent. I don’t think my poetry is explicitly political, but in my personal life I would like to try to be more of a political agent, which does not come easy to me. We need a revolution because capitalism’s growth imperative is a suicide pact, and I want to try to contribute to the possibility of that change and I hope to learn some ways to do so, become the kind of person who can do so, maybe even through poetry. Right now, that seems like our ethical obligation and what I’d like to anchor my time around.