Q&A with Elina Abou-Sleiman
“Between the fog and the rain, the mountains sing a constant reunion / Fish falling upwards / On leaves of a vanishing coast…”
~ ‘After Australia’ by Elina Abou-Sleiman
I read your speculative poem ‘After Australia,’ as a meditation on and revolt against nation and colony, with a move towards reimagining a new future. What was the inspiration behind your piece?
This poem arose from a collection of feelings, conversations, and experiences that have lingered with me after a year of political struggle in 2020. Reflecting on the resistance of those around me, which is my greatest inspiration, I hoped to reveal something about our confrontations with the violent state forces which oppress us all. Specifically because we oppose such violence, resistance offers a unique opportunity for healing and for uninhibited life, and I wanted to reflect on this dichotomy also. More than anything, this poem is dedicated to my dreams of a future beyond our present struggles.
The poem ends with the same phrases as it begins, but slightly altered. Why did you choose this structure and what did it allow you to achieve?
I wanted the poem to end with the same vision of hope and sense of meaning that it began with. I think that hope is a powerful force of revolutionary change, and that in its absence we risk feeling debilitated and without meaningful direction for the future. I wanted to reiterate that there is a future of vast possibilities worth attaining, just as there is a past we may look to as well. There is both a before and after Australia.
Your creative nonfiction piece in Overland ‘Remembering August in Beirut’ explores memory, forgetting, history and homeland. As both a writer and historian, do you find these disciplines inform or overlap each other in your work?
My formal education was in history and I think that this has greatly contributed to my strengths as a writer. Both disciplines offer avenues for the exploration of truth, including all of the personal and relational specificities that converge within it. Without history, whatever that may mean to us, we can never understand the intricacies of our present reality. I also understand history as something that we all live in, and which is not finished but manifests around and within us. The continuum of past, present, and future, and their simultaneity in our lives, is something we all navigate whether consciously or not.
You have previously written about the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Who are some other great writers or poets you admire?
Darwish wrote with such conviction and clarity and I wrote about his work, in part, as a letter of gratitude for this. Another writer I equally admire is the great American author James Baldwin, whose work beautifully champions justice in truth. Recently I have also begun long overdue ventures into the work of Alexis Wright and Ursula K. Le Guin, great writers who embody the revolutionary power of imagination. As for great poets, I must also mention my mother, without whom I probably would have never written anything at all.
Elina Abou-Sleiman is a Lebanese-Australian writer and historian currently based in Meanjin (Brisbane) on Yuggera and Turrbal country.