INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

(1) What diasporas do you write into, and what diasporas do you write to create?

I appreciate how the use of "diaspora" here is troubling a fixed origin that the word definitionally implies. I am a child of Iranian immigrants and activists, so that ancestry is particularly intimate for me. But at the same time, as an anglophone writer in the U.S., with its own rich and ongoing history of struggle, I don’t want to fetishize my cultural blood ties to a place I’ve never been to and which I primarily have access to in English translation. I refuse for my solidarity to be confined to nationalist or identity politics, even as these categorizations have undeniable influence on my subject formation and the way I move through the world.

(2) Where does this piece land within the greater history, body, and/or evolution of your work?

This is my first (semi) speculative poem! There’s an earlier version of this poem that I wrote after my mother’s brother in Iran died, and how she was unable to mourn with our family there. I had never met him, nor did I have to to be affected and to connect this to the broader violence of western imperialism. The version published here comes after reading a lot of family abolitionist praxis, so the poem is also working through: how to mourn this death, among countless others, without doubling down on salvaging the nuclear family, which would be a performed sentimentalism that doesn't actually resonate with me. Or put another way, how to move past the immobilization of grief to become more expansive, propelled into future socialities that see the end of capitalism, the seeds of which are already here.

(3) How do "xenolithic edges” show up in your piece?

I feel like they're everywhere—the speaker in the cemetery, in this country; the buried dead settlers; even the non-native trees which were planted here, I guess you could call these xenoliths. The edges, the incongruencies which give way to fractures in the social order, are in the playfully riotous seizure of this place against its intended use. The desecration of a specifically "New England" cemetery—an enclosure of public space and resources—is envisioned as an act of resistance, not only against the respectability politics of grief and who is afforded it, but against the attempted burial of colonial history as much as intergenerational solidarities. This is what I’m trying to say with the poem’s title.