Who Gets to be Human?

Editor’s Note: The following is an installment in the Poetry Foundation’s occasional series of poets in conversation with each other. This entry includes Franny Choi, author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (2014), Death by Sex Machine (2017), and Soft Science (2019). She is also the co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast VS. Franny talks here with Gala Mukomolova, winner of the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and the author of Without Protection (2019). The interview was condensed and edited.

Franny Choi: What does a lesbian poetics mean to you?

Gala Mukomolova: Anything that gets to use the word lesbian—I'm thinking here of Toni Morrison's line about using the word love—has to center women as humans with rich, complex interiors. In doing the work of learning how to see and listen and perceive, lesbian poetics allows a greater connective tissue to form, one in which natural forms and structures are part of our erotics and our sense of intimacy. I think Lesbian Poetics™ knows that humans who consider themselves women are humans who feel deeply for sleeping volcanoes, know intimately the strength of mountains and the resilience of trees, are curious about what allows certain small creatures to keep surviving. And, yes, I think lesbian poetics speaks of loving women as a woman—the rewarding work of it and the abject pain of it, too.

(To clarify, I intentionally use "woman" here, and I use it imagining all variations of what it means to say you are one. And I use it holding the knowledge that this world hates women, especially women who weren’t called women at birth.)

FC: That's beautiful. I'm super into the idea of empathetic relationships as a defining part of lesbian poetics.

GM: Imagined vulnerability.

FC: Yes, yes, yes.

GM: OK, I have a question. Your book’s glossary: How did it become? Was it a foundation or a postscript? Did you imagine your reader returning to it?

FC: I love "how did it become" as a question about making poems. I think, if I remember right, “Glossary of Terms” happened during that crux point of bookmaking, when you look at a stack of poems you've been working on and ask what they'd look like as a book.

I was really moved by the notes at the beginning of Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria (2016), as well as excited by the tightness of the language in the glossary pieces in Douglas Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (2015). In Aracelis's book, I just loved how bold a move it was, to foreground what people needed to understand in order to understand the book. It's such a different move than, say, cutting out the words you repeat over and over again, or hiding references in notes. And it felt both like a big control move and really caring at once, which is something I wanted my book to embody. I wanted this book to feel highly structured in a way I hadn't done before.

GM: "A big control move"—I like that. I think my book is the opposite of a control move. It's really a switch. No one knows who has control. For me, the Vasilyssa poems entered in slipstream [Vasilyssa is the heroine of several Russian fairy tales featuring Baba Yaga]. I wrote them separately—actually remotely—whether at Vermont Studio Center or in the depths of grief. They were a safe place to return to but also a dark place to dissociate. I think my editors might have wanted more of them. But no one is interested in giving anyone what they want.

I'm wondering about Donna Haraway, whom you quote, and how you align with her “A Cyborg Manifesto” versus how you imagine you depart from it.

FC: Wait, I'd love to talk about that, but could we stay on Vasilyssa? It's so interesting to think about those poems as a space you returned to—that the safe place of both return and dissociation was this strange, dark, hero's journey.

GM: I mean, they say we dissociate when we’re afraid. It's a childhood safety mechanism to retreat into the mind where one can't be "reached."

FC: Right, and that's fascinating because those poems are so full of danger.

GM: Maybe it's like "the stranger you know." Is that the right phrase?

FC: I don't know.

GM: Whenever I use idioms, it's an experiment.

FC: Me too. Immigrant writer problems.

GM: Oh, devil! Yes, it’s “the devil you know.” It feels familiar, or it felt familiar then, to float in a shadow world of stories and warnings I'd been saturated with since I was a child. It’s harder to move through the world as a regular person who has no idea how to relate to others because relation feels dangerous or like a wound opening.

FC: That makes so much sense. Like, not safety from violence but a safer, or just more familiar, sort of mirror to violence.

GM: Right. Or reckoning/acceptance of the fact that some core part of the self thinks even beauty and warmth is a graduation of violence. "The self" meaning me.

FC: To turn back to the cyborg thing: This idea of accepting the violence in the core of the self is related to how I identify with the cyborg as a way of looking or feeling.

GM: I had a sense I was wading into shared territory.

FC: I mean, a common way of reacting to news about Sophia the Robot or that video of Alexa laughing is horror, a vague horror about robots taking over the world. As well as a desire to cleave more intensely to the idea of humanity above all. But the category of "human" has always been an exclusionary one.

GM: Right. Who gets to be human?

FC: It's still extremely urgent to continue to expand the category of "human" to include everyone who has historically not been allowed in, but also, if some part of our identities is "manmade," that is, constructed by human violence, we still have to reckon with those parts. I'm mostly just parroting a bunch of feminist/post-humanist thinkers here. But in reference to your earlier question, I think Bhanu Kapil (the other writer quoted in the epigraph) is just as much a godmother to my book as Donna Haraway.

GM: Yes, her capacity for fractured empathy. I can sense that. I was also thinking about the way your narrator grapples with identity as it relates to selfhood—how it gets stripped into flashing bits of refuse. Am I supposed to hope that the cyborg self loses her "self" or finds refuge within her "self?" Do you want there to be a self left?

FC: That’s such a great question! I think what I wanted, mostly, was for the edges of the self to blur. In a sexy way. What I mean is: The long poem "Perihelion" has a lot of natural imagery. Maybe it's easy to think about that as a triumphant moment of embracing the organic and disavowing the machine. But I wanted to think about the blending of the self and the environment as a kind of cyborghood, and more importantly, as a kind of intimacy, one where selves could overlap without being destroyed.

GM: Integration.

FC: Actual integration. I think maybe the narrator tries both to lose herself and to find refuge within the walls of herself. And eventually, hopefully, she starts moving toward a full intimacy that's neither and both.

What do you think the speaker of your poems wants?

GM: I don’t think the narrator of Without Protection is open to true intimacy because she’s in a cycle of obsession and isolation. I read somewhere that intimacy is about being able to share your truth with something/someone (if we step outside of intimacy being defined as interpersonal toward an intimacy and erotics of place). My narrator hoards her truths. She holds them close to her bones. I don't think she always trusts her own version of what happened or what something means. There's also an immigrant lens to that I think, or a bilingual lens. My narrator says one thing but means it some other way. She experiences one thing but it affects her some other way. She grew up in one culture but was regarded as outside it. She came from one people, but couldn’t return to them. I think that Nothing Place—it's against intimacy.

FC: Oh, wow, yes. That sheds light on a question I have about the narrative drive of these poems, which seem to be about "what happened," and yet leave so much unsaid, or said obscurely.

GM: So much trauma seems to hinge on teaching you that you can't trust what happened, so you can't name it. And if you can't name it, you can't have power over it. That's fairy tale logic—and also archaic gods logic. Sometimes when I say what happened, what the moon is, what the Vasilyssa does, what I remember from fragment, I'm trying to touch power.

FC: That makes me think of the line “an eagerness to claim and be claimed” from your poem "There's always a forest I know.”

GM: Moons and power are things I thought about quite a bit in your book. Specifically, the moon cycle. There's so much there, more than we get to know, a lot of personal narrative layered into a gendered catalogue of time. What use has a cyborg for the moon?

FC: Amazing question. Feeling a deep affinity for the moon makes sense to me as part of this specific mode of cyborg subjectivity—that is, a femme, always-foreign, queer subjectivity. The idea of an orbiting, never-touching, non-living body that has the power to move oceans just by its magnetism: amazing! And maybe because my people use the lunar calendar, I'm primed to think of moon time as non-Western and prone to shifting. I think about how my grandmother's birthday changes every year because she uses a lunar calendar date. I haven't thought about it this way before, but it makes sense now that cyborg time is both reiterative and mutable.

GM: It does. And, also, the moon is both a fact of our human existence and highly contentious in terms of its selfhood and its affect: the moon as belonging to the earth, the moon as a place two countries competed to touch on the brink of war, as controlling menstrual cycles and oceans but somehow not a real source of information about moods.

FC: Right. I also think of those moon poems as maybe my gayest poems. For all those reasons and others.

GM: Yeah, I felt it, LOL. I have one final question. In “Intro to Quantum Theory,” you give the reader a choice: choose the parallel universe where the grief is not yours but someone else's, but in choosing it, choose a world bereft, a world eroded of sensory familiarity and pleasure. Have you ever had to choose? Or have you ever witnessed someone choose the red-oceaned world?

FC: You know, in that poem, those alternative worlds that show up at the end are actually worlds where what might be perceived as danger is actually uncertainty. Red oceans, shadows that smell like hooves, the dreams of non-human children—to me, these are images that are just as likely to be beautiful as terrifying. (Maybe that says something about me.) But I think choosing the red-oceaned world means choosing the unknown.

I think anyone who chooses to keep living after grief has wrecked their world is choosing the not-yet-dreamed world. Maybe that means choosing that still-being-imagined vulnerability you talked about. It feels urgent to me to keep trying to imagine other versions of the worlds and feelings we walk around in.

GM: It is urgent. All this wreckage is in service to a new world that’s coming.

FC: I really do believe that. Or at least feel it’s important to practice believing it.