Raena Shirali: On Writing the Persona Poem, Researching Witch Hunting, and Her New Book “summonings”
Raena Shirali is truly a force to be reckoned with. The Philadelphia-based poet and author of GILT (YesYes Books) is about to release her second poetry collection, summonings—and she’s certainly not stopping there. summonings, which is forthcoming October 28 from Black Lawrence Press, investigates witch hunting practices in India through beautiful, haunting poems with themes ranging from cultural norms and treatment of women, to belonging and the desire for connection.
I spoke with Shirali via Google Docs about her research on witch hunting in India, the way punctuation is used throughout the new collection, being a Philly poet, upcoming projects, and how various themes are linked in summonings.
First of all, congratulations on your upcoming book! Can you tell me about how summonings came to be, as well as how you landed on the title and the stunning cover art?
Thank you so much! The idea for summonings actually came from two poems from my first book, GILT: “daayan summoning magic” and “black magic.” Both are persona poems written in response to research about witch hunting in India; after GILT was published, I found myself returning to them time & again. I wondered what cultural climates engender witch hunting, outside of obvious misogyny; I discovered a historical shift from matrilineal origins, from women's role in society as valued, towards an economy of accusation that ultimately serves the tea plantation industry and maintains women’s subordinate status. The deeper I went into this research, the more I found myself writing poems informed by that landscape. Of course, it evolved over time, but summonings owes its beginnings to GILT. And I owe my gratitude to Meera Dugal, a childhood friend, one of the few Indian girls I grew up with, who read summonings & responded with the stunning painting you see on the book’s cover.
In the foreword of the collection, you lay out how summonings investigates witch hunting in India, in addition to cultural norms in India and America especially as they pertain to their treatment of women. The word “summoning”, as well as “daayan” also appear in numerous titles throughout the collection. How did you arrive at the theme of this book and what do you hope readers get from it?
The first two “series” of poems I wrote for the book were those now entitled “daayan ___________” and “summoning : __________” (where the blanks are filled in by the remainder of a given poem’s title). And I was interested in the interplay between the two series; the former is a series of persona poems, while the latter approaches existing as a woman in India and America in high lyricism, and from a speaker who I can locate as closer to myself. That interplay raised questions: where am I in these persona poems? What am I doing when I write a poem in persona, grappling with violence inflicted on women whose experiences are so far from my own, in a country I don’t return to often enough? Once I began asking those questions, another thread in the collection became apparent; no longer was I writing about a subject; no, now I was writing about the ethics and strategies and failures and beauty and spiritual experience of trying to write about a subject. I hope readers have the same experience reading summonings that I had writing it, and that they feel the nuances and disappointments of those failures, and find in them some ineffable truth.
There were so many favorite lines and poems throughout the collection (like “lucky inhabitant” and “summoning : ways you asked for it”) but one of my most favorites is the six-part “[every woman is a potential witch]” section. How did the poems in this series come to be?
Thank you for sharing your favorite poem with me! “[every woman is a potential witch]” was actually written as a challenge to myself. I tend to write shorter poems, closer to page-length, even when I’m working in a series. But this quote from anthropological research, describing how witch hunting is culturally engendered and subsequently accepted, internalized, normalized, literally states as a matter of course, “Every woman is a potential witch.” I just could not get over that line. Because I see it reflected in America’s general mistrust of women, I see it in India’s attitudes towards women even outside of witch hunting as a phenomenon, I see it everywhere. We all do. So I knew right away that this quote was one I would need to fixate on for multiple pages, and that it would need to be a poem where I combined the two cultures’ misogynies as a way of talking back to them. Drafting this piece was brutal; day after day I’d sit down and read the words again. Every woman is a potential witch. The poem grew as I festered. On the other hand, the sections themselves are addressed to redacted names. I knew that at some point in the manuscript drafting process, I wanted to incorporate quotations from women who have been accused of being witches in India; that led me to the epistolary form, thinking about what (little) I would be able to offer or say in the face of such atrocity. The names were redacted as a matter of implying potentiality; any woman’s name could be here. Every woman is a potential witch.
summonings was September’s Book of the Month with Blue Stoop and in their newsletter, you discuss the section breaks and how the names and quotes of the accused in those section breaks are the only things capitalized throughout the whole collection. Can you detail what the decision-making process was for that and why that was a crucial component of the book?
For me, to leave language lower-cased is to approach language with a kind of spiritually socialist bent–we are all here, on the same level, and no one letter is being given more significance arbitrarily; thus, from that equal playing field, what is then capitalized gains far more significance. It is a highly intentional decision. That theoretical approach is why I decided to only capitalize names of women who have survived being tortured for “witchcraft” and the words that they have said, within the body of the book itself. It is important to me that their voices be rendered symbolically as they exist for me both in the research and in my psyche–primary, essential, unfathomably concise and vulnerable and brave, and distinct from the entity of a poem. They Are. i’m just making art.
Along that same thread, the final section break is the only one without a quote accompanying it — was this intentional?
I’m so glad you noticed that! Yes, it was. I resist the idea in poetry that there can be a “final word” or an answer to the questions that we raise. And I really feel like it’s important to this book’s ethos that it ends in silence, in prayer, in my lived context, in an attempt to pin down fleeting moments of sisterhood and beauty while we are alive and while we are “safe.” I can see how a reader would want an answer from this book: something to the effect of, Well, if people didn’t hate women so much, maybe this wouldn’t happen! Because that’s not entirely true–the phenomenon is far more complicated, even as it holds misogyny at its heart. So the final section break, I hope, invites contemplation, and maybe even makes readers frustrated or uncomfortable. Good. We should be frustrated and uncomfortable with this content. It’s the least we can do.
Punctuation is used so intriguingly throughout the collection—from the plus signs used not only at the start of a section but throughout poems & stanzas, to the brackets that include language sampled from your research, as well as dashes and colons in between words and at the ends of phrases (like in “the village goddess talks to herself while applying kohl” and “to curse or to pray”) How did you arrive at where and how these various symbols would be used?
I made a map key! Seriously, I made a really intense map key of my personal punctuation rules, and then ruthlessly edited the book so that I stuck with them. It comes from one of my favorite poetry lesson plans–to ask students to track and explain every single piece of punctuation, particularly in poems that use M-dashes and colons. How is each used differently? Why? I held myself to the lesson plan standard. I invite readers to study the punctuation accordingly. The colon with a space on either side, for example, is supremely intentional and holds meaning for me; I wonder what meaning a reader might find & excavate there by digging.
The color pink and its various shades (magenta/fuschia/pastel) also emerge as images in several poems, frequently when talking about light, but also something the speaker calls out directly, like in “pastoral with keys clenched, as a weapon, in my fist”. What significance does this color hold in these poems?
I’ll quote Janelle Monáe’s “Pynk”, which influenced me both poetically and philosophically: “Pink like the skin that’s under, baby / Pink where it’s deepest inside, crazy / Pink is where all of it starts, crazy / Pink like the holes of your heart.” It’s everywhere and everything and it’s ours, even as it is used to sexualize us, objectify us, demean us, hunt us. “Pink as we all go insane.”
There are several references to Philadelphia in the later part of the collection (“summoning : ways you asked for it” and “jodhpur, jharkhand, philadelphia”) — in what ways has/does the city shape who you are as a poet and person?
Coming from an upbringing in South Carolina where I was used to being hypervisible as a POC, Philly is the first place I’ve lived where I have the privilege of feeling invisible. And simultaneously, I have such a strong, loving, supportive community here, who welcomed me as a late transplant, and who helped shape my relationship to the city. So I think Philly living for me is defined by both privileged lack of visibility, and being seen only on my own terms. The big exception to that is that no matter where I am, moving through public space as a woman is dangerous, terrifying, and mimics the level of ostracization and fear I felt at times in the South. I’ll never forget my dear friend, a wonderful poet, Nomi Stone, telling me, “You need more Philly in these poems. You are a Philadelphia poet.” I had never thought of myself as a Philly poet before, but it suddenly became clear that I was writing obliquely about place out of respect and love for this one. I do respect and love it. And it’s different from anywhere I’ve ever been. Except when it comes to the physical safety of anyone who reads as femme or female walking alone at night.
This book takes on reckoning and reclaiming in various poems. In the later section, the poem “summoning : ash in my palms, ash on the streets” also tackles belonging and connection. Why are all of these elements so integral to this story?
The ending of that poem was revelatory to write:
“that’s why
i want my nose pierced,” i’d said
at sixteen—stoned on the good high
of not eating & disappearing white—
Ma in the hospital
riddled with malaria, “i want to feel
connected.”
I was recently asked by an Indian person why I felt compelled to write about India, given that I do not live there. I feel that these lines are a kind of answer to both his and your question (though y’all’s questions are very different in spirit). The desire for connection, to see something I recognize in my “mother” country, is what compels me to write poems to begin with. So it is at the root of this collection, too, even as the poems recognize distance and acknowledge the space between author and subject, west and east. Earlier in that poem, I write, “am starved / for belonging. will never / belong.” That, too, is a kind of answer. A poem is a good replacement for the feeling of belonging. Or at least, it’s been a good replacement for me thus far.
And the relationship between belonging/connection and witch hunting boils down to a question: who is at risk of being potentially ostracized, outcast, and in these cases, cut off from their own lives, and why? Many of the villages and communities I read about are tight knit, but rumors persist, and fear and greed rear their heads as the most powerful forces in the room. Perhaps fear and suspicion of women are diametrically opposed to belonging and connection with women in the text.
Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?
Oh, I definitely do. “daayan at gold streak river” was written both very early in the project and as an ekphrastic poem, in response to a little painting my partner made as a prompt for my writing. He was working on these abstract surfing figures at the time; the prompt was yellow and pink water, water like the sunset, with the backs of a few figures on the horizon line. Really gorgeous. I was absorbed by it and wrote this poem in one sitting, and I think you can feel the propulsive energy underneath it because of the anaphora and the repetition here of a line that refers to common practice for determining whether a woman is a witch or not: putting stones in her pockets and putting her in a body of water. If she floats, she’s a witch. If she sinks and dies, she’s not. I love how this poem balances insistence via repetition, and blurring of voices/speakers via the use of the colon. Often when I’m performing this piece I get literally carried away by emotion and find myself choking back tears:
“...if we float : if we float : if we float
& soak the lentils & follow the field’s rows & if we came here
as brides & they threw us a feast : said welcome : sisters,
i say, here we are at the end of the earth : if the sky immolates: magenta
rimming the day as it dies : if it looks hopeless : if it is
hopeless : on the shore men jeer
& hurl branches : if we don’t turn back : if we wade out
together : cursed women : & find mountains instead”
Do you plan on continuing this research down the line? Do you have any other projects on the horizon?
Part of completing summonings involved coming to a place of stasis with this vein of research. Yes, there is so much more to learn about witch hunting than one could possibly do justice to in a collection of poems, but summonings is my best attempt to create a rich text that encompasses the full experience of that research.
You know, GILT was very much not a project book, in that it contained so many different thematic concerns and formal approaches; summonings is quite the opposite (at least in terms of its subject). And what I’m working on now is quite the opposite of summonings–a non fiction/poetry hybrid, a long poem written in prose lines yet governed by white space. The new work addresses my learning Hindi during the pandemic–well, trying to learn Hindi. No person who is fluent in Hindi would agree that I have “learned Hindi.” This, too, feels connected to those lines from “summoning : ash in my palms, ash on the streets”: “am starved / for belonging. will never / belong.”
Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her second, summoning ( Black Lawrence Press, 2022), won the 2021 Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Formerly a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine, Shirali now serves as Faculty Advisor for Folio—a literary magazine dedicated to publishing works by undergraduate students at the national level. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University. The Indian American poet was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Philadelphia.
About the Interviewer
Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Serotonin, FERAL, Gnashing Teeth, Selcouth Station, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020), her debut poetry chapbook. She volunteers for Button Poetry and Mad Poets Society. Follow her on Instagram @poetry_erica and on Twitter @erica_abbott and visit her website here.
