Marwa Helal
INVASIVE SPECIES Nightboat Books
language first my learned i second see see for mistaken am i native go i everywhere
—from “poem to be read from right to left”
HOW IT BEGAN: Wanting to bear witness to the experience my family went through in immigrating, wanting to find others who had similar experiences, wanting to highlight the flaws in the “legal” immigration system— a conversation this country doesn’t want to have—they would rather focus on what they deem “illegal” immigration when in fact they are the ones who are illegal, if anyone is. I didn’t know at the time that Homeland Security would become ICE, and ICE would become children in cages by the time the book was out. My story is just a small snapshot of the systemic abuse inherent in the immigration-industrial complex.
INSPIRATION: My teachers—the forms they have introduced me to, the
possibilities they’ve shared in editing, reading, and delivering the work; the Nile Delta; the heart and resilience of Randa Jarrar; Philip Metres’s abu ghraib arias and Sand Opera; the Egyptian people past, present, and future; the ocean; all of the ways journalism fails— especially “objectivity,” and how that’s where poetry begins; the America we are making together...
INFLUENCES: Harryette Mullen for her playfulness and subversiveness; Evie Shockley for her transformation of old forms and aphorisms; Rilke’s searching; Simone White for archive and music; and Suheir Hammad for syntax, witness, ancestry, and teaching others how to use resources. (You thought I’d say DJ Khaled?)
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I turn to photography. Or a dream will get me back in the space I need to keep going. Integrating the liminal.
ADVICE: Take your time—or, I am paraphrasing, “Time is your friend,” which is what my teacher Sigrid Nunez once told me. Trust your path and your work. Talk about it; don’t be shy about sharing your dreams. You never know who is listening or willing to point you to the next step in your path.
AGE: 38. RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: Teaching, writing, readings. TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About ten years. TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I’m grateful to Nightboat for taking on this project and giving me the time to make it what it became. I don’t know how long I had been thinking about Invasive species when they selected it. They were only the second press I submitted to, and it looked very, very different when I did!