"I am learning to call things disruptive instead of radical." (An Interview With Hazem Fahmy)
As part of the virtual tour to celebrate the release of Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo, journalists, bloggers, and editors across the Internet have been sharing reviews of the book for the past week on their platforms in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss a review by Emily Butler for Emily Butler (“There is some magic going on here. Sometimes the emotions hit me before I could process the words. The collection is real, raw, honest.”), Carly Kwiecien for Read With Carly (“I was easily captivated by Fahmy’s words, and the way he so seamlessly strings together memories and experiences with specific lyrics from Frank Ocean songs.”), and Andrea Valcárcel for Andrea’s Galley (“I think this is the most creative poetry collection I’ve read in years. It’s hard to read this book and not be moved.”). Also, an exclusive excerpt of the book on the Half Mystic blog (“The cold walk home could be a slow / hell, but it could also be a still kind of heaven. I no longer / await the day I will be happy. A stupid kind of progress.”)! Today, Hazem joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of Waiting…
HM: Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo begins with the dedication: “For س, who believed in this project when I didn’t.” Tell us a bit about how this collection came to be, and the people who made it possible.
HF: So many of the poems in this book are ones of observation, of family, friends and familiar spaces that grew odder as I grew older. Part of the driving force of the project, as many a poem title would suggest, was the interrogation of that eeriness. In writing these poems, I was trying to understand: had leaving Cairo somehow altered me on a fundamental level such that the mundane and quotidian now seemed strange? Or was I, in a sense, destined to reach an age where something as simple as my family’s living room became eerie? Now that I’m on the other end of the process, I can see that all this questioning came from a deep sense of love for my family and all its contradictions. It was, in turn, my family’s love which gave life to these poems.
Frank Ocean is a defining thread throughout the book, woven into and between your poems. While writing the collection, did you find you appreciated his music differently than before? What lessons did it teach you, then and now?
Writing the collection absolutely altered the way I listen to Frank Ocean. Ever since I first came across his music in 2012, his lyrics have had a significant impact on my writing, and I felt strongly that his seamless blend of the colloquial with dense, rich imagery and metaphor was a literary ethos that I’d want to guide my own work. Waiting, however, specifically made me appreciate Frank’s work from a more macro lens. In writing and revising poems, I was revisiting nostalgia, ULTRA.; channel ORANGE; blond; and everything in between. That process made me appreciate so much more how Frank’s music has evolved and bloomed, all while retaining an unmistakable sense of self.
Several of the poems in Waiting are centos using Frank Ocean’s lyrics. What does this poetic form achieve that others might not?
I adore centos because they are the most direct way through which poets hold conversations with other writers and texts. All poetry, and writing at large, is on some level referential—but the way the cento embraces citation and makes an intentional art form out of it, I think is simply beautiful.
One of my favorite lines in the collection comes from the poem “Frank Haunts Me Across a Decade”: “I am learning to call / things disruptive instead of radical.” Tell us about what this shift means to you.
I think ascribing “radicalness” to texts or ideas, while not incorrect per se, often makes us deviate from what is actually significant and worthwhile about them. The discussion becomes about whether the thing meets this mythic, amorphous threshold of “radicalness” rather than what the thing actually responded to, what it disrupted. Something could easily be radical in 2000 but not in 2022 and beyond. I find it much more interesting to try and understand what is being discussed within its own context. We should, of course, still use the benefit of hindsight to critique and analyze what has come before us, but I do think we need to distance ourselves from this idea that “radical” is a static state that one achieves, rather than an inherently relational dynamic.
A central theme of Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is that of home as both a physical and an emotional space. What do you ask from a place before you call it home? At this point in your life, where have you made your homes?
For me, Cairo will always be Home with a capital “H.” It is, in a sense, the starting point without which none of my other “homes” would ever make sense. At the moment, New York is my home, first and foremost in the most technical sense; this is the place in which I currently live. But it is also home in the emotional sense: this is a place in which I feel held and supported, in which I generally know my way around. That said, I am at a point in my life where the question most on my mind isn’t what am I asking from a place, but rather what I owe a place I have made a home. This is a complicated question, especially anywhere in the United States, because I do not feel an ounce of loyalty to this country nor to the institutions which keep it running. I do not wish to “give anything back” to the empire, but I do want to give back to the people and communities who have supported me here, and whose homes and streets I now share.
Ideas about race, policing, and immigration are examined throughout the collection. In your work and your life, how have you navigated the complex relationship between the personal and the political?
I used to separate my personal poems from my political ones. I would say “this is a love poem,” for example, or “this is a poem about a political issue.” That was a terrible practice that I am elated to have broken. At this point, I don’t even actively think about what is “personal” and what is “political” in a poem. Instead I just try to be honest, to adequately and openly explore whatever it is that drives the poem and see what happens from there.
Aside from Frank Ocean, what would we find on one of your playlists?
It completely depends on the week, but right now I’m listening to a lot of Zaid Khaled, Wegz, Sfire and Sheikh Imam.
In “Still Life of Reunion, to the Tune of ‘Close To You,’” you write about crying in the privacy of a bathroom instead of in public. How do your definitions of vulnerability change with place?
The reception of vulnerability is so gendered and classed, I’ve found that in certain environments (such as the one in which that poem takes place) it is nearly impossible to express vulnerability publicly without irrevocably altering the social space—a massive vibe shift, if you will. I would not generally say that I was raised conservatively, but I was raised conservatively enough that public displays of vulnerability are extremely difficult for me, and not for healthy reasons. That poem was a kind of reckoning with the absurdity of such a relationship with crying.
Memory plays an integral role in Waiting, especially towards the end of the collection. What is a memory you love to relive? What is a memory you hope to make?
I no longer look forward to making specific memories, but rather try to find joy in the present. I do cherish and revisit fond memories, and increasingly so. Lately, as a result of this collection finally coming into the world, I've been thinking a lot about 2012 and the feeling of hearing Frank’s music for the first time. It was actually an audiovisual experience, because the first Frank Ocean song I ever heard was “Thinkin Bout You,” and the first time I heard the song was also the first time I watched its astounding music video. That feeling will never leave me.
Weaving the lyrics of Frank Ocean’s discography, Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a poetic account of four years of shuffling, a catalogue of the constant in-betweenness of being caught in the middle of two places across an ocean. Exploring themes of family, gender, and the attempt to find meaning outside the confines of the state, Fahmy’s sophomore collection uses the singer’s iconic music and persona as a guidepost to a firmer understanding of the self and the spaces that define it.
The blog tour for Waiting features reviews and exclusive excerpts, interviews with Hazem Fahmy, and never-before-seen content on the creation of the book, culminating in an in-person launch in New York City on March 18th at 8 PM. Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is available for preorder now.