Intersections of Music and Poetry: Interview with Sanna Wani
Sanna Wani is a person and poet around Toronto. Her work is available in The Puritan, Peach Mag and TIME. She loves daisies.
This interview was conducted in-person between Sanna and Canthius Collective member, Manahil Bandukwala, over a cup of chai. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
To learn more about Sanna, follow her on Twitter @sannareya.
A note from Manahil: Sanna and I connected online, largely over our mutual love for desi (South Asian) music. In this interview, we talk about the music, poetry, and Sanna’s chapbook, The Pink of the Seams (Penrose Press, 2019).
*
Manahil: One of the first songs we connected over was “Kabira” from the film, Ye Jawaani Hai Deewani, which you said was one of your favourite poems. What do you make of the relationship between poetry and music?
Sanna: One time I got into a conversation with a friend, a professor. We were talking about how poetry and song did not live as far apart as they did in different historical and social contexts. Using music and rhythm on words was a tactic in oral tradition to make it easier to memorize. You want to pass it down to your children. It’s easier to pass on a poem-story when there’s a cadence to it. That cadence might turn into a song. Then it’s still a poem or a story but it’s also a song. I feel like we live in a context now where oral tradition and the passage down of stories through remembrance is pitted against written language. There’s a hierarchy of written over spoken or written over remembered. That plays into the boundary of translation in simplicity.
Manahil: We also share a lot of songs and qawwalis from Coke Studio with each other, in languages ranging from Urdu to Sindhi to Punjabi. I’m curious to hear your take on how you listen to a song when you can’t understand what the words mean.
Sanna: How do you listen to a river’s rush or a piano? Meaning to me isn’t locked just in the understandability of words. Sometimes there is meaning in a word or a song that I don’t know that is experiential. Logics that aren’t based in linearity. Translation is a heroic and beautiful genre but music is not dependent on translation. When I listen to songs in Sindhi or Korean or Indonesian, I’m not listening with the intent to understand. I’m listening with the intent to feel.
Manahil: A lot of translations of these songs seem miniscule, such as in the song, “Afreen Afreen,” a ghazal song first sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Sanna: I had a huge conversation – kind of an argument – with my dad about what “Afreen Afreen” means. If you want to translate Afreen into English, do you just have to say “your face, your face” or “beautiful, beautiful”? All of these meanings circling around each other in this deeply rooted word which has so much significance in a different language. When you want to carry it over – and it’s a great act to help others who don’t speak that language understand – then a rhetoric of “simple’ comes in.
It makes me wonder: simple against what? What is being simple versus not being simple. It makes me wonder about the lines between poetry and song again. This is something I struggle with a lot. I love qawwali. I love Urdu songs – Urdu or Hindi songs. The lines drawn makes me think about boundaries. This question of simplicity is more about boundary than it is about substance.
Manahil: Speaking of cadence, I want to ask you about your poem, “Bells.” Reading “Bells,” I thought of kathak dance, where you have these moves where you jump on your heels and toes, and the bells around your ankles make noise. The structure of bells reminded me of this jumping.
Sanna: I feel when I’m able to play with space on a page, I can convey so much more deeply what I want to convey. With “Bells”, I was trying to talk about love. I was trying to talk about all the different kinds of love that exist. I was in this moment where I had expressed my love for someone. Whether it was romantic or familial, I wanted to evoke the joy of the feeling when someone stays with you. You express your love to them, and they just stay with you. The feeling that produces, it felt to me like the sound of bells, or ringing. The ringing was something I wanted in the structure of the poem because I feel like my heart is ringing like a bell when I love someone.
Manahil: I like what you said about having the space to express yourself on the page. I like indenting a lot. What’s the purpose of this? I see the flush of the margin and the indent as the rise and fall of a chest breathing. It follows breath patterns.
Sanna: There’s an incredible tweet by a Toronto writer, Cason Sharpe, about how commas are not about punctuation— they’re about breath. That is so deeply what I feel. The ways I want to structure my poems are not about technical space. It’s about breath, it’s about my chest and my body. It’s not about purpose, not always. It’s just me wanting to give the space these words need to breathe. To feel these words on the page and where they need to be.
*
Manahil: I want to talk about punctuation in the poems. With commas, you don’t follow the rules of grammar.
Sanna: I hate grammar.
Manahil: You put commas right before a word without a space. Could you talk about that in “Pink (Palpitations)”?
Sanna: This poem is about having a panic attack on the subway. I use commas to show where I want people to pause. With “to velvet / to ribbons / to rivets or / rivers ,i’m not sure,”, There was a falling that came with the first breath. The commas suggest spatially and visually a breath around “,i’m not sure,”. This line is almost like an echo. It’s falling away from the thought that falls before it.
Manahil: You have “,can’t you see?,” with the question mark and comma.
Sanna: I wrote a version of this where I used parentheses instead of commas, and it just wasn’t right. Not just aesthetically, but in terms of what felt right to express that experience I had was with those commas. I was playing with the idea of how these poems would sit. The commas are pressed tightly to both sides of a phrase because that’s how I feel in those moments of panic. You feel like you’re being squeezed by breath. Something that’s supposed to help you and fuel you. But you’re being squeezed because you’re breathing too much, but also too little. And you feel like your thoughts fall between those squeezes.
Also, I just like it. I think that’s valid too. I like the way it looks on the page. I hate grammar. Do whatever you want. I had a professor in second year who I took a poetry class with who bothered me so much about this kind of stuff. He said, “why are you doing this? If there’s not a purpose, why are you doing this?” Well, it’s not a purpose you can see. Who decides what is discernible or what is purposeful?
Manahil: Like if there’s not a purpose to do something, you fall to this baseline.
Sanna: Which is ultimately white and heteropatriarchal and colonial. So not made for me or people like me. I’m not allowed to be purposeless. I should constantly produce and perform in a manner understandable to the white man’s gaze. No thanks.
*
Manahil: With “Traverser,” I was intrigued by the capital “He” and “His.” In Islam, that’s how you refer to Allah. But then I was thinking about your poem, “Schizotheism,” in Nuance, where you talk about Allah as They/Them because They’re not feminine or masculine.
Sanna: The pronouns I use for Allah in “Traverser” relate to the male energy I think is present in my genderfluid understanding of any god. The particular story that goes with “Traverser” had a lot of historically masculine energy so I decided to go with He/Him pronouns. At that time, I’d also already written Schizotheism and I don’t think of the pronouns use for Allah as mutually exclusive: you can use any of them, or all of them, or none of them, depending on the moment and how Allah feels to you in the moment.
The story begins in 2016, when I had just moved back to Toronto. I was sitting in the subway, listening to a song that is really important to me and my Nana. The song is “Maula ya Salvi,” which is a folk song from Medina. Children would sing this to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) every time he would return to Yathrib from his travels.
Manahil: The lines “thick feet” and “blood coated like laquer” that appear in your poem – I was thinking about how he would have to walk in the desert and would get pelted with stones. He would come back bleeding.
Sanna: That makes so much sense to me. I was on the subway, listening to this song about the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). It has a story in my own life where my Nana would listen to this song all the time and play it on Fridays before he went for Juma’a— he had it as his ringtone and dial tone. I was sitting in the subway and there’s this old white couple sitting in front of me. They’re sitting there chatting. The vibe is chill. And then a boy walks into the subway car. He’s carrying a calculus textbook and a gym backpack. He was also wearing a kurta shalwar, and he’s very tall, but he is also very clearly a high school boy. A Black Muslim high school boy. He walked into our subway car – I was still listening to my song – and I had to watch the demeanor of the white couple completely shift.
I remember even today how distinctly painful watching this encounter was. I was overcome with how confusingly strange it was to be listening to this song and watching this happen as someone who is non-visibly Muslim and acceptably racialized. The bleeding of the feet. The way the boy provoked such a different reaction in these people, while I was in front of them, secretly listening to this song.
The last two lines are really what this poem is about. Islam doesn’t scare you. Religion doesn’t scare you. The racialization of Islam and your own anti-Blackness, that’s what scares you. Admit it. That’s what is wrong with you.