With a Level of Respect, Honour, and Dignity: Interview with Leslie Joy Ahenda
Leslie Joy Ahenda lives on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph, and the poetry editor for Augur Magazine. She is the author of THRENODY FOR A DROWNED GIRL (Moon Jelly House, 2021).
In this interview, Manahil talks to Leslie about Threnody for a Drowned Girl. This chapbook of 17 poems narrates the journey of a woman who, after experiencing sexualized violence, descends into depths of the ocean. It is a tale of metamorphosis, healing, and hope.
This interview was conducted over Zoom on January 27, 2021, and has been edited for length and clarity.
To learn more about Leslie, see her work on her website, or follow her on Twitter @lesliejoyahenda and Instagram @ljahenda.
Manahil: Hi Leslie. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. Congratulations on your chapbook, Threnody for a Drowned Girl. One of the aspects of your chapbook that immediately strikes me is how you bring the technical terminology of sea life and poeticize them as comforts.
Leslie: The different elements of the poems came together slowly, and there isn’t one clear path. I remember listening to a song, “The Deep,” by an experimental hip hop group named clipping. The song is about pregnant Black women who were thrown overboard during voyages as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The narrators of this song are the descendants of those women, who were born into the water. The song had me thinking about the complexities of harm and the healing nature of the water. How does harm happen? How do we grow from harm? The ocean in this chapbook is a place of escape – the speaker goes to the ocean and drowns – but there’s an emotional journey that happens because of that drowning.
Manahil: You’re currently completing your Masters of Fine Arts (MFA). How does the theme of water and stories intersect with your academic work?
Leslie: The scientific language in my chapbook came from my desire to understand what was happening in the water. I want to know the situation I put my speaker in. I had to use the aquatic language to be true to the setting, so I could be as honest as possible to the emotional journey. I wrote these poems while completing my undergrad. I could feel like I was productive and doing research even though I wasn’t doing my coursework. I wanted to describe a rounded experience.
Manahil: Do you see that same process for your MFA thesis?
Leslie: It is a similar process. When I start a poem, I start with an image or an emotion. I start to think about how to get into the space and what that means. This chapbook had so much underwater imagery. In order to understand the emotion, I had to immerse myself in the speaker’s world. The best way to have this immersion was to research as much as possible. Once I start working on my thesis, the process will be similar. My thesis is a history dissertation in verse instead of prose.
Manahil: That is such a great form that allows you to bring out facts while maintaining emotional delivery.
Leslie: There’s a lot of responsibility and ethical stakes that accompanies this form. I’m writing about sexual violence in Kenya in the colonial era. Those are heavy and important stories. How do I tell these stories in a way that is appropriate and communicative while also holding the very real people in these stories with a level of respect, honour, and dignity? The way forward is to be as researched as possible, so I come at this with voracity. I don’t know if I will write with an “I” voice because “I” as the poet am not present in that time. Maybe there’s a different “I” whose story I can follow.
Manahil: This reminds me of Tell: poems for a girlhood by Soraya Peerbaye, in which Peerbaye has the same concerns of writing as witness without appropriation.
Your chapbook is one long narrative. I find working within a long poem – especially a book-length one – has you “living” in the world of the poem. Who are your influences for this kind of work?
Leslie: I wrote and workshopped a majority of these poems at the Banff Centre at the Emerging Writers Intensive in 2019. I was in a group of poets led by Canisia Lubrin. Canisia has been one of my main literary ancestors. Her first book, Voodoo Hypothesis, connects the speaker to the physical place. Although Voodoo Hypothesis isn’t one long poem, it follows the emotional journey of getting from Point A to Point B in a fascinating way. Canisia uses and shapes language like putty or clay.
Manahil: Her book, The Dyzgraphxst, came out much more recently, but has that same quality of shaping language.
Leslie: In 2019, The Dyzgraphxst hadn’t come out yet, but Canisia read an excerpt from the book at Banff. We were all blown away.
Manahil: It’s so cool that you got to hear poems before they came out. The community at Banff seems so lovely. Are you still in touch with your cohort?
Leslie: We are still in touch, and it’s pretty special.
Manahil: Some of the people in your cohort have had books come out recently, like jaye simpson’s it was never going to be okay. They were probably working on the poems in their book at the time.
Leslie: With jaye, I see poems that have changed and come into this unit. I flip through their book and see poems we workshopped and remember the poems in draft stages.
Manahil: Were poems in Threnody for a Drowned Girl ones you worked on at Banff?
Leslie: I had included a few poems in my application to Banff, but I wrote most of the poems while at Banff.
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Manahil: In “the only emotion / i understand / is responsible,” the structure of the poem itself emulates a sense of constriction that speaks to the poem: “i’m worried / about the / risks and i’m / also worried / about the risks.” I love how the title itself fits this form as well – it’s the first time I’ve seen this in a poem.
Leslie: I didn’t have a deliberate sense of what I was doing at the time – I knew that was how the title had to be structured. In retrospect, I realize I was thinking about breath while writing this poem. A lot of the poems from the speaker’s point of view take place underwater and subsequently have longer lines and less harsh enjambment. This poem is not set underwater and so feels constricted. As the speaker comes into herself in this drowned state, it was necessary for the language of the incident of not being underwater to be less habitable. I took a chance when I put line breaks in the title. I’ve never seen it done before – which is not to say it hasn’t been done. I knew “the only emotion / i understand / is responsible” had to be the title, but written out without line breaks made the line so fluid and breathable. This was the wrong sense. Everything, from language to form, came out of physical and emotional intuition.
Manahil: Some choices are intuitive. This poem stands out because it doesn’t have that sense of taking up space on the page. The poem wants to be small. The title of a poem does so much more than identify the poem. They aren’t arbitrary.
Leslie: A lot of the way I conceptualize titles comes from the fact that I hate coming up with titles. I struggle with nomenclature. I think a lot about nomenclature, and why things are called what they are. The name needs to do work rather than being an arbitrary set of sounds. Often, the first line of a poem becomes a placeholder title until I think of something better, but I never do.
Manahil: The poet Paige Lewis uses the first line of their poems as titles a lot.
Leslie: Using the first line of a poem as a title works so well for fluidity.
Manahil: I love your use of prefixes throughout the poems to express the feeling of unbecoming/becoming. When you write “re-self,” there’s such a sense of rebuilding and coming to terms with yourself again that really stands out.
Leslie: With “re-self,” I thought about what “self” was. Why couldn’t I use “self” as a verb? I know the sense or feeling I want to use in a spot. I intend to use a word regardless of whether the word is in a dictionary or not. Language is material and physical matter, like clay I can shape (to return to that metaphor). Language is physical, especially on the page. I don’t take language for what it is; I use it for what it can be. I consider how I can make language do what I want.
Manahil: That sounds like Canisia Lubrin-style wisdom.
Leslie: That’s why I look up to her so much. She knows how to shape language – I’m just floundering here.
Manahil: Your shaping of language works great.
Leslie: I struggle a lot with the concept of voice. Canisia uses voice effortlessly. What is voice within the sculpting of language? So many people define voice as the way you speak. You write the way you speak and that should sound natural. Written language doesn’t feel that natural to me. The fact of written language existing in a physical space makes it completely different from spoken language.
Manahil: Voice is always changing. I think about embracing that change as a good thing.
Leslie: I read the Border poem you and Sanna Wani wrote together as a series of emails back and forth. There was so much voice in that piece that felt authentic.
Manahil: So much of that voice emerged because of how I respond to Sanna specifically. I wrote a back and forth poem, Sprawl, with another poet, Conyer Clayton, and the voice in that was so different.
Leslie: We talk to people differently, so it makes sense that we would write to them differently as well. In this chapbook, the poem from the perspective of a snail is very different from the poem that calls to guillotine men. I don’t know if I have a consistent voice throughout the chapbook. Each point of view brings a new dimension to the narrative.
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Manahil: I love Nisha Patel. How was working with her and the press she runs, Moon Jelly House?
Leslie: I saw Nisha put out a call for submissions on Twitter. From what I knew of her, I felt she would be a trustworthy person to run a press. My editor was Katherine Abbass, and I corresponded a lot with Matthew James Weigel. When Moon Jelly House put out a call specifically calling for BIPOC writers, the call felt so different from the Penguin Random House-Simon and Schuster merger. Moon Jelly House aims to bring poems to people, which feels like the most genuine version of what we as poets are trying to do.
Manahil: I love the seaweed illustrations by the page numbers. It makes me as the reader feel like I’m underwater.
Leslie: The illustrations were Matthew’s idea. The cover art is by a Calgary-based artist, Natalie Lauchlan, and evokes that underwater feeling as well. I’m blown away by the depth of detail and precision in the work. The front cover depicts the water as though you’re looking at it from the outside. When you turn the page, you see a full-colour illustration of the depths of the water. Before the poetry appears, the chapbook submerges you.
Manahil: The detail on the coral is so beautiful.
Leslie: When Natalie sent the artwork to me initially, I was blown away.
Manahil: The choice of artistic medium for the illustration is colour pencil. This medium can disintegrate in water, but the art feels so solid and tangible. I also love the labels on the paratext, with “figure 3: notes” and “figure 4: on the author.” That evokes the feeling of scientific diagrams.
Leslie: That was also Matthew’s idea.
Manahil: The labels fit in with the language of your poems and bring attention to the research aspect of the chapbook.
Leslie: I feel fortunate to have worked with highly intelligent and brilliant artists who took the poems and elevated them into a coherent project. Even if people don’t have the language to describe these details, I hope the details elevate their experience of the chapbook. If you use language and artistic details, you can evoke the feeling you intend to evoke whether or not people have the technical training to identify the techniques you used. Even if people don’t consciously notice these details, I hope the work that Matthew, Katherine, and Natalie put into the chapbook will evoke what I intend the poems to evoke.
Manahil: When I first entered the space of “CanLit” (term referring to Canadian literature), I heard that no one was going to care about your work as much as you did. I’m happy to witness how untrue that statement is. I see people put so much care into artistic work.
Leslie: CanLit is a very individualized institution. I did my Bachelors at the University of Victoria and now I’m doing my Masters of Fine Arts (MFA). I see the competition to get into an MFA and obtain funding. There’s no room for care in the institution. Once you’ve completed an MFA, you go to Penguin and compete for publication. This type of institution prioritizes the self, which is antithetical to how I experience the world of poetry. I want to be in spaces where care and the depth of reading each other’s work are at the centre.
Manahil: I feel fortunate that this care has been at the centre of my direct experiences. Natasha Ramoutar has talked about how she doesn’t have an MFA, and therefore has been unsure of how to proceed with writing – but Natasha is doing fantastic work.
Leslie: The more I’m in this program, the more I realize that you don’t need an MFA. The fortunate aspect of being in an MFA is having the dedicated time to write. I have qualms with the methodology of funding, but it is such a privilege to receive funding to do this work. I decided to start an MFA because I knew the specific book I wanted to write required research. I needed to be in an academic setting.
Manahil: You need access to research settings for your specific project.
The last poem in your chapbook brings about a sense of vitality, and to quote your closing lines, “the same sea of the first mothers / all carbon and salt and dripping / in alivenesses.” I love the plurality of “alivenesses” and how it closes the chapbook but opens up into a thread of possibilities of continued life. This is again a place where you construct new words, which as the closing word of the chapbook, holds a lot of power.
Leslie: “Alivenesses” was a completely intuitive choice. I didn’t think about the fact that “alivenesses” wasn’t a real word. It felt like the only way to end the poem. I had an image in my head of a person emerging from the water and standing on a dock, dripping water. Each one of those drops is a sense of being alive. The speaker drowned, so there is inherently death in the water, but the water is also where she goes to re-become herself. Each drop was its own little sense of life.
The title of the poem is “each wave a list of faces.” I didn’t know what the line meant when I first wrote it, but it has something to do with how I experience the ocean. There is so much life in every single molecule of the ocean. How could I not make it plural? The concept of “aliveness” was too small for what happened over the course of the book.
Manahil: I love the idea of plurality. The one word is never enough to encapsulate the breadth of what has happened.
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Manahil: You’re guest editing an issue for CV2 with Chimwemwe Undi. How did that come about?
Leslie: Chim came up with the idea for the issue back in June. This was right after George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests. I held a fundraiser for the Minneapolis protestors. This was a period when Black writers were getting solicited and elevated and being told their stories matter. This onslaught praise felt so disingenuous. There was a cognitive dissonance to feel as though I was getting complimented, heralded, and noticed, but only because of the magnitude of sorrow, death and deep hurt. It felt strange and uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to hold this discomfort.
Chim texted me to tell me about her idea for the issue, and it felt like a way I could breathe in everything. I could work to amplify Black writers and say, “Hey, we really want your poems, and it’s not limited to this month.” It was an ongoing process of community building and sharing. I didn’t want this attention to feel like a temporary Band-Aid where we put ourselves on display while they let us, and then we would retreat to the shadows where we belonged – that was the feeling I got from CanLit as a whole. We need to tell our stories and deserve to take our space. Everything regarding this attention wasn’t completely bad – it just had the wrong spirit. We had to come at elevating Black writers the right way. The title for the call for submissions, “Black Alive and Looking Back at You,” is from a June Jordan poem, and honours one of our literary ancestors. We use her text to assert our place and sense of being. The spirit of the action matched what the action was doing.
I’m very excited for this issue.
Manahil: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, Leslie! It was so much fun chatting with you.