AW JOURNEYS: SPOTLIGHT -Mimi Khalvati

SPOTLIGHT: Poet Mimi Khalvati

Welcome to Spotlight, a regular feature of Among Worlds. Our goal in the Spotlight column is to highlight third culture kids in all ages and stages of life who are making a difference in the world. In this issue, we are honored to be able to introduce you to poet Mimi Khalvati. Born in Tehran and raised on the Isle of Wight, Mimi explores in her writing many themes that will be familiar to TCKs: identity, loss, displacement, shallow roots, the power of names, and the limitations and glories of various languages. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and she is an award-winning poet with numerous publications and honors. In our correspondence, Mimi said that reading Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds (Pollock, Van Reken) was “seminal” for her in helping her to better understand her life and her work. (All poems mentioned in the interview are available to read from her website.)

AW: I’ve noticed that you use quite a few images of growing things in your poetry: vines, leaves, bulbs, roots. Why do you think that is? Do you feel that you have “roots” and are able to grow and flourish in spite of or because of your mixed make-up of cultures?

Mimi: Although I’ve lived my life mostly in cities, I grew up on the Isle of Wight, which is a very small, rural, and pretty island off the southern coast of England. My childhood is the source of much of my poetry, so I often draw images out of the natural world and am particularly drawn to small wayside things a child might stoop to, such as wild flowers and even weeds. Perhaps I feel I too have shallow roots but am also happy to take root anywhere, whatever the soil or site. I’m aware at the same time of the uprootedness of my background, having left my home country so young, and of the tenaciousness of my roots once I do settle down.

AW: In your poem “Nostalgia”, the speaker mentions being alone in a “dream of a dark planet.” This brought to my mind the common TCK sense of rootlessness, of never fully feeling at “home” in a particular place on this planet. Is this a concept you explore further in other poems? Have you found a sense of belonging in a particular culture or place?

Mimi: Many of my poems revolve around the idea of home and belonging, both as a poet and as a woman and mother. Since I can’t read or write Farsi, my mother tongue, I only write in English and very much within the English lyrical tradition. But my subject matter is often Iranian, drawing on memories of my few years there as a young adult, writing about my family whom I have always felt close to, even though they were so distant. So the duality is always there. Culturally, linguistically, and in my writing, I feel very much at home here in London, but in my body, my sensibilities, and physical being, I am more Iranian. I don’t feel this as a mind/body split though; it’s more like two colours merging to make a new colour.

AW: Your poem “Ghazal: It’s Heartache” is a thoughtful read for global nomads. Does khalvati really mean “a quiet retreat,” or did I misread that reference? Can you talk a little bit about your name and what it means to you?

Mimi: Yes, you’re quite right. Khalvati literally does mean “a quiet retreat.” The adjective khalvat means quiet, secluded, but the noun khalvati also means a Sufi or spiritual retreat. I learned this quite late in my life, at the time that I was writing this poem, and was very excited at the discovery as it rescued me from the embarrassment of the ghazal’s “signature couplet,” in which the author has to mention her/himself by name or pseudonym. I’d never previously had any real emotional connection to my patronymic but have subsequently felt a much stronger sense of ownership. And it’s a good name for a poet!

AW: Is there a particular reason why you have written several ghazals? Does your attraction to that form have any relation to your cross-cultural life and identity?

Mimi: Yes, my attraction to the ghazal is definitely due to my (lost) Persian heritage, as it is an old Persian form of love song with a monorhyme and refrain, still popular both as song and as poem across Eastern languages and cultures. Many American and British poets have taken to it too and are finding ways of writing ghazals in an Anglophone idiom. Poetry is so dear to the hearts of Iranians, many of whom can recite reams by heart, and I have always wondered how medieval poetry is kept so fresh and alive and still relevant to their daily lives. Exploring the form of the ghazal was in part my way of asking that question, as well as my wanting to bring over into English poetry some of the rhapsodic and musical expressions the ghazal offers.

AW: What kinds of discoveries have you made about yourself and your place in this world through your writing?

Mimi: I have always felt ashamed at my appallingly bad memory, particularly biographical memory, and my inability to retain facts, dates, historical narratives, etc. I have little sense of my own life story and sometimes rely on friends to remember my life for me! But we live in an age of mass migration and displacement, at a time when telling one’s own story, creating a platform for it and being heard, is so personally and politically urgent. In lyric poetry, however, I have found a place, or a home, which legitimises and allows for lack of memory, story, or narrative. The lyric void a poem occupies mirrors the void at the centre of my life, in which float all the key words you have mentioned: home, belonging, roots, culture, identity. Through poetry, I have been better able to accept their ambiguity and to value my life for the richness of its texture, its cross-fertilisations and connections. I feel a strong connection with the many people—TCKs, immigrants, exiles — whose experience in some ways might mirror mine.

AW: Is there a poem of yours that you’d like to share with us that speaks specifically to TCKs in some way?

Mimi: My most recent collection, Afterwardness, explores the long-term effects of early displacement and loss and takes many of its themes from the TCK bible, Third Culture Kids, and I am hugely grateful to the editors. Unresolved griefs, passivity, disassociation, emotional flattening, chameleon-like adaptability, hidden diversity—many of my sonnets touch on these aspects and, although they are largely autobiographical, I hope others will recognise and relate to them. The title poem looks through the eyes of a young boy from Aleppo onto a symbolic garden of paradise, a lost paradise, where language itself is lost, and all the early memories encoded within it.

AW: Describe what “home” means for you: is it a place—if so, where? What qualities does your “home” have that make it home for you?

Mimi: “Home” is in the heart of my family: my two children, grandchildren, living separately in our own homes, but bound together by love, shared histories, a common idiom, our sense of humour, range of references, and intimate knowledge of each other. “Home” is in the English language, in a community of poets, locally in London but also crossing international borders. “Home” is in my own flat, where I have lived nearly 30 years, and whose furnishings reflect my different senses of home—with many books, photographs, textiles, gifts given to me over the years, my mother’s paintings and tapestries, memorabilia, my archive of work. At the same time, “home” is always elsewhere, beyond the horizon, behind the sky, somewhere I dream of going to, but don’t know where.

AW: Given this issue’s theme of journeys, is there something you’d like to share about what journey or journeying means to you in your life?

Mimi: The word journey immediately summons up for me an image of airports. I love airports (despite all the hassle of security) for their anonymity, passivity, the sense of being in a liminal space, in between time zones, neither here nor there. I love being freed of any sense of obligation or expectation of individuality and definition. Afterwardness begins and ends with air travel: the first poem set on my first flight to England at the age of six, and the last, more than sixty years later, in the here and now, looking up at vapour trails.

Vapour Trails

Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester.

Staring up at pure blue from down on earth,

we see them shining in the firmament,

the jets, the contrails, gliding back and forth

like deep sea fish, soundless and innocent.

Their exhaust particles and frozen vapours

show us, graphically, cause and effect:

in the silver bullet-nosed jets, the cause;

in trails like spinal x-rays, the effect.

It only takes a trigger, a single flight

in childhood, for example, early trauma,

to stretch the bare bones of the aftermath

into a lyric void beyond the finite

and knowable, a via negativa

cruising at altitude on plumes of breath…

To purchase Mimi Khalvati’s most recent collection, Afterwardness, please visit https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784107994.

Learn more about Mimi and read some of her poetry at http:// www.mimikhalvati.co.uk/index.htm.