RLU: I'm so happy to be talking about poetry today. This past week I've been hearing that Hanif Abdurraqib poem in my head, How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This. How can we be reading poetry when we also need to be in the streets? Reading some June Jordan work I was brought back to her idea that I think is also a fundamental truth about poetry: that poetry is, in and of itself, a necessary revolutionary act. That’s how I am landing here. I wanted to start by asking how you're doing and not just to jump into regular poetry interview questions without acknowledging the space outside of us.
SH: Thank you. Thank you for that and thank you for that introduction. The world is definitely in chaos right now. It's very unclear where our future is heading and I think that's the scariest part. As someone who grew up with undocumented parents, I know firsthand how this experience looms over you and becomes part of your identity. I ask myself the same questions and I think it comes down to how we resist and how we form resistance within our communities.
RLU: I’m curious about writing out or into material realities. You’ve said in previous interviews that school and writing provided a path to a stable, livable income. Healthcare. Material well being followed upward success. There’s an emotional or psychic recovery that happens through reading and writing, where we are deemed or where we deem ourselves as worthy. Instead of just asking about how the queer self is made, unmade, and remade through poetics, I want to ask about the lifeforce of poetics. What that means to you, especially when integrating the stories—some might call them themes—in your work, of childhood sexual violence, homophobia, and state violence against immigrants. I don’t want to presume too much, but going off my own experience and what I’ve heard from others, is that writing can save—has saved—our lives. Does any of that ring true for you?
SH: Writing and reading have been lifesavers for me. When I reflect on what kept me going, it has always been literature. Ocean Vuong said, “Queerness saved my life.” The world views queerness as deprivation, but queerness for him demanded alternative innovations and alternative routes. When I think of these together—queerness and literature—this quote always resonates. At the heart of it, queerness is the voice where you need to be heard. You have to make yourself known, and it is through the alternative innovations of these paths that you create where you keep discovering more and more of yourself. In a way, this gives you freedom. With that freedom also comes vulnerability. But growing up queer, especially for those of us hiding our queerness, visibility is what we've feared because it was dangerous.
RLU: I’m glad you brought up visibilty. Many of your poems straddle the boundary that splices the seen from the unseen. Poems with strong surrealist visual imagery are collaged or stolen from your dream world, an interstitial space of (sub)consciousness. Darkness cloaks the subjects in poems like “Short Film Starring Me At A Bathhouse” rendering an opaque visibility. But you have also spoken about your experience of allowing yourself to be looked over, or looked through, saying to The Rumpus, “Being invisible allowed me to be an observer.” And you also observed growing up in a mixed status family, that your parents had to be “quiet and invisible to society.” I’m curious about concealment, what poetry allows to make visible while respecting the integrity of the invisible, or, about what comes alive in unseen spaces precisely because it is unviewable.
SH: This is such a good question. I feel like this could take so many different paths to an answer. I never lived on the border, except when I went to grad school for my MFA. Growing up in San Antonio with undocumented parents and being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, while also knowing from a young age that I was different made me into an observer. Another way of saying that is I was invisible. Those three factors were such a huge force on how I viewed the world and why I stayed quiet most of my younger life.
It’s a beautiful thing to sit and watch—watch not only what's in the light, but also what's in the darkness. My own identity began forming. And in a way, it's what gave life to these spaces. I'm thinking of little me who in kindergarten was told to go to the reading corner because we're going to practice a Christmas song or have a holiday party, for instance. As a first generation American, I experienced so much—from translating for them to witnessing them lose their parents and not being able to return to bury them. In a way, there is a border that is invisible within my own life that determines what I can navigate. I'm still trying to navigate those borders. Growing up in that way engrains beliefs around certain things, like not to make yourself visible or allow yourself to take up space.
I'm 35 now. I spent the first twenty years of my life believing invisibility would save me. Every year I'm a little bit more free in these familial spaces. With my friends and chosen family, it's a whole different thing because I can be who I am and I can share my experiences more freely. It's just one of the ways I'm navigating those borders.
RLU: You grew up as a Jehova’s Witness, urged by your parents. In simple form, I’m wondering how religion shaped you. Do you still carry religion with you? Are you spiritual? I am also wondering if you may talk about your shared experience of your parents while growing up; their legal status, your witnessing their truncated interactions, facilitating conversations on their behalf, and the fear, of course, of the state imposing itself. Your parents were forced into a hiding. You also experienced hiding, with fewer and different legal implications, with queer identity. There is a threshold with queerness, marked by “coming out of the closet.” Coming out signified as arrival into a public, potentially self-possessed queerness, yet as queer theorists like Eric Stanley have posited, visibility does not confer safety, in fact sometimes it invites the opposite.
SH: I feel like religion gave us extra borders that we couldn't cross. At the same time, I feel it's because of those borders that my parents were able to survive longer here in the States. Being undocumented did infuse invisibility and turn it up a notch. We didn't have parties at home. We didn't have cookouts, we didn't play loud music. Those boundaries also kind of saved us back then. It made us a little bit more invisible.
We've talked about their hiding multiple times. When I moved to El Paso to do my masters is when we had the heaviest conversation. There's a border check on the way back from El Paso. We had a conversation one night where they said they were happy that I wanted to continue my education, but if something happened to me they wouldn't be able to help because they couldn’t come back. Another twenty minutes outside of El Paso there's border check in in New Mexico. I think it was that that motivated them to seek help from a lawyer to get lawful permanent residency.
As far as my own identity and like queerness, we don't really talk about it. I came out at 21. I was tired of living in secrecy. My dad said, this doesn’t change anything. You're my son and I still love you. It was more difficult for my mom to come around. She asked me multiple times if I was sure. She asked if I had a boyfriend. She asked when I knew and I said since I was a child. She said, children don’t know. But I was like, they know. I feel like you start to gain your own identity when you’re young. You just know. It's like this force that lives within you. And you know, I'm ashamed to say it, but as a child I very much hid that because, again, I didn't want to be seen.
RLU: I was rereading Audrey Lorde's Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power today and she's talking about how the erotic is this source of power and information that's suppressed by cisheteropatriarchy. I’m hanging onto what you just said because Lorde is impugning all the ways that self knowledge and self possession are disrupted without access to the erotic. The erotic, whether that be sexual experience or a sensual approach, may also be a positioning toward beauty. Or a positioning toward intuition. Children often know what they're drawn toward, or what their disposition is. The erotic in queer people is wrenched out of us or tamped down so early in our lives. When I queer my memories of childhood, I believe I knew but didn't have language for whatever sort of erotic information I was receiving. Or at least, I knew it was information that I shouldn't listen to, which begets this pushing away of information.
In talking about the presentation of information, I want to talk about form and white space. You’ve discussed previously how white space—invoked, emphasized, cast out—by form, is a language of its own. White space can build silence, gaps, or moments of sonic striation into the poem. White space can argue what needs to be seen or given attention by the reader. To me this feels akin to the way silence can be built into conversation—silence can speak, can emphasize what comes before or after. In a room, what allows a conversation to be heard is silence. If everyone is talking at the same time, it can be hard to delineate what any one person is saying. Silence is a necessary foreground.
SH: When I first encountered form and white spaces in grad school, I thought, why are we being constrained? Why are we getting boundaries? Now I think that white space is its own language. What fascinates me about it is what can be said in the unsayable. One of my favorite poets who just does white space so well is Diana Khoi Nguyen, the author of Ghost Of. I will play her reading of Triptych and that's like my Bible to me on some mornings. Listening to her I'm reminded of all the possibilities of form and white space.
White space builds tension and almost reminds me of my growing up—having to perform and navigate through these borders that are both inner and outer. That's what white space is. It's there to remind me that I'm here and I'm still pushing and pulling against what you're trying to say.
RLU: In talking about movement I want to talk about water. Water moves through the entire collection, How to Kill A Goat and Other Monsters. There’s drowing in dreams, there’s the very real Rio Grande river, there’s water pooling on your pillow, The Story of Water, and the book is split into sections of waves. Why water? Can you talk about water’s ability to parch, purify, or subdue, maybe kill?
SH: I've always felt like I've had some type of relationship with water. Maybe in a past life I was some type of fish. I've always felt like water is an observer. Water has seen so many things in its own life—deaths of people, animals, and of the world in general. It's a witness to everyone who has crossed water. It's very secretive and mysterious. We don't even know what lies in the depths of it. In a way, I see myself as water too: it can lie there without having any attention brought towards itself and still witness everything. I'm very curious about what it would say if it could speak and give us its own story.
RLU: In the poem “Dear Ivan” the speaker says, “Love is a way of haunting.” Your poems are replete with characters, a speaker “I,” who carry the dead with them. Who are stalked by a shadow of stories, that shadow called the past. It doesn’t seem though, as if the speaker wants to shed the past, but engage it. Survival may even require it. I’m wondering if this brings anything up for you.
SH: The speakers in this collection have to carry so much history and trauma. The poems build to that last line where the speaker has to decide what path to take. I wanted to make sure that I ended with beauty. I feel like it would be a shame for anyone to not want to be themselves and to not carry their history with them. History is our teacher. Audrey Lorde wrote an essay called The Transformation of Silence Into Action and Language. She says that you're never really a whole person if you remain silent. That line resonates so much. Creating this book is my way of saying, I don't want to stay silent. I want to be a whole person. Even though I’ve wondered how I can stop carrying the past with me, I’ve realized that you never can.
Maybe I'm a writer because I'm trying to find these alternative routes or different ways to transform. I hope that anyone who reads this collection knows that they're not tied to any path; they create their own path.