Meet Ladan Osman at Paris Review

A resident of Chicago, Ladan Osman is the author of The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony selected for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets in 2014. Our dear readers may also know Ladan from her tenure on Harriet this past April. Her poetry is included in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets (a project of the African Poetry Book Fund, with support from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's Poets in the World project). At Paris Review, get to know a little more about her work:

How has your background informed your work?

My parents are from Mogadishu, Somalia. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in neighborhoods that were largely populated, if not by Somalis, then by East Africans. So many different elements go into my work, but there’s a very direct link to the way my parents would tell stories—their comfort using parables, making leaps in language, speaking in metaphors. My father would often point to a complex image or something strange and say, Look, it’s a metaphor. But he wouldn’t explain further. My parents speak English and other languages, but they’re most comfortable speaking Somali and they would speak Somali to us. So I always felt like I was doing some kind of translating. And things that are untranslatable—that’s poetry, too.

Being a first-generation immigrant puts you in a unique position—you have a deep connection with Somalia and to your parents’ experiences, but most of it is secondhand.

That’s an act of translation as well. The stakes are much higher because there’s always something about my identity that feels fluid. There are often questions—if not from myself, then from outside myself—that have to do with loyalty and where I’m rooted. I was educated in the States. I have loved and matured here in the States. I’m rooted to America, and specifically to Ohio, but cellular memory calls to places I haven’t seen in my adult life. Sometimes negotiating that feels like a challenge. In my poems, too—trying to figure out who the work is for, what the work is for, what it is meant to do. Those considerations are definitely worthwhile, but they go far beyond poetry.

Continue at Paris Review.