Talking to Bushra Rehman

Tamiko Beyer talks to poet Bushra Rehman, author of Marianna’s Beauty Salon (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018) and the forthcoming YA novel, Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood, for The Rumpus. "Rehman and I met more than a decade ago in New York City, but we can’t quite remember how. We were both active in queer and Asian American activist and literary scenes. We bonded in part over the belief that writing and social change are inseparable," says Rehman. From their conversation:

Rehman: It’s such a scary moment right now when we see people turning their pain outward onto others. I know when I’m feeling a great deal of pain, if I can break it out into a poem, I feel a relief that nothing else can bring me. There is a necessary place for learning how to have this creative release.

I’m not saying that a poetry workshop will change all the hate and violence that the Trump presidency has surfaced and unleashed. I’m saying that all of us need to be able to get in touch with our creative selves in order to document, heal, survive, and overcome. There’s a place for writing just as there’s a place for grassroots activism, working at Planned Parenthood, getting out on the streets, doing the essential legal work, running for office. It has to be all hands on deck.

I also believe fiction and poetry can reach readers’ hearts in ways news stories may not. Stories get under people’s skin. So much of the rhetoric of the Trump administration is about dehumanizing “others.” Through my work, I hope to share my lived Muslim experience and complicate the narratives because I know most Americans are taught to believe we are monsters. Most Americans have not actually met a Muslim person, so they believe what they are told. I can’t be everywhere, but my books can travel far.

Rumpus: That raises the question of audience for me, which was really present as I read Marianna’s Beauty Salon. How do you think of audience?

Rehman: In the beginning, I wrote for myself, for my own sanity and pleasure. I never imagined I would share my work with the world. When I first started reading in public, it was almost always at fundraisers for queer, South Asian, and women of color organizations. I began to write more with them in mind. I loved when people exploded in recognition over cultural markers, whether it was a reference to Bollywood icon Zeenat Aman or working-class chic like plastic-covered sofas. It’s still the audience I’m writing for.

Even now when my work is being read by a more diverse crowd of folk, I try not to interrupt a narrative to explain a cultural reference. I trust readers will get concepts through context or take the time to look items up. What I don’t want to do is over-explain, so a reader from my original audience feels shut out. That’s how I feel when I read a fellow South Asian writer who over-explains cultural references within a story—shut out.

Read the full interview at The Rumpus.