ALEN HAMZA: on “An intimate portrait of the experiences of a Bosnian refugee”
Twice There Was A Country is Another Country is the first book of poetry from Alen Hamza; it was selected by Brenda Hillman in the 2019 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition. Of the collection Paisley Rekdal remarks, “Hamza’s poems are playful and often surreal; their examination of how language shapes both our political and cultural identities is timely and nuanced.”
Twice There Was A Country is available for purchase from The Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Leyna Bohning: All of these poems really ask to be read out loud—their musicality is so apparent and wondrous—what is your process when you write poetry? Is capturing sound second nature to you, or is there some sort of struggle?
Alen Hamza: Sound is really important to me, and a lot of my poems begin as lines of sound-play. Sometimes these insinuate themselves into my day as I’m doing mundane stuff—washing dishes, taking a walk, hearing a sentence someone utters—and I keep repeating them and modifying them while playing with rhyme and sound. They are, I suppose, akin to little ditties, and even if the final poem often bears little resemblance to those initial forays, I would like to think that it retains a richness of music. So I guess I do naturally tend to capture sound, but the struggle is then in figuring out how to refine it and make it appropriate for the poem that arises out of those beginning musical notes.
L: When you started writing this manuscript, did you have a thematic intention? Was there something you knew you needed to write about?
A: I don’t think I ever had a conscious thematic intention for the book, except in the sense that I was writing about my life and the experiences that my family and I went through as refugees. But then again, that in itself constitutes a certain thematic focus. A lot of my interest in writing comes from a fascination with what it means to exist in a foreign language. How does the immigrant body situate itself after a great loss—of homeland, of culture, of language? Language, of course, plays a central role in how we navigate the space between ourselves and our environment, but also in how we navigate our own psyche. It defines us as much as we use it to define ourselves, or re-make ourselves, or resist or welcome assimilation into a new culture and way of being. Immigrating here as a teenager and being immersed in the English language in high school was a thrilling experience: both scary and exciting. How strange to think that all these new sounds were now necessary in order to function in the world. This made me realize how porous our identities are, but also how vulnerable they are to society’s organizing structures, including language. I wanted the book to capture both the melancholy and exuberance of dislocation, both the sorrows and joys of immigrant life. And I also wanted to embrace a sense of playfulness while doing it.
L: Having worked with Twice There Was a Country when it was first accepted by the Poetry Center, I know that wasn’t the original title. Personally, I love the title now. It feels absolutely perfect for the project. Can you talk about the process of re-naming the project?
A: I’m so glad to hear you prefer the current title! In fact, Twice There Was a Country was the original title for the collection. While submitting the manuscript for publication, I would from time to time come up with alternate titles, usually after getting yet another rejection, for I’d think: It’s the title’s fault! Oh the things we do to make sense of the baffling publication process. One of those alternate titles I came up with was Exit Empire—a line from one of the poems in the collection—and that’s the title under which the manuscript was sent to the CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize. So of course, when the book got accepted, I thought, See, the new title made a difference. But though I really like the sound and idea behind “exit empire,” I felt a little uneasy about it as the title for the book. I kept thinking what it actually meant in relation to the collection as a whole, and sure, I was able to come up with some justifications, but they felt a little too abstract. For if you think about it, coming to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina implies entering an empire, not exiting one. But then I’d tell myself, OK, that’s true, but things are different if we take “exit empire” to be an imperative, or a stage direction in a play. Also, the fact that so much of the book is about the state of being in-between, of not belonging anywhere, allows for the fact that the poems are performing an act of resistance, of asserting a territory that’s separate from both the homeland and the newland. So while I had fun thinking through the ways in which Exit Empire fit the book, the feeling never left me that Twice There Was a Country was the more appropriate title. On the one hand, it refers directly to the two incarnations of Yugoslavia that came into existence after the First and Second World Wars. On the other, it highlights the quality of doubleness that operates throughout the collection, including questions of identity, past and present, sexuality, and so on. Also, it’s an utterance that points to how easily things are broken, how countries don’t exist forever, how limits are everywhere around us. This rich philosophical and emotional charge had made me fond of the title from the beginning. So when I finally approached my editors, Hilary Plum and Caryl Pagel, with the idea of changing the title, it was a relief to hear that they were also in favor of Twice There Was a Country.
L: If you could only use one sentence to describe this book to a stranger, what would you say?
A: How many semicolons am I allowed? This is really tough, but here’s a try: An intimate portrait of the experiences of a Bosnian refugee.
L: What other projects are you working on right now? Who are you reading?
A: I’ve written fiction, mostly short stories, almost as long as I’ve written poetry, and currently I’m working on a longer prose project that blends fiction and nonfiction. As far as what I’m reading, that’s determined at the moment by the class that I’m in the process of putting together. It’s a global literature class, and the novels I’ve been reading, or am about to read, include Teju Cole’s Open City, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer. I’ve also been leisurely making my way through this year’s The Best American Poetry, edited by Paisley Rekdal. And just as leisurely, I’ve been enjoying Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness.
Alen Hamza immigrated to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina as a refugee at the age of fifteen. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center For Writers, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the University of Utah. His work has appeared in AGNI, Fence, and The Southern Review.
Leyna Bohning is a third-year NEOMFA fiction candidate and has three kittens named after Sherlock Holmes characters. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she was the co-Editor for Underground Pool and an intern for The American Poetry Review. When she’s not writing she’s teaching herself Korean, taking polaroid pictures, or doing paint-by-numbers.