Interview with Youssef Alaoui

Photo courtesy of 2Leaf Press

By Alexis August

Editor’s Note: This interview were conducted by editor Alexis August at 2Leaf Press, a Black and Brown female-led press dedicated to highlighting sociopolitical issues with interesting and compelling literature.

Youssef Alaoui: First I would like to say that I am very happy and proud to have my book Critics of Mystery Marvel published and supported by a Black/Brown Female-Led Press. It is a great honor for me to have my writing represented by the same press as Abiodun Oyewole, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, and so many other incredibly talented writers and poets. Gabrielle David, publisher and author of the upcoming series Trailblazers is a greatly talented and inspiring woman.

Critics of Mystery Marvel revels in the elemental mysteries, is perhaps a love song to the doubters of the validity of those mysteries, and highlights several social justice issues such as sexism, prejudice, racism, authoritarianism, and poverty (in the USA, Morocco, and Latin America). My uncle Amine Alaoui in Casablanca painted the design on the cover. Moroccan and South American themes are found throughout the book, as well as my fascination with the old neighborhoods of Paris.

Alexis August:

When did you begin writing poetry?

Youssef Alaoui:

I began writing poetry when I was sixteen or seventeen. My grandfather had left me a manual typewriter. My friend, whom I loved but would date one of my friends, and I typed messages to one another and the typewriter, who would respond. Soon it was just me and the typewriter. Then new technology came and I acquired a thin word processing typewriter. I would fall asleep typing whatever thoughts came to me as I fell asleep. This was my new muse. We slept many nights together and I woke up with treasures or total gibberish if I had mistyped. I took poetry workshops in college, then was invited to take independent study with a famous poet professor on campus. We are still dear friends to this day.

AA:   As a fiction writer and poet, what differences do you find between poetry and fiction? What can you do in poetry that you can’t do in fiction? Have you ever transformed a poem into a longer story?

YA:   Many people think they are writing poetry, but it’s only fiction with line breaks. Line breaks are expression. Poetry involves metaphor and imagery that bring up associative thoughts in the reader. Poetry actively involves the reader or it is not poetry. Poetry is multidimensional and associative. Many poets are mystics and concerned with flashes of inspiration that occur when the brain is exposed to stimuli such as metaphor. A poem without metaphor is a poor poem indeed. Good poets smash language and elevate metaphor to the point where it becomes its own waking dream language. The language of dreams has no rules, no boundaries, and yet must be inherently familiar or else it will not function.

In poetry can go anywhere I want, be as expressive as I dare. I can break language down to its components and reassemble it in new ways. I collide metaphors. I establish and break meter and rhythm, creating polyrhythms, riffing on the precedent. In fiction, timing and rhythm are also essential. In fiction, I adhere to grammatical rules and an intuitive sequence of events, but the poetic impetus is ever present. These elemental collisions are the source of life in the realm of ideas, in the galaxies of inspiration.

Sometimes I think I’m writing a poem but it is not a poem. It must be unfolded carefully and properly rewritten as fiction. Sometimes I write a fiction piece that operates better as a poem. These are risky. There must be adequate juice to every line of verse or there will be no flavor to the piece.

There are many kinds of fiction. Each is valid. The public gravitates to fiction before poetry. Fiction can get verbose and go nowhere. So many people burn through piles of mass market fiction, like watching TV. Fiction can be as thin as murky water or as thick as peaty loam.

My main concern in fiction is the art of the short story. Sometimes my stories unfold into novellas. This has happened, but the poet in me tends to keep my fiction short and fills each line, each paragraph with strong images and events that approach poetic metaphor.

AA:   How does your identity as an Arab-Latino shape your poetry?

YA:   My Arab heritage and Latinismo are part and parcel of every word I write. In Morocco and Venezuela, both countries have magical realism imbued to their core. Although I was raised in the Western United States, this energy comes out of me genetically; in my behavior, humor, interests, and art. Dreams and pixies. Ghosts and passions. Dead cities and mute oceans. Mountains of grief. Skies of deep love. These worlds await the reader in the words that I write.

AA:   In your latest collection Critics of Mystery Marvel, some of the poems were originally in Spanish and French. How do you decide what language you want to write a poem in?

YA:   I rarely want to write a poem. They emerge of their own volition. It is a chemical reaction. A false memory. A real memory of a falsehood or a dream, the slant of light, heartsickness, anything. The functioning of consciousness, awareness, a reaction to stimuli. When it comes, it comes in whole and my job is to capture it as accurately as possible. I have written the most amazing poems in my head but sometimes fail to capture them. My job as a writer is to capture them in the purest form I can manage and sometimes they arrive in languages other than English. My three languages are English, French, and Spanish.

AA:   How was your experience working with the Clarion Alley Mural Project? In what ways do you believe art and storytelling can make a social impact?

AA:   Absolutely. Art and storytelling are integral components at the heart of making a social impact. Look at the variety of George Floyd murals that appeared throughout our country. This face is not only Floyd’s. This is the face of our brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins who are unfairly treated, violated, and killed at the hands of so-called authority who are actually charged with protecting the public. The murals refer to the social disease of racism.

The Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) is very important to the community of the Mission District, for San Francisco, and the world. Can we change the world with words? Is it possible? Words bring awareness. Awareness causes action, humane action. That humane action can also just be understanding. At the right moment, an individual armed with understanding can engage in healthy and sane physical reactions to unjust actions. How we react to certain situations can and will change the world. To describe the CAMP and my experience with this group of people, I have added the following entry from my blog www.youssefalaoui.info:

I am humbled and overjoyed to have been invited to this project by Poet Maw Shein Win and Artist and Organizer Megan Wilson to participate in the Clarion Alley Mural Project or CAMP. The Clarion Alley Mural Project, based on social justice murals in an alley of the Mission District in SF, is the collaborative effort of artists and activists to bring these important images to life. We poets composed a piece (or more) to represent the mural we were paired with. The result is passionate and beautiful. There are many components to this event. Poets are filmed reading in the alley, the event is live streamed, there is a round table discussion after, then the poems will be offered as broadsides enclosed in handmade boxes. I am honored to be included in the group paired with the Arab Liberation Mural.

Among the activists is one very special to me. Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan politician who was head of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces (UNPF) and secretary of the Tricontinental Conference. An opponent of French Imperialism and King Hassan II, he disappeared in Paris in 1965. It was not until 2018 that details of his disappearance were established by Israeli journalist and author Ronen Bergman in his book, Rise And Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, who concluded that Barka was murdered by Moroccan agents and French police, and disposed of his body. The other Arabic activists are allied with the Palestinian liberation movement; Rasmea Yousef Odeh, Leila Khaled, Yasser Murtaja, Naji Daifullah (ally of Cesar Chavez), and Bassel al-Araj.

AA:   How has the past year and the pandemic affected your writing?

YA:   The year of COVID-19 provided me with enough space to create another book, a novella, and a few short stories. I also had enough time to read some fascinating books, but those books mentioned other books and now I’m swimming in a happy pile of new information. I’ll get through it someday. I created a few great video poems for the Paris Lit Up reading series. They’re to be found on my website or theirs. The Bioptic Review came out during COVID. The Bioptic Review is a popular Parisian literary magazine of locals and expatriates. The sadness of this year for me was losing important people, to COVID and otherwise, and watching the stress of isolation wear on myself and my network of friends. I miss travel, going out with friends, and reading to people.

AA:  Are you working on any new projects that you are excited about?

YA:   I am! Yes, as I said I have a new book (or two?) coming out soon. Insh’allah. Coming up also is film I co-wrote with Vagabond Alexander Beaumont of Audio Visual Terrorism, which we’ve provisionally named Spirits of Coney Island, featuring his poetry, my poetry, and the poetry and presence of the great maestro Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets and 2LP. It will be a full length feature film. We hope to continue production in the Summer of 2021. Also to come out soon is the Clarion Alley Mural Project of the Mission District in San Francisco. My team and I are currently organizing the eighth year of Beast Crawl, the largest poetry festival in Oakland history. Beast Crawl will feature twenty events, an hour long each, over four nights, for two weeks, this September. Readings will be held on Zoom, then hosted on YouTube. We will also have “hybrid” readings with audience members that will also be broadcast on Zoom and YouTube. Something that just went live is “Voices of Trees” in Golden Gate Park of San Francisco with Italian Sound Artist Giovanna Iorio and fifteen Bay Area poets. The exhibit is based on a geolocation app that will play an audiopoem once the user nears a particular location in the park. Giovanna has done several sound installations of the like in many countries.

AA:  Since it is National Poetry Month, what would you tell the reader who finds poetry too intimidating or difficult to read? What advice would you give them on how to approach poetry?

YA:   How to approach poetry? Feel free to read poetry any way you like. A book of poems can be picked through or opened at random. It doesn’t have to be read sequentially form cover to cover. Place your eyes on whatever piques your fancy. Then read it quickly and let various words enter your mind and let them swell within your imagination. Then maybe read the poem through. Once you have done that, read the poem aloud to yourself or a friend. This is how a poem lives. It lives in the imagination, swelling, telling more in the mind than on the page, and it lives when read aloud. Listen to the rhythms and tonalities of the words. This is the music of poetry. A good friend of mine, years ago, in a quiet café in Seattle, used to read Rilke upside down. He said it slowed his pace. Maybe you can try reading poetry upside down, too. Enjoy the music and the passion that words offer. Words are ideas and ideas can change perception or focus it. Words can indeed change the world, one person at a time. (www.youssefalaoui.info)

Youssef Alaoui is a Moroccan Latino American poet, author, editor and artist. Alaoui studied classical Arabic and Spanish baroque poetry, and Moroccan contemporary poetry at New College of California, San Francisco. Alaoui’s work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Big Bridge, Cherry Bleeds, 580 Split, Full of Crow, Carcinogenic Poetry, Dusie Press, Tsunami Books, Red Fez, and Rivet Journal. He is the author of the novella, The Blue Demon (2012), Death at Sea — Poems (2013), Lost Frames Compendium of Poetry and Art (2015) and the short story collection, Fiercer Monsters (2017). http://www.youssefalaoui.info/

Alexis August is an editor with 2Leaf Press currently editing an upcoming series Trailblazers: Black Women Who Helped Make America Great American Firsts/American Icons. She is a recent graduate from the University of Southern California where she earned her bachelor’s in creative writing and master’s in literary editing and publishing. Her work has been featured in Talking Lit, Chatter, Scribe, and Talking Out Loud.