The Ghazal’s Triptych Tongue

Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Shenandoah contributor Ali Choudhary about his poem “Ghazal in which I am read aloud until I tremble,” a ghazal about religion, desire, and genocide. Choudhary discusses his relationship to the poem’s three languages—English, Arabic, and Aramaic—and the interfaith subjectivity of his poem as it traverses spiritual feeling across all three Abrahamic religions. The pair track the history of the ghazal form across languages and cultures, with Choudhary specifically praising its elasticity, versatility, and aesthetic complexity. Finally, Choudhary shares how language, with its poetic destruction and reformation, might help us to understand religious and political thought, especially in a moment dominated by violence and grief. “Ghazal in which I am read aloud until I tremble” was published in Volume 75 Number 1.

Your poem is written in three languages: English, Arabic, and Aramaic. How did you decide on this triptych of languages? What is your personal relationship with each one? The Aramaic, of course, is pulled directly from the New Testament, but from where did you source the Arabic?

Firstly, thank you for interviewing me, Chase—I am honoured to be published in Shenandoah and to be able to unravel this ghazal further. I grew up in a Muslim family and, as a child, would read the Quran in the Classical Arabic. I cannot understand Arabic in its contemporary form, and I did not know the translation of what exactly I was reciting in the Quran, either.

Translation of a religious text in Islamic culture is not supposed to supersede the original, since the Arabic represents the exact, unaltered word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. An English translation, for example, would pry open a “divine text” to human fallacy. There is a sense of blindness I associate with my readings of the Quran, a profound form of dissociation from the source material because I could not understand it, but there are repetitions you begin to recognise, like “barakah,” and the names of various figures and texts like Maryam (Mary), Ibrahim (Abraham), Isa (Jesus), Injil (the gospels), etc.

I think I was trying to echo the earliest form of my understanding of Maryam/Mary, which was her exalted Quranic image, her name like permafrost in the Arabic. The Aramaic was a nod to the New Testament, to the language spoken by the historical Mary—and an attempt to have some tether between my speech and hers, who for so long had existed in a language that she did not speak herself. English, of course, is my native language that suffers its own ruptures in the ghazal, and it presents a way of rendering myself onto the page, and to frame Mary with my own tongue. A triptych was perfect in the end: all good things come in three—Jesus Christ – God – The Holy Spirit, the Brontë sisters, the Macbeth witches, etc.

“Barakah,” the radif in this ghazal, is written in the Latin script despite its origins in Arabic. How are you thinking of this word in the poem—as an English word on loan from the Arabic, as an Arabic word written in the Latin script, or perhaps some other combination of the two? Why did you choose to present it this way? And, speaking more to the ghazal form, how did it end up as the radif?

“Barakah” is a widely used word in Islamic, Middle Eastern, and South Asian cultures. It’s associated with holistic prosperity, and one uses it to provide a firm, enduring foundation of goodness and blessing in their life. I am so accustomed to writing the word in the Latin script that it naturally made its way into the ghazal in that fashion.

A religious text like the Quran or the Bible is not fixed in a static state—to me, they embody being open to various meanings from whoever reads it and however they choose to transpose its didactic teachings upon their own life. In three explicit places in the Quran does God mention how he breathed life into his creation, like in Surah As-Sajdah 32:9 where it’s written that “then He fashioned them and had a spirit of His Own creation breathed into them.” Likewise, in Genesis 2:7, it is written that “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

I am part of the camp that thinks that there is a symbiotic relationship between a reader and a text’s author(s), and that a reader breathes life onto the page, animating it. I like to think that by using “barakah” in my ghazal, it breathes blessing into my act of creation, even if the definition of “blessing” is continuously remade and struggles to define itself in the face of horrifying realities. In some ways, me exploring the difficulties of imbuing blessing in various situations is a mirror of Genesis 6:6 where God regretted that he had made man on earth. There is a sense of a similar tragedy that permeates through the ghazal, where the formation of a thing can become distorted beyond your control by external forces.

Similarly to my question about “barakah,” I am interested in Mary’s relationship to language in this poem. Mary is named here in Arabic, and yet, when we see her speak in the poem, her voice comes to us in English through the Latin script. Why did you decide to write her prayer in English but to include her name in Arabic? Given that Mary is the only woman named explicitly in the Quran, I wondered while reading if including her name in Arabic infused her literary presence in the poem with a certain and particular divinity—a special barakah if you will—that the common English-language biblical name “Mary,” with its many appearances across the Christian New Testament, does not.

Mother Mary is a figure who has intrigued me for a long time, and even more so in recent years as I have found my way back to spirituality. I mentioned previously why I chose to render her name in Arabic, but the question of why her prayer appears in English is equally revealing to me when I look back at the poem.

In the Quran, Maryam’s speech is rendered in Arabic, despite the fact that Arabic was not her native tongue. In a sense, sacred texts already perform an act of translation, carrying her voice across languages, histories, and communities. I wanted to continue that movement rather than preserve an illusion of linguistic authenticity. To have her speak in English, my own native language, is to acknowledge that Mary exists for us as a figure continually summoned into narrative—through the New Testament, the Quran, and now through poetry. In none of these instances is she the author of her own story, and so her voice is always mediated.

At the same time, I could not write her prayer in Arabic. Arabic is not my native language, and to do so would have risked reducing her to an aesthetic or symbolic presence rather than allowing her an emotional reality. I wanted to imagine her as the grieving mother, the Mater dolorosa, confronted with the horrors of the present: the wreckage, the littered bodies of children, the relentless shedding of blood. There is a tendency to romanticise sacred figures through distance and reverence, but I was interested in bringing Maryam into the immediacy of human suffering.

My understanding of Maryam is shaped particularly by the Quranic account of her. In the surah that bears her name, while enduring the agony of childbirth, she cries out, “I wish I had died before this and been completely forgotten.” It is one of the most striking moments of vulnerability in scripture, and I wanted that anguish to reverberate through the poem's contemporary landscape, especially in the lines “God, I have nothing left to give you. / Not even this. Not even this is barakah.” Keeping her name in Arabic is therefore not simply a gesture towards divinity or barakah, but an invocation of that particular tradition of struggle, grief, and endurance. There is a simmering violence attached to the name Maryam that I did not encounter, at the time of writing the poem, in quite the same way with the English “Mary,” though that has changed since.

I should add, too, that this distinction is never absolute. Arab Christians also know and love her as Maryam, and so the name itself resists singular ownership. It carries multiple histories and devotional traditions at once, allowing different readers to encounter her through their own understandings while preserving the plurality that has always defined her literary and spiritual afterlife.

Interestingly, you are the only poet in Tran Tran’s guest edited poetry section who chose to put direct translations in their notes section. Why did you choose to provide these notes? Your note to “barakah” includes not just a definition of the word but also its role in the poem—more of an explanation than exactly a dictionary entry. It makes me wonder, are you thinking of this note section as a set of translations, a companion to the poem, or perhaps an extension of the poem itself? The “barakah” note makes me feel there is something more complicated going on here.

I’m afraid my answer is quite less exciting than what you point towards. I think my decision here reflects much of my anxieties as a writer: Would an audience read the ghazal if there was a sense of unfamiliarity through these languages that are not English? Would the poem make sense if there were no accompanying translations? Would an audience care to research the translations of the words I specifically chose to translate into a different language? If I do not offer translations, does the poem bridge itself closer to an inquisitive and intelligent audience, or does the poem forge a significant gap between itself and a potential audience? In a slightly unfortunate era where people are hardly reading issues a literary journal puts forth, and multiple poets are sharing their poems on social media, and audience attention spans are shorter than ever, it makes these anxieties even more vivid. I also tend to want to explain my work as fully as possible, thus the multiple provided meanings of “barakah,” though I do love and prefer the notion that it is read as a companion to the poem or as an extension of the poem itself.

There is also a connection in this poem between language and the political. Language is visceral in this poem, physical. It does things. As your poem's title suggests, reading has the capacity to make the speaker physically tremble, and it is the fluidity of words (“my language has no borders”) that seems to give the speaker the capacity to transcend across not only multiple languages but also the limitations of their own body, of their one tongue, and to occupy the consciousness of Mary and her prayer. Does this poem have a politics of language? Even more than making up the formal elements of this poem, how does the concept of language and the physical and metaphysical processes that bring it into existence make up the content of your ghazal?

The concept of language has intrigued me deeply for the last couple of years—its severance, especially, when trying to encapsulate and verbalise instances of personal, historical, and political violence. I did a workshop with Sinéad Morrissey this year and submitted a portfolio of poems that incised open the concept of being severed from language and then tethering yourself back to it. Sinéad wrote that I should “be wary of prioritising sound and effect over meaning”—and, as much as it might be sacrilegious to disagree with a poet of her stature, I found myself both amused and unconvinced. Because I think my poems and this ghazal do prioritise sound—and they should. I wouldn’t change it.

Sound is inherently bound to meaning, but it is freer than meaning. It appeals to the whole sensory imagination rather than operating restrictively within the cognitive. If a poem obstructs, it does so on purpose—to mirror the very suffering it struggles to speak of. I adore playing with assonance, rhythmic emphasis, clusters of consonants, etc. There is something Dickensian in the grotesque fleshing-out of language, something Plathian in the violence of its music. The whole alphabet sits in my little toolbox, and the play of it tethers me closer to a poem. I like letting sound lead.

Part of this impulse, I think, comes from a desire to break the limitations of the tongue and to return the speaker’s body to something metaphysical, something pre-linguistic and uncontained. And though it isn’t strictly relevant to this poem, I am someone who has lived with considerable anxiety, compounded by a history of childhood abuse and personal violence. For many people who have suffered that kind of harm, the act of “speaking out”—of trying to reclaim justice through language—often causes language itself to rupture. The very instrument of healing becomes the site of injury. That paradox exists in some form inside my poetics.

One of the epigraphs I keep returning to for my in-progress manuscript is from Edward Wilson-Lee’s book The Grammar of Angels, in which he describes Pico della Mirandola's vision of the soul: “If we want to be the companions of angels, speaking our way up and down Jacob’s Ladder,” Pico wrote in the climactic section of his speech, “virtue alone will not be enough, unless we had been instructed in how to move from level to level as the rites demand, never leaving the ladder. Once we have been initiated into this speaking or reasoning art, we will be infused by a Cherubic spirit, and, through our mental exercise, move along the ladder of being, passing through all things from centre to centre, now tearing the one into many, as happened to Osiris, and then, as with the limbs of Osiris, fusing the many back into One.”

That image—of language as the ladder, of the self simultaneously torn apart and gathered back together through the act of speech—is my modern manifesto. It is what I strive towards.

I want to ask you more about the ghazal shape this poem takes on. The ghazal has several interesting historical connections at play in your poem. First and foremost, there is the presence of Arabic, allusions to Islam, and the geography of and genocide against Palestine all present in this ghazal, a form tied culturally and historically to the Arabic language and the origins of Islam. I’m interested in hearing you further connect the dots for me between the history and culture of this form and the contents of the poem itself. But I am also interested in what aesthetically the ghazal is doing for you here. How does its unique use of repetition and the rigidity of its form give this poem its shape?

One of the reasons I chose the ghazal was that I wanted the poem to remain spiritually porous rather than enclosed within a single religious tradition. The poem draws upon Islamic imagery, Arabic language, and the figure of Maryam, yet Mary herself exceeds any one theological boundary. She is revered across Islam and Christianity, and even the name “Maryam” belongs also to Arab, Persian, and South Asian Christian communities. I wanted the poem to inhabit that shared spiritual terrain rather than declare allegiance to a particular doctrine.

That openness made the ghazal feel like an especially fitting vessel. Historically, the form emerged in seventh-century Arabia before travelling through Persian literary traditions, appearing in the works of Sufi poets Hafez and Rumi, and later flourishing across South Asia during the Mughal period. It is itself a form of migration and transformation. Given that the poem is concerned with Palestine, I was drawn to a form whose very existence testifies to cultural movement and exchange.

Yet my attraction to the ghazal was not only historical. Up until that point, I had written almost exclusively in free verse, and have done so since then too, and the ghazal represented an entirely different challenge. What fascinated me was the way the form seems to stretch language toward something beyond itself. The ghazal has often been associated with longing—for a beloved, for God, for transcendence—and I became interested in how its architecture might function as a ladder between the earthly and the divine, even while never fully bridging that distance. I wanted it to revel in the messy “humanness” of it all, for lack of a better word.

A particularly formative moment for me was reading Sarah Ghazal Ali’s essay in the Poetry Foundation website, titled “The Pen, the Throat, the Ear: On Ghazals,” where she writes: “Ghazals are notorious for their resistance to narrative. A couplet might emote, might beseech, but it does so without relying explicitly on any of its neighbours. Each couplet hinges upon itself—autonomous, it carries its own universe of context. One could even argue that ghazals aren’t poems at all, but a capricious assembly of couplets that could easily part ways.”

I felt windows in my mind being unbuckled as I read through these lines and imagined that a couplet within a ghazal could feel like a patch embroidered into this large, luscious quilt, engaging with sound and repetition, whilst feeling lonely simultaneously. When I wrote and published “Ghazal in which I am read aloud until I tremble” in Shenandoah, I considered it quite fragmentary, of sorts. However, since then, I consider the couplets in the ghazal to be like particles in a cloud chamber, rendering the invisible visible through these wisped trails of concentrated impact and crystallising sound in these saturated couplets. Each couplet registers an impact—amatory, seasonal, religious, devastating—and the poem accumulates meaning through those fleeting impressions. What appears discontinuous on the surface gradually reveals an underlying coherence. Isn’t that a gorgeous way of considering the ghazal? There is a freedom to it, which I did not realise when I (agonisingly) wrote the first draft.

To loosely borrow an idea Rebecca Gayle Howell mentioned in a recent interview, I am also interested in the interconnectedness of how narrative distils in its structure whilst the sonic qualities of a ghazal—like the radif—propels the poem forwards, offering a more complete sensory experience and kind of widening the gyre in the reader’s imagination.

Finally, the central thematic tension of the poem lies between its amatory language, so familiar to the ghazal form, and the explicit invocation of the ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza. Through the repetition of the ghazal form, sex and death chase each other through the poem, united by a shared divine sensuality. The opening of the poem gives this away with the pleasurable mouthfeel of the grape requiring its simultaneous destruction through consumption. Indeed, the “fractured vessel” of the erotic body gives way to the fractured spirit of Mary, who finds her body broken through the destruction of a people and a land. How does this poem continue the tradition of the ghazal as a poetic form about love? And how do we understand Mary’s pain—the spiritual and material violence enacted against her—as relating to the pains of love poetry? To anguish, to strife, and to dissatisfaction?

What drew me to the ghazal as the form for this poem was precisely its constitutive restlessness, of the self perpetually reaching toward something it cannot possess or hold. The ghazal has always understood that desire and grief are not opposites but reflections of one another; the beloved and the divine are interchangeable precisely because both are defined by their withholding, by the lover’s inability to fully arrive at or retain them. That structural ache of the radif returning and returning is like a tide that brings the same word back to shore.

From the very first couplet, the image of the grape is an act of sensory abandonment and an act of destruction through the “torn silk” of its skin. That mouthfeel of sweetness is inseparable from the rupture required to access it and embodies the erotic dissolution that I was reading in a collection of Rumi poems. Eros is a word we have somewhat domesticated. We use it as shorthand for the sensual and the appetitive. But in its older philosophical senses, eros is something far more ungovernable and more terrifying. It is the force of yearning itself, the gravitational pull towards what is “other,” what exceeds you, and what you cannot contain. And what strikes me about eros in that larger sense is its profound humility. To desire something truly is to acknowledge that you are incomplete, that there is a largeness in the world that you cannot domesticate or even fully perceive.

That recognition of something beyond the self’s jurisdiction seems to me one of the most important spiritual and political orientations a person can have. Because so much of what we are living through (genocide, war, homelessness crises, the corruption of officials), so much of this violence that structures our modern world, proceeds from the opposite impulse—the arrogance of those who believe they are in control, who believe the world is a resource belonging to them and them alone. Love, in all its forms, is the antidote to that. It is the experience of being overwhelmed by what you cannot possess, especially when you do not let love be something porous.

The theological tradition has long understood Mary’s suffering through the prism of love and grief—the Stabat Mater, the Mater Dolorosa, etc. Her grief at the cross is a grief of love, an eros that has been annihilated and yet must go on with the pains of living. What I wanted to think through is whether that framework—of love as the willingness to remain present to suffering that exceeds your capacity to bear it—might illuminate something about what it means to witness the destruction of Gaza.

The line from Aramaic, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” is of course Jesus’s cry of dereliction from the cross, quoting Psalm 22. It is the prayer of someone who has loved completely and found that the beloved—here, God—has withdrawn. And it seemed to me that this line belonged inside a poem about Gaza because what is happening there is partially a theodicy problem. It is the live question of where God is in the middle of this, and it is also a problem of love, of what it means to love a people and a land when all of those things are being systematically destroyed.

I have been thinking lately about longing as a kind of unified field, about how all longing, at its deepest register, is in some sense the same longing. The longing for the beloved, the longing for the divine, the longing of the dispossessed for land and language and the dead—these are not the same in their particulars, obviously, and I would never flatten their differences. But they draw from the same human source, which is the knowledge that something essential is elsewhere and is perhaps irretrievably gone. And the ghazal, more than any other form I know, refuses resolution because, like Sarah said in her aforementioned essay, the ghazal “intimates order, then shows its hand, revealing clamor, chaos, commotion.”

What I hope the poem does, ultimately, is not make an argument about Gaza because (a) I am not interested in political poetry that tells you what to think and (b) I am not interested in the debate of whether a genocide is a genocide. Rather, I want to reveal the sensation that the reader’s capacity for love and their witness to collective annihilation are not separable experiences but aspects of the same consciousness, the same flesh. That is the politics I know how to write.

This ghazal has had other iterations since it’s been published, and it’s likely to appear in a slightly different form in my manuscript, one that is second person instead of first and pares back the “eros” to focus on the loneliness of the ghazal’s central character. Currently, the line “My language has no borders” has become “Your language has no borders, but suffers from enforcement.” I love how a poem can circulate with different meanings in slightly different isotopic iterations, and each can exist in the world. Maybe I’ll have both versions of the poem, who knows? That’s the evolutionary instincts of poetry, its alchemy.

Contemplating on “barakah” again, I recently read Dom Xavier Perrin’s book The Radiance of Her Face, in which he writes of Mary’s relative, Elizabeth, who is also to bear a child: “This woman symbolises an entire epoch, the period of waiting, of straining towards something new that will be both fruit and gift.” What fruits/barakah do we hope to bear in our modern world? A free Palestine, the dissolution of war, the dissolution of ego, an interconnectedness, the miracle of community, to bear the capacity for love. . .to have its largeness pour through us, like water falling into water.