Leave From or Arrive There: A Conversation with Rima Rantisi

Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create.

Biography, The University of Hawaii Press’s quarterly academic journal, surveys the contemporary landscape of Lebanese and Arab women’s memoirs. In this, they have named Rima Rantisi as among the champions of “highly intimate personal narratives,” whose work portray their own “constructions of home.” As an essayist, Rantisi inhabits interiorities, taking time in its own tracts, but also incites reexaminations of how we think of (and therefore, how we read and write) the external—places we dwell in all our lives and have always felt ourselves to know. As an editor, she is a nonbeliever of geographic boundaries, welcoming works of art and literature from the ‘Arab-adjacent’ regions. How does she write about home, something ideally stable, when it happens to be a city that is ever-changing and fluid, a mere construct?

In this interview, I asked Rantisi about Rusted Radishes, the Beirut-based multilingual and interdisciplinary journal of art and literature she co-founded; framing the memoir as a genre within place-based writing; and contemporary Arabic and Anglophone literatures written from Lebanon and its diaspora.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is a point in your essay “Waiting” where you write about O’Hare Airport: “Each time I leave from or arrive there, I am away—from people I love, from other homes. I am reaching, always.” Can you speak more about this metaphorical always being away, always on the move

Rima Rantisi (RR): Home is one of those subjects that Lebanese writers and artists are intimately familiar with, and sometimes in ways they prefer not to be. But because of the country’s modern history of war and migration, complex conceptions of home are inevitable. For me, I was raised by Lebanese immigrants in the United States, in the small town of Peoria, Illinois. Later, I made a new home where I went to college in Chicago. And then I moved across the world to Beirut. The move to Beirut is when the ever-present awareness of place began to take form. Not only because it was so different from where I had come from, but also Lebanon now became a new lens to see the world through—including my parents, world politics, my past and future. One place that brings these places together is O’Hare Airport. It had always been exciting for me to travel from there as a Midwesterner, but now it gives me a deeper sense of distance between who I was in the United States, and who I am now in Lebanon. In this sense, “I am away” both physically and metaphorically. One thing we don’t talk about as much is how place changes us; not only does it affect us emotionally, but it changes our perception of the world, and the language we use to communicate it. 

Lina Mounzer writes about this beautifully in the essay “War in Translation,” which is an illustration of the merging of the translator with her subjects (who were victims of the Syrian War), but also about what it meant to translate the world of civil war-Beirut upon arriving in Canada as a teenager. She writes: 

When my family and I washed up in Canada, carried out on the great wave of migration away from the civil war in Beirut, I found that I could no longer unlock the trunk in which I carried the words to explain where I had come from, what I had lived. When I did manage to force it open, what I found inside was soggy, useless. The words were all in another language, non-native to this new soil. I translated them as best as I could . . . But the new words were strangely light. They carried none of the weight of what they truly meant. 

AMMD: In Slag Glass City, your essay “Inside the (Seismic) Shift” is more of a lyrical poetic meditation. “Days of Pearls” also leans towards the fragmentary. To me, these two Pushcart-nominated pieces seem to be departures from your other essays; I’m not only speaking about its æsthetic-structural divergence, but also of this sense of authorial distance. 

RR: I am very interested in trying out different kinds of form, thanks to my editors and teachers over the years, and this is why in my own teaching, I focus on form often as a lens through which to structure my courses. “Inside the (Seismic) Shift” was an assignment given by Slag Glass City editor Barrie Jean Borich for an edition called “The Blissful City.” She asked writers to write a micro-essay of three hundred words or less about “pandemic bliss.” You can imagine how challenging that may have been—but it was such a pleasure. For me, that form worked well because the pandemic, and any form of “bliss” I may have experienced, was almost elusive and mostly “felt,” not quite processed, as we were still in it. So the short, dense form of the micro-essay, or what one may also see as a prose poem, suited the subject well. 

In “Days of Pearls,” when I was conceiving of the idea, it was many aspects of the city that gave me a sense of anxiety about my future in Beirut—a place that greeted me at every turn with people and instances of a long gone era. It was akin to what I was feeling about being from two countries; that had always been somewhat the case in an American hyphenated way, but now I lived on the other side of the hyphenation, and life became multiple and confusing and infused with nostalgia, and the weight of moving across the world was heavy. The disjointed form of this piece reflected the disjointed lens through which I was experiencing my new life and looking into the future.

My ex-professor, friend and colleague, essayist Michele Morano talks about “freedom” in form when she told me in this interview

. . . form equals freedom, the way a jazz beat allows improvisation. When you’re writing an essay that doesn’t have such a rigid or artificial form, you have to think a bit harder to figure out what the form is, but there’s always an architecture you can push off from and come back to.

I remember this often when I am thinking about how to jumpstart a piece or when I’m teaching. Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create, the content. 

AMMD: Rusted Radishes was your brainchild. Now in its tenth year in circulation, it has published the likes of Marilyn Hacker, Hala Alyan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Hilal Chouman, Ahmed Naji, Hanan Toukan, even Rabih Alameddine in translation. With the journal’s expansion to becoming bilingual (Arabic, English) and interdisciplinary (poetry, drama, prose, translations, artwork, comics, reviews, and interviews), where do you see the journal is going five or ten years from now?

RR: The journal is at a moment when it can either go down the path of self-sustainability and institutionalization, or plateau if we must continue to largely rely on volunteer work with very limited resources. Our model for the journal was originally adopted from American journals—housed in a university with faculty and student interns making up the staff. This model can work for a limited period of time and with ample monetary support from the university, but for us this has never been the case. 

Also, we are based in the Arab world, where the rules are different. First, literary journals are not traditionally part of English departments (or Arabic, for that matter); we are the only one in Lebanon (and in most of the region). Secondly, full-time academics are not paid the types of salaries you see in big American universities, and nor are they offered the resources and time needed to run a journal. Finally, we are based in a country and region where the economic factors are grim. With the highest rates of youth and female unemployment as well as informalities and inequalities, the region has the most alarming labor indicators in the world. So how can we continue to ask writers and artists to provide work for free? This has not been sitting well with us, especially since we have faced our own endemic financial collapse in Lebanon.

So, enter our eleventh issue, Labor and Idleness. Our themes are always “of the moment.” Having trudged through three years of the worst economic crisis seen by the World Bank since the 1800s, not to mention a pandemic and near-nuclear explosion at the Beirut Port, there has been much soul-searching. How do we spend our time? What activities are we willing to volunteer for? How can we be idle and reflective without thinking about work and production? 

Where will we be in five years? Hopefully running a literary and art journal that is financially independent with a staff of paid employees, publishing paid excellent work in English and Arabic. Where will we be in ten years? Ask me in five years.

AMMD: Personally, you’re skeptical of the term MENA (Middle East and North Africa). You have mentioned that Rusted Radishes accepts work from Arabs or Arab-adjacent writers and artists.

RR: There are different ways to describe the region, whether MENA or SWANA or Eastern Mediterranean, these are political terms that help indicate what region we are referring to, but they are not precisely indicative of our mission. We often use the term “Arab” to describe who we support, but that also misses the bigger picture. This is why “Arab-adjacent” or “relationship with the Arab world” makes its way into our guidelines. I have always thought of the Arab world—especially having lived in an eclectic city like Beirut—as a revolving door of influences and identities. Having started as an anglophone journal in Beirut, it made sense to also accept work, for example, from people who were not ethnically Arab but had lived here for years. Additionally, the Arab diaspora is enormous. 

On the other hand, while places like Pakistan or Southeast Asia are not considered the “Arab World,” our shared cultural experiences in “the east” often bring us to intersections with each other.  Ultimately, Arab or Arab-adjacent writing and art is underrepresented, hence our insistence on keeping the guidelines flexible but focused.

This broader perspective brings in the question of language. We have happily published translations from French, Urdu, Filipino, Italian, and even Norwegian, but we do not have the resources nor ability at the moment to publish these works in their original languages. For now, we are focused on English and Arabic, especially putting added energy into the latter, which my co-editor Zeina G. Halabi, the Arabic section editor at RR, is spearheading. It is a significant and ecstatic challenge to publish excellent contemporary literature in Arabic, from a region that doesn’t have a single writing program.

AMMD: Apart from Rusted Radishes, I also look up to ArabLit Quarterly, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Banipal Magazine, newer ones like BAHR, Dardishi Zine, Fahmidan, the queer and radical Kohl Journal, and Hajar Press, among other publications that cater to voices from this vast region and their diasporas. Any other magazine and journal that outsiders like me should be reading? 

RR: Some other journals that work on the region include New York-based Bidoun, Beirut-based Safar, Syria-based Al Jumhuriya, American-based Newsline Magazine, and Canada-Beirut based Al Hayya. I recently did an event with a wonderful venue called The Journal of Visual Culture (JVC), headed by the awesome Marquard Smith. They did an entire crowd-sourced issue on Palestine in the wake of the siege on Gaza in the spring of 2021, and they work on “extending” what an academic journal can do. Of course, there are also western-based journals that show a lot of love to diverse and marginalized voices from everywhere such as Slag Glass City, Michigan Quarterly Review, Apogee, Asymptote . . .

In the event that JVC held, they also invited other editors from Hyperallergic, The White Pube, and Duke University Press, amongst others. It was the first time I was asked to be on a panel with other editors, and it was a really thrilling experience to hear each other out about what we do and why. While publishing may sound very exciting, usually small publications or presses are run by a few people, and it can be far from glamorous. This event allowed us to share internationally what it means to do the work we do, and I think this interaction really helps. 

AMMD: You confessed in afikra Conversation Series that your earliest attempts at writing were personal journal entries that never saw the light of day. You also had a personal blog which also featured writings by other people. Have you always thought, even in vaguest recollection, that you are going to be an essayist and editor?

RR: I think I always knew I’d be a writer of some sort. It was just a part of me, whether I was journaling or writing letters or poems. In our younger years, becoming a writer is not usually encouraged. So similar to my quick stint as an art major, I thought becoming a writer was just as impractical—that it could be there as part of my life, but not necessarily central.

What’s funny, though, is my mom used to always say I could become an editor. I didn’t know or understand what that meant as a teenager, but she seemed to pick up on something. When I accidentally became an editor in my early thirties with the founding of Rusted Radishes, the world of editing opened up before me in ways I hadn’t thought of. I knew through nearly ten years of teaching that I took pleasure in working with people on their essays, but now it was my main duty, and I began to take it more seriously.

Today, Zeina and I speak about the art of editing often. On one hand, we are immersed in it and loving the curatorial aspect of it. On the other hand, what if editing (to enhance a person’s writing) was more commonplace in the Arab world? How would this exchange between writers and editors make a difference? What work can we do to instill this art into the culture of writing in the Arab world? There are lots of questions and lots of work to be done.

As a teacher, I try my best to give my students what I would have wanted at an early stage, with the added awareness that my students are in a place that doesn’t have ample opportunities for writers—neither professionally nor educationally. That is, I focus on room to play in various genres, giving them exposure to literary and craft voices from across the world, and providing one-on-one conferencing in addition to group workshops. 

But most of all, writers need a community. I have found that without my people and a creative community, the journal wouldn’t exist, and nor would my writing. Rusted Radishes has been a community-building project, where young writers and artists can publish and interact. We need each other to bounce ideas off of, for support, and good feedback as well as ugly feedback. It’s one of the most honest and generous acts we can provide. And usually we come out better for it. 

Rima Rantisi is a lecturer of creative writing at the Department of English at the American University of Beirut where she co-founded Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. Her works have been published in, among other publications, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, New England Review, Arab Women Voice New Realities, Literary Hub, Past Ten, Sweet Literary, and Slag Glass City: Nonfiction for Living Cities where her essays “Inside the (Seismic) Shift” and “Days of Pearls” were nominated to the Pushcart Prizes. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote Journal’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice, and editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.

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