Fariha Róisín on Showing us what Resilience Looks Like
Caitlin McLoughlin talks to Fariha Róisín about her expansive writing practice and finding hope in the midst of despair.
INTERVIEW BY CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN
PHOTOS BY SUNNY SHOKRAE
Fariha Róisín is a poet, writer and activist who grew up in Australia but now lives in LA. Her 2022 book, Who Is Wellness For? uses her own biography and experiences of abuse alongside a critical examination of ancient practices of wellness, and the way they’ve been destroyed and co-opted by the joint forces of colonialism and capitalism. “My brain works in maps," she tells me over Zoom, which is evident in the book, where she draws intricate connections between these complex ideas and plots a route through for the reader, ultimately seeking to claw wellness back from the clutches of whiteness and consumerism. Her poetry collection, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, came out in 2023 and is an impassioned exploration of religion, eroticism, activism and a reckoning with the vast challenges we face as a species. She also shares her writing through her Substack How To Cure a Ghost, documenting her tireless activism for Palestine and reflecting with urgency but ultimately an unwavering hopefulness that the change we’re collectively striving towards will come.
Caitlin McLoughlin: We published your poem How To Make a Terrorist as part of our takeover in Novembre Magazine, could you tell us a bit about it?
Fariha Róisín: It felt as if I was writing a poem I was destined to write. Something that's been really clear for me, especially since October with what’s happening in Gaza, is that I was brought here for this time. From a young age I was politicised about Palestine and about what it means to be Muslim, and how it’s in complete contradiction to what the West says about Islam or what it says about who I am. I was 11 when 9/11 happened, so I was extremely impacted by it. I grew up in Australia in what was, at the time, a very white society. I didn't really have any capacity to be proud of where I came from because it wasn't an option. There was so much racism and othering that you were just forced into believing in that otherness. You couldn't escape it. So once 9/11 happened, I was like, oh, fuck… I guess I'm a terrorist. I guess this is what's going to define me for the rest of my life. I was really at odds with it because I came from an intellectual, academic, Marxist, socialist background, of people who were very learned and intelligent and curious. I was raised with the understanding that Islam was the modern world, and that it was the Europeans who came and destroyed it and then reclaimed it as theirs. But it's not just about Islam, it's about: what does it mean to be other? What does it mean to be a savage? What does it mean to be seen in this gaze with disgust? Throughout history, every single time black and brown Indigenous people have fought back, they’ve always been cast as the savages, as barbaric. I think that supremacy is at the core of this conflict – this desire to be supreme, which gives us the onus to steal, to take and then to call the other terrorists. I just want to agitate that.
In your book Who is Wellness For?, you meld memoir with a more intellectual study of wellness and the ways in which it’s been severed from its ancient roots and co-opted by whiteness and capitalism. The use of this form, where you’re blurring genres, seems to me a way of approaching this subject holistically, which is ultimately what you argue for when it comes to thinking about wellness. Was that a conscious decision?
I don't know if it was completely conscious in the sense that it's the only way I could have written it. Because for me, it’s so intertwined. I think that we've been given a very Western hegemonic idea that the mind is supreme – I talk about Descartes in the book and his approach of I think, therefore I am and how it's so removed from every kind of understanding of consciousness that came before it. But when you talk about transcendence — and you see this in Buddhism, Islam, — it's always about the body, it's never about the mind. You can only control so much in the mind, at a certain point you have to apply it to the body.
I have a chronic illness, I am a child sexual abuse survivor. Now, as a 34 year-old you're seeing a highly healed person. But for the last 20 to 25 years, I was somebody who didn't know how to be in their body. My personal journey was such that it wasn't until things were really bad that I had to find a way back to myself. When I started to come back to myself, I began to see where I faltered and the places where I fell off from myself. All of it had to do with societal teachings or something that somebody else told me, something that was denied in me, or dismissed about me. When I started to think for myself about my body, I realised that our bodies are the key to liberation. Now I see myself more than anything as an educator, maybe even more than a writer. I want to teach people things. I want to show them the connections. I want them to understand that they have agency because that was my entire journey with myself.
In the book, you relate this to Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, in the way that you found a sense of connectedness or intimacy in the drive to write, could you say more about this?
I think for me, my whole life has become a process of healing because I couldn't do anything if I wasn't focused on my healing. I really couldn't. I am always in this process of unlearning. There are all of these things I'm exploring, and to me, all of it is erotic. That kind of intimacy with oneself is a form of eroticism, a form of depth.
Eroticism is truth. It's power, it's pulse, it's life. It's a desire to just be with oneself.
But because of patriarchy, because of white supremacy, because of capitalism, that tells us our bodies are machines, our minds are machines, everything has to be diligently in service of something, whether capital or empire or both. It's like, of course we can't just dream. To me, dreaming is also a resistance against empire because there's just so much more to life than fucking war mongering.
How does that relate to your writing, and the way you share it with others?
I think a lot of people need better guides and alternatives. So many people ask me, well then what should I do? Or, what can I do? I think my writing is in service to that question. There are so many things that we can do. There's so many ways that we can be with one another.
There are so many ways in which we can honour one another and have deeper relationships and connections, and we can actually resist not only capitalism, but we can resist this way that we've been forced to be with each other and find true community.
I'm far more interested in that and writing about how we can get there. I think that, that's utopia. It's probably why I still write poems. I like that form. I like the malleability of language and the ways in which the abstract can be un-abstracted through words. That’s probably why I am a writer.
That feels like it speaks to so much of what your poetry collection Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is about, which came out around the same time as Who Is Wellness For?. What was the experience of writing them at the same time like, and then having them come out in such quick succession?
It's funny because putting out Who is Wellness For? was really trash. I hated putting it out, I was just so rough on myself. I'm very proud of it and I am so glad that people read it, but it's a very painful book. Yet at the same time, I think it's always going to be one of the most important things I've ever written, because it was so of the time. With Survival [Takes a Wild Imagination], it came out on October 17th, 10 days after October 7th and I write about Palestine in it – I actually have a quote in it from my friend Mosab Abu Toha, a poet from Gaza who had to flee. It felt like it was in conversation, not just with Who Is Wellness For?, but again in conversation with the times. My first books Like a Bird and How to Cure A Ghost were both books that I had been working on for years. By the time I sold them, and by the time they came out, they felt far from me and where I was stylistically and emotionally. But with Survival [Takes a Wild Imagination] and with Who Is Wellness For? it didn't feel like that. They felt very much like this is exactly how I feel, and this is where I am.
With your poetry, what’s your writing process like? I feel this sort of surge when I'm reading them and I wondered if that's true to how you write?
That's a great question. It is very much a surge. It's a flow, a pump. It's something that's happening, that's flourishing. I wrote God of Fruit, my forthcoming book of poems — which How to Make a Terrorist is in — in three or four months. A lot of that is because I think writing poetry is how I process grief. Part of the reason I turn to the page is because I don't feel very understood by humans. I feel very disconnected from people. I've struggled in interpersonal relationships and that has been one of the reasons why I feel very connected to words. Words became a companion. With Survival [Takes a Wild Imagination], it felt like a romantic relationship, with this implicit trust that what needs to come out has to come out, and it's always in service of the work. I've heard other writers talk about their writing like that and I never thought that I would be able to feel that way.
I’m an avid reader of your Substack How to Cure a Ghost, where you share a lot of writing about Palestine, as well as other political struggles and analysis. But it’s also diaristic and personal and impassioned. I’ve found these equally informative, empowering, moving and painful. I wondered if you could talk about the importance of this literary space to you?
Substack changed my life. Until 4 years ago I didn't have a consistent paycheck. I would make short bursts of money and then so much of my life was just waiting on cheques, not being able to sustain myself or take care of myself or pay rent. It was wild. When Substack happened, and I think a lot of writers will tell you this, it created this direct relationship with your reader. If they want, they can have contact with you, but really, they can just read what you're writing. Being a MySpace girly, as somebody who grew up on the internet, and living so far from everything in the middle of Australia, I found a way to connect to people online. I think that has really lent itself to the way that I still write. I am really fearless, that's probably quite clear, but I love writing to a reader. I think one of the reasons that I have a vast readership is because I figured out early on that I'm speaking to somebody. I've never had help with anything I've done, I've never had a publicist, nobody ever told me, put your stuff on Instagram, it just happened organically. I think a lot of it is about the value of your own voice and the value of what you're saying. I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted people to hear what I had to say.
In all your writing, but particularly on your writing through Substack and Instagram, you manage to hold space for this incredible generosity and even hopefulness in the face of the harrowing and devastating things your writing about, such as the genocide in Gaza, whats happening in Sudan, or the immense struggles you’ve faced in your own life. How are you able to do this and why is it so important to you?
It’s the only way that we can get through this, it's the only way that revolution can be real.
I think of that famous Toni Cade Bambara quote, the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. That to me is just everything. I have to incentivise people to want to do this work.
[Pauses] I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional. There's so much despair. There's just so much fucking despair. But my own life has been so horrible that it's instilled me with this incredible amount of resilience. So I know that it's really possible. I mean, Palestinians are showing us what resilience looks like everyday. In the West, we're extremely conditioned to think about ourselves, and I'm not interested in that. It just is not fucking interesting to me. Especially when the planet is burning and thousands upon millions of people are being murdered every day, it's like, have we not had enough? So let's call a thing a thing. Let's stop pretending. Let's stop living in delusion. We don't have to live like this. It's not working for any of us. It hasn't been working for a really long time. So what's our responsibility? Our responsibility is to actually do this work and to revolutionise. We have to want to do it. I come from generations of revolutionaries, so I have come tasked with, not only all of this trauma, but all of this political education and I can do something with it. I have something to offer that I feel is deeply profound. Even if that's just in the possibility of a better world. Or showing that the horrible things that happened to you as a child don't have to determine your future. I was formed into a diamond through this extremity, and that's not only singularly my story. I think that's a human story. I think that anybody can shift and transmute their life. All of us sadly have gone through something trash. So all of us can compost that in service of revolution, in service to our communities, in service of ourselves. Whether it's unlearning whiteness, whether it's unlearning anti-blackness, or Islamophobia. There's just so much work to be done. But that doesn't make me feel despair. I feel excited by the work.
Can you tell our readers a bit about your work with Writers Against the War On Gaza?
We are an international group of writers that are creating a cultural front for Palestine against the Zionist machinery that exists throughout the world and impacts historical and media narratives, working to expose cultural complicity with Zionism and with American imperialism. We are actively fighting institutions like PEN America and the New York Times and one of the reasons that we're sharpening our intentions against these institutions is because they are the institutions of American imperialism. We’re in this work of understanding the points of connections between old oppressive narratives and the knowledge that struggles for liberation can and must be advanced on discursive terrains. We also understand how valuable this time is to politically educate and really start rewriting the narrative with what we believe is the narrative of truth. It should be the responsibility of every writer in the world, to prioritise truth.
Fariha Róisín is an Australian-Canadian writer. She released her debut poetry collection How to Cure a Ghost in 2019 and her debut novel Like a Bird in 2020. Her first work of non-fiction was written in 2022, Who is Wellness For: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind.
