Rarely has a collection of poems so perfectly embodied the experiences of the poet as does In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls, by Majda Gama. Gama, born in Beirut to a Saudi father and an American mother and now residing in the
D.C. area, has chronicled her life of moving between cultures and identities before coming to at least a temporary rest here. This book, her first full-length collection and published appropriately by Wandering Aengus Press, is the best volume of poetry I’ve read so far this year and likely for a long time to come.

The book’s title refers to a girls’ school that the poet attended as a girl. The attraction of art outside the Islamic-based curriculum already exerts its hold on the poet. While her schoolfellows race outside for break, she remains indoors:

 “Girl fingers unclasp

a tin pencil case of Caran D’ache

long, fine drawing pencils in primary shades….

When the school bell rings, I shut up

my colors and file into the dark

room for Quran memorization lessons.

We wrap our hair in white and sing.”

(“In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls”)”

In “Meeting Jibreel,” the poet shows a glimpse of her American side during Quranic study:

“In my Quranic primer of short, and long, verses

I scrawled in the margins with metallic ink.

I learned the name of an angel, as my body

Shaped a conduit from aya to hand to pen.

I grounded pre-teen words like “cool” and “ok”

While the class chanted the story of visitation….”

This poem also shows examples of one the collection’s most daring and fascinating elements, the layering of untranslated Arabic words into the poems. “Aya,” above (meaning verse of the Quran, but carrying secondary meanings that add to the word’s resonance), is one example of many that appear throughout the book. The risk the poet takes in avoiding definitions pays off well in the enrichment of texture this practice lends to the poems. It functions in the way sampling in music does (apropos given the many poems that refer to the poet’s musical experiences), adding layers of meaning and pointing to sources and influences.

In fact, a large number of poems herein detail explicitly the poet’s travels through Western (or perhaps Global Northern would be more apt) popular music culture, in particular punk, which implies an entire subculture including but not limited to the music. Several of these pieces describe her attending shows or gathering with friends at iconic D.C. places such as The 9:30 Club and P Street Beach. These will particularly resonate with readers, like me, arrived in the DMV in the 80s and 90s and discovered these places ourselves.

I found one poem especially powerful in illustrating the poet’s transition from punk to poet:

“You can’t pass out to Diane Seuss

on the turntable while a burning cigarette

Flirts with your knuckles….

I would. Forgo friends’ DJ nights for open mic,

Oh, I hate myself for blinking under the klieg-light

When I could be dancing to White Punks on Dope….

I’m safety pinned together now by

Emily Dickenson’s—dashes—by

The fishnet stockings of her alliteration:

Oi, oi, oi! The Soul selects her own society.”

(“When Did Poetry Become My Rock’n’Roll?”)

The last poem I want to bring to your attention is “Why Aren’t You Just American?, which beautifully sums up the complexities of what Gama calls “the hybridity of being a hyphenated American,” which no doubt mirrors the experience of many immigrants:

“What is asked is not a question

A brown body can answer

Because that body is busy, being brown.

That body is in fight or flight.

That body is continually

Liminal….

Because a body from Appalachia

Can be Scots-Irish

& that’s a heritage, a birthright,

A calling, a place to be….

Brown can be pale too.

& spice—didn’t you ever

Drink tea made from

Prairie grass, or

A Bohemian beer in Chicago?...

[T]hey smile

With white teeth

While picking you apart

For too many consonants

In your name, for praying

with cupped hands

For leaving to visit

Your ancestors & coming back

Why don’t you just stay over there?

I answer,

Don’t you hear my answer?”

Watch and listen to Majda read the entire poem and read more about her at http://bit.ly/470mTMU.

I would love to continue to go through this book and quote many more passages, but the only true way to do it justice would be to reproduce it in full. So I urge you to order your own copy. And visit Majda's website for more about her.

This book was so compelling and fascinating that I wanted to know more. So I sent Majda some questions that she was kind enough to respond to.

Can you explain more about the school referred to by the title? It clearly had a great impact on you.

The elementary school I attended for four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was called Dar Al-Tarbia Al-Hadetha (lil banat) which I've roughly translated to the title of my book, In The House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. My whole year revolved around attending the school, my days spent carefully packing my schoolbag and dressing in uniform. It's where I learned to read and write Arabic, and my father had not hired a driver in those years so would drive my twin sister and me as part of his morning commute to his ministry position. It was a rare part of my day when I had him to myself, on that journey into the old part of the city, past the open-air cafes where men smoked shisha and listened to wireless radio with the Red Sea bluing the horizon. I often binged on English language books as well on that ride, before exiting to the school gate as a second version of myself, one not yet hybridized. Historically it was one of the earlier schools established in the Kingdom after schools for girls opened in the late 1960's.  

How early did you encounter popular music of the Global North (rock, punk, New Wave, et al.)? Did you have to listen covertly or was it tolerated by your family

Music was always a part of my household, but it was also a covert practice given that when I was growing up women were banned from entering music stores. That juxtaposition of "permitted" and "banned" was just normal life back then and is entirely the backbone of the first section of the book. The first music I heard and appreciated was probably disco (The Bee Gees) as my parents were quite young when they came to the States in the Seventies for my father's job. Summertime in the Eighties I shopped for seven inches at the mall with my father, which is when I'd pick up New Wave singles, or rock hits by Joan Jett. All of my taste changes were a direct result of exposure to MTV, as my parents’ taste in music diverged wildly from mine to AM radio tunes. And exposure to Punk in the mid-Eighties drove them away entirely which was probably the plan all along on my end. My father was a good sport though, he'd watch the video for "Rock The Casbah" by The Clash with me and laugh. He was hugely into tech and shared his equipment generously with me, so I began making mix tapes around the age of ten and still have a few of them. We kept the seven inches too. I never took music for granted, access to it disappeared all the time. I wish I could say that we listened to Arabic music at home, but my father always listened to Western bands he appreciated in his youth: The Platters and The Moody Blues as well as Ennio Morricone were all on heavy rotation at home. Mozart and Bach too.     

In a number of the poems, you describe gatherings of young companions involving music, alcohol, cigarettes, and other possibly transgressive behaviors. Was this typical teenage rebellion or does it also illustrate your growing attraction to the American side of your
heritage?

Those transgressive American years were actually in my twenties! Many American friends I made while hanging out in now iconic DC spaces like the P Street Beach had been doing so since their teens, but my ability to experience the city that way occurred much later for me due to being overseas. Musical subcultures were a source of creative expression and growth for me as an adult, creative destruction as well. it wasn't possible for me to live that way in Saudi Arabia, but I hear now that there was a musical underground and have even read about death metal scenes in Egypt during the Nineties.

How long did it take to put together this collection? Did you conceive of it as a unified work from the beginning and write toward that, or did it become a container for a body of poems on the themes of upbringing, love for your Muslim/Arabic roots, hybridization, etc.?

The collection has been on a fourteen-year journey. I never wavered from the title, even as the rejections piled up. I really believed that the themes of thresholds and girlhood could be contained by these poems even as they changed location, landscape, schools, and schooling. As for upbringing, I knew I had to open a window on what was normal, not exotic, to my family, to my life. Maybe even try to frame the Western side as being just as "strange" to the reader. For example, there are also places in the West where girlhood was erased. My poem set in Exeter, England documents a young female Morris dancer dressed in black jeans, this was always considered a male dance tradition, yet newer research posits that the contribution of women was not considered important enough to record.   

One thing that continually struck me in reading these poems is your frequent use of untranslated Arabic vocabulary. In the review I compared it to sampling as practiced by DJs and hip-hop artists. Did you ever consider adding notes or was this a deliberate decision?

Thank you for bringing the language of sampling to this discussion! If you imagine a mixing board, I'm probably crossfading language to language and not sampling, when I use Arabic words and phrases. Now that I think about it, maybe the Darwish pantoum samples from him? The pantoum seemed like a good container for his metaphors and was originally a musical form. I did have heavy footnotes in the early drafts of the manuscript, but all the contextualization diluted the poems. Ultimately, I hope that the poems contain the clues needed to understand them, even where there is Arabic. The poems that reference my Arab life are already a kind of translation.

What kinds of things do you do for a living and how do they affect your work?

I prefer to keep my professional and creative lives as separate as possible. Jobs I had when I was younger might make their way into poems, I haven't read any Tower Records poems yet and I was a clerk there in the late nineties. Everyone working there also contributed tothe musical infrastructure of DC in some way, it was such a great job for weird artist types, and we were thrilled to have insurance.   

And finally, the standard question: What’s next? I think—and I imagine I speak for many readers—that you should consider writing a memoir. In any case, are there new poems and/or other writings coming soon?

This is such a generous question to ask, thank you for holding this entire space for me to expand on my book. I do think that In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls ended up being a memoir in verse but am open to exploring its themes and journey in CNF form too. I'm still interested in the ways my family defined home and culture, from the days of the Ottoman Hejaz, 1950's Egypt, right up to the United States in the late twentieth century. I do have a second poetry manuscript completed, titled "Animal Age." It's still very nascent, but I'm exploring animal symbolism, adolescence, and American life in the pandemic. One of the poems in the next book is out this fall inAGNI.

Thanks so much for your time in answering these questions!