Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She was nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes by various journals in 2019. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. She still can’t believe (or deserve) any of this. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
Interviewed by Nazli Karabiyikoglu
In your interview with Tom Simpson on American Microreviews & Interviews, you are explaining your relationship with Romanian history as follows: “My relationship to Romanian history is more tangled, since my relatives and family were directly implicated in the crimes of the last century, whether by witness, silence, patriotism, or lack of dissent.” People generally say that writers/poets are living memories of their societies, do you agree with that? How does your writing relate to your family history? And linguistically, how does your writing style deal with Romanian (if so)?
I love this question, Nazli, since writing is the medium of trying to answer it, and the answer continues changing, evolving, and this evolution is part of the boogie that is poetry. Words exist in an intimate relationship to place: Romania by birth and Alabama by over 35 years of residence. Insert ongoing dialogue between linden and magnolia. Insert summoning spell for dead mothers. Insert profound fear of patriotisms, whether flagging a state, nation, or region.
Per living memory, I’m closer to infected stitches than museum tapestry; my threads don’t suture straight. Loyalty (the debt to groups who allow one to fringe their tablecloth) wants to play the role of internal censor— but really, loyalty is out there showing gilding the space that needs to be probed, opened, laid bare, written.
The hunger for acceptance, to yearning to belong somewhere, to be placed, is one of our species’ most destructive hungers; every war is buttressed, rationalized, and supported by it. What is my place? How does place map on what is appropriate for me to say or dream or write? Who is entitled to narrate the homeland story? Is an immigrant’s experience in the South somehow threatening to the ideal others need to make of it? Why do we idealize places instead of people anyway?
I love writers who stare the monster of Belonging-Hunger in the eye and speak to its mama directly: Edwidge Danticat, Paul Celan, Benjamin Fondane, Don Mee Choi, Roy Guzman, Kazim Ali, Meg Day, Dorothy Alison, Sarah Borjas, Audre Lorde (forever), Jenny Erpenbeck, Ewa Lipska, countless Birmingham poets, and so many poetry translators who cross internal borders to meet the world in humility, trepidation, and love.
Since my mom died, I’ve been writing and reading more Romanian to keep this mothertongue alive in my kids. This has put me in touch with romanian writers — which is a gift. A gift. A reminder that Romania, itself, remains a space of multiple ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and linguistic identities, a vast expanse of socioeconomic experiences, Party affiliations, elites, ideologies, and difference.
Ha Jin noted that when we act in “the name of a country or God, we tend to set loose the evil and act it out, because we have others to share the guilt and responsibility, which under such circumstances can be divided into small, forgettable pieces.” The small, forgettable pieces ask to be written. Maybe it’s better to be alone in one’s lonely than accepted. The writer has to grapple with this. The writer that is writing from love for humanity has to grapple with the walls we erect to keep others out.
No one can speak for all Romanians. This isn’t due to the trauma of diasporic division so much as the drift of nostalgia, and what it does to exiled minds: only in the U.S. are emigres and ancestors allowed to invent a nation-state of innocence or normative goodness. Maybe the American dream also includes the idealization of the lands left behind. Would any human in Romania or Serbia publicly extol the myth of national greatness or innocence without being exposed as a revanchist nationalist? Sometimes I feel like the myth of the magical homeland where locals only hurt each other due to colonization by Soviet or Ottoman empires gets fueled by emigre communities, including my own. Of course the Soviets colonized Romania. Of course that story of origin became the excuse for Ceausescu’s nationalist socialism and the cult of personality required to sustain it. I cannot separate my relationship to Romania from the crimes of fascism, communist dictatorship, and crony capitalism. I cannot separate my relationship to Alabama from the crimes of slavery, white supremacy, Tribal erasure, religious fundamentalism, and voters who continue to elect the worst of what this state represents to national office. Alabama wants to be Ceausescu when it comes to abortion policies — they want to citizen the unborn fetus in the name of the state which becomes god. It’s eerie to be living in these intersections.
Trampset published “Something Malnourished in Our Hands” on July 26, 2019. What was your main drive while writing “Something Malnourished in Our Hands”?
A flower in a flowerbed is a certain type of flower — it is a cultivated being, a bounded one, a settled, unwild thing. What happens when you take a love whose origin is a ditch, whose lineament is wildflowered, whose roots require nothing, and bed it? Maybe marrying is trying to move wildflowers into flowerbeds and then realizing the soil is all wrong; the container alters what grows. Maybe what we want from marriage has nothing to do with the raw rapture that led us to touch the flower in the first place.
Sure, Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage” is an aesthetic and emotional idyll, but the country we inhabit may not be as self-contained as the country we are given to poem. I want to write beautiful things, and sometimes those beautiful things are rooted in my hunger to have been born-here, to be like my husband, a born-here citizen rather than a “naturalized” one. To be an easy citizen rather than an un/easy one.
Rosmarie Waldrop said making love seems like such a private act, and yet it may produce a citizen. When I think about the 80 million refugees currently struggling to survive on this planet, I feel like anything I have done in the service of a nation-state is deeply, quietly criminal. What does it mean to give birth to a citizen? What have I done? Part of being American involves a massive insularity, as well as the use of foreign countries as mental colonies. We make them what we want in our minds. The greatest crimes on this planet are committed in the citizen’s name, with the citizen’s money. The citizen funds the prison that holds his father, the bombs that obliterate his family abroad. How much should we nourish?
When did you first realize your affinity for writing? What is your “origin” story?
I was born on a train in the Arcade Fire recording of a song originally written by The Magnetic Fields. No, I’m joking. But seriously, my origins are a form of motion rather than a place, a constant attempt to reconcile loyalties and belongings. I don’t know my origin story. I don’t know who I am outside the words people use to create me.
Writing was what I wanted to do from my earliest journals and notebooks. At 35, I found myself alone in an intense way — alone with the realization that many humans I loved, some of whom were powerful, saw me as a tool to accomplish their personal ends. My mom said, why don’t you submit some poems for publishing? So I did. I believed my words were an adjunct to the voices of the Significant, and having kids made it feel urgent to press my lips against a tiny bit of grass and say: this.
Publishing is different from writing. I smell scorched cattle flesh whenever poets talk “brand,” or personal “branding.” What a verb. C. D. Wright said all the poetries she admired unsettled their native or adopted “labels” — choosing to be “vagrant in their identifications.” She called them “tramp poets… a new label for those with unstable allegiances.” I identify as trampish.
Maybe the diaspora of American dreams are peak complicity; we have abandoned our critiques of consumer culture in return for the idea of empowerment. But the cogs are built on market models — the question remains, will it sell, or is this person capable of selling it? Can I sell it? What have I sold? If poetry is an adjunct of boosterism, a wing of the Chambers of Commerce, let us declare this outright. I want to learn how to write in a way that doesn’t blur the line between extolling and selling, in a culture where money and prizes determine value, and elite gates still decide worth. What if all the gates are just openings into more powerful cattle pens?
I’m just not sure there is anything worth defending in the powers that be. The problem is I want you to like me. The truth remains unlikable, messy, unclean, dirty, complicated, riven by American notions of success. The machine of markets and product placement grinds us down into pulp, then spits us into the landfill. The poet makes portraits from the detritus. I am still aching to get my mind blown by pigeons who aren’t selling status in park plaza or else the wonder of wind making a nest for dead leaves on my face.
