‘Nigeria shaped the kind of poet I became’

Laura M. Kaminski, otherwise known as Halima Ayuba, grew up in Nigeria but now lives in rural Missouri, in the United States. She started writing in 2012 and has gone on to publish three poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her latest book, Dance Here, is published by the Origami imprint of Parresia Publishers, Lagos.  She […]

Laura M. Kaminski, otherwise known as Halima Ayuba, grew up in Nigeria but now lives in rural Missouri, in the United States. She started writing in 2012 and has gone on to publish three poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her latest book, Dance Here, is published by the Origami imprint of Parresia Publishers, Lagos.  She talks about how poetry has helped her deal with solitude, her illness and the things that have shaped the kind of poetry she writes

First, tell us about the name Halima Ayuba. How did you come about it?
 I’m not exactly sure. From my earliest memories in Bambur, Taraba State, I was called both Halima and Laura. Mostly I heard my father referred to as Likita or Likita Ayuba, so I’m thinking the Hausa names were given when my parents first arrived in Nigeria. When speaking Hausa, my friends have called me Halima for as long as I can remember, and referred to me as Laura when speaking English.

That is a strange but convenient arrangement. So how did poetry come to you? Can you tell us the moment that made you realise you were going to be a poet?
I’ve loved reading and reciting other people’s poems since I was a child and wrote some myself during my teens and early twenties, but it wasn’t until August 2012 that I decided to self-study poetry seriously and see if I could learn to write poems well. I think I came to the realization a bit late – it wasn’t until I was proofing the manuscript for my second chapbook that it registered that I was “going to be a poet.”

Reading through two of your three collections, ‘Considering Luminescence’ and ‘Dance Here,’ it is interesting to note how much your poetry is influenced by other poets, or is a response to other poems. How important is this level of engagement to your work?
Extremely so. I learned to write by reading other poets, studying how their poems worked – both worked on the page and worked on me as a reader, how they changed me in some way, put words to something I hadn’t had words for previously, or how they gave me new eyes through which to see a thing or situation. I tend to read poems as if they are personal letters, as if the narrator of the poem intended me as the audience. When I feel a poem hit home, I try to write back. Poets are my virtual pen-pals, as it were, even when I am responding to poems written a dozen centuries ago.

In ‘Dance Here,’ there is an overriding influence of memory and nostalgia, mostly from your time growing up in Nigeria. How important is place to your poetry?
Some places more than others. I think I do tend to try to give most of my poems a setting. I have carried something of a sense of displacement, of being uprooted and transplanted, since I left Nigeria – so I think there is a tendency for my poems to return again and again to a time and place where I felt I belonged.

How important was growing up in Jos to you as a poet? How has that experience shaped the kind of poet you have become?
Jos was a marvellous – and, at the time, mostly peaceful – mix of cultures, faith traditions, ethnicities, languages and at school, shades of skin and nationalities. And (again, at the time), there wasn’t a sense, at least among my classmates at school, that any one particular combination of these characteristics was intrinsically superior or inferior to another. There were tensions elsewhere, but we weren’t really touched by them much in primary school. Later, yes, but we had a few precious years of just being human. I imagine not very many people in the world get to have a few years in which they are living without the unwelcome bile of racism, entitlement, ethnocentricity, religious intolerance rising unpleasantly and unexpectedly. I did. It was in Jos. It was precious training for learning to see myself more as a member of humanity rather than some subgroup of it. I think the kind of poet you are is really an extension of your understanding of the kind of human being you are.

In terms of style, your poetry is free and flowing, defying the constraints of rhyme and even punctuations. What decided the style of poetry you have adopted and honed?
Actually, I do write in form and rhyme also. I have a chapbook coming out the first week of July that is all ghazals. But since most of my poems are something of a personal letter to the poet, they tend to either adopt the style used in the poem I’m responding to, or be very casual about structure and punctuation. I credit Abayomi Animashaun’s poem ‘Playing tennis with the net down’ with giving me permission to let the poem take whatever shape seems to best fit its purpose.

It has often been said that poets are preoccupied with navel gazing, in that they write mostly to impress other poets (admittedly, your works strikes me as different), is this something you are conscious of when you sit down to write?
I think there’s room for a little friendly competition and a little light-hearted cleverness in the world of poetry. But for me, most of my poems are either written in the mode of one-to-one personal correspondence or personal meditation. (In that sense, they are the ultimate in navel-gazing – not self-promotion but self-investigation.) If the poet to whom I’m responding is still among the living, I do my best to actually get in touch with them and send them the poem personally and I ask them to let me know if they would prefer I not submit it for publication anywhere. And then I honour whatever preference they express.

That is an interesting model for writing. You live in the US now and yet you still retain a strong connection to your Nigerian links and the poetry from this corner of the world. What is it about Nigeria and its poetry that has captivated you?
There’s a sense of community and solidarity, a literary family if you would – a squabbling family sometimes, but a family with some common traditions, roots, cultural experiences, references.
The ANA does much to cultivate that sense of solidarity. But the common references are important to communication. When a friend in Sokoto writes a poem mentioning vultures, and I respond with a poem that ends with TRY NOT TO DIE, I don’t have to footnote the connection between the two. And harmattan. And cashew-stained school clothes. And plaiting hair. And talking drums. And how can I ever explain about what happens in the heart when the flame tree sets blossoms when all else is still parched and coated in dust, that resurrection, that covenant?

Is poetry therapeutic for you?
Without a doubt, and more than I expected it to be when I started these four years of poetry practice in 2012. I am actually home-bound now, unable to travel further than the grocery, and that only occasionally, after a brain-haemorrhage stroke and spinal degeneration. Initiating a practice of poetry encouraged me to reach out to poets to further my learning and ask poets questions about their poems I was reading. I see human beings other than my husband in person maybe one or two times a month. But I am far from alone; I am virtually surrounded by an extended community of poets. And, in truth, it is the best pain management and ward against depression – I can sometimes completely lose track of myself completely when trying to debug a poem, which has been an unexpected blessing.

That must be tough. But thank God for poetry then. Regardless, poetry has lost traction with traditional publishing houses but the internet has come to the rescue. Is it likely that poetry will ever be commercially viable again, you think?
I think those cousins of poetry that have become commercially viable have been disowned by the more “adult-oriented” sub-genres, the so-called “serious” poets. Nursery rhymes. Light-verse humour. Popular music. Advertising theme songs and slogans. Greeting cards.
Children’s books in rhyme still have a place, and they still sell, and children, given the opportunity, will gleefully commit them to memory, and it’s a rare listener that doesn’t sing along occasionally. But what sells is the ability to be transported to another environment, to have a lightening of the day’s burdens via engagement with other characters, becoming absorbed temporarily in their challenges to a degree that you set your own aside during that time. Or, as far as non-fiction, self-help books. Many people want “out” of where they are, temporarily or permanently. “Serious” poetry doesn’t get you out. It puts you further in. Harder work for the reader, which makes it a harder sell.