3 Questions with Anaya Marei

Anaya Marei finds herself overthinking (supposedly) basic questions, such as “What's your favorite color?” “Where are you from?” and “Is this bio long enough?” If her work is forthcoming elsewhere, she has yet to be told.

Nonfiction Editor Amber Wardzala talks with Anaya Marei about their work from Issue 74, out now!

So much of your essay “Desert(ed)” is linked to place and your descriptions of it. What role does place play in your overall writing?

I’ve been asking myself this question over the past few months, and I’m not fully sure what I’ve found! I can say this: Place has always been tied to identity—to language, to belonging. As someone with a multi-hyphenated identity, spread across three continents, I struggle often with my own place, my own strangeness. Do I belong to the land where I was born? The land of my passport? The land of my blood? If so, which one(s)?

I find I can’t mine the answers within myself, so place suggests history as well. Which places? Which histories? I come from people before borders—before the labels I now adorn myself with. I’ve begun to look elsewhere: dust-haze air, a stranger calling me daughter in passing, the birthmark on my eyelid only visible when I shutter vision closed. Place becomes more than terms, more than arbitrary lines carving up land. Instead: meaning. I write, in part, to catch glimpses of it.

All my people are from land shaped by miles of silence. I don’t know that the desert will ever stop claiming me or my words. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to claim it back—though something tells me that the urge to “claim” is the wrong sort of yearning. What is left to seek?

The desert births seekers as it once birthed prophets. Perhaps the emptiness opens them up to revelation. That great expanse of sky.

Something that struck me about your piece the first time I read it was the way you were using paragraph breaks and the unique formatting of certain lines on the page. I think they are so effective, beautiful, and show the masterful skill you have as a writer. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your process of choosing these moments and why you think they are important to your piece.

I love this question, Amber!

The breaking of lines was present even in the first draft of the piece. Poetry had a hand in it: what else could better reveal the power and sheer wonder of a single line? One of my favorite things in poetry is thinking about the line—how it breaks, how it begins, how it sits on the page, the white space that surrounds it. I (try to!) bring this awareness to prose.

“Desert(ed)” further explores that white space. I wanted the piece to visually hold some of the experienced emptiness—some of the desert, some of the void. My churning, maybe. Near the end, there is a heartbeat where my words fail me. Allowing the paragraphs to splinter, then, is perhaps a nod to the disintegration of language and meaning.

Is there anything you’d like to share about your piece “Desert(ed)” that we don’t know?

“Desert(ed)” was written at dawn after pulling an all-nighter. In the leftover darkness, I caught a wistful edge to my voice and could then beam a light on it, see which way it turned. Transforming desert to a verb created a chasm: movement, echo, song. I wrote of emptiness from emptiness.