Joy, and Other Things BAHR Celebrates: In Conversation with Zein Sa’dedin
Illustration by Sasha Haddad (@sasha.haddad.illustrations)
I allow the water to flirt with my feet as I arrive at the sea. Every time I am here, a multitude of emotions linger right beside me. You shut your eyes and allow yourself to be consumed by feelings and scenes only the sound of waves are able to induce. The sight of the growing expanse of water—the sound of it, the smell of it—fills the mind with serenity. Arriving at BAHR, an online literary platform housing the work of creatives based in SWANA, evokes these same senses.
It is late July when I virtually sit down with Zein Sa’dedin, a young creative shaping her local literary scene through poetry and education. Zein is also the founder of BAHR Magazine and cat mom to Sabah. With BAHR recently having released its first issue at the time, my heart swelled with joy and gratitude at the chance to have an in-depth conversation with her. It was all so exciting. Two smiles grow on the screen—one from the heart of Amman, and the other from the heart of Sharjah.
Zein talks to me about her “long time coming” project BAHR, and how her lived experiences played a crucial role in its fruition. What is so fascinating about what Zein puts forth as BAHR’s principles is that although these lived experiences are unique to each individual, there is a medium through which these struggles become universal. BAHR, along with the many things it resembles, is a means for that—to situate yourself in the growing sea of tribulations.
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Shayma: Tell us more about the story that led you to the creation of BAHR—from the ideation process to the moment you announced and beyond, I am curious about it all.
Zein: BAHR has been a really long time coming, and I think one of the few perks of being in a pandemic is that it gave me time to think about it and conceptualize it.
The beginnings of BAHR trace back to 2017, when I was in St. Andrews doing my MFA. Part of my program was practical experience for writers, where there was a literary journal there called the Scores. At first I was a poetry reader, but then I started to fall in love with the behind the scenes of publishing. Eventually, I became a poetry editor in my last year where I had amazing editor-in-chiefs, Patrick and Rosa. They helped me curate an Arab Heritage feature of poetry in the journal, and I got to reach out to poets from around the world and really experience the joy and benefits of a digital community. I am still friends with people I got in touch with at that point and worked with. So the idea of publishing was always in the back of my mind.
Then when I came back to Amman, I noticed that there was a really big lack in any sort of contemporary and young literary scene. There were only a few places that would host a few poetry nights, but there was nothing really substantial or curated like what I was seeing online through other literary journals like Sukoon Magazine and Rusted Radishes based in Beirut. A lot of journals based in Cairo and in the Gulf that are up and coming too are doing incredibly engaging work, but there wasn’t much like that based in Jordan!
I thought to myself: if Sumou could do it, if Unootha could do it, if Jaffat El Aqlam could do it and start building platforms in those different ways, why not start a space out of Amman for Amman to be its focal point?
The idea kept bubbling in the back of my mind until the pandemic hit,where I had some time off teaching and said: alright now is the time for Bahr, if not now then never. So that’s sort of what I did, I just made it happen.
It has been a really cool experience and also hectic in the best way possible. So BAHR has been kind of like a long time coming—pretty much since the moment I started sending out work to literary magazines and also editing and doing all that behind the scenes. I really wanted something like that but closer to home if that makes sense.
Shayma: That makes total sense! I think the influence of lived experiences is something common when it comes to creating creative outlets. It’s very interesting to see how the idea of a platform like this was implanted within your educational journey and continued to bloom as you came back home to Amman. This brings me to my next question which I believe you partly answered Zein. As BAHR makes its debut as a platform during an ongoing pandemic with restricted in-person activity and limited interactions, how will we see it restore these connections?
Zein: Well the idea of BAHR started before the pandemic. When it is safer for everyone, I do want BAHR to host in-person events from poetry readings to workshops. But what I love about BAHR is that its community isn’t completely tied to one place. The internet allows platforms to reach out further in much more accessible ways and in a way, establish a community that is not solely local. That’s the thing about physical spaces and interaction, it is always based on locality. But with the internet, you can take part in events all over the world! I did a reading with RAWIfest a few weeks ago who are based in the US and I got to join them from my house in Amman. That’s something that I have never been able to do before.
Also, the pandemic really cemented how important accessibility is even for locally oriented events. A lot of people have physical disabilities that could make it difficult to to leave their house or go to a potentially inaccessible venue, but having access to the internet and online events really bridges that gap. That is really important to me as I move to not only just publishing with BAHR but also hosting workshops, reading groups and other types of events hopefully coming soon. So I think establishing that sort of interaction has been a lot easier with the internet, especially with platforms like BAHR that are so rooted in this sense of community. We have a duty to serve the people that support us and I think right now the best way to do that is online. And in the future, accessibility has to be something that has to be something event-hosts keep in mind especially as more countries are loosening their restrictions.
I do want to eventually host in-person events and activities—with online, accessible methods of participation too—but right now we are very much about making sure everyone remains safe and also that we have as wide a reach as possible. We are so indebted to the community around us and I think the best way to serve it right now is to make BAHR as accessible as possible in the current moment and in the future.
Shayma: I admire this fresh perspective on accessibility Zein! And I agree, with a digital presence comes more opportunities for outreach and hearing from more writers within the community. On that note, I would like you to tell me more about what we expect to see on your platform. What type of work are you intending to spotlight?
Zein: Currently we are publishing poetry and prose and sort of intergenre pieces. Mainly we focus on writing, but we aim to expand into the visual arts too. Things like illustration, animations, films, or videos! I really want BAHR to be a creative platform, not just a platform for writing. BAHR is all about fluidity and mutability. So I am really interested in intergenre and anti-genre types of writing—thinking of like, Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog, where it is prose but poetry, but not really prose poetry and not poetic prose. It’s like this whole different thing which mimics the two elements that it really dissects, Sea and Fog, because they are shapeless to an extent.
If people have a piece of writing but are not sure under which submission field it goes in—so they want to submit under prose for example but their piece feels more like poetry. Or something that is half visual art half poetry or incorporates painting with words for instance. I really want BAHR to be a space for that. Especially in the Middle East, I feel more traditional art or literary institutions have a somewhat rigid idea of genre and form, so I would love for BAHR to be a thing that breaks that or helps in breaking that. I would love for it to dismantle these ideas of what work can look like under what genre and those types of restrictions that artists and writers often put on themselves and others. So that is what Bahr is going to be seeking out in the future.
Shayma: Insha’Allah. I can see that Bahr celebrates fluidity as its name might suggest. I also know that it celebrates the literature of multiple languages as it stands out as a multilingual platform. What other things does BAHR celebrate?
Zein: Joy. Each other, I think, is a really big one. One thing that stood out to me, if I had to pick, with the launch of BAHR was the amount of people who came out in support of it at its very beginning. I have always had a strong support system, but the lengths that other people, total strangers, went to to promote it, talk about it, and celebrate it in ways that I didn’t expect has been astounding. BAHR is a celebration of itself, of all the work we receive and also of the community that supports it.
I think joy is also something that you don’t see others celebrating publicly and creatively that often as writers. At least not in our current moment and geography in the Levant which has suffered so many disasters throughout its modern political history. It has just been constant trauma over trauma over trauma and I think those are really important things to write about and discuss. But it seems to be all that we’re ever allowed or expected to write about and discuss on a global level. I think it’s infinitely as important to realize that writers from this region are human beings who experience joy too and can write about joy and love and pop culture and all the things. Bahr really celebrates that, or it tries to.
Shayma: Both Najat Al Saghira and Fairouz sneak in love declarations to the sea in their melodies. Elia Abu Madhi writes about being one with the sea, while Farouk Jweida arrives at it with open arms, defeated. What significance does the sea or BAHR carry for you?
Zein: I go back to the poem project of Etel Adnan, who is a Lebanese-American writer and artist currently based in Paris, called Sea and Fog. In the first half about the sea, the sea stands as its own individual agent but at the same time it becomes part of and a projection of the speaker. It becomes totally all-encompassing, and that is my relationship with the sea I think. It swallows me in the best way possible, it makes me forget myself while also taking me inwards into myself. That aspect of being all-encompassing yet at the same time totally individual and totally independent is a feature of the sea that is really fascinating to me.
I think also of Abdel Halim Hafiz’s song رسالة من تحت الماء, based off a poem by Nizar Qabbani.
I always get this physical image of AbdelHalim being at the very bottom of the seabed, lying down and screaming into the watery void. That image stays with me all the time, especially with working on Bahr and visualizing what it does. The act of reaching out or reaching towards something whether that would be like: the surface of the sea, other people or towards each other. I think that really sticks with me as well.
Shayma: I think your imagery of AbdelHalim is really going to stick with me too. I am a Abdel Halim superfan and when people talk about him I can’t help but fangirl, I have his merch hung up in my bedroom.
Zein: That’s amazing! I love meeting other Abdel Halim fans!
Shayma: Who are the people that are keeping BAHR buoyant at the moment—in other words, tell me about the team behind Bahr. Who are they, what are their stories?
Zein: Well at the moment, the team is me, myself and I. I kind of run everything from the social media promotion to the actual editorial work, communications, and the visuals. I do have some tech help from a product designer called Mohammed Rabaya—he helps with some coding and web design technicalities because I don’t really understand all of that at the moment. But otherwise, the masthead of the journal is just me.
BAHR really stems from being in that multitudinous space, linguistically especially. At the moment I only speak Arabic and English—born into Arabic and educated in English, so I feel pretty comfortable with both languages. But I understand that our community and the regions around us speak in other languages from French to Turkish and Greek. I would love to be able to have a team that speaks that and understands those languages as deeply as I do mine so that we could grow into those languages as well and expand. So that’s the vision currently, hopefully we expand into that soon and manage to pay the team and our contributors too.
The people who keep BAHR buoyant right now, honest to god, are the people who tweet and post and share about it. I am very online, on Instagram and Twitter, and seeing people repost a poem from Bahr or share a few lines from one of the pieces is so necessary! It is necessary for my spirit because currently it is an individual effort but hopefully not for long. But seeing people engage with the platform so earnestly keeps it afloat for sure, on those long nights where I am typesetting all of the poems and going through coding. All it takes is just one other person going like: “Oh this is a cool thing that is happening”, that is enough for me to keep going.
Shayma: What would you say BAHR stands for, what does it advocate for, what does it value?
Zein: Above all I think it stands and advocates for us. The reason why I created BAHR is because I wished something cool and fluid and open like BAHR existed. And I think that it is very much, again, rooted in the community—for the people who are writing or engaging with the world and observing it in some way, shape or form. I want to stand up and advocate for them and platform their work in every capacity I can. And I believe that one way I can do that is with BAHR where their work is treated with integrity, where we value things like multiplicity and variety, vulnerability and experimentality as well. It is for people who are willing to make mistakes and venture.
Art, writing and the ways we choose to express ourselves never exist in a singular form. I am a really big fan of Frank O’Hara, and he has a few lines in a poem called In Memory of My Feelings and the lines are: "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible." And thinking about what BAHR’s principles are, I wanna celebrate the ones who live as variously as possible and write about it and engage with it. And I think everyone lives variously, no one is just one thing.
A lot of traditional avenues venture either into really strict negotiations of what art should look like or what poetry should look like, especially in the Arabic language. But on the other hand if we are going to look at other avenues like literary journals abroad or even in the Middle East that are more into the English or bilingual sphere—a lot of them can accidentally venture into orientalist or even overtly capitalist structures and forget the reason and driving force behind the writing community.
People want to write and people want to create art and those people should not have to be either exploited or exploit their own backgrounds and traumas in order to be heard. I think that space for people to be vulnerable while simultaneously experiencing joy, and to be more than one thing is what BAHR aims to be at the end of the day.
Shayma: I know that BAHR will be working towards housing multilingual content which I anticipate with excitement. In a creative scene that is dominated by English, what makes you take this step? Why was adopting multilinguality in your initiative crucial?
Zein: I always felt restricted trying to create anything in one language. I went to the UK at 17 as a newbie into writing poetry or writing anything at all, but almost immediately I knew that I couldn’t just write in English. There had to be an element of Arabic in my work because if I wanted to express any self that existed inside me, I knew it could not just be in English. Likewise, I wasn’t super comfortable writing just in Arabic either. I was taught primarily in English. We had a few Arabic literature classes but even with those there was no aim of creating people who wanted to experiment with language in my opinion. It never encouraged us to be creative or generative or look at literature critically in that way.
I am still learning and attempting to write in Arabic. But when I was writing primarily in English it never felt like myself either. Coming back to Amman and thinking about what type of publishing I wanted to do and what sort of platform I wanted to have, I started doing a lot of research and found that primarily there are a lot of spaces for English language writing, a few for bilingual but nothing really for multilingual writing.
My country was colonized by the British, countries around us by the French and so on. Naturally, you would find writers working their way through that in various languages simultaneously, yet there doesn’t seem to be much of a space for it. So multilinguality is really important to me because I also feel like it is the most honest means of self-expression for so many, at least for myself. There is also something to be said about monolingual work being in dialogue with writing in other languages within the same space.
BAHR explores this sort of inter-linguistic dialogue, being a space that doesn’t separate its content by language.It all flows into each other like the tide. Each issue goes from one language to another, and vice versa and in between.
For our first issue we had two pieces of writing that were just in Arabic, and three bilingual pieces with Arabic and English. I hope, moving forward, that we have a bigger balance between those two and have more work that engages with both these and other languages at the same time.
Zeina Hashem Beck, the Lebanese poet, writes primarily in English and a little in Arabic, invented this form called the duet with English writing on one side and Arabic on the other. The sides aren’t a translation of each other and if you just read the English, you get an entirely different poem than from just reading the Arabic and when you read both you get a fuller picture.
BAHR is indebted to a lot of various things, but its conception is especially indebted to that form in particular, thinking of not only how these languages behave when put together but how they can intersect, argue and go against each other and produce really interesting work through those tensions and interactions.
Shayma: Believe it or not, one of my most favorite poems is actually on BAHR’s debut issue — Ya Bahiya by Haneen Amr.
Zein: Haneen yes. Oh what a piece! I am so honored to be able to have that in our debut issue which actually had a ridiculous amount of cool work that was sent through. And I think the reason why that happened is having such a solid and supportive community of writers that really believed in the same things I believed in and were as excited about it as I was! So when they saw that BAHR was finally happening, because I was talking about it online and offline for ages, they were generous enough to send me their best work and that was just something I will forever be grateful for. And Haneen’s piece was so amazing! When I was reading through it the first time and saw the Arabic stanza I was like: “Yup, they got me. They know exactly what Bahr was looking for.”
Shayma: I can imagine that certain challenges arise with this decision of housing multilingual work. Have you encountered any tribulations with the construction of BAHR in that aspect thus far? Do you anticipate any as you expand to work with more languages?
Zein: My level of comfort with the Arabic language has been the biggest challenge so far. Currently I am working to build it up, strengthen it, and write in it as well. Though it’s my mother tongue, before this year I had never written in Arabic and that anxiety was stopping me from starting BAHR because I was like: who am I to read and edit Arabic work? Then honestly I decided not to care, because you can never really perfect your knowledge in a language really. There’s always going to be more stuff to learn. I’m currently working on literary translation—poems from English to Arabic which has been a massive learning experience..
But still, even years down the line I don’t imagine that I’ll ever be comfortable “enough,” just as I will never be fully comfortable in English. And I think as writers, editors or creatives there is always this pressure to perfect a craft before sharing.
People are going to criticize you no matter what, you just have to trust that you are able to put out interesting work. Also, what falls upon us regardless is to work with integrity. With contributors, you can let them know how involved you are going to be in editing their work. Personally, I don’t like to be super involved in changing someone’s submitted work. Sometimes it is necessary if a certain section doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the issue. I know some editors in other journals can be really hands-on and change images, or word sequences but I try not to be at this level of editorial curation. Initially, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to engage with the submitted Arabic work that way because I wasn’t as familiar with the general landscape as I was with the English language. Then I remembered that I wasn’t really keen on micro-editing or line-editing at all, whether in English or in Arabic. I was just adding pressure on myself that wasn’t really needed. So I would say that a lot of the challenges I faced were largely mental for me with BAHR. But at the same time, BAHR has absolutely pushed me to challenge myself and throw myself into Arabic to make BAHR the best that it could possibly be. This is something I want to carry forward as BAHR grows and expands to other languages.
Shayma: With the challenges come perks as well! What are you most excited for with the launch of BAHR?
Zein: I think I am most excited to reach writers I would not have been able to reach out to or read from otherwise. Part of the reason BAHR was launched was my curiosity about the kind of work that was being made that we are not necessarily seeing, whether that was because of an intimidation factor or if it was because of people not finding spaces for that multilingual existence, or accessibility reasons, etc. I am really excited to find ways to reach those people and explore writing and art that I wouldn’t have otherwise..
Whenever I see a name in BAHR’s inbox that I don’t recognize I feel a spark of joy in my heart because it is wild that they have even seen BAHR let alone want to submit to it. I am really excited to grow in that way!
There are so many marginalized people whether it be through their gender, race, sexuality, or religion who don’t fall under the hegemonic image of a writer in our region and might not necessarily feel comfortable submitting to traditional, established platforms. We want BAHR to be a safe place for anyone and everyone who’s existed on the margins to become the focal point. So I am really excited about that and finding ways we can support them.
Shayma: Three fun facts about BAHR?
This is kind of hard but let’s see!
This is a bit of a weird personal fact but for someone who is so in love with the sea that I named my platform after it, I don’t enjoy swimming in the sea at all. I am more of a sit on the rocks and stare at it for hours type of person.
The two seas BAHR embody are the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. I try to imagine what these two seas look like whenever I conceptualize anything about BAHR, especially its visuals, even though the Dead Sea is not technically a sea.
And then the last one, is that the soundtrack to BAHR is always Abdel Halim Hafez songs, especially رسالة من تحت الماء, which is hopefully going to be a name of a special feature that I am planning to bring to life in the future. It’s what I personally envision every issue of BAHR to be, a letter from underwater or a ray of light reaching towards something.
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BAHR is currently accepting submissions for their third issue until December 31st 2021. If you feel like BAHR is the place you would like your work to be virtually housed, send over your literary creations to their inbox bahrmag@gmail.com after revising their submission guidelines.
You may also fund BAHR through donations by subscribing to their patreon.
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Shayma is the Arabic submissions editor at Unootha Magazine.