Interview with Sophia Terazawa

CHINAECHEREM OBOR: My first question has to do with time. I have been obsessed with time, and you will see evidence of that in another interview I had with our fiction contest winner. Our relationship with time has been severely influenced by Western interpretations of it as something linear, something useful for measuring human productivity towards the fulfilment of capitalist ambitions. Your essay flows against time and through it and, in the words of Rajiv Mohabir, who selected your poem as the runner-up in our 2024 Nonfiction Contest, “resists linearity.” How do you negotiate your relationship with time in both your craft and in your life? Do you think there is a place outside of linear time where we can do meaningful work?

 

SOPHIA TERAZAWA: Dear friend, oh, how you move me with this first question! Thank you for acknowledging “de Clérambault” as both essay and poem, a tango with time—a deep bow to you. Thank you. Thank you. I like to think of writing as a way of flitting through obscured doorways, obscured in ways that an open door might symbolize two disparate points of leaving and returning. But I can only measure this passage by distance and less so with architectural markers of space. For example, in the words of Anne Carson: “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”

Or in the voice of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, while the father’s memory enters our house of dreams: “The overwhelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening.”

Or Derrida on half-sleeping and writing: “There’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth.”

Am I thus working for or against time’s flow in the face of desire? Language in the capitalist sense of forging ahead through each constructed sentence, word after word, or am I just selectively drunk on its grammar and philosophies?

For me, not negotiation, but maybe pleasure as a commitment to totality; for my small life, the same—I demand an equal rigor of dialogue around the collective heart over the individual mind. Already, I love the stranger. I would lay my life down for the stranger, and that is not a metaphor. Expressing such commitments tends to shock people around me. Because of this, I’ve been called an extremist in various ways, but I don’t want to shock you. There needs to be more of us: extremists, not in a legislative or religious sense, but extremists of love and unabashed humanity against WAR and the SENSELESS PRODUCTION OF MECHANIZED VIOLENCE. A scene from Tiananmen Square: the man blocking a tank with his body.

What else might be anticipated outside of measuring split-seconds between incoherence and coherence, someone who runs out into the street waving a flag of no country, beyond the sense-making doorway? Is the anticipation of everything locking together relieved by someone else walking through that open passage of logic unannounced; he, who declares after so many days and so many nights gone: Beloved, I have returned!

No!

Alright, how do I negotiate melodrama in my writing, the political and the personal brushing up against each other like two strangers meeting for the first time?

That half-sleep vigilance is broken by the shock of a real subject’s return from the battlefield, a subject who bears the grand bouquet of pink flowers and his devastating brow bone, a subject who declares upon returning how all the green grasses were indeed not greener on the other side of our field. But no, oh no, it’s too late. Too late, my dude! You’re on fire. There’s the door. Good riddance. Take your grasses and GO! [Laughs.]

 

CHINAECHEREM: A more complete version of Rajiv Mohabir’s blurb on your essay says that it “both resists and invites linearity.” I think the resistance is in the content, in the push against linear time. The invitation towards linearity, however, is in the form, in the way the essay subverts genre expectations with lines of lyric and poetic movement. I love that this essay is genre non-conforming, but did you at any point question whether you were writing towards one genre or the other? How much do you think of genre when writing a piece like this?

 

SOPHIA: Me, promiscuous with genre? Yes. However, wishy-washy with questions of erotic integrity? No. I have simple needs and simple understandings. I desire one Human at a time. If the Other mirrors my desire, fine. I mirror back what Echo might have wanted to demand of Narcissus by the lake: “Want me or don’t. But either way, I will be devoted because I have yet to know you fully. You have my devotion until then.”

The push for a written line by any means necessary is that simple gesture of whatever imprints me onto the stranger. I’m obsessed with getting to some core of a shared conviction about unconditional love. Echo: “Yes, we were meant to meet in this life. You led me to believe that with your ignorance of my limits.”

But just as equally, I rush toward the syntax of meeting a linguistic equal in the face of heartbreak: “No, I was wrong. We were not meant to be. You were only seeking a reflection of your truest self in my words.”

Author: “Now, you probably think this interview is about YOU. Please stop calling. Leave me ALONE!”

In a past life, I must have been either a lagoon siren or a tiny burrowing insect. I must have destroyed larger mammalian creatures with my tireless tunneling, eventually popping out, without fanfare, on the other side of their bodies. Oops.

CHINAECHEREM: Amor fati. Resignation to fate. I heard that line recently in a show. White Lotus, I think it was. And it made me think of how your essay asks questions of fate. One line says, “The palm reader was right.” Another says that “Because two lines met over a low vein, recognition would be simple.” But inevitably, there is also the resistance to fate: “the plan moves without us,” “…the palm reader was only half-right, without you the garden still grows,” “fate cannot be counted on.” What do you think happens when we choose to exist outside of fate? Is that even possible, or is inevitability simply the price of our intimacies?

 

SOPHIA: Alright, I can be vengeful. I will have my vengeance! The fate Nemesis, or daughter of divine night, Justice, pushes Narcissus into his crystal lake of vanities. Outside this drama, I’m laughing—laughing and crying. What happens next? I might wander the earth without my mirrors. I might sing or whistle for years on end. Somewhere on the ground, near one of my ankles, Panda might adjust his brown pajamas. Together, next, we might wander into the dark forest.

Dante, translated by Longfellow: “For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

It’s not a terrible price to pay.

 

CHINAECHEREM: Considering what we have said so far about fate and given the overwhelming grief we feel at the destruction of the planet, I think there is some comfort in ascribing a sense of inevitability to climate and ecological disaster, to question whether humans really have the power to do this much damage. Because of how much this essay interrogates causality vs inevitability, I am curious to hear what you think of this. Do you think the earth could be preemptively fighting back to discourage or prevent more harm from us? Is it all our doing? If the earth really is fighting back, do we even stand a chance?

 

SOPHIA: We are doomed! [Laughs.] But some of us still have our imaginations, right? So, on the nature of “fighting back,” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these gestures of conflict, conflicts between the inner and outer constructions of identities concerning separate identities, conflicts of dominance and submission, though not mutually exclusive to each other, and conflicts of harmony and disharmony amongst our species.

Did you know that whales sing the great story of their oceanic journeys to each other? I learned this recently from a Human that I have a Very Big Crush on. But back to the sky… How did Paul Celan “wrestle with Jacob’s Angels” simultaneously with the fallen language of the Holocaust? Is the planet fighting back in similar fashions? Singing the odyssey of its collective extinction? Wrestling with neither good nor bad angels? Who am I to say “yes” or “no” at these moments? I just have to get out of the way.

Since the age of five, when I first discovered the wonders of ecstatic Death in service of Justice, I had no use for chance. I was ready to DIE for my Mother and my Visions. I would stage my body’s grand and physically brutal annihilation many times in front of an audience of stuffed animals.

 

CHINAECHEREM: So many of the lines begin with the word “Because…” What follows in such lines is the imposition of causality between two events that do not share any apparent connection. And so, the speaker saying that the one thing happens because of the other thing happening, that is what establishes the causality in this essay, and it is happening in real time, almost like an incantation. Yet, it is in the lines without this inverted causality where we see a more obvious incantation: the invocation of flower and plant species to “come.” Similarly to my last question, do you think humankind has the power to reconstruct the earth and other species therein? Can we bring about the manifestation of a new world? Do you think there are spiritual practices and belief systems that could be useful in this regard?

 

SOPHIA: A terrifying depth. Flowers will arrive with or without our calls. Flowers will extend toward extreme saturation amidst machine detritus, perhaps via Necropastoral mixtapes according to Joyelle McSweeney.

I appreciate your observation of the inverted causality. Efflorescence and incantation live side by side in my work. Indeed, the essay leads with a rhetorical anaphora to manifest whispers and grunts for the plastic-ridden soil. Come, yarrow. Come, fairies, our precious Short Kings.

 

CHINAECHEREM: Can you speak to the essay’s title, “de Clérambault” and its association with erotomania if that relationship is something you had in mind when writing and titling this essay?

 

SOPHIA: Yes, there’s a direct association between the psychiatrist and the syndrome. I struggle to say more… Let me tiptoe slowly… The title came last. Previously, the essay ended with a dream of my friends standing beneath an open skylight. In the waking space, Fatima had just painted her baby’s bedroom a soft shade of lavender in Victoria. Bessie had just launched a book in Connecticut. Leo had just landed an audition in New York. Isaac had just been Isaac continuing to thrive in desert magic everywhere. What I had in mind was a web of worlds in which all of my friends were safe and joyous among their kin. These were and still are the relationships that ultimately carry the essay beyond its completion as I continue to break emergency glass around my personal life.

 

CHINAECHEREM: You said in an earlier correspondence that “This piece began after an egg ritual that went totally wrong this summer.” Can you speak more about that?

 

SOPHIA: [Stares directly into the camera.] I’ve been working on a book that details the full story of being scammed by witches in my Appalachian town. Looking down at my left palm, one of the psychics had hooked me with this statement: “I see that you have already met your soulmate. Do not doubt it. He is the One. With him, you will have your Baby.”

Immediately, I burst into tears. Again, I was a simple thing with simple desires—I still am. When the witches identified the One and the Baby, they instructed me to light several candles for a week. They instructed me to get a dozen regular eggs among additional ritual objects. Out of the carton, I was instructed to select an egg at random and pray with this over my womb for several nights. Eventually, I was instructed to break the egg, which was revealed to be filled with bright red blood. That was terrible for everyone involved, not because of the sudden blood but because of the screaming.

Reflecting on this pivotal ceremony later, I was surprised and pleased that I hadn’t succumbed to a full psychotic break. In previous years, I would have succumbed, yes. I would have lost every single marble. But that summer, after the witches and I finished screaming, we quickly pulled ourselves together. In the end, they scammed me out of $777.77.

Would the soulmate, in fact, return? I might keep this plot twist to myself! [Laughs.] But meanwhile, I had begun to write “de Clérambault.” See? I’m a very simple thing.

One last point about erotomania: The part in my essay about the crow also shook a whole can of marbles for my brain. It might be a long, long while before I can fall asleep in a parked vehicle again without slipping into uncontrollable giggling. How embarrassing!

 

CHINAECHEREM: Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts with me. And congratulations once again on being named runner-up in the BWR nonfiction contest!

 

SOPHIA: Thank YOU! What a treat this has been! J Here’s a photo of Panda in the Cherry Honey bag as a token of our gratitude.