Nur Turkmani
Photo by Gabriel Ferneini
Oyster River Pages: Why do you write and/or create?
Nur Turkmani: I think the answer depends on the means. When I write in my journal it’s because I’m terrified of how quickly and easily things slip away. When I write poetry it’s because language is a god that makes me more attentive and malleable. When I write non-fiction it’s because I want to lean in, listen, take part in conversations. But with fiction, which is the genre I currently think most about, I write because I am fascinated by people. I love them, and I want to honor them in the best way I know how. Also, I’m whatever the opposite of dexterous is. I couldn’t direct, manage, or build anything if my life depended on it. So maybe fiction is a way to construct a house with my own hands and tell its inhabitants what to do, where to go.
Ultimately what holds all these splinters together is the desire to archive and store things my own way. A vain way of saying—hey, look, I was once here too.
ORP: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
NT: I think it’s how much I condone distraction. I write while talking to my mother, listening to my friends’ ten-minute voice notes, watching The Office, mentally choreographing to a new Afrobeats song. It’s a ridiculous way to write but I justify it, revel in it even, as though it is an intrinsic component in my artistic process. And maybe it is….Ha. Another challenge is that I am a people pleaser. When I imagine myself sharing a piece of writing, I immediately think of how the different ‘categories’ of people in my life will receive it, whether they will be bored or uncomfortable halfway through. I see their frowns sometimes. This is why I could never stick to poetry because I feel ‘liberated’ in that genre, which ironically makes me uncomfortable.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
NT: Before I get carried away, let me answer the question in a straightforward manner: I speak two languages, Arabic and English, but can properly read and write only in the latter. Many artists have said this before—so this is nothing new, or interesting—but experiencing the world in several languages and having to contain it in one is incredibly limiting. I’m in awe of writers, like Zadie Smith and Junot Diaz, whose novels teem with accents, sounds, streets. Or Arundathi Roy who uses the English language to recreate an entirely new way of seeing, specific to her characters in Kerala.
I loop on this a lot. How do I ‘translate’ a conversation between two people in Tripoli who’ve never spoken English? My mother, for instance, becomes a different person in English. So do I, in Arabic. This angst—to capture the variations of ‘selves’ within one language or the other—keeps me on my toes. So does trying to enact dialogue, music, and the wildly different socio-political realities and communities in Lebanon or Syria. It’s hard and sometimes debilitating, and writers must suffer from this more than most other artists I think. My written words don’t seem to hold all the textures and soundbites of the people and spaces in my life. But this desire to and failure at it keeps me going.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
NT: For me, vulnerability is acceptance. Acceptance of shame, inconsistency, uncertainty. Acceptance of how flawed and ugly, also luminous and tender and wild, we can be. I think in the process of leaning into acceptance, I am more capable of naming things. I’ve found a lot of power in that—when we name what it is we see or feel, we’re less threatened by its hold and more capable of forgiveness and intimacy.
