There was a time: an interview with Amira Hess - The Keys to the Garden: Israeli Writing in the Middle East - Interview

Literary Review, Wntr, 1994 by Ammiel Alcalay

AA: In 1986 I saw you with Sammy Michael on Yaron London's show, and he expressed amazement about a poem where you wrote of Baghdad and Trafalgar Square, like it was some mystical or impossible connection. After an awkward silence, Sammy Michael said: "After all, Iraq was under British rule and there are parts of Baghdad that look a lot like Trafalgar Square." I use this as an example of the kind of non-understanding or lack of consciousness about that world, and how people from it are always categorized as representatives of it. Can you talk about your own ways out of these kinds of assumptions that are supposed to describe you and your work?

AH: I would begin with the question of how one gets out of this. Or, rather, what is it I am supposed to be getting out of. I begin from the initial fact that I am myself. I was brought into this world in order to reach perfection, in every sphere, and I have to be strong enough to perfect my own inner world and my self in order to develop to my utmost capabilities. Until not very long ago, I was under the influence of all the various stigmas, each miserly and mean-spirited in its own way, that prevailed in this country. But I came from a wonderful family, extremely well-educated, wealthy people who really did have "British manners." It was as if I was a blue blood starting to turn a bit yellow, first in the eyes of others and then in my own eyes. I felt as if my blood was being drained and I was being turned into something I had never been, something not nice. Yet I had come from a very loving family, a family that respected others even more than themselves, with very high spiritual values, giving and caring and involved in public and communal affairs. I relied on the strongest side of myself here, so that my personality wasn't completely broken even though, in some sense, it was shattered into fragments. The only thing that pulled me through was the illusion I had that I hadn't been fully shattered. But there remains this feeling of nothingness, a human feeling of being null and void, of being a carpet under the feet of others who don't even have the vaguest idea what living culture means, people who only understand their own troubles. When I am critical though, I have to start with myself for only then do I have the right to speak. Despite the anger that exists, I first have to comb out all the curls in that anger so that love and grace emerge. If they put scorpions blood in me, I would do everything I could to make it blue again. Even if I was sentenced to the hell of distancing myself from the home of my parents and reliving the death of all those who were burned in every ghetto there ever was, I would still come through to tell of it.

Your first book had enormous power, the amount of subconscious material was highly condensed through the complexity of language and structure; what kind of processes did you go through in your later work?

With that book, my damaged humanity, my damaged ego, had been embraced in some way; that helped stitch the flesh but it did not stitch my spirit. Think of flesh that has been stitched but there is a broken wing, teeming fear, falling into black holes -- all of this is within my body. The poetry slowly gave me self-confidence, the feeling that with the passage of time there was suddenly this moment of embrace. But I was skeptical about this too, because I thought that even with that touch, only a drop from the typhoon within me had come out. What would happen were I to let it all go? I don't know if I would even love myself. My cousin is serving in Gaza now, for instance, and he was telling me about the things he sees there, about people killing each other. I told him that if they're killing each other they're actually killing themselves because that's the point we've brought them to; it's we while brought them to this inner suicide. For me there are no nationalities or religions, I am someone who exists within creation. In the second book, there was a thrust towards obliterating myself, going into the abyss, from fear of myself and everything else. When I read my poems, it is only then that I begin to consciously understand them, but conscious understanding can also make you stop. I have thousands of pages that I don't know will ever see the light of day or whether I even want them to. Sometimes I just want to burn them, because I have guilt feelings, towards myself, towards my brothers -- and they love me dearly. I feel as if I am uncovering their very souls, because I speak their feelings. I clash between the modest and innocent East within me and consciousness which is not an innocent thing. I have turned into a person who is not innocent by any means and that makes me very sad. It is said that as a person matures, they lose their innocence. I have torn through many curtains beyond those that go with the orderly passing of time, and that makes it very difficult, for you become transparent and you see through things. I feel like I am a person of great compassion, I am even compassionate with those who hate me, simply because we are human, in spite of ourselves. This lets me out of that meager little thing we call self-respect. My self-respect can play a role in a variety of places, but not in these wider spheres, for we are truly nothing under heaven's dome.