Mandy Shunnarah’s resolute and irreverent debut poetry collection We Had Mansions starts with “ars poetica of partridges and palestine.” The connection may sound surprising. Shunnarah’s paternal grandfather, who they call Sedo, once told them, “our last name means partridge.” As the poem progresses, Shunnarah uncovers an illuminating link between partridges, which have many species, and Palestine. They write, “National Geographic says 43 of those species are decreasing / in population; something Palestinians know all too well.” 

Throughout We Had Mansions, Shunnarah’s witty associations assert their wholeness. A queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist, Shunnarah had to separate aspects of their identity while growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. The custody agreement to their white mother and Palestinian father’s divorce decreed that Shunnarah could only see their father every other weekend, which limited time with Shunnarah’s Sedo and Teta, what they call their paternal grandmother. A cultural contusion formed from the marital rift and had Shunnarah feeling like “a part-time Palestinian.” We Had Mansions chronicles Shunnarah’s reclamation. Writing in a documentary poetry tradition, Shunnarah draws from source material like 16^th century archives recording their family’s life in Ramallah, museum exhibition labels, and nutrition facts for communion wafers. With candid language, Shunnarah reconstitutes their personal history, including their Sedo and Teta’s displacement in Palestine, their father’s opioid addiction in Appalachia, and their pursuit of community in Columbus, Ohio. 

Shunnarah and I met during this year’s Tin House Winter Workshop, where we connected over our gratitude for Naomi Shihab Nye and how her writing, which focuses on Palestine, has inspired ours. Picking up over Zoom this spring, Shunnarah and I discussed the poetics of poppies, Arabic’s linguistic possibilities—courtesy of queer communities, and their deliberate decisions in writing about love. 

Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed: Your debut poetry collection We Had Mansions spans your Orthodox Christian upbringing in Alabama with your paternal Palestinian and maternal Southern family, the community you’ve cultivated in Columbus, Ohio, and portrayals of Palestine. The titles to your poems indicate the collection’s thematic range, from “jesus was trans,” “marriage, as peaches rot on the counter,” to “palestine is for lovers.” When did you realize that your themes were maybe inextricable from each other?

Mandy Shunnarah: I’d been writing about Palestine for a long time, and nobody would take that writing until very recently. But I just kept coming back to it, as you do when you come from a colonized people. You yearn for the homeland. When I finally started realizing that Palestine is a part of everything I do, that’s when I started seeing the themes kind of connect. It really wasn’t until about maybe a year and a half ago that I started realizing the connections. Mahmoud Darwish is a huge inspiration to me. I’m like, oh, one of the preeminent love poets of the past century is Palestinian! How can I not see love and Palestine as inextricable?

Before I had that “Aha!” moment, I didn’t even really know that I had a poetry book. I just thought I had all these very disparate poems floating around. And I thought, oh, well, okay, I’ve got my nature bucket, and I’ve got my love bucket, and I’ve got my divorce poem bucket. And then I have my queer poems and my Palestine poems and my Southern poems. I thought those were all different collections. But when I thought about trying to pigeonhole any one of those things into its own singular collection, it felt like it wouldn’t be me. All these things are actually intersectional, to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s word. I had to realize it in myself before I could realize it on the page. Once it hit me, I put all of them on the floor, lined them up, and it felt like the person with the red string and map, connecting everything.

SAA: What is your understanding of why publications are taking your Palestine poems now?

MS: As I got more stuff accepted over time and it just wasn’t the Palestine stuff, I started realizing, oh, it’s not that I’m a bad writer. And I’m not saying that every single Palestine thing I ever wrote was the pinnacle of literature. But at a certain point I started realizing people don’t want to touch Palestine. Post-October 2023, the magazines that did take a very vocal pro-Palestine stand were suddenly very hungry for this kind of work, which I have a lot of mixed feelings about. If you’re going to support my people, I want you to do it not just when we’re the cause du jour.

My voice is not a replacement whatsoever for Palestinians in the homeland, especially Palestinians in Gaza who either grew up there and have had to flee or who are still there writing poetry against the greatest odds imaginable. Now I do think Palestinian poets in the diaspora have an important role too. Being real with you, I tell people, I put the palest in Palestinian. I very easily pass as white, just looking the way I look and from the fact that my family is Christian. I am a “palatable” Palestinian. People will ask me questions that they would never ask people who look more Arab. I try to use that privilege for good. 

SAA: How did the title We Had Mansions come to you?

MS: I saw this post from the Institute of Palestine Studies. They had published this academic article by Johnny Mansour about the Pasha mansion. So there was this mansion that had been built by this wealthy Palestinian family. Then of course the Nakba happened. If you’re a colonizer and you see a tiny house versus a mansion, which one are you going to pick? It’s going to be the mansion every time. They were using it for different colonial purposes, and then the “liberal” Zionists said, we should turn it into a theater. But it ended up just being abandoned. And I started thinking about how class impacts your experience of colonization. That’s a conversation that we don’t have nearly enough. 

I learned that the last play that they did in the Pasha mansion was Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. It’s like, okay, well, what is the endgame here? These Israeli colonizers got the mansion. Now they’re letting it fall into disrepair instead of letting it house the family that owned it, or literally any Palestinians whatsoever. All this was swimming in my head for weeks, maybe months. Finally, I just sat down and wrote up that poem in the form of a play, and I titled the poem “our people had mansions.” But later after the poem was published, I was like, why did I say, “our people”? Because that’s a little bit of a remove. As a diaspora Palestinian, I’ve never lived in the homeland. But then because the collection as a whole is bringing all parts of me to the table, I was like, no, it has to be, “we.” I have to put myself in here. I felt that poem really encompasses a lot. It also kind of captures my weird and at times experimental style and covers a lot of social issues. Because I don’t want to act like, oh Palestine was just perfect pre-Nakba. No. We had class stratifications like anywhere else. 

SAA: My favorite poems in your collection involve Arabic, which does not have a “p” sound. In “only an american,” you point out, “Just like the Brits to rename our country / with a P: a letter we don’t have, a sound / our tongues wrestle to say.” How would you contextualize the decisions of your paternal grandparents, who settled in Alabama after their exile from Ramallah in 1948 and named their first child Patricia, a name “with a letter their mouths refused to speak, / damned to a lifetime calling her Badrisha”?

MS: The Palestinian side of my family is extremely acculturated and was very dedicated to assimilating in the U.S. for a couple of reasons. They moved to Alabama in the 1950s as brown-skinned people. They experienced a lot of xenophobia and a lot of racism. They also had, until the day they died, very thick accents. I think they experienced so much hatred that they were very determined that their kids were not going to experience that. As a way of protecting themselves, they felt like they had no choice but to assimilate, kind of in the same way that I would code-switch and be Palestinian at their house and Appalachian with my mom’s side of the family. They were very Palestinian, but out in the larger world they tried to basically assimilate into whiteness as much as possible. Years ago, I was so angry, like, how did you not teach us Arabic? I felt that language wound. Now, as I’ve gotten older, I have more empathy for them. They kept cultural knowledge away from us not because they were ashamed of being Palestinian but because they didn’t want us to be violently attacked.

SAA: Earlier, you were talking about arriving at your collection’s title from your poem, “our people had mansions,” and I’m wondering if you kept that discrepancy as a record of your thought process. To what extent did you face challenges with using pronouns “we” and “our” with regard to Palestinians and Palestine and incorporating Arabic in your poetry? 

MS: I learned to really love myself in the fullness of my identity through this process. I didn’t want to go back and self-edit and make it look like I always had this stuff figured out. We never do right? It’s always a learning process. I want everybody to come out of the womb loving themselves and never stopping. But that’s just not what the U.S. does to your brain. 

I really debated about what pronouns to use in almost every single poem. I’m Palestinian, but I’m in the diaspora, and I don’t want to appropriate the struggle of people in the homeland. That would feel disingenuous. I am not currently experiencing genocide. I have never experienced genocide. I have never lived in Palestine because of the exile and dispossession. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to act like it doesn’t affect me at all. I feel like my heart is divided. Palestinians are such a collective culture. That’s just part of who we are. 

The language wound is still there. I’ll never be a native speaker, having never lived in Palestine or any part of the Arab world, and with Sedo and Teta very intentionally not teaching us Arabic. So I’ve been trying to learn as an adult, and it is really, really hard. I found that there are 12 million words in Arabic as opposed to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has 175,000. Trying to heal that language wound as an adult has been a deeply rewarding process, but also a very humbling one. 

SAA: In “the hookah,” you incorporate Arabic script as you go through pronouns. The speaker rejects labels like transgender, effeminate, intersex and considers identifying with a third gender, maybe the pronouns you, them or she/he or you/them. I know from studying the language that Arabic grammar assigns a masculine or feminine gender to everything. In your poems reflecting on gender, what insights have you been able to access by referencing Arabic?

MS: As The Queer Arab Glossary shows, there are terms that queer communities have created and kind of extrapolated from this very gendered language all throughout the Arab world. I just thought that was so beautiful that no matter where you go in the world, any time there’s a gendered language, the binary gets broken by queer people. That’s an incredibly cool tradition. I wanted to explore that while also addressing the language wound. Even in the little bit of Arabic I’ve learned, I’ve noticed it’s very gendered. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m learning the language now as an adult, as a proudly out queer person. Why would I not also learn the created language that my queer community has already built? That’s another way that I was very intentionally bringing multiple sides of me to this table. 

SAA: The last quarter of your collection swells with love poems. I want to linger with the poem, “you bury me,” especially its lines, “In Arabic, / the language that should have been my mother tongue, one of the ways to say / I love you translates to you bury me,” and, “Can I say it now, having couched & hedged the words? I love you. There are / so many more words for it in the language that should have been my mother / tongue.” When I was learning Arabic in college, I noticed how Arabic texts would repeat words in a way that might sound redundant to a Strunk & White-trained ear. As writers and lovers who primarily use English, should efficiency be the goal? What do we lose as speakers and writers when we focus on concision? 

MS: Efficiency should not be the goal, especially not in love. I often feel that’s what the relationship escalator is. I got that term because I’m polyamorous, and you know, I’ve read the poly literature. You’re on this escalator where there’s always a goal until you have kids after you get married. And then it’s like, okay, you’ve plateaued. You’ve done what you were “supposed to do.” When you think about it like that, it is efficient. But the escalator doesn’t always work for people, and that’s why divorce exists. I grew up in the Bible Belt in Alabama, and evangelical culture is very relationship escalator forward, even to the point where I was told many, many times that you shouldn’t even date someone if you cannot imagine yourself marrying them at some point. Like no casual dating. And I realized that the escalator was not going to work for me, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, because there is a little bit of a grieving process, at least for me. When I realized, oh, this marriage is not working out, oh, I don’t know if I want to have kids at all, but if I do, it’s not going to be with this guy, I felt like something was wrong with me. This very efficient process that had worked out for so many different people was not working for me despite my best efforts. 

Once I learned about polyamory, I considered it and read about it for many, many years before I actually became a practicing polyamorous person. And I realized that polyamory kind of throws a wrench in the relationship escalator. You can casually date. And I’m not even talking about hookup culture. I mean long-term, meaningful relationships that don’t have marriage or children as a goal. As silly as it sounds, I was just like, you mean, those relationships can be meaningful and valuable too?! It’s not just frivolous? 

The love poems in there were written about multiple different people. I debated on whether to really mention [that]. At the end of the day I decided that it really didn’t matter. The more important thing was that even after being separated and my marriage not working out and being deeply depressed about the genocide, which does not really put you in a dating kind of mood, I found that I still had the capacity to love deeply and I wasn’t going to let the romantic pain of the past keep me from experiencing love in the future. I feel like that resilience and that hope is very Palestinian of me. I started to see the two as very linked. The world’s going to hell. If I’m going to carry on, I’m gonna really carry on. I’m gonna try to live to the fullest.

SAA: Another poem, “in arabic, the word for poppy is pieces,” presents the flower as a metaphor for Palestine. You write, “Any farmer / will tell you they’re weeds—an annual nuisance that can / germinate from seeds planted half a century ago.” In “ode to the hare,” you continue to investigate poppies: “no one ever asks why Britain’s / flower of war is not native to its shores.” Why are poppies such an apt symbol for Palestinians?

MS: There’s so many layers to it. When the Zionists outlawed the Palestinian flag, the poppy arose as a symbol because it is native to Palestine and has all the colors: black, white, red, and green. Part of the reason they’re Britain’s flower of war is because there’s some chemical in the implements of war and the rubble of buildings that is actually a nutrient that makes poppies come up. “In Flanders Fields,” that whole poem is a war poem about poppies. Britain tried to cultivate them for their opiate effect and figured out real quick that you can’t just transport them. I was thinking about how these colonizers think that you can just uproot a thing and put it somewhere else or just take something for your own use and not really consider the environment or consider, do you even need to have this? Like, do you specifically need to have this? Why do you think this belongs to you? I could write a whole collection just about poppies.

SAA: Throughout your collection, you interweave sections of your poems with snippets from other poets including Marwan Makhoul, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha. Why is it important for us to read your collection as part of a lineage?

MS: It goes back to the collectivist nature of my people and also kind of extrapolating from that, the collectivist nature of poets. I think most of the people who read poetry are poets themselves, whether professional or amateur. We have such a tight-knit community. No poet exists in a vacuum. So I try to shout out my inspirations. I get so much inspiration just from reading other people because they show me what’s possible. Also I want to be in conversation with these folks. I think there’s something really great about that communal aspect of poetry, and I think an epigraph is such a great way of bringing another voice into the room and showing that, oh, there is a lineage here. There’s a poetic tradition here.