FIRE AS COMPANION: Janette Ayachi on ‘Quick Fire, Slow Burning’ & More

Janette Ayachi is a London-born, Edinburgh-based, Scottish-Algerian poet. Quick Fire, Slow Burning is her second collection, succeeding Hand Over Mouth Music, which won the Saltire Prize for Poetry Book of the Year in 2019.

Quick Fire – a slender but densely-packed volume of 23 poems over 58 pages – begins (as its title demands) with fire (the National Museum of Brazil fire of 2018) and ends with the poet’s ‘I’, awoken by gunshots in Medellín, Columbia and “listening for echo and fire”.

In between, Ayachi roams her home city of Edinburgh and points afar – a small library of Rough Guide-worthy destinations get a mention from Beirut to San Fransisco, St Ives to Toulouse and Panama City. As all this globe-trotting suggests, Quick Fire operates not just as a collection of poetry but also as a map. On this map are plotted two journeys – first, that required by the life (imagined/creative as well as lived) of a working Scottish poet “gear[ing] through this phase of her career”, and second – a journey of the heart.

Quick Fire is shot through with absence and lost love. Its third poem (‘Equations in Paradise’) opens on one of “the nights I melt then solidify without you”, goes on to grieve “a friendship” that is “still sore in comparison to what we shared before” – while there are references elsewhere to “the ghost of you” and “miss[ing] her like I miss the sun”.

The impression gleaned is of a collection which seeks a weighing – of  the heart against Ma’at’s ‘feather of truth’ (Quick Fire even references Egyptian death rites in ‘The Mad Hatter of Heart Matter’). On the latter’s side, poems such as ‘Translating the Transcendental Mountain’ (commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library for a Nan Shepherd-themed event in 2022) and the ambitious, roving ‘isolated, together’, on which this collection turns, probably just tip the scales.

GRB: Hi Janette, could we start by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and also what inspires, informs and drives your poetry?

Janette Ayachi (JA): Travelling and art and relationships influence me, they are three things that make me think, not just ponder, but deeply, profoundly pull apart the visuals and theory circling my cerebral – when I am excavating like that, the poetry comes in bouts, ebbs and flow because in new places fresh stories are invoked and surprise adventures create characters and the heart holds on to what it wants to carry onto the page.

Poetry itself is a form that is endlessly captivated by the possible motivations and consequences of human behaviour, so it’s a cathartic form for the writer and healing for the reader or listener. My work is mostly centered around the notions of identity, heritage, memory and connection with the land or serenades from cities – language is not just a communication tool, it’s a vehicle for culture. The language of poetry is a craft, a series of associations and signs that allows humans to think reflexively, ask questions, tell stories, dialogue details and engage in complex social interactions. This longing for knowledge drives me.

I wrote my first poem when I was eleven, I was a sickly child and it was a lament for one of the hospital doctors, it was pinned on the wall in the ward and I realised then I wanted to write poetry and I wanted to share it with people, I had wanted to perform and exhibit so I could connect with humanity and feed off the intersectionality and this would be my life’s purpose!

Poets are truth-seekers, memory-keepers and misfits who hyper-fix notions and theories and concepts to make sense of the world. Audre Lorde asks “What is it that keeps the eyes alive?” and experience is what has kept my eyes alive; I have been watching and filling many journals with vestibules of versions and visions since I was sixteen. I have seen many things. I am grateful, even for the moments of blindness because when I shut down the external, I go on myopic journeys into the self to learn how to master emotional equilibrium.

Albert Camus said in his essay, Create Dangerously, “to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death – these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all.”

GRB: Your last collection (which was also your first), Hand Over Mouth Music, was published in 2019. What has changed, in terms of your focus and writing practice, between then and now?

JA: With first collections poets tend to write about the home, early environments, early conditioning and even early traumas. First collections are always personal. Poets like to begin at the beginning, most of the time, to explore poems about our family, our ancestors and our world growing up – these are our first memories, our first stories and we can explore any pent-up residual rage we might have [. . .] which is all kept for the exorcism that is a poet’s debut collection. Kill the daemons. Empty the skeletons. Get it off your chest! Then you can move on.

The second collection is, in a way, more personal because the roof comes off and the concentrated truth about what matters to the poet most comes out. In terms of focus and writing practice, well – I am always writing poems and collating them – between surprising commissions that make it into collections, to obsessions, to whatever grips me at the moment. I then have a database – a.k.a, a long Google Drive doc. that takes ages to load, titled ‘all poems’ which I sew together with my editor, Deyrn Ress-Jones, to make a montage under an already selected title and theme.

Nothing has changed other than the time between collections – it took me a decade to find a publisher for my first book – no-one in Scotland wanted it, so I found it funny that Liverpool University published me and then the book won Scotland’s biggest literary prize for poetry book of the year!

I love Pavilion Press, we are a sisterhood of poets there as (so far) only women have been published. A year later, my editor said they would be interested in another book from me – imagine the joy, of writing for a publisher, instead of writing and trying to convince a publisher to publish you! That was one of the defining moments as a successful writer, I felt anyway, all those years of submitting to journals, magazines and anthologies – now they approach me and invite me to submit, often with a fee and a form before they have even read the poems!

Publishers today, as well as much of the developed world, understand that (for the most part), the industry has been created as a white patriarchal heterosexual landscape that has been oppressive and violent for a long time to many groups of people. Part of a female poet’s mission is to challenge these doctrines for better ones.

GRB: Can you tell us a little bit about how the poems you were writing, up to the point Quick Fire became a finalised MS, cohered into this collection? At what stage did the overarching theme[s] emerge, and can you describe the process you went through, to organise them into the sequence in the book?

My Editor, Deryn, helped with the ordering, she is fantastic at connecting links within themes or words. There is always intention behind the structure, otherwise, you have a shaky foundation and the reader might be slightly rattled at the lack of dissonance and charm to the chronology. I even had a last-minute slip-in poem, which just so happened to fit in exactly at the end – it was meant to be!

Quick Fire, Slow Burning is a collection of poems sifted from the times that inspired me most – from the times I was gently shoved sideways from watching a volcanic eruption on the screen to the feeling of what it was like to feel an earthquake myself in Panama; from the longing I felt, as a star-crossed lover was kept away across borders during times of restriction; to visiting a museum exhibition – but what seized me was that the last few years have been a time of great fires – a furnace of redwoods in California and explosions in Beirut, fires not from war or terrorism but also from carelessness and climate change.

On a universal level, the natural disasters called out to be spoken about and, on a cellular level, the personal wanted to be cracked open, people lost their homes, and their cities – but at the same time, I also wanted to write about how disastrous desire could be, how it could feel like love but wasn’t, how loneliness had been amplified the more separated we became.

It is a known truth that extreme weather events were linked to irreversible changes in the climate – which were caused by increased greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, a direct effect of burning fossil fuels and a slightly less direct effect of our greed. Awareness has allowed us to bring down borders, an attempt to change and transform into a more unitary planet. These liminal spaces between worlds are luminary, they give us room and time to question and request our ethics and moral code, to reinvestigate the past to redefine the future, a place to figure out how we can be better.

A Promethean narrative speaks to fire as a power source, something abstracted from its natural setting, perhaps by force. A primaeval narrative tells of fire as a companion on our journey, a link that joins humans to the living Earth. We have birthed a world with too much bad fire, too little good and too much combustion overall. We need a lot less Promethean fire and a lot more primaeval. Yes, I want to raise awareness, not just to showcase the tragedy but to show how resilient human nature can be and how communities band together in crisis and loss and how our love for each other can bring more peace to the world if we believe in positive change and the power of love.

It’s not simply about actual fires, but about what fire enables us to know. Poets know its danger and its power. I wanted to take the temperature of the world. Not an easy task! Like August Sander who desired to document the cross-section of society in his series of photographs but claimed the project was never complete – there will always be stuff to record, life is potent and archival.

GRB: Despite its regular use as a proper noun – fire is not (strictly speaking) an object but rather a process, or reaction – the liberation of heat and light through the consumption of fuel. What sort of fuel did you have to burn, to make these poems, and what were you left with afterwards?

JA: Fire itself isn’t a thing, no, it’s a reaction, exactly – heat, fuel and oxygen, that is the science – yet fire moves through biomass and consumes life like it is hungry, fire (much like a virus) is often attributed to the qualities of a living thing. The language used to describe fire further personified it as something possessed of violent appetites: fire devoured and raged. Fire is a creation of the living world – life created the oxygen and fuel it needs.

Fire’s chemistry is a biochemistry, taking apart what photosynthesis put together. The abstract concepts of fire come with the privilege of poetic license, it is felt in the imagination, the faraway metaphor, the clever couplet but the physical is felt in the body, the senses, in our reactions to catastrophe and our prayers for resolution.

How do I balance, or counterbalance it? Well, the synchronicities find themselves, plus I like to flip things on their head, declare meaning from language, and show how we are all interconnected by juxtaposition. Humanity’s firepower is unbounded. Fuel, fodder and felt experience set a circle of fires, yet it’s the living flame, eternal, unpredictable and only the bones turn to ash to be a scattered spark for the next collection. Fire breeds more fire.

GRB: I’m always interested in the poem that sits in the middle of a collection – in this case, that would be one of your longer pieces in Quick Fire, ‘isolated, together’. Is there a sense in which the book turns, or develops, from the poems that appear before this one, to the poems that come afterwards? What changes, in terms of the way the second half of the book operates, compared to the first?

JA: I’ve never thought about that, shifts from the centre. Interestingly, this middle poem was mentioned in the book’s first review from The Poetry Society as the favourite because of its flow and ‘rhapsodic’ element. It is one of my longer ones, sometimes, I just have more to say than others – plus when I have more space I relish the sounds of the language I select as the longer poems (I believe) are the best ones for performance. I said that to my editor, that people often ask for the poems I’ve performed and they are not always ones in the book just because they are longer, even the line breaks are longer, the tempo varies, so QuickFire, Slow Burning has more performance poems – this centre poem is one of my favourites to perform from the collection.

GRB: Your poem, ‘Translating the Transcendental Mountain’, makes some telling points about the influence of a gendered mindset, in terms of the way our Scottish landscape lives in writing and the popular imagination (“The men take to it like athletic swimmers / doing laps across / the blunt pyramidal landscape”). To what extent does poetry have a role, in encouraging us to ‘be’ more, in the landscapes we visit, rather than seeking to conquer or control them?

JA: I’d like to think of myself as working towards a queer ecology, challenging dominant narratives about the natural world so all living beings are empowered. We can never conquer or control Gaia, Mother Nature will surprise us infinitely each time, to fight it or make it ‘man-made’ is a losing game. Nan Shepherd was a fascinating creature who wholly surrendered, like those Romantic poets pressing up against Enlightenment, what happens if we drop the playground stunts and lend our ear to the spiritual forces that whisper beneath the competition, beneath the surface?

I get lots of what I call ‘downloads’ in nature, easy meditations under the ever-changing sky or sent into a trance by the passing of water kissing land, or I ground myself with my body finding contours in soil or sand. This all encourages answers to my endless questions and philosophical musings!

GRB: Edinburgh and its environs (Stockbridge, Portobello Beach etc.) makes repeated appearances in Quick Fire. To what extent has the city coloured or influenced your work? And how important has Edinburgh’s writing community been, in terms of supporting the development of your practice?

JA: Poetry demands that you use your intuition, sometimes more than tuition, that you grasp at the ungraspable mystery that encompasses us and you trust your feelings, no matter what, no matter how submerged they are in context, to be the psychic state of dialogue between the self and the other, the poet and the reader.

The environment is the backdrop to that dialogue, sometimes I converse with the city directly and sometimes it turns to speak to me. I am an avid traveller and prefer to write about places I have never visited before, something about the immersion into the unfamiliar that really wakes me up! But the last four years have been ones of stillness and solitude, personal illness and the ills of the world kept me from moving far beyond my periphery.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous, but I prefer aloneness to the chaos of running with a pack. I don’t join writer’s groups, I’m surprised I have a community of friends just from the events I attend! I love collaboration with other poets and artists, but only for the length of the project and practice and performance, then I retreat and walk the lonely path into the unknown! Culture and public opinion are fascinating and I’m an extrovert, sometimes even an exhibitionist, lusting for the creation of spectacle but I’m an enigma and prefer the internal compass of the self to follow for comfort. Poets are like that, we pop out to perform and experience then need to be alone to write about it, and then back out to share . . .

GRB: Widening the focus a bit, as a Scottish-Algerian woman, and a mother, born in London – how would you characterise your relationship with Scotland as a country/community?

JA: I’ve been hyphenated, displaced grappling for a sense of belonging and meaning, like most of us, I have learnt that to be human is to be haunted by loss, saved only by love and as a poet, I aim to explore how poetry speaks back to this through heritage and complex relationships with nature, place and language.

If Scottish-Algerian is my ethnicity, Scotland is my home, my mother’s birthplace, the birthplace of my children and my sanctuary for more than half my life, its culture has leaked its way through my stories, and its holdings have been absorbed from my roots. I grew up with two countries, two passports, but my birthplace of London is lost on me, I’ve lost my accent too. I’m not sad about it, I can speak in loads of different accents, I often do!

I grew up under my mother’s easel and much of my interest in ancestry comes from my mother (her stories, her painting of clans and clearances or battle scenes), working as a Scottish historical artist. Through intergenerational transmission, we transfer knowledge – we transfer our unspoken knowledge, our DNA underlying – it always speaks back to the sense of wonder in my poems.

Blood is strong, we inherit our blood group from our parents and it runs through our veins, the circulation of it around our bodies ensures we stay alive. I also think about how blood is shed through wars and immigration. How blood is spilled. For me, so much of my passion lives in my blood. I carry it through conditioning and lineage, it is my origin, my descent. The McNeills travelled far and wide from the Outer Hebrides, which showed their global influence and diaspora of the clan’s legacy, I learnt about this early on.

Now, I’m interested in exploring differences, particularly between women, in how race and sexual preference, along with ethnicity and class, establish separate priorities. Focusing on disparate social and cultural heritage and histories, this criticism speaks out for new representations, for a more diversified theory of female spectatorship (how women distinct from men interact). If up until now we have been devoted to discovering the pervasive influence of sexual difference, maybe now is the time when we, as ethnic women, come to a better understanding of the differences between ourselves.

GRB: Your collection starts and ends in South America (in Brazil, and Columbia) and you’ve said that your “affinity with South America runs deeply rooted” – along what vectors, or lines of connection does this affinity run? I’m particularly interested in the extent to which you may (or may not) have held an ‘imagined’ version of these countries in your mind, prior to your visit[s], and the extent this affected your experience when you were there.

JA: I only write about what I know and what I have experienced -autobiographical poems which have mostly been recorded in my journals at the moment of happening. So what happened was, I had been invited to perform in Medellin in Colombia, the biggest poetry festival in the world where the audience no longer resembled people but more like plankton! But I was recovering from a bike accident a few years ago, and when I was in the theatre waiting for surgery on my skull, I met two jaguars under anaesthesia – they are my shamanic animal and I’ve always dreamed of South America but only wrote about it when I was there.

They kept my invitation for the following year and we wrote hearty poetic emails to each other in the meantime. I started to get a sense of the people there. South Americans are bright, bold and colourful, they wear their emotions on their sleeves, they are passionate above all and they love loud music! In comparison, British people seem more reserved, less wild, and less inclined to delve into the spiritual, the syntactical, the soul.

I don’t share any blood, but I share spirit. Colombia was everything I expected, even the darker parts, and since Creative Scotland funded my plane tickets I had a bit to spare for further travels. Panama was more political than I thought and Mexico was gorgeous and lively but Costa Rica disappointed me, it was not the paradisical, ancestral land I imagined, it was too technicolour, tourist-driven and not sunny – and, oh don’t get me started on the bugs that dropped from the ceiling onto your covers in the night!

But that’s a really great question, I talk about it in my travel memoir, Lonerlust, a book which needs a second draft and then back out for more submissions (it’s the journey, not the destination!) and what about all our expectations – Paris syndrome, it’s a thing, people visit the city imagining all they have read about in books or watched in movies and then are sick by the letdown.

GRB: In your ‘Acknowledgements’, you mention reading these poems, ‘over and over until they felt perfect’ (and there’s a real sense of the importance of word/sound and mouth/feel in lines like, “haunting & haunted, hauling the herring / from the harbour, the liquids, the metals.”) – can you tell us something about how you use sound and music, as well as meaning in your poetry?

JA: I use sound and music as well as meaning in my poetry, yes – sound is important, that’s why I feel the poems should be read aloud – I enjoy the theatricality of reading them! When you write a book and it gets published, aside from the odd review, you don’t see any reactions from people reading it at home in their beds, with performance and live audience, you have an immediate response – it’s a perfect accoutrement to the editing process. I hope there’s magic at play, with ‘spell’ing so when the words are recited by readers they carry the same pleasure on the palette – some words taste better than others and when in rhythmic concession, diction can become a dance.

I want to create something that is moving, magnetic, celebratory and channels voices from centuries of our deep burials. I also have just started working with sound artist Alanna Craig and the Arab Arts Festival in Liverpool in July commissioned us to do a piece, a twelve-minute poem with a soundscape of SFX and backing track – it brought the poem to life, a poem about my Berber heritage mixed with Scotland’s essence – it was haunting and the diegetic sound added something special to the language!

GRB: On a related subject – you’re widely-regarded as an amazing performer, as well as a writer of poetry. How do the dynamics of performance impact on what you write, and how does the anima of your poetry change, when it’s read to an audience, compared to its existence on the page?

JA: Am I! That’s really sweet to say, thank you! I also really love your word ‘anima’ and it makes me think about the infinite set of archetypes within the collective unconsciousness! I think it’s back to the sound question with an answer for this one when the words have a voice and become hypnotic and dramaturgical – just love it!

I loved acting when I was at school and took part in musical productions, then before I started writing my dream was to be a TV presenter – well, I wanted to introduce Top of The Pops! So performing my poetry at festivals and doing live Arts reviews for BBC Radio Scotland I feel like I am living the dream – I just had no idea how they would be combined, so I went to Stirling University and studied Film and Media and English Literature and took it from there! It worked!

GRB: What are you reading right now, and would you like to recommend a couple of your current favourite books to our readers (these can be poetry, prose or anything else you’re enjoying)?

JA: I mostly read fiction at the moment so I keep in the right mental tone for my novel writing; Coco Mellors, Ottessa Moshefgh, Deborah Levy, Rumaan Alam, Megan Hunter, and Akwaeke Emezi are recent discoveries. I keep dipping into Anais Nin’s Diaries and essays by Marie Darrieussecq and I adore Olivia Laing for her insight, but yearn to fill my soul with poetry so I’m always sneaking it in! I’ve been revisiting Lorca and Rimbaud – and a modern poetry collection I loved recently was Safia Elhillo’s Girls that Never Die’.

GRB: Finally, what writing or other projects are you working on, at the moment?

JA: I am writing my debut novel — I started in Denmark last September and I hope to have the first draft finished as the year cycles back to Autumn. Then I’ll work through my second draft and look for a literary agent – I’ve never needed one before, poets don’t need agents, but novelists do.

I’m happy, I have a lot of words and it has been incredible to work the spine of a narrative and character development, revealing the psyche through dialogue, instead of conceptual themes. Poetry can be so abstract, that’s the bounty and beauty of it, but prose needs to mean exactly what it says it means – that takes a lot of discipline for my wandering mind!

I’m also Poet in Residence at Edinburgh Park, where I have named new streets after famous poets and continue to work on their arts programme with a lit. zine called ‘Polaris’ which commissions poets to write work in response to art on-site and I have curated and hosted events there – I’m a huge fan of poetry in public places.

Lastly, I am also mentoring, through the Scottish Young Makars at The Scottish Poetry Library, and through the Scottish Book Trust – sharing all my learned techniques, experiences and cobwebbed wisdom with the next generations of poets. I had no idea I could do it, yet I have mentored four poets now, it turns out I’m good at it! – and it’s such a thrill to see these poets encouraged and doing well in the busy business of it all!

The start of the summer for me was busy with gigs and performances across the U.K, I plan to spend the end of it sitting under my big Saxe-Coburg windows watching thirty-three shades of green change hue in the shifting light and finishing my novel. If you’re an agent reading this – reach out to me!

Janette Ayachi, thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions!

Quick Fire, Slow Burning is available now from Pavillion Press and good booksellers.#

This is part of a collaborative project between Glasgow Review of Books and Bella Caledonia. The Glasgow Review of Books is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. They accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots.