In leena aboutaleb’s THALASSA, the speaker grapples with inheritance, place, and language itself as she grieves her brother who has passed. In poems that follow a kind of dreamlike video game structure as the speaker moves through the underworld as she defines and understands it, aboutaleb reckons with questions of memory and myth. Moving fluidly between language, place, and form, and anchored always by a deep generosity towards the texts that shape one’s sense of self and understanding of the world, THALASSA is brilliant and sharp reflection on the ways empire and landscape shape grief and the everyday.
In this interview, we discuss the influence of film, landscape, translation and multilingualism, and more.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): To start off, the collection is largely framed by the speaker’s loss of her brother—and how that grief is something that carries. Could you talk a bit about how you see the role of language and poetry in relationship to memory and grief?
leena aboutaleb (LA): Language is like excavation, like building. Things are solidified into meaning and values by a collectivist agreement. We use language as a framework to create reality or to define it, to an extent, in so far as a mutual understanding. That’s one function I have always been fascinated by; the curiosity and construction of reality via language. It extends, then, into poetry: a beautiful functionality. I wanted very much to offer my memory and grief as a sort of everlasting torch of and to my family. My family means the world to me and losing Yousef is a fundamental loss of myself. So it became a task in grief; I would, in humanity’s conception of mortality, immortalise my brother and family to show that they are loved across all realms.
VM: Building on that, myth is central to how this speaker’s world in built out—we see this both in interpersonal grief in the poems themselves, but also more broadly, in terms of the structure of the collection itself—I’m thinking in particular of the [UNDERWORLD] sections that periodically appear in bold on pages of their own, that become a sort of framing device for the collection. Myth, in your poetry, is both something enacted in the everyday and something much larger. How do you approach writing that tension of myth?
LA: It ties in with language; that curiosity I have for our social reality’s construction. The tension of the daily and this larger aspect doesn’t necessarily occur to me. There’s always the interest, in mythology, of who the hero is before the transmutation into a ‘hero.’ It’s a question of accessibility. Can I, then, also access these spaces, these myths? Can I, too, have access to this wondrous realm where the expanse of worlds and powers and fates work to explain the depth of humanity and being alive, of death? Over the years, I’ve felt it’s like making bread—a metaphor I use often—in that it’s a daily labour and choice. Every day we are alive until we are not. The daily, for me, is more compelling than the end in some ways. Each day we build our lives and live them. We can forget that when we are always thinking backwards or forwards, or even too much in the now. But I always wonder what my life will look like at the end of it all, and so I look into the daily as a map to understand. I suppose that is the tension for me. One does not exist without the other.
VM: Beyond the speaker’s relationship to her brother, there are also other ways kinship and lineage come up in the collection—particularly in Part III, where the speaker addresses her grandfather. How do you see kinship and lineage working in this collection and in your work more broadly?
LA: Micro feeds into macro. I’ve talked about this before, but it took me a few years to truly sit with my intentions for writing and to arrive into a place where I feel fulfilled writing from. My grandfather was a surprise even to myself in the collection. On October 7, 2023, I was in a workshop hosted by Kundiman on writing letters to ghosts. I was thinking about Palestine all day, that kind of prison break, and I wondered what else I desired to say to Yousef—only our grandfather became my subject. I kept writing him these letters as the genocide began and to my mother, who began to share family stories. It became this melody in my head. I had always been close to my grandfather, though he died when I was 7, and I love him deeply. I have spent over a decade trying to piece his life together by sitting with my family members to learn about him. That curiosity of him, of trying to piece together his human life from so many different sources to form a cohesive picture of him throughout different points of his life, was probably one of the openings into my understanding that we are never just one, singular person. But ultimately, I am my mother’s daughter, something I came to fully embody in my grief. My love for them, the glory and griefs of their lives, and the ruins of everything—I wanted to preserve it. It was always about the act of love. I am never only leena, but I am made of so many people whose names and faces and lives I can’t imagine and it is incredible that they lived and one day, centuries later, I, too, live. How can I write about the interior without acknowledging their lives? How can I not be curious about them and love them? My work can never be isolated from my family and loved ones; it’s the immutable fact that I am made of them.
VM: You write in “ENTRYWAY TO CAPITAL VII” “Translation as underworld, underbody.” In “Hijacked Interiors,” you write: “I dream of my dead in Arabic.” The poems also move between languages sometimes, and thinking about this line and language in the collection more broadly, I’m wondering if you might be able to speak about how you see translation and multilingualism in your work.
LA: Many people I love exist in Arabic. There are things I only understand in Arabic, especially at an emotive level. When I grieved, I understood grief and love from my mother, and so I entered Amman. It is never just language, but all that it holds. The sway of the trees, the wind, the fruits, the land itself, the jokes, the movement—everything. That is the fullness of Arabic when I think of the people I love. Yes, I can imagine my favourite aunt in Germany but there is always a disconnect, an incompleteness to the image—the fullness of their lives, how do you translate that? How do you translate yourself? The building of language in THALASSA is never meant to isolate non-Arabic speakers, but it is an attempt at holding space for all the worlds my family are alive in.
VM: In “Bridegroom,” you write: “The only way I’m made real is in this script. The director gives me shape to inhabit.” Thinking about this, and also about the fact that you also work in the medium of film, I’m curious how those two modes of art inform or shape each other across your artistic practice.
LA: Film is visual, truly. I know I can write images in my poems, but I’ve always loved film. My dad loves filming our lives, and my brothers and I always wanted to take turns playing director. I grew up loving plays and ballets, and making collages as a teenager. I wanted very much as a child to be a ballerina—to have this language in my own body and performance. But I am always so shy about performing in front of a crew, so I pivoted. I began to think of the visual, the cinematic worlds available through image and how the relationship between text and image can complement one another. Things are already overly visual in my head and it’s the main way I learn as well, so there’s quite a few layers of translation that I go through when I write a poem. It is not only words, the translations between Arabic and English, but how to also take these images and alter their form into an entirely other medium.
VM: Witnessing, and the desire for it, is something that comes up throughout the collection; how do you see the relationship between witnessing and language, and more specifically, witnessing and poetry?
LA: I want to reframe witnessing here. While it holds political connotations, it isn’t the same as witnessing in Islam, in my perspective. Witnessing in Islam has a severity to it, and now I am unable to remove it from genocide. It’s what is recorded at the end of times, whereas in THALASSA, witnessing is a testament to myself and my family. It is also a furious desire to show how even the small things people easily dismiss can and do lead to destruction and ruptures. Would my brother be alive if we were back home? If the geopolitical and colonial worlds no longer held us hostage? What would safety look like in our societies had we never been colonised and occupied? Would my mother have married my father if she had been able to stay in Palestine? What would it mean if I did not have English, if in another world it is totally irrelevant? Who would I be if certain conditions were nonexistent? Mostly, would my brother be alive if we were free? How different would our lives look under that liberation? THALASSA sits in that mediation, particularly. My brother could’ve had the chance to live a long, dignified life. He deserved to, and so do many others. It’s pointing to that: we would have lived if we could have.
VM: I found the “ENTRYWAY TO CAPITAL” poems particularly interesting formally—how they recur, and how they might be both read as a series and as one long poem broken into sections. Could you talk about the process of writing that poem or series and how that came to be?
LA: When I began to think of THALASSA, I realised I understood it as a map. It seems to be the primary way I relate to my work, always functioning as a cartography in some way. ENTRYWAY follows the speaker as she enters different parts—think of it like villages—of the Underworld. How did I decide where she was? It’s mostly how I felt when writing certain poems, things I may have been thinking through or spaces I was passing through. Desire, for instance, is from the winter I spent reading Sappho. In grief, I was amazed at how I could feel anything at all and found the mundane intricacies of daily life to be so surreal when I was embroiled in such horrendous grief. How could I feel curiosity or want or joy when my brother is dead? But I did. ENTRYWAY allows that to exist, because it tries to show the fullness of being alive while grieving. You don’t stop being a human just because death has arrived to you, and it’s a painful thing to reconcile. You wonder how the world goes on when you are so bereft and in such misery, when someone you love across all the worlds is no longer with you, but the flowers are still growing and you have to learn to accept that somehow.
VM: Could you talk a bit about the relationship between video games and Legend of Zelda and your poetry?
LA: The first Legend of Zelda game I ever played with my brothers was Wind Waker. It was one of the only iterations where they gave the main character, Link, a sibling. He had to save his little sister and so, he has to go across sea on a dragon boat to rescue her and the princess Zelda. Because I was playing it with my older brothers, I felt a lot of love and relatability to that plot. When my father had bought it for us, it was with a rule that we had to share the game, so we had to play together. It ended up becoming one of my favorite memories growing up. My living brother and I, Kareem, we still play it together—it’s never left our family.
There’s a refusal of linear time, because they never get to escape their fate. They have to keep living it—how much grief and sorrow Link must have. It’s a tri-force, so it’s Link, Zelda and Ganondorf/Ganon. They’re always reincarnated, but it’s only Link and Ganondorf who remember, and Zelda doesn’t remember until later on. It’s always a heartbreaking thing to realize that Link is carrying around all of these memories and waiting for her to remember.
I’m a bad gamer in the sense that I will take forever to finish the main quest, and I love to do side quests. The last few Legend of Zelda games have been open world, which makes it all the more compelling for me to not finish the plot. Along the way, you meet so many people and they fill the game with so many things to do. When I was thinking about the construction of the underworld, I was thinking about it in the sense of a video game and as a map, because you have to unlock parts of the map as you go through the game. You don’t just get a map that’s complete, and that’s part of what THALASSA does. You don’t really know where you’re ending up with the speaker. The only think you know is that you’re dropped into the underworld, and she’s making her way through it. As you go through it, you begin to understand all these entryways, which function as villages. Each village she’s in is something she’s ruminating on, that she has to experience, that she has to accept.
Something else I’d like to add is that Summer Farah is one of my best friends, and she’s also the editor of this book. One of the things I really loved in her pamphlet, I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024) was how much she tied in Legend of Zelda and Palestine. She is a passageway where I learned that I can bring my interests into the poems; it doesn’t have to just be literary legacies. I can tell you that I really love video games, and it is a part of how I write and how I understand my family. Our friendship had such an impact on the book and the way it ended up being written.
VM: Sappho is a poet who has influence on your other work as well—I’m thinking also of your film Oracle. Could you talk about your relationship to Sappho and how that shapes your work?
LA: It’s such a deep loss that so much of her work is missing, but it makes the fragments so much more compelling. They are like a map or puzzle that you put together. She also has a multitude of translations, making her work even more multi-dimensional. I started reading her when I bought a used copy of If Not, Winter—the Anne Carson translation of the fragments—from an old library. I read it one winter in Amman, around the time I was rereading Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is the first recorded epic we have so far in human history, and is the origin of the hero’s journey. I found something very moving in that, especially because I’m usually so against the conception of linear time and the hero’s journey works so much in linear time. I’ve thought about it more in a cyclical sense of what it means to be alive and that you are constantly searching, and so the hero’s journey never has a tidy ending.
There’s an epigraph from Sappho in the opening of THALASSA, where Sappho writes about who I presumed was her brother; I remember sitting down at the café and reading that portion. It snapped me into a tension where I felt that this was another bridge I could use. This was the eternity of grief that has carried over through centuries. It felt very surreal for me to be able to stretch my hand out into the past and to hold onto someone else who’d also lost their brother.
When it comes to Oracle, Youssef and I were working on a film about the Mediterranean Sea, and were thinking about our relationships as Egyptians, as a Palestinian, to the sea. Often in Western readings of history, the Eastern Mediterranean, where we’re from, is dismissed unless it’s about the Hellenistic or Roman Empire. I always found that peculiar when I came to America. I would hear in history classes the teacher explaining something from a Western Eurocentric perspective, and ignoring the fullness of the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. We are very much present in the Mediterranean and we are Mediterranean. That doesn’t negate other identities but it does allow for a fullness to be present and to show similarities and how opaque borders really are.
VM: Could you talk more about your relationship to water and how you approach writing that?
LA: I grew up along the sea, the Persian Gulf in Kuwait. That has always been a very core memory of mine. When we would go back to Egypt for the summers, we would always be along the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea. There was always this deep love I had for it growing up. Both my parents loved the sea, so it was very much inherited. My mother had studied marine biology in Jordan for a short while in university. She was in an area called Aqaba. I always found it romantic that from this tri-point of Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt, in the Red Sea area specifically, you can see the other country. I grew up wondering if my parents had ever stood on the edges of their own countries at one point at the same time and were looking at the sea, and they didn’t know each other, and didn’t know their futures would cross. The sea allows for a lot of that movement.
The sea is something I was raised with. Where I’m from, in Cairo, it runs along the Nile, as does the city. It has always been a part of my life. My brothers are the same way. When I write about water, it takes so many different forms because I’m thinking about myself, about my family, about history, about movement, about the absurdity of borders. For me, it’s just another way of stretching your hand out and meeting someone.
VM: Who are some of your influences as a poet?
LA: For THALASSA, I was re-reading Gilgamesh and sitting in Jinjin Xu’s There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife; Diana Khoi Nguygen’s Ghost Of; Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments in If Not Winter; and a conversation on translation, ‘Faithful, Lossy, Radical: Talking Translation With 최 Lindsay & Erik Isberg’ with Sarah Clark.
More generally, I love Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, K-Ming Chang, Safia Elhillo, Leila Chatti, Phoebe Giannisi, Solmaz Sharif, JinJin Xu, basalt hsu, Tracy Fuad, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Summer Farah, Jess Rizkallah, Mary Ruefle, Madeline Miller…I have so many influences truly…if I keep talking I’m going to start telling you about my favourite mangas and video games even more.
VM: What were the landscapes you wrote the collection in and how did the poem change across different landscapes?
LA: I wrote the poems mostly in Amman, in Jordan. I am my mother’s daughter, and so when my brother passed away in America, I felt that I couldn’t be there. I tried going back to Cairo and ended up in Amman by accident. I knew how to grieve in that landscape because all I could think about was my mother, who was partially raised in Jordan. So much of how my mother raised me is rooted in Palestine. Working through and having that grief, and learning who I am in grief make so much more sense in that physical landscape. The majority of the book (up until the last part) was written entirely in Jordan.
I had started writing the third part of it around October 7, 2023, during the Kundiman workshop I previously mentioned. I went into that workshop with the intention of writing to my brother, thinking there was maybe something more I wanted to say to him. I ended up writing all these letters to my grandfather. It was at the time that I was supposed to do a residency in Italy, but the genocide had just begun. I had these non-refundable plane tickets and so my best friend Julia and I entered Europe. We went around, and by the time I got to Berlin, I just thought: God, this is so necrotic, I don’t want to be here. I booked a ticket to Amman for the rest of the winter. That’s where I finished writing the final part of the book, between the EU and Amman.
When I re-entered Amman, returning to the safety of not needing to explain my humanity to anyone around me, of knowing that everyone around me believed in Palestinian liberation in its entirety, it was a relief. You don’t have to walk around on edge, wondering if you’re going to see a kidnapped poster. You know that everyone is with you, and that you are part of this community. That was both a kinship and solace, and that’s where the poems were able to circle back to my brother and have a sense of release. It is why the book ends in the sea—at the end of the day the narrator realizes she has to leave the underworld. She cannot keep staying there because she’s alive. She works her way out of it but it’s a passage that comes with acceptance. The toll of that passage is that she still has to keep her ghosts with her; her dead are with her, and it’s both a comfort and a responsibility.
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leena aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer who asks you to commit to the Palestinian liberation struggle. She is the author of THALASSA forthcoming with Game Over Books. Her pamphlet, Expeditions of Projection, was released in 2023 (VIBE). Her film, ‘Oracle,’ co-produced with Youssef ElNahas debuted in Venice, 2025. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow, a Kundiman fellow and Tin House scholar. Read her work at www.leenaboutaleb.onl.
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Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature and an MFA in Fiction from UMass Amherst. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and edits Liminal Transit Review.
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