In Jaia Hamid Bashir’s The Afterlife of Sweetness, matrilineal inheritance, silence, language, and place come together to examine mythologies of the self and of culture at large. In images that are both abundant and luxurious, the speaker engages with questions of hunger, of want, of yearning, ultimately arriving at an always shifting and dynamic understanding of self in relation to other and to the world.
In this interview, we spoke about place, language, myth-making, and more.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): The images and the language of The Afterlife of Sweetness are so abundant, it was such a delight to read. There’s such a rich focus on sensory details, and the intersections of the interior and exterior worlds in this collection. I’m thinking in particular of the way the very first poem evokes the geographies of the American West, and the moment in “The Strangers” where the speaker says “I returned / to our hometown. I never wanted to[,]” as well as the poem “Brine,” where you write: “The word Panjab comes from panch and ab: / the five waters. But I am from one body of water—/ Great Salt Lake, buried, barbed, barren…” Could you speak to your relationship to place and how that shaped the worlds that you build in these poems?
Jaia Hamid Bashir (JHB): That’s one of the central questions I’m always engaging with when I’m living within the poetic imaginary and how it intersects with autobiography. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Pakistani immigrants. My dad immigrated here as a teenager, and as did my mother. So, in a way, I kind of have this third culture experience, because my parents were also in formative years when they moved here, rather than being adults. And that also changes the relationship to the “homeland” as well, because they only had so much of an attachment to Pakistan before leaving it at such a young age. The Pakistan of their memories is no longer congruent with the Pakistan of today. With that in mind, I’m always thinking about belonging, and what spaces mean to someone who is part of and thinking and negotiating a diaspora. Utah is very homogenous. It’s very well known for being not only ethnically homogenous, predominantly white, but also religiously homogenous with the LDS faith. I grew up frequently being the only person of color in a room. That experience isn’t odd for me. It’s actually almost comfortable because it’s so familiar, and I find that to be very melancholy in a way. I also mention New York City quite a bit in the book, because when I moved to New York City, it almost felt like an extreme culture shock to be around so many people like myself, and navigating that as a woman of color is really sad and difficult and curiosity provoking about navigating what it means to be a person at all, but also a person who exists in these intersections and this larger matrices of identity and belonging and yearning to be part of something. The book, in some ways, asks these questions, but also arrives in engaging with loneliness and solitude and disbelonging. And what do we do if that’s part of our lived reality?
VM: The poems in this collection are deeply concerned with language, and the movement between languages. In the poem “The Shadow Self,” you write “Language is both a cage and a portal.” And of course, the second section of the collection is particularly deeply concerned with language, as the poems move between English, Urdu, and Spanish. How did the focus on language shift or grow as you wrote more of these poems?
JHB: I think of poetry as a medium where language is the material. In some ways, all of poetry is an engagement with language, whether that’s from the semiotic, semantic, linguistic, or etymological level. It takes so many shapes and forms. The potency of poetry, and what poetry is as an art, medium, craft, practice and landscape of thinking, is an engagement with language itself. Through that, I was thinking about my own relationship to language. I love to ask people what language they dream in, especially when they’re ESL speakers or just multilingual, because there are so many languages that live within us, conscious, unconscious, subconscious. Especially with poetry, if you’re trying to find the words, when you have so many languages, there’s a polyphonic experience happening inside of you that comes out on the page.
VM: I’m particularly interested in how you engage with the orange across the collection—as metaphor, such as in the poem “Aubade in Another Universe,” where you write “I want warmth the way oranges store / winter in their pulp” and also as something that denotes linguistic movement, such as in the poem “In Dead Horse Point, We Are Alone.” Could you speak to how you see the orange throughout the collection and in your work as a whole?
JHB: With all symbols in my poetry, they just exist so deeply in my toolbox, in my imaginary. Looking back at my work the orange is doing a lot of different work. “Dead Horse Point, We Are Alone” is one of the oldest poems in this collection. I wrote that in my MFA. I think it’s like one of four poems from my MFA that made it into my debut. I love Spanish, and one of my goals, that I don’t know if I will achieve in this lifetime, is that I wish I could write poems in Spanish. I’m deeply obsessed with the language for multiple reasons; one being that as a child, the only people of color I really interacted with outside of my own small community of South Asians was folks who spoke Spanish. And so, it was this language that was constantly surrounding me. When we think of the United States and its languages, Spanish, in many parts of the United States, is the lingua franca. “In Dead Horse Point, We Are Alone” came from playing a game with a friend who is a Spanish speaker from Colombia; we were interested in how Romance languages and Hindi-Urdu come from the same linguistic root, the Indo-European language family. We’re always looking at what roots are like and what shared branches of that tree are. The orange, for me, evokes our planet. It’s spherical, it’s circular. It’s also something that feels whole but is segmented in its interiority, which is also how I feel; I’m all these different identities. That’s how the orange is operating in many of these poems, because the rind is so bitter and the interior is so sweet. One of the dilemmas of this collection is about being a person who commits sins and is imperfect and just grappling with being human. It’s also a nice note to believe that there can be all these other layers of the self.
VM: Hunger and want plays such a central role in how this speaker inhabits the world. In “Eyeball Halves,” you write: “This morning, hunger set me going / to write about reciprocation.” In the poem “Con La Serpiente I” you write: “speaking in octaves, searching for variations / of hunger to speak to myself.” These poems also have such detailed, material landscapes rendered in such sharp, vivid images—how do you see the relationship between image and materiality and hunger and/or desire?
JHB: This could really just turn into a conversation about Platonic versus Aristotelian ideals. I won’t go there. But with that in mind, I believe the image is more of that “secret third thing,” to use internet brainrot language. I’m going to resist saying that the image is a stamp or a print of the actual material. I don’t believe that to be the only way an image exists. Frequently I hear poets talk about the image as the mimetic trying to take from the real and make into language. I’m not sure I totally believe that, because I’m also really interested in how something exists in the mind. When we conjure something in our mind, it becomes, in a way, real. And again, that’s not material, that is somatic, neurochemical, maybe even spiritual. But the image is something. It’s not just a rendering of the material or the lived world. It’s a living something. Materiality, the sensual world, is so complex, and language is so limited. When I’m writing poetry and I’m writing about a landscape, a person, or something that I have encountered in my human experience, it’s a mode of translating. You’re trying to take something and put it into language, which is immaterial. That kind of experience is the ecotone in which poetry occurs.
Yearning is the engine of the human experience. There is very little that humans do that is not directly tied to yearning. For those of us who are not living in “survival mode” I would argue that almost everything experienced or done is towards and driven by yearning. Yearning takes on polysemous modes. People think yearning is often about sexuality and sensuality, and of course, that’s so present in the poems. But there’s also a yearning of wanting to experience the self in a way that feels congruent with the dream self or the fantasy self or the ideal self. There’s also yearning for belonging, a sense of conviviality and a sense of playing Tetris, that puzzle piece experience. There’s also yearning for wanting to be with the divine. So many different sacred religious frameworks are about unification with the divine or obliteration of the ego, and that’s a type of wanting, yearning. Hunger is the way yearning is frequently experienced because in the book, it’s literal hunger—there’s so much food in the book—but also hunger for emotions and experiences.
VM: Silence also plays such a central role in the collection, even as the language of the poems is abundant and luxurious. In the poem “Con La Serpiente II” you write: “Between us—/ sometimes that genre of silence.” In the poem “The Shadow Self,” you write: “Things that remember / what they were before / they fell.” How do you approach the tension between silence and abundance as a poet?
JHB: I have synesthesia, which I talk about online a lot. My experience of being in an MFA was realizing how I write and experience poems in the body. I don’t think I’m unique in that way. I’ve been reading a lot of studies coming out of neuroscience that show that the idea of five sensory experiences is so reductive. Formally, the language being very abundant is coming from the idea that we are people writing from bodies and particular ways of processing experience. That’s where a lot of my formal engagement with poetry arises from. It’s very hard to write minimally. It’s against my natural energy. I’m kind of making an impasto painting, layers upon layers—there’s a palimpsest happening. For me, a lot of revision is taking off those layers because there’s such an impulse to put them down. Silence occurring in the collection is also because silence itself is such a large part of language. Especially when we think about linguistics, and history and logic, the word is what it’s not. So, in a way, language and its relationship to silence is what it is and what it’s not. But I also think silence is a genre of intimacy. I talk to friends a lot about what intimacy, vulnerability, connection, look like, and what comes up again and again is the ability to be silent. And the ability to be quiet with someone. Why do I want to make a Depeche Mode reference here?
Honestly, one of my favorite feelings in the entire world is being quiet in New York City. I can go an entire day without speaking in New York City. I don’t think that could ever happen to me in Utah, because there’s just so much other sensory phantasmagoria occurring around me that I don’t need to speak to be heard or seen. I’m just part of this larger, amorphous, human, collective feeling. Silence is occurring also because the speaker of these poems is so adamant about finding the right language, or learning language, or being part of language. There’s also a relinquishing, that There’s also a relinquishing, that maybe language cannot be found and that silence is also holy.
VM: How do you see the role of myth-making in the trajectory of the speaker across the collection?
JHB: There’s that beautiful Joan Didion line that’s quoted so frequently, but it’s because it’s so resonant: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We’re always telling stories. We’re a culture obsessed with story, with narrative. The self is a story we tell as well. That might be controversial, but the self is a constantly evolving story—the story we tell ourselves and the stories other people tell about us. So, I think that myth is just elevated story—a story that takes on a grander role, that becomes outside of time, outside of place. The word myth also carried this connotation of being symbolic rather than a one-to-one of what the person or story is. When you’re part of a diaspora community, a lot of what you’re actually inheriting is also more similar to mythology—there’s this story of reverence that’s being passed down to you that’s more fantastical than the thing itself. With that in mind, I’m interested in the myths we tell each other. For me, I’ve always been interested in how we think of the human experience through symbols across space and time, that are deeply ingrained into how we think of being human. Myths become a synecdoche to think about how a culture thinks about themselves.
VM: Who are some of your influences as a poet, and how did they influence the poems in this collection?
JHB: There are so many poems in the collection that explicitly mention Plath. There’s even a poem in the collection, “Girlish,” that I wrote after I decided to sit down and write a Plath poem, and this was my version of it. Like a lot of young women in the United States, my poetry reading experience really started with Plath and Emily Dickinson, and then grew out of them being the nucleus. I was reading a lot of what I would consider nature poets, ecological poets—Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright. My biggest influences are Dennis Johnson, James Tate, Lucie Brock-Broido. I was reading a lot of Bhanu Kapil. There’s just too many to name! Frank Stanford is a huge influence of mine as well. I studied Jorie Graham quite a bit. Anne Carson—she was the first “working poet” that I met, and I was nineteen years old, and it changed the entire trajectory of my life; for me, poetry being a place to play with language and myth and human experience really comes from her influence. Sebald, Paul Celan, Jack Gilbert. I revere poets—they’re my idols. They’re an important part of how I think about poetry. And obviously, the people I’m around, who I consider to be peers, influence me so much—everyone who’s publishing right now is so influential. I like to take the pulse of what’s occurring in poetry and let that guide what I want to do and what I want to bring to poetry.
Jaia Hamid Bashir is the author of The Afterlife of Sweetness (Ohio State University Press, 2026) and the chapbook Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables, 2024). The daughter of Pakistani artists, she has published poetry in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative, and journals across the United States and internationally. In addition, she has published speculative fiction in Black Warrior Review and Nimrod Journal. She is the winner of the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize and the Ralph Hamilton Editors’ Prize from Rhino Poetry. She has been honored by the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, the Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize, and the Best of the Net award. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in Utah with her husband. She will be a visiting poet at Westminster University in 2026.
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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 from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. 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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