In our latest Fellow in Focus lunchtime discussion, Rooney Writer Fellow Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe sat down with fellow poet and writer Seán Hewitt of Trinity’s School of English to discuss her project at the Trinity Long Room Hub and to explore how communicating without written language and without a narrative brings us closer to the more-than-human world.
Nidhi is a poet, pacifist and fabulist and has been appointed as the 2023 Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub following Caitriona Lally’s inaugural fellowship in 2022.
Speaking to Seán Hewitt, Nidhi told a rapt audience in the Hub’s Ideas Space about her early life and her journey to becoming a poet. “I never thought I would be a poet,” Nidhi said as she spoke of her “migratory” life between the Middle East, India, and the US. Having lost her mother to illness just days after embarking on a creative writing degree in Ireland, she turned somewhat “accidentally” to poetry, but not before a period of losing her ability to speak or even “string a coherent sentence together” in any language.
These writings, and “doodles, glyphs and dreams” became the "seeds” of her first collection of poetry Auguries of a Minor God, which was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. This was not intentional says Nidhi, adding that she had to “learn how to become a poet.” Nominated for numerous poetry prizes, the collection was chosen as Book of the Year by both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.
In a fascinating conversation reflecting on the limitations of written language and the inspiration for her current project, Nidhi spoke of her time spent visiting a monastery with her parents in India and the tantra magical practices she observed there. She remembered the folktales and mythologies of different cultures which kept her grounded in a somewhat ‘itinerant’ life before settling in Ireland (she also spent time travelling and living with indigenous community in New Zealand, New Mexico and in South Western United States).
Nidhi’s current project the ‘Honey and the Hare’ picks up on some of those mythical themes (including the prominence and symbolism of the hare) and the relationship to the more-than-human world.
It looks at indigenous languages and the other beings that are native to this land. The hare, she says, is an example of the oldest indigenous surviving mammal in Ireland and bees have been recorded as being here before Christianity. The hare was also part of a creation myth in the Algonquin tribe where they saw it as the great creator, she noted.
Through this body of work, she is concerned with “how we might reacquaint ourselves with other beings who have inhabited this space long before us,” and that poetry seemed like a natural “way in” because of the oral element to it.
“What I’m trying to do with this project is to find ways that we can transcend the meaning of words and move towards the meaning that sounds carry, so it’s not necessarily the definition of a word that helps me understand something; it’s the tonality of the voice, it’s the rhythm, it’s the melody...”
Nidhi suggests that we need to reattune our ears to the sounds we have lost familiarity with and that “we have to reassess our place in the world...we’re not the centre of everything.”