Rakyah Assam: How I Wrote ‘The Scientist’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

I think the way that foreignness affects your relationship with the place that you’re in has a lot of parallels to the way that we operate in dreams in this way.

The Scientist

Night is recorded at destination to fall at 5:28pm



(But before that:
ballroom bathed blue, sunken
waltz, underwater serenade, dinner served
on china plates with cobalt oxide
print portraits of
sleepy scholars
write the day in invisible ink from
the impossible inkwell of the sea bubbles
heated by underwater fires, the
surface shines
under red hot
town house windows Van Gough
the tides, star spotted with white seagulls,
the dusk star venus, a fairy moon,
a single cloud,
a buttercream
smear of birthday cake memories.
The air is remembering raspberry slushies,
a childhood fascination with birds,
and predators
their oil slick
heads now ducking for fish under
five metres to your left now)

You describe your poetry practice as connecting the surreal and foreignness. Could you say a bit more about that?

I think that foreignness has a lot of negative connotations, both from paranoia concerning an invasive Other, and of being foreign as some very sad, fractured experience heavily concerned with the loss of what you’ve left behind. I’m much more interested in exploring foreignness as a neural mode of being, one where the idea of conventionality is disturbed through travel or even the passage of time, and you’re forced to quickly adapt your logic. I think the way that foreignness affects your relationship with the place that you’re in has a lot of parallels to the way that we operate in dreams in this way.

This poem begins in a factual mode but soon falls into a chain of association. Is this a strategy that you often employ?

The employment of this technique related to the context of this poem, which explores two different sides of science. It starts with the act of taking a measurement, and then as an aside explores all the wonder and childhood fascination that culminated in the execution of that act. Though punctuation is used to denote the main body of the poem as an afterthought, the attention paid to the scene and its comparative length to the initial statement shows how important this part of science is. Science and poetry are both exercises in finding extraordinary things in the details of the ordinary.

You have some intriguing images. Do these just come to you? Do you use automatic writing? Or is there some other method that you use?

The images are descriptions of things that I was literally seeing. I wrote this poem whilst studying for a science degree by the sea, when in the winter after working for hours straight I would go out onto the jetty as the sun set and the sky turned the most indulgent blue. Being in all of that blue light felt luxurious. The black birds of prey were literally these giant black cormorants which would dip under the water so close to where I was standing. When I decided I wanted to write a poem about that experience I waited until the next day to go outside and very purposefully stand in that feeling and look at the things around me.