Hello beautiful creative people!
We are excited to reveal May's poet of the month; the brilliant Dana Dajani. Dana is an absolute powerhouse of a creator, and recipient of an array of accolades including Emirates Woman Artists of the Year. She's also an all-round fascinating person - so we'll let her do the talking!
If you'd prefer to watch this interview, the full video is below!
Hi Alex! it's good to be with you, and with Poems by Post! My name is Dana Dajani, and to all who don't know me I am a spoken word writer and performer. I like to blend the genre of spoken word with theatre to really add this dimension brought out by gesture and character and accents, to really augment the pieces and bring them to life.
Hi Dana! It's great to be talking with you! I read somewhere that you describe yourself as a ‘born storyteller’. Can you start by telling us a bit about your story?
Sure! I was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1988, and our parents were living in the States at the time. So we went back to the States and I spent the first few years of my life there until about the age of seven. And I would say that it was within this age I had already fallen in love with poetry and the written word and reading and performing. My mom really encouraged me to read - I had this ferocious appetite for words. I would pick up the cereal box and the Kleenex box or whatever it was in front of me and just read! And so that lent itself well to being on stage so I was the narrator at the school play in kindergarten.
Then we left the States, we moved to Jordan, and then we moved to Saudi Arabia, where in 2003 the compound that I lived on was bombed by Al-Qaeda. And so we were evacuated out of Saudi and we went back to the States, but we went to a new state that we hadn't been to before we went to Kansas.
And so all of that love of reading and writing and speaking that I had in my youth kind of came to my rescue after this traumatic event, the bombing. That was the only way that I could get through my experience, it was to write myself through it, and to know myself through my journaling process and to just give myself that space, especially after being uprooted from my friends and community at school in Saudi Arabia to Kansas, which is really such an opposite kind of end of the cultural spectrum. So that's kind of where I dove in and it stopped just being something that I enjoy, like a hobby, but writing became my own coping mechanism and my own healing mechanism.
So I started to write poetry then and I also started to write short stories, and it was then that I realised I need to go to school for theatre. My parents really wanted me to pursue business or engineering or language, for me, it was clear nothing gave me the presence of mind of being here now as I felt on stage performing. So I decided to go to school for theatre, and there was a lot of challenges within the family dynamic - I really left my family for some time. But this is the one life I'm living, so I had to give it my shot. And eventually over time, they came around and I did graduate with a BFA in theatre. So that really brought all of this storytelling, it really filled it out in the body.
In a lot of your poetry, perhaps most famously in Love Letters From Palestine, you take on the role of other characters. Does it help you to write from a position of empathy?
What a beautiful question, Alex, thank you. I feel like empathy definitely plays into it. Love Letters From Palestine is perhaps the first poem in which I really intentionally fused these two forms, one of which being spoken word and the other solo performance, monologue. And that came out of a limitation; the limitation was my own experience. Somebody asked me to present a poem about Palestine at a fundraiser, and I thought I'd like to write something new. But, at that point I'd only been to Palestine in 1997, I wrote this in 2012, and I felt like my experience was too limited for Dana to write a poem about Palestine - but who can tell the story better than I can?
And so I created the character of the Hajjah. In Arabic, the Hajjah is the old woman who's gone to do Hajj, the pilgrimage, so she’s like the wise woman. And this Hajjah was born on the day of the Nakba, which is, when Israel declared independence within Palestine and many Palestinians fled and were displaced, lost their homes and many villages were taken over. So she was born on that day and she has lived the history of the conflict. And I thought that through her voice, I can tell a story that is much bigger than Dana, and Dana's experience.
And in that I found a key, because getting out of myself and into a character I can really allow myself to see things from different perspectives. And so that's always a prompt whenever I'm teaching writing; what's an issue that you care about deeply and you want to talk about? But how can we approach this, not from your personal perspective, but from the perspective of an unlikely witness?
And so that's what I tried to offer in Love Letters From Palestine. And yeah, I think definitely it creates empathy because it's not just me.
So by taking on a different character, you make your view much more expansive and actually add legitimacy to your opinions?
Yes! And you know why, Alex? Because nobody can argue with a story! This is this woman's story, no one can argue with it! But by virtue of the fact that it's a story, we feel, we empathise, we put ourselves in that person's shoes. If we allow ourselves to go that far, we can't argue with someone else's experience. And even if it is a symbolic character, there's weight in the symbol of the character, you know?
One of the reasons that Poems by Post came into existence was because we were so inspired by the endeavour, the passion and the drive that people put into their craft. Now, a recent poem of yours that I watched was Caged Bird, which was the culmination of more than a year's worth of work. It's a collaboration between yourself and your partner Rami, and it's beautiful! How does it feel to put so much effort, so much heart and energy into something over the course of a year and then see it go out to where it's supposed to be?
Well, it feels really good! Because my background is in the theatre, I focus my time and energy on live events because that's where I feel good, I feel good when I'm connecting with people. And you can feel the energy change in the room. Because I'm always doing these live shows, I didn't always have the greatest documentation of my poems because in a space you can, you feel it, you're and moved by it. But when someone's filming a live show and it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a fully formed made-for-the-screen product, it can feel bare. The performances felt really bare.
So I had the intention before the pandemic to really put a lot of effort into making productions of my poetry. I wanted to make it for the screen, it's not just about a stage performance. How do I translate that with music and with colour and the shape and image? So just before the pandemic, it was Feb 2020, Rami came to Amman where we had access to a green screen. We chose some poems that I don't usually perform on stage so that I'm not already limited with the presentation, and we wanted to film them and see what we could create together from scratch. It was two days of shoot and we came out with three things - Caged Bird is just one of them. But it took us the whole year to work on the graphic design, to bring it to life, so, yeah it feels really great to have it out.
And how have you found the reaction to Caged Bird since releasing it?
It's good! It won best animation at a different film festival, Dreamers Short Film Festival, I think it now goes into a global thing. And then we got our first review, which is good. And yeah, the feedback on RedZone has been awesome as well. We're just trying to push it out to more film festivals because it really was something that took such a chunk of time - for that it didn't feel right, just posting it directly to YouTube. It felt like we want to kind of get this out into the festival circuit. Also because I'm not quite sure about social media. Instagram is definitely not the platform for long form poetry. People don't want to watch it. They're scrolling, they're scrolling, they're watching something that's a minute, maybe even less. And I refuse to bite-size my stories! I tell these longer form stories so you can really travel somewhere with the imagination, feel something come out changed a little bit. It's hard to do that in six seconds!
You've performed in many great venues all around the world, including the Sydney Opera House and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. I read somewhere that one of the places that you want to perform in is the Globe in London. Is this something that you've managed to achieve since?
Not yet! It's still very much on the list. It's such an icon to me, and Shakespeare is such an inspiration to me. I think I fell in love with language and theatre as an art form through Shakespeare's work. I'm just so impressed also at the fact that he created words. You know, I don't think that's a liberty that we take enough! And he was so playful with language and that's why he has such a legacy.
One of your poems, If I Were President, made me wonder whether you think politics is something that you're going to move towards at some point in your career?
…Yes, but only recently, really. And I'll tell you in what capacity. I think now is the time for poets and not politicians. I think that good leadership is rooted in spirit, is rooted in essence. It comes from a heart place, doesn't come from a place of force or dominance, it comes from deep understanding and care. And I think that that's also the same root of poetry. It comes from a place of wanting to understand and to somehow mend or make sense of. Whereas the politics of today has nothing to do with this space. It's not about serving the self. It's not about serving the masses. It's about serving very few who sit high on top. And so I hope that in in this new decade that we are in, that we will see a move to elect more leaders who do speak from that heart space.
One of the things that I might be doing soon, I hope, is to go and be something called a keynote listener at conferences, and be there as a creative scribe to take notes of what is said and then transmit it back to the audience members or transmit it back to the public. But to tell that story from this heart space, to not record it like a journalist, to kind of echo back the spirit really, that everything is infused with. I want to be someone who speaks to the heart from the heart and that inspires others to work towards the betterment of our world from that space.
It would be another great thing to add to a very impressive and wide-varying CV, which is available publicly on your website. You have some very unusual skills on there; you’re trained in rapier, dagger, katana and shamsheer [all types of sword]. How often do you get to use these skills?!
Not often enough! It was part of my training at theatre school, the rapier and dagger training and unarmed hand-to-hand combat. So you learn masking and napping, and you learn how to hide the fight, make it safe. Then I was part of a kung fu series in college called Kung Fu Johnny. It was really one of the first web series, apparently. We ended up being published in a book because we're cited as one of the first web series that got online. Weird. But I did all the core makeup in the in the shoot and I also had a character who fought with a katana, which is a Japanese samurai sword.
And then I did another show called Sinbad, The Untold Tales and I played the legendary Sinbad's daughter Ittifaq, who goes on an adventure with the new young Sinbad. And so we had to do shamsheer for that show. And we also did rapier and dagger in that show. So sometimes I get to put these skills to work, but not often enough!
That's pretty cool though! Dana Dajani - writer, performer, politician, stunt woman!
I like to dip my finger into everything. I feel like it's really important, especially today. There's this phrase, the jack of all trades, master of none. But I really feel the more that you can really put your hand into different pots, the more you really know what you like, and you have experience and influence from other things around you that can encourage you to look at that thing that you know that you like from a different perspective that nobody's ever really seen before. So I do let myself kind of get distracted along many different paths.
Thanks Dana! You can see more of Dana's work on Instagram (@danadajani.poetry), her YouTube channel, and on her website - www.danadajani.com.
