“The past is there to be used”: An Interview with Ammiel Alcalay

Sharma-Patel, K., (2026) ““The past is there to be used”: An Interview with Ammiel Alcalay”, The Hythe Review 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/thr.29439

Ammiel Alcalay is perhaps one of the last great polymaths. His groundbreaking After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) charted the various causeways and vectors of Arab-Jewish life, highlighting the Zionist homogenisation and erasure of the diversity of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish culture. A rich patchwork of literature, textuality and poetics is pieced together to unearth the deeper interconnections of the dying world of the Arab Jews as part of the European colonisation of the Levant, looking at figures such as Shime’on Ballas, Anton Shammas, Etel Adnan, Edmond Jabès and Jacques Derrida amongst a polyphony of others ranging from the tenth century until the contemporary. More recently, A Bibliography for ‘After Arabs and Jews’ (Punctum, 2021) was published as a staging of the controversy that surrounded this radical text, setting out the political stakes of historical and literary scholarship.

Alcalay, as a child of Sephardic Jews from Serbia whose roots are traced back to Al-Andalus, has committed himself to translation as a form of solidarity. He has made important translations from Bosnia including Sarajevo Blues by Semzedin Mehmedinović in the wake of the Post-Yuglosav wars, and recently co-translated the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah in Gaza: the Poem Said its Piece (City Lights, 2025).

Alcalay’s own poetry, collected as Controlled Demolition: a work in four books (Litmus Press, 2025), is rooted in modernism of the New American poetry, following in the vein of Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, and Amiri Baraka, while connecting to wider frames across a Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. Alcalay’s archival work, as part of the Lost and Found Project at CUNY, and documented in ‘Follow the Person’ (Punctum, 2025), is a testament to his general vigour and extra-institutional enthusiasm that gainfully balances erudition and curiosity alongside critique and action.

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Kashif Sharma-Patel: Let’s start with Gaza, Palestine. You’ve worked on this wonderful book by Nasser Rabah as part of a collaborative translation. Mosab Abu Toha also refers to you in the foreword as instrumental in organising and bringing Rabah, and other Palestinians, to greater attention highlighting your wider collective reach. I was wondering about developing a collaborative project and if all translation will inevitably depend on collective action.

Ammiel Alcalay: Elias Khoury was teaching at NYU in 2003/4. I sat in on his courses whenever I could. In a seminar on prison literature in the Arab world he gave us a manuscript by the Syrian poet Faraj Baraykdar, recently released after a long campaign that included Abdellatif Laabi translating him into French. We were just floored by these poems. I suggested we do a collective project, so we translated the book, A Dove in Free Flight, collaboratively. One of the students, later a treasured colleague, the late Shareah Talneghani, also translated a long interview that Mohammed Ali al-Attasi conducted with Faraj. He asked questions that I never saw asked before, like: ‘how did you feel about your body?’ Extraordinary questions, and responses.

That book took 16 years to get published in the US, for various reasons. We worked in pairs and trios, circulated versions, and then all met over it. Shareah had the chance to see Faraj in Syria, and learned there were mistakes in the publication because the poems were either memorised or written on cigarette papers, so we had lots of corrections to make.

When I translated work from Bosnia, it wasn’t collective in terms of the direct translations, but in terms of the choices. I had already been translating journalism and personal accounts, but I kept asking people what mattered most to them in terms of poetry or prose. And people kept mentioning Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović, so it was a collective decision by people there saying, ‘if you do that, you’re doing something meaningful for us’. Then, through Semezdin, there were other suggestions.

A similar thing happened with Mosab Abu Toha. I had gotten in touch when I first heard about the Edward Said Libraries that he created. We talked about translating material from Gaza and he said you have to read Nasser Rabah. I got together with friends Emna Zghal and Khaled Al-Hilli, and we started working together. I also worked with Mosab on his first book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, and insisted on including an interview I conducted with him, for some context. For Nasser, we worked as a trio, and stayed in touch with him as we could. The collaborative practice is not just in the act of translation but in the whole conception in terms of how you are getting involved in it.

I would also like to mention my latest project, Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine, a collaboration with a great young artist in Gaza, Kholoud Hammad, with my poems (some also translated into Arabic by Sinan Antoon, Khaled al-Hilli, and antón shammás), Kholoud’s drawings, an interview and a statement by her.

I teach in an MFA programme at Queens College (CUNY) in translation, and one of the things I impress upon the students is that it’s not best practice to swoop in somewhere and decide to translate based on what you like, especially as you’re dealing with the language of empire. A French student, Marine Cornuet, did a translation of the great Algerian poet Anna Gréki – poems written when she was detained and tortured in 1957/58. It’s one of the projects I’m most proud of. There was something about Marine not being a native English speaker that made her translations unique; it reminds me a little of Etel Adnan’s poetry. There are oddities that you can’t pinpoint as incorrect, but they give life and oxygen back to the language. I feel that American English is so exhausted, and depleted, and toxic in so many ways. Translation is a place where we can disappear and submerge ourselves, and stop being these directors of the world and just listen.

KSP: You mentioned people telling you to translate Semezdin Mehmedinović, and they were saying ‘that’ was what was needed. I was wondering what ‘that’ was exactly.

AA: A voice that spoke for them. A voice that depicted their situation in a way that felt right. In the preface to the Gréki book I wrote about this phenomenon of Refaat Alareer training a generation of writers in English. Some of these writers are incredible, even if they haven’t studied with Refaat and only got the idea from him. You may know Alaa Alqaisi who’s at Trinity College Dublin now. I read her and I feel like I am learning English again. I’ve also translated Nasser Rabah’s daughter, Sahar Rabah, as she writes in both English and Arabic, looking for new expression of the cataclysm they’ve been through. Something unique is happening in this work, as it comes from such a profound break that is so vital to traverse for any kind of continuity of communication.

About a week before the US/Israeli attack against Iran I got a wonderful letter from a publisher in Tehran wanting to translate After Jews and Arabs. I was absolutely floored, moved, and honoured. I wrote back immediately and we started communicating, even though the person I was corresponding with almost got killed bicycling home on his way back from work. And they started translating my book, amidst this depraved and destructive aerial bombardment.

KSP: Speaking of After Jews and Arabs I am interested in how your work regarding Arab-Jewish culture in that book, as well as to some degree Keys to the Garden, your edited anthology of contemporary Mizrahi Jewish literature, can be read in light of the ongoing genocide and displacements in Palestine and the wider Levant area. How do we read those books in the context of what is happening now?

AA: As elegies, I think. When I finished After Jews and Arabs it was already an elegy. I finished that book in 1989, before the fall of the Soviet Union, before the Gulf War, and the tail-end of the first Intifada. That world is finished. That’s not to say some future might not bring another transmutation of what we might think of as the al-Andalus, rather than the Samson option, but it’s not going to happen under the aegis of the Zionist entity as we saw with the bombing of the synagogue in Tehran, on Passover no less. That is their attitude to those ancient communities, they have no right to flourish or even exist in the non-western diaspora.

KSP: When you read After Jews and Arabs the world feels very present, is it fair to say we should now read it as a historical narrative?

AA: The past is there to be used. We don’t know what people will take from it. As I see what’s going on now, so many of the people who call themselves Jews in Israel, maybe they were the Baal worshippers, the people who threw children into Tophet. I don’t know what other conclusion to reach. They certainly can’t be the people who transmitted the culture I depict in After Jews and Arabs.

Simone Bitton made a wonderful film on Edmond El Maleh, and there is an interview with an older woman who looked after him in old age. At one point, she says: ‘what was Edmond? He was a Jewish Muslim’. Very beautiful. People change. Cultures change, languages change. The geography doesn’t change, unless you destroy it. The present puts into question the whole history of the Jews in a very drastic way. In some sense After Jews and Arabs was a premonition of that because I was witness to the last generation of Arab-Jews. Those close relationships I had with Samir Naqqash, Shimon Ballas, and Nissim Rejwan were priceless. Those are experiences that are gone. The question is not to be nostalgic but to think of the past differently. Look at the way that people have revived looking at the 1936 Arab Revolt again, rereading Kanafani’s work on that period, thinking about those rebel poets such as Abu Jilda. Turn the prism, look at things differently, see what energies emerge.

Nasser Abourahme’s recent book, The Time Beneath the Concrete (Duke, 2025), places the camp experience as central to the idea of Palestine. His grandmother was Salma Khadra Jayussi who started the Project for the Translation of Arabic Literature (Prota), and they did dozens of anthologies, important books, many with Salma’s daughters Lena and Mayy. Nasser told me once that he was visiting Grandma in Amman, and she said ‘you must read this’ and gave him After Jews and Arabs. It just floored me again.

KSP: Let’s turn to New York, and working in the centre of empire. Your own poetry is rooted in American modernism and counter-culture, and offers a form of cosmopolitanism that you link back to the Mediterranean. You write long poems in the main, that delve and drift through huge sweeps of history and landscape. At the same time you intersperse various mediums and forms of documentation. How do you balance the aestheticist impulse alongside the political? Do you see poetic form as a method of counter-imperial practice?

AA: My father was a painter, so the idea of being an artist wasn’t abstract. I had the blessing to know family friends, like the poet Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, my first real mentor. His parents had been Italian immigrants, and worked in the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts, and Vincent was in the far left electrician’s union, hounded by HUAC and so on. My models weren’t glamorous, and certainly weren’t making money from their art. This in itself was motivated by a political position in relation to the cultural economy.

My high school years were 1969 to 1973 in Boston, so that was a political education in itself. From reading the Black Panther paper weekly and discussing things with the kids selling it, to going to the Arlington Street Church and talking to guys who were trying to go to Canada and not Vietnam. That was the atmosphere that I came of age in. The idea of politics was not something you went to, like a demonstration, it was just a normal part of daily encounters. And Boston at that time was like Mississippi, it was really a brutal, racially-segregated situation, so there was an awareness of that too.

I understood the kind of writing I was interested in wouldn’t get me anywhere; it was always going to be a struggle, there was nowhere to reach, no aspiration; it was a question of doing it as something that I innately felt I had to do, or was the channel for. And my mentors were hardcore! Gilbert Sorrentino was an important figure for me. Gil was one of the founders of Kulchur Magazine; it was like the ideological wing of the New American Poetry. They did these deeply critical reviews to forge positions against mainstream and acceptable culture. The editorial board included Amiri Baraka–then Leroi Jones–Frank O’Hara, Gil, Marc Schleifer who became Abdallah Schleifer, A. B. Spellman, who wrote Four Jazz Lives, a true masterpiece, and so that was the kind of stuff I had in hand when I was just a teenager. I wasn’t very amenable to moderation on those terms. That’s how I viewed my education, I wasn’t pliable at all, I was a pain-in-the-ass.

I didn’t go to college when I got out of high school – I worked for several years doing all sorts of things. It was Gil who suggested I really ought to study something, so I just enrolled at City College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. I couldn’t be bothered with applications so I was at the School of General Studies, which was basically night school, but people I knew said you could take whatever you want. I started studying Classics, Ancient Greek, Latin, odd things that I wanted to learn about; I stayed very far away from the English department. I got into an argument about Ford Madox Ford’s influence on Joseph Conrad in one of the few classes I took there and I just walked out mid-class!

I grew up in a multilingual household so I was always interested in ‘something else’. And because of the family lore I had this mythological ‘al-Andalus’ in the back of my mind, which also fit into my dissatisfaction with the ‘canon’. In other words, I was always on the militant American side versus conservative Anglo poetry, but I started to realize that if I was given Aquinas, what about Maimonides, what about Ibn Rushd (Averroes) or Ibn Sinna (Avicenna). This opened up that whole world which I saw in fragments in my own family, from an older generation that spoke many different languages. The older generation had once spoken Judeo-Spanish, which even my parents knew as kids. It was there and not there, so I went in search of the world it came from.

KSP: It follows nicely onto the way you have ended up being variously involved with institutions, whether academic, literary or political/activist, with a heavy focus on archives as part of your CUNY ‘Lost and Found’ project. At the same time, your commitment to poetry and poetics seems to have kept you independent from specialisation and narrowness, at least that may be my romanticised idea of the poet. You refer to After Jews and Arabs as a ‘poet’s book’ in the Bibliography for ‘After Jews and Arabs’ I believe. I am interested in how you have managed to navigate the pull and strictures of the institution alongside the creative desire to branch into the world and commit to widening frames.

AA: My old friend Mark Ribot, the musician, was really into After Jews and Arabs. He asked me once, ‘What is really underlying this, is it Albert Ayler?’ And I said, ‘Yes, absolutely, Albert Ayler!’ It is taking that known melody and going as far away as you can and coming back to it—think of Julie Andrews singing ‘My Favorite Things’, and then John Coltrane playing it, or Ayler’s own version of ‘The Saints Go Marching In’.

I had an unorthodox entry into the ‘academy’ by having an unorthodox education. I didn’t even have a BA, which I ended up getting through ‘Empire State College,’ where you find mentors and create your own curriculum. But I loved old school, serious scholarship. I loved people who really knew stuff. I had a class at City College with a guy named Mr Hennion, who seemed to me like a defrocked Jesuit. The class was called ‘Science in Antiquity.’ We started with Babylonian Math and ended up with Plato, going through the Pre-Socratics, and Pythagoras in Greek. It was the first time I ever understood math. I loved that kind of knowledge.

My entrance into academia was an apprenticeship. I had no idea what I would do “with it”. I was in Comparative Literature, and my great mentor was Allen Mandelbaum, translator, scholar, and human par excellance. I went in search of him because I knew his work; after reading the Aeneid in Latin, I read his translation. My strongest languages were not languages in Comparative Literature generally, and my politics precluded me from going into Jewish Studies at the time. And my Arabic wasn’t quite good enough to primarily be an Arabist. I just fell into this job at Queens College where I was a Hebrew professor for quite a while, before drifting over to Comparative Literature and English at the Graduate Center and the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens. I had a friend I knew before I got the job at Queens, the great Cuban poet José Kozer, and he always advised me that I should present myself as I am, and eventually they would have to come to terms with it. So I always said: ‘I’m a poet, a novelist, a translator, a scholar, and a political commentator’. It kept me away from narrow field definitions.

Teaching at a place like CUNY is not like teaching at other places. You are basically a civil servant, but I always looked for ways to use the institution in innovative ways that could engage students in public oriented work. The story of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, is complex but, suffice it say, we’re going into our 16^th year, with dozens of groundbreaking publications in chapbook and book form, and dozens of very well-trained students all over the map who have gone on to do their own important work. The basis of the project is that I found graduate students encountered things in highly mediated ways and I thought archival work would force them to confront materials that had no terminology to buttress them. Each student would have to make judgments on their own.

I am a bit unusual as an academic because after my experience with After Jews and Arabs I never published again with a university press and I’ve just gone my way. I don’t really participate in the peer-reviewed or conference world. Thankfully my university generally accommodates that, and, in various pockets, it’s even part of our ethos. It definitely is influenced by our mission, by our student population, by being the largest urban public university in the country, so I generally feel very lucky and well-located!

KSP: Remind me, is it mainly poetry pamphlets published in the ‘Lost and Found’ Project or is it a mix?

AA: It’s a total mix. It’s mainly extra-poetic material. For example, our projects include publishing the teaching materials of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom were CUNY teachers at crucial times. And these publications have themselves become teaching materials, used by people all over the country. My whole point is that these writers are also thinkers. We did a whole series of Diane di Prima’s lectures. She was generally typecast as the ‘Beat chick’, but when you start reading her poetics, her work on Shelley, on Olson, on H.D. and others, you understand her deep knowledge, and are presented with terms that are unknown except to people who studied with her. I could give you so many examples.

KSP: There is still a poetic mode of thinking there, the poetry is somehow enabling a more horizontal development, or something that moves in weirder directions.

AA: Correspondence was a big part of it. In the US in the 1950s, it was a place that people felt they could be freer. These writers didn’t have places to publish their thought, really, until Kulchur–they could maybe publish a poem here or there–but they didn’t have places to extend their thought. Most people didn’t have money, so they couldn’t travel to be with each other. So they wrote to each other. Amazing amounts of letters. We published selections of John Weiners’s correspondence with Charles Olson, we published Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn’s correspondence, we published Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch’s correspondence which nobody had ever seen, also, ‘Letters to and from Joanne Kyger’, correspondence between Jean Sénac and Mohammed Dib when they were starting a little magazine in Algeria.

I write about this in “Follow the Person”: Archival Encounters. That’s the model. Forget about schools, labels. Pick a person and see who they pay attention to, who they ignore, who they’re thinking about, who they’re not thinking about, and build that world.

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