How did you feel when writing that poem? Where were you?​

​​​

This poem was written in its earliest iteration as a rough version of fieldnotes on the train after the encounter it describes. I was amused and tickled by what had transpired and also wanted to immediately capture the essence of the scene for reflection and poetic construction later.

​​

​​

What was the context in which the poem was written? What led you to that title?

​​​

I was in the train on the way to Manchester where I would be co-facilitating an ethnography workshop for graduate students. So I was thinking a lot about vivid description and our attempts, at times futile, to capture the criss-cross of thoughts and observations in the field. A lot is happening at the same time, and we never quite experience things the same way again. That unique moment is lost somehow, despite attempts at documentation. We have to put on our ethnographic glasses and train ourselves to zoom in on certain things within the bounds of our research framing, while being open to the possibility of having our vision guided in unexpected directions. The title is meant to capture that training (in the train, it so happens), and also my literal observation of someone who (I thought was) wearing sunglasses. 

​​

​​

The poem conjures very beautifully particular kind of relations, of distance and at the same time fleeting proximity? Would you like to expand on the kind of relations you meant to evoke?

​​

I wanted to reflect on what we consider to be ‘real’ in ethnographic observation. If we sustain our gaze and attention as we are often expected to in ethnography, we may find that the nature of things are not as they initially seem. Regardless of how familiar we are with our interlocutors and the sites of our fieldwork, I suppose there is a desire to see things afresh so we may see things otherwise, imagine the world differently beyond what we take for granted – that adage about ‘making the familiar strange’ comes to mind. In the encounter that inspired this poem, the sunglasses lessened the awkwardness of staring directly at a stranger, enabling what I thought was eye contact to establish a fleeting connection on a train ride. So much of ethnographic relations relies on seeing each other in some form in order to connect, to learn, to understand. Seeing visually is only one way of seeing, and even that is not promised to be ‘real’, as evident in the mundane encounter that inspired this poem.

​​

​

I really like the phrase ‘daring to stare’. Do you think there is a certain politics to ‘daring to stare’ that emerge in your poem? Is this something you thought about when writing?
 

I’m not sure I was actively thinking about the politics of ‘daring to stare’ while writing this poem, although this is an interesting and important question. Upon reflection, my use of the words ‘dare’ and ‘avoid’ does suggest some risk in this act of observation, perhaps a play on how there are cultures where people have been socialised that it is rude to stare at strangers, while this is not necessarily the case in other cultural norms. Staring is also associated with otherness and the multiple ways they invite curiosity, attention, risk, even danger. As a minoritised migrant in many Western spaces over the years, I have experienced my share of being stared at. Daring to stare perhaps is an act of turning the gaze somehow, to enact the capacity of seeing.

​

To think about the politics of this in a different way, I imagine many ethnographers actually do quite a bit of staring in the field, and in turn, find ways to navigate being stared at in the process. I recall one time in the field where the gaze was turned on me. Amused, an interlocutor captured a photo of me taking notes during an interview, which made me realise the strangeness of ethnographic practice despite our sense of attained familiarity within our field sites, and our attempts to blend in.

​

​

Where is the Otherwise in your poem?

​

I suppose the otherwise here is in the speculative nature of the observation. Why was this person wearing his sunglasses inside the train? Is he avoiding someone? Where is he going? Who has he left behind and will he be returning? Will we get off at the same stop? In this brief moment together before we part ways much can be imagined, even though not everything is as it seems.

​

​

Who is training (sun)glasses in your poem? What comes out of each of us doing that training once in a while? When are you training your (sun)glasses?

​

Anyone curious about social life I suppose. I think that training helps with attention and imagination, a capacity to be generous and willingness to bear witness to uncertainty and transience. In the end, not everything can be held together exactly in the way we see it. But the poetic form enables imaginative ways of representation, one among the tools of experience in what anthropologist Anand Pandian calls ‘the writerly traffic in metaphors, myths, and other deliberately affecting modes of narration’ in his book A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. I’d like to think I am training my gaze all the time. Photos and stray notes in my phone as fieldnotes help me to make sense of the world bit by bit, some of which end up as threads for poetry.

​

Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar teaches education at Keele University and is the co-lead for the ethnography stream for Methods North West in England. His research interests include education and inter/national development, postcolonial studies, ethnography and the politics of knowledge production. He also writes creatively and hopes to bring this interest into his academic practice. 

​

Read Aizuddin's poem Training (sun)glasses in the Unbinding issue.