Could you tell us more about the context of this poem, and your inspiration for writing it?

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‘the line starts here, but it moves’ grows out of long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2017–2023) I conducted in Esenyurt, Istanbul, a district that is both materially dense and symbolically charged as a zone of arrival. There, I was struck by how displacement unfolded not only in spectacular events like border crossings or deportations, but also through the recursive labour of remaining: waiting, reapplying, improvising. The inspiration for the poem came less as a moment of emotion and more as an accumulation of observation. It became a way to write within that density of texture and temporality rather than about it.
 
The poem captures the mundanity and weight of the migrant experience, permeated with ordinary yet loaded objects like lists, folders, and plastic bottles. How did the materiality of the poem take shape for you?
 
The materiality of the poem emerged directly from the bureaucratic and affective infrastructures I encountered. Lists, folders, bottles, rumours are temporal technologies, the very scaffolding of endurance: they structure how people move, stop and stay. I intended the poem’s form to mirror these material and temporal conditions. Its lines stutter and re-form like queues that dissolve and reappear. Its syntax leans on repetition and residue. The pulse of waiting rooms or queues, the syncopation of rumour, the small re-starts that hold a life together all have rhythm, and that rhythm can be ethnographic data. I wanted the writing here to become a tactile act of accompaniment, a way to stay with the ordinariness and exhaustion of these materials without aestheticising them, allowing their literal and social weight to speak.

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How do you see the relationship between ethnography and poetry? Why turn to poetry?

 

For me, poetry can be a mode of ethnographic attention. Both demand attunement to the partial, the relational, and the unsaid. But while ethnography often translates experience into analysis and concepts, poetry allows me to remain inside ambiguity. Poetry is less about conveying knowledge than making space for crooked, relational, and felt forms of knowing that exceed explanation. Many parts of my research resisted analytical closure, so I came to think of these moments as situated poetic witnessing: writing that’s accountable to the encounter, the fragment, and the shared time of fieldwork. Poetry in this sense let me trace not only what displacement meant, but how it felt and unfolded.​​​

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Your poem is also accompanied by a drawing. Could you tell us more about the relationship between the two?

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The drawing developed alongside the poem as part of the same ethnographic practice. Much of my fieldwork ‘entry’ came through teaching Turkish language and mixed-media arts courses in migrant-initiated community organisations across Istanbul’s most densely migrant districts. I wanted this visual to extend that collaborative space, to stay close to its textures and gestures. For this poem, I worked in a slow, pointillist style where marks accumulate and overlap over time, each line or dot a small gesture of staying, a refusal of erasure. The single empty chair is a trace of presence within systems that move people but rarely let certain groups arrive, while the faint, uneven lines and dispersed pigments evoke a horizon in motion within a landscape of suspension and unfinished movement. The visual and the verbal are in dialogue through a shared logic of attention, a durational witnessing where form emerges through repetition and proximity rather than through resolution or clarity.

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Where do you turn to for inspiration these days, especially in terms of your art and writing?

The minor and mundane have always been my sources of inspiration, and I have been deeply shaped by the people and spaces I spent time with. Artistically, I’m drawn to practices that work through duration and accretion: Mona Hatoum’s transformations of domestic materials into precarious architectures, Emily Jacir’s archival itineraries of mobility and loss, Nil Yalter’s documentary feminism of labour and migration, Agnes Martin’s grids, Etel Adnan’s notebooks, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s displacements of text and image. In writing, I’m inspired by poets, ethnographers, and feminist thinkers who stay close to the edge of documentation, such as Solmaz Sharif, Nayyirah Waheed, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Layli Long Soldier. Their works remind me that form itself can be method, and that slow, precise, relational attention can be ethics of representation.

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Does your poem speak to the possibility of an otherwise, and how so?

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Yes, and cautiously so, much like Otherwise Magazine’s approach. The poem doesn’t offer an ‘otherwise’ as a utopian horizon; it gestures instead toward the fragile openings that appear within constraint. These openings appear in the shared knowledge and affects of a waiting line, in a song hummed by a child, and in the quiet persistence of tending to life and others despite repeated interruptions. These are fleeting, contingent, yet real micro-calibrations of relation rather than escapes from precarity. The ‘otherwise’ here is less about arrival and more about insisting on presence within structures designed for the erasure of some.