Saying Many Things at Once
A Conversation with Daniela Naomi Molnar
Last night I met Daniela Naomi Molnar for drinks before her reading. She gave me a copy of PROTOCOLS: An Erasure—a beautiful object—and we discussed why I had made the difficult decision not to publish the interview that we conducted in the spring of 2024. I felt too exposed by the conversation—like enough of me was there to make me vulnerable, but not enough of me to defend myself. She understood. Some things can’t be said. Some things bring only shame and regret.
As we walked from the coffee shop to the Eastside Jewish Commons in Portland, two young Jews, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot leaving the Capital Jewish Museum in DC. Daniela read alongside two other Jewish poets. The Israeli poet explained why she needed to explain that she is Israeli. She said she felt that she could do so in that space, suggesting how regularly she felt she must hide. She apologized for her accent. The host said, “I think you can understand why we need to lock the doors.” I don’t know if anyone in the room knew of the shooting. They would have had to have looked at their phone during the event.
I didn’t hear about the shooting until this morning. A family friend (about my age and about Yaron’s), used to work with Yaron and Sarah at the embassy. This morning, his dad posted on Facebook something along the lines of, “This could have been my son.” It could have been his son, my friend. In the social and intellectual circles where I seek community, it’s deeply unpopular for me to express that I care. Better that I tell you how dramatically my politics differ from theirs. Better I keep my tongue tied.
On that note, here is the conversation that Daniela and I had last year:
Adie B. Steckel: I want to start by asking you about your childhood in Queens, which I’d never heard about before reading an excerpt from PROTOCOLS [forthcoming from Ayin Press in 2025]. I was thinking about how your work messes with or maybe degrades traditional notions of time and place while at the same time feeling very place-based. In recent work, threads of Queens, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, the Arctic, and Eastern Europe all come through very strongly. So first, I’m curious if there’s anywhere else that I’m missing, and then I want to talk about Queens.
Daniela Naomi Molnar: I spent most of my twenties moving around—I was very restless. I still am, but less so. I spent a year and a half in Central America, especially Guatemala and Chiapas. This was the early 2000’s so an especially tumultuous time for that region. That time and place certainly had a huge effect on me. And yes, Eastern Europe and also Israel-Palestine have also always been huge in my life because of my family’s connections. I think degrade is an interesting word, but I might use “dilate” instead – the way I think about it, place is deep rather than wide. It’s a vertical axis. And I’m often thinking about place in terms of time.
ABS: The idea of a vertical axis is immediately really interesting to me because I tend to think about things in terms of a flat network. Or maybe in terms of strata, but still spread out horizontally. But then, where is the site of the vertical axis? Where is it rooted? Is it rooted in an individual?
DNM: I think it is, and that’s something I’m just beginning to understand. The sensory experience of a place contains deep time and spreads beyond what our conscious minds can comprehend. Our bodies understand places in ways that our minds don’t. I used to approach place like a lens through which I arrived at new thoughts. But I’ve shifted lately towards “what does it feel like to be here in my body?” The feeling involves things our minds can’t necessarily grasp... But you wanted to talk about Queens. It surprised me when Queens started coming up for me. I left New York when I was 17, and I did end up moving back 10 years later, but I never planned on that. I never loved it. I don’t even like it really.
ABS: When you went back, did you return to Queens?
DNM: No, Brooklyn, and I was working in Manhattan. I didn’t like it then either. I guess I love New York, but I don’t like living there. I get flooded. Sensorially, it’s just too much—the noise. But Queens started coming up for me as soon as I started writing about my grandmother. I was immediately in Forest Hills, which is where I grew up and where my grandparents were. The place started to come alive for me through memory. Forest Hills is an immigrant neighborhood. My parents are immigrants, and my grandparents were enmeshed in an observant Eastern European Jewish culture—an immigrant culture. It was almost like this little shtetl on the edge of Queens. The very edge of Queens—it doesn’t resemble Manhattan. I didn’t realize as a child how unique of a place it was until I left, and then I felt like I had grown up in a different country. It’s not like growing up in a suburb somewhere where you can find a rough replica. And now it’s completely different because the immigrant populations change every few years. There are waves of people who come and establish their worlds, and walking down the street in Forest Hills you hear like 15 different languages and no one’s speaking English. And there’s all colors of skin, ethnicities, and religious orientations—the diversity is really rich, which I didn’t understand until I was living in a place like Portland.
ABS: So you mentioned that you’ve had a propensity to wander. I’m curious about your feelings about the word home. Does that word resonate?
DNM: I have very big feelings about the word home—I actually have a whole manuscript about it. I don’t think I have a home. That manuscript wrapped up for me unexpectedly this October. I was in the Arctic, and I expected that trip to be many things, but I didn’t expect to feel at home in the Arctic. And I did. And it’s not because that part of the world is home for me in any traditional way, but because I came to understand there that the feeling of home, for me, is the feeling of disorientation. In the Arctic, the light is super weird. The stars are out of place, the moon is out of place, the sun is out of place, and everything is melting really fast. The amount of change and disorientation felt to me like home. I realized that my home has everything to do with unsteadiness and light and a quality of light that’s constantly shifting. I think this feels like home to me because I am part of a diasporic people. I don’t believe in a homeland. I don’t believe in a singular home-place for me. For many people, this doesn’t apply at all. People ask, Well, where are your parents from? My mom grew up in Transylvania, and my dad grew up in Hungary, but that’s not where they’re from. They’re from Jewish cultures that were barely tolerated in those places until they weren’t. On the whole, the Hungarians and Romanians who understood those places as home hated the Jews. My home is my inheritance and my lineage in my body in that sort of deep time way. Shaul Magid makes long-overdue points about diasporic notions of home in The Necessity of Exile. He’s making them primarily from a sociopolitical perspective, but I think they apply on a spiritual and emotional level too.
ABS: Since we’re moving in this direction, you mentioned that Israel/Palestine is one of the places that influences you. Have you spent time there?
DNM: I have. I have family there, most of whom are dead now. But I went there when I was a child, and then my mom worked for the Technion (Israeli Institute of Technology) so I went there as a teenager and that was the last time I was there, so it’s been over 30 years. It’s mostly a place of memory for me. I was actually supposed to go in October, right after the Arctic.
ABS: How did you hear the news of October 7th?
DNM: I had no internet or cell phone access from October 2nd until October 22nd. None. Zero. So I had no idea. None.
ABS: Meanwhile, you are experiencing a sense of home through feelings of disorientation.
DNM: Yeah. And I was doing that trip as part of this ongoing fascination I have with climate chaos and climate grief. So I was in that mindset, but I was also having a really good time with the other artists on this sailboat in the Arctic. It was an amazing experience. So then I came back to the island of Svalbard, and I actually didn’t turn my phone on immediately because I didn’t want to. And then people started to be really in their phones, and the energy shifted very dramatically. I looked, and my heart just sank. I was the only Jewish person on that trip and everyone started treating me really differently immediately. I sort of became an ambassador for the situation in a way that I was not prepared for. I’ve experienced that default ambassadorship a lot, and it’s not something that I ever, ever want. I immediately reached out to my family and my parents were so distraught. I was going from immersion in a prolonged crisis to immersion in an acute crisis.
ABS: One of the things that I’ve felt is this incredibly urgent need to say multiple things at once, and wrestling with that in writing and in speech. We are in a culture that demands singularity and binary thought. Social media demands unilateral singular speech acts—performances of statements. This is why reading your book Chorus this fall was so important for me. I have felt such turmoil about our inability to say multiple things at once. How do you navigate that tension in your writing and in your life?
DNM: That’s a huge question.
ABS: Yeah, it’s really the driving question of the book.
DNM: Chorus is very much about the multiplicity of self and my unwillingness and inability to be like, “here’s who I am.” Our culture is constantly forcing our hand to make ourselves into a product, flattened. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher who talks brilliantly about the driving force of modernity and postmodernity as a sort of flattening, a pancaking of ideas and of place.
ABS: The flattening of places is interesting to think about in terms of your vertical axis.
DNM: Exactly. So Chorus expresses what was happening to me at the time during which I was writing that book, which I wrote very quickly. My sense of self was rapidly dissembling under the weight of multiple personal and communal crises. I was suddenly becoming aware that there isn’t a unitary self—it doesn’t exist. Letting go of that was the necessary thing for me in that moment. And seeing how the profit directive of social media interacts with this reality is horrifying. It’s not new, it’s just that the events of this October brought it into clearer focus.
And in terms of how I’ve navigated Oct 7th? I have not made any public statements on social media at all. I’ve had people, friends and others, reach out to me, very angry that I had not made a statement like “Ceasefire Now.” And they’re angry at me for not making a statement like, “Bring Them Home.” I’m just not willing to do it, and not because I don’t have opinions on it. My opinions are nuanced—incredibly nuanced—in ways that social media simply can’t hold.
ABS: Yes. The refutation of nuance—the direct attacks on nuance—things like, “Don’t let people tell you this is nuanced,” are very, very disturbing. It’s propagandist thinking. It’s propaganda. And it’s very disturbing that people can’t see that they’re wielding the very tools they’re trying to speak out against against themselves.(1)
1 In One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, Omar El Akkad presents a necessary condemnation of the weaponization of supposed nuance against Palestinians. I think Akkad’s notions are compatible with my condemnation of a wholesale dismissal of nuance.
DNM: Exactly. We must defend the need for nuance. I think of Hannah Arendt, whose writing became very popular when Trump came into power, which has now faded into the background, but it’s so relevant to this issue right now. I don’t hear her voice coming back in ways that I wish it would. Her political beliefs aside (and who knows what those would be today—I think they might be different), everything that she said about language and its erosion by totalitarian impulses is so relevant at the moment. Totalitarianism is a political mode, but it’s also a linguistic mode. It’s a flattening drive to define something as a single, neatly packaged product. Language gets eviscerated and eroded by authoritarian regimes. Eviscerating language is often the first step to establishing authoritarian rule. So, in terms of how I navigate it in writing, a lot of that for me has to do with incorporating multiple voices, literally. It’s also intentionally writing in multiple modes and playing with multiple forms. I never, never want to feel like I know what I’m doing, you know? I’m saying something that’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again: poetry is unique because its life-blood is contradiction. Poetry wants to hold both things at once. There is a force of nothingness at the heart of poetry that is inherently dialectic. Poems want to disagree with themselves emotionally. That’s what makes a good poem.
ABS: Something confounding.
DNM: Exactly. A poem is the opposite of having a thesis and defending it. AI cannot write a poem because it cannot disagree with itself because it cannot feel. This confounding poetic core is so much of what we need right now.
ABS: In Chorus, you write, “Each day, reseal the seal / between self and not-self / badly so it’s porous, fidgets or shimmers / when asked to stay quiet / when asked to stay contained.” This is your refusal to be singular. It’s fantastic.
DNM: Thank you. I think what I’m playing with there is how the world operates. I’m fascinated by how unstable the simplest acts of perception are. Like, if you look at a leaf for 60 seconds, it’s not one thing. That complexity of perception and the complexity of the world can’t be shoved into one thing. And sure, that’s a spiritual perspective, but it’s also a political one.
This takes me back to Queens. A memory came to my mind recently, and I think it touches on the inherent complexity of place and time, and how nothing exists in a singular form. I was thinking about going to Jones Beach with my grandparents as a kid. Robert Moses is the person responsible for the enormous parking lot at Jones Beach and was also responsible for the destruction of massive portions of New York City. I would say destruction, some people would say development. One of the things he did was to make the tunnels to the approach to Jones Beach too short for buses to go into, so that public transit—so that the public—couldn’t access it. This was an overtly racist and classist move. My memories of being there are so layered. I remember being close to the water and feeling the joy and wonder and fear of the primal pulse of the ocean. And I remember being with my grandparents, who were incredibly traumatized people. They were both there and totally not there most of the time. I remember being with my brother and the different ways he and I navigated it. And I remember how white it was. How Jews in this country decided to be white. My understanding of that as a child was nonexistent, but in retrospect, there is so much privilege and lack of privilege at the same time—there’s being both the perpetrator and the victim at the same time. And then there’s the ocean there, being the ocean, doing its thing. The Jones Beach coastline has been built and rebuilt so many times. There are so many social and ecological layers to that shoreline, and to water and waterways in general. And that’s something that isn’t being talked about much either, the ways that water is a huge ecological issue and a huge part of what’s going on in Gaza right now. That’s not being talked about enough.
ABS: You mention the victim-perpetrator relationship—a kind of feedback loop, and you touch on this in PROTOCOLS in really amazing ways that show how profoundly simple it is—how the traumatized are primed to perpetrate. This is one of the places that I get stuck, because I see this happening, but there’s part of me that wants to refuse to believe it—the part that says, “Wait, aren’t these the people who should know what it is to be a victim?” And that’s what it means to say “never again…for anyone.” But that’s how profoundly tragic trauma is, in the way that it’s able to flip the brain.
DNM: Tragic and pervasive and stubborn. It just doesn’t die. And it’s really alive in me right now because frankly, I’m tired of it. An earlier draft of PROTOCOLS went on about how I just don’t want it, how profoundly tired I am of trauma. Trauma has become social capital at this point, and people use it. I get why people are doing that, but I also find it disturbing and profane and disgusting. If I could drop the trauma and not have it be part of me I would have done that so long ago. That’s what I’m really up against in my creative life right now–the fact that I just can’t get rid of it and I don’t know what to do about that. It’s not interesting to me and I don’t find it compelling. I don’t want it!
ABS: Similar to how you describe approaching The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—like, why do I have to do this, it’s so banal?!
DNM: It’s so boring! The story of bigotry and hatred and oppression…It’s a story that’s been told thousands of times. Tens of thousands of times. And yet…
ABS: Here we are. It seems to be the only story on the planet at times.
DNM: And in many ways, I think it is, because it doesn’t die. That’s the question I’m really trying to push on right now: what does shift trauma? And this is the question of our current moment, the question of what’s happening in Israel-Palestine. I think it’s a question for all of us in this country, maybe especially for the literary community, the artistic communities. What does shift trauma? Because it doesn’t die—it’s a zombie and won’t die. But what shifts it from one form to another? That’s really what I’m trying to engage right now creatively. How do we reconcile ambiguity? How do we hold two thoughts at once? Trauma thrives on either/or thinking, victim/perpetrator thinking.
ABS: This moment has felt so intensely urgent. I have felt an intense, maddening urgency to say two things at once. But you point out in PROTOCOLS and draw on Naomi Klein to remind us that genocide is not exceptional, not in the least bit. You write, “The Holocaust, contrary to dominant Jewish rhetoric, is not exceptional. It’s part of a widespread, embedded system of thinking still very alive today.” Thinking in terms of urgency and exceptionalism is part of how we arrive at these tragedies. The present wants to carry with it the urgency of exceptionalism, but I think your work disperses this energy by speaking across space and time. So, how can it be both urgent and non-urgent? What do you feel urgent about right now? And how do you think trauma actually transforms?
DNM: I think that is an urgent question, and it must be taken with extreme slowness. It’s an urgency that requires slowing way, way down. The most urgent things require slowing way down and returning to a sensorial understanding of time and place, and finding contemplative spaces in our own lives that are about connection. I think we’re just starved for conversation.
ABS: That’s certainly how I’ve felt. Hence the conversation.
DNM: Yes, I mean conversations like these. There’s a way in which exchange can occur through social media or journalism in sound bites. (In the way that most journalism exists at this point anyway, which is just headlines.) It tires our systems out. We get spun out and then we get tired. I think we need to bring back forums that involve conversation and real time—that’s incredibly urgent.
ABS: What’s happening on social media is wholly terrifying and also not novel. Early on in Chorus, there’s this image of you and your phone: The lines are, ”While the hopeless form of the phone / again finds my hands’ helpless hope.” I’m curious, what is meant by “helpless hope?” What is it, and where do you find it?
DNM: It has multiple meanings. It’s partly the hope that I will find real connection in my phone. Real connection through the device is very rare, but we keep coming back to it. It’s, of course, a very human thing to want that—it dies hard. No matter how many times I learn that when I pick up my phone, what I’m actually going to get is alienation and loneliness, I still pick it up looking for connection.
I also think it’s this helpless hope about what humans can make as a collective. I refuse to believe that we’re doomed to make horrors only. I think that belief is super widespread and really effective at keeping political unrest—or even social questioning—quiet. That nihilistic belief is dominant at this point and it’s politically damaging, and personally and spiritually and creatively damaging in really profound ways. So it’s a hope that I refuse to abandon, but I disagree with myself on that hope like a hundred times a day. There’s so much evidence to the contrary.
The meaning of the word hope has shifted tremendously for me and was shifting while I was writing Chorus towards something that’s not about belief, but rather is the opposite of belief. It’s about refusing to believe a singular thing. Hope is not knowing. What we can’t know is hopeful to me. We don’t know what’s gonna happen and that is pretty much the only form of hope I can get behind at this point.
I participate in a weekly conversation with a group of American and Israeli writers, and I feel really lucky to have that, but it’s very difficult—we have one person who lives in a settlement and is deeply Zionist, and then we have a young anti-Zionist activist in the Bay Area. When we are able to have an actual conversation across these differences, I think it speaks to our Jewishness. We all come from different types of Judaism but we were all raised with Talmudic thinking at the core of our consciousness. Talmudic thinking is about not knowing. It’s about multiplicity, ambiguity, and layers—the vertical and horizontal at once. The process of analyzing and never, ever coming to a firm conclusion. Not seeking or expecting a conclusion. Loving the questions most.
ABS: And the embracing of disagreements.
DNM: Embracing the disagreement and loving the disagreement. Understanding that the disagreement is the truth. These things are incredibly real and vital, but when someone’s starving and being bombed it’s really hard to advocate for not having a firm opinion. I recognize that I’m in an incredibly privileged place, literally and figuratively, to be able to say that.
ABS: Absolutely. And if looking at the most religious in Israel you don’t see this way of thinking manifesting. It’s amazing to find spaces where that kind of thought comes through, but overwhelmingly, we’re not there.
DNM: Mostly we’re not. The Israeli government is run by religious fundamentalists—and fundamentalist thinking in any form is simplistic, it’s violent.
ABS: You write, “care is infinitely messier and harder than a calcified belief system which obviates the need for care.” I’m reminded of our carceral system, which is the easy way out. It’s so much easier to shove people into cages than it is to manifest new ways of addressing harm—we can’t even imagine what that would look like, let alone implementing it. Cheaply, I want to ask you your own questions: “How might we care? How to not be history’s accomplice? How to, in the words of Simone Weil, ‘never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it?’” And I’ll add, where in your life are you finding care?
DNM: Well, I of course don’t have a singular answer for the questions I posed. I’ll start with the one you posed, which is where I’m finding care. I’m finding care in the earth. I’m living temporarily on a mesa in a remote part of New Mexico and one of the reasons I’m there is because I need to recover from the events of the last few years. It’s selfish in some ways to be there, but I’m there as a way to observe the resilience of the earth and to be part of it and cared for by it. One of the things I love about the desert is how life persists in incredibly harsh conditions. If you slow down and pay attention, the persistence of life is very visible. I’m being cared for by the earth’s resilience. I think that’s so much of what we are longing for as a species—a reconnection with care of the earth itself, of which we are a part. We long for care to be reciprocal.
ABS: It’s interesting to turn to the thing that is arguably the most harmed, for care.
DNM: It’s really hard for us. Why would the Earth care for me when we’ve done more harm than is imaginable to the Earth? But it’s not about right or wrong, or good or bad, or deserving or not deserving. We’re loved by the earth in a way that doesn’t correspond to a human understanding of deserving or not deserving. And to be able to receive that is to be able to enter into a reciprocal relationship that is not separate from how I believe we need to approach the situation in Israel-Palestine. It’s not separate from having a conversation with someone you disagree with.
Care is an act of listening, an act of listening to the sensory things that comprise our world in order to become fully human. We’re actively taught to not do this. Listening to light, color, taste, touch, and sound and reflecting upon these sensations makes us human. I try to do so indiscriminately, not assigning good or bad assessments to these sensations as much as possible. There’s pleasure and pain, but those are interpretations, not the sense itself. I also listen indiscriminately to every kind of language I encounter—other poets, journalists, writers, artists, musicians, birds, trees. These are all sensations and languages. Color is a language, visual art is a language, the weather is a language. I’m definitely seeking out other humans working with language, even languages I don’t know. I love listening to people read poems in languages I don’t know, or reading the poems and then reading the translations, or not. The whole world is an idiopathic language of itself. I try to listen to all the people and ideas I disagree with. I try to listen to everything that enters my sphere of perception. It can easily be extremely overwhelming because the world is so full of violence and atrocities, but there is also an overabundance of care.
ABS: What do you want to listen to more of?
DNM: I’m trying to consciously move towards listening to things that are about joy and love. I spent so many years actively listening to grief and trauma and allowing myself to go towards that because I had to do so. We talked about how I don’t want to stay there because I don’t actually think that’s the richest part of life. I think it’s romanticized, and we receive a lot of messaging that tells us that to be in pain or to be deep within one’s trauma is virtuous, but I don’t think it is—I think it’s a very partial way to live. I think it’s necessary work, but it’s not where we should stay, so I’m trying to move in the direction of other voices, timescales, angles, and moods.
Original art by Daniela Naomi Molnar:
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who works with color, water, language, and place. Her most recent book of poetry, Chorus, was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and won the 2024 Oregon Book Award. Her second book, PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, will be released by Ayin Press in June.