It’s 2021. COVID-19 buzzes like a hungry wasp over the tentative return of public events, while a small community event called ‘Poetry in the Park’ is launched. I hoped to escape the sting of shutdown by arranging an outdoor open mic. It was here I first met Minney Richani. Name called, standing at the mic, she shook. Crumbling and determined, her quivering voice gaining steadiness with momentum. Minney embodied that maxim: speak, even if your voice shakes. To which I’d add: keep speaking, and it’ll stop shaking.

Years on, that same determination has pulled Minney through a self-publishing journey. She’s driven to bookstores across south-east Queensland; from Toowoomba to Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast to the Bayside, talking to booksellers, establishing relationships and handling rejections. Undeterred by the industry’s derisive view of self-publishing, she’s shown what’s possible when fuelled by determination, self-belief and the unwavering commitment to art as a tool for connection.

Tell me who you are

I’m a mountain woman; I connect with otherness. I am Syrian with roots in Lebanon and Palestine. I don’t have a solid understanding of my family's history which sometimes makes me feel like an intruder but I think it’s important to still remember my history in the face of erasure. A dear friend passed on some advice that was given by an Aboriginal Elder, they told me that we may never know all of our ancestors but they will always know who we are. I’m Arab, there is a collective experience in being Arab that is linked by language. I’m something today and something more tomorrow. I’m the author of Amongst the Grapevines. I don’t like labels, but for clarity’s sake, and for today: this is who I am.

Why the title, Amongst the Grapevines?

The grapevine holds value to me and my family because it was such a significant part of our upbringing in Syria. My grandparent’s home, where we spent most days, was designed around an open courtyard. To go from one room to another, you always have to step outside. The middle, the courtyard, was predominantly filled with grapevines. So, our lives were lived among grapevines. When thinking of grapevines, I also kept thinking of rumour: “I heard it on the grapevine.” When the Syrian war first broke out [in 2011] there were a lot of controversial things said, rumours spread and many different people were blamed. The impact of these rumours and assumptions fed into the decision to title the book this way. Lastly, I thought about the change and versatility of grapes and grapevines. Before grapes are ripe, they’re picked and pickled. We call it hosrum. The leaves are used for wara ‘enab and the grapes for fresh fruit and sultanas. All this is part of my memory too: the grapevine is present even when it’s out of season. It’s like even if something has passed, its presence remains preserved. That idea of preservation and change plays into the use of mixed-form in the book as well.

Your book includes drawings, prose and poetry: what is the value of multi-form work and why did you choose it?

The content of the text is heavy and I felt like the illustrations - which have some humour - helped break up that heaviness. With the poetry, well, the poetry gives room for the reader to bring their own narratives and emotions into it. With the prose, it’s more direct story-telling, it’s when I take the reader through my journey in a clearer, more direct way. All forms felt necessary to the story I wanted to share.

Some people deride self-publishing as ‘vanity projects’, what’s your rebuttal? Why did you choose to self-publish?

I’m very uncomfortable with people handling my words and my work, and of them altering it in a way that diminishes or redirects my voice. That happens enough in our day to day lives: when we go to speak or take up space, we’re told “not that much” or “not in that way”. I didn’t want that to happen to my work, I didn’t want an editor to alter me. My experience of self-publishing has felt like the opposite of vanity. It’s taken both humility and confidence to push myself, and put myself out there, and to be okay with hearing no from booksellers who don’t want to stock my book. By being the one to advocate for my own work, I’ve directly connected with people like booksellers, community and readers. The book is my avenue to connect and share with people.

Something embedded in the subtext of your writing only legible to those with connection to the region is that your Druze. To me, it is important to always push back against homogenising narratives that flatten Arabs and Muslim into one shadow.

Being Druze does give a unique perspective; I don’t know if it’s just me but as a minority in a minority, it has made me very very empathetic… like, I feel attuned to complex experiences. As much as I express myself, I often feel like with being Druze, it’s the part of myself I’m often suppressing. I graduated from an Islamic College, my family made a conscious decision to place me in an environment where I could preserve my Arabic. I experienced the embrace of community over shared language and the shared belief in One God, but I never openly talked about being Druze. I didn’t want to experience otherness in a place that I felt, at the time, I most belonged to… Being Druze, we are connected to Islam in our own way but Muslims don’t always see it that way. So, embracing my Druze identity has been a long journey. It's a subtext in my writing and it's a subtext in my life. In writing from this space, it also feels like I’m writing from a space of desperation: I want complete acceptance with no amputation or suppression.

You have a strong decolonial politics, and you use your art as part of your activism. Has your experiences as Syrian Druze shaped your writing and politics? How so?

I don’t have an elaborate answer for why I care about decolonial politics and activism; in my mind, I feel like I have no choice but to be involved because it is my reality. We’re forced to exist in this way because of colonisation, because of what it’s taken from us. Activism is a way of snatching those pieces back and arranging them in a way that serves us. Actually, not just serves us, but revitalises us. I take my book with me to events, because it is an offering and an invitation to connect. It is giving a piece of myself. My goal for this book was to put it in as many hands as possible and bring people together. The book is written across a long period of time, almost a decade, and I wanted to leave the pieces raw: what’s been me in the past may reflect someone in the present and through that, they can connect with my work. I want to share the different stages of my journey: like, I cringe now at some of the pieces but it is me and I leave it there to show growth. It says to the reader, just because you’re here now doesn’t mean it’s where you’re going to remain.

You’ve spoken to me about writing from your dreams - that you dream the poem and it pours out of you when you wake up. What is this relationship between dreams and poetry? What is your experience of this space between dreaming and wakefulness that lends itself to the poetic?

In the state between wakefulness and sleep, there is this rawness, this stillness, that is uninterrupted by any external factors. It is a small opportunity to just be with yourself and capture that rush of thoughts and emotions. You’re not anywhere in particular: it’s an open space where everything is in the peripheral and blurry. Because you cannot see physically, you are immersed emotionally. It’s hard to explain but for example, the poem location, location I wrote from that space of wake and sleep, it spilled out raw and ready to be presented. I do think it captured what I’d been thinking subconsciously. At the time, in my waking hours, everything was overwhelming with the war. As soon as the phone rang and it was from Syria, it was the question of what happened? Who? I couldn’t channel all of that into conscious writing but in that moment of writing location location from that space, I could feel it all.

You have rotating themes around plastic, suffocation, breath and ocean throughout the collection. Toni Morrison, in her essay Site of Memory, talks about the images we keep coming back to, and to explore what such images are inviting us to discover. Tell me about the images you keep coming back to? What did they invite you to discover?

Plastic, suffocation and breath are quite attached to my experience of a DV relationship. I think of plastic covered furniture in my home in Syria. Sometimes I think plastic is us trying to preserve things that we don’t need… And breath… yes, I talk about breath, about last breath: about death. In my relationship, I was restricted, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Breath is not something you usually think about in your day to day, but I was so conscious of it because of that entrapment; from the intensity of war and DV, to the intensity of the weather, I became so aware of my breath. Then the ocean is a huge part of all this: we’re travelling over it to go to Syria, to come back from Syria. The ocean is a place we visit; it’s an in-between space, it's a floating, it’s an experience of being pushed by waves and currents in certain directions.

I’ve often thought of diaspora literature as a way of holding on, and going back, amid the spectre of loss and the impossibilities of return. What role does writing play for you in grappling with return, loss and the holding of Syria for you?

For the longest time, I was between do I belong here or do I belong there? In diaspora, I feel like we’ve created our own space to belong. It’s not about more of this or that: it’s a safe space for us to be interchangeably from there and from here and we can lean more on one way or the other in different times and different moments and it’s okay.

I love the concept of diaspora; it’s so inclusive. Because anyone who belongs to any kind of diaspora, well, our paths and journeys cross in experience so much. Writing in diaspora invites a range of people to be part of the space you’re creating.

Sometimes it seems like the only diaspora literature being published is from Western Sydney. However, you’ve grown up in Brisbane and continue to be based here. What did growing up in Brisbane do for your writing and the perspectives you bring to your work? What advice would you have for other diaspora writers outside the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne?

At the time I was growing as a writer, there weren’t many diaspora writers in Brisbane that I could see. Brisbane is very white. So, even though I was also studying Creative Writing at university, there weren’t many people around to inspire me. Because of that, I turned inward: I became very in tune with my emotions and myself as part of my writing process. It’s almost spiritual, therapeutic. However, I did crave connection as it was also isolating to develop my voice alone. The Melbourne and Sydney scenes weren’t part of my awareness at the time: it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve become aware of the writing emerging from the diaspora communities there.

When I first became aware it was exciting and overwhelming; exciting at the prospect of being embraced by such a community and overwhelming because I felt self-conscious. It was like something had been happening without me and now I had to find my way in. In Brisbane, I felt like I’d been fighting so hard to have my voice heard and I worried that a similar thing would happen except, instead, I’d lose my voice among a saturated crowd. This also fed into my self-publishing choice: I just wanted to be, I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to get involved in personality or publishing politics. I wanted to preserve my connection to my work and myself, and not lose my authenticity. So that’s my advice to writer’s outside major cities: hold onto your authenticity, don’t compromise your voice for entry. If you have a clear idea of what success looks and feels like to you, encourage yourself. You will find community along the way and grow from the experience.

You are a single mum with a gorgeous two-year old. If he were to read your book, what messages do you hope he takes from your work?

This book is so important because my son cannot access Syria. So, I hope my book will give him a sense of place and belonging to Syria.

So, what’s next for Minney Richani?

My next project is translating Amongst the Grapevines into Arabic. I want my work to connect with people who don’t speak English, like my cousins overseas.