An unexpected journey: the fantastic tale of Wales's first Muslim national poet Hanan Issa

The Welsh-Iraqi filmmaker and wordsmith with a deep passion for JRR Tolkien and mythology talks about the motifs that have run through her life and work

Hanan Issa could only watch on helplessly while her devastated husband struggled to express any emotion in the days and weeks after his father died during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At one point, as Abdurrashid sat dry-eyed and silent, trimming the stems of a sympathy bouquet to arrange in a vase, Issa realised that she had never seen a male of colour depicted in art in such a sensitive way.

The moment inspired a project about masculinity called Tender Men, part of which involved the Welsh-Iraqi filmmaker and poet shooting images of Rashid in a botanic headdress that evoked the Flower Men of the Tihama and Asir tribes in southern Saudi Arabia.

So when Issa was named the National Poet of Wales a year later in July 2022, she knew exactly who to enlist to best capture the occasion for posterity.

“I’d worked with Grace [of Flowers by Grace] for the short film. She made the flower crown for my husband, who is my muse,” she tells The National.

“Literature Wales, the body that appoints the national poet, said: ‘We’ll do a nice photo of you by a wall.’

"I said, ‘No, that’s not what we’re doing. I am going to get a florist to build me a cape from flowers that are grown in Wales and feature in the Welsh legend of Blodeuwedd, a woman created from flowers.’”

'I am a diva'

Issa, 38, pauses, remembering the exchange, and then laughs. “One thing you need to know about me is that I am a diva,” she says.

Soon afterwards, she struck a pose beneath the gold-leaf ceiling of the Arab Room in Cardiff Castle, a location Issa had fallen in love with after chancing on it as an English literature undergraduate at the city’s university.

The outfit chosen was a mulberry-coloured hijab, velvet green trouser suit and enormous living mantle woven from the broom, meadowsweet and oak flowers used to create Blodeuwedd in the earliest Welsh prose stories known as The Mabinogion.

“The cape was amazing but so heavy. They had to bring a stand to rest it on every few photos.

"It was my way of saying: ‘I exist here, a hijabi Muslim woman cloaked in the blossoms of ancient Welsh folklore, in a space that celebrates both my Welsh and Arab heritage.”

Although any doubts she experienced in becoming the nation’s poet never concerned whether she was Welsh enough, there were real fears of a potential backlash about being a woman of colour in a hijab.

A bold, defiant statement

Viewed through such a prism, that carefully orchestrated official image not only set the tone for her tenure but was a bold, defiant statement.

As with all national poets, Literature Wales said she was welcome to be political “but with a small p, and not be biased in my leanings”.

They also warned Issa to brace herself, schedule therapy sessions and have someone filter any vilification posted on her social media accounts.

In the end, the abuse never came. “I was so ready and then I just got one or two comments saying, ‘Oh, she looks really Welsh.’ I had intended to print comments if I got a lot of heat and make a skirt out of them. I was gutted – I didn’t even get enough for a top.”

While Issa has been writing poetry in private since the age of about six, motivation to share her work publicly came in the unexpected shape of the then Prime Minister David Cameron, who in 2016 singled out Muslim women for not properly integrating into British society.

“It was so antithetical to everything I knew about Arab women. The same day, a close friend, a Saudi woman in niqab and a geneticist, was talking to me about arranging a skydive.

Harnessing the narrative

“I wanted to harness the narrative rather than being written about or talked about. But we are not a monolith. I don't want it to come across as me speaking on behalf of all Muslim women because I think that can be problematic.”

Wrestling with more than one identity is something Issa is very familiar with. Her Welsh mother Karen, now 62, then a born-again Christian, met her father Ala, newly arrived from Baghdad, on a night out in Cardiff.

Issa, the eldest of six siblings, came into the world in St David’s Hospital in 1986, and grew up in nearby Penarth all but completely disconnected from her Arab heritage in a council house next to a field of hay that served as a playground.

While family members on her maternal side can trace their ancestry back generations, all that was known of Ala’s heritage for years was that he was descended from Al Taie tribe in southern Iraq.

She still struggles to fill the gaps where pieces of the jigsaw are missing. “There are a lot of holes in what my father knows. I feel a loss and I guess I’m connecting to it through my writing.”

No memory before poetry

Instead, her Welsh grandmother Jean, 85, and “Grampy” Cliff, 91, were a greater influence and, looking back, Issa can’t remember life before poetry. Young Hanan would listen in delight as the two frequently launched into impromptu limericks and other rhymes.

Thanks to the gift of a book from her mother, she was inspired to write about dragons, partly using the fantastical to escape the harsh reality of growing up in the only mixed-race family in a largely white and often hostile community.

A rude awakening came at the age of about nine when she hit back at a boy who had attacked her – and was roundly rebuked in racist terms by his mother.

“That was the moment I realised I was not white like my mum,” she says.

“I remember running home and shutting myself in my room and telling her: ‘You’ll never understand.’ She said that was like a knife.”

Retreat into fantasy

Writing has always helped to ease Issa’s anxiety as a means of explaining the “storm upstairs’’, and the genres of fantasy and mythology, in books or gaming, continue to provide a retreat to this day.

She was familiar with The Mabinogion from a young age and fled whenever possible into the worlds of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and The Crown of Stars by Kate Elliott, which blew her mind with its biracial protagonist.

Her fondness for PlayStation games was even the source for the names of the family cats, Miyu and Mayu.

During the Covid lockdowns, Issa and Rashid’s daily hour of exercise was regularly devoted to wandering through woods to hunt for goblins hiding among tree stumps with their son, Yousuf, now 12. Although not much of a reader, he has embraced his mother’s love for fantasy.

She learned Welsh and Arabic but confesses to not being fluent in either. Yet both are infused in her writing, whether it is favourite Welsh words such as aelwyd, meaning hearth or heart of the home, or the Arabic free verse of rebel Iraqi female poet Nazik Al-Malaika.

After her parents separated while Issa was a teenager, her father sought solace in religion and introduced his children to Islam by “presenting these ideas in a very gentle way”.

A 'massive' green light

But it was her mother who, spontaneously sitting in on lectures when dropping the siblings at the mosque, converted first in a “massive green light” for Issa that later inspired a piece called With Her Back Straight, performed as part of the Hijabi Monologues in London’s Bush Theatre.

“It really impacted me,” says Issa, who donned her own headscarf months later at the age of 14. “It made me question why I was holding back.

"There was an Islamic shop down the road so I bought one of those awful pull-over-your-head hijabs, put it on in the shop and came home in it.”

Her parents reunited but split once and for all when she was at university. Issa recalls a difficult time that preceded a period of estrangement from her father, now 68, but they have since made their peace.

“It’s easier on your heart when you don’t have tension in a relationship,” she says softly.

Tellingly, the tutor of a poetry module at university picked up on her tendency to channel emotions through writing.

“He said: ‘Is everything OK? Everything you’re writing seems to be about death.’

"Writing has always been the way that I process life, even if I'm not entirely conscious of the connection.”

Around the same time, she had an awakening when reading the philosophies of Edward Said, Nawal El Saadawi and Mona Eltahawy led to "the idea of being perceived”.

“It really solidified me being OK with feeling liminal. Some days I feel more Welsh, some days more Arab. Identity is a fluid thing. It is something that is constantly ebbing and flowing.”

An invitation to join the writers’ room of the hit Channel 4 show We Are Lady Parts after “slipping into the DMs” of its creator, Nida Manzoor, became an opportunity to explore that sense of liminality.

“I found her on Instagram and said how incredibly wonderful it was to have such a joyful expression of hijabi Muslim women,” she says. “I’ve never worked with a creative who is so focused on ensuring that everyone feels seen and heard.”

She was compelled to co-found an open-mic night in Cardiff called Where I’m Coming From after becoming frustrated with talk about the lack of talented writers of colour.

“Almost everyone we platformed has gone on to be published or win awards,” she says.

The cats love him, too

Issa’s own pursuit of writing as a career was strongly encouraged by her Bangladeshi husband, who is now a 39-year-old biomedical scientist for the National Health Service.

When she was working in the charity sector for several years and manned phone lines for adult social services, he said: “You have to chase your dreams.’’

“My husband is phenomenal. He is the one who will get me to the event, hold my bag, be the loudest one cheering.”

Their marriage in 2009 was arranged through a friend of her mother’s after a few meetings during which she tested him by seeing how he interacted with her siblings and, not least, the cats.

“Both of my cats – and I kid you not, this was such a big sign – would go in and flop on to his lap like he was made of catnip, and they still do to this day. I thought: ‘You can’t be a bad person if the cats love you.'’’

Her first paid commission was for International Women's Day in 2017 at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the spoken-word style that Issa prefers to use when conveying complex ideas.

Geek of form

Since then, a project dear to her heart as a self-confessed “geek” has been honouring cynghanedd, a Welsh poetic tradition that translates as chiming, and has strict rules of sound arrangement, rhyme and alliteration.

Issa has assembled poets who write in English to take a crash course in the method in a project arising from her curiosity as to what they might create.

“It’s how we make language sing,” she says. “Traditionally, it’s in the Welsh language but I’d like to see how poets writing in English with an ear for form and musicality play with it.”

The titular poem of her 2019 anthology My Body Can House Two Hearts is written using cynghanedd techniques and performed with a pastwn or staff made from ash wood that is beaten in time on the ground.

Commonly used as a weapon or badge of office by men, Issa’s was made specially for her and inscribed with Welsh and Arabic sayings.

“It felt important to me to write the title poem in this way because it felt like the perfect way to bridge all those parts of me linguistically – this hybrid of Welsh and Arabic, writing in the English language but using a Welsh tradition,” she says.

Once and future poet

Issa was appointed for three years as the National Poet of Wales but the official tenure has recently been extended to five. Good thing, too, since she says: “I’m not done.’’

Beyond writing, she can often be found communing with nature (especially trees) while walking and wild-swimming, or dabbling in her other artistic talents of painting and crochet.

As well as giving plenty of opportunities to indulge her love of travel, the role as a cultural ambassador has given rise to commissions such as a tribute called The Unsung to NHS workers and a poem to be inscribed on a walkway through a woodland memorial dedicated to victims of Covid.

Things have come full circle following the recent publication of the bilingual children’s poetry anthology And I Hear Dragons, a nod to the mythical creatures that first roused Issa as a child to pick up a pen.

Throughout the intervening decades, the flame-breathing red dragon on the Welsh flag has flown overhead as a symbol of courage. And, just like the enduring heraldic charge, there is still plenty of fire yet in the belly of this once and future poet.