The difference between “poetry” and “hair” in Arabic is nearly imperceptible.
Columbus poet Ruth Awad kept asking her Lebanese American father to repeat the words for her— “shi3r” and “sha3r”— but she’s still not confident in her own pronunciation.
The comparison is the subject of a poem in an unpublished collection, which unpacks her experience with hair loss due to alopecia, which she was diagnosed with last year.
Both poetry and hair have played an important role in Awad’s life, and the former only grew stronger as the latter went away.
“I lost my hair, but all these poems sprang up,” said Awad, 36, of Clintonville. “The words grew in its place almost.”
Awad is ready to share the untitled volume of poetry with the world, especially to encourage other women who share her experience. As she shops for a publisher, she is also preparing for the release of another collection, “Outside the Joy,” through Third Man Books next year.
Both works tackle intensely personal and challenging experiences in Awad’s life, and offer more of her perspective than her first book of poems, “Set to Music a Wildfire,” which centered on her father’s experiences during the Lebanese Civil War and beyond.
“I feel like I’ve tapped into a voice that I didn’t have access to, and I don’t think I would’ve had access to if I hadn’t lost my hair,” she said.
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Growing up, Awad said she always viewed her long, dark hair as one of her “defining physical traits,” because it both solidified a resemblance to her mother, whom she idealized, and reflected society’s standard of beauty.
Before she was diagnosed with alopecia, her hair stretched down to her hips.Get the Evening Update newsletter in your inbox.
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“It’s really difficult to lose handfuls and handfuls of hair every day,” she said. “Seeing it happen all the time was just too stressful. So, I shaved off what was left and have been wearing wigs.”
Awad said she initially felt guilty about how much the change affected her.
“I’m very cognizant of how harmful gender stereotypes and expectations can be,” she said. “Like, here I think that I’m so evolved or progressive in my thinking, and here I am privately struggling with this gender ideal that I feel like I’ve lost. … I feel like I failed in some way. And then I started to give myself some mercy.”
Awad said women should not feel ashamed for not having hair, even though hair loss is treated as a shameful experience in the culture.
“The only representations you see in media of women without hair are women who are sick, women who are alien, women who are monstrous or villainous in some way, or they lose their hair as a comeuppance for some other moral failing, like being vain or being a mean girl,” she said. “You don’t see many powerful depictions of women being bald.”
Awad examines those stereotypes in her poem, “Can You Still be Hot as a Bald woman,” which was based on an internet search.
“I just wanted to see what the internet had to say about it, and boy, I wish I hadn’t dipped my toes in that one,” she said.
“A lot of the lines are just pulled from those responses and trying to put them in conversation with each other. You can see how discordant all of it is, where you’re just getting all these conflicting ideas about what it means to be a bald woman and what it means to be an attractive woman.”
The collection also features a poem about her husband, Eric Shonkwiler, helping her shave her head.
“I don’t think that I’ve never been as vulnerable with him as I was in that moment,” she said. “And he was so gentle and caring and tender, and I could feel the love radiating off of him. It really floored me. It’s humbling to be loved that much.”
Shonkwiler, 38, said he has admired his wife’s strength as she continues the process the change in her appearance.
“There were times that she was horrifically depressed,” he said. “It was absolutely a blow to her, but I don’t think that she ever let it shake this core of her.”
As a novelist, Shonkwiler said he is “humbled” watching Awad create poems, or “little kernels of emotion and truth,” so quickly.
“Her writing is entirely organic to her,” he said. “It has to occur whether she knows it or not. … I think that it was always a necessary part to her well-being, and without it, she would be robbed of an outlet that’s almost like not being able to exhale.”
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‘Grieving the interpersonal and universal’
Awad isn’t the only member of her family navigating health issues; her mother is battling a thoracic aortic aneurysm.
“My family has been on pins and needles since we found out about this,” Awad said.
It’s a scary reality Awad addresses in the poetry of “Outside the Joy,” which also celebrates her mother’s personality and image.
“She (was) this total June Cleaver, perfect wife, who would bake cookies for the neighbors around the holidays and hand-sewed all of the clothes that me and my sisters wore,” Awad said.
“And then, when my parents divorced, this other version of my mother just emerged from like the smoke and ashes. And from that point on, she always dressed in, like, black flowing lace and chiffon, combat boots, really dark eye makeup and plum lips. … When a 6-foot-tall, gorgeous vampire walks into the room, everyone just looks at her.”
“Outside the Joy” also explores Awad’s close bond with her sister, Sarah, as well as concerns about everything from climate change to lack of resources in Awad’s ancestral home in Lebanon.
“The unifying thread is grieving both the interpersonal and universal worlds at the same time,” Awad said. “As horrible as it is for me to experience this with my mom, when I step back and I think about what’s happening in our city, state, country and on the global level, it just makes everything feel smaller, and I like the tension that that creates.”
Bexley-based poet Maggie Smith said she was impressed when she heard Awad read from “Outside the Joy” at a recent event.
“They are stunning,” Smith said of Awad’s poems. “I gasped my way through her set and was brought to tears in public.”
Oftentimes, it is the personal, vulnerable writing that resonates more than the general, Smith said.
“The best poems — and Ruth’s are the best poems — are a lens through which we can see and process our own experience and our own lives.
“And she’s created these beautiful, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, sometimes painfully clear lenses for her readers, and it’s such a gift.”
Ruth Awad will read some of her new poems at 5 p.m. on Sept. 3 at Streetlight Guild, 1367 E. Main St., as part of the “Rhapsody & Refrain” poetry series. Admission is $5.
