Salmah Salam Oiza on the Weight of the Unsaid in Poetry and Life

Salmah, who recently published her collection of poetry, Foreign in a Long Familiar Leap Year, explained that her work is rooted in self-expression, not literary ambition. Born into a “series of dramatic events” in a polygamous family, she found poetry offered the perfect medium for dissecting and processing life’s complexities—a way to express rage, sadness, happiness, and melancholy, making her own existence observable from a detached, audience perspective.

The Intertwined Nature of Life & Art: Intentionality and Flow

For Salmah, the influence between her life and her art is mutual and constant, akin to the concept of Yin and Yang; they perpetually flow into each other. While her lived experiences naturally provide the raw material for her writing, discovering poetry has fundamentally reshaped her existence, instilling an expressive energy into her everyday world.

“When I’m doing something as little as going out for brunch now, you know, it’s poetic to me. I want it to be poetic. I want it to be cute. I want it to match. I want it to have rhythm. I want it to have flow. I want there to be some kind of musicality to it. And that is what poetry has given me.”

This philosophy extends directly to her role as a digital lifestyle creator. She emphasised that every piece of content she shares is rooted in intentionality. She is emphatically not interested in randomness; she is interested in the crucial, deliberate act of noticing. When she posts, nothing is done “just so that it is done.”

“The tree can be rusty, right? But you have to notice its beauty… If I post a picture of a rusty tree and I add a music to it, there’s a reason. There’s some kind of connection… I’m trying to communicate something to you and I hope, I just hope that you can understand it.”

This connection is critical: the chosen music, the photo’s subject, the caption, and the resulting emotion are all interwoven. For Salmah, her work’s internal structure must always serve this emotional intent, even at the expense of traditional poetic rules. She recounted a critique where a line was suggested to be switched to improve the rhyme, but she refused, explaining that while it would “look better,” it would “take away from the message I’m trying to pass.” She prioritises the successful transmission of feeling over superficial aesthetic perfection. “I am communicating, and I really want to make sure that you get from it what I’m telling you,” she asserted.

Finding the Story in Silence: The Weight of the Unsaid

The conversation turned to the craft of poetry, particularly the hidden power held by the unsaid. Salmah highlighted silence as a crucial tool in her work, arguing that it holds immense weight and is an intentional invitation to the reader.

“Silence is a very important tool when it comes to poetry, because in poetry, silence holds a lot of power… We are kind of trusting the reader or we’re kind of hoping that the reader is able to fill in that silence, is able to kind of deduce that this silence has weight.”

She explained that punctuation—a comma, a full stop, or an em dash—is never arbitrary. It is a signpost telling the reader to pause, to become silent. In that silence, “it’s a whole story of its own.” The pause forces the reader to rummage through their own complex, messy, and contradictory human experience to determine what comes next. In that gap, there could be laughter, pain, joy, or profound uncertainty. By withholding forced resolutions, she invites the audience to confront their own feelings. The poem is finished, but the silence remains a space where the writer has surrendered meaning to the world, allowing the reader to find their personal conclusion.

The August poem, “Spaghettification,” was cited as a perfect example of this. The term—a physics phenomenon where an object stretches until it loses all shape—came to her through a loved one and perfectly encapsulated her first intense year in the UK. She felt stretched emotionally, physically, and psychologically, and the poem’s structure mirrors that elongation, forcing the reader to feel the sense of widening and thinning until “all that is left is length.”

The Power of a Mother’s Trust: The Journey to Independence

This personal approach unexpectedly led to broad relatability for her advanced readers. She initially shared her anxiety about releasing her poetry, which began as mere diary entries, believing “Nobody is going to want to read this. Nobody is going to care.” However, the response to her published poem, “One Way Ticket,” and others, proved otherwise. An Indian editor, for instance, reached out to express how the work, despite cultural differences, gave her a real-life flashback to her own journey to the UK, reinforcing the universality of the emotions captured.

The poem “Mother Calls on the 29th” resonated particularly deeply, drawing on her own unique relationship with a mother who prioritised her daughter’s peace over relentless ambition. She contrasted her experience with her university days, where her mother drove her to school, set up her room, and randomly brought large portions of stew and soup. For Salmah, independence never felt truly separate until her move abroad.

Moving to the UK was her moment of “Aha,” a time defined by the push and pull of wanting to expand but also yearning to remain in the “cocoon of safety” that home provided. Her mother’s words—”If it’s getting too much at any time, come back”—were not a suggestion of failure, but a blanket of unconditional trust.

“That’s that trust that she has handed to me, kind of like I know you would make the right decision and I would hold you through it… I would cocoon you as you go, as you embark on this journey of yours.”

This universal theme of unconditional parental love—the parent who calls not to push, but to ensure safety—was a powerful touchstone for readers, validating her decision to put such intimate thoughts out into the world.

Overcoming Burnout with “Sassy Women” and Community

When asked about battling creative burnout, Salmah was candid about her struggle with imposter syndrome and the pressure of a demanding life, especially after abandoning a sprawling 100,000-word novel draft that she deemed “rubbish.” She explained that for a long time, her writing had been confined only to her Instagram and WhatsApp status.

Her cure for burnout is neither solitary retreat nor frantic action, but community.

“It always goes back to the kind of people that I have around me, my friends, my families, my lovers, they are always speaking life into me.”

She shared how friends would read chapters or cycle back random passages she had forgotten writing—a powerful physical reminder of her talent. One friend even screenshotted a passage from 2023, favourited it, and re-read it constantly because it spoke to her. This collective reinforcement “sucks the burnout” out of her.

Beyond her immediate circle, she draws significant inspiration from literary and artistic foremothers, calling them her “sassy women.” She specifically named Maya Angelou and Chimamanda Adichie, alongside the singer and poet Nina Simone.

“I love to watch interviews of Maya Angelou… She’s so sassy. And when I watch her and I watch her certainty in herself and I watch how she carries herself, I’m just like, this is who I want to be.”

She sees their legacy as a burning motivation. The ultimate goal, she says, is not just to write for herself, but to know that one day, someone somewhere might watch an interview or read an article of hers and feel the same consuming inspiration, fulfilling the cycle of art and influence.