Book Review: "Abdellatif Laâbi: Poems/Poèmes"

(Originally published on Yahoo! Voices on March 11, 2013)

Abdellatif Laâbi is an acclaimed Moroccon poet writing in the French language and the Poetry Translation Centre of the UK has published a chapbook of his work translated into English by André Naffis-Sahely. It is, of course, too short to be representative of decades of poetry, but is a fine testament of admiration to Laâbi.

Naffis-Sahely explains Laâbi's clashes with Moroccon authorities in the introduction. Apparently the poet even spent some time imprisoned, which is mentioned in the poetry as well. It is clear that Naffis-Sahely has a deep respect for Laâbi and his poems. This respect is evident in the translations.

I do not pretend to be an expert in French. Indeed, I could use some refresher courses. But to the ear of a non-native speaker who, it must be said, became less fluent as I went along, the French of Laâbi's poems is not overly concerned with the inherent musicality of the language. Instead, he seems to employ rather direct wording. I do not think it very possible for French to be gruff, but if it could I get the sense he might take that route. In the absence of that ability, the nearest descriptive word could be straight-forward (?). I add the question mark because even that does not seem to adequately describe my impression, but is the closest approximation. He does not seem to strive for pretty; what he seeks is impact.

This is something that Naffis-Sahely strove to bring over to the English translations. And English is a language that can do straight-foward, even gruff and worse, quite well. The challenge for Naffis-Sahely was to translate impact without becoming too rough and thus losing the quality of French to always remain somewhat pretty when the subject is anything but. He succeeded. For example: "I hear the wolves/ switch the lights off at midnight/ and lawfully rape their wives" (from "The Wolves").

Standout poems are "My Mother's Language", "The Wolves", and "The Poem Tree". The most truly beautiful poem in the chapbook is, for me, "La Terre S'ouvre et T'accueille" translated "The Earth Opens and Welcomes You". It was written for Tahar Djaout, a writer killed in Algiers in 1993.
"O my friend
sleep well
you need it
because you worked hard
like an honourable man

...

Sleep well my friend
Sleep the sleep of the righteous
Rest well
even from your dreams
Let us shoulder the burden a little"

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"The Heart of Darkness" and "Nights of Musk"

(Originally published on Yahoo! Voices on January 1, 2010)

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 261 pages, fiction, $4.95 U.S./$5.95 Canada.
Haggag Hassan Oddoul, Nights of Musk: Stories From Old Nubia (The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 126 pages, fiction, $19.95 U.S.

Of these two books much has been said. Much deserves to be said.

They share some similarities. Joseph Conrad was a Polish immigrant resident in England at a time when England was very xenophobic and superior-minded. He felt isolated and under-appreciated. He was one of what Salman Rushdie has called the"translated men" (a phrase I just love and feel akin to). So is Haggag Hassan Oddoul, in a way. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1944 of parents who were displaced Nubians. He later helped to work on the Aswan Dam, which eventually completely drowned Old Nubia out of existence. His work in "Nights of Musk: Stories From Old Nubia" is an effort to chronicle life in Nubia before and after the Dam to preserve that part of him that is lost or feels alone.

In "The Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction", Conrad draws heavily on his youth on the merchant ships of France and England. His highly fictional autobiographical style reveals his feelings of outsidedness. Four stories comprise this volume: "Youth" (originally published in 1898), "The Heart of Darkness" (published first in 1899), "Amy Foster" (1901), and "The Secret Sharer" (1910). The volume contains much scholarly material, including a lengthy introduction, timeline, endnotes, further reading suggestions for the serious Conrad reader, and even a short piece on various works inspired by "The Heart of Darkness". Conrad's feelings of alienation are most clear in "Amy Foster", but resonates in the odd intimation of personal disconnectedness from the events he (or rather the character Marlow) partakes directly in, as if he is watching someone else go through the motions, as it were.

Conrad used this character Marlow extensively. Of the four stories in this volume Marlow is the named narrator of two. By the time one gets to the last yarn, one automatically slips Marlow into the place of the unnamed first-person narrator by default. Marlow is a man of the times, with all the prejudiced views of other men of that time. And yet, he only half-believes it. For example, in "The Heart of Darkness"- easily Conrad's most recognised work and quite possibly his masterpiece- he speaks of women as being far removed from reality, happy in their illusions, and quite incapable of handling the truth. It is the responsibility of the men to preserve those illusions so that womankind can be safe and happy and protected. He speaks of the African natives as savages, niggers, and cannibals, unable to fully understand technology or be educated beyond a certain point. But that cuts both ways for Marlow. He also saves plenty of venom for his fellow white men, whom he calls pilgrims in order to highlight their hypocrisy and the fact that they- including Marlow himself- have no business in that part of the world.

Sometimes Marlow's vacillation between belief in the propaganda of the empires of the time and his disbelief in it can be hard for the modern reader to swallow. But "The Heart of Darkness" was critical in ousting the worst of the powers that were in Africa at the time and stopping what has been called the African holocaust. Based on Conrad's own experiences on the Congo River, from which he returned to England physically ill and mentally disturbed, the novella paints a murky picture of the truth that the empires tried desperately to keep from the people at large- all for the riches to be gained from ivory trade. The general public outcry became so loud and widespread that some changes were implemented. It did not end the suffering of Africa, but it eased it a little. Even today, people who work firsthand in needy Africa refer to this novella as a comparison piece.

Still, as I have said, the dominant feeling I was left with from the four stories collected in the volume was Conrad's disconnectedness as an outsider viewing the atrocities of others and living among those who would not fully accept him. It is said that "Amy Foster", in which this theme is dealt with most directly, is loosely based on his own marriage to Jessie George. These are the stories of a man trying to make it in a world that he loves but can only partially belong to.

The same feeling can be derived from Haggag Hassan Oddoul's "Nights of Musk: Stories From Old Nubia". This volume also contains four stories: "Adila, Grandmother", "Nights of Musk", "Zeinab Uburty", and "The River People". They are poetic stories which marry the Nubian tongue with the Arabic, since most characters in the story speak both, even if only brokenly. They are also simply written and easy to read. Unfamiliar terms- taken from both Egyptian languages- are explained in the text and in a small glossary in the back. Oddoul skillfully and effectively resurrects the sights, sounds, colors, smells, and thoughts of this lost world. It is easy to forget that one is not actually in old Nubia and amongst its people.

"Adila, Grandmother" reads like a piece very akin to an autobiography. A child who is half-Nubian/half- Egyptian visits his family every summer in the land allotted to the Nubians after the Aswan Dam was built. Eventually, he is accepted as completely one of them and marries his cousin, according to the tradition of the tribe. But the story clearly demonstrates the "translated man". Part of it deals with his life in Alexandria and his sister's utter contempt for anything Nubian even as he embraces it.

"Nights of Musk" is the best story of the volume, hands down. It is the most poetic. Its time-line is not linear. It contracts and expands like the heart muscle, like the annual flood of the Nile before the Dam interfered. It relies heavily on onomatopoeia and the senses. It is more a meditation than a story and is beautiful. Herein, more than any other story in the book, pulsates the life of old Nubia.

"The River People" closes the volume with an emotion of utter despair and loss. This is a story which clearly communicates the devastation wrought by dislocation, migration, and the slow hissing death of a way of life and it does so from the point of view of those left behind. In it, Oddoul has poured all the suffering and sadness of his parents, of himself, of those Nubians who were left behind in the indiscriminate mercy (or lack thereof) of the Aswan High Dam, and of that of the culture itself which died with the natural rhythms of the Nile. While "Nights of Musk" is the most pleasing story, "The River People" seems to drive home the purpose of the collection. The effect is a little unsettling.

Both of these books, when viewed as works of immigrant and/or displaced people, have a very great relevance today. It has been said that we are living in a time of the greatest migration of peoples since the fall of the Roman empire. The emotions, sufferings, and feelings of isolation which plays about the edges of Conrad's stories (being direct only in "Amy Foster") and which is the central moving theme of Oddoul's stories resonates in every continent and land on this earth. It is a global phenomenon that finds ready expression in these books which are both dissimilar and very similar.

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A Short Conversation with Poet Kit Fryatt

(Originally published on July 10, 2008 on Yahoo! Voices.)

I first met Kit Fryatt through Livejournal.com (I have since deleted my account there) when she wrote an entry regarding an event she attended at which Bono of U2 fame read and gave her thoughts on the whole affair. Being an avid U2 fan, I was highly entertained by that entry in which she was not at all pleased. Since we share a common love of poetry, we continue to correspond and I have learned much from her over the last few years. She is an unfailing support to me poetically. She is also a very good writer as well as teacher and has been published, among other numerous journals, in the Poetry Ireland Review. As a way to give back to her, I asked her for an email interview to be published here on AC (Associated Content, later Yahoo! Voices). Without further ado, here are the results of that interview:

S. R.: Where and when were you first exposed to poetry? How did you come to love it?

K. F.: I don't remember: the first poems I heard were nursery rhymes, probably. I remember laughing and laughing at a silly rhyme my father used to say: "Spring is sprung, the grass is riz / I wonder where the birdies is?" I never got tired of that. I have memories of writing poems on a paper napkin in a restaurant when I was 7. One began "A knight / In sight / On a horse / Of course", which I think has a certain modernist flair. I learnt poems by heart at an American school for military children in Izmir, Turkey. Rose Fyleman:

I think mice are rather nice,
Their tails are long, their faces small,
They haven't any chins at all.
Their ears are pink, their teeth are white,
They run about the house at night;
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
and no one seems to like them much,
but I think mice are rather nice.

When we were still in Turkey, my mother brought home a copy of the New Golden Treasury, not Palgrave but a new selection chosen in the 70s by Edward Leeson. Books were a special event: even in Ankara, the capital, there were only a couple of bookshops that sold English-language books. There I found:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wude nu,
Lhude sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, sing cuccu
Ne swik thu naver nu!
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!

That's from the 13th century, and it's really just a slightly -- ever so slightly: note that farting buck -- more sophisticated version of my dad's rhyme. I had a cult of Old England going on at the time, despite or because of being surrounded by the remains of much more ancient cultures in Asia Minor, and I was hooked. I think rhyme and repetition hooks children into poetry, but it's a sense of the strangeness of language that keeps them reading.

S.R.: Which poets are the greatest influence on your work and why?

K.F.: Not for me to say, I think. Influence is a slippery thing. You might think a poet is heavily inflected by Auden or Yeats and I mightn't hear it at all. I've never tried consciously to imitate anyone, except in parodies, but I find I'm always unconsciously imitating. Sometimes imitating very bad stuff.

S.R.: Are there non-poetic influences, such as environment, other interests, etc.?

K.F. : Of course: anything and everything can be material. That said, the Irish bardic schools allegedly encouraged their pupils to compose indoors, in darkness. There's something to be said for sensory deprivation, too.

S.R.: As an academic, do you feel that is beneficial to poetry or not, and why?

K.F.: I'm lucky: I get a lot of pleasure out of close analysis. Sometimes a poem won't really ravish me until I've done the forensics on it. That's not true for many people I think, even some who end up studying English at university. Students often complain that they dislike "dissecting" a poem; a revealing metaphor, because they see the poem as a corpse to start with. I tell them it's not dissection; it's vivisection, except you can't hurt a poem by torturing it, luckily. As for poets making their living in the academy: poets need their patrons; always have.

S.R.: Give a brief anecdote of an experience in your life or at a literary function that has impacted you as a poet.

K.F.: I think all the experiences that have made an impact on me poetically are experiences of reading poems, which isn't very interesting to talk about. Literary events are usually the reverse of inspiring, though sometimes there is free wine. The poets I know personally -- I think I should like them as well if they weren't poets.

S.R. What is it that you most hope readers will take away from your work?

K.F.: Words. In their particular order.

S.R.: Are there any projects you are working on or ideas for future projects? What makes these appealing to you as a poet?

K.F.: I'm sending myself to poetic boot-camp for the summer. Formal exercises, that sort of thing. Starting over is always bracing.

S.R.: If you could could give an aspiring poet advice in only one sentence, what would it be?

K.F.: I *am* an aspiring poet! I saw this on a medieval mazard bowl in the Cloisters in New York: "Reason bade that I should write, think much and speak little".

S.R.: You are originally from Britain, I believe, but have also lived in
Ireland and Scotland. Would you consider yourself a British poet or an
Irish or Scottish one? How do you think that experiencing these
different perspectives has shaped you as a poet?

K.F.: That's a big and dangerous question. I'm bound to offend someone. I was born in Iran, to British parents. I left when I was ten months old though -- no memories. I spent some time in the south of England, and then my parents travelled with me to Singapore and Turkey. Then I was at boarding school for a year before they finally came back when I was ten. I spent my teens in the south of England and moved to Ireland when I was 21. I've been spending a bit of time in Scotland over the last few months too. National identity -- whatever some critics may say -- I think is rarely to the forefront of a poet's mind when he or she is writing, and yet poetry turns out marked by the regional -- perhaps, rather than the national -- in all sorts of ways. Politically, I'm not a Unionist: I think the United Kingdom has come to a point now where it is no longer really sustainable. I would be happy to see an independent Scotland -- making the island of Ireland a single country has particular political and social difficulties which I think would have to be negotiated very carefully, but given that it's done equitably I think it would be desirable in the end. England and Wales will probably remain as a unit: an independent Wales isn't viable economically. The cultures of the British Isles have their distinct differences but they also share a lot. England is often (especially in Ireland) seen as a monolithic imperial nation, but it's actually very various. I see myself as English within a wider british culture. The small b is deliberate. I think the imperialist conception of Britain, along with English domination of the United Kingdom, should and will come to an end. English people often don't think about this stuff. Their relative power insulates them from it. Well, white English people. There's a very different usage of "British" by English people of colour, because they often feel that "English" is a racial as well as a national marker, whereas "British" is inclusive. I'd like to make my small-b britishness somehow cognate with that. Living in Ireland and Scotland has made me think about these things, which I mightn't have done otherwise -- they make their way into poems sometimes. Quite a lot of Hiberno-English gets into them too, and the odd Scots word which makes its way in via the Scottish ballads, which I love.


Wurm Im Apfel, a small press that Fryatt runs herself.
Find her on Goodreads.