Our very lives are miracles: Landbridge [life in fragments] by Y-Dang Troeung

In attempting to review this book, I can think of no better place to begin than with the first passages of the author’s preface:

The intensity of these accounts, the imprint they leave on me, does not lessen with each telling.

A quarter of Cambodia’s population died during the genocide; the remaining three-quarters were physically and mentally debilitated.

US bombings, the Khmer Rouge genocide, toxic and carcinogenic exposure, incarceration, urban and rural divestment, deportation.

In this book, theory, fiction, and autobiography blur through allusive fragments. These fragments—a perforated language of cracks and breaks—seek to knit together, however imperfectly, the lifeworlds that inspire me to write here, on this page.

I was made aware of Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung via an article by the author’s close friend, novelist Madeleine Thien. My knowledge of the details of the Cambodian genocide is limited; I was young at the time and I’m afraid that my historical understanding of the wars in Southeast Asia is more informed by Hollywood than the stories of survivors. However, the onset of war in Gaza inspired me to learn more about other genocides because, as Troeung says, Cambodia was not the first, nor will it be the last. And then there was the extra heartbreak of knowing that the author died of cancer (a legacy of the toxic and carcinogenic exposure she mentions above, in utero and during her first year of life) just months before this book was published.

But I was not prepared for the singular power of this work.

Through a series of fragments, interspersed with letters to her young son, Troeung writes about the experiences of her family—her parents and two older brothers—during Pol Pot time: years spent hiding, working in forced labour camps, starving and, finally, escaping to Thailand. She talks about coming to Canada at the age of one, growing up in a small town in Ontario, the complicated strangeness of life as a refugee, and her efforts to reconnect with her ancestral land and make some sense of the horror that unfolded there and, finally, the process of coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis. The story, or stories, she wishes to tell unfold in pieces, moving back and forth in time, generously illustrated with photgraphs, documents and art. She is raw and open about her own experiences, but sensitive to the respect that must be afforded to those that belong to others. Her voice is measured and thoughtful, but not without emotion. Her anger and pain is real. So is her innate optimism. This is more than a memoir—it is a personal journey shared.

Troeung’s unusual name, Y-Dang, honours international workers at the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand who cared for her family after their dangerous trek through land mined jungles to reach the Cambodian border. After arriving in Canada as refugees, they were given new winter clothing and photographed meeting Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The final stage in their journey would take them to Goderich, Ontario—home of Alice Munro where volunteers helped them adjust to a their new home, learn English, and find jobs and schools. Having already survived so much, the newcomers were resourceful. Troeung describes waiting in the car on rainy nights while her family salvaged for earthworms in the local cemetery with cans tied to their ankles. They were part of an underground network of refugees who collected and sold worms to fishermen to use as bait. This additional income would help them save for their future. She reports that the family experienced both welcome and antagonism in their new hometown, but notes that distrust of foreigners has become worse over time. Refugees seem to be particular targets of late.

For the refugees themselves, however, there were challenges and contradictions others might not appreciate. Certain expectations colour the way one learns to integrate a tragic past with what, given luck and years of hard work, had ideally become a comfortable present. Refugees were expected to show happiness and gratitude for the privilege of a new lease on life, while their past experiences were subject to interpretations approved by others. There were things, Troeung found, that she was only allowed to speak about in a certain way such as “War in the abstract as if what happened to us was an abstract thing.” But this was not something that only occurred in her life and studies in Canada, it followed her back to her homeland as she discovered during the years she lived in Hong Kong and visited Cambodia regularly.

She writes about watching, in a courtroom near Phnom Penh, lawyers debate the ECCC’s 2014 verdict convicting Nuon Chea, second-in-command to Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan, Cambodia’s head of state during the Khmer Rouge, of crimes against humanity and genocide. The question is, of course, is genocide not defined as an act by one racial or religious group against another? If so, can Communism be considered under either category?

I’m beginning to lose hope in definitions, and perhaps in language itself. As the lawyers declare the importance of reserving certain words for some peoples and not others, I do not laugh or cry or shout. Instead, I marvel at what is happening before us in this country, at the machinations of an entire legal-humanitarian-academic industry, speaking for the millions of Cambodian people still left grieving with open wounds.

Throughout this book, the ongoing events in Syria form a point of reference and empathy for Troeung. She thinks about what the Syrians are going through often, with empathy and concern. Reading Landbridge  today, in late 2023, while the war in Gaza fills the news and genocide is a word that is being simultaneously denied and weaponized, one can only imagine how deeply she would be pained.

Landbridge does not pretend to be a formal historical exercise, complete with exhaustive details and dates, rather it is an intensely personal account that gathers together memories, pieces of lost information, and accounts of visits to museums and memorials, with records of significant stages in the slow reckoning that the horrors that unfolded Cambodia, like so many others in recent times, have received in public forums. It is a sad indictment. So many times the experiences of her family and her people during the war are devalued, or deemed to be of insignificant interest to Western audiences, while at other times her ability and her right to tell those stories is questioned against the expertise of dedicated Western scholars.

Subtitled, in brackets, life in fragments, Lifebridge is an extraordinary book, one that carries so much in its short, pensive passages. It is a search for understanding, of the self and of the history, traumas and challenges that shaped her parents’ and siblings’ lives and, in turn, her own life, for war does not end for those who survive, even when the bombs stop dropping and the killing fields are designated a historical site. Troeung recognizes so much of that fallout in her parents, aunts and uncles. And she carries it in her body as cancer spreads. But she is also fully aware of the strength and resilience her family has always shown. As she writes to her son, Kai:

Stories of the dead and suffering need not drop you in stillness. They can instead show us that our very lives are miracles, that every day since Pol Pot time has been a gift. Our family has always lived that way.

As the book nears a close, one can only marvel at the peace and resolve that seems to settle into her words, for this is also a love story—for her family, her husband and her child—one that achieves its fullest expression in the letters she writes to Kai, first to mark his earliest birthdays, then reaching into the future, as missives for the birthdays she is afraid she will not live to see. The wisdom, the composure and the unconditional love she offers the child he is and the man he may become are a precious gift that we, as readers, are privileged to share.

Lifebridge [life in fragments] by Y-Dang Troeung is published by Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and in the UK by Penguin.

What is important is to love: The Worst Thing of All is the Light by José Luis Serrano

The worst thing of all is the light because it’s always the same, but we are not ever the same, and then that light reminds us of the others we were before, once, those others who did things that now we would not do, that we don’t admit to having done. In spring, the light of a clear, bright day, when the wind has left the air clean and pure, leads us to clearer days, days of youth, of holidays. Or that yellow light of autumn, also clean, sharp at the final hours of the afternoon.

Light, light, light. Such is the thread along which the thoughts of Edorta, a middle-aged man, run through the course of his free-flowing poetic reflections, a diary of sorts, addressed to, but not meant to be read by, his long-time friend Koldo. As he reaches for a way to understand and articulate his tangled and conflicted feelings, light serves as a mechanism of memory, sometimes consoling, at other times cruel. But Edorta’s musings are only half of The Worst Thing of All is the Light, an inventive, metafictional novel that sets an exploration of the boundaries between friendship and desire against a parallel examination of the relationship between imagination and reality.

Edorta and Koldo are the creations of Spanish writer José Luis Serrano, but within this double stranded novel, they are also the evolving characters taking shape in the mind of an “author” who is, presumably, a fictionalized representation of Serrano himself. In a series of journal entries, the author/narrator records the activities and conversations that mark each day of a vacation he and his husband are spending in Bilbao. His report, which details where they go, what they eat and what they talk about, is addressed to his husband directly, with the all familiarity two decades together has wrought. These dated entries, each illustrated with a scenic photograph, occur over the course of ten days in August of 2014 and appear to set up the proposed novel the author is planning to write: the story of a very close friendship—one that might even be described as love—between two heterosexual men. He’s not sure if he will be able to pull it off (his husband is even more skeptical) but he knows it will require an inventive approach, perhaps one that plays a fragmented diary of some kind against an author’s journal within which the potential narrative structure and details are formulated and debated. His husband plays the foil, devil’s advocate and, sometimes, the anxious spouse:

“But then, aren’t you going to write a normal novel?”

“I never write a normal novel. What’s more, I’ve always made it clear that I’m unable to tell a story, There will just be snippets, bits of what could have been the novel. Perhaps a diary by Edorta.”

“And these dialogues.”

“That’s right. Perhaps not these, but others I make up based on these.”

“And will I be myself? I’m worried about being myself in your novel, worried that you’ll put me in your novel.”

With chapters that alternate between the author’s journal and Edorta’s diary, the novel that exists is the one that the author is planning to write—the final project and a self-conscious analysis of that project in its formative state. This is where the metafictional game lies, where the boundary between literature and reality blurs and where questions about the “fictional” characters, their relationship, and the nature of love and attraction arise. As the author and his husband debate the possibility of platonic desire between men from the outside in so far as they can intellectualize beyond their own homosexuality, Edorta explores the matter from within, in trying to articulate the quality of his affection for Koldo while holding to an assumption of his own heterosexuality.

Edorta’s diary offerings are undated; each one is named after a song released by the Bristol-based UK independent Sarah Records(1987–1995), and opens with the artist name, catalog number, and a few lines of lyric. These sections resemble a form of stream of consciousness, admittedly composed in writing, but unfolding without clear direction or specific chronology as if Edorta is trying to sort out his feelings on the page. Consequently, allusions—to the light in particular—and scenes from the past are revisited repeatedly. Where he is writing from, temporally speaking, is intentionally vague, though he does often correct himself, pulling out of his revery to recall that adult life, relationships, and children have made the endless days of youth but a memory. Their occasions to actually be together are now few and time-constrained. His longing is palpable, his prose dense with fervid imagery:

Today I lug the grief of not being able to say the unsayable, fighting with the anguish of being and not wanting to be, of sinking into oblivion forever or of turning back, before even being, before myself, where there is not even oblivion. Life breaks loose from the poplars in tatters, and the branches, outlined in green-black shadows, shrink inward in their extinction of dying rapture, paralysed, surprised by the cold of November, overwhelmed in its frozen casket of gargoyles and waits.

The confluence of a grown man’s sense of loss with an adolescent ardor enhances the interrupted, unstructured memories and reflections that the novel’s “author” seems to want to capture with Edorta’s diary passages.

The two alternating streams form an intriguing novel that presents itself—openly—as a meditation on the nature of attraction, love, and memory within a discussion of the questions that arise in the process of formulating a story that a writer wishes to tell. But does it work as a cohesive whole? Certainly neither half of the equation—the author’s descriptive vacation diary or Edorta’s endless poetic entreaties to Koldo—would hold as a sufficiently interesting narrative on its own. Yet together they complicate one another, less to provide one complete story (even with the metafictional reshuffling of expectations that occurs as the novel nears a close) than to continually raise questions about the exercise of creating and inhabiting characters to flesh out a story that an author may or may not be able to realize. As such, much hinges on the idea of platonic love and the degree to which sexuality influences the way one conceives of and is able to realistically depict an attraction that differs from one’s own.

Are Edorta’s feelings for Koldo of a different order than anything his friend can ever return? On several occasions he tries to reassure himself that they are not. Certainly he recalls and cherishes moments of intimacy that seemed to have distressed and embarrassed Koldo. But he is unable to let go of the need to define and claim his love, whatever it may be, even if he would not be the first person, regardless of orientation, to be hopelessly attracted to someone who, shall we say, plays for “the other team.” Of course, as the author’s creation, one has to ask, who exactly—Edorta or his creator—is unable to accept that their affection for the other might just be of a different order? The author’s admitted obsession from the very beginning of the novel is: “What is important is to love whether or not it’s reciprocated.” However, if, at the end of the day, to love truly is enough is a question that may prove easier to ask than to answer.

The Worst Thing of All is the Light by José Luis Serrano is translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel and published by Seagull Books as part of the Pride List.

Good news doesn’t come easy in this land of ours: Tali Girls – A Novel of Afghanistan by Siamak Herawi

The girls of Tali are beautiful. They have long hair, large almond shaped eyes, and skin the colour of wheat. They grow up learning to cook and sew. At seven, some are taught to embroider as well. They stitch and seam and sing together. And when they reach puberty, they fall in love with the sunburned boys who wear their skullcaps cocked to the side and play their reed flute as they scale the mountains shepherding goats and sheep and stealing young girl’s hearts.

Siamak Herawi’s Tali Girls opens with a disturbingly vivid account by his central character,  Kowsar, of one of her earliest memories. She offers it as an illustration of the condition that has plagued her for as long as she can remember. She is walking with her mother when a grizzled old man from her community comes up and kneels before her. He whispers, “Kowsar, I could eat you.” Before she can resist, the foul man has devoured her, leaving nothing but a pile of bones. When she comes to, in her mother’s arms, we realize she’s had a fainting spell complete with hallucination. Her family has been advised it’s epilepsy, but doctors are expensive and her family, like everyone else in her village, is poor. Once the harvest is complete, her father takes her into see a mullah in the nearby town. His appearance and manner is frightening to the child and, as he pronounces his call for the demon to leave her, waving his dagger in the air, she is lifted out of her body and watches as he slices her to pieces. Episodes marked by fever, convulsions and loss of consciousness will continue to strike Kowsar in moments of extreme distress, but the graphic visions that accompany these first two incidents stand as something else—a foreshadowing of the very real violence that lies ahead, especially for women, in a world where extremist fundamentalism is on the rise.

Set in Badghis Province in northwestern Afghanistan, Tali Girls is based on true stories and revolves around Kowsar and her friends Geesu and Simin, three young girls growing up in the village of Tali in the impoverished Jawad District. Although it is well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the community is without electricity, plumbing or paved roads. The residents are farmers and shepherds. Conditions do not improve much over the course of this novel; in many ways they deteriorate greatly. But for three short years, the children of Tali will at least have the opportunity to go to school—if their families can spare their labour at home, that is. For Kowsar who demonstrates exceptional academic aptitude and a prodigious memory early on, her gifts could be her ticket out of a society in which women are married off young and typically spend their lives bound to the demands of home and husband. Unfortunately, her teacher’s effort to advocate for her in the provincial capital, does not succeed. Rather it turns the attentions of a powerful and hideously evil mullah to Kowsar and her little village, the first step in a series of events that will, over the years to come, have a devastating impact on the lives of the girls, their families and the peace of their little valley.

In clear, crisp prose with a tone that is almost folkloric, Herawi weaves a tale of rural life in contemporary Afghanistan that honours both the beauty of the landscape and the stark realities—internal and external—that have impacted the population over the years. For the poor farmers, conditions are harsh but it has long been a society designed by and for men, so often the only control they can exercise is over their wives and children. Women are restricted in their movement outside their homes and, in some communities, even inside their houses where they are not to be seen by any males who are not part of their immediate family. Without power or running water, traditional customs continue. Food and tea is prepared over fires, bread is baked in kilns and, when company is present, refreshments are left outside the doors of the rooms or guesthouses where men gather. Young, often prepubescent girls can be bartered for or purchased as brides for powerful mullahs and Talib leaders while the aging wives they have at home are pushed into increasingly subservient roles. And, if a woman’s fate was difficult before the Taliban’s presence expands, as they become a permanent fixture in Tali, taking over the schoolhouse and filling the fields with poppies, it becomes even more circumscribed. Excessive religious prohibitions are strictly enforced. But within this world, Herawi grants his female characters a strength and resilience that is not easily defeated, even in the face of unspeakable evil.

Kowsar, who is gifted, prone to fainting spells and a bit of a risk taker, is the primary first person voice in this multiple narrative in which, alternating with chapters told from a third person perspective, various characters pick up their own accounts as the action focuses on their particular experiences. Throughout, Kowsar is the voice of hope, however faint at times, in a story that is punctuated by moments of terrifying violence. The prose style is light, poetic and almost folkloric in tone, carrying a story that is at once a coming of age tale, a horror story, a love story and an adventure with action that moves across a mountainous landscape, from lush valleys to harsh deserts and back again. A decade and 380 pages pass swiftly, and it is best to say little in advance about what happens.

Through the dialogue and shifting narrative voice, Herawi has created an exhilarating novel with a relatively large cast of characters that we quickly come to care deeply about—or despise as the case may be. Some readers may feel that this is at the cost of depth and historical context, but much rests in the conversations between characters, as they share their hopes, dreams and fears. Mothers speak to their daughters and sons, with resignation, about the cards life has dealt them by virtue of their gender; Kowsar, who has had a wider access to books, expresses to Geesu how, the more she learns about the outside world, the more their own frightens her; a young man from a tribal community demonstrates an astute understanding of the current state of lawlessness in Badghis that has left the people caught between corrupt government officials and Taliban rebels:

“Back when the Taliban were first defeated and left, and a new government came into power, we though Afghanistan was finally safe and ready for progress. We though the Westerners who came with their money had freed us from living in limbo. But that sweet nectar soon turned into bitter poison. . . . It was all lies. Ignorant thieves left, cunning pillagers replaced them. And life here remains what it was. Every day, we have less security than the day before.”

Characters, scenes, and scenery propel this story forward. The result is a novel that is a vital portrait of simple people trapped by a shifting set of circumstances beyond their control.

Siamak Herawi is an Afghani writer born in Herat province who studied in Kabul and Moscow. After completing his masters in Russian language he returned to Afghanistan and started to work as a journalist. He then moved into politics, eventually taking on a diplomatic role at the Afghanistan Embassy in London. He resigned when Ashraf Ghani was elected in 2014 and presently lives in the UK. Tali Girls which was originally published in 2018, is his first work to become available in English.

Tali Girls: A Novel of Afghanistan by Siamak Herawi is translated from the Fasri by Sara Khalili and published by Archipelago Books.

The revolution isn’t a rocket but a river that flows and pours forth: Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh

Each summer night in Nablus was just like the next: breezes pregnant with the scent of jasmine, dew and whiffs from the sewers. The municipality went to great pains: every morning the marketplace smelt like a freshly cut bouquet of the most fragrant flowers; however, by the time the afternoon rolled round—when the hustle and bustle had died down and the shops had closed and the rugs and carts had disappeared along with the cries of the hawkers—the city became a rubbish tip: crumpled papers, plastic bags, used tissues, piles of trampled fruit.

This is the setting of Sahar Khalifeh’s Passage to the Plaza. But Nablus is a city on edge. Originally published in 1990, this novel is not only set during the First Intifada (1978–1993), it was written and published in the middle of this period of upheaval marked by sustained Palestinian protests and rioting in Gaza and the West Bank. Born in Nablus in 1941, Khalifeh is one of the most prominent Palestinian women writers. As the fifth of eight daughters, she was well aware of the fate that awaited members of her sex but sought early refuge in reading and writing. Married off against her will, she endured a difficult thirteen year marriage in Amman, Jordan, during which she found it impossible to write. This changed in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967—she not only published her first novels, but returned to school in her early thirties. Her work, which is centred around the lives of women, offers a wider female narrative than that often associated with resistance literature.

Passage to the Plaza, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain, is a very immediate response to the circumstances of the Intifada through the intersection of the lives of three women and one man who come together in one unlikely location. There is Sitt Zakia, the midwife, an older woman who, by virtue of her chosen profession, is at once on the margins of society and yet central to the lives of the countless children she has brought into the world. She crosses class boundaries but, at the end of the day returns to the comfort of her hookah and her prayers. Her beloved nephew, Hussam, is a freedom fighter whose political indoctrination began young, inspired by his infatuation with a fashionable teacher. Samar, the baker’s daughter is a young woman with a university education and decent job. She is also an activist with a women’s movement. And, finally, Nuzha, living alone in a house rumoured to be a brothel, is the daughter of a woman who was accused of being a spy and publicly murdered. She is a true social outcast with a complicated past. When Hussam is wounded and finds himself at her door, her home becomes an unexpected sanctuary.

The three women in this novel represent different facets of the conditions women face in Palestinian society. Samar, a patriotic and hopeful twenty-six year-old, is conducting research into the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives and the answers her questions elicit from Sitt Zakia and Nuzha are telling. When asked how her life has changed, the midwife responds: “Honestly nothing much has changed for us except more worries. More worrying means more burning hearts. I pray for God to help us women!” She sees women out on the streets protesting, throwing stones and protecting the militants. But all of the old worries women have always carried still exist. Sitt Zakia’s own daughters are married and living in other countries and she hasn’t heard from them at all since the uprising began. Her more immediate worries involve her militant nephew who is on the run.

When Samar arrives at Nuzha’s house, survey in hand, her inquiries are greeted with anger and bitterness directed at Palestine, at the men who have let her down and at a community that has rejected her. Only one year older than Samar, her life has been impacted by a very different set of circumstances beyond her control. She is defiant and combative and slow to trust any kindness. Her greatest concern is for her younger brother Ahmed, a resistance fighter who is hiding somewhere outside the city; she longs for his return. While she shares her past with Samar, the wounded and feverish Hussam is in another room, listening from behind the door.

Hussam comes from a “family that was mediocrely rich, educated to a mediocre standard, mediocre in their claims to nobility and prestige.” His uncles went abroad and achieved success while his father took unethical advantage of their portions of the family land to present himself as a much richer man then he was. For Abu Azzam, his unconventional sister Zakia and rebel son were his sole sources of shame, not his own duplicity. For Hussam, his rebellion was fueled not only by his unrequited love for the beautiful and politically active Sahab, but reinforced by a series of arrests and periods of administrative detention—”a rite of passage for all young men”—that freed him from his boyish fears, ultimately pushing him toward the resistance. However, as the situation in Nablas deteriorates with an increased presence of Israeli soldiers, the imposition of curfews, establishment of checkpoints and construction of barriers, Hussam’s condition worsens, leaving him bedridden in Nuzha’s house, drifting in and out of consciousness. The female characters are the ones who must negotiate the challenges and dangers of the streets and the social expectations of their gender on their own.

As in all of Khalifeh’s work, women’s enslavement, lack of rights and fight for equality are important themes, but her female characters are complex, their motivations often at odds with one another. The pious Sitt Zakia, for example, despite her independence and estrangement from her brother, worries about protecting his reputation when her sister-in-law arrives begging for refuge from his cruelty. She sends Um Azzam back to her own house, insisting that it is where she belongs. Nuzha, abused by the men in her life, has been forced into a situation that causes her and her late mother to be despised by other women. She is rightly fed up with both sexes. Meanwhile, Samar, for all her ideological optimism, still dreams of love and a handsome husband to come home to her each night.

Khalifeh allows much of her story to unfold through interactions between her primary protagonists, occasionally punctuated with direct access to brief internal monologues that reveal emotions that often contrast with what is otherwise expressed or described. A natural tension builds by virtue of the complicated emotional responses the characters have to one another and to their own predicaments, but outside the particular house where most of the engagement takes place, action explodes in periodic episodes of violence—the women’s collaborative efforts to dismantle a barrier the soldiers have built, a beating Samar receives at home from one of her brothers, a deadly ambush—that raise the tension suddenly and intensely. This narrative style has an almost theatrical feel; the story moves quickly, shifting in unexpected directions. It is all reflective of Khalifeh’s in-the-moment manner of setting a story in motion amid critical historical events as they are happening rather than waiting for the dust to settle. If it creates a degree of uneasiness, if certain details are left unexplained, so be it. Through it all, the voice of the poet of resistance rings out, reminding us what is most critical:

Golden days like those of a birthday. In a revolution, one is born a hundred times and dies a thousand more. The revolution isn’t a rocket but a river that flows and pours forth. Sometimes foreign aid sinks, rain becomes scarce, the river goes through difficult times, drying up, seeming fine as a silk thread. Other times it breaks forth, like a turbulent volcano, sweeping away all in its path, deafening. Oh generous sky, oh angry earth, anger that, like a storm, chooses its hour. Then the cycle comes to an end and goes back to how it was: the river becomes an oscillating thread again, the revolution returns to reality, the boulder tumbles back to the bottom of the river and Sisyphus picks up his load once more.

Reading this book while Israel is waging war in Gaza offers a reminder that nothing is new. One is forced to remember this novel was published in 1990. There are lines uttered here, during the Intifada, that could just as easily appear on social media today. The desperate plea Nuzah utters toward the end of the book hits especially hard, some thirty-three years later: “Enough of God, Mohammed, Essa, Musa, Red Cross and the UN. No one sees or hears. Since when has the world thought of us as humans?”

Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh is translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and published by Seagull Books.

Fragments of Happiness: What is Saved by Aamer Hussein

I came rather late to the work of Pakistani British author Aamer Hussein, surreptitiously as I’ve said before, through an unsolicited essay I received when I was an editor for an online journal, from a writer who had also encountered him by chance when she found a copy of his collection Insomnia in a “decaying” bookstore. The essay impressed me so much that before I sent a letter of acceptance I had already ordered a copy of Insomnia for myself. This was, I knew, an author I needed to read:

Hussein’s stories display an audacious ability to synthesize complexities of social subjectivity; yet behind this complex surface lies a rich silence. His stories remain porous, marked by gaps and holes—a kind of silence which, rather than a lack, represents a positive capacity, Hussein’s most potent mode. What Aamer Hussein offers us is an invaluable model of resistance in literature: resistance that works through silence, through that which remains unsaid.[1]

Yet, if silence can be such an effective mechanism in a fictional context, would the same author approach autobiographical writing with greater detail or, dare we say, denseness? Not if you’re Aamer Hussein.

What is Saved, released earlier this year as part of the Red River Story Series, is a selection of “Life Stories and Other Tales” gathered, editor Sucharita Dutta-Asane tells us, from two earlier collections, Hermitage and Restless: Instead of an Autobiography. Among these short works are accounts drawn from Hussein’s childhood in Karachi, tales inspired by friends and family members, a variety of true and re-imagined truths set in London where he has lived since the age of fifteen and at various points in his long process of rebuilding his connection to the country of his birth. If the pieces gathered in What is Saved might in some sense speak, as the Urdu subtitle—Batori Hui Khushiyan—implies, to all happiness, anyone familiar with Hussein’s fiction knows that in his work happiness tends to be tinged with melancholy. In this collection, which deals so openly with longing, displacement, illness and mortality, a similar wistfulness again permeates the quiet hopefulness that buoys his prose.

Loosely, the early autobiographical and autofictional pieces highlight Hussein’s early years in Karachi, offering a portrait of the culture of the city in the 1960s. His life is enriched by his mother’s love of music, and a proximity to Urdu literary figures and even a film star who moves into his neighbourhood. These are followed by a selection of stories and fable-like pieces, some no more than a page in length, inspired by friends or family members or traditional tales. But the themes that become prominent through the balance of the collection include literary friendships, the Covid-19 lockdowns, the loss of loved ones, injury and, finally, life with a terminal cancer diagnosis. Whether he is reflecting on life’s rewards and realities directly or through the lens of fiction, birds, gardens, and flowers tend to create a greater sense of continuity than any particular place or time. He is ever a writer who captures the ambiguity of belonging—in a city, in a culture, or in relationship to others.

Two of my favourite pieces in What is Saved fall onto the memoir side of the fiction/nonfiction equation and address elements of the connection between language and identity. In the first, “Teacher,” the only essay in this volume originally composed in Urdu (translated by  Shahbano Alvi), Hussein recalls a man he called Shah sahab, the London based friend of his parents whose private tutelage helped him gain confidence in his mother tongue. With his tutor’s support, the teenaged Hussein was finally able to read, in the original Urdu, a book he’d first encountered in English translation, a text that had already had a profound impact on his understanding of the world he came from:

My eyes opened to the imagery of an intriguing past; the imposition of the British Raj  in the 19th century and the downfall of the Oudh culture of which I’d been only vaguely aware. Brought up in the Westernised circles of Karachi, I had been exposed for the most part to history books written by the Western historians.

Thus, halfway across the world from his homeland, he would become sufficiently proficient to study Urdu prose and poetry at university even if he would go on to dedicate himself to English literature, as a teacher and writer. In a later piece, he talks about returning to Urdu, as he begins to spend more time in Pakistan and learns to trust his ability to creatively express himself in the language.

The second essay, “Suyin: A Friendship,” remembers a teacher of a different kind—a literary mentor. Although her books are now out of print, I remember when Han Suyin’s novels were a popular item in the bookstores I worked at during my university years but I had no idea what had happened to her. In this piece, Hussein reflects on his friendship with the Chinese born author and doctor, nearly forty years his senior, who encouraged him to listen to the music of Urdu, a language she loved without understanding it. Her advice was wise. “Trapped between tongues like her, I did what she couldn’t,” he says, “I reclaimed another self in my forgotten tongue.” In thinking back on their profound and yet ultimately strained relationship—she influenced his career even if she could not remain the writer he wanted her to be—his own journey away from and back to both Pakistan and Urdu is mapped out. It was not a path without its own inherent contradictions, especially at the beginning:

Reclaiming Pakistan had made my fragile anchor slip away and my feet were sliding on slippery sand. My terms of belonging had changed: I was not whole. I wasn’t a Westerner of foreign origin. I was not someone who, to quote Suyin, happened to live abroad and went back for my roots: I was someone who had left behind a homeland and never found anything to replace the empty patch.

There is a restless running through many of the pieces in this collection that echoes Hussein’s movement back and forth between language and place. It finds him, or his fictional alter egos, feeling isolated and confined by the restrictions that a broken leg, pandemic lockdowns or the medical implications of disease impose, but remaining resistant and unwilling to fall into complacency. Between the lines, a vulnerability exists, as it does for any one of us, but Hussein has a way of writing, especially in the memoir/personal essay form, that carries his reader just to edge, revealing only what is needed, more concerned with what is felt and leaving silence to hold what cannot be answered.

What is Saved: Batori Hui Khushiyan (Life Stories and Other Tales) by Aamer Hussein is published by Red River Story.

[1] Ali Raz, “Silence as Resistence in Aamer Hussein’s Stories,” 3:AM Magazine, Published May 15, 2018. https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/silence-as-resistance-in-aamer-husseins-stories/

In the footsteps of the man pretending to be me: Under Our Skin – A Journey by Joaquim Arena

The first large group of captured and enslaved Africans arrived in Lagos, a maritime town on the southern coast of Portugal on August 8, 1444. The shipment of 235 men, women, and children marked the establishment of the earliest slave market in Europe, and a segment of that initial African population would end up in Lisbon. A century later, Black Africans would not be an uncommon sight in the city, as colonial Portugal became a major player in the growing trans-Atlantic slave trade. A street scene painted in 1570 depicts a busy plaza in the capital in which half of the people pictured are Black, some socializing, others working, and in the middle of it all, a Black knight passes through on his horse. This image, and the conference where he first sees it, will serve as a catalyst for a journey that will take Cape Verdean-born writer and journalist Joaquim Arena into the Portuguese countryside following the family history of an older woman he befriends who is the descendant of a freed slave. Alongside this narrative, runs the author’s meditation on his own personal history in light of the death of his estranged stepfather.

The hybrid essay is a delicate balance—a common focus must lie at the root of seemingly disparate threads or it feels awkward and forced. With his first nonfiction effort, Under Our Skin: A Journey, originally published in Portuguese in 2017,  Arena manages to weave history, memoir, and travel writing, into an idiosyncratic and entertaining exploration of the early roots of the Black African diaspora in Europe. The thematic mix along with the inclusion of grainy black and white photos will remind some of Sebald (to whom he has been compared), but although both writers blend a personal story with historical and landscape writing, Arena’s story is not fictionalized and his literary style, if at times digressive, is generally more direct.

Under Our Skin opens with Arena’s first encounter with Leopoldina, a retired school teacher, at a conference on Lisbon’s history to which he, much to his surprise, has been invited to represent the ethnic minorities of the city—he, a man of mixed race born in Cape Verde and raised in Lisbon who had until recently been living back in his homeland. While discussing the painting described above, Chafariz d’El Rei, this striking older woman rises to speak,  seemingly with a particular sense of intimacy, of the Blacks, slaves and Moors who would have been living in Portugal in the sixteenth century. Several weeks later, Arena and Leopoldina happen to meet again on a train. They are both returning from an exhibit entitled Blacks at the Heart of the Empire and, as they talk, she confesses that since her retirement, research into the history and social conditions of Africans in Portugal has become a passion of hers. He’s inclined to wonder if this hobby has a personal meaning. Her response: “It’s in the blood.”

Since he is back in Lisbon, at least for the time being, Arena begins to visit Leopoldina on a regular basis, to help her out with occasional tasks and listen to her stories about her family which she can trace back to her great-great-great-grandmother Catarina, a slave in the first Count of Belmonte’s estate. She was apparently treated so badly that she took advantage of an opportunity to escape with a group of slaves who disappeared one morning early in the nineteenth century, making their way south across the Rio Sado valley to settle near the village of São Romão where they found farm work alongside poor white and Black families already in the area. Leopoldina, who would be born there a hundred years later, came to understand her bond to Catarina through the memories and accounts passed down by her female descendants and now she shares this history with her new, younger friend. However, when Leopoldina has a stroke, she asks Arena to go one step further. Unable to speak, she puts her thoughts down on paper, as strength allows, expressing regret that she cannot be buried in her village cemetery because it has been closed for years:

These words make me realize just how much of her life has been spent, that few joys remain for her, and she knows it. I think of her village as a corner of the universe and about time deferred, about permanence and eternity, about all the moments that contribute to a life. I feel an incredible longing for the Sado valley, a nostalgia for heaths, woodland, and rice fields I’ve never seen.

She starts writing again: “Will you go there for me . . .?”

Against Arena’s account of his friendship with Leopoldina, her family’s past and the journey it inspires, is the story of his own family history. Chapters numbered in alphabetical form tell the first story while the latter unfolds in unevenly alternating chapters designated with Roman numerals. Arena’s is a distinctly Cape Verdean story. It is also a search for identity. Born on the island of São Nicolau, to a local woman and a Portuguese temporary worker, Arena grew up with only an imagined picture of his birth father who left when he was two. Four years later he found himself bound for Lisbon, as part of a migration of Cape Verdeans drawn to the city in the early 1970s with the strange man his mother intends to marry. But as a child he initially greeted this new land with a sadness and longing for his island home while his new stepfather, a seaman, essentially remained a stranger who disappeared for months at a time. Now, after years living back in Cape Verde, Arena has returned to Lisbon to help settle his stepfather’s affairs. Can the city’s streets lead the middle-aged man to the boy he once was and, in the process, to himself?

These intertwined journeys, one through the landscapes, villages, and historical sites in an area south of Lisbon reaching, ultimately, all the way to the site of that fateful landing in 1444  and the other exploring the author’s own heritage, as a mixed race Cape Verdean, both include fascinating detours to include eccentric relatives and Black historical figures who started life as slaves, only to find themselves rising to positions of influence in European and Russian society—even if such transformations had their limitations. Arena’s journalistic skills are evident in his ability to transition between historical details and present day encounters. Although they do not explicitly play off one another, the two strands of his journey are necessarily connected, or rather, it seems as if he needs to trace Black African history in Portugal to complete a piece of himself that is missing, a piece that connects him back to a distant African homeland that generations of Cape Verdeans have sought to deny. Cape Verde was discovered and settled by the Portuguese to serve as a base for cross-Atlantic slave trade and, as a result, most of the local population are mixed race and were, historically, afforded a better education than other colonized populations in mainland Africa. This enabled them to play a more active role in the structures designed to exploit African peoples. Such a legacy can foster a complicated relationship—or rejection of a connection—with others of African origin.

Of course, following the stories of others, tracing their lives, and visiting the places they lived is one piece of a much larger puzzle. To understand himself, Arena will also have to come to terms with his own experiences growing up in Portugal and attempt to understand those closest to him, even the one man he feels most estranged from. The journey he will take extends far beyond the Lisbon city limits and reaches far back in time, and it’s conclusion is as rewarding and as nebulous as any historical/existential exploration can be. But it does make for a very rich reading experience.

Under Our Skin: A Journey by Joaquim Arena is translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, and published by Unnamed Press. It is Arena’s first work to appear in English.

A knock at the door: Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag

Kannada author Vivek Shanbhag’s eagerly anticipated new novel opens with the statement: “There are no coincidences, only unseen chains of consequences.” It is a random quote that his middle-aged protagonist once scribbled down for future reference, accidently recovered during a search for something else altogether. Inspired by his finding, he rushes out to the kitchen to share it with his wife who is much too busy with dinner preparation to entertain his interruption. He is fully aware of this but intends to impose on her attention regardless when he is, in turn, interrupted by a knock at the door. That unexpected intrusion will mark the advent of a series of events that threaten to overturn Venkat’s comfortable complacency and not once over the following days will he heed the wisdom he was about to share with his wife on that fateful night.

As with Ghachar Ghochar, the widely acclaimed novella that, in English translation, introduced Shanbhag to a wide audience within and beyond India, Sakina’s Kiss also explores the impact of shifting dynamics within families, and is narrated by a man who is unable, perhaps unwilling, to understand the women in his life. But this time the cracks that threaten familial peace and security run along political, gendered, and generational fault lines and, although uncertain outside forces come into play, Shanbhag again resists any neat resolutions to the mysteries that arise.

Our hero is Venkat. Born and raised in a small rural community he comes to the big city somewhat conscious of his origins, and through his engineering studies and on into his career he works to cultivate the confident, sophisticated manner he wishes to project. He enters the workforce at a time when the necessity of dealing with foreign clients meant that offices tended to be places where Western styles and tastes were favoured and traditional Indian social factors such as caste advantages were publicly downplayed. When the insecure young manager happens to encounter a man whom he begins to see as a kind of secular guru, he is inspired to adopt a steady diet of self-help books as a roadmap to the life he hopes to craft for himself.

And, Venkat does achieve a respectable degree of professional and financial success but, as his narrative reveals, there is an underlying insecurity despite his expressed self-confidence. His wife, Viji, by contrast, appears to be the more rational, empathetic partner in their relationship even though we only see or hear her perspectives through Venkat’s report and, by the time this story opens, the couple has long since drifted into a rather distanced coexistence. When, early on, he launches into a rather detailed account of their arranged meeting, courtship and honeymoon, his descriptions are so oddly matter-of-fact and one-sided that it’s little wonder their marriage is strained decades later. She is also a successful professional and their combined incomes allowed them to purchase a decent two-bedroom apartment in Bengaluru where they still live with their adult child, a daughter who is now twenty-two and working toward an arts degree at university, much to her father’s dismay. He had, of course, favoured the sciences, but Rekha is a free-thinking, rather rebellious young woman. It is primarily around her that the troubling events at the heart of this novel revolve.

When two young men claiming to be friends of Rekha’s appear at the door desperate to reach her, Venkat explains that she is out in his home village, staying with her great uncle in a location where there is no landline or cell signal available and that they will have to wait until she calls to check in before their message can be passed on. The following day, a Sunday, the same young men return and when they receive the same response from Venkat, they leave and send in a couple of thugs to impress upon him the urgency of their need to contact his daughter. A strange story about two rival gangs, one led by the publisher of a sensational tabloid, the other led by the former owner of a poultry shop unfolds and somehow, in the middle of it, it appears that their sons are both smitten with Rekha who, curiously, is never mentioned by name. None of it makes any sense, but the messengers definitely look unsavoury. Neither Venkat nor Viji know what to make of it all, but when, on Monday, they learn that Rekha apparently left the village on the bus to Bengaluru on Saturday night, panic sets in.

Venkat’s narrative alternates between an ongoing account of current events and chapters that attempt to fill in the background, as he tries to explain and make sense of his marriage’s evolution, his daughter’s increasing radicalization, and the strange history of his politically active uncle Ramana. Buried family secrets and complicated levels of willful blindness and stubborn pride cloud his observations and limit his insight. He seems especially frightened of anyone who expresses individualistic or idealistic goals. For example, when Rekha becomes enamoured with the ideas her college English teacher espouses—“patriarchy, the myth of sexual purity, the shackles of marriage and so on”—Venkat responds defensively. Upon learning that this admired teacher secretly smokes on campus:

I began to criticize all smokers so I could ridicule him indirectly. I suppose I was trying to show that my contempt for Surendran was not without reason. This was a strange kind of envy. Or fear. Or something. Along with the feeling Rekha was escaping my orbit was the restlessness brought about by her infatuation with the words and ideas of this fool.

He makes a vain effort to expand his own world view to little avail. His fears only fuel his continued efforts to assert his role as the “man of the house.” This naturally causes his daughter to become even more defiant towards him while pushing her closer to her mother. That gulf only continues to grow.

There are many loose threads and potentially explosive elements in this novel, but with a narrator who is unable to step back and attempt to see the big picture, a number of “what ifs” remain just out of sight. Venkat comes close at times to wondering if he could or should have done something more with respect to the various dilemmas he has faced, yet, for all his self-help book consumption, a personal awakening eludes him. Even more critically, his fragile masculinity will not allow it. Unable to navigate a changing social and political terrain, he now finds himself excluded from his wife and daughter’s confidence and haplessly sliding into a potentially dangerous situation.

Sakina’s Kiss is, again like Ghachar Ghochar, a deceptively easy read with an unsettling undercurrent that leaves more questions than answers. Shanbhag excels at creating ordinary male characters who are unable or unwilling to fully appreciate shifting social dynamics or their role in them. As such, his narrators end up granting the women in their lives an insight that they are at a loss to understand. They find themselves in situations that are at once funny and tragic—how they will manage in the end is uncertain. In a way, his first two translated titles remind me of the work of South African writer Ivan Vladislavić who has perfected the myopic middle class male character who finds himself in over his head in a world that is changing around him.

Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag is translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur and published by Penguin Random House India.

A tale of two travellers, You and I: In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish

Allow me to see you, now that you have left me and I have left you, safe and sound like pure prose on a stone that may turn green or yellow in your absence. Allow me to gather you and your name, just as passersby gather the olives that harvesters forgot under pebbles. Let us then go together, you and I, on two paths:

You, to a second life promised to you by language, in a reader who might survive the fall of a comet on earth.

I, to a rendezvous I have postponed more than once with a death to whom I had promised a glass of red wine in a poem. A poet is at liberty to lie, but he only lies in love because the heart’s promises are open to alluring conquests.

The celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was aware that his own death was nearing when he composed In the Presence of Absence, an intimate synthesis of memory and meditation that not only turns its attention to the past, but looks ahead to contemplate what words can carry into a future that he knows he will not see. It is a self-elegy, an established genre in classical Arabic poetry, re-imagined, reshaped and realized through a unique “convergence” of prose and poetry in which, as translator Sinan Antoon puts it in his Preface: “[t]he living ‘I’ bids farewell to its imagined dying other in a sustained poetic address divided into twenty untitled sections.” Presented as a dialogue between the poet’s present self and his absent self, each section explores a particular experience or theme.

Early on, Darwish invokes his younger self, a mischievous child caught up in the magic of the natural world, lured by curiosity toward adventure and injury. However, another love was also nurtured at a young age: the love of language. The third section is devoted to the endless possibilities that the future poet discovers in the wonder of letters and words. It will become his life:

You become words and words become you. You do not know the difference between utterer and utterance. You will call the sea an overturned sky and the well a jar to preserve sound from the world’s tinkering and the sky a sea hanging from clouds.

There is something that assumes the obscure. It cannot be smelled, touched, tasted, or seen. It is what makes childhood a sixth sense. They called you the dreamer because you often gave words wings invisible to grown-ups.

Darwish devotes several sections to this time of dreams and dreaming before, at the age of seven, dreams turn into nightmares. The Nakba’s destructive force drives him and his family from their homeland under the cover of darkness at a time when his absent self was:

Still too young, you could not imagine your own death. You did not yet grasp that children could die.

Life will go on but, but this sudden, unprecedented displacement  will cause him to hate the second half of his childhood and foreshadow the circumstances that will shape the rest of his life.

In the Presence of Absence is not a memoir in the familiar sense of the word, but significant life experiences—imprisonment, exile, heart surgery, a visit to his mother—shape his reflections. Yet, at times, he turns to more open meditation on themes like love, loss, dreaming and what it means to return. These meditations turn on the poetic as poetry is always, for Darwish, more than a vocation, but an essential means of making sense of the world. Ever the dreamer, his dreams are soaked in a melancholy that reveals itself in imagery bound to a land and a life forever lost:

Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning toward the distant. Longing is the spring’s thirst for the jar-carrying women, and vice versa. Longing allows distance to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed, the past tense hangs from a cypress tree standing on its rooted leg behind a hill, enveloped in its dark green, listening intently to one sound only: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind.

The more you delve into your loneliness, like that tree, the more longing takes you with motherly tenderness to its country, which is made of transparent, fragile fibres. Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of a boy who never witnessed a massacre.

Darwish plays presence and against absence through this text, the image surfaces and reshapes itself in endless variations, including the confrontation with his own absence when he visits the ruins of the village he was born in. For, to articulate an absence that is present or a presence that is absent is not only the task of this self-elegy, it is, for Darwish, a poet’s role. This is, then, more than anything, a book about language—as a means to express, to understand, and to exist in a world that has been torn apart. His prose is rich with metaphor and sensual, even sexual, imagery, but the pain of a man who was denied the ability to live freely within the land of his birth, and witnessed, by the time of his death in 2008, the impact of sixty years of occupation and conflict on the Palestinian people, is never far from the surface.  It is, sadly more timely than ever.

Sinan Antoon’s translation honours the poetic energy of this work, aiming, he tells us, to preserve, where possible, the pulse and rhyme of the original. Endnotes supply necessary context, as required. This text, like Journal of an Ordinary Grief and Memory for Forgetfulness, is classified as poetry, but, as poetic as these works are, I prefer to consider them closer to prose lest a potential reader who is apprehensive about poetry be inclined to avoid them. Darwish’s meditative, incantatory prose is neither elusive nor intimidating. He writes from the heart and with the heart his words are best met.

In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish is translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon and published by Archipelago Books.

The heart’s nocturnal lament: Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos

On the tree trunks the same two initials are always carved. By what knife, what hand, what heart?

 In 1973, Issue 10 of The Ant’s Forefoot, a New York City based poetry journal (originally started in Toronto) was devoted to one single epic poem—Lewis Warsh’s translation of Night of Loveless Nights by French poet Robert Desnos. As such, it was the first English publication of a book by Desnos, more than forty years after its original limited French release in 1930. The chemistry between Desnos, one of the early Surrealists and Warsh, a member of the second generation of the New York School of poets produced an translation that is attentive and sensitive to the original despite the fact that Warsh was born the year before the Desnos’s death. The context of the creation of Night of Loveless Nights is as fascinating as the story of its first appearance in English. Long out of print, this translation has now been rereleased in a special fiftieth anniversary dual-language volume from Winter Editions, complete with an afterword by poet David Rosenberg, the editor who originally gave Warsh’s translation a home.

Robert Desnos was born in Paris in 1900. He published his first poems in his teens and, in 1921, he was introduced to the Paris Dada group and André Breton through poet Benjamin Péret. He became an active member of the Surrealists and demonstrated a particular gift for automatic writing. But he began to move away from Surrealism due to political differences and this led to a falling out with Breton. By 1929 the rift was more or less complete as Desnos  joined Georges Bataille’s journal Documents. During the Second World War, he was active with the Resistance and, in February 1944, was arrested by the Gestapo. He died of typhoid in Terezin in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945.

Desnos began writing Night of Loveless Nights, which he titled in English, in 1926 and completed it in 1928–29. It was inspired, like several other pieces he composed during this period, by his hopeless romantic obsession with night club singer Yvonne George. Although his love was not returned, he remained devoted to her through her increasingly crippling addiction to drugs and alcohol, to her death from tuberculosis in 1930. His epic unfolds over one anguished and feverish night filled with sleepless dreams, slipping in and out of opium delirium and infused with blues and jazz tones. Lewis came to Loveless Nights with little translation experience and less than full confidence with French, but he connected with the imagery, irony and rhythms of Desnos’s verse and felt he could carry it into English.

In his afterword, American poet and Biblical translator David Rosenberg recalls how he and his friend Warsh were both drawn to Desnos’s  poetry over that of his contemporaries:

We were twenty-somethings when we took the French avant-garde poets in primarily the 1920s, from Max Jacob to Pierre Reverdy, as our forefathers of deadpan, no less than Louis Armstrong: it was the decade in which American jazz riveted Paris. Stein, Breton—they were too pragmatic for our sensibilities, though Stein was in our blood and manifested later. But Robert Desnos. . . was in-between; he seemed to push through surrealism and come out the other side as a literal dreamer, in search of reality and lost love. Desnos’s dreamer was parallel to a soul, disembodied—not the disordered mind’s “we must change life” of Rimbaud. Desnos was more grounded by loss.

Warsh was a regular contributor to Rosenberg’s The Ant’s Forefoot when he shared with him his Desnos translation for potential inclusion in the magazine’s upcoming issue. As they read it together over a shared joint, Rosenberg marvelled at its length and wondered if it would be feasible to turn an entire volume over to a single text. Excerpting it did not seem to be an option; it had to be reproduced in full. Desnos’s original publication was a collaborative effort with painter Georges Malkine who provided illustrations to accompany the text. Financial constraints and devotion to a minimalistic aesthetic guided the layout and production of the English edition which included archival photos provided by Lewis. The cover featured original artwork by Rosenberg himself, which is reproduced in the present fiftieth anniversary edition. Otherwise, the materials and production techniques employed in issue 10 of The Ant’s Forefoot are now lost with a graphics art scene that no longer exists. But the Winter Editions anniversary edition now has the advantage of extra space—the French text runs alongside Warsh’s English version, allowing a bilingual reader to appreciate how poet meets poet in this now-classic translation.

Night of Loveless Nights opens with vivid imagery that leans toward the surreal, but with the long initial section of rhymed quatrains, Desnos is adopting a classical form. Warsh does not attempt to reproduce the rhymes, but focuses on staying to true to the mood, tone and important motifs that will recur throughout the long dream-soaked night that follows. One can almost smell the foul air:

Hideous night, putrid and glacial,
Night of disabled ghosts and rotting plants
Incandescent night, flame and fire in the pits,
Shades of darkness without lightning, duplicity and lies.

Who sees the rivers crashing inside himself?
Suicides, trespassers, sailors? Explode
Malignant tumors on the skin of passing shadows,
These eyes have already seen me, shouts resound!

Quatrains like these carry much of the poem, broken first by a section of landscape inspired prose poetry and then by stanzas that vary in length and form. Desnos then returns to the stricter quatrain format before falling into longer, often incantatory, free verse  as the night stretches on and the speaker wearily and warily faces the brightening sky and his growing fatigue.

Desnos never names the object of his desire, but his longing and unrequited passion is laid bare. His romantic desperation is tangible:

I give everything to you, down to the heart of the ghosts,
Submit it to my fatal and delicate torment
Leave in order to disappear in two lines of a book
Without having invoked the evening of lovers.

I am tired of fighting the destiny which conceals me
Tired of trying to forget, tired of remembering
The slightest perfume which rises from your dress,
Tired of hating you and blessing you.

Although Desnos had, perhaps, as Rosenberg suggests, “pushed through surrealism,” it is not entirely behind him here. Beyond a surreal quality to much of the imagery, Warsh’s translation retains a suggestion of Desnos’s experiments with automatic writing and especially something he called “sleep writing,” especially later in Loveless Nights where the verses become freer, the poet seeming to riff on an image, such as in an extended chant-like passage featuring hands which in part reads:

Hands that stretch hands that soften
Is there a sincere hand among them
Ah I no longer dare to shake hands
Lying hands loose hands hands that I mangle
Hands clasped in the prayer of one who trembles when I look him I the eye
Is there still a hand I am able to shake with confidence
Hands on the lover’s mouth
Hands on the heart without love
Hands cut by false love
Hands founded on love
Hands closed to love
Hands dead to love
Hands straining for love
Hands rising for love

And on it goes. It feels, when one reaches this passage, that the poet is drifting off while writing, until the hint of dawn at the windows pulls him back to attention. To read this poem is to accompany the lovesick speaker into the haunted and lonely night, but somehow the dark beauty and the underlying sense of opium-enhanced irony keeps it from feeling impossibly bleak. It is as if Desnos is aware that the depth and futility of his romantic and sexual obsession is the real drug that fuels his poetry and keep his pen on the page.

The fiftieth anniversary edition Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos is translated from the French by Lewis Warsh, and published by Winter Editions.

Reimagining the question “Why translate?”— River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, edited by Nuzhat Abbas

I started reading River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, a generous and provocative collection of reflections on what it means to live, and work, between languages, places and social and cultural identities and realities, as I was preparing to visit India for the first time in four years. I finished it as violence escalated in the Middle East, with the latest and most violent episode of a conflict that has been part of my consciousness for all of the more than six decades I have been on this planet. It marks the evolution of a troubled history that has taken on added depth and meaning for me through the words of Palestinian poets and writers, that I have been able to access through the work of translators. As a result, my recent travel, not only the open conversations with friends about the schisms we are witnessing in our own nations and communities, but the experience of navigating a vast, multilingual country without the ability to easily communicate in so many everyday situations, combined with the explosive events that have absorbed so much of my emotional attention these past weeks, has enhanced my response to the essays contained in this anthology.

Nuzhat Abbas, founder and director of trace press, has described this project, the Canadian publisher’s first anthology, as one that arose out of a desire to “NOT center whiteness” and to examine translation outside the Western conventions that tend to influence what literature deserves to be translated, and by whom. It is a project of decolonial feminism, one that might not always be a typical context for a reader like myself who, like so many other readers, translators and publishers I know, is passionate about translated literature which, in the broader publishing world, is still undervalued and even suspect. Yet, to listen to the voices of translators from the Global South for whom translation is inextricable from essential questions of identity, history, land, dislocation, gender and sexuality offers an invaluable opportunity to expand one’s understanding of what translation can be. Here, crossing linguistic borders is not simply a possible professional endeavour, it is a way of being in the world, of understanding where one comes from and how one belongs.

In her Editor’s Translation to River in an Ocean, Abbas poses the following guiding questions:

What, and where, is the time and place of translation, and of literary translation, in particular? Of the translator as writer, as attentive listener, as co-creator, responsible to what [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak calls “the trace of the other within the self”? Or of the editor-publisher as convenor and gatherer in the project? This anthology emerges from such a questioning, and from curious and communal conversation, to offer a space for the soundings of different trajectories—connecting spaces, times, languages and bodies with origins in East Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.

With each one of the essays that follow, these and other questions rise, open up, revolve and return, leading the writers toward a fuller sense of self. No two essays are alike, each is unique in form and expression, yet they all speak to a longing to find, not only Spivak’s “traces of the other within the self,” but reflections of the self within the words of the other.

The collection opens with Khairani Barokka’s buoyant and provocative dual language essay “Ava Kabar, Penerjemah?” Paragraphs in Indonesian are followed by the English translation, moving back and forth between tongues, as Barroka directly addresses her fellow translators, asking if they are alright. Her concern is with the emotional and physical well-being of the translator who is marginalized by race, country of origin, illness or disability. In the second essay, Palestinian-born translator Yasmine Haj begins with the notion that translation is an activity we all engage in from our earliest moments as we learn to communicate with those around us, those who can answer our basic needs. But she moves on to reflect on how her first language, Arabic, remains distinct from the other languages that she has come to know—Hebrew, French and especially English:

To survive, we must translate, almost everything into English—sometimes even the rhythm of our thoughts. And so, it becomes the way we think, the way we write, the way we talk to ourselves. The way we dream. And so, Arabic remains a dreamless jumble of love, melancholy, nostalgia, and an inability to properly express ourselves or anything for that matter—an obsession with accents, stumped travels and halted communal growth, mother tongues and beautiful people that we could never meet.

If, in some sense, Arabic is everything that is lost, translation is a way of remapping a history— personal, political, cultural—and of finding and feeling one’s way along a path filled with uncertain obstacles and unexpected discoveries.

The contributors to this anthology include both emerging and seasoned translators, and their approaches to the central theme—why translate?—include epistolatory essays, memoir and, at times, embedded photographs and documents. Their stories are deeply personal, poetic reflections. A passion and commitment to the power of language shines through, as do the many complex dynamics that arise when one’s identity and experience crosses the boundaries between the Global South and the West.

I can attest that there is not a single essay in River in an Ocean that does not turn in a fresh, fascinating and meaningful direction, but to attempt to summarize each offering in a few sentences would be counterproductive. Rather, I will highlight a few pieces that hint at their range, beginning with Suneela Mubayi’s evocatively titled “The Temple Whore of Language.” Born in New York to an American mother of Jewish origin and a Hindu-Kashmiri father, Mubayi was raised between the US and New Delhi by a host of relatives. She (the pronoun in her bio) claims: “I put the trans back into translation.” In addition to providing an excuse to avoid her own writing, she says that she “inhabits” translation because, as someone who is mixed race and nonbinary, her identity is unsettled:

I translate because I am not stably anchored—neither in my origins, nor in my cultural affiliations, sense of belonging, or in my gender. To translate, for me, is to experience being an outsider, a trespasser, a poser— and to be able to revel in that condition.

As a trans person myself, unsettled on somewhat different grounds, I understand this internal sense of balanced imbalance well. For Mubayi, this unsettledness, along with political factors—9/11, the Iraq war and the Palestinian condition—leads her to learn Arabic, a language to which she has no ethnic or geographic connection. As a translator, her linguistic engagement with the language is informed by her unique perspective as a person who exists on the margins of more than one axis of being, and, as such, leads to some very interesting observations.

By contrast, in her essay, “A Tally of Unfulfilled Longing: Translating Dalit Poetry,” Gopika Jadeja returns, as a translator, to her native language, Gujarati, but crosses another distinct boundary. Her own mother, denied an education, was determined that her daughter have an English education. It was not simply a concern for her future, but the more immediate need to have someone at hand to translate what she could not read. This planted the seeds of her daughter’s future occupation, however:

What I choose to translate is perhaps a world that is not hers, and yet hers. I choose to translate Dalit and Adivasi poetry from western India. As a Hindu upper caste woman in postcolonial India, choosing to translate Dalit and Adivasi poetry raises more questions than it answers—both from those whose works I translate and from myself?

What she realizes, once she begins to read and translate this literature, is the full existential impact of the accepted social hierarchy on those at the very lowest rung. This leads to many open ended questions about the relationship between translation and what can be considered decolonial—especially when translating literature from marginalized communities.

In varying ways, translation as a means to engage with one’s cultural and ethnic identity seems to underlie most of the responses to the why translate question, especially for those who were born in or have immigrated to the West. In “Elegiac Moods—Letters to Agha Shahid Ali,” Rahat Kurd, the Canadian-born daughter and granddaughter of Kashmiri women, engages in a moving correspondence with the late Kashmiri-American poet and translator. She opens her first letter:

Dear Shahid,

I’m bound to begin with translation. Whether I’m working within only one language or between two, if I want to convey an experience or an impression, to inscribe the meaning of a text or an event, I will always have to draw on abstractions, memories, dreams, and fears, and hope to make myself intelligible.

Calling on his poetry, especially those he wrote for his mother, she speaks of the enormity of the loss she senses in his words, the loss of a homeland that has, in more recent years, fallen further into a state of crisis. Although Agha Ali was writing in English, Kurd recognizes translation as a “strong, changeable current” running throughout his poetry, especially the sequence of poems that recount the journey to bring his mother’s body home to India, “From Amherst to Kashmir.” Her intuitive tracing of translation as a vital force in this work had me pulling my own collection from the shelf and returning to these poems anew. She goes on to share her own journey to understand how translating can be a means of responding to and resisting the loss that estrangement from one’s past can bring.

The other contributors to this anthology include Kenyan-born, Ugandan-raised poet and scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Nedra Rodrigo who was born in Sri Lanka, Ugandan Canadian writer Iryn Tushabe, Tamil poet and translator Geetha Sukumaran, Norah Alkharashi, originally from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Lisa Ndejuru who was born in Rwanda, raised in Germany and came to Canada in her teens. The current of their translations flow between languages, with varying motivations and objectives. As well, the majority of the women involved in River in an Ocean currently live and work or study in Canada and recognize themselves as settlers on traditional Indigenous lands, a reality that adds an extra dimension to the decolonial vision at the heart of this vital project.

River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation is edited by Nuzhat Abbas and published by trace press.