Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

March 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

Ambiguities, Ruptures, and Shifting Perspectives: On Enchanted Lion’s “Unruly” Imprint

March 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Colin Leemarshall

Each of these Unruly publications presents a semiotically hybrid and richly aporetic narrative.

The art of book illustration has long accompanied the story in its imaginary expeditions—to vivify settings, to enrich character, and to extend language along sensorial planes. Yet, in contemporary publishing, there are few fictions for older readers that truly explore this complex reciprocity between image and text. In fall of 2020, the independent press Enchanted Lion addressed this lack with the announcement of Unruly: a new imprint that would be dedicated to “the picture book’s full potential for readers of all ages”. This was followed by the issuing of several titles dedicated to the dialogues between visual and literary languages, manifesting in enthralling alternatives of description, evocation, and narrative realities. In the following essay, Colin Leemarshall takes a close look on the three works out now.

In the popular imagination, the picture book is a highly circumscribed form. The apparent consensus—fomented both by market protocols and by entrenched reading habits—is that picture-heavy storybooks are for children up to the age of about eight; beyond this age, children are expected to graduate to chapter books, then to young adult novels, then finally (it is hoped) to sophisticated adult literature. (Those who remain drawn to the artistic gestalt of text and image have recourse to the graphic novel—a form that is now widely afforded the status of ‘serious’ literature.) This imagined trajectory not only obscures the fact that the world of illustrated children’s literature has always had its more provocative practitioners (from Heinrich Hoffmann to Tomi Ungerer), it also erects an unnecessary palisade against any ‘incursions’ from the adult world.

The New York-based Enchanted Lion seems to be one of the few anglophone presses invested in upending this prejudice. The publisher has long been open to putting out more challenging and unexpected works, and several of the books on its main title list might be said to be as much for adults as for children. However, it wasn’t until fairly recently, with the 2021 establishment of its Unruly imprint, that Enchanted Lion canalised these preferences into something more systematic. On its website, the publisher writes:

We’re launching Unruly because we believe that the possibilities for the illustrated book are larger and richer than the categories of board book, children’s picture book, graphic novel, and art book that currently exist [….] Picture books are rich with design and story, and yet the genre has come to be seen as one strictly for children. At Enchanted Lion, picture books are for readers of all ages, and sparking awareness of this boundlessness might finally be what is needed to allow the unique form that is the picture book—where word and image live together as nowhere else—to be seen as the expansive narrative medium it is.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Toothpick” by Mari Klein

March 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Mari Klein

it had been accidentally baked into a slice of Gerbeaud cake, and the confectioner, without knowing it or wanting to, had begotten a tragedy

This Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present a brilliant vignette from the innovative mind of Hungarian author Mari Klein, who also translates her own work into English. Dropping us in media res in this tableau of a woman crouching on a bathroom floor as she gasps for her dying breath—the ignominious cause revealed only near the very end—Klein not only gives us a masterclass in the depiction of consciousness but also a glimpse into her huge gifts as a mordantly funny writer.

(Then she groped on all fours on the worn bathroom floor, along the bathtub, under the washing machine, behind the laundry basket, but couldn’t find it: half a pair of the pretty green stone earrings were gone; there goes the family heirloom, she thought, wiping the blood that had clotted on her neck. But the snake bracelet―the clasp was broken and it was only cheap trinket gold anyway―she couldn’t get rid of, even though she threw it in the toilet and flushed it three times: the blue-purple marks of the scales would have to be worn and concealed on her wrist for a long time to come.)

She opened St. Peter’s Umbrella, to be read by Wednesday, and turned to the last page: “. . . a whisper, it sounded like the buzzing of a fly. Poor child!” she read, but suddenly slammed the book shut, crumpling the dust jacket in her hands, clenching it so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Then she gently stroked the letters on the cover, as if to apologise, and put the book back on the bedside table, next to the polka dot mug. With her finger she stirred the cold cocoa: the pale swirl swallowed the skin and then, as it weakened, spat it back to the surface. She licked her finger: the milk had gone sour. Titi said her daddy made her cocoa every night too.

 (From the white vinyl apron on the drying rack above the bathtub, she counted: water dripped on every fourth. The heavy body was sweating, panting, reeking of booze and garlic; but then all she could see was the fly on the mirror, rubbing its feet, buzzing, moving back and forth a few centimetres every now and then.) READ MORE…

‘Lost and Found in Maps of Wandering’: A Review of Bothayna Al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca

March 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.

Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.

Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.

The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?

From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 15, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Colombia!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us news on the most recent bestsellers in the Philippines, the translation of board games in Bulgaria, and the posthumous publication of García Márquez’s final novel in Colombia. From Wattpad-homegrown Filipino authors to the politics of posthumous publication, read on to learn more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines 

The memoir of Korean mega boy band BTS (both its English and Filipino translations) and the novel Queen of the Universe (Tuttle Publishing, 2023) by 2015 Miss Universe titlist Filipino beauty queen Pia Wurtzbach have triumphed over the early 2024 bestsellers list as gazetted by the National Book Store (NBS), the Philippines’ largest chain of commercial bookshops. 

A source of the so-called ‘Pinoy Pride’ from said list are The New York Times chart-topping debut fantasy novel by Thea Guanzon, The Hurricane Wars (Harper Voyager, 2023); journalist and historian Ambeth Ocampo’s Cabinet of Curiosities: History from Philippine Artifacts (published last year by Anvil, NBS’s sister company); and Panda Book Awards-shortlisted Gail Villanueva’s Lulu Sinagtala and the City of Noble Warriors (HarperCollins, 2024), a children’s book imbued with ancient Tagalog mythological lore—all testaments that Filipinos read books written by Filipino authors. 

Populating the local fiction hits are Wattpad-homegrown Filipino genre fictionists, their works ranging from new adult to romance, from chick lit to fantasy—among others, Gwy Saludes’ The Rain in España (which has since been adapted into a popularised Viva One web series) and Safe Skies, Archer, both released last year by Precious Pages under Saludes’ penname 4Reuminct; Disney Panganiban’s Zombie University 3 (Lifebooks, 2023); and No Perfect Prince (Majesty Press, 2023) by Jonahmae Pacala or Jonaxx, dubbed as the country’s ‘Pop Fiction Queen’ and the most celebrated contemporary writer from my hometown.  READ MORE…

I Write From A Lost Place

March 14, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine  |  by Olivia Elias

refugee in Poetry / I live the life that is mine / over which hovers the shadow / of a great Catastrophe

In this wandering, immense poem, Olivia Elias, a poet of the Palestinian diaspora, shares the intimate elegy of the landless, travelling between voids, violences, and grief. Looking at the casualties of not only people and landscape, but also language, Elias’ rhythmic fragmentations hover and intuit around the immense unsayability of hell, in the guise of “civilized realities”. From precipices, from near-disappearances, and estranged by horror, by censorship, this poem is the work of a writer who sees her work—and its singular ability to give weight to negated spaces—as one of the few remaining places to situate life, and all of its losses.

I write from a lost place

on the edge of all edges

a land floating between presence and absence

I write & weave ropes of words
to overcome this Mountain
of fables & legends    lies & betrayals
face the storms of fire      resist the
hurricanes that would throw me
in abysses teeming with vipers
escape the soldiers judges & censors
on my heels

the new Khans & their powerful Allies require that I only use
words listed on their official registers while strictly complying
to the elements of language they carefully crafted over a
century ago

A land without a people     For a people without a land
Bedouins on their camels      and so on

among the forbidden words    this one that starts with the first
letter of the alphabet    using it means immediate excommuni
cation      relegation into the last chamber of hell READ MORE…

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ghayath Almadhoun

March 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Cobham

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

This Translation Tuesday, prose poems come in from Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, translated with care by Catherine Cobham. A warning label alerts us to the peculiar nature of the metaphors in “Poet in Berlin”. Almadhoun’s poet starts, stops, and starts over, as if trying to get the metaphors in his head to express the correct thing. His slow progress perplexes the detective trapped in the poem’s dense and mazey interior—he needs that warning as much as we do. In “Everything’s the Same” the sorrow of a sudden disappearance is ‘green’, ‘still fresh’, and we find grief and shock doing their customary thing. The poet stalks the house he once shared with the absent presence. Time is either stopped dead or winding backwards, his senses are heightened, and household objects take on a sudden, dangerous redolence.

Poet in Berlin

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze, searching for a woman carrying a forest, who went into the sea and did not return.

Lonely as a bench in a public park, most of those who have touched his wound think he is a poet from Berlin, but he is in fact a poet in Berlin.

He resembles a park bench, and therefore, he used to swear to passers-by that a woman he loved took him to the sea and brought him back thirsty, and in another account, in a poem they found in a pocket of his blue shirt, he said she brought him back from the sea thirsty, but she did not return. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has not been able to verify the truth of the information contained in this poem.

A lonely man, in a city crowded with lonely people, he assured the German police that he took full responsibility for the disappearance of a woman as ripe as a peach tree.

The detective asked him to stop using metaphor, because the investigation report was not a postmodern poem, and in any case the sea could not possibly be a crime scene in this city, for even in David Bowie’s most defiant songs there was no sea in Berlin, then he added as calmly as an abandoned house, I cannot bring any charges against you at the present time, for as of the date of the writing of this poem, no official reports have been submitted about the disappearance of a woman who looks like the sunset, walks like a herd of gazelles, and loves summer and children. Furthermore, according to German law, there is no crime if there is no body.

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze went into the sea to look for a woman who went into the sea and did not return, and he did not return.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 8, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Carol Khoury, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, India, and Palestine.

New arrivals of a Sinophone Proust, a celebration of Lucknow and Urdu culture, and a new solidarity campaign to share Palestinian literature. Our editors are bringing you the latest literary news from on the ground, and there’s plenty to discover.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China 

“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.” This snarky remark by (maybe) Anatole France has long hovered over the labours of translators worldwide, as much a challenge as it is an implicit acquiescence to just how difficult and time-consuming the text is. As multiple as his English appearances, Proust in Chinese also comes to us through a plethora of voices. There exists at present only one complete collection of À la recherche du temps perdu《追忆似水年华》in the Chinese language, published in 1989 through a concerted effort by Yilin Publishing House and a total of fifteen translators (who called themselves the “Suicidal Translators Squad”). This is the only version that has accompanied readers for over thirty years—with plenty of updates, corrections, and criticisms along the way—though the possibility of alternative editions always beckoned temptingly from the beyond; critics are always quick to note (not entirely without resentment) that in neighbouring Japan and South Korea, five or six full translations of this masterwork has been made available to the public.

Short as it may be, life presents plenty of distractions and exits for the overwhelmed translator. Luo Xinzhang exhausted himself after 50,000 characters. Xu Jun made it until halfway through the fourth volume before giving up at an impressive 230,000 characters, having expended eight hours a day for over two years (and also suffering from depression). Xu Hejin passed away. Zhou Kexi plead a lack of physical stamina, saying that he was drained by the text’s beauty. Many of them, along with readers, expressed tremendous regret that there would not be a single unified representation of Proust in the Chinese language, fluid in style, levelling up to the original, rooted in a single, persistent mind.

Then in 2020, something changed. The Dafang offshoot of CITIC Publishing Group suddenly announced the “Proust Project”, involving a plan to newly translate À la recherche du temps perdu with a single translator at the helm, based on Gallimard’s revised and annotated 1987 edition. The individual selected for the job was Kong Qian, a professor of French at Nanjing Normal University, who had been named Best New Translator at the 11th Fu Lei Translation Awards for her work on Kaouther Adimi’s Our Wealth. Kong has since been given ten years to complete the task—one that is, for any literary translator, a dream. It is the opportunity to occupy a permanent estate in world literature, a claim to a text that has embedded itself in both the literati and the public consciousness of China, even amidst the hurried days. (The book is so famous in China that directors will use it as a prop, in order to directly communicate a character’s highbrow tastes or worldly intellect.) READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Kristin Vego

March 8, 2024  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

Just in time for the weekend, a sparkling conversation with current contributor Kristin Vego!

In the second podcast episode centering on contributors to Asymptote’s landmark 50th issue, Danish-Norwegian author Kristin Vego joins Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak in conversation. Her story, “All Things Lovely,” as translated by Jennifer Russell, represents her debut in the English language. Vego’s story also arrives at a moment when Norwegian literature is receiving global attention with last year‘s Nobel Prize in Literature going to Jon Fosse. Kristin Vego speaks of the “ghost of childhood” inhabiting a story of a young girl leaning into adulthood during a summer holiday within a Nordic landscape. Russell’s translation of Kristin Vego’s story sits alongside new work from 35 countries and 21 languages in the Winter 2024 issue, dedicated to the theme of coexistence. Listen to the podcast now.

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A Song of Eternity on the Hill of Slaughter: Najwa Juma on the Palestinian Poetry of Liberation

March 7, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Palestinian poetry has always been the stage on which the Palestinian tragedy was performed.

My encounter with the poetry of Palestinian writer-translator Najwa Juma was made possible by my writer-friend, Asymptote contributor Stefani J Alvarez-Brüggmann—both Najwa and Stefani are alumnae writers-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, an artists’ fellowship at Stuttgart in southwest Germany. For the esteemed and ever-relevant Arab magazine Mizna, Najwa meditates, “There is no salvation but to return / to ask the grandparents chanting / songs of farewell.” Earth, or I daresay a stand-in for the act of coming back to a liberated homeland, malignantly, “is an object of desire and longing in Palestinian poetry,” reflects Sarah Irving in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2021).

 Born three decades after the Nakba in the Gaza Strip, the largest open-air prison in the world according to HumanRightsWatch.org, Najwa is a poet, essayist, fictionist, playwright, translator, and educator whose body of work as an artist-activist chronicle the struggles of the Palestinian woman under settler-colonial occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In the words of Mizna editor George Abraham, Najwa’s poetry arrives “at an impossible music … embody[ing] a resistive spirit of a people who refuse, with the whole of our bodies and voices, to die.”

As of press time, Najwa’s fate is hinged on the disquiet: she is an asylum-seeker in Germany while her family is still in genocide-ravaged Gaza, wishing for a reunification—which you can support via GoFundMe.

In this interview, I spoke with Najwa—confined in a refugee camp in Germany and shivering from the cold of a Covid-19 infection—on the poetry of occupation and exile written from Israeli-occupied Palestine and what it means to write during a time of ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

This interviewer, following Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s call to hijack literary spaces, would like to express unconditional support for Palestinian liberation and call on readers of this interview to “get in the way of the death machine”, wherever and whoever you are. For starters, consider donating an e-sim, fasting for Gaza, sharing and translating the words of Gazan writers, and reading and distributing this chapbook of Palestinian poets.

najwa

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Genocide and ethnic cleansing have been ongoing lived realities in your occupied homeland. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces since October 7th this year—not including the death toll from 2008 to 2020 alone accounting to more than 120,000 Palestinian lives. Leaders of the so-called Free World are either the very perpetrators or are complicitly silent. Much of the world, the equally powerless, can only do the bare minimum: bear witness and never stop speaking against this carnage as it happens right before our eyes. In these times of the unspeakable, what is the role of poetry and what is the task of the poet?

Najwa Juma (NJ): I always loved poetry that expresses emotions, shares ideas, and creates imagery, but at the time I started writing poetry, as a refugee in my own country facing the occupation from childhood, I found myself writing to resist, to make voice for the voiceless, and to feel free under all the restrictions surrounding me. For example my first poem was about a dead Palestinian person who happened to be buried on top of a hill looking at the Gaza sea in an area only Israeli settlers can reach. The poem expressed the fear that this person feel whenever he hears them speaking in Hebrew right next to him.

Whose voices these are I think I know
Strange and fearful sounds though
I miss my mother’s hands and tears
Sitting at my grave vanishing my fears

Throughout my life I have chosen unarticulated feelings and scenes to write about. I think that the deeper you think and see, the deeper you feel and write.  READ MORE…

Riveting Banality: On Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle

March 6, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

It’s the pungency of this story—the characters, the house, Uncle’s habits—that keeps us locked in tight.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, translated from the French by Jordan Stump,  Two Lines Press, 2024

About Uncle is Swiss writer Rebecca Gisler’s debut novel, translated by Jordan Stump—a dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics. A love letter to the oft hidden odd and grotesque mannerisms of our family members, About Uncle boils over with emotional distress, set just on the verge of the first COVID lockdown in spring of 2020. But, it’s not COVID that sets the tone, it’s everything else: family at its most banal, at its most crude, with an emotional tinge humming with tenderness.

At the center of the story is the unnamed narrator’s uncle, a 52 year-old recluse who seems to thrive among the squalor and filth built up over 30 years of hygienic apathy. In an unkempt house in the Brittany region of France, Uncle lives with his niece and nephew as “a congregation of do-nothings.” The siblings struggle to balance their personal struggles with their shared concern for Uncle’s health and lifestyle, and the “involuntary flatshare” is the centerpiece of a claustrophobic world that quite literally reeks of death and decay. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

March 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

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