Place: Eritrea

In my dreams I reply like this

August 15, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

READ MORE…

Spinning Stories: On Black Foam by Haji Jabir

May 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

In inscribing his protagonist with an ever-shifting self, Jabir asserts that stories are a potent tool for self-fashioning. . .

Black Foam by Haji Jabir, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey, Amazon Crossing, 2023

In a 2019 interview with Marcia Lynx Qualey for Arab Lit, Haji Jabir gives a fascinating response when asked whether he writes “political novels”: “I write about the people of my country, because they are a persecuted and suffering people, and so my novels come in this manner. I would like to write far from politics, but I would betray these people if I turned away from their issues.” At the time of the interview, Jabir had recently published (رغوة سوداء (2018), which has now been jointly translated into English as Black Foam by Sawad Hussain and Qualey. The novel follows an Eritrean man on a journey to find his place in the world, and as he uneasily moves from one location to the next, unable to find a place where he can lay down roots, he changes names and identities fluidly in order to fit in, to have a better chance at a new life.

Given the name Adal at birth (or so he says), he claims to be a ‘Free Gadli’, the Eritrean term for children “born of a relationship between soldiers on the battlefield that goes against religious law.” The Eritrean War for Independence against Ethiopia went on from 1961 to 1991 and Adal, by his admission, was born during this conflict, growing into a seventeen-year-old soldier when Eritrea was finally liberated. To avoid the association with “Free Gadli” in the post-war nation, he changes his name to Dawoud. He is then sent to the Blue Valley prison camp for infarctions committed when he is supposed to be in the Revolution School, but when he supposedly escapes—though he never divulges how—to the Endabaguna refugee camp in Northern Ethiopia, he becomes David. From there, he manages to enter the Gondar camp by posing as a Falash Mura named Dawit, and gets resettled in Israel. These changing names indicate transformation by association, from a Muslim to a Christian to a Jew.

In inscribing his protagonist with an ever-shifting self, Jabir asserts that stories are a potent tool for self-fashioning; they dictate affiliations and guide assimilations, helping Adal become whoever he needs to be at that very moment. The oral traditions of storytelling are further reflected in the way the novel is structured. The narrative is circuitous and fluid, the chapters quickly moving between the past and present in order to flesh out details, with the name Adal uses as the quickest identifier of time and place. In Jerusalem, during an interview with a sociologist, he is asked which of his three names he prefers: “Should he say Dawoud, with all the defeats and losses that old name carried? Or should he choose David, a newer name, yet with as many bitter experiences? Or should he stick with the infant Dawit, without knowing for sure whether it was any different from its predecessors?” Seemingly a simple question, it clearly throws him into existential confusion. READ MORE…

I Have a Story to Tell: An Interview with André Naffis-Sahely

July 15, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulistic tone with an exposé's sleuthy grittiness.

André Naffis-Sahely has been translating the multi-lingual work of Eritrean writer, poet, and refugee-rights activist Ribka Sibhatu for over a decade. Born in Asmara but in self-exile from Eritrea since 1982, Sibhatu has lived in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. First published in 1993, Sibhatu’s much-acclaimed Aulò! Canto poesia dall’Eritrea was revised, expanded, and re-released by Italian publisher Sinnos in 2009.  Sibhatu is also the author of Il numero esatto delle stelle, a bilingual edition of Tigrinya folklore. She is the subject of a 2012 documentary film, Aulò: Roma Postcoloniale, holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from La Sapienza, and has been widely published in journals and anthologies around the world.  

Poet, translator, editor, and critic, Naffis-Sahely has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles into English. And yet it has still taken Naffis-Sahely almost ten years to garner the funding needed to publish his full-length English translation of Aulò, Aulò, Aulò!, a collection of Sibhatu’s poems and retellings of Eritrean folk tales written in Tigrinya, Ahmaric, and Italian. Ahead of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Ribka Sibhatu Tour, a series of online events celebrating the publication of the book, I asked Naffis-Sahely about the significance of Eritrean sycamore trees, the long road to publication, and white gatekeeping in the publishing industry. André sought input from Sibhatu, and we conducted the following interview via email.  

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, June 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): What was the first piece of Ribka’s writing you encountered? Do you remember your initial response, and how you were able to form a relationship with it?

André Naffis-Sahely (ANS): I first came across Sibhatu’s work on a blog sometime in 2009, which featured an account of one of Sibhatu’s visits to a public school somewhere in Italy. The post also reproduced a snapshot of her prose poem “Virginity,” an autobiographical account of how Sibhatu had once been forced to pretend her virginity had been violated to avoid entering an arranged marriage at nineteen, by which time she’d already spent a year in prison for refusing to wed an Ethiopian army officer. I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulist tone with an exposé’s sleuthy grittiness. The writing was lyrical, yet economical, and the author’s personality was sharply on display: uncompromising and questioning, but never devoid of empathy. Sibhatu’s work clearly operated on a variety of engrossing levels: first and foremost, perhaps, her opus is deeply inspired by her native country’s ancient literary traditions; secondly, it is a song of exile, one which has seen her live in Ethiopia, France, and now Italy. The truth is that translating Ribka Sibhatu also enabled me to interact with my Italian heritage in a way I’d never thought possible. Although I mostly grew up in the United Arab Emirates, my earliest memories of Italy include being chased down the street by neo-Nazis, all for walking hand in hand with my older brother, who—having taken more after our Iranian father—had proved too dark-skinned for their liking. My other memories aren’t too different from that point of view. Thus, translating Ribka not only introduced me to realities I hadn’t experienced or knew little about, but she also helped me reconnect with my own roots. Here was a black woman from Eritrea crafting wonderful, engrossing literature out of a language I thought was too resistant to be employed by anyone as outward-looking as her. Of course, Ribka, like many so-called postcolonial Italian writers, has not received as much attention as she deserves. But I think that will only change with time, albeit perhaps too slowly for many of us.

STH: You have written that you tend “to think of Aulò as Sibhatu’s Leaves of Grass.” Can you tell me why this is?

ANS: As Sibhatu enthusiastically told me during one of our earliest meetings in London in 2011, Eritrean literature has been handed down through generations in the form of aulòs, the Tigrinya word for “bardic songs,” which are performed at public and private celebrations and religious rites. Performers always begin their tales by invoking the word Şïnşïwai, which roughly means, “I have a story to tell,” to which the audience replies, Uāddëkoi şęlimai, “We’re ready, we’re listening.” Sibhatu learned her craft in the capital city of Asmara and her ancestral village of Himbirti, in the high plateaus above the capital, where these stories can be traced back for centuries, and she spent a great deal of time talking to village elders in order to transcribe their stories. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile, and it is a work that is continually evolving and growing, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is a deeply personal book, heavily fueled by its author’s biography and background, but it is also one of those rare books that is strong enough to carry a national sentiment—or spirit—on its shoulders. READ MORE…