خمس قصائد

I first met Ashur Etwebi at the Al-Sendian Cultural Festival in Syria in 2009. He gave a captivating reading, silencing an audience of about a thousand people in the valley amphitheatre. He and I became fast friends in a country on the precipice of war.

Later, when French and British planes bombed Libya, Ashur went underground for a while and I wrote a poem as a way to reach him. When he reemerged in a new Libya, Ashur invited me to his hometown, Tripoli, just months after Gaddafi had been killed. With Khaled Mattawa, he organized the first international poetry festival held in the country to celebrate, what I then perceived, as a new atmosphere of freedom for Libyan writers (Gaddafi had banned several writers’ meetings and his followers used to celebrate him as the country’s foremost author). Not long after this, perhaps because of his internationalism and visibility, a militia burned down Ashur’s house. His family were lucky to escape with their lives. Ashur now lives in Trondheim, Norway, in political asylum.

Ashur and I met for a third time in August 2017, in a very different but, once again, extraordinary place: a glacier-surrounded town in Svalbard, the nearest archipelago to the North Pole. Ashur was on a residency there, writing every day (“so I don’t have to think about other things,” he told me). In a typical spirit of collaboration, he broke his routine and, during twenty-four-hour light, we worked for a solid week on literal translations he’d sent me six months previously. The process was intense: usually two shifts, day and night, involving not just word-by-word or line-by-line translational methods but chewing over semantic and formal possibilities for each poem, reading aloud, and discussing cultural elements of Libyan society.

The poems presented here were written after Ashur was granted political asylum. They retain the same musical ear and interest in the world as his earlier work, the same Sufi-like concern for humanity. His anaphoric tenacity, especially in “Things You Can Hear” and “A House in the Wind,” approaches incantation or prayer. Ashur is able to give something of himself away, freely, to the poem. What is left is a scar, as he folds and unfolds the complexities of his life and those of his fellow Libyans.

Some poems were, I imagine, particularly difficult to write. For example, “Village of Etwebia” signifies the orange orchard Ashur used to wake up to, and the house that was torched.

At times in Svalbard, we had to break off and focus on the language and sound of the poem. I have a distinct memory of Ashur in Libya, leading a dance under the Marcus Aurelius gate as the festival got underway. In the distance, soldiers, some who looked no more than children, lined the perimeter fence. As in this scene, Ashur’s poems bear witness, but also celebrate, a country that continues to be torn apart.

—James Byrne, March 4, 2018