The Dubrovka Theatre
Inside the theatre,
women dressed in black
sit on red velvet seats
with bombs in their laps.
Delicate hands
linked across
their backrests,
they nurse no
Chechen babies.
The women
who carried
bombs in their laps
have given birth
to a terrible disaster.
The women in black,
who slept a dreamless
sleep, have vanished,
in silence, as if nothing
had happened, along with
the dead children of Beslan.
African Grandmothers
Lacking the wings
of an eagle,
resigned, she admires
the distant moon,
cuddling cats and dogs
without asking them where
our neighbours have gone.
She spends all her time
at home and school, reading
or asking how the earth was made.
Unable to find
the stairs to the stars,
and seeing that God
won’t answer
her questions, Sara
wants me to give her
the names and
the surnames
of our African grandmothers,
whom Darwin declined
to mention in his book.
Now No One Sings Hosannas: An Open Letter
The Ethiopian people stirred and raised a loud cry:
“Justice! Justice!” and PM Abiy answered them:
“We must forgive and come together in the name
of love!” And so his motto won the people’s trust
and instead of chanting “Aboy! Aboy!” they began
to sing “Abiy! Abiy!” but unfortunately, Abiy,
exulting “Isu, Isu!” derailed the whole process.
When the people swapped “Aboy, Aboy” for “Abiy, Abiy,”
hope soared for new and lasting peace, hymns
were sung, and all waited for the words of Saint Yared
to carry north in tune with King David’s harp.
Then, when we saw Abiy publicly cheer “Isu! Isu!”
we knew he’d betrayed his Nobel Prize, and reeled:
“How can angels and demons be friends?”
Next, his men started breaking up crowds, burning
the mosques and churches of our ancestors,
who’d written the country’s history in their blood,
who’d sated their thirst with dew, and used stones
as pillows. Now machetes slit the mourners’ throats
who dared to wrap the dead, and the young
fall from windows or rot away in prisons.
Now no one sings hosannas to Aboy and perhaps the same
fate awaits Abiy; to find your rightful place in history you must
keep your word, and like King Menelik and Tewodroso,
be worthy of this great people you lead.
from Aulò
Ribka Sibhatu
translated from the Italian and Amharic by André Naffis-Sahely and Ribka Sibhatu
Read the original in Italian and Amharic
Ribka Sibhatu was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a slow-burning liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to ten months in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Upon her release, Sibhatu first took refuge at a relative’s house, then adopted a false identity, finally fleeing to Addis Ababa in 1981, where she completed her education. Later she relocated to Lyon and then to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems. Although Sibhatu writes in many languages, the lost paradise of her native home always manages to sneak through, one way or another, as an act of preserving Eritrea’s cultural heritage whilst in exile.
What is clear to me about Sibhatu’s work is that the author’s uncompromising humanity is deeply embedded into each word, each poem of hers ultimately reconnecting us in both mind and heart to the wider human condition. Her poetry manages to deftly relay the experiences and traumas Sibhatu suffered during her youth, offering us a highly intimate personal history, as well as more overtly political poems. In addition to her work as a lyric poet and human-rights activist, Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon: a body of oral literature that has been handed down through the ages in the form of aulòs (literally, “Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!”), the Tigrinya term for chant-poems, or bardic songs, that are performed at public and private celebrations, as well as during religious rites. Her decades-long efforts in keeping these traditions alive—in the midst of her country’s continuing unravelling—mark her as one of the Eritrean diaspora’s most indefatigable voices.
I began to translate Sibhatu’s work in late 2010 and, over the past decade, I have received poems from her in Italian, Amharic, Tigrinya, and French. The poems included in this selection are presented both in their original language of composition, and in my English translation. The translations were worked from Sibhatu’s Italian versions of each work, or directly where the poem was composed in Italian.
What is clear to me about Sibhatu’s work is that the author’s uncompromising humanity is deeply embedded into each word, each poem of hers ultimately reconnecting us in both mind and heart to the wider human condition. Her poetry manages to deftly relay the experiences and traumas Sibhatu suffered during her youth, offering us a highly intimate personal history, as well as more overtly political poems. In addition to her work as a lyric poet and human-rights activist, Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon: a body of oral literature that has been handed down through the ages in the form of aulòs (literally, “Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!”), the Tigrinya term for chant-poems, or bardic songs, that are performed at public and private celebrations, as well as during religious rites. Her decades-long efforts in keeping these traditions alive—in the midst of her country’s continuing unravelling—mark her as one of the Eritrean diaspora’s most indefatigable voices.
I began to translate Sibhatu’s work in late 2010 and, over the past decade, I have received poems from her in Italian, Amharic, Tigrinya, and French. The poems included in this selection are presented both in their original language of composition, and in my English translation. The translations were worked from Sibhatu’s Italian versions of each work, or directly where the poem was composed in Italian.
Ribka Sibhatu was born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1962. Wrongly imprisoned for a year in 1979, Sibhatu fled Eritrea in 1980. Travelling first to Ethiopia and then to France, Sibhatu moved to Italy and settled in Rome, where she has lived ever since. Sibhatu's first published work was Aulò, canto-poesia dall'Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a collection of lyrics and prose poems originally written in Tigrinya and translated by the author into Italian. In 1999, Sibhatu published Il cittadino che non c'è. L'immigrazione nei media italiani (EdUP), a sociological look at the Italian media's coverage of immigrant communities, which was followed up by ll numero esatto delle stelle e altre fiabe eritree (Sinnos, 2012), a collection of Eritrean folk tales. Ribka Sibhatu currently works as a consultant and interpreter for the Italian court system, as well as various other international organizations.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. His translations include over twenty titles of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, featuring works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Joseph Kessel, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Rashid Boudjedra, Abdellatif Laâbi, and Frankétienne. He is the poetry editor of Ambit magazine and the 2020 author in residence at UCLA.
