Balafres

Marie-Célie Agnant

Vade Mecum
  “Negro peddler of rebellion         
You know all the routes of the world.”        
—Jacques Roumain, “Ebony Wood”        

don’t tell me about your life
and I’ll keep mine to myself

we will feel our way along
chewing on our uncertainties

with our contorted laughs
our eyes riddled with lies

and our lives
drained of pleasure

don’t tell me about your life
I won’t tell you about mine

and side by side we’ll go
not looking at each other
not touching

and this beast in our bellies
fear

don’t tell me about your life
let’s take out our masks
our frocks
our fables
let’s dress up in carnivalesque
sneers
and falsehoods

keep your secrets to yourself
I’m not indiscreet
I won’t talk your ear off either

I do want to say something
about those countries
of unending
absences
and also say
that I’ve seen so many men
consumed by hate
poisoned by venom
like hungry waves
their starving mouths
opening on the shore

I’ve seen stars change into tears
bewildered fireflies
I saw them
fall from the sky
sucked
into the guts of the earth

they were children
they never saw
the dew
or its promises

I don’t want to bother you
but before the hooves of silence pound out
                                                                       my voice

let me just say
that I was born
with my neck
between the chopping block
and the machete

they told me: “move”

I snuck past the prison guards
but on the other side
they said:

“if you’re not happy
go home”

the desert stretches on
burning beneath my feet
I can’t find my way home

my home
in tatters
mismatched shreds

the blunt shears of exile
cut out a shroud to cover my life
time mocks me
a long sob chokes me

with the passing years
I’m no longer this woman
or that woman
or this woman next to me

I’ve become
the wave
to be warded off

the horde
to disperse

the menacing crowd

I arrive
I unfurl

indecent

with my bongo-drum look

my face of a sand nigger

my tongue

my customs

my heritage

barbarous

suspicious

I dare to ask for
the sun
for my children

don’t listen to me if you don’t want to
but I need to shout
the noose is tightening

squeezing so the rot seeps out

the noose is tightening
echoing all the way from Sharpeville
this memory

the noose tightens

shouts—five hundred years captive—
ring out

saying Guacanagaric

saying Anacaona
the one we called
the flower of Xaragua

the noose tightens
and the names are called out

of Tupac Amaru

of Caonabo

and of Toussaint Louverture
at Fort de Joux
in the Jura mountains

THIS IS HOW PAIN IS BORN

the same pain that continues to plough our banks
all the way from the coasts of Africa

don’t tell me your story
but I need to tell you what mine’s been like
what was once mine

like the snorting breath of a thorough-bred
my voice kicks up dust
I don’t want to wrap my wounds
                                                  in silence

though my neck’s on the chopping block
I won’t water down my wine
I get drunk every day
on cups of refusal
and I will live a thousand existences
on Robben Island
with hate as my only companion

I didn’t tell you anything

and as for me,
I heard nothing

but in this life of slashing knives
speak



Glowings

                     to the places of my childhood

Down the hallways of my mind
I lug
this bundle of broken memories
a diver
a keeper
at the mercy of each new day
a hungry man
becomes a bull
thighs move in cadence
to a rhythm that rages on
feet and asphalt blend
memories
smell of tafia
rotten mangoes
bottle-sellers
trinkets
clutter
toothless Marias decrepit in the dirt
courtyard of miracles
rivulets of bird droppings
negro children’s crib
rancid fried food
re-heated
in the sun
and that echo of flies
bees
acid chuckles
sweet syrup
candied ginger
sewer screaming its stench
down the hallways of my mind
memories
abrupt
despondencies
discomforts
dizziness
a procession
of mummies
symphony of dread
bathed in sweat
and mud.

translated from the French by Siobhan Marie Meï

Read the original in French

What is powerful about Balafres (the collection from which these poems are excerpted) is the variety of ways in which Angnant uses poetry—her writing serves simultaneously as a mouthpiece for the disenfranchised as well an intimate (though troubled) ode to the Haiti of her childhood. One of the major challenges in translating Balafres was first identifying its complex blend of literary activism and mémoire without letting my own assumptions surrounding the nature of political exile to color the complex psychological picture that Agnant paints as she weaves the spaces of her youth in Haiti with her experiences as an immigrant in Montreal.

To this end, I found myself listening closely to the ways in which issues of race were treated in the collection. Moving language across cultures is always a challenge, one that often forces me to consider my own socio-ethnic identity and my positionality as a translator. What I tried to respect in translating Agnant’s portraits of black womanhood is the way she evokes a language of racial prejudice to define and depict the spaces her body moves through, particularly as an immigrant. Racial slurs such as gueule de boula-boula and bougnoule are deeply embedded in French-language expressions of xenophobia and cultural intolerance and are difficult to translate into a language such as English, which carries and creates its own histories of racial violence. My aim as a translator was to capture the spirit of these terms by tapping into a facile and readily available language of discrimination in English while also striving to keep these expressions somewhat foreign through the use of less-common phrasing or image pairing. While I feel it is important to identify the ways in which discrimination pervades all cultures, as a translator, I believe it is equally important to reveal the role language and cultural context play in generating discourses of racial violence that are neither spiritually nor historically fully translatable.

Marie-Célie Agnant is a poet, novelist, and children’s author born in Port-au-Prince who has lived in Québec since 1970, where she has worked as an interpreter and a French language teacher. Agnant’s novels have been widely translated into Catalan, English, Italian, and Dutch, and her novel Le Silence comme le sang was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award in 1997. Her writing addresses the politics and poetics of exile and womanhood and actively examines Haiti’s painful postcolonial history. Her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes de terres brûlées, was released just this year by Les Éditions de la Pleine Lune in Montréal.

Siobhan Marie Meï is a poet and translator from mid-coast Maine. Her translations of Belgian national poet Emile Verhaeren have appeared in the Quebecois literary journal carte blanche, and her translations of French spoken-word artist Abd Al Malik are forthcoming in Transference, published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Siobhan is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts. Her most recent research projects use translation as a lens through which to consider the historical complexity and cultural specificity of the relationship between language and racial prejudice.