Translation: Poem: Mustafa Stitou

© Pieter van der Meer /
Tineke de Lange

I'd originally planned to post this poem 5--yes, five--years ago, but like the 75+ other draft posts in my queue, some from almost 10 years ago, time to do so eluded me. As a result, it's been waiting to be completed, so here goes. It's by Mustafa Stitou (1974-), a Dutch poet of Moroccan birth. I first came across his work when I picked up a copy of his second book Mijn gedichten (My Poems, 1998) at a little Amsterdam poetry store during a trip to the Netherlands in the late 1990s.

I'd taught myself basic Dutch--enough, in fact, to fool a postal worker there, but with such a heavy German accent that she thought I might be from that country--and was convinced that I might be able to read, if not translate Stitou, Astrid Roemer (1947-), and other Dutch-language writers of color, especially immigrants from the global South, but of course, learning the basics of a language to be able to read street signs and order food and be fluent enough to read, let alone translate, are two different things. And this is true even for languages like Dutch and English, which are linguistically quite close. When I think of the current immigration and refugee crises in Europe, the failures of integration and the ongoing social and political marginalization of black and brown Europeans, it strikes me that hearing their voices is even more important now than ever.

All of which is to say that I nevertheless decided to try to translate at least a few of Stitou's poems, whose linguistic inventiveness and play intrigued me. He has won a number of major Dutch poetry prizes, and continued to publish, with his most recent book, Tempel (Temple), appearing in 2013. Below is a poem about teenage love from Mijn gedichten; such is my Dutch that any infelicities are mine, but I think you get a sense, however imperfect, of his artistry. (When I return to JC I will look for the original Dutch, which isn't online, to recheck it.) You can find more of his work in the original and translation if you click on his name above.

PALPITATIONS

You

 bright


  transparent and immaculate
     little sight

glim
 glimpsed
  in puberty

through the present moment

laughed at me
one time
 or five

by all the swarming voices
 that besieged me
  --my pooljourneydaydreaminess

even with
 the lightning feeling
  while my humor grew
   immature!

Going bald from the world to drift
without party kilos
 my life's evening complete?

In the Almere Music District you stepped off

But I definitely didn't see you
that spring
 among the talk show
    audience

Train nymph
 are you writing my life?
I can really cook

Copyright © 1998, 2016, from Mustafa Stitou, Mijn gedichten. 

Translation © copyright John Keene, 2011, 2016.

Abdellah Taïa's Appeal

A novel that I wrote an essay about for Spirale (at the invitation of the brilliant Nathanaël) a few years ago, Une mélancolie arabe (An Arab Melancholia), by the Moroccan queer writer Abdellah Taïa (1973-) is now available in English from Semiotexte/Smart Art, under its Semiotext(e)/Native Agents series, having been translated by Frank Stock. I browsed a copy at St. Mark's Bookshop the other day, and hope to pick it up (there, at McNally Jackson, Unabridged Books or another independent bookstore) very soon.

Since I've already written about the book I won't attempt to review it here, but I do urge readers to plunge into it, because I think it's Taïa's most ambitious and accomplished work of fiction, and extends the themes of his previous works in ways the prior novels and nonfictional works do not. One of the themes I wrote about was the omnipresence of "deaths," actual and metaphorical, creating a series of what I read as sites and performances of sublimity, tying this novel to that of a Francophone predecessor, Antonin Artaud, and his theorization of the Theater of Cruelty. An Arab Melancholia also expands upon the idea of "melancholia"--racial, colonial, queer--that Taïa engaged in his previously translated and acclaimed novel, L'armée du salut (Salvation Army), but in its strong embrace of Arab and Muslim cultures, its challenge to simplistic integration into French homonormative narratives, its queer, recursive structure and defiance of genre, and its insistent struggle with selfhood itself, An Arab Melancholia productively complicates any attempt by the French or any literary culture or establishment to exoticize or recolonize him.

Abdellah Taïa (Chema Moya/European Pressphoto Agency)

A week ago, Taïa published a short essay in the New York Times, "A Boy to Be Sacrificed," which explores some of the very incidents he treats in An Arab Melancholy, but in this piece he amplifies certain of them and downplays others. The entire essay reads like a radical, journalistic distillation of the novel. The gist is that as a young, effeminate queer boy, he was so completely rejected because of his sexuality, rendered so abject, so subject, so socially dead and alien even to his family, that he and other boys like him could (and can) be used as sexual playthings by any man who wanted, an irony in a religion and society that at the same time harshly condemn "homosexuality," particularly in its Western guise(s), but which also have created social and economic spaces for colonialized sexual differences and relationships. In the Times piece, he recounts one night in 1985 when men in the neighborhood--not white European foreigners seeking boy lovers--began calling out for him to come downstairs, so that they could violate him, and the response of his family members was to turn their backs on him, which not just metaphorically but literally--affectively--"killed" him. That night he died, as he had begun doing before, and would, he makes clear, repeatedly thereafter.

What particularly interests me, beyond the convergences and slippages between this autobiographical account, situated within the truth-bound, journalistic frame of a newspaper, and the novel's different, more dramatically structured and stylized versions of this story, is that the latter work provides through its narrative and serves as the embodiment of the answer to the rhetorical statement he poses to Times readers: "I don't know how I survived." This, he says, is a truth, that he doesn't know how; and yet the truth exists in fictional form, in that work of fiction, it seems to me as I read this mini-essay, a performance itself, of a particular type of subject speaking to a particular liberal, Western audience that probably has not read his book or much literature from Northern Africa, has little understanding of the complexity of sexualities there, and yet is not unwilling to sympathize with a sentimentalized account of his plight. I'm not criticizing him. But I do think too that he knows the answer lies in the novel's version of this story, with its multiple deaths and the journey they constituted towards a survival, the survival of that fictional Abdellah, and the real one, now 38, who also now can write this Op-Ed piece.

Taïa begins closing his piece by saying: "I don’t know where I found the courage to become a writer and use my books to impose my homosexuality on the world of my youth. To do justice to little Abdellah. To never forget the trauma he and every Arab homosexual like him suffered." The novels cumulatively, however, show us where he found this courage; they do not in fact "impose" his homosexuality on the world of his youth so much as they respond to and make sense of that trauma; peel back the many hidden layers of that world; invest it with a living shape, a density and a texture that perhaps he might not even have been able to see in his youth, though he felt and knew it, and can now, through his books, fictional and nonfictional, his movie appearances, his journalism and essays, convey it. His books open windows, multiple ones, on the world of his youth and of Morocco today, the queer Arab world, windows onto the lives of queer boys and girls like little Abdellah, and allow him, and we the readers, to respond to and make sense of that world.

He concludes with this appeal: "Now, over a year after the Arab Spring began, we must again remember homosexuals. Arabs have finally become aware that they have to invent a new, free Arab individual, without the support of their megalomaniacal leaders. Arab homosexuals are also taking part in this revolution, whether they live in Egypt, Iraq or Morocco. They, too, are part of this desperately needed process of political and individual liberation. And the world must support and protect them."  Rather than quibbling with his specific rhetoric, I will agree with him, and add that the world--and especially we in the United States, with our vexed national and imperial relationships to the Arab and Muslim world--must begin by listening carefully and attentively to queer Arab people, listening to their appeal, listening to their accounts of their lives, listening so that we can hear what it is they want and need, and thus respond accordingly. Taïa's work represents one call; there are many others, and if we are willing and able, we should listen.

Poem: Abdel-ilah Salhi

I'm procrastinating about writing/finishing a talk I have to deliver later this week, so in my tours through the web, I came across this poem, by the Moroccan poet Abdel-ilah Salhi (1968-), amid Poetry International's online mini-anthology of Moroccan poetry, translated by Norddine Zouitni. The translator says this about Saleh:

Since 1987, Salhi has been published widely in several magazines. Two collections of his poems, one in French and the other in Arabic will be published shortly.

Although the poetry of Abdel-ilah Salhi has varied extensively over the past years, it has kept some of its main characteristics, such as the celebration of everyday experience, the tone of humor which turns desperate situations into brilliant poetic moments, and the narrative tendency which dominates most of his poems. Indeed, Salhi is a brilliant storyteller whose friendship and hospitality are highly recommended. He is considered by many as the mouthpiece of the Moroccan “new poetry” in France, and Europe as a whole.

Salhi earns his living as a journalist and radio correspondent in France.

Here's one that stood out. (You can go to this page, where the long lines aren't cut off.)

***

THANKS GILLES DELEUZE

They were quoting you
Murmuring your name like a prophet coming from afar
From whose mouth a unique music issues

My own French was not good enough even to purchase
     bread decently
But the ring of your name
In the sidewise discussions had a special magic
Which for long put my extreme ignorance to shame

Migration is a sacred right, you said once
Nobody said that before you, and no one dared say it after
In this country which we married for love
I, Mohamed, Abdelkader, and Fatima
And other Arabs whose dusty names this poem is too narrow
      to contain.
Until now I haven’t met anyone who could explain the mysteries
     of your obscure expression
Laws say the opposite from one government to the other
And the caretaker is French of Portuguese origin
Yet he looks down on philosophers

I was in the subway stealing glances at a newspaper
     someone was reading
When I saw your name printed in bold, and the headline
      your death
It seems you threw yourself from the window
But why all those who love you to blindness
Love life more than anything else
I felt ashamed of my ignorance once again
And hated myself in plain Arabic
Despite the grumblings of the coloured owner of the newspaper

Migration is a sacred right
An expression which is enough it was once said
For me every morning to pursue my own sacred right
Seeking your protection O Gilles Deleuze

© Translation: 2004, Norddine Zouitni

The Arabic: