A grandfather clock resembling a big wooden headstone, its two hands still rotating, tolling its bell for midday. A river gull perches on its crown. The old man and old woman are sitting on two chairs, close by their things that fill the boat that’s sailing away now, their bedroom mirror between them. Their house is sailing off with them inside it, crossing the great water slowly. We, who always watched them from our balconies and windows, are left behind, as if we were the dead.
•
(The Deluge)
You don’t notice anything because you see like someone who remembers.
Like a prophet in a film, be the camera.
Meanwhile the entire city passes by: on the sidewalk a homeless man holding a piece of cardboard ‘I am hungry’. The benefactor, the preacher, and the one who pities approach him, but in the end it’s an air hostess who accompanies him beyond your field of vision. A lady carrying an orange tree crowned with just a few oranges passes by, another lady walking cautiously and carrying a large china bowl passes by, and more than once the same man carrying books balanced between his hands and his chin, he’s elderly and bald with round eye glasses. Men with hoardings pass by, a lady carrying an empty cat basket, a man carrying a large maquette of a house, and behind him a small girl wearing shoes larger than her feet and carrying a bear doll. A lady pushing a pram containing a bonsai pine, a small child whose red balloon bursts in front of him. And a large rolled-up carpet carried by two wall-painters. A young woman descending the stairs and remembering, before leaving the building, that she’d forgotten something and you understood it was her black bag. Many bags pass in front of you, some people clutch one in each hand. Someone who’s carrying a cheap chandelier, a lady whose shopping bag has burst and a young man helps her to gather her spilt groceries before quickly leaving. People arguing and shouting without noticing you’re there. A tall girl opening her parasol for her less tall mother, a group of women in mini-skirts whose calf muscles are strong, men who look back as if their pockets might have holes, a priest carrying a box with a parrot in a cage tied on top. Someone who’s carrying a column of grey hats and another who’s carrying a television and a third carrying a heavy blanket in a transparent bag. Then you see most of those who have passed in front of you returning from the opposite direction, doing the same things, everyone acting as if the porter of their own lives. Are those who were in a rush the same ones who escaped with their skins? Has all this scene been taking place in a mirror? What is the difference now between the original and the copy, the image and its reflection, sleep and wakefulness? Don’t leave, illusion. What does it matter if the deluge comes.
MAJID NAFICY
Translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Majid Naficy was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1952 and currently lives in West Los Angeles, California. Raised in a large and well-educated family, his first poems were published in a literary journal in Isfahan when he was just 13. After studying at the University of California at Los Angeles, Naficy returned to Tehran University, abandoned writing poetry, and joined political groups working to overthrow the Shah. After the 1979 Revolution, when Khomeini began to crack down on dissidents, Naficy and his wife, Ezzat Tabaiyan, were forced to go underground, but continued to work against the new regime. In 1981 both Ezzat and Naficy’s brother, Said, were imprisoned and executed and thereafter, in 1983, Naficy fled the country. With the help of Kurdish guerillas, Naficy escaped to Turkey on horseback, carrying the nine poems he had written after Ezzat’s death, some money, an Afghani passport, and torn photos of his brother and wife. Eighteen months later he was granted asylum in the U. S. and moved to Venice, California.
Naficy’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has published more than twenty collections of poetry in Persian and two collections in English. He is a beloved poet among Iranian exiles in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and an inspiration to many. In his honour, a stanza of his poem ‘Ah, Los Angeles!’ is engraved on the wall of a city park in Venice.
These two poems of Naficy’s speak to two poles of exile: the longing to return to a fondly remembered homeland and the desire to sever ties with an old life and build anew in a foreign land.
One Night I Will Return to My Birthplace
One night I will return to my birthplace
to stand on my rooftop
and pick stars.
Father will say, ‘Look, There!
Don’t you see the Seven Brothers?’
I will stretch out my hands
and caress their unsheathed swords.
Then the nightly battle will begin.
Together we will cast out the moon-eating dragon
and in the dark corners of heaven
we will fasten each star firmly in place.
At dawn Mother will say, ‘Look,
There! Don’t you see the Two Sisters?’
I will stretch out my hands
and caress their jugs of water.
They are the messengers of the rain-making clouds
that disappear with the rising sun.
My brothers! My sisters!
One night I will return to my birthplace
so that under my childhood sky
I will find again my own stars.
NOTE: The ‘Seven Brothers’ refers to the Pleiades, and the ‘Two Sisters’ are the dog stars Sirius and Procyon.
To Iranians in Exile
When will we burn our ships?
It’s been a long time since we dropped anchor in this harbour.
The sea’s storms have nested in our souls,
our hands have not yet let go the heavy lines
and our eyes see nothing but the whiteness of salt.
Death has been mixed with our saliva
and no mouthwash can make our mouths pure.
Greedy mice chew on our memoirs
and their footprints cover the deck.
Birds no longer circle above the mast
and breadcrumbs
remind us of nothing at all.
It’s been a long time since our spouses abandoned ship
and our children have been lost in the wailing wind.
Where is our fire-maker?
So that by striking a match
she can set our threadbare sails on fire
and open the way for the pure fire
to burn the ancient charts to ash.
Go on, let’s leave the sea to the sea
and burn the travel story of Sinbad the Sailor.
On this hard shore we must stand
and feel the solidity of the ground beneath our feet.
Among us
can we not find a woman like Roma
to burn this ancient ship?
Tell her to rise up
and before the vultures
dance on our bodies
tell her to come
so that in the shining of her savage eyes
we may see the miniature Iran
that on the edge of these Pacific waters
will grow, little by little, from our hands.
NOTE: According to Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, when the survivors of Troy arrived in Italy a woman by the name of Roma set fire to their ships, forcing them to give up the idea of returning home and thus to build the city of Rome.
NASRIN PARVAZ
Writing in the ‘Host’ Language
Over the years since I came to England in 1993 as a political refugee from Iran, I’ve been to many fiction or creative writing classes and seminars, where I was the only person who did not have English as their first language.
The teachers and the other students always welcomed me and I usually found the classes very helpful. It took me a while, but I began to wonder why no other non-native English language speakers came to these classes.
We all know London is full of non-native English speakers and among them there are many writers. Som
e exiled writers are members of organisations such as Exiled Writers Ink, who run readings specifically for refugees or immigrants, but the majority of exiled writers are working in isolation within their own communities; and no matter how long they have lived here, most writers from immigrant and refugee communities continue to write in their native tongues.
This last puzzles me, as while it is obviously easier to write in the mother tongue, and of course each language has its own idiom and beauty, English is the world’s international language and writing in English offers any writer a far larger potential readership.
It is true books can be translated into English but in practice only three percent of all the books published in English are translations from other languages. Writing in our mother tongues means we talk to ourselves, not the world, and I will argue that this creates a cultural apartheid, which suits the ‘cultural colonisers’.
I write because I want to speak to the world, and that surely is the reason all writers write and I wondered why other non-native English speakers were denying themselves access to the wider world. And then I questioned myself, were they in fact denying themselves deliberately or were there other factors that I had not recognised (and had somehow not experienced) which inhibit immigrant and refugee writers from trying to write in the lingua franca.
I began to look at the factors that maintain what I have called cultural apartheid. First (and this is controversial), our host country has no integration policy. The first move to integrate ‘others’ into British society would be to give newcomers access to free or very inexpensive English classes. Up until the early 1980s, this had been state policy, but slowly, both local councils and government moved from a policy of providing English classes to providing translators and interpreters. This has disempowered immigrant and refugee communities, as without real knowledge of the host language we not only have difficulty talking to our hosts, but we have difficulty communicating with different immigrant and refugee groups who speak in different languages. This policy of providing interpreters and translators rather than English classes disempowers, ghettoizes us and keeps us as the permanent ‘other’.
Perhaps we stay in our ghettoes because we feel threatened and beleaguered and feel safer among ‘ourselves’.
The Daily Mail, 17 November 2015, published racist cartoons, showing us as dangerous rats swarming into western countries, when we should be facing a closed door. Perhaps subliminally we can only write in our own ‘ratty’ languages, for our fellow ‘rats’?
And that means, while we are vilified, we are also silenced. Our stories and insights into the human condition are shared only with each other. The host ‘natives’ continue to get their information about us from the mainstream media which is not interested in our struggles any more than it is interested in western complicity in the tragedy which has overtaken so many of our countries. Now in the current crisis the media attacks the easy target of ‘people traffickers’, but not the western politics which has created this huge movement of people.
And where are the Tolstoys who will write of today’s War and Peace? Still writing in their own mother tongue, which the world will not hear?
Perhaps he or she died on their journey of escaping and never reached the ultimate exile to tell the story. And what about those who are able to bring the shell of their bodies to the shore of exile? There are so many ‘foreigners’ in every country, but they don’t have a say. There are so many writers among them; yet they are not accepted in the host country as equal to a native writer. It seems the word ‘exiled’ means ‘condemned’.
The struggles to have a voice force writers to escape execution and imprisonment and they end up in exile. In exile they can shout as much as they like, but no one hears them, because we are sectioned and we cannot reach people. Writers in exile, it seems, experience a censorship that is of a much more subtle order than that of their native countries.
So, while the immigrants’ writers are held between the pain and safety of exile, they are also watched with suspicion. As if their writing in English might contradict the sameness of the white space. Or they might write about here and now, and that is not considered a subject for them to write about. So, despite the fact that it is usually the white bullet that we escape from, no matter if it is aimed at our heart by our government or by a white man through war, here it is not the white bullet that keeps us silent, but white racism through marginalization and dehumanization by mainstream media. It is in this order that we the exiled writers do not have a voice but in a different way from the way in which we had no voice where we were born.
Lack of integration policy and racism prevent immigrants and refugee writers from expressing themselves in English. However, it is not enough that here we can speak against our governments without facing persecution. We need to force our way into the society and try to have a voice in the world by writing in English about the injustice in every country. Only in writing in the world’s international language can we reach the world and tell it what we fought for and why we must die in exile. And this might help the future generation to have a better life, by turning our individual struggle into one great movement for justice in the world.
YOUSIF QASMIYEH
Translated by the author
Upon being faced with a real world, one can discover in himself the being of worry. […] Are there other nothingnesses than the nothingness of our being?
– Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie
The concept of ‘the nothingness of our being’ has become omnipresent in an era where responding to a disaster via writing or, to follow in Blanchot’s footsteps, ‘writing the disaster’, becomes the correlative of presence itself. The presence that is no longer measured through living but more precisely by how life itself, in the presence of all these beings who insist on moving to counter death, has become translucent, like a fleshless body. But whose body is it? It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that of the refugee. The body that conquers language, noise and, above all, borders to hear itself en route.
These fragments, written by moving in and out of Arabic and English, and at times, transposed and translated from Arabic into English, claim nothing other than the fragmentary body of the refugee, the corpus that is carrying its corpse and others.
If this is my face, so be it
Walking alongside his shadow, he suddenly realised that it was both of them who needed to cross the border.
They fortified their walls with cement and nails. They moved their women and children to a safe place and shouted: they are coming after our faces; they are coming after our crops!
Immemorial is the smell of refugees.
The body is but a wound.
Nancy, The Birth To Presence
The equivalence of a refugee would be his body.
Wake! He said to his body when they arrived. A bit of air was in the air.
The child has become water... It is to the side, a tad clear, a tad not, but when you look him in the eye you will see the meaning of water.
Whoever can sense the coming is a refugee. The refugee can neither come nor depart; he is the God of gestures.
We might also say: the face is a dead God.
Whoever claims asylum, whoever lends his hands to his strangers so they could bear out his presence and his things, is the one who has many deities and none.
The incorporeal is the body of the refugee.
Refugees and gods always compete for the same space.
What is intimate is the face and never the refugee.
The refugee is only intimate in his death and if there is only one death to ponder, it is that of the refugee.
If this is my face, so be it. For once, it is a stone’s throw away.
The immanent being is the refugee.
A being with cracked soles is Man.
They use their voice to ‘sacrifice their sacrifice’ (Derrida, The Animal That Therefor
e I Am).
The refugee is the superimposed being. Not only does he act as an alibi (to existence), he also creates existence. Without the refugee, existence is no longer existent.
Refugees, to kill time, count their dead.
Killing time is the correlative to killing themselves.
A no-place is what substantiates a deceased refugee.
A death with no place can never happen.
A refugee only returns to bear witness to his own return.
In the absence of time, arrival takes place.
Claiming asylum is the act of self-annihilation sensu stricto.
The Great Flight Page 8
