As the days went by, we grew more tired, and soon,
the journey was difficult for all of us, even the military.
And it was they who thought all of this up.
We had such a long distance to cover.
Some old people fell behind, and they wouldn’t let us go back to help them.
It was the saddest thing to see — my heart hurts so to remember that.
Two women were near the time of the births of their babies,
and they had a hard time keeping up with the rest.
Some army men pulled them behind a huge rock, and we screamed out loud
when we heard the gunshots. The women didn’t make a sound,
but we cried out loud for them and their babies.
I felt then that I would not live through everything.
When we crossed the Rio Grande, many people drowned.
We didn’t know how to swim — there was hardly any water deep enough
to swim in at home. Some babies, children, and some of the older men
and women were swept away by the river current.
We must not ever forget their screams and the last we saw of them —
hands, a leg, or strands of hair floating.
There were many who died on the way to Hwééldi.5 All the way
we told each other, “We will be strong, as long as we are together.”
I think that was what kept us alive. We believed in ourselves
and the old stories that the holy people had given us.
“This is why,” she would say to us. “This is why we are here.
Because our grandparents prayed and grieved for us.”
The car hums steadily, and my daughter is crying softly.
Tears stream down her face. She cannot speak. Then I tell her that
it was at Bosque Redondo the people learnt to use flour and now
fry bread is considered to be the “traditional” Navajo bread.
It was there that we acquired a deep appreciation for strong coffee.
The women began to make long, tiered calico skirts
and fine velvet shirts for the men. They decorated their dark velvet
blouses with silver dimes, nickels, and quarters.
They had no use for money then.
It is always something to see — silver flashing in the sun
against dark velvet and black, black hair.
4 Kit Carson’s Navajo name.
5 Navajo name for Fort Sumner.
ADNAN AL-SAYEGH
Iraq
Iraq disappears with
every step its exiles take
and contracts whenever
a window’s left half-shut
and trembles wherever
shadows cross its path.
Maybe some gun-muzzle
was eyeing me up an alley.
The Iraq that’s gone: half
its history was kohl and song
its other half evil, wrong.
Translated from Arabic by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo
RIBKA SIBHATU
In Lampedusa
On 3rd October
a barge carrying 518 people
arrived in Lampedusa
Having survived a brutal dictatorship
and a journey full of pitfalls
they stood atop their raft in the dead of night
and saw the lights of the promised land
Believing their suffering had reached an end,
they raised a chorus and praised the Virgin Mary.
While waiting for those ships to rescue them,
men and women, children and grown-ups,
the sick and the healthy began to sing hymns!
I wasn’t ashamed when I called out Your name,
I called out to Mary and didn’t fall
Your name sustained me throughout my journey
and here is the grateful echo of the song I raise to thank you!
Suddenly the raft
started filling with water;
they began flashing
red lights to sound the alarm;
switched their lanterns on and off!
Alas, all was quiet on the island.
Meanwhile the water rose, stoking fears the ship would sink.
To send a distress call,
they set a sail on fire, and as the
flames began to spread, some frightened people
jumped overboard and tipped the boat.
They were all adrift in the freezing sea!
Amidst that storm, some died right away,
some beat the odds and cheated death,
some who could swim tried to help
some drowned using their last breath
to send messages back to their native land,
some called out their names and countries of origin
before succumbing to their fate!
Among the floating corpses
Mebrahtom raised a desperate cry
Yohanna! Yohanna! Yohanna!
But Yohanna didn’t answer;
all alone, and in
an extreme act of love,
she brought her son into the world,
birthing him into the fish-filled sea:
yet nobody in Lampedusa
heard the seven ululations welcoming his birth!
Because after a superhuman struggle
Yohanna died alongside her son,
who never saw the light of day
and perished without even … drawing his first breath!
A baby died
drowned in the salty sea!
The baby was born and died
with its umbilical cord still unsevered!
A woman died while giving birth!
368 people died! 357 Eritreans died!
On 3rd October
3,000 feet from Rabbit Island,
in the heart of the Mediterranean,
a tragedy struck the Eritrean people,
only one of many they’ve endured.
Translated from Italian by André Naffis-Sahely
DYNASTIES, MERCENARIES AND NATIONS
AS THE WORLD GREW smaller, the possibility of soldiers and mercenaries finding themselves farther from home than they could have possibly imagined became an everyday reality. Among the many anecdotes assembled and published by Percy Sholto (1868–1920), brother of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, we find the story of Richard Grace (c.1612–91), an Irish Royalist who fought for the last three Stuart kings of England. When his first monarch, Charles I, lost his head, Grace was labelled a fugitive criminal by Cromwell’s Commonwealth, which may have contributed to Grace’s decision to serve under other governments in Continental Europe, first Spain’s, then France’s; yet whoever wished to gain Richard Grace’s loyalty had to consent to a chief condition, namely that he should be “permitted to go and serve” his own king, Charles II (1630–85), whenever required by the latter.
While kings, princes and petty potentates rose and fell across Europe, in 1795 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Europe’s largest nation, was dissolved and partitioned for the third and final time between Austria, Russia and Prussia, unleashing a wave of Polish emigration that would last for decades. Indeed, long before the famous Légion étrangère was founded, France sent the Polish Legion to Haiti. Assembled by Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) from captured Austrian regiments composed of conscripted Poles eager to turn on their new oppressors, the Polish Legion was sent by the French emperor to put down the rebellion in the sugarcane paradise of Saint-Domingue. Setting off from Italy, the Legion reached the island we now know as Haiti in January 1802, carrying with it thousands of men, among them Władysław Franciszek Jabłonowski (1769–1802), an officer of mixed Polish and African heritage. Nevertheless, surrounded by a British blockade, plagued by illnesses and starved of supplies, the Legion proved unable to hold back the tide against Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803). Missives from these Polish soldiers of misfort
une spell out the horrifying extent of their mission’s blunder: “I cannot forgive myself the naïvety and stupidity that drove me to seek my fortune in America.” As Józef Zador’s letter home to a friend confesses, “I do not wish such a fate on my worst enemy. It is better to beg for bread in Europe than to seek one’s fortune here, amidst a thousand diseases”. Those who didn’t die or flee back to France eventually switched sides and joined the rebels, becoming the ancestors of a community of Polish Haitians who claim direct descent from Napoleon’s soldiers.
Although it took only twenty years for Poland to be partitioned, it would require over 120 years to be put back together.6 As the translator Boris Dralyuk has noted, the result of those invasions was that “the story of modern Polish literature to a large extent” became “a story of exile”, and that while Poland died as a political entity, it survived in the works of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), who was born in what became Russian Lithuania in the year of the Third Partition and who died in Constantinople. A poem penned by Mickiewicz in either 1839 or 1840, but never published, shows him having grown listless to his surroundings after spending years wandering around Russia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France, nevertheless retaining a hold on the spiritual Poland in his heart:
I have a country, homeland of my thoughts,
where my heart has innumerable kin:
a land more fair than what I see before me,
a family more dear than anything.
The legacies of the American and French revolutions towards the close of the eighteenth century are difficult to overestimate. Not only did they inspire the nationalist revolutionaries of the nineteenth century and the ethnic self-determination movements among Germans, Italians and Poles, among many others, but they also provided the kindling for the idea-oriented Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the last of which sent over two million Russians into exile. While the new nation states triumphed, the old pluralistic empires collapsed, one by one.
Since the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Middle East’s near-continuous fragmentation has ensured its writers have endured violent retaliation owing to their work in a way perhaps almost entirely unknown in other parts of the world. Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was stabbed in the neck, the Palestinian writer Ghassan al-Kanafani (1936–72) was murdered by the Mossad, the Egyptian intellectual Nawal El Saadawi (1931–) has been imprisoned and has lived much of her life under police protection, Kateb Yacine (1929–89) was sent into internal exile, while the great Abdelrahman Munif (1933–2004) was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and banished to Syria.
At the age of seven, Mahmoud Darwish’s (1941–2008) native village of al-Birwa in the Galilee was razed to the ground, for ever shaping the man who would become the voice of Palestinians in exile and one of the world’s most famous poets. Although Darwish’s compatriot Edward Said (1935–2003) considered exile an “unhealable rift”, a loss that would permanently undermine all achievements in its wake, Darwish took a very different view, which he arguably elaborated best in his prose book, In The Presence of Absence, which he wrote only two years prior to his untimely death: “Exile is not journeying, it is not moving back and forth. Nor is it to dwell in longing. It may be a visit, or a waiting room — what time does to you, or a departure of the self for another, to know and be in harmony with, or for the self to return to its skin. Each exile has its character and every exile his characteristics. In exile you train yourself to contemplate and admire what is not yours.” Darwish’s poems would have a great effect on the young Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi (1942–), who founded the magazine Souffles in 1966, helping to launch a generation of writers such as Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Mustafa Nissaboury, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi, leaving an indelible mark on North African literature.
As Laâbi wrote in his editorial in the first issue of Souffles: “Poetry is the only means left to man to proclaim his dignity, to be more than just a number, so that his breath will remain forever imprinted and attested to by his cry.” In January 1972, Laâbi was arrested by the Moroccan security services of Hassan II’s brutal regime and savagely tortured. Student demonstrations ensued, which eventually forced the authorities to release him, but he was rearrested a month later, at which point he began serving an eight-and-a-half-year sentence at the infamous Kénitra penitentiary for distributing political pamphlets. During his stay in Kénitra as prisoner number 18611, Laâbi penned a long poem entitled “Lettre à mes amis d’outre-mer”, or “Letter to My Friends Overseas”, to whom he says:
you’ve become
one of those beacons of light
who help to defend me
from the forceps of the night
You find your way to me
through the mercy of the poem
and I’ll see you again
beyond the barbed wire of exile.
This poem was first published in La Nouvelle Critique in August 1978, after being smuggled out of prison piecemeal to friends of Laâbi’s in France and later reassembled. A truncated and transliterated English version appeared in Index on Censorship in 1980, in order to bring attention to Laâbi’s worsening medical condition, by which time he had served seven years of his sentence. Laâbi was unexpectedly released shortly afterwards, largely thanks to the behind-the-scenes efforts of various international committees and Danielle Mitterrand, at the time the wife of the French President François Mitterrand.
6 This occurred after World War I.
PERCY SHOLTO
An Irish Colonel
An Irish colonel, of the name of Richard Grace, after serving Charles I till the surrender of Oxford, withdrew to Ireland, where he continued to maintain the cause of Charles II as long as any part of that island held out for him. When the royal cause became hopeless, Grace had still influence enough with the predominant party to obtain permission to carry along with him into the Spanish service, a regiment of his own countrymen, consisting of twelve hundred men. The colonel procured a very honourable and favourable engagement for himself and his men, from the Spanish government; but as soon as they arrived in Spain, the Spaniards forgot all their promises, and used them so ill, that before they reached Catalonia, they were reduced to one half of their original number. Notwithstanding this cruel treatment, Grace and his Irish followers served in the Spanish army with great reputation, till the end of the campaign of 1656; when they were left to garrison a castle on the frontiers, of considerable importance. Colonel Grace reflecting here on the ill usage which he had received, and was still likely to receive; and learning, at the same time, how differently several Irish regiments in the French service were treated, he felt strongly tempted to go and join them; but though the Spaniards had broken their engagements with him, he had too much regard to his own character, to quit them in any other but the fairest and most honourable manner. He sent a message to Marshal D’Hocquincourt, who, at that time, commanded the French army in Catalonia, to let him know, that on a certain day named, he would march off with his regiment, and join him on these conditions; that his regiment should be upon the same footing with the Irish regiments then in the French service; and that they should be permitted to go and serve their own king, whenever his affairs required their service. These conditions were readily assented to by the French Marshal, who added the most tempting offers to Colonel Grace, to induce him to deliver up the castle at the same time. Grace, however, would not on any account consent to such a breach of faith; and would only allow the marshal to have a party of horse in waiting near the castle, to cover his retreat. When the day appointed for the evacuation arrived, Colonel Grace sent to the commander of the nearest Spanish garrison, and gave him notice of his intention, in order that he might instantly despatch some of his men, to take possession of the castle as he marched out of it, warning him, at the same time, not to send more than two hundred, for in case he gave him any reason to suspect that he intended to betray him, he would give up the castle to the French. The Spaniards did not
offer to infringe this condition; and as soon as their detachment of two hundred approached the place, Grace permitted them to enter at one gate, while he marched out at the other, and went off to the French, who were waiting for him.
POLISH LEGION IN HAITI
Letters Home
“General! The First Consul has rewarded the brave Polish Legions that have shed so much blood for France… by sending them to Saint-Domingue; but here too, fighting a savage, barbarous nation, the Poles have demonstrated to ungrateful France that they fulfill their duties. We are surrounded by 3,000 Negroes. Unable to hold them off and not wanting to fall into the hands of savages who are fighting for their independence, I take my life.”
From a letter sent by Battalion Chief Jasinski to General Philibert Fressinet, 1803.
“This is likely my last letter. Only 300 men from the Third Brigade remain […] The others are dead, among them your brother, whose destiny was to die a few months after arriving. I cannot forgive myself the naïvety and stupidity that drove me to seek my fortune in America. I do not wish such a fate on my worst enemy. It is better to beg for bread in Europe than to seek one’s fortune here, amidst a thousand diseases […] and the blacks, who commit the greatest atrocities against their prisoners. Night and day, I dream of returning to Europe […] I am begging you, for God’s sake, do not let [my brother] Teodor follow me, because both of us will end our lives here.”
From a letter sent by Józef Zador to a friend at home, 1803.
Translated from Polish by Boris Dralyuk
MADAME DE STAËL
from Ten Years’ Exile
The Heart of a Stranger Page 10
