stands for shipload after shipload that docked,
unloaded, watered, scrubbed, exercised and restocked
thousands more souls for sale in Bristol’s port.
Cab-drivers speak of it all with yesterday’s hurt.
The good conservationist calls it her 300-year war;
those raids, deals, deceits and capture (a sore still raw).
St Paul’s, Toxteth, Brixton, Tiger Bay and Handsworth:
petrol bombs flower in the middle of roads, a sudden growth
at the feet of police lines longer than any cricket pitch.
African slave, your namelessness is the wick and petrol mix.
Each generation catches the one fever love can’t appease,
nor molotov cocktails, nor when they embrace in a peace
far from that three-named, two-bit vandal and conservationist
binning beer cans, condoms and headstones in big puzzle-pieces.
II.
Stop there black Englishman before you tell a bigger lie.
You mean me well by what you say but I can’t stand idly by.
The vandal who keeps coming and does what he calls fucks
on the cool gravestones also pillages and wrecks.
If he knew not so much my name but what happened to Africans,
he’d maybe put in an hour or two collecting his Heinekens;
like the good old conservationist, who’s earned her column
inch, who you knock, who I love without knowing her name.
The dead can’t write, nor can we sing (nor can most living).
Our ears (if you can call them ears) make no good listening.
Say what happened to me and countless like me, all anon.
Say it urgently. Mean times may bring back the water cannon.
I died young, but to age as a slave would have been worse.
What can you call me? Mohammed. Homer. Hannibal. Jesus.
Would it be too much to have them all? What are couples up to
when one reclines on the stones and is ridden by the other?
Will our talk excite the vandal? He woz ere, like you are now,
armed with a knife. I could see trouble on his creased brow,
love trouble, not for some girl but for this village.
I share his love and would have let him spoil my image,
if it wasn’t for his blade in the shadow of the church wall
taking me back to my capture and long sail to Bristol,
then my sale on Black Boy’s Hill and disease ending my days:
I sent a rumble up to his sole; he scooted, shocked and dazed.
Here the sentence is the wait and the weight is the sentence.
I’ve had enough of a parish where the congregation can’t sing.
Take me where the hymns sound like a fountain-washed canary,
and the beer-swilling, condom-wielding vandal of Henbury
reclines on the stones and the conservationist mounts him,
and in my crumbly ears there’s only the sound of them sinning.
FARHAD PIRBAL
Waste
I was born in Hewlêr, I got to know Lenin in Baghdad, I began feeling my statelessness in Tehran, my Kurdishness in Damascus, I opened my eyes in Spáňov, I got my passport in Aalborg, in Copenhagen, I faced thoughts of suicide, in Stockholm, for the first time, I slept with a European woman, in Paris, I got my first foreign diploma, in Kraków, my ears were purified by the music of Chopin, in Santiago, with love, in Düsseldorf, with hatred…
Now I want, like the Austrian-Jewish businessmen of World War II, to go work for a while in Canada and then marry a Brazilian woman, then come back to Europe and publish a book in London, finally I will go to Amsterdam to kill myself: my corpse, like a rotting sack of potatoes, tossed into a dumpster, known to no one.
Translated from Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse
IMAN MERSAL
The Idea of Houses
I sold my earrings at the gold store to buy a silver ring in the market. I swapped that for old ink and a black notebook. This was before I forgot my pages on the seat of a train that was supposed to take me home. Whenever I arrived in a city, I felt my home was in a different one.
Olga says, without my having told her any of this, “Your home is never really home until you sell it. Then you discover all the things you could do with the garden and the big rooms — as if seeing it through the eyes of a broker. You’ve stored your nightmares in the attic and now you have to pack them in a suitcase or two at best.” Olga goes silent then smiles suddenly, like a queen among her subjects, there in the kitchen between her coffee machine and a window with a view of flowers.
Olga’s husband wasn’t there to witness this regal episode. Maybe this is why he still thinks the house will be a loyal friend when he goes blind — a house whose foundations will hold him steady and whose stairs, out of mercy, will protect him from falls in the dark.
I’m looking for a key that always gets lost at the bottom of my handbag, where neither Olga nor her husband can see me, drilling myself in reality until I give up on the idea of houses.
Every time you go back home with the dirt of the world under your nails, you stuff everything you were able to carry with you into its closets. But you refuse to define home as the future of junk — a place where dead things were once confused with hope. Let home be that place where you never notice the bad lighting, let it be a wall whose cracks keep growing until one day you take them for doors.
Translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell
SHOLEH WOLPÉ
The World Grows Blackthorn Walls
Tall, stiff and spiny.
Try to make it to the other side
and risk savage thorns.
We who left home in our teens,
children who crossed boundaries and were torn
by its thousand serrated tongues,
who have we become?
We who bear scars that bloom and bloom
beneath healed skins,
where are we going?
I ask myself
is home my ghost?
Does it wear my underwear
folded neatly in the antique chest
of drawers I bought twenty years ago?
Or nest inside my blouse that hangs
from a metal hanger I’ve been meaning to discard?
Is it lost between the lines of books
shelved alphabetically in a language
I was not born to? Or here on the lip
of this chipped cup left behind
by a lover long gone?
Why do they call us alien,
as if we come from other planets?
I carry seeds in my mouth, plant
turmeric, cardamom, and tiny
aromatic cucumbers in this garden,
water them with rain I wring
from my grandmother’s songs.
They will grow, I know, against
these blackthorn walls. They are magic.
They can push through anything,
uncut.
I left home at thirteen.
I hadn’t lived enough to know how
not to love.
Home was the Caspian Sea, the busy bazaars,
the aroma of kebab and rice, Friday
lunches, picnics by mountain streams.
I never meant to stay away.
But they said come back
and you will die.
Exile is a suitcase full of meanings. I fill up
a hundred notebooks with scribbles.
And when I am done I throw them into fire
and begin to write again; this time
tattooing the words on my forehead.
This time, writing only not to forget.
Complacency is communicable
like the common cold.
I swim upstream to lay my purple eggs.
Spirits urge and spirits go,
but I write postcard
s only to the future.
What is a transplanted tree
but a time being
who has adapted to adoption?
They say draw sustenance from this land,
but look how my fruits hang in spirals
and smell of old notebooks and lace.
Perhaps it’s only in exile that spirits arrive.
They weep and wail at the door of the temple
where I sit at the edge of an abyss.
But even this is an illusion.
KAVEH BASSIRI
99 Names of Exile
Adam & Eve
Afflicted
Afraid
Alien
Banished
Beggar
Castaway
Colonist
Condemned
Crippled
Dangerous
Dark
Deportee
Deserter
Detested
Different
Dirty
Disgraced
Disinherited
Dismissed
Disowned
Displaced
Dispossessed
Dyke
Emigrant
Ethnic
Evil
Exotic
Expatriated
Expelled
Extraterrestrial
Foreign
Forsaken
Fugitive
Guilty
Heretic
Homeless
Homesick
Impure
Infectious
Inhuman
Insurgent
Invisible
Ishmael
Jew
Kashmiri
Lost
Malefactor
Marooned
Mysterious
Nigger
Non-citizen
Non-conformist
Other
Outcast
Outlaw
Outsider
Overseas
Pariah
Queer
Refugee
Resident Alien
Runaway
Scapegoat
Squatter
Stateless
Stranger
Street Arab
Terrorist
Traitor
Trespasser
Unclean
Uncorrectable
Undesirable
Undomesticated
Unfit
Unfortunate
Unidentified
Uninvited
Unknown
Unnamed
Unrecognized
Unskilled
Unspeakable
Unthinkable
Untouchable
Unusual
Unwanted
Unwilling
Unworthy
Victim
Villain
Virus
Wanderer
Witch
Wrong
X
Yellow
Zero
FADY JOUDAH
He came, the humanitarian man
He came, the humanitarian man, and
In the solitude of giving, he befriended
A stray dog as mirror.
Every day after the long arduous hours
Of the humane, he would come home
To be consoled: the dog
Waiting inside the door,
Wagging and panting, in a rave.
He named him
Nothing foreign to the population
So as not to offend anyone.
He trained him
To sit on the cheap sofa
One finds in places of conscious exile.
And the dog got to know the front seat of the car,
His tongue licking the air, hair
Blowing, children cheering barefoot.
Then it was time
To make the dog part of his family
Of dogs back home, but the cruel
Government of the wretched refused:
There was no identity card.
And no mirror inside the mirror
Could console the dog, slumped by the door
In hunger strike until it died.
He came, the humanitarian man,
He came and loved, then he went.
JEE LEONG KOH
To a Young Poet
Quit the country soon as you can
before you’re set on a career path or marrying
the home ownership scheme.
Pay no heed to the village elders.
They are secretly ashamed that they did not leave.
Quit the country but do not
shake the dust off your feet against it.
Leave instead with a secret smile
for all that leaving has to teach you.
Learn what it is to be welcomed
for the coin in your purse, for strong hips
in pushing a cart uphill, a firm voice in a good cause.
When the welcome wears off, as it will,
learn to leave again, this time by the sea.
Be always on your way, and on arrival
sleep with anyone who asks. You never know
what gift they may have for you in the morning.
You will discover, suddenly or over the course of a winter night,
what gift you have for them.
Always kiss goodbye on the lips.
There will be seasons of great loneliness.
You cannot outrun it, so sit and survey
the thunderless desert.
In every town, pick up the local accent
and blend it into yours, already impure,
as a secret ingredient is fused into the top note of a perfume.
Hearing you, the taberna will wonder where you are from.
Drink deep of their wonderment. Do not betray it.
JENNY XIE
Rootless
Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.
I mean, no three —
See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet
over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.
Hours ago, I crossed a motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat,
the size of a date pit from a distance.
Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?
No matter. The mind resides both inside and out.
It can think itself and think itself into existence.
I sponge off the eyes, no worse for wear.
My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns.
At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.
Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.
EDITOR’S AFTERWORD
Exile begins with loss, when one is torn from one’s roots and prevented from returning, either temporarily or permanently. For some this can represent new beginnings, while for others it is an insurmountable calamity, or, as Edward Said called it, the “unhealable rift”. Regardless, once one finds oneself, as Joseph Conrad once put it, in some “obscure corner of the earth”, one must either busy oneself with returning home, like Ulysses did, or grow reconciled with one’s lot, like the Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein, who finds comfort in “feeling foreign” wherever he goes. To speak of exile, however, is inevitably to speak of human history, and my aim with this anthology, quite simply, was to produce a miniature history of humanity as seen through the prism of exile. As such, The Heart of a Stranger is to be read as a series of meditations which, while acknowledging the narratives of time and nation, is otherwise focused on showcasing a wide spectrum of exilic experiences through verse, fiction, letters and memoirs.
Over the course of the past three years, I have sought to assemble a modest picture of what it means to be an exile and the emotions that it engenders, while simultaneously attempting to po
rtray the myriad situations that might lead one to becoming an exile in the first place. Thus, while the initial sections, “Origins and Myths” and “Dark Ages and Renaissances”, follow a conventionally linear approach to history, taking the reader from Egypt to Israel, Greece, Rome, China, Muslim Sicily, the Byzantine Empire and Renaissance Italy, the authors selected to represent these cultures and epochs do not necessarily belong to the time in question, as is made evident by my selection of Naguib Mahfouz’s adaptation of the ancient Egyptian myth of Sinuhe as the opening contribution. The following four sections of this anthology, “Expulsions, Explorations and Migrations”, “Dynasties, Mercenaries and Nations”, “Revolutions, Counter-Revolutions and Persecutions” and “Cosmopolitanism and Rootlessness”, have instead been arranged chronologically by the date of their authors’ births, while taking a more sharply thematic direction than the preceding two sections.
While the mechanisms of how exile occurs can be relatively simple and straightforward — brutality and unlawful extirpation being the primary tools in most cases — what happens after one is deracinated is often left to fate and the causality of context. Therefore, I have sought to portray as vast an array of “exilic” situations as possible. Although the Ovidian conception of exile has taught us to see the “Exile” as a whiny, withered husk forever longing for the branch it was unhappily torn from, I wanted this anthology to showcase an alternative genealogy of misfits, rebels, heretics, contrarians, activists and revolutionaries, particularly in the later sections of the book. Exile, this anthology argues, can be defiant, like Emma Goldman aboard the USS Buford, or Leon Trotsky’s stirring “Letter to the Workers of the USSR”, written months before Stalin’s pickaxe found him in Mexico City; it can be horrifying, as the Polish legionnaires learnt while fighting to oppress a people they knew nothing about in Haiti; it can be depressing, like Giacomo Leopardi’s poem on Italy’s sorry state following the tumults of the Napoleonic Wars; it can speak of heroism, like the sacrifices made by poets such as Yannis Ritsos and Abdellatif Laâbi, all of whom spent long years in prison for their peaceful activism, or for their “crimes of opinion”; some exiles even end in triumph, the way the revolutionaries of 1905 returned to rule in 1917 — a political sea-change crystallized in the image of Lenin arriving at Finland Station.
The Heart of a Stranger Page 23
