anmly_mpusod – Page 33

Ella Bartlett translates Rim Battal

Venus

Dada
Here, here
Whoopee
Nanny

Boobies.
She had the biggest boobies in the world, the longest hair in town and an enormous beauty spot under her left eye.
Almost a third eye and even then, she was nearsighted.

We called her Dada I don’t know why
Well, yes
Yes, of course: because her face
went blah
blah, no esthetics.

One day me and my sister put makeup on her—
Mama’s expensive makeup. Mama was furious.
Commoners don’t have the right to Dior.

I really liked my Dada with big boobies
With her, I watched porn for the first time
We drank Cola, we laughed, we went Oh!

In reality her name was Zohra,
Just like the planet
Venus
My Dada with big boobies
Who is no longer here, here
No, no.

Untitled

I roll kefta balls between my palms. I roll a dead animal between my palms. I role the inside of a dead animal between my hands. I roll the death of an animal between my hands.

I roll death. I roll the interior of a dead animal with the exterior of a live animal.

a) With this death, I will feed my child. I feed death to my child, who transforms it into life, grows through eating death. Children are machines for transforming death into life. For transforming life into death into death into life. Who wins from life or death—

Win what, is it about winning—

b) The odor of this meat is strong. I wonder if I smell the same inside. The deepest I’ve been inside myself is the length of my middle finger. Into my mouth and into my pussy.

Mistaken is the one who says we only have one life (and I’m not talking about reincarnation).

Translator’s Note:

Rim Battal is a French-Moroccan poet I accidentally stumbled across in a collection of essays entitled Lettres aux jeunes poétesses, a spin-off of Letters to a Yong Poet but addressed to women and non-binary aspiring writers. Her letter was unashamedly brave, full of music and raw emotion. I knew right away that her poetry, and her approach to practice, could potentially teach me many things about form and music.

In these two poems, one on childhood and the other on motherhood, we are invited into a world where small details are the most intimate, and violence is simultaneously present and hidden. When I embarked upon translating them, I realized how many risks she takes within strict French poetry conventions. She challenges the most well-known forms of French verse, employing more casual rhyme schemes and wordplay than the revered 12-syllable alexadrines used by Rimbaud or Baudelaire. This gave me the liberty to pay more attention to the weight of the words and the line breaks instead of the rhythm, as Battal’s poetry approaches prose-poetry in its music.

I also found a certain crudeness in her poetry that gave me the space, in my translation, to use words like “blah,” “boobies,” or “pussy,” to think less about the poem as a sacred form of pure language and more as a means to explore human experience and all its macabre, gritty, natural aspects. Especially in untitled, I removed many articles after finding the directness a sharper way of communicating this quality of her poetry in English.

The speakers in Battal’s poems address the body, womanhood, and motherhood in a way that hides nothing and that made me feel less alone as someone raised as a woman. From putting makeup on the babysitter like a doll, to reflecting about how to keep children alive we must feed them death, the poems speak honestly about female empowerment and struggles. They exhibit an unstoppable pride in their contradictions.

I challenged myself to step beyond what I consider as traditional English poetics in translating her work. I stopped trying to be “pretty,” I followed the childishness of the sounds of the words and embraced the sometimes clumsy line breaks. In doing so, I hope to help readers discover Rim Battal’s potential to inspire us all, young poets and beyond.

Rim Battal, born 1987, is a Moroccan artist and poet who lives between Paris and Marrakech. Her most recent poetry collection, Les quatrains de l’all inclusive, was published by Le Castor Astral in 2020. Other collections include Vingt pòemes et des poussières (LansKine, 2015) and L’eau du bain (Supernova, 2019). Her photography has been shown internationally, including individual shows at the Galerie Verdeau in Paris and the Voice Gallery in Marrakech in 2019. Photo by Dorothee Sarah.

Ella Bartlett (they/them) is an Iowan-born, New York-educated, Paris-based writer and translator. The recipient of the Gigantic Sequins Poetry Award of 2021, judged by Arisa White, Ella’s work has been published, among others, in Jet Fuel Review, decomP Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Rust + Moth. Their debut translation, a collection of poetry by opera singer Elodie Kimmel, was published in May 2022. For more, follow @EllatheRewriter. Photo by Lea Volta Photographie.

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Grant Schutzman translates Hirondina Joshua

Portraits

to my mother

I was born before this time… Before myself.
Look at how my words twirl around and around in you. How I steal them
from you.
Mother… Can you see through the magic behind this?
How it all leaps and beats dripping in silence the blood of this
motor the life vein of a heart that is perhaps impossible to find.
Yes you know that sometimes I don’t have eyes for certain
things, I am uncertain, I create myself from eagles and transcend my body
in their eyes, all because the few times that I have transformed
I find myself more and more in you.
And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
Not what you can see, nor what you cannot.
Look… see how similar we both are and different, too.
See how deeply we stare into each other’s hearts as
we carry them like packages weighing us down even as
they cure the links between the eternal world we hold inside.
Mom, is it true one day we’ll leave ourselves?

RETRATOS

à minha mãe

Nasci antes deste tempo…Antes de mim.
Olha como esta minha grafia circunda e circula em ti…Como te a
roubo.
Mãe…Vê em magia como isto se sucede?
Como isto pula e pulsa gotejando em silêncio o sangue deste
motor a veia da vida de um coração talvez impossível de descobrir.
E tu sabes que eu às vezes olhos não tenho para alcançar certas
coisas, coisas certas e invento-me em águias transcendo-me
em seus olhos, tudo porque nessas poucas vezes em que me transfiguro
descubro-me mais em ti.
E não me importa nada. Nada me importa.
Nem o que se vê e nem o que se não pode ver.
Olha… vê como parecidas somos e diferentes também.
Olha como a fundo nos olhamos nestes corações alheios que
carregamos como trouxas e que nos pesam mas no mesmo
instante nos curam das eternas mundanas que temos dentro.
Mãe, será que algum dia iremos partir de nós?

Translator’s Note:

As in much of her poetry, genre-defying author Hirondina Joshua uses “Portraits” to examine origins, in this case, of both self and the language used to express it. The narrator, addressing their mother, finds the source of all things in reflections, that is, reflected back at them by others. The narrator is formed in the eyes of eagles that they have themselves created. They claim to exist before birth, within the mother who will come to produce and shape them. The other’s heart, even as it may weigh us down, is as much a part of us as the “world[s]” we hold inside. In the poem-world of “Portraits,” the boundary between creation and being is blurred.

Words, too, bounce back and forth between interlocutors. Much like the narrator, language itself depends on duality. There is no language without speaker and listener, without someone to produce the code and another to understand it. The narrator claims to steal a sort of language from their mother, finding that their idiolect draws more and more from hers. They are linked by their common language, and the poem’s very medium, and thus, the poem itself, becomes caught up in this self-referential cycle of dependent existence. In the world Joshua interpolates, in which mother and child are inseparably entwined, individual identity is put under interrogation, namely, what is me and nobody else?

Hirondina Joshua was born in Maputo, Mozambique in 1987. She is the author of several books of poetry and writing, including Os Ângulos da Casa (2016), with a preface by author Mia Couto, Como um Levita à Sombra dos Altares (2021), and Córtex (2021). She has appeared in a variety of anthologies of Lusophone poetry and appeared in literary festivals in Macau, Portugal, and Spain.

Grant Schutzman is a poet and translator. He is fascinated by multilingual writing and that which has been deemed the untranslatable. He received a commendation from the 2022 Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and his poetry and translations appear or are forthcoming in Rust + Moth, The Shore, The Inflectionist Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, and Bennington Review.

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Daniel Obasi

Excerpt from “Corridors of Power”

Daniel Obasi is a multifaceted artist. Attracted to old cinema and Afro-Futurism, this Nigerian born Artist is deeply concerned with advancing the scope of African narratives. Consistently working and drawing inspiration from his city Lagos, Nigeria, Daniel is famous for exploring subject matters like sexuality, masculinity, beauty, cultural symbolism, Afrocentric fantasy and human relations. Daniel Obasi’s works birth a certain idealism to Afrocentric concepts; whimsical, soft yet powerfully contrasting with sharp silhouettes, colors and stories. Today, Daniel Obasi is based between Lagos and Paris working internationally as a photographer and director.

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Dandelion Eghosa

Excerpts from the series “Is this a Woman?”

Wearing My Love II

Is This Sex, Is This Poetry?

Dandelion Eghosa is a 28 year old non-binary and queer visual artist whose work explores home, the identities of Afro-lgbtq+ people and human expressions in everyday life. By presenting the personal stories of their community through diverse visual mediums and storytelling, their work offers a fresh interpretation of queer imagery. In the last two years their practice has focused on researching the role of performance in African queer archival practices. They have a passion for experimenting with mediums that encourage the development of the human thought, beliefs, and feelings.

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I.S. Jones

Weather for Two

To love is to undress our names
—Octavio Paz

Lover, tonight I baptize you with my mouth.
Trace the velvet & sandpaper of your skin

with my lips. Dip into the honeyed bouquet
of you. Fill myself with your every flavor.

Touch you until your sins & your ghosts
have nowhere left to haunt. Tonight,

let me relearn your wounds. Put on
soft music. Light candles. All your hauntings

know how to undress your sadness. But
when I undress you, I fill myself

with a bountiful harvest. Here, we make
our own Wet Season.

I too know the wild ache of want. I stand
in awe of such a blessing. Knowing fire

comes from the root stem of ‘yes’
‘again’ ‘please’ ‘more,’ my thighs

these hands, are sugar to salvation.
I am greedy heaven, hungry

to make you a shivering night. Sing:
god of gripped sheets, of the curious tongue.

How you learn to twist & pull,
loosen & partition me.

How I have taught your hands to build me
into a nation of hungry mouths,

to make me speak in tongues
until I am a pool of myself.

To be possessed by the wet gallop
of flesh thrumming your labor.

Even after we come apart,
there’s a way in which you open

me & I stay that way.

Originally published in Spells of My Name

How to Spell Infinity

The sun—red and singular with longing. Outside, cold once gathered the dream of snow.
Now it’s spring. Who I once was is gone, one self out of another. Season into season.
The fields return to green. Let me be brave like the wildflowers who challenge
the completion of death. Your human problems are irrelevant to me, says the wildflower,
My job is to populate the fields with beauty. To die back to the earth then return. It’s true:
I survived my father and now I am endless—the bullet sung back into the barrel,
the arrow unsung, the brute hand at last out of reach. In this land, there was no sleep,
just longing with my eyes closed. Now, I can kneel my body back to the soil.
I’m opening the blinds. I’m setting the table, taking out the good silverware.
I’m preparing a great banquet to celebrate with everyone I love. It was no one’s birthday
yet we sing anyways. Pass me the rice and stew; I haven’t eaten this good in so long.
I’ve come to understand a person’s wounds by the joy they resist. I say of my selves:
I was whole before my father made me. The peace that comes not from his absence but
despite his echo through the forest. Light filling my cup. As if by miracle there are new days ahead
and I am on my way to be kissed by them. Field of Tenderness, open.
The world made gentle beneath my hooves. I am made infinite by love
and such love makes my hair grow long. A sweetness only the body could make.
When I was a child, I planted heads in the garden in hopes of growing better fathers.
I mixed up percussion and concussive, but both are music. I say of myself: I am worthy
of every gallop towards salvation. I toast with my selves, and sunlight goes down glowing.
Believing his harm spellbound my legs, I ran and ran until the earth fathers me a song.
I look up and can hear it. I didn’t know the hummingbirds knew my name.

Originally published in Spells of My Name

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and essayist. She has received support in the form of fellowships, retreats, and residencies from Hedgebrook, Callaloo and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. For the last three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets. Her chapbook Spells of Name was selected by Newfound for their Emerging Poets Series. She is at work on her debut full-length collection of poems.

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Pelumi Adejumo

My Lover Has No Face

_ _ _ ~ –
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_ _ _ ~ – – -_
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_ _ -~ ~ -~ —
– – – -~ ~ ~

– – – – – – – – -_
– – – – – ~~

– ~ ~~ —
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~~~ – _ _
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Deze tekst kwam tot stand in het kader van een residentieproject van het Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren (www.deburen.eu) in samenwerking met de stichting Biermans-Lapôtre.

what’s up?

mom carries multiple faces in her bag
each church activity knows a different one
dad lost the remote control somewhere
between five languages and his mind
like the pursuit of happyness
but with less action
of a well-meaning parent
it is well repeating itself
from a dried-up hollowed calabash
sampling the title song of our lives
renunciation becomes
a habit when with every new haircut
colleague’s introduce themselves
reparations for 17EU per head
malaysian kinky curly
aliexpress sells 6 bundles
for only 30EU in total
charlotte adigéry rocks I know I shouldn’t do it but
do it     but
do it     but
do it     but
do it     but
do it     but
              friends
with hushed breasts slide
clippers through my TWA while
what’s up? blasts, hair falls, hearts frail
on my wooden floor
our voices are getting raspy
and we drink red wine but I don’t like red wine
which reminds me of my mom
bumping against a train chair on our way back
spilling grape juice
yelling ẹ̀jẹ̀ẹ Jésù!
while I walk through the door
my sister says it’s giving
on a spiritual journey
I’m not as usual as usual
a man working
for the tax authorities, therefore
cannot give me his
phone number, therefore
asks mine
to go out for a drink sometime

not today

one of those friends howls
like a wolf when his strap-on won’t
and calls his mom
I don’t tell him it’s anonymous
men after complimenting ask
if they could come on my face
all this was way easier as a pre-adolescent
I just had to open
and shut my mouth
charlotte adigéry sings but sometimes
I’m judy, penelope (no home, no phone, no car, no bed)
or sandy on a sunday (no home)
way back when
on stardoll I got advised to go a few tints lighter
if I wanted to gain more friends
well at least this is my true face
when I write it’s not to leave
a footprint, nor for the next generation
they’d laugh at me, is2g
wherever after

I pass by the attenuation well

and a shiver
   a breath
      a spirit
runs through
my spine
and arrives
at the tip
of my tongue

as though my body
remembered

this is how I learned
to speak

to get on the kano
the frog in the pit
of my stomach
commands me
but I get seasick

I feel him bob
as I do on my way
to the land
of no beginnings
of no return

where does meaning root
my frog asks
in language
in sound
in movement
in the rhythm between

all oceans have a connection
but mine
sank

Pelumi Adejumo is a runaway pastor child, writer, (vocal) artist and lucid dreamer living in the Netherlands. Writing on/with migratory grief, African/Black Pentecostal music and alienation. She uses glossolalia, unintelligibility and linguistic plurality to open up disruptive and rhythmical possibilities. She wrote soms ik voel mij zombie, a text exploring multilingualism in grammar. She has a BA in Creative Writing and is enrolled for an MA in Fine Arts. Her thesis explores the relationship between Yoruba praise poetry and the concept of àṣẹ; how these influence the understanding of language and the role of a poet in creating and archiving cultural identity.

She has written essays on visual art, language and artist books for Mister Motley and Metropolis M. She has written for nY, de Gids, het Nationale Theater, deBuren, Nationale Opera & Ballet, Sonsbeek Biennale 20-24, Tent, and performed at festivals such as Into The Great Wide Open, Transpoesie and Read My World. She lectured and speaks to students on poetry, identity and transdisciplinary methodologies at LUCA school of arts, ArtEZ, Rietveld and Sandberg. This year she joined the programming team of international literature festival Read My World in Amsterdam. Her most recent publication was a letter exchange in response to the Dutch translation of Sick Woman Theory for publishing house Chaos x Das Mag. And the album Public Relations with a collective of musicians and writers.

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Taiwo Hassan

Salat

somewhere in the mind is a mosque.

the adhan is called, believers fall, on all fours

& kettles are scattered, water runs from them into drains,

carrying the sins of a hundred and one men.

a boy rushes in, reaches to scoop this bleach

of an element. he’s scared, his faith’s pendulum

effect turning him, too, into a circle. can i ever be

purged? he asks. another question seeps in after the second

face wipe & he washes thoroughly on the third. iqaamah

is made, his hands are at his feet, his heart, too. steadily,

he proceeds to join a string, connected toe to toe, on the ruku.

alhamdulillah, he whispers, there’s still a chance after all.

in the sitting between sujud, he wonders, thinking

about that incident, carefully shredding the thought,

like a smoked fish being deboned. he’s almost at this

skin, when a takbir turns electric, jolting in him the unexplainable.

how could I be thinking about that? just how?

wa a’la ali ibraheem innaka hameedun majeed, a ritual completed.

he looks inward again. will this pass? will I move through this?

questions still swim. staring in the eyes of a stranger, he sees

the same despair in a different shade. a salam & a smile, he’s given.

he searches for words, for bones, for strength to return this gift.

wa alaikum salam warahmatullah wabarakatuh, he finally offers. for some

reason, a chip falls off his qualms, he feels it. well, seems asr

washed this off a bit, i better make sure to pay maghrib his visit, too,

he concludes. perhaps chances still live after all.

Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A 2x Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He’s also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His debut chapbook, Birds Don’t Fly For Pleasure is published by River Glass Books.

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Zach Tanimola

The Rhetoric of Persecution: An Essay with Quotes from John 16:2

Quoting Paul, this pastor
says he doesn’t mind
being cancelled

for declaring people
like me an abomination.
He’s ready to die,

be persecuted for this:
his right to keep me a secret,
locked up, or, if merciful,

have me corrected via therapy.
There are about two
billion
Christians in the world.

Some queer, afraid, Nigerian.
The handful of us, prey. Tell me
how
a boy kissing another boy

is persecution.

They will put you out, Jesus
said,
his eyes on mine as he spoke

in Gethsemane. O Christ,
your children have made a mess
of Love, killing in your name,

tyres around necks,

bodies aflame.
They have built Hell

in your honour, made
the gospel a horror.

Zeal, when sharper than

God, will lead to lynchings.

…in fact, the time is coming
when anyone who kills you

will think they are offering
a service to God.

I kiss you, my boy,

in the name of the Lord,

my boy, I kiss you.

Prayer for Queer Abandoned

Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me. Teach me your way,
LORD; lead me along a safe path because of my oppressors. (Psalm 27:10-11)

God will direct you into laughter.
She loves you.

Resist the Nigerian suggestion
of
a Divine Apartheid. God is not

a man.
Not a pastor, priest, bishop, deacon.
She loves you, will tend to your wounds.

God will direct you
into laughter.
She will direct you.

God will direct you into freedom.

Zach Tanimola is a queer poet and teacher from Nigeria. When not reading, he is birdwatching.

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Vina Nweke

what they call indigenous

i am from everywhere i been

your borders don’t mean nothing to me
but they mean everything to you

the composition of your blood does matter,
is it hot or is it cold?

i am from every land i been as i am from
every soil i touch,

your borders don’t mean shit to me

Vina Nweke is a writer and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Their work is centered on interrogating materiality and troubling those sticky boundaries of being. They are currently working on their BA in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Africana Studies from Williams College. They are a member of the hotbed collective and their work has been previously published in The Republic and Bunker Projects.

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Egbiameje Omole

Loving the World, that it Loves me back

in those days of despair
that every word was a prayer,
and understanding
the gravity of that promise,
i promised it. i said:
i love you, i am here for you.

i prayed:
i love you, i am here for you.

i prayed,
for Love.

To Me

your desire: a performance
mine: a prayer

but is it not, eventually,
a matter of perspectives?

shut up,
please.

comforter,
comfort me.

Egbiameje Omole (they/he) is a poet, editor, and performance artist working from Ibadan, Nigeria. Formerly known as Joshua Morley, they have had other queer poems (like the two above) published in Olney, Corporeal, En*gendered, Stone of Madness, and Boy Brother Friend. Find them @morleyxoxo on Twitter and Instagram.