Author: anmly_mpusod

we never had to name our sons after Jesus

Those who looked up at him from the ground, behind palms
shielding the sun, did not lower his body
from the cross today either.
hands clasped beneath their chests, they did not
reach out to one another but stood apart in a pride justified
by their lamentation at bearing witness to the punishment.
this before our own caliphs approved of taking sides.
beneath the scratchy fabric that cloaked my body, I stitched
my eye to my groin, my mind to the quick of my nails, the feeling of
my headscarf’s fold,
I took in the faces of whoever was there at the cross
and brought them to you. 

“Here’s the prophet, here’s the camel,” my milk-sibling
whispered in my ear—I didn’t like the way he raised his brow.

In this world on which my ass sits or my soles stand,
what sense is there in taking blood as if it were a progress payment?
because I tore the cloth from my head
and used it to soak up all the mottled liquid from those wooden beams.
today they did not take Christ down from there, nor did they
find the killers of the children shot at the police barricades today.
we’d talked about it all that afternoon, twelve women
at our gold day, our second meeting after Muhlis Bey’s heart attack
and Besime Hanım’s first hysterectomy,
“He hung on the cross exactly thirty days, rotted, and the crows ate him,”
said Huriye the hostess, slipping another gold coin down her shirt. 
they ate their mosaic cake and mumbled 
thank God we never had to name our sons after Jesus
I would never forget their faces as they did. 

“Here’s the dirt, here’s the people,” my milk-sibling
yelled—I never liked the way he’d pinch me. 

I was sent to schools and enrolled in courses,
calligraphy, ballet, piano and folk dance—hopefully 
we’ll do something from the Caucuses—
but I wish I knew how to talk to a board
whenever blood is spilled, I wish I’d told my mother I wanted 
to be enrolled in a course that helped me know at a single glance 
the kind of tree that cross had been carved from,
“Don’t you dare nail him to a spruce.”
it was only after eight funerals, six weddings and thirteen births
that I understood it was my classmate Abdullah 
who’d been crowned with thorns.
after three separate beatings he had to stand on one leg 
in front of the chalkboard, both arms held out, his urine dribbling 
down his columnar leg because he couldn’t hold it anymore, 
I’ll clean his shame with a big towel
thank God there aren’t many children in our class named Abdullah.

Bargain-counter cologne, unruly beard, the smell of
wet feet after his ablution, and right in the middle of our house.
we set up a scarecrow to keep the crows away from my father’s 
homemade sausages, a long board with short arms nailed to it. 
at the behest of my grandmother, who was reluctant to draw a face 
on the scarecrow, we tied two long black strips of cloth to its arms. we made
a turban out of fabric leftover from Huriye Hanım’s trousseau and hung it 
on the top of the post—we’d been wiping the floor with it for the past ten years,
you could hardly see its flower pattern anymore.

“Here is the woman, here is the field,” they commanded the public,
and I resented my milk-sibling for finding me a husband. 

Even as we consume every halal thing to the end, we have neighbors
deluded enough to believe we can find another country from 
a fiber of meat in our teeth. there are those who said 
they never ate pork, and we countenanced their lies
so they cut special willows for everyone
without delay, free of inertia, nailing chic crosses without
exactly measuring their short and long angles.
our duty was to listen to the confession of atheism with pleasure 
and infuse ourselves with the evident power of pure Muslim faith.
at the celebration for her grandchild’s fortieth day on earth,
Gülsüm Teyze explained all this with elegance and grace,
while the smell of bargain-counter cologne wafted upwards
from the baby’s neck wrapped in muslin cloth and struck my nose.

Our eighth trip to the same exorcist 
and the demons won’t come out, the hodja is bushed, 
he prays, blows air, jumps up and down at regular intervals, 
“They didn’t take Christ down from there today, they didn’t
find the corpses of the women burned on the side of the road today.”
after a while, we know how to say destur to our inner demon
and begin to extinguish our teacher’s fire
with three kuluvallahs and a nas,
protecting our national solidarity and unity
from the evil eye.

“Here’s the seat, here’s the law,” they said among themselves, 
and I was so offended by my milk-sibling’s drool.

I wondered what to do with the tax deducted from my salary
in this life of mine whose fragrant edges are adorned with roses,
on the evening of my milk-sibling’s wedding, which I’d been invited to, 
all those lessons and courses would finally come in handy—
maybe they’ll play a Caucasian tune—
but when I saw the gold that Besime, Huriye and Muhsin Bey’s 
widow pinned to the bride and groom’s chests,
I was amazed to see it there for the first time
because the relief on the gold coin wasn’t Atatürk’s head.

Those who looked at them from the ground, with eyes they’d closed 
with both hands, did not collect their dead from the djemevi today.
I neatly lined up their faces one by one, male and female,
but my milk-sibling didn’t know the Elham
and reversed the yem yelid and the yem yelüd.

I caught him one afternoon under our scarecrow
greedily chewing sausages shaped like a crow’s beak.
instead of getting a turban, my hair was cut and tied
because I told everything I saw, opening a new front against crows.
this makeshift cross gets so big it falls over, 
and the scissors cut wounds into my head.

“Here’s the sausage, here’s the crow,” he defended himself,
my milk-sibling’s face looked like Petrus’. 

The fifty-eighth time we were brought to the same hodja, 
my bothersome curse still didn’t go away, 
so I took it and brought it 
here to you.

 

Translator’s Note:

This is an excerpt from Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu’s semi-autobiographical novel Elfiye, which we’re hoping will soon find a publisher. The novel tells the story of a Turkish poet and academic who, in the middle of completing a groundbreaking translation of an Ottoman-era sex book, exiles herself to Georgia after being declared a terrorist for signing a petition calling for peace in Southeastern Anatolia. The novel is in prose, but lengthy sections of it are told in highly referential, stream of consciousness, free verse poetry that deal with Elfiye’s sexual orientation and her family’s suppression of it throughout her childhood.

This section takes place just before Elfiye decides to leave Georgia for good. She’s been invited—lured, more like it—by her former professor to join him in New York so they can finish their work on the aforementioned sex book under the patronage of Columbia University. Not only has Elfiye done the translation, but she’s also written the articles and abstracts herself, all without receiving any official credit, and her professor has invited her because he can’t actually finish the job himself. Naturally, Elfiye is reluctant to go. Above the little Georgian town she’s exiled herself to, there looms a large cathedral which looms large in her mind as well. As a child, Elfiye was indoctrinated to believe that a Muslim—even a now nominal one like her—should not enter a non-Muslim house of worship, lest she become possessed by a djinn. But she goes anyway, hoping to find some guidance. While she’s there, she composes the following “hymn.”

 

Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu is an author and LGBTIQ* activist who has published four story collections and one novel, and co-founded the #MeToo movement in the Turkish publishing industry. Due to political and gender repression in her home country, she now lives in Germany. She also drew attention from the US literary scene with her last novel Elfiye in the field of queer writing. She has been accepted to the Master of Human Rights program at Friedrich Alexander University. She is currently a PEN Writers-in-Exile fellow. nazlikarabiyikoglu.com

Ralph Hubbell is a writer, teacher and translator whose fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in the Sun Magazine, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House’s Lost and Found, Asymptote, and elsewhere. In addition to Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu, he has also translated Oğuz Atay’s short story collection Waiting for the Fear, which will be published by NYRB Classics in late 2023. 

 

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Louse

[Louse, Ψείρα]

Ψ

He left their little eggs behind on the piano keys and the keyboard of his laptop—nobody could guess what sort of dust this was. He liked to pick them out of his hair. Trapped between two human fingers dragging it ruthlessly from its resting spot, the incubating insect slid down the pole of hair like a firefighter descending to his truck at the sound of the alarm. 

You can’t tame a louse, even if you do let it out to graze on your head. You can’t explain to it that it has to play dead to go unnoticed and not wave its arms and legs helplessly when it lands on the porcelain of the bathtub. Death is incomprehensible even to a louse.

At school they have advanced to the Last Resort. The enforcers are called lousemothers. They are the mothers who inspect the children’s heads—every class has its own. You didn’t get special treatment if your mom became a volunteer, and anyway, in your case, that was out of the question. 

The first time they took him and his father by surprise. A woman they didn’t know stopped them at his classroom door. When she explained her mission, his father turned pale. He was afraid not that he would be caught with lice, his father explained to the boy later, but how Mom would take it. Mom took it badly even though they didn’t find lice on him that day. It wasn’t even about the lice—she railed again and again, turning more and more red with anger every time—but about his school sufficing with such ineffectual inspections in the first place. Had they known, they never would’ve even enrolled him in this school. 

“And how do they inspect you? Go on, tell me, how do they inspect you.”

“With a pencil.”

“A sharpened pencil? Are they joking? Are they trying to get a rise out of me?”

The reason they used a pencil with a rounded nose was to make it seem to the children a little more like a game. Could they avoid covering their small skulls in pencil marks? The boy had told his mother the whole story to lighten the mood, but the very idea that they had pitched lice hunting to them as a game made her turn an even deeper shade of red. 

By the time it was his turn to be searched again, the pencil had developed a gleaming, smooth finish from its many rounds around the classroom. He heard it moving through his hair, like a little plastic shovel that’s been worn down by struggle with the sand. His ears weren’t used to the sound, nor his nose to the smell: the lousemother combing his hair wore the same clothes she’d worn yesterday, doused with a perfume that had spoiled. Something about the way in which she held his head still, setting her hand at the base of his skull and pressing two fingers into his nape, reminded him of a hairdresser who used to come to the house to cut his hair when he was younger. 

“You’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” the lousemother pronounced finally, laying her tool down to rest. Everyone seemed to be saying this, yet they all meant something different by it. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last little genius, teased his sister Violeta. (“Little geniuses can catch lice?” she’d ask him now, with a wry smile.) You’re not the first and you won’t be the last child to have a hypersensitive mom, said his father. Anyway, this hypersensitivity wasn’t unrelated to the fact that he had such a great aptitude for math, his father would add.

The boy’s cellphone rang before he got home. His father had been notified, but he didn’t sound angry. Why is contracting head lice still so common? His father had explained this to him last time too. Immunization. He contracted head lice at a young age to build resistance to other body lice, which were actually dangerous, and which he’d have contracted as an adult if he were to go, say, to jail, or war. This whole business of lice hunting however was ridiculous and didn’t solve the problem. (The boy had heard this before too; his father was repeating himself.) The proof lay in what the lousemother had said, You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Despite their routine inspections, the school didn’t manage to rid all the children of lice. Before they got off the phone, his father suggested the boy prepare himself something to eat and make use of his free time by playing the violin. 

Certainly, his father would find a way to break it to his mother gently. But if Mom came home before she found out, then he would have to tell her himself. He would have to make sure not to agitate her. She would assume he was sick—that’s why they had sent him home, because he was sick. But his mother was as disgusted by illness as she was by head lice. (How many times have I told you? Don’t walk around barefoot, you’ll catch a cold. How many times have I told you? Don’t play with sick kids. How many times have I told you? Don’t stick your head so close to others’… ) 

The boy put off playing the violin. But the more he put it off, the better the chances she’d catch him playing when she walked in. So, he wasn’t sick, she would realize…

Mom liked the sound of the violin. 

Instead of picking up the violin, he gets on the internet. Science waits at his fingertips. Singing Dunes. That would be his excuse for not having been practicing. An avalanche is for the sand pile what the bow is for a cello. The sound waves the avalanche creates as it tumbles down the slope get trapped in a dry layer of sand that acts like the resonator of a string instrument. The secret is that underneath all the dry sand, there remains sand that is still wet. When sound hits and reflects off of it, it attains otherworldly frequencies. The dunes’ string instruments are simply sand piles that have begun to dry out. What sand pile would want to sing during monsoon season? 

Now it was dark outside. On Wednesdays, his sister came home late. Upon entering the house his mom said nothing to him at all. She went and shut herself inside her bedroom. He decided to go get his violin. He started playing Boccherini’s minuet, a piece he knew well. 

“Will you stop that scratching?” came Mom’s voice, from inside. 

She meant the violin. Though in the meantime, she’d probably heard about the lice, which would explain why she was mad. Now someone would have to clean him. And the music wasn’t helping, because unlike the little kids who, enchanted, followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin contentedly, lice couldn’t care less about music. 

He put his violin aside and went into the bathroom. He knew that Mom could hear him from her bedroom. After hearing the bathroom door shut, she’d be listening closely. He opened the left drawer under the sink and started moving things around; meanwhile the little metal comb, with the aerodynamic appearance it had when it was clean, lay right on top. He threw it in the tub from a modest height. A loud clang would only make things worse. The sound of metal striking porcelain could not be mistaken. This, combined with the absence of a flush, would’ve had—with a little luck—the desired effect. Mom would assume he’d shut himself inside the bathroom to clean out the lice on his own. 

By the time Violeta had arrived home, he’d finally come out of the bathroom. Violeta was on her cell phone when she opened the door. How is the little genius? she asked him merely with a glance from across the room. Then she made herself comfortable on the other end of the sofa. The television was on, loud. Violeta was still on the phone, speaking in a low voice and in code. So even if he or their mom had been eavesdropping, neither of them could have made out what she was saying. Some time went by like this. Then they shuddered from a sudden avalanche: the sliding doors behind the television that usually remained shut were opening. Mom had materialized between them. She wore striped pyjamas like those worn around a prison yard. 

Mom started to yell at Violeta. “You will be the one to clean up his filth! I’ve spent my whole life cleaning you… You disgust me.” 

They heard the line on Violeta’s phone drop. 

He and Violeta locked themselves in the bathroom. 

“You cried, admit it!” she tried to tease him, but when he wouldn’t bite, she stopped. “We’re not going to call Dad,” she said, determined, having him kneel onto the wet bathmat. 

The nit comb was still lying at the end of the tub. Violeta reached for it noiselessly. She managed to pass it through his hair and then immediately turned on the faucet. Lifting his head just a little, he could see the fountain of water as it cascaded over the comb. It wasn’t enough to carry away whatever was lodged between its teeth. His gaze rose to the bracelets on Violeta’s wrist and to her fingernails, painted in a dark color that was now chipping at the edges. Chipped nail polish—his sister thought—betrayed an artistic temperament. Violeta obliged him to bend over again, passed the comb through his hair once more, and turned on the faucet. This time she let the water run for longer. 

It wouldn’t last long, that was for certain. Violeta would quickly get bored and tell him that the whole delousing process was pointless. It was a vicious cycle. Even if she did manage to clean him up, he would just catch them all over again from someone else at school. They would keep sucking his blood for years. They feed on blood, hair, and dead skin, said the label on the lotion. 

Violeta put down the comb after the third try. The water running forcefully down the spout had still not pulled the last little black things down the drain. 

“In any case, at some point they just disappear,” sounded her voice over the water. “You don’t believe me, but it’s true,” he heard her say again. “Sometime during puberty they disappear on their own without any special shampoos or lotions. I thought I’d never escape. I buried dozens of mine in school books—I stuffed them deep inside the gutters. I had hundreds of abortions. The most innocent-seeming abortion in the world, unpeeling their eggs from your hair. Until one day it was over. By then I’d gotten so used to them that I hardly noticed I had stopped scratching.” 

He didn’t believe this, either, but he kept quiet.

If his sister was interested in physics, he’d explain to her how sand dunes that’d started to go dry could play the cello. And how a comb could produce sound effects just by chafing against strands of hair—the hair-chords. But Violeta was dreadful at science; she wanted to be an actress. Now, she asked him to bend over again and she started washing him with regular shampoo, which definitely would have no effect on the lice.

He surrendered to her touch, for the first time with a vague urge to cry.

[ Keywords: hypersensitivity / string instruments / siblings ]

 

Translator’s Note:

“Louse, Ψείρα” is excerpted from Dimitra Kolliakou’s Insect Alphabet (2018), winner of the 2019 Greek State Prize for the short story. When Kolliakou first published Insect Alphabet she intentionally refrained from categorizing it as a novel or a short story collection, preferring to leave more room for the reader’s own interpretation. Because Insect Alphabet has twenty-four chapters, organized according to the Greek alphabet—where each chapter corresponds to an insect beginning with that letter—I wanted to preserve the integrity of the Greek by setting each title in both languages, where feasible. This way the reader brushes up repeatedly against the Greek. The sense of defamiliarization, which after all lies at the heart of translation, felt like an important experience for me to honor. In this book, especially, acknowledging difference matters. Insofar as each chapter also reads as an independent short story, there is no central protagonist who matters most, just many separate characters brushing up against each other whose experiences matter equally. 

Each chapter’s seemingly independent narrative also centers on a meaningful convergence between insects and people in a way that ironically hints at the parallels between life in microcosm (insects) and macrocosm (humans) in order to bring out the inextricable affinities that bind humankind daily, socially and environmentally, with other organisms. A widower turns obsessively to beekeeping. Two siblings tiptoe around their mother’s temper just like the lice on the younger boy’s scalp. A precocious teenage girl, bullied and marginalized, finds hope in the communal lifestyle of ants. This is a book that curiously, microscopically examines multiculturalism, familial relationships, biological instincts, and the ways in which our given language might falter at climactic moments. 

On a stylistic level, my challenge in translating Kolliakou’s prose lay in its precision and succinctness, as well as the ability of Greek to be abrupt without sounding curt or incomplete. I sometimes had to soften the transitions between sentences—although, here, too, I saw an opportunity to retain, on occasion, the sense of estrangement one feels upon encountering the other.

This is not unrelated to Kolliakou’s intention: the epigraph to Insect Alphabet opens with, “My dear Europe.” This address frames the book as if it were an open letter to Europe and its citizens, but not just any Europe, a version of “Europe which is vulnerable, which is lacking in openness,” as Kolliakou said in an interview with Greek magazine Athens Voice. After completing her studies in classical philology and linguistic theory in Athens and Edinburgh, Kolliakou reveled in the cosmopolitanism of Europe, moving often and self-identifying as a “stranger,” admittedly “a choice which ultimately cannot have been random,” she said. The more familiar one gets with defamiliarizing experiences, the more multiplicity and texture one’s experience attains. The more sensitively we come to perceive the strangeness of our own routines, the eccentricity of our singular lives, the more supple and tolerant we can become of difference and change.

 

Dimitra Kolliakou (b. 1968) grew up in Athens and she lives and works in Paris. She has been awarded many prizes for her works of fiction, including the Short Story State Literary Award and the Anagnostis literary prize for Insect Alphabet, (Αλφαβητάρι Εντόμων, Patakis Publishers, 2018). Her most recent book is the novel Αταραξία (Ataraxia, Patakis Publishers, 2022).

 

Eleni Theodoropoulos grew up in Athens, Greece. She writes essays and translates from Modern Greek. She is currently translating Insect Alphabet by Dimitra Kolliakou and is a PhD student in Comparative Thought & Literature at Johns Hopkins University.

 

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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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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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