Excerpts from “Don’t Say My Son Is Walking in Heaven” – Islam Nawwar, trans. Phoebe Bay Carter

 

1

I was in my bedroom when I heard the muezzin call:

“Praaaaaayer is better than sleep / praaaaayer is better than sleep”

So I hastened to the router to begin my daily worship.

 

 

Had I been there

At Lorca’s execution

I would have been neither Lorca

Nor the one wielding the gun

I would have clapped, nothing more

And left,

Awaiting a slap

From determinism.

 

 

 

I am alive and Cinema Paradiso, demolished among tears at the end of the film, tells me I am alive, and all those kisses between the actors at the end of the film tell me I am alive, and this soundtrack resembling the time I put a black-and-white television in my bedroom window for the school children standing on the opposite balcony so they could watch, applauding, a kiss in an old Arabic film – this soundtrack tells me I am alive. This naked breast tells me their dog of a private-school teacher with his stick on the opposite balcony is dead, and I am alive. My imaginary lover’s cracked lips tell me that my dog of a father is dead, and I am alive. The hair sprouting around my penis tells me my dog of a mother is dead, and I am alive. All those kisses at the end of the film tell me that my dog of a prophet is dead, and I am alive. O hug between my lover’s arms, tell me that my dog of a president is dead and I am alive. Tell me, hug, that this rocketship flying me to Mars without a series of hysterical kisses from my lover is dead, and I am alive.

 

[…]

 

 

3

I walk

From page to page, empty

And the page is empty

I curse it and walk away

In empty time and empty place

The two shake hands before me

While my neck filled with scar lines

Can no longer bear to have other hands

Entwining around it

Have I nothing but my determination to curse the emptiness and walk away

I tremble in the emptiness

A one-sided coin

And the tourist snapping a selfie

Beside the carved stone

Looks at the big skeleton of my fish

Tossed down beside my rickety boat

At anchor

Its flesh eaten by sharks.

And this rural road full of gravel

The tourist screamed, “Oh my God, a shark skeleton!”

 

The wine barrel Faust carried from the cave

Reminds me of all the wine barrels stacked in rows

Jostling against in each other

Carried to the mosque.

Faust passed by, a tired old man

In his boat, sailing across the mosque floor,

And everyone – not excluding our insulted God – passed by, tired old men

Everyone in a rickety boat at anchor

In the skeleton of a fish whose flesh was eaten by sharks

And I write a poem on a slab of marble about voyages

That never should have happened,

So please shut up.

Where shall I put these convolutions inside my skull that I write with:

Between la ilaha ila Allah and long live Egypt

Or between the drops of semen ejaculated on my bedroom rug?

These convolutions which on which

A massive crowd of words I did not live slide uncaringly

And the family is filth that sticks to the back.

Blessed are the new barbarians who do not need to strike a match to set fire to memory,

In a giant leap towards voluntary extinction

I really love pizza

Especially chicken shawarma pizza

And sausage fatayer too.

I often imagine myself as a dirty mouse

I’ll be scampering between the round windows in a swiss cheese triangle

When I’ll be summoned by the demon

Lord of mice, lice, and bedbugs

To gnaw him a round talisman on a closed door

My ultimate dream is for it to be a pizza talisman

Indeed, this is my dream both as mouse and as man

I don’t actually know which species of vertebrates I belong to

And I’m still surprised by the highly specific classification of my identity

On my ID card, where they wrote:

Male, Muslim, single.

I also don’t know which species the shark belongs to.

Poor shark teeth

Like a mouse running away from poison

Killed here by Martin Luther’s emaciation

And there by Gandhi’s potbelly.

God is not a mouse

Because a mouse exists

Maybe he is a dirty mouse caught in the trap of your greatest fear

And maybe you would betray the love of your life if they threatened to release him to gnaw at your face with gusto.

The existent mouse gnawing at your face is certainly greater than any non-existent metaphysical God.

Besame

Besame mucho.***

 

 

 

 

*French song

**The priest

***Spanish song

 

 

 

Islam Nawwar is a poet, writer and physician from Cairo , born on 1992 self published 3 poetry collections.