English translation by Pina Piccolo, based on Sana Darghmouni’s Italian translation from Arabic. Cover art: No strangers still, painting by Ron Laboray.
Pain is always served hot
Where can I draw words from, after darkness falls?
I fish out a word from my wars,
and yet it doesn’t brighten the sadness within.
How can I take Yousef back to his mother after
the plane closed off the road?
how can I feed the starving?
I weave in and out
of two worlds, nothing resembles me except pain
Pain dishes are served roasted, boiled,
sometimes burned
but always warm.
I told my mother that I don’t like pepper.
I no longer remember why
perhaps because I have nothing left to burn.
I melt when hell opens all its mouths
all the names inside me melt away
like a heap in the form of a stifled cry
that walks me through every nightmare
I plummet into an abyss and then wake up
soon as I am awake I find a new name engraved on me
I am a body with no human features
a chained entity covered with names
They said, we shall live another night.
We shall live to tell the story again
I want to see you so that the war can become warm
like a wool sweater,
affectionate as a hug
Come, let us braid our memories together
The braid keeps memory safe
should they demolish our whole city
The raid intensifies and the moans
of those trapped under the rubble rise
But your voice is louder
Come to me even only once
before the massacre begins
over there, my love
journalists with expectant eyes
paramedics with exhausted bodies
and smoke, my dear, is a mare
trotting away with the souls
At nighttime stories fall asleep
hatred grows and planes wake up
At nighttime
mothers no longer count their children
Pain slumbers in the darkness
Everyone awaits for the day
and the sun forgets to rise
Messages from the pit of Hades
Here, all is calm, I am bumped by a few waves
Waves carry or drag messages.
Heavy messages back and forth, bent and crooked,
cross the border to a place forsaken by the
world and by the map and known only to the sender.
Must one know the address to receive a distress call?
The two-year-old girl says, “I don’t want
smoke to get into our house.”
Due to a faulty wave, I couldn’t close
the window against the air.
War is a circus, the clown sits
on the spectator’s seat
and lions feed on young spectators.
I edit an article about how to make cakes fluffy
while hiding with my children on the nails
over the correspondence window.
We ignore the fact that we are hundreds
miles away from the raids.
I sat face to face with the new message,
it was fat, brimming with other messages
and in a bad mood.
I offered it wine, perhaps it would talk, but it didn’t
I offered it a piece of bread and cheese,
which it ate greedily, without speaking.
I danced for it the monkey dance on its ceiling.
Then it approached me, opened its mouth,
and I fell into a dark pit, squeezed inside its belly.
“I don’t want to die” “Stop the war”
“The most important thing is the Eid dress”
“I saved my fish from the raid,” “Mom, don’t
leave” “My children are dead”
I swallow the messages whole,
the smoke of concrete and rubble
comes out of my mouth.
I cough, the message flies out of my mouth,
it dissolves amid the waves, nothing comes in,
my battery explodes, I switch off.
The tomato of identities
Some tasks are done quickly
How to free yourself from your identity,
the smell of cardamom
and a poem about a house you’ve never seen
on an autumn sidewalk
at the extreme ends of the earth and aimless walks.
In speaking about lightness, I didn’t find clear answers
on what’s the weight that causes me to hiccup
and which other one keeps me
from being hurled far away by the air.
In the other room
autumn is still young and smartly dressed
It lies firmly with memory
And it tells her:
– I am of color only in this country, so
forget what happened before.
Everything is allowed during intercourse
for once words are silent
and love takes over the story.
Every time I tell this story
I fall prey to panic.
What am I going to tell them?
What will I hide behind the photo?
– Gender: Male/Female
I leave that one blank
– What is your homeland?
I leave that one blank too
Some questions exist only
to increase alienation, add
more of it.
Says one:
– The others are lovely too, they love
and let themselves be loved, but we settle for
writing poetry.
On the way to the stage
everyone casts intense glances at me
and I wonder:
On what planet will we meet for coffee?
In another room sit exhausted people.
They don’t know me and I don’t know them.
I start talking about you without mentioning your name
And suddenly even these unfamiliar faces repeat it.
Alienation and exile are two sides of the same event.
Which we meet once
One time only
But it is a prolonged moment that never ends
A portrait with no details
With a pixelated face
and breasts that stretch forever
I shoot a portrait
I am an imaginary thing lying inside a lute
Its strings color my images with their music
The colors did not shape me,
just a deformed colored image open
to interpretation
You think I am intriguing and call me a man
In an ornate world
everyone wears dark glasses
which paint the world black and white
I gather the rest of the colors in my portrait
You speak of me as a man
and I answer;
“I am the aura that ferments all the colors of the world.”
What trans/deformation shakes in bed like a woman
but wears the shirt of manhood when facing the world!
You ask and I laugh
I collect more colors,
I paste them together maybe the face becomes clear
But something forbids it
Just a patched-up face with no details
I chase the heaviness of breasts inside the lute
which seems to have a limited shape
its music made it more spacious than
we thought we would see
How can I take a picture of music?
How can I draw a face from colored squares?
I run toward you but weight gets in the way
I can’t button up my shirt
Nor do the colors give me myself
I ring the church bell,
I listen to my verse,
I build holes in my instrument
perhaps my melodies will bring me back to myself
There is no place for me in memory or eternity
There is no place for me in nouns or adjectives
I am neither black nor white
I am a pixelated thing with breasts and pain
I flog the images
they swell,
I attempt to build a new portrait
Each time I become grayer
and loneliness devours me even more.
Wesam Almadani is a Palestinian writer. Originally from Jaffa, Wesam grown up between Sudan, Egypt and Gaza. She lives in Norway. She published two books, the novel The body’s schizophrenia (Arab institute for research & publishing, 2020) and the poetry collection ياء yaa, (Dar Al Kalima for Publishing and Distribution, 2015). Wesam’s literary works have been translated into English, Norwegian, Swedish, Hebrew and Italian. As an activist, Wesam has fought for human rights, freedom of expression whatever the religion, gender or background and the collective right to live in peace.
