A Walk With My Father on the Iron Curtain
Arm in arm, my father and I return
to the ground of his failed escape:
it is now forty-eight years on.
The border between Romania
and Bulgaria at 110-111 point
is bathed in gold October light.
The maize silos where he slept are still here:
an old border guard curious to see us
loitering on the train tracks confirms Dad’s memory,
as if History itself sent him our way
with the flock of geese and the red tractor
raising all the clamour in the peaceful morning.
It’s a holy day for me, at my father’s side,
with the map of his life, listening, listening
to the tempest in that night, icy rain, snow,
him and his friend inside the maize shelter
melting snow for tea, the horrifying days
when they searched the way with binoculars.
He ran to the other side of the world
with seventeen half-slices of salami,
a flashlight, and a dictionary,
some coins, probably more for good luck
than for anything they could buy, the shaver
for good looks, and a heart full of hope.
We carry on past Negru Voda:
Tolbukhin railway station, golden afternoon
and a wind that buffets us,
then Elhovo that looks more like a painting
with a dream worked inside the peeling blue
walls of the train station, my father, a puzzle
in changing light, seen through broken windows,
the coffee and baklava on the main street.
Arm in arm in the old quarters searching for his hotel
where he hid from police, the trap door that is
no longer there. Memory leads us off the map.
Then Lesovo in fog, like an elusive fish, the map
with the haystack where he slept to hide
from border guards, his hike along the roads
through the circular swamp, 400 metres from Turkey!
Ground of being on his ground of escape.
You cannot take the dreams away from anyone who dreams.
‘I never thought I’d be back here as a free man,’ he says.
Here he is, the white in his hair, snowbells at temples,
the grey-green eyes, now wet, now dry, twinkling.
Locals watch us step off ghost trains at the disused station.
AMARJIT CHANDAN
Translated by the author and Julia Casterton
Astoria, Oregon is the birthplace of the revolutionary Ghadar party formed in 1913 by workers from the Punjab to liberate India from British colonial rule. Back home in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case, 291 Ghadris were tried and sentenced: death for 42, 114 were transported for life, 93 awarded varying terms of imprisonment. No one appealed against the punishments. ‘The Ghadar movement,’ said O’Dwyer, Colonial Governor of the Punjab, ‘was by far the most serious attempt to subvert British rule in India.’
Suchness – Memorial to an Unknown Immigrant
In my talk I will project a blank slide for the Ghadar memorial that I believe should be in Astoria, Oregon.
– Johanna Ogden, historian (Email 6th November 2012)
This white patch framed by dark
is the memorial that exists only in the mindscape.
It is the surface too delicate to bear the weight of any colour.
It has no horizon – here the earth and the sky never meet.
It is the still that always moves.
It is the passport to the unknown with the true likeness of the alien
attested in fate’s hand
with the stamp of no return.
It is the timepiece whose hands move backward striking the past
the moment he left home with moist eyes on the future.
It is the prisoners’ dream.
It is the mirror spread out, burnt with the light of hope.
In the daylight sky the moon hangs over the shadowless tree.
It is the crescendo of vowels
the text with no consonants.
It is the last page of the book of life that caused his end.
The void after the film reel snapped.
The peace frozen.
Suchness.
(AC)
NOTE: Tathatã – suchness – in Sanskrit and Pali; Shunya – absolute emptiness – is a key concept in Buddhist philosophy.
A Punjabi Compatriot in the Barcelona Metro
When you looked
I thought the old man is eyeing me.
Are you on your own?
No body came with you?
I can’t work now.
I’m not that old – just twenty-five plus.
Have been here for six years.
Half the years I spent standing making rotis in the oven in restaurants.
Money’s God.
Many boys went mad and suicidal.
For future we’ve mortgaged today’s comfort.
Bahawalpur and Barcelona are drifting apart day by day.
Home is an island floating in the vast ocean.
The sun of this city welcomes all.
Leave the fog of London, come and live here.
The metro stopped at the next station.
Getting off he sighed and said:
What an age to endure pains.
And disappeared making his way in the crowd.
(AC)
In This Country
In this country the foreigner starts losing his memory the day he arrives.
He remains speechless in his own language.
The air around translates his silence into English –
It is snowing.
Dry leaves are falling.
The sea waves recede.
The river ebbs away.
The tea is getting cold.
Photographs are fading.
He wonders – one shouldn’t be in this country.
He keeps on being a stranger here, and
He starts believing in other strangers.
A cog is broken from the wheel of time.
The gramophone record moves on with the needle stuck in one track.
In this country the foreigner does not know what he does all the time.
He remains unaware lost in his thoughts.
He wears maojay Punjabi shoes with his 3-piece suit.
In this country the foreigner keeps on looking at the photo in his old passport
and gets scared of his own image.
In this country the foreigner is surprised to realise that
the way back home is rather long
When lost in his hometown the moon shows him the way
It keeps on walking with him till the dawn breaks and he knocks on his own door.
(AC / JC)
There’s No Escaping Memories
There’s no escaping memories
I wish memories were swallows
That fly endlessly to nowhere
I wish memories were letters
You pick, read and put aside
Whenever you feel like
How I have yearned this city could be mine
These roads
These rain-soaked lights
could hide me in their arms
And I could forget my past.
Whenever I walk
The tapes of old songs littered on the streets
Entangle my feet
Whenever the aeroplane passes over my head
It lands deep in my heart
My heart sinks and wonders time and again
Why it came, where it was bound
The wings of years shrink
> A mystery bird neither flies nor sings
But trembles on my mind.
If there’s no respite
I’m afraid I’ll go mad.
There’s no escape from memories.
(AC)
MAYA TEVET DAYAN
Translated by Rachel Tzivia Back
The poem ‘My Sister’ is taken from a collection of poems in which Tevet Dayan addresses her deceased mother, and expresses her loss as an existential experience of migration from the home her mother used to be for her in this world. For the mourning daughter, that existential exile was soon followed by an actual migration with her family to Canada, where another layer of homelessness and alienation was added to her writings. Tevet Dayan’s poetry is significantly influenced by the Hindu concept of rebirth as well as by the Jewish biblical imagination of the mutual yearning between the individual and God. The poem ‘My Sister’ is an exception from such imaginings: in straightforward, short sentences, the poet addresses her sister, her partner in the destiny of an exile, to describe the North-America external landscape that surrounds them and that reverberates an internal landscape of absence and orphanhood.
My Sister
Now we are refugees
from the life that once was
ours,
that abandoned us like slippery
ground beneath our dreaming
feet. Now
in this other land,
the horizon is clear and blue,
the northern winds muddle
our memories
like sightless flies
and sometimes for hours
we can turn our blind
gaze away
from the chair beside us,
remaining always empty.
HABIB TENGOUR
Translated by Caroline Price
Habib Tengour’s poems are spare and sharply focused, without a superfluous word. In beautifully weighted and highly visual language they convey the poignancy of exile, both cultural and physical, the search for identity, man’s ambiguous relation to place and the past. Although Tengour moved to France with his family for political reasons before he was a teenager, and has written mainly in French, the Arab and Berber storytelling voices of his Algerian childhood haunt his writing and I tried to keep their presence at the forefront of my mind as I worked. These poems, written in 2014, were performed at the 45th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam the same year; ‘Time to Set Out’ and ‘Living at a Distance’ deal with Tengour’s great preoccupying themes of identity and exile.
Time to Set Out
I don’t know the place
At the mouths of which rivers?
I’ve heard that in your country
The dead visit when it snows
To calm the troubled dreamer
They speak a language of fire and stone
Drink out of chipped cups with the birds
I know they head towards the West
When it’s time to leave
When the ashes in the hearth grow cold
Exile trains its machine gun
At the border you feel empty, completely drained
The form you have to fill in baffles you
By morning love is revealed in still water
An invitation to cross over
Living at a Distance
Ghostly figures of our friends rise up in the streets
To remind us of the exact moment
When hopes crumbled to a dust
Pierced from all sides by sun
We meet them in the padlocked bar
Of the fish factory in happier times
The judge and the grass rubbing shoulders
Each with his own crate on the table
They’re an embittered bunch
Legacy of a decade with nothing to chew on
Brightly coloured paper napkins
Make a rainbow of welcome in the star-spangled doorway
A disappointing evening despite the festive preparations
THREE ETHIOPIAN POETS
Translated by Chris Beckett and the authors
These three Ethiopian poets, all tenacious fighters for democracy in their homeland, fled three successive regimes: first, Hama Tuma from Haile Selassie’s absolute monarchy in the early 1970s; then Gemoraw from the brutal military/communist Derg which overthrew Selassie in the mid 1970s; lastly, Alemu Tebeje from the Tigray-dominated government which sacked the Derg in 1991 and still rules Ethiopia today as a one-party state.
Hama and Gemoraw are heroes of the 1960s and 1970s student movement, centred on Addis Ababa University. Haile Selassie allowed a certain leeway to student expression, as long as this stayed on campus. Gemoraw famously won the annual university poetry competition with his still much-loved poem ‘Berkete Mergem’ (Gift of a curse), but it proved too richly rebellious for the Emperor who attended the reading but walked out in disgust!
Gemoraw’s journey since fleeing Ethiopia took him first to China (where the authorities deported him for writing about the anarchist novelist Ba Jin who had been disgraced during the Cultural Revolution), then to Norway and finally Sweden. Hama bases himself in Paris and Alemu in London, but like all exiles there is a sense when you meet them that they have never left their country, however far they go or however many languages they master – and they are all dedicated linguists, including, in Gemoraw’s case, of Ge’ez, the ancient precursor to Amharic. What I love about them all is their passion, their fearless and reasoned protest, and most of all, their modest humour in the face of barbarity and injustice.
Alemu Tebeje
ALEMU TEBEJE
Greetings to the People of Europe!
Over land and sea, your fathers came to Africa
and unpacked bibles by the thousand,
filling our ancestors with words of love:
if someone slaps your right cheek,
let him slap your left cheek too!
if someone takes your coat,
let him have your trousers too!
Now we, their children’s children,
inheriting the words your fathers left behind,
our bodies slapped and stripped
by our lifetime presidents,
are braving seas and leaky boats,
cold waves of fear –
let salt winds punch our faces and your coast-guards
pluck us from the water like oily birds!
but here we are at last to knock at your front door,
hoping against hope that you remember
all the lovely words your fathers preached to ours.
(CB / AT)
Gemoraw
GEMORAW
For The Voiceless People
Of all freedoms, speech is the first,
and it is the tongue which allows us
to voice our desires and our desiring.
If the tongue is tied down and cannot tell
what we feel, not only our flesh is tied,
but our soul. And if our fellow man
The Great Flight Page 6