“Delay our tomorrow so our road
may extend and space may widen for us, […]
you are so much yourself … and I am
so much other than myself right here before you”
Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another. Translated by Fady Joudah
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Category: language
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“… I found
The failing olive and the cajoling flute,
Where I knelt down, as if in prayer,
And sucked a moist pit
From the marl
Of the earth in a sacred cove.
Edward Hirsch, A Greek Island
He who steals the land does not surprise us by stealing a library.
He who kills innocent civilians does not surprise us by killing paintings.
He who destroyed a whole homeland does not surprise us when he destroys a wall on which we hung our paintings.
The enemy of the Palestinan tree,
the enemy of the Palestinian painting,
the enemy of the Palestinian poem is,
first and foremost,
the enemy of the Palestinan homeland.
-Mahmoud Darwish in ??????????? ???????? (Kassem Hawal, 1984) via bidoun
Créer des conditions de subversion à une assimilation
Vous évoquez également une «grammaire humaniste et émancipatrice de Suzanne Césaire». Qu’entendez-vous par là ?
J’entends par grammaire humaniste et émancipatrice la méthode par laquelle Suzanne Césaire appelle à une nouvelle conscience littéraire et artistique afin de créer les mécanismes de disjonction avec une littérature doudou établie. Cette grammaire lui permet de déconstruire l’ordre des choses afin d’élaborer une sensibilité où la condition de subalterne et de colonisé devient la matrice d’une émancipation esthétique et d’un nouveau mode d’existence politique. Elle écrit pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et sous le régime pétainiste de l’amiral Robert qui a d’ailleurs censuré Tropiques en mai 1943. En tant que témoin et actrice d’une opposition idéologique et esthétique à ce régime, il est donc urgent pour Suzanne Césaire de créer des conditions de subversion à une assimilation coloniale qui sous Robert gangrène les libertés et fragilise toute spontanéité identitaire et toute affirmation d’une différence culturelle.Concrètement que peut produire cette grammaire humaniste et émancipatrice ? Par exemple, dans son article «Le grand camouflage», il existe un personnage féminin, Bergilde, que je trouve fascinant, car elle condense et synthétise cette émancipation esthétique et constitue l’ancêtre littéraire de beaucoup de figures féminines libres et subversives dans les littératures caribéennes.
Anny-Dominique Curtius on Outre-mer la 1ère, 2021
Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée, par Anny-Dominique Curtius – éditions Karthala.
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in conversation with Dr. Anny-Dominique Curtius, 2023.
AG2022_2100689a or in proportion
“Inspiring both wonder and dread in equal proportion.”
“Slow, careful, focused. Avoiding damage.” (JC)
A gift
“I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.”
Li-Young Lee, The Gift
AG2023_2080754a or palm metonymy
“…this
is your moment–the one
you’ll remember (the hot breath
of August breeze, the sun
white in the sky, the trickle of sweat
on his neck
[…]
Remember this is how the small survive”
Laura Kasischke, Palm
“Swords and Friendship the card says.
Monday your lucky day, seven is rare.
You will encounter a great, lasing friendship.
The future beckons; your loves will prosper”
John Waller, Hyeres Les Palmiers
“The palm … is the show’s leitmotif: “a symbol of wealth, elegance, fertility, exoticism, and order,” Yto Barrada (Bindoun). Palm Project Manifesto (L’appartement 22).
Am I a fraud?
One of the complications of managing decline was nostalgia … this self-deceiving mood
Only children think one person can ever wholly save another.
… and perhaps, in some imagined utopia, … she could be met on even, common ground with a clever soul
So much of life is delusion.
– (ZS)
Trying to Love the Whole World
I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
is such a public display of affection, a flex even,
one the lone magpie staring back from the backside
of a badly shorn sheep finds suspect. I flap my arms
& blink three times. Bad luck to glimpse just one.
Magpie being the only creature rumored to have
refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast
& curse the rain. I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon
or a tent pole. The world stays busy out there, hammering
itself into softer ground with a flat rock & yet, the sound
of wind softly shaking the stars awake. My world
I have missed your mouth, your morning
breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat
lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.
– Jenny Brown, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.
– Donika Kelly, I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house.
we are carried.
in bellies. in arms.
in love. in hope.
in caskets. in urns.
in grief. in memories.
our whole lives
and into the next
we are carried
Sara Ria via IG