Something Evergreen Called Life

The first COVID-19 lockdown began soon after poet Rania Mamoun had left Sudan with her young daughters and taken up asylum in the United States. Poetry became her daily practice for one hundred days:

[…] with this thread of silk
I sew
my poem which is
mattress
pillow
coat &
crutch

The result, collected in Something Evergreen, elevates everyday moments. Yasmine Seale’s translation is luminous and precise. Thanks to the chill of exile, “the tea has lost its taste” and the speaker has become “a foundered boat.” Her solace comes from friends, whom she describes as “life’s crutches / holding up the tired heart / in hard exile.” When a depression thaws, “the sun announces itself / with gentle warmth / over skin music spreads.” Birthday candles “paint a smile on / the lips of a child.”

Equally, the reader encounters Mamoun’s frank accounts of what she has left behind. She describes the misogyny and abuse she witnessed and experienced in Sudan with confident clarity. In a country where “they beat sisters wives daughters” and “hitting women is man’s honor,” women are forced to conceal their pain. The result, in the poet’s crystalline metaphor, is that “the scars clear unless / soul scars run deeper.”

The poet speaks of her own experience of female genital mutilation with moving immediacy. She describes how a child, innocent of what was to come,

loved her new dress
  soft green
  with golden ribbons
she loved the henna on her hands
  the red paint on her nails
she did what they asked her to do

Another poem begins: “glint of water on the river’s skin / […] merry dance of light on the glass rim,” before radiant joy transmogrifies into a frightening drawn blade that leads to permanent damage—“since the age of five I live / a permanently stifled life.”

Mamoun is not a poet to shy away from directness. One poem reads in its entirety “mourning.” Yet the transformative power of human bonds is never far:

in a dream
packed with dew
we met
brilliant blue
spread within us like a sky