Where Not to Be Born
In his translator’s foreword to Safaa Fathy’s Where Not to Be Born, Rawad Z. Wehbe writes of the original: “In Arabic, the language moves sideways. Image after image is effortlessly produced within each line and in between. However, the images transgress syntactical lineation, causing meaning to leak through both implied and imposed punctuation.” Though this sounds like a theoretical tip a reader unfamiliar with Arabic might do well to keep in mind, it is astonishing to watch it play out in English in the very first stanza of the first poem “First and Last”:
The blade has gone to
times of painful sighs forbid eavesdropping
polluted skies conceal
suns of warmth from oppression
deep within grief are endless sources.
A momentum gathers around “the blade” and it leaks over “time,” which could be part of the predicate of the first line, or the subject of the second. There is an impulse at the start of every line, as if reaching toward the right of the page, that makes the reader extremely aware of a mechanical fact: English flows from left to right. A shadow sensation follows the words in reverse, as would be the experience of reading them in Arabic.
The poems in “from … and One Night,” an obvious reference to One Thousand and One Nights, are stacked with wonders: “Flayed birds addicted to darkness,” and “When it was time for a truce on a Persian carpet, / an owl held me close.” But Fathy is not paying homage—there is a flatness and quickness of tone, one that routes from the spectacle to the self: “Why should I make this hasty return to the absence of my being / when the womb is the end of the road?” Fathy is perhaps expelling some kind of inheritance, seemingly surprised by the presence of odd ancient birds in the midst of her words:
Dancing words coalesce around the inanimate and swell with the letter S until it becomes segments of scripture and solid supplication, and something suddenly shone from the box around a bald-headed dancer and the purse was suddenly like a sin that fills a green apple.