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language: Arabic (English tr. Sara Elkamel)
country: Kuwait / n/a
year: 2023
form: poetry
dates read: 15.12.24
He disinfects his soul,
hoping to escape philosophy
(from “Cosmic Haemorrhage”)
Mona Kareem’s poetry collection I Will Not Fold These Maps (translated by Sara Elkamel) is excellent. Kareem is a Bidoon poet born and raised in Kuwait but denied Kuwaiti citizenship; she was officially banned from Kuwait in 2023 for her criticisms of the Kuwaiti government. her poetry is at once sharp and elusive, full of striking imagery:
The night is strangled by a choker of stars
(from “Perdition”)
exile is here, of course, perhaps most notably in the prose poem “Lot’s Wife”:
At the border checkpoint, a migrant is not allowed to occupy herself with anything but the present moment. They said that in turning back, she had compromised the identity of the Lord. Or that in her gut, she believed Sodom innocent, wrongly battered to dust.
as Elkamel notes in her introduction, though, Kareem’s poetry resists efforts to pin it down, to read it as “just” about any one topic (exile / statelessness / gender / war / …). “Journey to the Catacombs of the Heart” is maybe the most striking example; as Elkamel observes, it “reads as an elegy for a suicidal friend at first glance, before you realise that the protagonist has merely flung herself from the windows of the speaker’s heart”, leaving the reader with question rather than answer: who is the speaker mourning in its final lines?
I will leave the cups empty.
For even tea, my friend,
will not rouse you from your death.
(from “Journey to the Catacombs of the Heart”)
even the poems that didn’t quite work for me as a whole are composed of compelling turns of phrase and concepts, like “My Body, My Vehicle”, where Kareem imagines her body as a car, attempting to navigate a world not build to accommodate her:
What do I do with this vehicle of mine?
I cannot park her, abandon her anywhere!
When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
The glossy ceramic floors
And when I go to the beach
She sinks into the sand
my prior experience with a book produced by the Poetry Translation Centre was the Somali poet Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf’s Tahriib / The Sea-Migrations, which left me dubious because it bills itself as “translated by Clare Pollard” (who doesn’t speak Somali) and only on closer examination reveals that Pollard worked with the Somali writers and translators Said Jama Hussein and Maxamed Xasan Alto to produce the final texts (which were also underwhelming). it seems like they’ve moved away from that model, however — Sara Elkamel is herself an Arabic-speaker and a poet as well as a translator, and I really enjoyed her translations (except for one lies-lays mix-up in “Perdition”). it’s left me feeling more positive about other of the PTC’s chapbooks. above all else, I appreciate that they print all of them bilingually.
definitely check this out if you get a chance!
moods: emotional, reflective