Each Friday, well, let me put it this way, every other Friday, my parents used to invite all, or almost all the elders of the village to a bun session. Coffee beans were cooked in seething hot sesame oil or butter ghee. The eldest man was to eat first. Most of the time it was Grandfather Madaq. Well, to be sure, he wasn’t my grandfather, but we were told to call him that out of respect. Grandfather Madaq was in his early 80s and childless. Actually, he never got married, which made most of the community – I mean those who were old enough to gossip and talk about certain stuff – either fear or pity him. It was also reported that he never lost his first baby teeth. Some kind of mystery was associated with that, but it was always beyond our youthful understanding. I personally liked Grandfather Madaq a lot, and that, I think, was why my mother always invited him to our house.
This particular Friday, though, Grandfather Madaq wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Perhaps, I thought, someone else had invited him over. He was such an affable and good-natured person that you couldn’t dislike him. This Friday, my mother told me to spread the prayer mat for a new visitor. When he sat down, he told me to come close to him and he started patting my hair. At first it didn’t feel strange or funny, but after some time, I thought something wasn’t right. His hand would fall on two different parts of my head at the same time, or that was what I thought was happening. I wasn’t brave enough to look up, as I didn’t want him to notice my unease. Then a cup of tea was brought to him, but for some strange reason my mother put the cup on the floor. That was very unlike my mother. At least, she never put the cup on the floor for Grandfather Madaq. Well, I thought, what’s in the grass will have to come out into the open. Why don’t I wait and see. It was rude, at least that was what we were told, to make a visitor uncomfortable with either our words or our actions. The cup lay just where my mother had put it for a long time, which also was unusual. Grandfather Madaq and even the other visitors, and believe me there were many of them, never would let their tea cool off for so long. Grandfather Madaq would grasp his cup with both hands, taking it directly from my mother’s hands, and then hold it up to his temples. I thought our guest this Friday must either have had a cup of tea earlier or wasn’t an avid tea drinker. Again, this was a strange thing to understand, because most people in my community, especially the elderly, drink many cups of tea each day with lots of sugar. Rag waa shaah, dumarna waa sheeko. (This was a kind of sententious saying concocted by males in the community. I don’t want to digress here, but in high school we had a classmate of mixed Somali and African-American parentage. She was funny, and with her American twang, she would say: “Rag waa shah, dumarna waa shaqo.” Her bold inscription appropriated the saying, and gave it a new twist: in her interpretation, men were still avid tea drinkers, but women were not weavers of idle stories but a hard-working and diligent lot. I liked her. Well, now that’s me talking, but I should leave my opinions out of my story. My views should remain my private views. Miss Block, my fifth grade teacher from Florida, once confronted me about this habit of mine: “Do your parenthetic sentences qualify or amplify your intentions?” Apparently, I could be lured away by them. But I’d better return to my story, lest I confuse both of us.) I was saying, to satisfy my curiosity, I was tempted a couple of times to remind our visitor of the cup of tea, but I thought perhaps my mother or even my father, that is, if he comes home from the house of his junior wife this early, would remind him of it. And then I thought perhaps Mother forgot to put the necessary spices in the tea. You know how old people are sometimes meticulous about what they drink. Perhaps, unable to smell cardamom, ginger, and cloves, he let his tea sit on the floor untasted so as not to “disturb” his host, who should have had the sense to understand that this was why he didn’t drink it in the first place.
About half an hour later, my mother brought the bun in a wooden kurbin dish with a wooden spoon. No sooner had she put it on the floor than our visitor held the wooden spoon in his right hand. So I was right. Awliya Allah! He couldn’t hold on to the spoon. Each time he tried to dip it into the bowl, he made a mess. I was really terrified to watch him struggle with the spoon. I didn’t keep my gaze on him, as that would invite my mother’s disapproval. And you wouldn’t want my mother to be mad at you! She might even hurl whatever is in her hands at you. Allah, how good she was at feinting with the left hand. Fear, however, didn’t make me stop looking at him with sidelong glances. I couldn’t understand why my mother didn’t help him eat his food, or even let me help him eat. I thought my mother didn’t like our visitor this Friday. But then why invite him in the first place?
When he ate what he could, my mother gave him some money and he left showering our house with blessings. He was sweating profusely, which was reasonable, I thought, after what he had gone through to feed himself.
Later in the day, in the shade of our verandah, my mother, sensing my curiosity, explained to me certain things about the visitor. As a young man, Aw Madag (that was his name) had been a very energetic person. His father Muddawi had a lot of children, both male and female. My mother’s mother was one of his many daughters. Aw Madag, like the rest of his brothers, looked after the camels and cattle of his father. But this visitor was different from the rest of his peers. As a young man he would always sneak off to the nearest town and visit the colonial courts in session. He, of course, didn’t understand the language they used, but he was greatly fascinated with the procedures he witnessed. Soon after that, he developed a proclivity for suing other people. The practice got out of hand after his father died. Rumor has it that one evening his mother tried to stop him from taking one of her relatives to court. Aw Madag was so involved with the case that he forgot who he was talking to. With one blow, he knocked his own mother onto the ground and proceeded with his case, which he won. It was said that on the third morning after that incident, he woke up with both his hands shaking. It was a form of paresis that never left him.
Desperate for money to live on, he became an even more compulsive suer. It was reported that one day his oldest son fell from a tree and broke his arm. The poor boy came crying to his father in excruciating pain. When he told him of his injury, Aw Madag asked the kid:
Who threw you from the tree?
No one.
Who was with you on the top of the tree?
No one.
Who was playing on the ground below?
No one.
Was there anyone in the vicinity?
No.
Could you see anyone looking in your direction, even from afar?
No.
Impatient with his son’s answer, Aw Madag shouted at him, “Couldn’t you even name one single person in this large community as the culprit? May you die, for death is what you deserve.”
After that incident, no one in the community wanted to have anything to do with him or his household. The neighborhood kids were warned by their parents to keep away from Aw Madag’s children. I guess his house became another Harlem, where kids from other neighborhoods weren’t allowed by their parents to venture or stray into.
Many people thought that Aw Madag would refrain from practicing this alien tradition once its propagators left this country for good. But it wasn’t to be. In fact, on the night of independence, it was rumored that he was scheming to renew a case in which the outgoing Italian Magistrate had ruled against him. As one of his neighbors once commented, “Ayax teg, eelna reeb,” or “Don’t be fooled by the migration of the locust. They leave their larvae behind.”
Five years ago, in our corner, while on vacation from my boarding school, I heard older men at a tea shop talking about what had become of Aw Madag. He died peacefully in his bed in the same dark corner of the city. But what intrigued the old men were his last words, addressed to his children. “You remember the brown calf that was run over by Soofakali’s truck … (hiccup) … I was to appear in court the day after tomorrow … (hiccup) … all the legal documents are in my white jacket … (hiccup) … if you are my legitimate sons, don’t let him off
the hook, fight to the last.”
From the Ashes of a Pigeon
For we went, more often than our shoes changed countries;
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was only injustice and no revolution.
Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born After”
Small hours of the night
fear
fear of brutes, thirsting
human blood
shrieking
howling
a strange scene
Africa
haunted by a specter
Ghost, harrowing the
tears sliding down
her cheeks, blurring
vision, reeling
unease
terror
panic!
Shivering, tremors
in her spinal cord
Rejecting me, she begins
retrospection of unknown depth
years past haunt her
rainy and dry seasons
her eyes close
And I
thousands of miles
from the center of agony
nursing my sorrow
In glasses of tequila
keep chanting
A lutta continua!
Si continua …!
till death and sleep
become one
the deserted in the sea
awaken to
a smog of uncertainty, across
sky once azure
what’s gone wrong?
who betrayed whom?
what midwife
can deliver
a sound Africa
a bush fire
eine Umwälzung?
Is revolution made
by those far from
Expectant Africa?
Anthem of the Nation
Without you life shall be life
Without you life will be death
Without you death should be supreme
Without you cairns would be anthills
Atmospheric Spirits
for Nuruddin Farah
In my hometown, the dead
Still exact revenge
From the grave.
The receptacles of the dead
Are the living dead
Who already straddle
Two worlds.
Do the parched remains of a scuttled idea
Refurbish a tale mangled by time
And reduced to ashes?
Let cinders tell our story.
HANS VAN DE WAARSENBURG
Translated from the Dutch by PETER BOREAS
HANS VAN DE WAARSENBURG published his first collection of poems, Gedichten (Poems), in 1965. His collection De vergrijzing (The graying) was awarded the prestigious Jan Campert Prize for Poetry in 1973. In 2004, he received the first Municipal Award of the Helmond Town Council for his entire work. He is the founder of the Maastricht International Poetry Nights.
For thirty-odd years PETER BOREAS taught English at secondary schools in the Netherlands; he now works as a freelance translator in the village of Banholt. His translations, which include work by Ilya Kaminsky, Amir Or, and a number of Dutch poets, have been published by the Maastricht International Poetry Nights, Ralph Liebe Verlag, Azul Press and the Bonnefant Press.
Over de velden
voor Seamus Heaney
Over de velden, voorbij het midden
Van het leven, de schimmen van de paden.
Het verlopen van het zure middaglicht.
Met een veer in de keel en zicht op
Traag tuimelen. Over de velden schrijdt
Het woord zo langzaam, dat de klank
Verdwijnt, oplost in de nevel boven
Stoppelvelden. En de wandelaar? Hij
Tuurt over de velden naar tanende
Horizon. Probeert uit zijn schaduw te
Stappen, terwijl het donkert rondom
Het hoofd. De doden ritselen tussen
Herfstbladeren of rusten op de takken
Van het verleden. Als er al een afscheid is,
Laat het dan nog duren en breng ‘hout
Naar de bossen en turf naar de venen’.
Across the Fields
for Seamus Heaney
Across the fields, well past the midst
Of life, the shadows of the paths.
The changing of the harsh afternoon light.
A feather in his throat and watching
Things tumbling slowly. Across the fields
The word strides, so slowly that sound
Is lost, dissolving in the midst over the
Stubble fields. And the walker? He
Peers across the fields at the fading
Horizon. Tries to step out of his
Shadow, while dusk falls around
His head. The dead rustle among
The autumn leaves or rest on the branches
Of the past. If there should be a farewell,
Let it wait a while and bring some ‘wood
To the forest and peat to the moors.’
Galway
We roken de rook in de kroegen, staarden
Naar de turfvuren, alsof alles zou blijven
Duren, er niets veranderd was. Woorden
Niet gezegd, verzwegen. In duinen, op
Stranden achtergebleven. Misschien, zei je
Zijn er reizen om alleen te gaan, leefden we
Zonder tijd of bestaan. Maar waar ook
De wegen waren, altijd meerden er schepen
En zocht ik in de havens naar je gezicht.
Want horizon is slechts een verte in altijd
Ander licht. Het dorst in je stem, zei je.
Kom hier en zet je lippen aan glas of gedicht.
Galway
We smelled the smoke in the pubs, gazed
At the peat fires, as if everything would
Last and nothing had changed. Words
Unspoken, suppressed, left in the dunes,
On beaches. Perhaps, you said,
There are journeys one should go alone,
If we lived without time or need. But
Wherever the roads went, ships arrived
And I looked for your face in every port.
Horizons are but a perspective, in an ever-
Changing light. Your voice is parched, you said.
Come here and put your lips to glass or verse.
Aran
We hadden ons rillend met dekens omhuld.
De hoeven van het paard ploften trouw,
Of de wegen zachte paden waren. Iedere
Stap omkeerbaar was. Zeehonden zwommen
Naar de horizon. Aardappelen lagen als
Eieren in het schaarse turf. Op je lippen
Proefde ik een zout, dat steen gedoogde.
En je me daarna aankeek, door mijn ogen
Terugkeek. Dit is het einde van een wereld,
zei je, waar oud nooit ouder wordt. Waar
Tijd een vliesdunne stilte is. Aran,
Droom met de geur van paardendekens.
Aran Islands
Shivering we huddled in blankets.
The horses’ hoofs thudded steadily,
As if the roads were soft paths, every
Step reversible. Seals were swimming
Towards the horizon. Potatoes lay like
Eggs in the scanty peat. On your lips
I tasted the salt that encrusts stone.
And then you looked at me, looked back
Through my eyes. This is the end of a world
You said, where the old can never age. Where
Time is silence, paper thin. Aran,
Dream with the smell of horse blankets.
BILL DODD
BILL DODD was born in Lancaster, UK. He lives in Italy and taught English Literature at Bologna and Siena universities for over forty years. In 2013 he took part in the inaugural Spier / Pirogue Collective poetry festival Dancing in Other Words. Dodd has published poems in various British magazin
es including Stand, The New Writer, Other Poetry, The Red Wheelbarrow and Weyfarers.
Imagining Africa
Rules of the Yorkshire moors:
be dour, prefer grey weathers,
expect damp clothes, bare greetings.
Wonderful while it lasted.
Is now, again, that it’s so far behind.
That black-green grass,
peewits, wheat-ears, curlews
practising melancholy.
And all that horizon round the moors
as if moors were everything
the hemisphere knew.
And going out walking
on the springy turf
discovering you were lighter
than yourself.
You were sure reality lived there