Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

This summer, at an artist retreat in Italy, I took morning walks with new friends. We hailed from all parts of the globe. One does large scale photographs, another does sound installation, another a painter, a filmmaker, a composer, and, like me, a poet – some of us Americans, one of us from Ukraine, another from Palestine, another from the Philippines. Through fields of bright red poppies, our talk mostly covered our projects, the joys of making art, the fine balance of caring for elders and children while tending to our practices. Eventually, a few began to testify to political realities as the backdrop to their artmaking.

An Iranian friend shared her story about how she and her family fled war in the 80s. My father decided to stay through the first wave of attacks, she said; life went on but with fighting around us. Fear was in abundance; food was not, she said. Her father made a different choice when a neighboring country invaded again. They were able to escape through cunning and influence. Her work powerfully addresses displacement and complicates notions of home.

For stateless people, writing poems, taking pictures, composing songs is precarious, but making art happens, nonetheless. Often, it is a counter insistence of one’s presence on earth. Today’s poem is a humanizing statement of profound sorrow borne of conflict and exile.

from “Elegy for the Times”
by Adonis, translated by Robyn Creswell

     Trucks of exile
     cross the borders
     through songs of exile
     and sighing flames.

     The wind is against us and the ash of war covers the earth. We see our spirit flash 
on a razor blade, a helmet’s curve. The brackish springs of autumn salt our wounds.
     Doom drags at history’s face—our history needled with terror, a meadow of wild 
thorns.
     In what salt rivers will we wash this story, stale with the smell of old maids and 
widows back from the hajj, our history stained with the sweat of dervishes’ loins, its 
springtime a feast for locusts?
     Night thickens and a new day crawls forth over dead sparrows. The door rattles 
but doesn’t open. We cry out and dream of weeping and the eyes have no tears.
     My country is a woman in heat, a bridge of lusts. Mercenaries cross her, applauded 
by the massing sands. From distant balconies we see what there is to see: animals 
slaughtered on the graves of children; smoking censers for holy saints; the black rock of 
tombstones. The fields are full of bones and vultures. The heroic statues soft cadavers.
     So we go, chests bared to the sea. Old laments sleep under our tongues and our 
words have no heirs. 
     We reach out for alien islands, scenting a virgin strangeness in the sea’s abyss. We 
hear the sorrowful moan of our ships at port. Sorrow: a new moon rising, evil in its 
infancy. Rivers issue into the dead sea, where the night births weddings of sea scum and 
sand, locusts and sand.
     So we go and fear scythes us down, crying out on muddy slopes. The earth bleeds 
all around us. The sea is a green wall. 

"from 'Elegy for the Times'" by Adonis, translated by Robyn Creswell. Used by permission of the translator.