An Anthology of Somali Poetry Tr. B. W. Andrzejweski with Sheila Andrzejweski

“Till the middle years of the 20th century it remained an entirely oral art, for only in 1972 was an official system of writing established, but even today the spoken word remains supreme.” This is how professor B.W. Andrezejwski opens An Anthology of Somali Poetry, co-translated with his wife Sheila Andrezejwski. The introduction is a metonym of the anthology itself: an earnest and admirable foray into an underdiscussed country’s poetic history limited by the author’s lack of access to women poets (“their poetry seldom reached the public forum”), the broad cultural gulf between Somali oral tradition and western written tradition (these poems were nameless before Andrezejwski), and ultimately a certain arbitrariness in the selection based on “which I think will have universal human appeal.” It’s not entirely clear what “universal” here would means that might make Somali poetry distinct from the commonly taught and equally foreign Iliad; it’s the qualification of a linguist on his field, not a poet on an art. The scansion “reminiscent of that in Classical Greek” combined with sustaining alliteration (explained in the helpful Appendix III) is a major contribution of Somalia to poetry, and it feels a little odd to say the limits of publication are the boundaries of the universal. Classical Greek is an apt comparison though. An Anthology of Somali Poetry feels like a stopgap — limited, genuine, sufficient — for a tradition waiting for waiting for its first totalistic translation, its George Chapman.

To the ends of universal aspiration, it’s odd to include Faarax Afcad and Qawdhan Ducaale’s “Camel-Rustling” poems. Not because they’re incomprehensible or bad, for they are farces on recognizable masculine vanity. As Afcad’s concludes his poem, “O what numbers of men I have killed/For the sake of those beasts of the excellent udders.” The association of heroic violence with petty theft for milk (not even milk! Just the udders!) captures the play-acting quality of a type of masculinity which Andrezejwski highlights with his note stating these poems arose from “an old custom among poets of imitating, in jest, the boasts of vainglorious warriors.” They’re  exemplary in that the full heft of the joke is a little lost on a society removed from pastoralism, parody requiring familiarity with the parodied — much is lost with Barbara Billingsley’s jive speak in Airplane without knowing she played the archetypal mother from Leave It To Beaver. And while there’s some context provided preceding them (Raage Ugaas displays this manliness in the rap battle-esque “Riposte to a Young Opponent in a Poetic Dual”), there’s an artlessness to the delivery of their work on par with the awkward translation of the rhythms in “of those beasts of the excellent udders.” They’re the most fun, lighthearted, buoyant poems here and it leads me to wonder where levity resides in Andrezejwski’s universal?

Perhaps there’s less space for levity in the focus of An Anthology of Somali Poetry: Over a third (36 pages) revolves around Maxamed Cabdille Xasan, the leader of the extremely serious Sufi, anti-colonial, nationalist movement who waged war against British, Italian, and Ethiopian forces from 1899 to 1920. There’s a directedness, a concreteness, in Xasan that makes him a perfect centerpiece to the collection. Contrast a trope he and Magtymguly, the Turkmen national poet I wrote about last month, share. “Men who did not know the will of the Lord/poured away the contentment I enjoyed” Xasan writes in “A Land of Drought”; “Eslim and Baba Salman ordered a brave man,/they poured a cup of liquid, which made me suffer” Magtymguly writes in ““Wake Up” — They Said.” What Xasan drains of metaphysics he transforms into a political statement of being driven to “grinding want” with an aesthetic contrast between contentment and wealth as a liquid “poured away” during drought. To that end, it’s worth hovering over a portion of Xasan’s poem “A Terrible Journey.” Here we get a taste of the Somali oral alliterative flair we otherwise won’t see elsewhere in the anthology, telling a journey worthy of Wordsworth’s meandering in The Preludes:

There was a thicket of xagar trees,

There were faleefan and qurax, and the cutting jinow,

The close-growing galool, and the sarmaan

With its pods that whistle in the wind,

The swinging and recoiling jimbac,

The intertwining jiiq trees,

The jiic shrub and the ssiq wild fig,

The stinging jillab nettles,

The shriveled jowdheer gum tree,

Jagged branches inflicting grievous pain,

The jirme with its thorns,

The jiiqjiiq with its prickles,

The jeerin with the yooco flame tree,

The qaroon, the jaaful and the seerin,

And tree-stumps everywhere along the path I trod.

There’s a political content to form. “Somalis identify a poem by their alliterative sound” is what  Andrezejwski says in the introduction and which here, this baleful mouthful of js, esses, ens, els,  becomes copyright and the physicalizing of experience; Xasan, despite the walls of the language, steps a visible foot into English. Why only in Xasan when this is a technique Andrezejwski says is typical of the tradition? I suspect Andrezejwski’s passion is the difference, but I cannot know.

It's difficult to fully, briefly capture a collection that’s forced to do so much work. As of writing this review it remains the sole anthology of translated poetry for a country of 20 million, edited by two foreigners to the country 33 years ago whose expertise is the source language and not the craft of poetry, requiring a depth of explanation to foreign readers necessarily limiting the pool of selectable poems, and which ultimately slices away 50% of the population due to constraints on gender. It has an obvious effect on quality — the above unnatural sounding “of those beasts of the excellent udders” — but equally a monotonizing effect. There’s greatness and there’s a lot of the same, strangely burdened by masculinity; poetizing each other’s wimpiness, poetizing the poetizing of manliness, poetizing manliness as a revolutionary virtue, poetizing Byronic pining in Climi Bowndheri, poetizing manliness as revenge against wounded manly pride in Maxamed Ibrahim’s (Hadrawi’s) disturbingly incel-ish homage to Bowndheri. “Inside my breast she tick-tocks to me like a watch” Bowndheri vainly writes a woman as a constant reference for himself in “A Vision,” decades later Ibrahim writing in a eulogy for him, “If they had no such strong protection/who would ever trouble about them?” Women, of course, only being worth the trouble because it proves your warrior qualities to fight them — where are the poets mocking the boasts of such vainglorious warriors? And where is George Chapman?

Favorite Poems:

“Old Age”

“Camel-Rustling 1”

“A Fine War Horse”

“A Terrible Journey”

“A Hoopoe Rebuked”

“A Vain Love”

“Where True Profit Lies”

“The Serpent”

“Bitter and Sweet”

“At The Grave of Climi Bowndheri”

Modern Sudanese Poetry Tr. Adil Babikir

In an interview with Sudanow Magazine, Sudanese prose poet Mahgoub Kbalo said that “I think that progress is compulsive and man is doomed to freedom and development no matter how powerful the oppressor is.” This sort of ruthless, haunting optimism seems ever-present nowadays, if not only for a marked lack of obvious comforts. It fits Sudan, a country currently torn apart by its second civil war this century, each a consequence of dooming freedoms — the First and Second civil wars about what level of independence South Sudan had from Sudan following British withdrawal, and this recent war about who will govern Sudan after Omar Al-Bashir’s ouster in 2019. “It is no wonder that the theme of war has featured heavily in post-independence Sudanese poetry,” Adil Babikir writes in his introduction to Modern Sudanese Poetry. One of my favorite anthologies, Written in the Dark, poetry from the Siege of Leningrad, shares such themes; but it’s not war that distinguishes these poems. Here, as Babikir calls it, is a “limited cross section of the colossal mass of poetry” from which a multiverse sprawls out its numerous potential and actualized traditions. From Babikir’s guided tour of the country’s poetics to a chronological arrangement of the poets themselves, Modern Sudanese Poetry plays the role of the definitive English language collection of the developments actual and to-be realized in Sudan. Doomed to freedom and development indeed.

Kbalo stands directly in the middle, a weathervane of the Modernist. “Deng Malo: A Biography” is perhaps a classic poem in that conceptualization, bathed in angst over historical development’s roughshod run over present life. The titular Deng Malo is “from the bike age” and displaces his fantasies of a better life through dreams of “girls the color of his girlfriend" while singing about a Cockaigne of “a hill of bread/a lake of stew.” Kbalo paints this erratic, homely character as embodying time and space: “under a hat the color of Tuesdays, the color of a desolate printing press” and “his snoring decorates the song with the route of a dusting plane roaming the morning sky.” The longest lines of the poem, fittingly, as they stretch Deng Malo as a masquerade of the world. You can see the  ancestors of this philosophical disposition, albeit less surreal, in Muhammad Abdul-Hai’s “The Signs Ode,” a centipedal array of godly signs summed up in the lines “an ark, pregnant with all our weaknesses/and longing for our old new land.” You can find descendants of this disposition, transformed over time into a more casual, tragic tone of prose poetry, in Nylawo Ayul’s “On The Bank of River Sobat” where:

The water’s sadness was pink

The decomposed fish

…

And yeah—the tall stalks of grass

They die when elephants choose them as battleground

The transitional “and yeah” almost dismisses the violence of war as an obviousness not worth mentioning, following the seam from the symbology of bloodied water to the actual, real grass destroyed in war.

While these are my own favorite themes, they’re not the only— or most important — for Sudan. With constant civil war comes, in complement, innovations on unity. As Babikir notes, the most influential innovation was from Muhammad el-Mahdi el-Magzoub, the godfather of what would be formalized as “the Jungle and the Desert current” school, “a group of young poets [trying] to probe a way out of the polarization between Arabism and Africanism.” These poems express the tensions of belonging in the varied ways of any poetic movement. El-Magzoub’s singular poem in Modern Sudanese Poetry, “Wedding Parade,” is an exemplar. An epithalamium of sorts, the poet writes of longing “for my innocent village,/that knows nothing about my sufferings/here in this alien city,” while observing one woman, “a pigeon stepped forward, uncovered her hair/and spread wings and chest,/exposing gleaming scars on the cheeks.” Amidst all this we never see the betrothed. Or, rather, the celebrated marriage is between the poet and his scarred homeland. All poems in this exiling fracture, literally and figuratively, possess this naturalized tragedy. “I shall lie like water on the Nile’s body;/like the sun over my homeland’s fields” (Mohammed El-Fayturi); “waiting for a cheerful morning,/with promises laden,/to land like a turban,/on the shoulder of the homeland” (Mahjoub Sharif); “I was attacked by a strong craving,/for a drop of my homeland's nectar,/and a gnawing urge for running away” (Rugaia Warrag).

Which highlights the trade-off of building the book as a montage of themes, conventions, tropes, and traditions: Babikir emphasizes the Jungle and the Desert current as a central pillar of Sudan’s literary history, yet the decision to leave out examples of what this tradition was reacting to gives it the quality of just another thing. This likely would have been remedied by the inclusion of Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, had they been able to get permission. Babikir mourns they couldn’t for this anthology. Based on the snippet of his works he provides, they would have  highlighted the continuity between the regional/global traditions (Arabic metrical verse, African themes, Modernism) and the distinctly Sudanese traditions (the Jungle and the Desert current, the development of new scansions and ultimately prose verse). That’s not an avoidable issue, sadly, although its mitigated by the inclusion of four of Mohammed El-Makki Ibrahim’s poems. “One of the pioneers of the school,” he entirely captures the loving revolutionary spirit of it in “A Drib of your Nectar,” an ode to his girlfriend, “partly a Negro you are./Partly an Arab—for sure”:

your color dissolved in my color and genes;

I am dissolved in you.

So blend me,

with the graves of tropical flowers,

with the tearful times,

and ages of slavery.

It’s a utopian vision, the dissolution of self, of identity markers, into love itself. It’s a violent act, recognized by the accompanying imagery of “graves” and “tearful times” and “slavery,” and yet distinct from the lived violence of Sudanese history in that it is the destruction of union, where selves are stretched over the world. The dream of Deng Malo continues. This fireball of branches belongs to the same tree growing from the same root, doomed to freedom and development.

Favorite Poems:

“A Poet”

“Dig No Grave For Me”

“An Afro-Asian Song”

“The Exile and the Kingdom”

“The Signs Ode”

“The Pre-Eruption Silence”

“Deng Malo: A Biography”

“Uncle Abdur Raheem”

“Under Abundant Shades”

“On the Bank of River Sobat”"