André Naffis-Sahely has been translating the multi-lingual work of Eritrean writer, poet, and refugee-rights activist Ribka Sibhatu for over a decade. Born in Asmara but in self-exile from Eritrea since 1982, Sibhatu has lived in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. First published in 1993, Sibhatu’s much-acclaimed Aulò! Canto poesia dall’Eritrea was revised, expanded, and re-released by Italian publisher Sinnos in 2009. Sibhatu is also the author of Il numero esatto delle stelle, a bilingual edition of Tigrinya folklore. She is the subject of a 2012 documentary film, Aulò: Roma Postcoloniale, holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from La Sapienza, and has been widely published in journals and anthologies around the world.
Poet, translator, editor, and critic, Naffis-Sahely has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles into English. And yet it has still taken Naffis-Sahely almost ten years to garner the funding needed to publish his full-length English translation of Aulò, Aulò, Aulò!, a collection of Sibhatu’s poems and retellings of Eritrean folk tales written in Tigrinya, Ahmaric, and Italian. Ahead of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Ribka Sibhatu Tour, a series of online events celebrating the publication of the book, I asked Naffis-Sahely about the significance of Eritrean sycamore trees, the long road to publication, and white gatekeeping in the publishing industry. André sought input from Sibhatu, and we conducted the following interview via email.
—Sarah Timmer Harvey, June 2020
Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): What was the first piece of Ribka’s writing you encountered? Do you remember your initial response, and how you were able to form a relationship with it?
André Naffis-Sahely (ANS): I first came across Sibhatu’s work on a blog sometime in 2009, which featured an account of one of Sibhatu’s visits to a public school somewhere in Italy. The post also reproduced a snapshot of her prose poem “Virginity,” an autobiographical account of how Sibhatu had once been forced to pretend her virginity had been violated to avoid entering an arranged marriage at nineteen, by which time she’d already spent a year in prison for refusing to wed an Ethiopian army officer. I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulist tone with an exposé’s sleuthy grittiness. The writing was lyrical, yet economical, and the author’s personality was sharply on display: uncompromising and questioning, but never devoid of empathy. Sibhatu’s work clearly operated on a variety of engrossing levels: first and foremost, perhaps, her opus is deeply inspired by her native country’s ancient literary traditions; secondly, it is a song of exile, one which has seen her live in Ethiopia, France, and now Italy. The truth is that translating Ribka Sibhatu also enabled me to interact with my Italian heritage in a way I’d never thought possible. Although I mostly grew up in the United Arab Emirates, my earliest memories of Italy include being chased down the street by neo-Nazis, all for walking hand in hand with my older brother, who—having taken more after our Iranian father—had proved too dark-skinned for their liking. My other memories aren’t too different from that point of view. Thus, translating Ribka not only introduced me to realities I hadn’t experienced or knew little about, but she also helped me reconnect with my own roots. Here was a black woman from Eritrea crafting wonderful, engrossing literature out of a language I thought was too resistant to be employed by anyone as outward-looking as her. Of course, Ribka, like many so-called postcolonial Italian writers, has not received as much attention as she deserves. But I think that will only change with time, albeit perhaps too slowly for many of us.
STH: You have written that you tend “to think of Aulò as Sibhatu’s Leaves of Grass.” Can you tell me why this is?
ANS: As Sibhatu enthusiastically told me during one of our earliest meetings in London in 2011, Eritrean literature has been handed down through generations in the form of aulòs, the Tigrinya word for “bardic songs,” which are performed at public and private celebrations and religious rites. Performers always begin their tales by invoking the word Şïnşïwai, which roughly means, “I have a story to tell,” to which the audience replies, Uāddëkoi şęlimai, “We’re ready, we’re listening.” Sibhatu learned her craft in the capital city of Asmara and her ancestral village of Himbirti, in the high plateaus above the capital, where these stories can be traced back for centuries, and she spent a great deal of time talking to village elders in order to transcribe their stories. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile, and it is a work that is continually evolving and growing, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is a deeply personal book, heavily fueled by its author’s biography and background, but it is also one of those rare books that is strong enough to carry a national sentiment—or spirit—on its shoulders.
STH: “Lampedusa” is a multi-narrative re-telling of the Lampedusa boat tragedy in which 368 people died, many of them Eritreans seeking asylum. How did you approach the translation? And can you share some of the insights into the background of this piece that you learned through your research and from speaking with Sibhatu about Lampedusa?
ANS: Sibhatu sent me her poem, “Lampedusa,” in March 2014, coincidentally not long after I finished editing Abu Bakr Kahal’s African Titanics (Darf, 2014), translated by Charis Bredin, an unjustly overlooked novel which chronicles the trials of a young Eritrean as he makes his perilous escape through the Horn, Sahara, and Mediterranean, to Europe. The incident described in Sibhatu’s “Lampedusa”—the sinking of a boat just off the island’s coast on October 3, 2013, whose survivors were mostly men—was only one of many such tragedies directly caused by the Khartoum Process. An EU initiative whereby certain African Union nations are provided financial incentives in exchange for restraining the exodus of migrants and refugees, the Khartoum Process has fueled a highly-profitable network of human trafficking, abuse, and slavery, leaving some of the world’s most vulnerable people to be preyed upon by the militias, corrupt security forces, smugglers, and criminals of all stripes, all in the name of keeping Fortress Europe “safe”. Sibhatu visited Lampedusa six months after the shipwreck and spoke to some of the tragedy’s survivors, an experience that deeply influenced her process. As such, acquainting myself with that reality was an indispensable component of my efforts. Sibhatu holds a Ph.D. in communication studies and her published thesis was entitled Invisible Citizens: Representations of Immigrants in the Italian Media. As such, I thought it appropriate to emphasize the journalistic tone of her account. It‘s perhaps one of Sibhatu’s most militant poems and there’s a reason for that.
Sibhatu would tell you that she wrote “Lampedusa” to encourage Italians to reflect upon a reality they have willfully ignored for far too long. She’s been consistent about this. On May 10, 2016, she delivered a speech before the Italian parliament—on the state of Eritrea and the dictatorship’s direct responsibility for increasing the tide of refugees fleeing the country—and concluded with the following dire prediction:
“Thanks to the Khartoum Process, you have created a monster. You mustn’t be surprised if one day you’ll have to reckon with Eritrean terrorists. […] Following debates held at the UN, I did not see the Italian delegation speak of Eritrea. Nobody talks about any of this in Italy. After the death of all those Eritreans in Lampedusa, the Eritrean ambassador was invited to attend the funerals. […] It was a kick in the teeth to the dead, to the living, and to us all. There are nine of us women here. As a woman, and in the name of our countries’ shared histories, I ask you all to join forces to guarantee the freedom of this oppressed nation.”
Unfortunately, however, Sibhatu’s words proved entirely prophetic. On April 25, 2020, The Old Bailey jailed two UK-based Eritrean Daesh supporters “for sending thousands of pounds to jihadis,” one of many indicators pointing to rising extremism among Eritreans both at home and abroad. I would like to underscore the fact that Sibhatu referred to Italy’s colonial crimes in Eritrea as constituting a “shared history.” The humanity and humility inherent in that statement is absolutely disarming. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Italians—and their governmental institutions—have not repaid her, or her people, in kind; even worse, they see no need to. Readers interested in how the poem was initially received in its English translation should read the excellent afterword Sasha Dugdale wrote for Aulò, Aulò, Aulò!. Sasha’s been one of Ribka’s greatest supporters in the UK, and she published ‘Lampedusa’ in the Spring 2016 issue of Modern Poetry In Translation.
STH: The sycamore tree is a recurring image in Sibhatu’s writing. Can you speak to its significance?
ANS: The sycamore is the ultimate embodiment of indigenous Eritrean democracy. According to traditions established several centuries ago by communities living in the country’s highlands, elected village elders would meet and discuss tribal laws under the shade of a sycamore tree especially planted for that purpose on public land. Thus, the area beneath its canopy served as a parliament, a court of law, a community center, and a venue for literary performances, providing nearby villages with a civic focal point comparable to the Roman forum, or Greek agorá. It was a sacred space whose worthiness and memory have been brutally extirpated by Isaias Afwerki’s tyrannical regime over the past quarter-century. The sycamore appears in many poems in Aulò, Aulò, Aulò! as both a tribute to this glorious history, as well as a call to action against all dictatorships. This is the background to the poem “To the Sycamore,” which Sibhatu wrote in 1997 in the wake of Afwerki’s refusal to implement a constitution approved by popular referendum, and his cancelling of all future elections. While perennially ignored by much of the Western media, Afwerki’s rule has turned Eritrea into the world’s fastest emptying nation, the effects of which Sibhatu has witnessed in several capacities, not just as one of the diaspora’s leading intellectuals, but as an activist who has devoted a great deal of her life to helping exiles less fortunate than her, despite the fact she has suffered a great deal of hardship herself. In this light, it is easy to see why Sibhatu describes the sycamore as “the bard of a mysterious past” in her poem “The Oasis.” Following Afwerki’s stifling of the country’s academic and literary establishments, Eritrea’s vast corpus of historical, legal, and literary traditions is now more endangered than ever before, especially since so much of it exists purely in oral form. As such, the sycamore is less of a running motif than it is an attempt to transcribe part of that tradition before it wholly vanishes, taking its “ancestral treasures” with it, as Sibhatu wrote in “Mother Tongue.”
STH: It took you over a decade of submitting grant applications and advocating for Sibhatu’s work to secure funding for Aulò, Aulò, Aulò! Let’s talk about that…
ANS: I applied for grants to work on Sibhatu’s poetry in 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2018, but only received one in 2020, despite the fact I always used the same application. I’ll leave your readers to consider why that might have been the case. I used the same application because I knew there was nothing wrong with the work itself. As if that wasn’t enough, most publishers felt absolutely comfortable in denigrating Sibhatu’s work in their rejections even though they never did so with other authors. It certainly doesn’t help that many arts organizations and translation bodies do little except reinforce their own prejudices. Many of them pocket large grants to increase “inclusivity”—although that never seems to involve hiring someone who doesn’t look like them.
The Poetry Book Society, which in the UK selects four translations a year as their seasonal choices, increasing sales and visibility, is a good example of this: five employees, all white. Their translation choices have also been entirely white: between 2016 and 2020, during which time there were sixteen spots up for grabs, they gave a non-European book that distinction only once, to Yang Lian’s Narrative Poem (Bloodaxe) in the summer of 2017. I’m a huge admirer of Yang Lian’s, and I’ve reviewed his work, but Lian has been a firm member of London’s literary life since the 1990s. Thus, for Lian to be the PBS’s only non-white choice in over four years is indicative of their unwillingness to look beyond their noses. When I confronted the PBS about this, they laid the blame firmly at publishers’ feet, claiming they weren’t sent enough books by non-white authors, but that’s just not true.
Thanks to research I carried out independently, I was able to see that in recent years, each time the PBS were presented a choice between a white translation and a non-white one, they always opted for the white one, even when the books were from the same press! As such, organizations like the PBS have not accidentally ‘overlooked’ works by non-European writers and translators, they have instead willfully excluded them even when presented with the choice. Of course, if you criticize them, as I have, your words are often interpreted as personal attacks, even though I don’t know the people that work there. Diversity should mean more than the color of the faces on your Twitter feed. Let these organizations address the real issue: they decide what to highlight based on what they think white middle-class audiences want, which ensures the economic survival of their white employees. That is the compass that keeps publishers and arts bodies anchored to their true north: a whiteness that is utterly complacent with the status quo.
STH: Indeed, it’s disappointing that the translation community largely seems to have addressed this issue in the past few months by sharing or citing John Keene’s brilliant essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness.” Keene’s essay is essential reading, but the fact that it appears to be some of the only writing on this topic that is regularly cited and uplifted is a clear illustration of the problem. What are the immediate changes you would like to see in the publishing industry?
ANS: Rachel Long recently said that black women are “invisible but also hypervisible when they need you to be,” and I think that’s exactly right. We discussed who “they” are in the previous question. I think what “they” need to do is also abundantly clear: they should appoint more BIPOC to positions of actual authority, examine how their practices can positively impact certain communities, and always be open to re-examining their record. Instead, all I see them doing—especially in tense political moments such as these—is virtue-signaling, as they tremble in fear of being “called out” for claims which they’ll then immediately deny, regardless of their validity. I’m glad you brought up John Keene’s “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” whose reception and influence was somewhat similar to that “bestowed” on Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How To Write About Africa,” meaning that as far as white mainstream literary culture was concerned, this was a piece one retweeted, but did not put into practice. I think some writing about Africa has actually gotten worse since Wainaina’s piece. You’re correct: it is a clear illustration of the problem, and I think we’ve all seen that paying lip service to certain issues only means they keep resurfacing time and again. It’s admittedly very difficult to criticize certain institutions, especially when you depend on them financially, and I’m privileged to be able to do so. I’ve seen the “soft” racist practices of white mainstream publishing and arts bodies make a mockery of the very ideals they appear to uphold on paper, and I’m freer now to say these things because I don’t actively translate like I used to and as such feel that “my authors” are less exposed. Given my criticisms of others, it’s only fair to praise the good ones: Emma Cleave and Will Forrester at English PEN, Erica Jarnes and Ed Doegar at the Poetry Translation Centre, the formidable Daniel Hahn, Sasha Dugdale, and Clare Pollard at Modern Poetry In Translation, and of course, Asymptote, to name only a few. It’s not about getting it perfect every single time, it’s about realizing that real change is needed and then making some effort to carry it out.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including works by Abdellatif Laâbi, Rashid Boudjedra, Alessandro Spina, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Frankétienne, and Ribka Sibhatu.
Sarah Timmer Harvey is a writer and translator currently based in New York. Sarah holds an MFA in writing and translation from Columbia University and, most recently, Sarah’s work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Gulf Coast Journal, and Cagibi.
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