I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel, Poetry Translation Centre, 2023
In 1986, just one year before the poet Mona Kareem was born, the stateless Arab population of Kuwait, who had been denied citizenship when Kuwait declared its independence in 1961, became categorized as illegal residents. Despite enjoying relatively equal status to Kuwaiti nationals until then, approximately 250,000 people were stripped of their access to free education, housing, and healthcare. Following the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent war of 1991, many of the Bidoon community, including Kareem’s mother’s family, were expelled from their positions or deported outside of Kuwait, accused of collaborating with the enemy. Forced to flee their homes, they became internal refugees when they arrived at Kuwait’s border with Iraq. For Kareem, memories of such scenes from childhood bleed into the present moment, where she is exiled in the US and denied the opportunity to visit the country in which she was born, as well as the members of her family who still reside there. I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel, is a curated collection of poems covering twenty years of Kareem’s poetry, both previously published and new. It is a collection marred by exile, war, and the fraught relationships and ruins they leave in their wake.
Kareem’s poems are replete with unique images—they paint scenes in language that mirror the chaos of memory, the fragmentation of exile, and the mutilation of war. As Elkamel points out in her introduction, it seems that everything in Kareem’s poems has a body—one that bears the brunt of individual and collective traumas. At the same time, the poet is at a loss regarding what to do with her own body, as she tells us in her poem “My Body, My Vehicle” (Jasadī Markabatī). Her vehicle of a body is not one she can park or abandon just anywhere, for
When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
the glossy ceramic floors
and when I go to the beach
she sinks into the sandsmall and dark, completed and broke
her windows are an almanac of winds
and her voice falters at rush hour.
The comparison she makes between her body and a mangled car whose owner is looking to fix up with spare parts from the junkyard couples with the metallic crescent in her poem “Remains” and the electronic pigeons that overthrow their animal originals in “Cigarette of Light”, which in turn recall the ship that “asphyxiates/the ocean’s larynx” in her poem “Perdition.” An industrial and mechanical landscape full of stray bullets, shrapnel, and tonnes of dust swallows the original one—pocketing it, as Kareem says darkness does with light, before going on its way; even the trees have their canopies and leaves ripped asunder by the truth and the Autumn that has “inhabited” the poet her entire life. As in the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s poem “Weapons and Children” (al-Asliḥa wal-Aṭfāl), natural landscapes get written over with “steel/bullets/bullets/bullets/steel” until the air itself becomes lead and the roads themselves become old steel. In Kareem’s poems, there is a renewed sense of displacement amid the debris of modern warfare and weapons; cities “die every day” within them.
But while Kareem is attuned to the ruptures that have riven the urban landscape, the natural world offers no refuge—itself a place of rupture. Perhaps what she wants us to recognize is that to a stateless poet in Kuwait, even the country’s natural landscape take on a menacing character. It is in the desert “of life” that Kareem’s mother first buries her, and the mother’s womb is the first desert a child emerges from before he enters another. The water in Kareem’s poems offers no reprieve either. In one poem, water is the poet’s grandmother’s tears, a wailing she wishes to dive into; in another, it is a river that drowns itself, and in another, “the river saunters all night/mourning the fishermen’ departure.”
Insomnia and paranoia threaten to unravel these poems’ characters—every other body (human or not) is on the verge of falling or flinging themselves to their deaths, off balconies, from the abyss of the poet’s eyes or her heart. Martyrdom, suicide, and murder are sometimes indistinguishable; in the Arabic, Kareem calls each of these rushes into oblivion intiḥār, but Elkamel distinguishes between them, calling our attention to the lack of agency that burdens the poems’ characters (human or otherwise). The translation does this throughout the collection—tying together meanings scattered throughout different stanzas and poems to make them clear to a reader of another language. My favorite example of this is from the poem titled “Cities Dying Everyday”:
I will not fold these maps;
It might dent my country’s nose,
Prompting a raid on all our pockets
for emergency plastic surgery.
Instead of translating literally Kareem’s “it might hurt my country’s nose,” she makes the choice to use “dent,” which carries the image of folding maps brilliantly into the next line of the English. In the second half of the stanza, too, she opts for “on all our pockets” instead of something more literal like “the people’s money”—perhaps to complement the language of Kareem’s other verses, one that honors the collective and draws connections between all the wars which Asia, “for the millionth time,” dons as a coat. Here too, it seems that Kareem is in conversation with Sayyab’s “Weapons and Children”—a poem published in 1954 that draws on the varied and connected struggles for liberation throughout the global south, struggles that are thwarted time and time again:
Who are all these bullets for?
for Korea’s wretched children
the starving workers in Marseille,
the sons of Baghdad and all the restIf ever they hope for salvation:
Iron
Bullets
Bullets
Bullets
Iron
Lethargy and fatigue grope through the dark landscapes of these poems to find their victims, and light is so elusive our poet tries to hang it near her windows with a hammer and nails—but it “departs this contrarian horizon,” nonetheless.
While the entire collection brims with such images, in “Cosmic Haemorrhage,” the poet puts everything out on the table for her readers. The numbers that separate each stanza (forty-six in total) allow the reader to experience a swirl into and out of an absurdist and surreal array of scenes. Are these scenes, these stanzas, dreams, memories, or prophecies? Or perhaps they are metaphors, what ElKamel refers to in her introduction as Kareem’s “relentless ruptures” of meanings—ruptures that leave powerful scars and silences, imparting upon the reader a vivid sense of the whiplash born of war and exile. For it is as Kareem says: that “Exile disrupts all your senses, and it is a disruption you will not recover from.”
Ruwa Alhayek is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, studying Arabic poetry and translation in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. She received her MFA from the New School in nonfiction, and is currently a social media manager at Asymptote.
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