farewell from Lampedusa
for Cal
and, out of silence
this grief is born:
heavy
long
deep.
and the breath turns flesh
hatched out of the heat at the bottom of the sigh.
and the heart became stone,
Ruby
and pushed the breath out of this place
in tensed rhythms:
systole
systole
silence!
a music gushed from the bottom of the sigh
vivid
powerful
Jazz!
and filled this room
clinging to the life of a red glowing light,
it, it alternates with the darkness of the room.
and this music filled the stone
and the stone becomes heart
Sapphire
and carries the breath in rhythms aspirated
diastole
Jazz
coco Jazz
coco choco Jazz dressed with raisins!
the flop-flop-flop of the waves rejoin me
in this world of dreams
sudden
the freshness of the waters swallowed me
and i shiver out of cold
overwhelmed by the souvenirs of a new
life ambushed in my fists.
i re-see
at present
the brightness, though out-of-the-world, of your
smile
the charm in your
eyes
and my heart rises into waves of blood and of sighs
of doubts and of smiles
overcome by these rhythms:
systole
systole
Jazz!
diastole
systole
Jazz with the aromas of La Piedra!
farewell, my
love
my
beloved,
a life torn away from a smile.
the heart becomes stone
and keeps the grief inside its heart
along the coasts of
Lampedusa,
the absence of you with it.
letter xv: to the spokesperson of parliament
they eat
before the curfew
the legs of cockroaches
covered with droppings
they go
behind the curfew
to expropriate the tombs of the neighbors
too concerned about their own past. at least
they, the neighbors,
can proudly beat their chest for having
a roof over their bodies
still dripping of maggots and juices.
here,
thousands of their like
litter our eyes
their dreams smashed up in the skull
without any shelter
nor mortuary lands
to rest sorrows and hopes.
they walk
ahead of bullets
looking for afterlife motherlands
one day
hopefully
the eyes of the world
will come and count/recount their fate
for the sake of fairness
in the sharing
of Phosphate
of Oil
of Diamonds
and of national disgrace.
from Winds from Yonderheart
Patron Henekou
translated from the French by Patron Henekou
Listen to "farewell from Lampedusa" read in the original French by the poet:
Though I write creatively in both English and French, and speak and understand a couple of West African languages, I have only contemplated translation loosely, be it my own work or that of other writers. I understand this is a result of the rigid linguistic spaces existing within me, where English, French, and Ewe (my native language) resist harmonious cohabitation. Therefore, crossing the barriers of these languages by means of translation has been as tedious and frustrating as crossing the actual borders between Togo and Ghana, for example. This situation changed when I was invited by the African Poetry Book Fund to be featured in “Celebrating African Poetry,” hosted by Kwame Dawes, in the framework of the National Poetry Month program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. During this event, I read translations of poems taken from my book Souffles d’outre-cœur and from award-winning Ivorian poet Josue Guebo’s Think of Lampedusa translated by Todd Fredson and published in the APB Series. This was the occasion I seriously considered the translation of my own works as a wonderful moment of conversation between texts, but also as a political decision to transgress borders present in my mind due to the colonial past of Ghana (an anglophone country) and Togo (a francophone country), the two West African countries in which I have spent the major part of my life. The poems featured here are taken from the first part of Souffles d’outre-cœur which addresses the 2013 shipwreck in which 366 immigrants of African origin died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Patron Henekou is a poet and playwright, and co-organizer of the Festival of Literature and Arts (FesLArts) at University of Lomé, Togo. He writes in French and English, and translates. His poems have appeared in anthologies such as Palmes pour le Togo, Arbolarium: Antología poética de los cinco continentes, and Best “New” African Poets 2017 Anthology, and in poetry journals such as AFROpoésie, Revue des Citoyens des Lettres, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and Kalahari Review. His published works include a play in English, Dovlo, or A Worthless Sweat (2015), a poetry book in French entitled Souffles d’outre-cœur (2017), and a poetry chapbook Souffles & faces (2018). Henekou was a Langston Hughes Fellow at the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
