Poetry

Occupation 1943

by Saadi Youssef

We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot

We boys, the neighborhood’s naked

We boys of stomachs bloated from eating mud

We boys of teeth porous from eating dates and pumpkin rind

We boys will line up from Hassan al-Basri’s mausoleum to the Ashar River’s source

to meet you in the morning waving green palm fronds

We will cry out: Long Live

We will cry out: Live to Eternity

And we will hear the music of Scottish bagpipes, gladly

Sometimes we will laugh at an Indian soldier’s beard

but fear will merge with our laughs, and dispute them

We cry out: Long Live

We cry out: Live to Eternity

and reach our hands toward you: Give us bread

We the hungry, starving since our birth in this village

Give us meat, chewing gum, cans, and fish

Give us, so no mother expels her child

so that we do not eat mud and sleep

We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot

do not know from where you had come

or why you had come

or why we cry out: Long Live

...............................

And now we ask: will you stay long?

And will we go on reaching our hands toward you?

London, December 3, 2002

Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

Translator Notes:
The date of this poem’s composition will no doubt help us contextualize it. Just as Bush Jr’s speechwriters were about to include the misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s purchase of uranium from Niger in the 2003 State of the Union address, Saadi Youssef sat down in his tiny apartment on the outer outskirts of London to write this poem.

“Occupation, 1943” is from Al-Khatwa Al-Khamisa (The Fifth Step), Saadi’s latest collection published by Dar al-Madaa of Damascus. The fifth step suggests not Saadi’s latest relocation, for he has moved around the world a great deal, but the fifth stage of his writing career. Now in his seventies, he’s lived in London since 1998, when he gained political asylum there. I have not asked Saadi about the title of the book, not because he does not provide answers, but because he allows his questioners to believe whatever conjectures led them to ask their questions in the first place. Hence, the fifth step suggests a major phase in his life, characterized by stability, solitude, and a recurring sense of exhilaration caused by observations of nature that have opened him up, allowing him to find love again, and to remember precisely and comprehensively.

Yet the candor in Saadi’s poems does not necessarily add up to autobiography. The dates and locations set at the bottom of his poems, and the poems themselves, are the only parts of himself that he is willing to give.

The images of “Occupation, 1943” resemble those in a longer poem titled “Enemies” written in 1977 that chronicles a childhood during an unnamed political crisis. In the poem before us, the news of a planned war on his country and the poet’s intense recollection intersect and give us a moment in the past that speaks the poet’s, and our, present situation. The circularity of the forces of power and history can corner us into moments of regression as we face an old helplessness. Before the poet looms the long tunnel of a dark future which so terribly resembles the past, and through which he and we seem fated to pass. The return to the past has the comfortable aspect of an innocence retrieved, but with it comes a terrible vision, for which our only defense is a defense of our innocence.

—K.M.