It is no coincidence that Naffis-Sahely found Sibhatu’s poems, becoming the first to introduce her work to English readers. He grew up in Abu Dhabi with an Iranian father and Italian mother before his family was exiled from the emirate, but his maternal country was not any welcoming either, facing him with xenophobia. When encountering Sibhatu’s work, Naffis-Sahely discovered himself as a literary translator––seeing the possibility of another Italy, narrated and inhabited by the strangers within. In 2011, Andre was asked to translate Sibhatu’s poems for an Italian documentary film. Twenty titles later, Naffis-Sahely has now finally been able to publish his English translation of Sibhatu’s work.

Reading Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! (ኣውሎ! ኣውሎ! ኣውሎ!) released this year by the Poetry Translation Center in London, I felt jealous of this perfect poet-translator pairing. They both talk about how their friendship over the past decade has been built around the multilingual poems contained in this collection, which Sibhatu sometimes translated into Italian, before Naffis-Sahely presents them in his English productions. Their ongoing collaboration confirms my belief that the connection between poet and translator is a lifetime commitment, to grow and write and think together. The translator worked on these poems over years of their friendship, embracing the multilingual capacity of Sibhatu’s work, rather than viewing it as an obstacle. This is reflected in the chronology of the book, its multiple themes, as well as in the variety of styles and themes. In this sense, translation plays an active role in servicing the vision of the refugee poet who is not afraid to live and move between two worlds. When looking at the titles Naffis-Sahely translated from Italian and French over the past decade, we see pre-modern and modern European names, as well as contemporary writers from Morocco, Algeria, Eritrea, and Cameroon. The way Naffis-Sahely kick-started his translation work with Sibhatu helped orient him to use translation as a way of trespassing the arbitrary boundaries of national literatures.   

Sibhatu is not only a multilingual poet, she also insists on an “archaic” usage of the Tigrinya alphabet, which is uncommon among Eritrean writers. She explains in an interview with another exiled Eritrean writer, Abraham T. Zere, that she did not study Ge’ez script and taught herself Tigrinya as she was learning Amharic in school. Sibhatu never seems concerned about the linguistic accessibility of her work or having to mediate and negotiate with the reader. She explains to Zere that without the archaic alphabet, their connection to their ancestors (their canon, stories, songs, powers) will be lost.

The ancestral question is at the center of Sibhatu’s work, in her choice of language, genre, and form. She examines it at different points and in varied directions, sometimes as the exiled writer dreaming of a lost egalitarian society (“the sycamores”, as she calls it), as the diasporic daughter out of touch with her language and history, or as the comrade in grief for those imprisoned and killed. In her gorgeous poem “How African Spirits were Born,” she writes a fable that subverts the classic story of two feuding brothers dividing their kingdom to instead become a story of origins, or rather epistemological origins, when the kings split the world into two halves: the material and the metaphysical. As such, Sibhatu hints from afar––from her distant modern place––at this rupture caused by greed and oppression, which have cost humans their wholeness, their connection to the past, and their ancestral companions.

Similarly, in “The Exact Number of Stars,” Sibhatu writes another fable about a king who orders his village men to murder their fathers. A call that frighteningly resembles the postcolonial proposal to break away from the past for the promise of progress. However, one man in the village decides to hide his father, which then saves the entire village. With every impossible test given to them by the king, the hidden father saves the village from the king’s punishment with his wisdom. The fable-poem here too becomes another testament to the power of memory, without which survival is impossible.

In “African Grandmothers,” Sibhatu writes about a girl called Sara who is burdened by her alienation as a girl born in disapora, her lack of tools and means: “She spends all her time/ at home and school reading/ or asking how the earth was made.” She is the wanderer born into a strange world, she cuddles with the cats and dogs, admires the distant moon, “seeing that god/ won’t answer/ her questions, Sara/ wants me to give her/ the names and/ the surnames/ of our African grandmothers/whom Darwin declined/ to mention in his book.” This powerful poem, about the daughter and her exiled mother, contemplates the possibility of diaspora as lineage, and the loneliness and the difficulty of such a prospect, especially at the heart of Darwin’s land.

The poem’s vulnerability is striking. I haven’t encountered such text that captures, on such an intimate level, the question of exile and diaspora. It is moving how Sibhatu is able to leave her place to look at the world, in its full foreignness, with a girl’s eyes, before reconnecting a daughter and mother with their grandmothers in the face of a world that has long diminished their existence. Sibhatu allows us to see the diasporic daughter making something out of her incompleteness, her lacking, her unanswered questions.

But she is never entirely romantic or sentimental in her treatment of these microrelations. In “Virginity,” she writes in a journalistic yet humorous style about an important man who wanted to marry her after finding out that his bride was not a virgin and abandoning her. Sibhatu opens the poem with the line “For a bride, her virginity is just as important as her eyes, if not more so” and goes on to play on this connection between sight and virginity. This poem celebrates a heroic act, inherently feminist, in which the poet foresees that she must compromise either her honor, and by extension her family’s, or her own freedom and well-being. Knowing that her father might set her up for an arranged marriage, she lies to the man and says she is not a virgin either. Sibhatu writes: “Children greatly fear the might of their parents’ curses.” Thus, the poem takes away the romance of family, repositioning the individual woman at the center of her survival, while still capturing the fragility of the loved ones who might betray her.

With poems such as “Virginity” or “My Abebà,” about Sibhatu’s friend who died in the prison under dictatorship in Eritera, “Prison Cells,” or even her most famous poem “Lampedusa,” which captures the moment when more than five hundred migrants, many of whom were Eritrean, drowned off the shore of the island of Lampedusa, I am reminded of the poem “The Idea of Ancestry” by Etheridge Knight. In Knight’s vision, which unfolds as the speaker lays in his prison bed, the ancestors are already impossible to memorialize, and in light of this rupture in lineage, they are realized as a fiction rooted in intimacy, in the cousins who share the same name, some far away, some close and alive, and others who have gone missing and unmentioned. It is an idea, and therefore, the pursuit of a lifetime, something that Sibhatu is well aware of and goes to explore, at home and in diaspora, and sometimes in the bleak places in between.

“Lampedusa” shows us the kind of multiplicity that Sibhatu possesses as a refugee writer. Across her poems, she builds on ancient fables, evokes biblical cries, and sometimes plays the old role of the poet as a public mourner. In one interview, Sibhatu admits how she used to believe in the separation between these “political” stories or issues and art, but while in exile, she has learned otherwise––that the label of “refugee writing” is meant to introduce her as an “exotic survivor” (to borrow from James Baldwin), and to reduce her story to a matter of one crossing journey, with no past or future.

The truth is that the refugee today is the new traveler, the new clandestine, the new flâneuse, and her story goes beyond death and survival; it is one of human triumph, to recreate the self, to hold a multitude, to speak in one’s mother tongue, or in “stepdaughters”, as Sibhatu describes her five languages. In “Lampedusa,” the poet uses the true story of a woman who drowned while giving birth to masterfully merge the events of death and birth, the ululations of the boat companions fly in celebration and commemoration––it is that human wholeness which was long lost when the two brothers split our world into halves. 

* Published in Words Without Borders 

1.

Here we are in exile once again. We’re not the first Arab generation to cast itself into the labyrinth, and we won’t be the last. Sometimes they call us migrants or refugees; at other times they call us marginalized—then they invite us to talk, from the margin, about the margin: “How’s the weather over there on the margin?” They put us in anthologies that no one will read but the mummies in Middle East Studies, and they consider our poems and novels as documentaries, or treat them as confessions from the dark end of the tunnel. Perhaps there might be a little progress, consisting of a hyphen, tantamount to a mist-shrouded bridge, being placed between our identity and theirs: “Arab-American.” It’s a bridge not intended for crossing, one they take it upon themselves to guard; someday they’ll erect an electric fence on it.

I’ve spent ten years in the USA now. I haven’t obtained nationality yet, so I still travel on a twelve-month refugee passport, each annual renewal taking three months on the grounds that travel is a luxury. I am referred to, without hesitation, as an “Arab-American” writer; I don’t know when exactly this transformation occurred, shifting my classification from “exiled Arab” to “Arab-American.” By contrast, I was born in Kuwait and raised there until the age of twenty-two, by which time I had already published two poetry collections and worked for five years for local newspapers. In fact there was hardly a field I hadn’t dabbled in, from acting to theater criticism to literary translation to political organizing—feminism, workers’ rights, and the Bidoon cause.[1] I also played violin, oud, and piano, and if my voice hadn’t been thin and ugly, you would even have found me singing in the shopping malls and on the polluted beaches of the Gulf. I lived large during a short life, succeeded and failed and grew, all of it without a denotation or a classification to my name.

In 2011, after the Bidoon movement was born in the streets, there came to be something known as “Bidoon literature.” Prior to that, “Kuwaiti literature” anthologies and encyclopedias had ignored our very existence, their raison d’être being to shore up the idea that Kuwaitis actually had such a thing as a literature—and that by extension they also had a nation, a history, and a state. They excluded us Bidoon from the Kuwaiti Writers’ Association and from all public benefit associations. Although these are supposed to be more democratic than the state, they are in reality even more reactionary, grim, and racist than the state is. We would chat with our migrant comrades—the Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, and other Arabs wandering lost in petroland—and make friends with them in the knowledge that all of us existed on the margin, the margin of here and the margin of there, without knowing how to create anything out of this margin—a geography of our very own, say, or at least a space based on something other than His Lordship Mr. Citizen. “Bidoon literature” would never have been born without the birth of the Bidoon movement. Every political cause has an innate need for literature, for culture, to voice the suffering of a people and recount their progress towards their collective aspirations. Someone’s profile would be defined by the single vague line “born in Kuwait,” with the phrase “a Bidoon poet” deleted by the editor, because how can anyone be defined by a negation?

2.

If we go back to the history of literature prior to the nation-state, which first arose in Europe, we can observe how literatures were originally classified according to language, not geography. Some authors also wrote in more than one language, or were at least fluent in another language in addition to their mother tongue. This was equally likely to be the case whether they were in the East or the West. Today, that world sounds like a fairytale. There were some early attempts in modern literature—especially by the surrealist movement—to make internationalism the goal of the literary community, but they all met with failure. Even Arabic literature, the far-flung reaches of whose vast locality were always accessible to each other—and to the minorities whose people write in this language—has now been dismembered along state or regional lines. Indeed, modern literature is moving in the opposite direction to internationalism, towards the minority and the community, with community being defined by a single point: the issue that brings it together. 

Bidoon literature did not come into existence simultaneously with the Bidoon movement, after the revolutions. Rather, the first published text by a Bidoon writer was by Sulaiman al-Fulaih, in the 1970s—a decade after the independence of the state and the birth of the community. Al-Fulaih was later forced to migrate to Saudi Arabia, where he worked for years in local newspapers and continued publishing his work. However, he remained a stranger to the literary scene there, staying close to his original one instead; so it seems that one’s Bidoonism does not end with merely obtaining nationality, or changing one’s place of residence. During the 1990s the Bidoon dominated the poetry scene in Kuwait. By virtue of being banned from studying or teaching in universities as well as from public-sector employment, most Bidoon worked in the Kuwaiti press. They co-edited the cultural pages with Arab migrants, organizing literary events and seminars and then writing about them, or writing pieces sparked by them, in the press. 

The Bidoon literati did not think of themselves as constituting a distinct group within a literary community of foreigners in a country whose cultural sector had collapsed in the wake of the Gulf War. They simply considered themselves individuals on the margin, so there were no attempts to present Bidoon writing as necessary or urgent. Most of them found a comfortable space for themselves in poetry—where it was comparatively less dangerous to write about identity and belonging and pillaging. Some critics traced the Bidoon preference for poetry over prose narration back to their Bedouin culture, which would be a reasonable enough interpretation if it wasn’t for its narrow horizons. The funny thing is that poetry was not actually ever safe as far as the Bidoon were concerned: all of us have always heard about visits by state security to poets’ homes, or decisions to fire Bidoon from the Kuwaiti press. Fahd Aafat is perhaps the most famous example of this, given that he disappeared into the prison system for a while on account of a poem that was interpreted as satirizing the Kuwaiti Emir, before later reappearing as a migrant in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Usage of the term “Bidoon literature” has increased in the last decade, with a growing interest in the cause on the part of new academics, whether from Kuwait or in the West. The new Arabic and global exodus towards the novel has also had an influence on Bidoon books. Naser al-Zafiri, who migrated to Canada in the 1990s and died there two years ago, is the author of the novel cycle Al-Jahra's Trilogy. The trilogy attempts to recount the history of a community transitioning from life in the desert to the ashish, the popular housing projects in which the community was concentrated, progressing through the story of their lives in the petrol cities. It fluctuates between the shock of modernity and the aspirations of a Bidoon generation raised in a growing pluralistic society that was not as excluding as it seems to be nowadays.

We find that pivotal period in the life of the Bidoon appearing repeatedly in Bidoon writings, whether in al-Zafiri’s oeuvre or that of others from his generation, such as Karim al-Haza’a, and in the work of poets such as Dakhil al-Khalifa, Sulaiman al-Fulaih, and Ahmed al-Dusari, as well as a young novelist such as Khalid Turki. But many of these literary narratives tend to flow in one sole direction, with a focus on belonging—in its problematic and sentimental sense. This preoccupation is played out most starkly via the character of the Bidoon soldier, veteran of the 1967 and 1973 wars and then the Second Gulf War, considering him as a representative of the highest form of state allegiance and patriotism. In contrast, we find that the discourse of the state and the hegemonic class often exploits the same point to portray the Bidoon as hired mercenaries.

3.

In exile, I have met other Gulf peoples. Their origins on paper are India, or Iran, or Egypt, or the Philippines, and some of them write in English, but they were born and raised in the Gulf and then ended up in exile for one reason or another. They define themselves as “a writer from Abu Dhabi” or “a poet from Dubai” even though some of them don’t speak Arabic. Through reading their textural conjuring of a whole other Gulf I came to understand that my imagination had fallen victim to definitions of national literature. How have state institutions in the entire Arab world pulled off corroborating the notion of national literature as literature written by citizens, and necessarily in Arabic? Literature linked to state identity and state narratives, rather than to geography, which is in reality the natural vessel for any creative act. The state formation system across the Arab world—or even across the Third World as a whole—has been downloaded like a revelation received on the same template everywhere: in order to create your state, you must manufacture a folkloric culture, a literature, some arts and a traditional local dress, and then the lie is bound to become truth. Gamal Abdel Nasser dispatched his specialist committees to every corner of the Gulf, to organize cultural operations and trajectories that have come to be repeated ever since by successive generations of citizens who guard over them, their chests swelling with pride. And within these violent operations, no one leaves any space for the migrant or the Bidoon—or any other passerby stranded along with them—to join in and contribute with their own cultural production.

I grew up in a country where, after the Second Gulf War, the state TV channel used to cut the names of Palestinian or Iraqi artists from the credits of drama series and other programs, even going as far as erasing entire scenes from “their” national culture because they were acted in or made by the new enemy. People passed cassettes by Kadim al-Sahir and Yas Khidr to one another under the table, in the same way forbidden substances like wine and hashish were circulated. After the occupation of Iraq in 2003, people celebrated national holidays in Kuwait in a different way, crowding the Gulf beaches in their cars to sing Iraqi songs at the top of their voices. God, so freedom is to listen to an Iraqi song in public!

In his engagement with Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt cycle of novels, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote an exceptional essay titled “Petrofiction,” which blasts the entire Gulf literary project. Ghosh discusses how no literature anywhere has known how to deal with the discovery of oil; the extraction of crude, which has changed the balance of power across the whole world, happens in places far out of human sight. Then it is traded in imaginary markets we know nothing about except for their price indexes in economics bulletins. Ghosh goes on to focus on Cities of Salt as being perhaps the sole literary attempt ever made at understanding this terrifying encounter between man and oil, an encounter played out in a rugged and inaccessible region such as the Gulf. Here, history has not passed through the natural phases of development from feudalism to industrial revolution and then petrocapitalism. On the contrary, and as we understand from Munif’s novel, the Gulf has been transformed from a geography dotted with small communities, the desert on one side and the sea on the other, to states and cities rapidly outstripping history’s lung capacity.

Upon opening a novel about the Gulf, one is struck by the abyss of oil or the looming abyss of modernity, gigantic and formidable, dark and full of silence. Every work leaps from descriptions of the humble, simple life straight to the problematics and aspirations of modern life. But what about that fissure? What about the ecology lost in the middle, the desert having been the living room of your home just yesterday, only for you to become housebound in a concrete house the very next day? Nothing. Ghosh discusses the clever intervention Munif dares to make in the first novel of the Cities of Salt cycle, whereby he captures this dubious paradox that, by its very nature, has facilitated the region becoming an unlimited playing field for the Americans. But Ghosh goes on to note the failure represented by the second novel in the quintet, in which Munif falls back on the binary of citizen vs. “outsider,” positing the latter as a thief, with an integral role in the system plundering land and liberty as part of the petroproject. And perhaps this failure of Munif’s serves as a greater metaphor for Gulf literature itself having failed, to this very day, to destabilize the hegemonic historical narrative and deconstruct the binary of citizen vs. other, or to free itself from the lie of national literature. It is a lie that does not fit with the reality—either before oil, or after it—of cultural production on the ground.

These days I see “Bidoon literature” as an opportunity to write against the tide and outside the mainstream, considering that we are stuck in the triangular trap formed by the nation-state, petrol, and the fissure of history. A writer who continues to reduce writing to performing the tasks of representation and voicing will not have much to offer, either in terms of minority literature’s aspirations or towards destabilizing national literature. It is possible for the Bidoon—and this opportunity extends to migrant literature as well—to expand the imagination in the face of hegemonic narratives. To reexamine this violent encounter between oil and the human being, in order to liberate the human relationship with place. I don’t aspire today to obtain a hyphen to place between two identities, because I don’t think that this punctuation mark will create a space for the novels of Ibrahim Abdelmajid, Sonallah Ibrahim, Ghassan Kanafani, Mohammad al-Asa’ad, Khozama Hubaib, Yahya Yakhalif, Walid Abu Bakr, Ahmed Zain and that long and wide page of Arab and South Asian and African writers who lived or wrote in the Gulf. But I do know that armed with even a single spoon, I am capable of demolishing the ramparts behind which national literature and those who have earned themselves a place in its canon have retreated.

This essay is part of our series "Reminiscence of the future". To commemorate ten years of revolution in North Africa and West Asia, the authors share their hopes, dreams, questions and doubts. The essays indicate how important such personal engagement is in developing political alternatives and what has been achieved despite the violent setbacks.

In addition to the series we also address the ongoing struggle against authoritarian regimes, for human dignity and political reforms in various multimedia projects: For example, our digital scroll story "Giving up has no future" presents three activists from Egypt, Tunisia and Syria who show that the revolutions are going on.