Showing posts with label Hawad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hawad. Show all posts

Friday, August 28, 2020

Joel William Vaughan reviews Hawad’s Furigraphic Horizons, trans. Jake Syersak (2019) in Broken Pencil #88


Joel William Vaughan was good enough to provide the first review of Hawad’s Furigraphic Horizons, translated by Jake Syersak (2019) over at Broken Pencil. Thanks so much!

Translator Jake Syersak selects three poems from Hawad’s Furigraphic collection for this English language chapbook. The poet, Hawad, belongs to the nomadic Saharan Tuareg people, and the poems were composed in Tamazight dialect using Tifinagh script. However, Hawad alters the already obscure characters with an invented method of furigraphy, a wild calligraphic brushwork. These were subsequently translated into French by the author and his wife, Hélène Claudot-Hawad. Thus, conceptually, the project is a marvel: Hawad’s Tuared-Tamazight tongue, written in Tifinagh, collaboratively rewritten into French with the Roman alphabet and again into English by Syersak. Then, of course, these were printed and bound by rob mclennan on his trademark coloured copy paper and sent, most likely, to your mailbox. Following so far?
            The poems themselves are compelling, meant to achieve a “literary transcendence of the self to encompass ubiquity and escape the superficial physical and mental constrains of time and space,” Hawad’s subject matter appropriately returns again and again to a search for solid, extrasensory truth.
            His verse is punctuated by galloping images and grammatical puzzles. One is never sure where he is headed, because one is never sure where he’s situated to begin with. Just try reading “The Swell of the Horizons” – “Iron hoof horse,” / Inside the brain head pebble / brain pebble head / horse inside the hoof / The fatal march toward utopia / forces the rider to drunk / the swell vertigo tempestuous urine / of his horse inside the head.”
            To read Hawad is disorienting, to say the least, but any determined search for immaterial truth should be. Hawad’s poems are fascinating on their own, but the implications brought to the fore a dogpile of languages make these social poems sedimentary, worthy of study.

Friday, June 19, 2020

Black Lives Matter : chapbook giveaway,


I thought it would be interesting to select a handful of titles from the above/ground press backlist for a Black Lives Matter chapbook giveaway, as a way to use our resources to provide our support in tangible ways (we have also donated monies, as we’ve been able), and to help further amplify the work of some writers of colour the press has produced over the years. So, read up on resources to donate to in the link: https://linktr.ee/NationalResourcesList (thanks to Khashayar Mohammadi for providing the original link); and, after donating (no proof required) $5 or more, I’ll send you a chapbook of your choice from the list below; if you donate $25 or more, I’ll send you a handful of titles, if you wish.

Poetry chapbook give-away titles in this give-away include: Solitude is an Acrobatic Act (2020) by Khashayar Mohammadi; Furigraphic Horizons (2019) by Hawad, translated from the French by Jake Syersak; from The Book of Bramah (2019) by Renée Sarojini Saklikar; After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees— (second printing, 2019) by Renée Sarojini Saklikar; Open Island, three poems (2017) by Faizal Deen; CONCEALED WEAPONS / ANIMAL SURVIVORS (2018) by natalie hanna; dark ecologies (2017) by natalie hanna; G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #9 (2020), edited by natalie hanna; and ANGELTONGUE / LENGUA DE ÁNGEL (2018) by Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez.

First come, first served! And while supplies last, obviously. I’ve twenty or more of all but natalie hanna’s earlier chapbook on hand for this give-away. I had hoped, as well, to be able to include copies of either of Jordan Abel’s above/ground press titles, or either of George Elliott Clarke’s above/ground press titles, but I simply haven’t enough copies of any of those. If you are able to donate and wish to let me know, send me an email to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com with your mailing address, and your requested title(s). I will keep running this until all of the chapbooks in this box by my desk is empty!

Could above/ground press be better at producing works by writers of colour? Oh, certainly. There’s plenty of room for improvement. I will do my best to do better.

Friday, October 18, 2019

new from above/ground press: Furigraphic Horizons, by Hawad, trans. Jake Syersak

Furigraphic Horizons
by Hawad
translated from the French by Jake Syersak
$5

The Haulers of the Horizon


I hear the ember
incubating the names
of shooting stars
And I demand from the cricket
once again
that it strip nude the night
any night
that would not deliver a dawn
suspended from the droplet
blood ink bile
tear of my brothers
sweat condensed
in the interstices of my quill
Quill rifle
leveled point-blank
against the temple of oblivion
Quill stinger
frothing and vomiting up rumors
swarms and abrasions
memory
isles and reptiles
insect letters
Tifinagh
crawling with fury
over the deserts and the stars ahead
already laughter and grimaces
lines peopling our faces
as haulers of the horizons

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Hawad
is a visual artist and poet originally from the Aïr region in the central Sahara. He composes his work in his native Tuareg tongue of Tamazight, in Tifinagh script, which is then co-translated into French with his wife, Tuareg scholar Hélène Claudot-Hawad. Hawad’s work is unique for its deployment of what he has coined “Furigraphy” (a therapeutic poetics involving the frenetic repetition of words, gestures, sounds, and images to evoke a vertiginous and obsessional rhythmic trance), a means by which he achieves “Surnomadism” (a nod to both Surrealism and the nomadic heritage of the Tuareg people). Surnomadism, according to Hawad, is a literary transcendence of the self to encompass ubiquity and escape the superficial physical and mental constraints of time and space, to investigate the breach between the inner and outer self, the self and others, and the past, present, and future. Common themes of his poetry include anti-colonial resistance, Anarchism, exile, nomadism, and the prolongation of Tuareg heritage. Hawad is the author of multiple books of poetry, including Furigraphie: Poésies 1985 – 2015, from which the poems in this book are taken.

Jake Syersak is the author of Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press, 2020) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Press, 2018). Two of his full-length translations of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s work are forthcoming in the coming year: the poetry collection Proximal Morocco— and the hybrid novel Agadir, co-translated with Pierre Joris. He edits Cloud Rodeo, an online poetry journal, and co-edits the micro-press Radioactive Cloud.

This is Syersak’s second above/ground press chapbook, after These Ghosts / This Compost : An Aubadeclogue (2017).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com