The prison officer stares at me. I fear to answer his persistent questions. He wears this horrid, wrinkled face of the man of law, solid, unfeeling. But sometimes I think he feels. He keeps asking me the same question every time he has a chance to talk to me, only when there is no other guard nearby, alone with me, as if for the sole purpose of torturing me.
'Did you really do it?' he wants to know.
'Yes, I did,' I answer.
Terrible times
The heart is touched by pain
asking time rather than fate:
"What has become of my brothers?
What wind has confused them
as it got inside them and dried
all love from them,
and cut all their wings?
A wind that carries hatred
and that kills the blossoming flowers."
This heart cries in sadness.
And I ask time:
What has become of all those
that went together,
soul brothers,
eager for victory?
You have to write in blood
on this scene of life
the beautiful cry of "Freedom"!
You, mother, who is by the door,
scrutinizing with tired eyes
in case your offspring arrives.
The blood has fallen to the ground,
a land that opens
with her innocent heart.
The rogue has managed,
the most tender of the youths
and your child will not return.
Translator and writer, Basim Mardan, was a young librarian at the university in Mosul when the Americans invaded Iraq. A former student of English and linguistics, he was one of the first to celebrate the end of Saddam Hussein's psychopathic regime. He took a job as a translator for the US Marines, full of hope that he and his friends could help to construct a free and democratic Iraq.
Hope was quickly extinguished. The library at Mosul University was torched. He was branded a traitor. His family was terrorised. The CD of a friend being decapitated was left on his doorstep and he received death threats every day. Every household in Iraq was invaded by fear and Mardan went into hiding. His wife gave birth to a son and he returned to Mosul to work for a students' rights organization, until a close colleague was murdered. This time he left Iraq, finding safety for his wife and his child through Kjell Olaf Jensen, President of International PEN in Norway.
The Dance
By Basim Mardan
I was sitting in my usual corner in the bar, wasting my moments, trying to rediscover my world again, this time through the bottom of my glass of beer. People around me did not exist, and the music echoed as if it was coming from a distant place. The sounds were very vague, very unclear and completely meaningless, Not only because they were spoken in a language that I know very little about, but also because of this state of mind that I sometimes get. When all my senses are not in any way functioning, and there appears this wall that blocks my brain from receiving any sign from the rest of me or from whatever that's around me, you can cut me with a knife and I will not feel a damn thing.
photo: copyright Jakob Goldstein
The Cuban poet, writer and cultural critic, Carlos A. Aguilera, (b.1970 in Havana) has been living in Frankfurt since August 2007 read Carlo A. Aguilera's biography
by Carlos A. Aguilera
And anyway today he's famous for his shrunken, vertically metaphysical
mind
and not for that lyrikproletarian argument between a yellowbelly
sparrow
that falls and a yellowbelly
sparrow
that flies
or parentheses
between a yellowbelly sparrow that falls and a yellowbelly sparrow
that doesnotfly
as Mao the economist defined smilingly
and as he said: "There, kill them..."
pointing to a light and compact space like that notunique
yellowbelly
sparrow
become now that "disgusting yellowbelly sparrow" or
that "hardly
ecological yellowbelly
sparrow"
By Carlos A. Aguilera
Translated by Todd Ramón Ochoa
For Carmen, the
Farmer
The
afternoon
during
which
Hooper
,
Andrew
alias
"
the
farmer
"
Hooper
