artwork by
Laura Racioppi
This is the second issue of other tongue mother tongue, the multilingual poetry supplement of the other side of hope magazine. In this issue, we present 20 poems in Albanian, Arabic, Bangla, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Konkani, Maltese, Nigerian Pidgin English, Pahari, Rohingya, Shona, Spanish, Tigrinya, Ukrainian and Yoruba, alongside English translations. The editorial team is Mike Baynham, Lina Fadel, Mahima Kaur, Laura Racioppi and Grace Cowie. We are hugely indebted to our team of language experts and reviewers without whom putting together OTMT would be impossible. Within the overall mission of the other side of hope, we invite a wide range of submissions on different topics, receiving submissions in a multitude of languages, without a specific focus. Each issue typically throws up a range of themes that run through the collection. On this occasion we identify the themes of Memory and Connection, War and Violence, and Place/Displacement. It is a tragic consequence of the times we are living in that we are noting an increased number of poems explicitly focused on war and its consequences. Not every poem of course can be neatly pigeonholed in these themes: more often than not they overlap.
We start with Shamima Azad who takes us back through memory to the houses she has lived in, finishing before birth in that first place she can’t remember, her mother’s womb. So the poem evokes both memory, before memory and place. Abdul Raouf Qureshi vividly recalls childhood visits to his grandfather’s house in the mountains, which gives rise to a poem in which the child in his loneliness communes with the old woman who lives on the moon. Again memory intersects with place. Dana G. Peleg recalls a home beside the sea which is fragile and easily destroyed like a child’s sandcastle.
Snehal Amembal’s memory is a current one as she captures the tender exchange between mother and child sharing a dosa. No place is mentioned but the space is intimate and domestic and the poem instantly creates its own homely setting. Grandparents figure largely in a number of the poems as already mentioned in relation to Abdul Raouf’s poem. In Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s poem, situated beside rivers and waterways, her Nani explains lands and borders in a way which infuses the poet’s current thinking about borders. Intriguingly the poet ends by introducing the element of time:
Snehal Amembal’s memory is a current one as she captures the tender exchange between mother and child sharing a dosa. No place is mentioned but the space is intimate and domestic and the poem instantly creates its own homely setting. Grandparents figure largely in a number of the poems as already mentioned in relation to Abdul Raouf’s poem. In Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s poem, situated beside rivers and waterways, her Nani explains lands and borders in a way which infuses the poet’s current thinking about borders. Intriguingly the poet ends by introducing the element of time:
the currents running in my blood
which belong to another century
which belong to another century
Shifting further into place, Nasouh Hosari’s poem takes us to the city of Dublin, addressing it as 'a city of light', tenderly as a lover. Herberth Cea as if picking up this theme, nuances the ambiguities of belonging in a landscape of uneasiness and dread, while writing again of love, here of its uncertainties, of being:
unfit to find the right words,
to say how deeply we love
a land that does not belong to us
to say how deeply we love
a land that does not belong to us
Davinia Hamilton takes the reader into both memory and the way war impacts the innocent, here in a bombing raid in rural Malta in 1942 that blows apart the home and the intactness of a family at a stroke, leaving a father weeping in the dark while his children try not to hear him grieving. So many echoes of the present here. In Tsegay Mehari’s poem the poet adopts a tragic and epic voice to portray the agony of a mother with her baby dying of thirst in the Sahara, innocent victims of internal conflict that pitted a government against its people, triggering mass migration. The story of the mother and child is one story among the multitude, a drop in the ocean as we would say in English, though Tsegay has shared with us the expression in Tigrinya, 'ካብ ባሕሪ ብጭልፋ' meaning a spoon of water in the ocean of grief.
In another tragic pairing, E. R. Traina and L.M. in different ways address the matter of domestic violence, E. R. in reportage style tells the story of imprisonment in the home and violence leading to murder, while L.M. in first person asserts she feels safer in prison than at the hands of men.
In his touching poem Dmitry Blizniuk evokes a temporary escape from the horror of war, closing the bedroom door and getting naked with his loved one. It seems to echo these lines from the Bob Dylan song, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight:
In another tragic pairing, E. R. Traina and L.M. in different ways address the matter of domestic violence, E. R. in reportage style tells the story of imprisonment in the home and violence leading to murder, while L.M. in first person asserts she feels safer in prison than at the hands of men.
In his touching poem Dmitry Blizniuk evokes a temporary escape from the horror of war, closing the bedroom door and getting naked with his loved one. It seems to echo these lines from the Bob Dylan song, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight:
Shut the light shut the shade
You don’t have to be afraid
I’ll be your baby tonight.
You don’t have to be afraid
I’ll be your baby tonight.
Even in the midst of horror it is possible to snatch moments of joy and consolation through love.
Mobility can involve return and in Abíọ́dún Abdul’s poem, the speaker returns to her homeland after an absence and recognizes herself and is affirmed in the beauty and dignity of a Benin bronze figure.
Jamal Nassari’s poem brings in the motif of mobility and the road, with echoes of Mahmoud Darwish in lines like 'you who migrate towards yourselves.' Also echoes of Bruce Springsteen's Tougher Than The Rest: 'the road is dark and it’s a thin, thin line…' Radidja Niacelem looks back at the country she left, apostrophising it:
Mobility can involve return and in Abíọ́dún Abdul’s poem, the speaker returns to her homeland after an absence and recognizes herself and is affirmed in the beauty and dignity of a Benin bronze figure.
Jamal Nassari’s poem brings in the motif of mobility and the road, with echoes of Mahmoud Darwish in lines like 'you who migrate towards yourselves.' Also echoes of Bruce Springsteen's Tougher Than The Rest: 'the road is dark and it’s a thin, thin line…' Radidja Niacelem looks back at the country she left, apostrophising it:
I have left you,
Although I was born in your bosom I have left you
Although I was born in your bosom I have left you
Nweke Benard Okechukwu sketches the trajectory of flight across a Nigerian urban landscape: 'there are a thousand ways to know the body/ in the shape of exile', writing in the voice of one who has seen from his boyhood the residue of war. Handsen Chikowore evokes in a hyper real way Heathrow Airport as a perfectly working mechanism, observed without comment but triggering so many questions. Sirajul Islam, writes from a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar Bangladesh, living in a state of stuck mobility like so many others around the world, in Gaza, Western Sahara, to name but two. In his poem he claims the right to hope.
We started this collection with a poem that took us to a place before birth, we conclude with two poems that take us to the end of life and after. We have seen how many of the poems we publish here speak to each other. The last two poems in our collection are also in their way a pairing. In a torrent of surreal images, punctuated with the idea of 'letting go' Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah encourages the reader to let the dead go, let themself go and sleep in a nightmare landscape of ecological disaster. The second poem, by Sali Bouba Oumarou, lifts us into the skies of an imagined future in which we are not present, in which 'everything will go on without us, after having begun again.' Our own death? The death of the species? While offering this bleak vision the poem also lifts us into light.
We started this collection with a poem that took us to a place before birth, we conclude with two poems that take us to the end of life and after. We have seen how many of the poems we publish here speak to each other. The last two poems in our collection are also in their way a pairing. In a torrent of surreal images, punctuated with the idea of 'letting go' Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah encourages the reader to let the dead go, let themself go and sleep in a nightmare landscape of ecological disaster. The second poem, by Sali Bouba Oumarou, lifts us into the skies of an imagined future in which we are not present, in which 'everything will go on without us, after having begun again.' Our own death? The death of the species? While offering this bleak vision the poem also lifts us into light.
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