Farrah Sarafa
Estadounidense que vive en Manhattan más conocida por su trabajo como poeta. Trabaja como traductora, escritora y profesora.
Sarafa, ganadora de un SLS Becas Escritura verano y Grant, un segundo lugar Marjorie Premio Rappaport, ganó un premio en Chistell Concurso Anual y recibió el Premio Hopwood por su poema Palestina Olive.
Hija de madre palestina y padre iraquí, cuya poesía es una respuesta a la guerra y la ocupación. Poetisa, profesora, editora y traductora, está asentada en Maniatan. Aunque varios de sus poemas se centran en la guerra de Iraq, en “Padre iraquí, Madre palestina” se queja de esa guerra y de la ocupación de Palestina, que le impiden ver a su abuelo iraquí y a su abuela palestina; en “Olivo” su padre saborea el aceite de sus tostadas mientras sueña con el abuelo, con los niños de su país, con los olivos plantados por sus ancestros, con las antiguas canciones, que estarán bajo la radioactividad de las bombas; en “Higo palestino” evoca el sabor de ese manjar que endulzan las penalidades de sus gentes; al inicio del poema “Sólo habla el miedo”, referido al ataque contra Iraq, surge la alusión a los israelíes en Palestina:
Siento los gritos de su madre moverse dentro de mí,
mientras quita de la encimera de granito
los jarrones de flores y los potes de mármol.
Tiemblo. Firme la voluntad
y deseando quedarme, estoy hecha de cristal,
mientras ese pequeño está hecho de arcilla.
Los soldados americanos le han dado ese pote,
del que los israelíes pueden beber su leche de pasas
en la Palestina de mi madre.
(http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/poemsJLY_06.htm; trad. de C. Mª Thomas).
y en “Colonizando recetas” expresa que, por más que los israelíes que se apropien de las recetas de Palestina para sentir que pertenecen a algo hermoso, no podrán robarles sus señas de identidad:
“Nosotros inventamos esta comida”, dice él, cogiendo su hummus,
su tabuleh y su berenjena asada.
“Vosotros la ocupasteis”, replica ella.
“Okey, la robamos y entonces la mejoramos, ¿qué te parece? Salam ala lekum”.
“Podéis tomar la tierra, pero no nuestra identidad”,
canta ella suavemente, cogiendo el bolso para irse.
Y ahora un poema:
Invadiendo el cuerpo de los pensamientos de nuestro abuelo
con sus cañones hechos en América, contiene el aliento,
incapaz de librarse del azote de dolor que en él traspira
y que en sueños se convierte en lluvia de los ojos de los niños refugiados,
que tejen nuevas artimañas a cambio de dinero para comer,
para tratar de llenar su estómagos vacíos
con el grano que ellos plantaron en Cirjordania
y con el que moldearon recetas de pasta.
Las tías pasan días preparando para la familia
deliciosos bocados para comer,
ahora reemplazados por el hambre y las súplicas
para comer una vez más de las palmas de su madre tierra,
para untar sus secos corazones
una vez más con el aceite de oliva
de la fértil Palestina, arrancado de sus entrañas
como una alfombra árabe bordada.
Añoran abrazar los árboles que proporcionaban
aire a los pulmones que respiraban con amor
e imaginaban los ecos mediterráneos
del pasado y las modernas fragancias,
degustadas y deseadas por los extranjeros judíos
ansiosos de sentir que pertenecen
a un lugar hermoso.
Lo adoptan como suyo, cambiando nombres,
jugando a enredar, para apropiarse
de los delicados y aromáticos sabores
de generaciones de palestinos.
Pueblos ocupados, os morís de hambre o coméis
el alimento sembrado en el corazón de mi abuelo
donde el aire palpita puro y verdadero.
(http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/poemsJLY_06.htm; trad. de C. Mª Thomas).
Father Iraq, Mother Palestine
Mortar attacks a bus in Baghdad, 15 die
Civil war strife mirrors the war
America has waged on Iraqi life
More than two years ago.
How can this happen
How can this be
That I will never see
The land of my great grandfather?
I strive, I feel too much zeal
to help heal the schisms
splitting this poor country
and that of Palestine.
*
Hamas' request that they vacate the west
and return East Jerusalem
on which they settled, built checkpoint and a wall
In 1949
How can this happen
How can this be
That I will never see
The Land of my dear grandmother?
I cry, I whine, abstaining
From bodily pleasures
emptying myself
of the life deprived Iraq.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Olive
Your father,
his inheritance shed of him
like the skin of a snake.
only he cried afterward.
Walking through barren olive fields
he envisions their roots active with sprout,
alive, as they once were, with the fruit of his ancestors.
The bitter black taste of Palestinian soil
accompanied by the toasted pita-bread and melted white cheese,
he dreams
of children's olive-like eyeballs
their sparkling gaze
like onyx,
but the dream is shot with the poke of an empty hand
a branch, fringed-ash and embroidered by greed
whose jugglers and smugglers in moan
have thrown staunch families into pleas
they sneeze
to rid of the fumes clenching their inner lung
constricted black and frightened tongue,
ambitions sullied, by ancestor's songs unsung
life squeezed out of my grandfather's love
he blows the ash from a branch
wind carrying it from his eyes
open eyes, lashes curled toward the heavens
he inhales their deeply embedded fragrance
buried beneath layers of activity and reactivity
from which this culture will continue to flourish.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Munich
Biased Metallically:
Not gold, cherry or grain made,
not rich, sweet or nourishing to our side they laid
a biased film to hypnotize
sleeping American french fries.
His voice is soft like chick peas
I listen to his impression as a native
and feel nothing but sympathy
for olive eyed communities.
Should my aim be to temper extremity
hard, metallic stares to sympathy?
To dull sharp knives, to melt metal eyes
made opaque by lies
with the beauty of eloquence?
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Palestine Fig
Inner worlds lined brown like the earth,
tinted gold like divine mirth,
the occupied race of people plead
for an outside light to dissolve their worry
into the Dead Sea.
Dense bubbles, sugar grains condense
like caramel apple heating
under my hot tongue. I imagine
soldiers' threats induce a similar
effect on their poor children who have long been
constrained to sacrifice
their fame, knowledge and skill. Sweet fig flesh
that grips wrinkled outer skin
like old native man's hands made hallow
from fear, disdain, longing to cry peace by tears
formed from the pain of clouds
waiting to be tasted and felt.
Pains produced from sweet-thirsty twigs,
resting on the earth, come together,
tighten, roll, and shrink into small balls called seeds-
reproduce from the hungers, contempt and needs
of Palestinian
souls. They swim in the memories
of their buried ancestors,
whose lives, disintegrated, nourish
fig tree soils, coalesce to become seeds
that constitute fig fruit.
Hearts gold- earth speckled, firm flavor,
a seeded promise that you
will savor the Arabian air
that you will inhale when you eat a fig
from my ancestors.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Untitled
Blood splats on his car front window,
Mother screams
An American spits onto a bud of flame
that burst from the ground.
Soil dehydrated by flame
(not by the desert)
Iraqi ground bears the shame
of Saddam Hussein.
1500 aircrafts and 50 troops American deployed
into a swarm of queen bees
whose honey-coated hives
have been suffocated by Bush's demonically dry
breath, liquid sweetness dried
into crusted fermentation in the mouth of a Conservative
fly,
I cry to help to re-moisten the soil,
to nourish the boils
one man's angers transmits as fear and martyrdom
to a population of the desperate.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Blood, Sand and Tears of a Young Boy
I wipe my tears while they-
they have no tears left to cry.
Dehydrated, like dried pineapple,
the closest they come to resembling the concentric yellow
and fiber-branching slices
is the tired eye;
swollen and puffed like a pregnant belly
their shadow-plated arches, underneath
reveal how much they question "why."
"For what are you longing,"
I ask, looking into the complicated retina of the young boy.
"What is floating in the water of your deep and narrow well my
dear?"
He only speaks fear.
I feel his mother's cries moving inside of me,
shaking off flower vases and pots of marble stone
from granite table-tops
I shiver; steady in will and
willing to stay, I am made from glass
while this little boy is made from clay.
He is brought to pot by American soldiers
from which the Israelis may drink their raisin-milk in warm,
making excuses to stay
in my mother's Palestine.
Placing my hand on his cold, winter's chest
I transfer my comforts as warmth, but their flag's pointing west;
they are looking for help from a nation that is "best,"
though it is we
that have made Iraq into a land of nuclear test.
Missile tanks and planks
for cannonballs make storm in a place where
smoke bombs, tear gases and raping little girls from lower
classes
bring to form
nerve knots and tissue clots
along the green-starred spine of Iraq.
These people need no more tears;
they are merely
hungry.
"What does she hide beneath her big red striped gown" he asks,
inquiring of her tasks.
"Rice with cumin-spiced meats and lemon-sesame treats
or niter, sulfur and charcoal dynamite for an endless fight
against the rest of the world," he wonders of her vast plunders.
Desert souls, their tears are made of blood mixed with sand
while I, American, laugh in pain
at Charlie Chaplin going insane on the television screen.
CNN bulletin interrupts my bliss with news of terrors
about red and flaming wearers
of suicide and contempt.
My laughs push into cries
and form a current for the Arabian Sea
whose crystal salts perspire and become of me.
Her waves undulate like snake-thin layers of blood thickened with
sand and stone
like a serpent's plea to be let free
and to roam
the Garden of Eden.
America.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
War fire
High-wired and fuel ridden
their toes withdraw in fear
of dying.
What do you hear?
Gun shots, army trucks skidding tires
whose squeaks were once minaret adhan
Your grandparents are now buried beneath
the mountains of your sacred pasts,
the rubble of disturbed memories and
American deeds, what can we heed?
"Saddam, Saddam!" They cry out for the
despot whose regime was better
than the conditions are now.
Iraqis are dying, hundreds by the day
and here we stay watching films
whose figures spit on the fires of war
from so far away,
I cry to help put out the flames.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
The Dead Sea
Reality dwindles into unfulfilled fantasies
for the hungry people in Iraq.
Unable to ward off the pangs in their bellies
for food, all they can do is to convert what
they feel into something unreal, into fantasy.
Blood thinning, Iraqi voices become cries--
their tendons reach out into pleas,
and their hearts painting their hands
send out a gigantic "please!"
The organs of young Iraqi children condense
as they sip burning cups of tea devoid of milk-
the very substance their mothers used to build
their bodies-without the sugar that could bring
them joy.
The skin of young Iraqis flakes off into piles of
rubble and bricks from the many misplaced
words that abound. I stoop to pick one up
and from it begin to construct this
plea for sympathy.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
Colonizing Recipes
"We invented this food," he says, handing her the hummus, tabouli
and roasted eggplant.
"You occupied it," she responds.
"Okay, we stole it and then made it better, how's that? Saalaam
Ala lekum!"
You can take the land, but not our identities, she sings
softly,
taking the bag to leave,
And now a poem:
Invading the body of our grandfather's thoughts
with their American-made shafts,
he holds his breath, unable to release
the curse of pain he perspires and dreams into rain
from the eyes of refugee children
knitting new crafts for money to eat,
to try to fill their empty bellies with the grain
they planted along the West Bank
and moulded into dough recipes
Aunties spend days preparing for the family.
Delectable bites, active chew
Now replaced by hunger and pleas
To eat one more time from the palms of their mother
land-to lubricate their dry hearts
once again with the olive oil
of their fertile Palestine, stripped from their bottoms
like an embroidered Arab rug
They long to hug the trees that gave air
to the lungs that breathed into love and conceived
Mediterranean echoes
from the past and modern fragrances
tasted and desired by Jewish foreigners
eager to feel that they belong
somewhere beautiful. They adopt
as their own, changing names-playing games to own
the delicate and fragrant flavors
of generations from Palestine.
Occupied peoples, do you starve or eat the food
planted in my grandfather's heart
from which true, pure air palpitates.
Farrah Sarafa
© Copyright 2006
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario