A Date with Hope

A Review of Something Evergreen Called Life by Rania Mamoun

“like someone running to the end/ of exhaustion/ at the point of a polished blade”

Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry collection by Sudanese activist and writer, Rania Mamoun and translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, is a testament to art as the antidote to grief. Mamoun, an activist in her birth country, organized for years against the cruel regime of Omar Al Bashir until she was forced to flee and take refuge in the United States with her two young daughters. Shortly after, the world was hit by COVID-19 and the poet found herself in lockdown in her new home. The loneliness and fear brought on by these conditions sent her into a downward spiral of depression. 

In her introduction, she tells readers how writing and sharing poetry online with a neighbor literally saved her life as she “sewed” her poems like “mattress/ pillow/ coat &/ crutch” (107). Untitled, with no punctuation, the poems are like daily journal entries. However, these little gems are polished pieces rather than stream of consciousness scribblings in a diary. The translator’s skill is apparent even to readers like me who are not proficient in the Arabic language — Seale has taken care with line breaks, imagery, and sonic qualities of the poems. For instance, this excerpt from the poem dated April 17, 2020, contains both sound echoes (shout/shut) and slant rhyme (chime/died),

  I hear the echo of

my shout

  my mouth is

shut

  if not for the chime

in my daughter’s laugh

  I would think

that I had died (39)

Images cross the bridges of language with ease, as the sure hand of the translator leads readers without a wobble into the poet’s world, her fears and hopes:

silk thread

wound tight

like time

with it I sew

my dream

a shady tree

a window ledge

from which to watch

the evening (107).

Arabic sentences can have either subject-verb-object or verb-subject-object constructions depending on which ––subject or verb–– is more important for meaning. The lines are clear to English speaking readers thanks to Seale’s skillful translation. She remains faithful to the Arabic, which has no capital letters. Aside from the personal pronoun I, the poems in translation use all lowercase letters, which feels intimate and invites the reader into the immediacy of the poet’s thoughts.

Like a journal, the poems reflect the proverbial “monkey mind” moving restlessly from day to day. Readers will recognize the feelings of confinement and loneliness experienced during those early days of the lockdown:

loneliness is greedy

   feeds on herself daily

lies in wait on

   time’s rough body

octopus-like spans

   her thousand arms

around me (26).

Hard on the heels of loneliness comes homesickness, that perennial grief that lives in the hearts of exiled individuals, even when the leaving is a personal choice. Like the cry of “the bird whose night song pierces isolation/ pierces silence & the room’s dark” (21) these poems transport us back to the motherland. We see the poet’s mother making tea in her kitchen and understand why she finds moments of respite in the memory of “nuzzling like a cat at mother’s lap,” or the little lemon tree that “Mother planted in the courtyard.” But these moments are few as the speaker struggles with past traumas – violence committed against women and condoned by family, society, and state. On April 2, Mamoun wrote,

in my country

they beat sisters wives daughters

in the name of religion discipline honor 

hitting women is man’s honor (23).

The practice of female genital mutilation is deeply rooted in culture, social norm, and tradition in Sudan despite repeated attempts to mandate laws against it. According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators Report, in 2019 Sudan had a high prevalence of FGM both in rural and urban areas (87 percent and 86 percent), while less than half of women in both areas supported the practice. FGM was criminalized in Sudan only as recently as 2020. The shock and betrayal felt by the poet when her parents participated in the ceremony of her circumcision at the tender age of five reverberates here for readers. We experience her shock as she writes,

the child they lured

with games

with colored dolls

loved her new dress

soft green

with golden ribbons

she loved the henna on her hands

the red paint on her nails

she did what they asked her to do

to take a picture to commemorate

her circumcision (52).

And later in the poem:

she did not know

this child

lost in her innocent dreams

that they had set down

for her a half life

never to be whole (53).

Mamoun processes her heartache through the poems, witnessing the violence and brutality against her fellow activists, and being betrayed by a partner. The May 30 poem consists of just one word. A single word that opens a space large enough to accept the sorrows of the poet and the world at large, reeling under the losses of the pandemic: 

mourning (87)

Structurally, the collection is held together by time, which, poem by poem, marks the slow passage of days. The poems are acutely conscious of it as memories flit backwards and forwards. Through the long and lonely days, Mamoun despairs in her search for wholeness while “the doors are shut/ and time does not return/ to heal the wound” (84). Even though the poems seem to “float” on the page, like the poet herself, “on worry like/ foam on riverskin” (36) they tell a story of resilience, a hard-won struggle for survival. And in the layers of time, she rediscovers her dreams to find flashes of hope dancing “like fireworks in a dark sky.” In the room of the poem, at last, she can promise herself and her daughters,

none can touch my peace

or threaten you

stretched in this room

alone in the open (103).

One of the most moving lines in this poetic journey comes in the latter portions of the collection. In a glimmering of hope, these lines:

 despite the rough journey

we were together

this alone was

enough (81).

Through the torment of “the soul resisting/ body limits” (52), Mamoun makes “a date with hope itself” (55), carries herself, her children, and her fallen activist comrades to moments of precious redemption, achieved through hardscrabble effort. And through the act of reading, “on love’s shoulder” (55) we, the readers are carried too.

Citations:

Kashiwase, H. “Female Genital Mutilation is still practiced around the world.” World Bank Development Indicators. World Bank, September 16, 2019. https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/stories/fgm-still-practiced-around-the-world.html