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A letter arrives from Ain Defla. 1
It tells me
that I was a young shepherd
in one of her villages.
I was born in 1918.
I had a brown cloak
and an embroidered saddlebag
my grandmother had knitted.
My life was short. I was killed
in my youth, before all my peers.
I was 27 when the spray of bullets
tore through my chest,
one of the million martyrs
you’ve immortalized in oblivion.
Don’t wave poems in my face
or show me speeches
from the openings of public institutions—
I’m in the fog now
and I cannot see.

There was a small flute in my bag
that the colonizers broke,
though no one remembered it
or looked for it—
just like my village, Barbouche.

You know what I’m speaking of.
Quick now, give me my flute.
I’m standing in the fog
and I cannot stay.

—

1 Ain Defla is both a city and a province in Algeria. This poem likely refers to the colonial massacres that took place in Algeria in 1945 (often referred to as the Sétif and Guelma massacres), in which up to 30,000 Algerians were killed by the French colonial authorities and by European settler-militias.

Najwan Darwish
Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. His second major collection in English translation, Nothing More to Lose and Exhausted on the Cross, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, was published by NYRB Poets in 2021, with a foreword by Raúl Zurita. It was shortlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the National Translation Award in Poetry, and the Derek Walcott Prize, and won the Sarah Maguire Prize. Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem. His third collection in English, No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014-2024, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is published by The Margellos World Republic of Letters, Yale University Press, 2024.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an award-winning translator, editor, writer, and scholar. He has translated numerous writers, namely Najwan Darwish, Rabee Jaber, and Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adunis (co-translated with Ivan Eubanks, New Directions, 2019; Penguin Modern Classics, 2021), among others. He is the recipient of awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies from PEN America, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry magazine, the Fulbright Program, the Lannan Foundation, and Banff Centre for the Arts. Abu-Zeid lives outside of Santa Fe.
http://www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com