Recently, I came across a new book that collects and translates hundreds of Kirundi proverbs. It’s the work of Lionel Kubwimana, and it brings treasures from the language of Burundi to speakers of English and French — and to speakers of Kirundi outside their homeland. As so many peoples know, it is hard and humble work to reroot language once it has lost its lands.
One of these many proverbs won’t release me: Akazimiye ntaho katarondererwa, which Kubwimana translates as, “In the labyrinth of loss, seek every possible passage.”
That’s the work of Guernica this month, as our writers seek passage through grief.
In “Déja Vû,” Tiffany Marie Tucker maps loss with local Black history, family memory, and growing grievance against a world so indifferent to its erasure of both. In “Flipping Grief,” James McNaughton empties the home of his brother, who’d himself built homes before he died of an overdose, as he fends off speculative investors. In Tanmayi Gidh “Komorebi,” Spotlights Fiction Editor Raaza Jamshed writes, “the very personal loss of home is sublimated into grief for a world that may soon be lost too.”
In Fungai Machiori’s imagined exchange with the African literary giant Ama Ata Aidoo, we grieve in celebration. With Hala Alyan, through her poem “Revision,” we grieve in witness.
With this issue, we also share a Guernica collection of literary witnessing. Voices on Palestine brings together work from the Guernica archives, mostly by Palestinian writers, that documents the many forms of violence wrought for so long on Palestinian lands. These are but a few of the works exploring these themes that Guernica has published in its nearly 20 years; they are among the pieces that cling to our consciousness, and our conscience. We revisit them as if in echo-location as we try to understand where, even whether, we might find passage in this time of ineffable injustice and loss.
We also have poetry by Cortney Lamar Charleston and by Ernst Meister, in translation by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick; fiction from Amanda Su and Katarzyna Szaulńska, in translation by Mark Tardi; and a cutting from Susan Kiyo Ito’s new memoir.
—Jina Moore Ngarambe
