Illustration by Anne Le Guern

You say, our village.
Do you mean our exact village,
The one we saw at dawn,
Where we watched the sunrise
And spent the morning,
The afternoon,
And the evening,
And where we stayed?

If you really mean
This village,
It has a village underneath,
And a village under that

Before the modern one you see:
A village before Islam;
Another village before Christianity;
Yet another before the kingdom
Of the Jews;
And one before the worship of the sun;
Yet another
Before the deities of anyone.

You say, our village.
Exactly which one out of these?
Our village is a veteran of
So many histories
That if you want to know
About the one below
Or about the one above
You have to say the number
Counting up or down.

You say, our village,
But is it at night,
Twilight, midnight?
The village where we sleep,
The village where we wake
At sunrise,
Or at the dawn of history?
All at once they make

One massive ladder
With endless rungs
Through vast and countless
Levels upon levels
Outspreading up and down,
Set deeply in eternity
To rise
Beyond the skies.

You say, our village, but
In relation to what?
The village has a village
Behind it and before;
To the right, in the middle,
On the left, and more
Villages beyond.
Our village runs the range:
From traditional, to hidebound,
To life in balance, and to change.

You say, our village, but
Merely numbering the districts
In the province looks
Like counting pages in a book
That should be read instead.
Step by step and inch by inch
Our village and our home
Is like our nation –
Exceeding any sum of its parts.

So, you say, our village.
Exactly which one?
Our village of the past,
Our village here, today,
The modern wannabe,
Or the village you can’t see,
And the village that will really be
Modern, even postmodern?

Tesfamariam Woldemariam
Tesfamariam Woldemariam (1948-2015) joined the armed struggle of Eritrea's nationalist independence movement in the mid-1970s. He was a leading intellectual, writing in Tigrinya and establishing Tigrinya journals. Internal conflicts within Eritrea’s liberation forces compelled him to immigrate to Sudan in the early 1980s and eventually to the United States. Woldemariam continued to write poetry and occasionally published political and cultural essays, eventually returning to Eritrea in 2014 to work on a new collection of his poetry. “Our Village” comes from this last volume, a 300-page critically annotated collection entitled ህያው ደብሪ (Hiyaw Debri), or The Living Monastery.

Menghis Samuel
Menghis Samuel is owner and managing director of Ewan Technology Solutions, Inc. in Eritrea. A veteran of Eritrea's armed struggle for independence, he has lived in the United States and worked as a former project manager at AT&T. He is chairman of the board of the Eritrean National Chamber of Commerce. As a poet and translator, his most recent work includes the co-translation of Gfi Gezati Ethiopia ab Ertra (Atrocities by Ethiopian Rulers in Eritrea).

Charles Cantalupo
Charles Cantalupo's work has received support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank. He is the author of four books of translations of Eritrean poetry; four books of literary criticism ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; a memoir, Joining Africa – from Anthills to Asmara; a book of selected essays, Non-Native Speaker; and four books of his own poetry, the most recent of which is The Woodstock Sandal and Further Steps. He is co-author of the historic "Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures" and his latest book, Sykes in Eritrea, is on the photography of Lawrence F. Sykes.