Familiar tropes from Arabic poetry, the loneliness of the desert, sweetness of roses, cups of tea, the intimacy of courtyards, tears, hearts, souls, night and weeping to the moon, which can all become quickly sentimental, abound in Mona Kareem’s bilingual I Will Not Fold These Maps. But they are given a new twist because they are all personified and have bodies that can walk around, can see and taste, which makes the world odd, transformable and slippery. The cliché tropes are interspersed with more contemporary references, to refugees for example, such as bread trucks or “Africa’s resurrection” (in “Remains”), and even “electronic pigeons” (in “Cigarette of Light”).
Most often Kareem’s strategy is to put the tropes in a new setting, as in the breathtaking opening of the book:
Roses jump to their death
from the rails of my bed
as my mother
tries to tuck me into the desert of life (from “Perdition”)
Many poems contain superb lines, frequently with absurd metaphors, such as the rather spectacular:
I forgot to construct my heart closer to the ground;
another friend has flung herself from the window of my heart.
It wasn’t until halfway through the chapbook length collection that I was struck by “My Body, My Vehicle.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a poem that I was able to follow from beginning to end. Basically, it’s an extended metaphor.
My body is my vehicle
I drive her like a reckless teen
She crashes into others, into sidewalks
She breaks red lights at the last second
As the Death Policeman shakes his head
If that “Death Policeman” is horror slapstick, the ending is poignant and unforgettable, yet still slightly deranged (but in a good way):
What do I do with this vehicle of mine?
I cannot park her, abandon her anywhere!
When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
The glossy ceramic floors
And when I go to the beach
She sinks into the sand
Small and dark, complected and broken
Her windows are an almanac of winds
And her voice falters at rush hour
Some poems suffer from an excess of abstractness. “In Praise of Modernity,” for example, begins with “I could be a turtle / you drive around in your bag,” which pairs a clear and amusing image (although it would be better to translate with “tortoise,” I think — it’s the same word in Arabic) with a fantastic starting point for musings about age and time, which Kareem duly delivers, but she also chooses to mix in a stanza with big words
My mother defines my expatriation
by the desiccation of the smell she loves;
We receive some kind of explanation of what this could mean; the lines are followed by a sharp observation that the smells of enemies can be washed out in the laundromat, such that their loads of clothes can spin back-to-back. Although my Arabic is barely there, I checked this translation with the help of a dictionary. It seems that the original phrases here say something like: “My mother knows my alienation by losing my scent, which she imagines…” So those overly abstract concepts must have been introduced by the translator. Expatriation is a lot more specific than alienation, although translator Sara Elkamel may have felt that it suited the theme of many of the poems, which deal with exile.
This touches upon another point about the translations in that they read somewhat clunky in places, as if the meaning came before the sounds. It may have been a conscious choice that has been made by Elkamel (who is a poet herself). In an example from “Genetics,”
Her plump lips held no emotion
towards the bitterness, sweetness, or stickiness of juice—
wouldn’t this translation, although faithful to the original, be more pleasant to read if the gist were smoothed out?
“Lot’s Wife” is an engrossing prose poem, even shocking, with its bold opening sentence: “Lot’s wife stands near the entrance, deformed more radically by the artist than she had ever been by the Lord.” Lot’s wife, who, according to the Bible story, was changed into a salt pillar when she looked back to the destroyed city of Sodom behind her, is compared to the life of an immigrant. This poem is interesting for the view of the homeland as destroyed; not necessarily in the sense of the Bible where God razes Sodom due to its surplus of sinners, but figuratively because the immigrant, especially when involuntary, cannot see the past and her homeland as whole anymore. The poem moved me also for its double removal of the home country. As if being turned into a salt pillar isn’t bad enough, Lot’s wife’s shape is frozen over again in a bronze statue, or head rather, as the statue that the poet contemplates has no limbs, as the poet says: “so she wouldn’t escape.” The poet doesn’t mention which statue she is showcasing; I’ve only found statues with limbs of Lot’s wife, such as the one by American artist Kiki Smith.
After reading the introduction and afterword to the collection, provided by Sara Elkamel and André Naffis-Sahely, respectively, the map of these place-shifting poems begins to take shape. Kareem belongs to a group of Arabs known as the Bidoon, or a stateless people who are unrecognized by the Arab state that they used to live in or live in currently. That means that their civic rights can suddenly be revoked. Kareem’s family hails from Kuwait. When Kareem went to the US on a student visa in 2011, she discovered she would not be welcomed back in her home country. Since then, she’s stayed in the US, while her family remains in Kuwait, and apparently is unable to visit them.
Currently, Kareem has three poetry collections to her name, and has translated other poets’ collections. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from SUNY and works as an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Washington University St. Louis. The mini collection is presented by the Poetry Translation Centre, based in the UK, who specialize in the translation of non-western authors. This slight sample of thirteen poems would be fitting if this were the first introduction of this creative and original poet to an English-speaking readership, but she already had an earlier chapbook, Femme Ghosts (2019). It’s definitely time for a full collection in translation.
MONA KAREEM is the author of three poetry collections. She is a research fellow at Center for Humanities at Tufts University (2021-2022) and a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appear in Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Find her at monakareem.blogspot.com.
SARA ELKAMEL is a poet, journalist and translator living between her hometown, Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry London, Poet Lore, among others, and in the anthologies Best New Poets ‘20 & ‘22 and Best of the Net ‘20. She was named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, the winner of both Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Elkamel’s debut chapbook “Field of No Justice” was published by the African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books in 2021. Find her at saraelkamel.com.
JACQUELINE SCHAALJE has published poetry and short fiction, most recently in The Comstock Review, The Friday Poem, and Pembroke Magazine. She’s the winner of the Florida Review Editor’s Prize 2022, and was a finalist in a few competitions, among which Live Canon’s and Alpine Fellowship. She participated in the Fall 2022 W2W mentoring program of AWP. She is a translation editor at MAYDAY, and reviews books for Painted, spoken, too. She earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.
