André Naffis-Sahely
* * *
THE PROMISED LAND
Poems from Itinerant Life
Contents
I
Disposable Cities
San Zenone degli Ezzelini
Escaping East
Lead, Kindly Light
An Island of Strangers
Vanishing Act
Jumeirah Janes
Mina Zayed
The Foreign Correspondent
Wanted Man
Sehnsucht
Stopover
The Return
Home After Five Years
Infidelity
Flying on New Year’s Eve
The Promised Land
II
A Kind of Love
N16 8EA
The Translator
Forward March
The Carpet that Wouldn’t Fly
This Most Serene Republic
Auroville
Mounting Mileage
Feast of the Sacrifice
Postcard from the Cape
Through the Rockies
Brief Encounters of the Hopeless Kind
In the Shadow of Monadnock
In the Catskills
III
The Other Achilles
Atticus
Patience
The Crisis of the Third Century
The Pagan’s Lament
Put Not Your Trust in Princes
Acknowledgements
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PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PROMISED LAND
ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY was born in Venice in 1985 to an Iranian father and an Italian mother, but raised in Abu Dhabi. His poetry has been featured in Ambit, Areté, The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015), and Swimmers, among others. His non-fiction writing has appeared in such publications as Poetry, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and The Independent. He has been awarded fellowships from bodies including the MacDowell Colony and the Dar al-Ma’mûn Foundation. He is also a literary translator from Italian and French; his Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, winner of a PEN Translates award, was published by Carcanet in 2016.
for my parents, my brother and my wife
I
* * *
Petroleum changes human nature.
It ignites people even before it has left the ground.
JOSEPH ROTH
Disposable Cities
They begin as blips on the horizon of prospects, rumours, snippets of exaggerated talk, too fabulous to believe, but too alluring to forget. Something has been found: gold, silver, uranium, coltan or oil. Before long, the prospect of immeasurable wealth drowns all incredulity. The migration begins. The engineers in their hard hats and linens are the first on the ground, and with them come derricks, drills, platforms and dry docks. Pipelines sink their tentacles into every lucrative crevice marked on the map. The maps are kept secret.
A handful of shacks are erected to provide a few basic services. Soon enough, the handful swells into a hamlet, then a village, and finally a city. Such cities are the perfect sort of settlement for the modern world: everything is shipped in, everything is easily assembled. Their primary and overriding purpose is to extract, process, and distribute. Just like a motorized pump draws water out of a well, they start inhaling people from all over the world, one desperado at a time.
At first, these fresh arrivals find their new homes unsettling. They find it difficult to adjust to the weird climates and are frazzled by the confusion of languages. No one is under any illusions. They are ephemeral guests, non-citizens; belonging is a dream best forgotten or deferred. Most have come empty-handed, having traded their old lives for grubstakes. Lots of money sloshes around, but most of it is spent simply surviving, and when it runs out, people watch their lives fall apart. Everyone exists in a heightened state of awareness: one false move and they’re gone. The poorer they are, the more modest their gambles, which more often than not make them poorer. ‘Beggars don’t build homelands,’ they tell themselves, fantasizing about the day when they might return home and become somebody.
The myth, meanwhile, has travelled to the four corners of the planet. More than cities, these El Dorados are a state of mind, places where people come to reinvent themselves and realize their most eccentric fantasies. All conurbations live out their lot and die, but the disposable cities are special. They thrive in areas of the world generally deemed inhospitable or uninhabitable, in Greenland, Siberia, the Amazon, the Yukon, or the Empty Quarter. They are mushrooms of greed, requiring no loving care or attention, they simply erupt and flourish.
Yet their fame is fleeting. Once bled dry, these cities’ roads go raw with potholes, chickens roam loose in the opera houses, power lines sag, and rot seeps in, tarring all in sight. Only those unlucky enough not to make it stay in town for the decline. One day, the wind howls and the last tent comes undone. The lie has moved on to the next disposable city. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me that lies had short legs, and thus could not get very far. Somebody lied to her.
San Zenone degli Ezzelini
There was only a church, a school and a bar
where old men sipped spritzers till dusk.
A dual carriage-way cut through the town,
but nobody ever stopped. Now and then,
there was a car crash; an elderly couple
once burned alive inside their Ferrari
after hitting a lamppost. Their obituary
in the local newspaper read: OUT-OF-TOWNERS,
DEAD. San Zenone was where my father
had taken up carpet-selling: his office
was a storehouse of dust and debts,
with a samovar in view of the window.
The town had once belonged to the Ezzelini,
ruthless warlords who preyed on the weak
in the wastelands between the Pope and the Emperor.
Their most famous son, Ezzelino III, the ‘Terrible’,
once won his father’s soul during a game of dice,
and refused to give it back. In 1254, six years
after he was excommunicated, Pope Innocent IV
yelled ‘Let the tyrant die!’ and launched a crusade against him,
the only one ever declared on a single man. It was
the beginning of the end. After months of retreats
and failed sieges, a lone arrow pierced Ezzelino’s ankle,
and brought him down at Cassano. Foreseeing
his own doom, Alberico, Ezzelino’s brother,
assembled his mercenaries in San Zenone’s tower
and waited. From its heights, Alberico watched
as his sons were killed and dismembered,
and his daughters raped and burned. Sometime
before the inevitable, Alberico was told
how Ezzelino’s dying breath had betrayed him.
A final act of brotherly love. The tower is featured
on San Zenone’s coat of arms, where a giant snake
peers out of the stones, its tongue red and snarling.
‘What is that?’ I once asked my primary school teacher.
‘It reminds us of the poison that lurks in our families.’
Escaping East
It was like going on holiday, permanently.
Even though I was six, I steered my own ship –
or pretended to, perched atop suitcases,
rolling along the corridors at Frankfurt International.
While half the world swept west,
we trickled eastward, one by one,
single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:
Abu Dhabi, where my father had a j
ob
and money, for the first time in years.
Our house was squeezed between
the Russian embassy and a cemetery –
the latter the healthier-looking of the two.
The embassy was a model of the Yeltsin era:
that nauseating smell of rot and booze,
the officers swaying either side of a gate
with a hammer and sickle’s silhouette
still legible in the wood. When bored,
I would ring the bell just to hear a drunken ‘Da?’
bellow from the other side. The gate stayed shut.
I watched the guards from my mashrabiya,
our first-floor balcony, as they cursed the heat
and loosened their belts. Like them, I put on weight;
everything seemed edible in this city. Everywhere
you looked were fast-food outlets – the vanguard
of globesity. There was so much food, in fact,
that the streets were sticky with its stains and residues.
Each evening, the grocer nearest us left crates
of unwanted mangoes and limes outside his shop;
within hours, they fermented into chutney, leaving
One day the cemetery gate was left ajar: without
hesitation, I snuck in to breathe some air, a bit of clean air.
Lead, Kindly Light
The school was an hour south of the city, in the middle of nowhere, but the compound was walled and guarded. Our headmaster was a retired policeman, and the windows of the bus were criss-crossed with bars. Submission was the order of the day: you have been given your place in the world, and now you must pay for it. We didn’t study much; our books were outdated and censored. As for the rules, they were eminently negotiable. Everyone kept to their own, just like in prison. Suspicions fluctuated with hormones. We knew nothing of the country we lived in, save that our presence was temporary. Our hosts were calm and indifferent. One day, when the subject of oil arose, an Emirati classmate exclaimed: ‘My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I will drive a Lamborghini, and my son will drive whatever he likes – but my grandson will ride a camel.’ The day the USS Cole was bombed in Aden, a large Israeli flag was set on fire in the playground. The white kids were nowhere to be seen.
An Island of Strangers
The rooftop was the place to be. I was fifteen
and in love with ash-cans, pigeon coops,
women hanging their laundry. There was a fifty-
foot portrait of the King by the sea,
overlooking a busy junction – always smiling,
like an ad for toothpaste, or mouthwash.
At night, the shore on the west side of town
was the quietest, where hotels, Natashas and haram
coalesced into parties. Every half-lit room
was a sure sign of orgasms and the passing
of money from stranger to stranger. Anything
interesting and pleasurable was haram. I envied
the King, and his sons, all eighteen of them.
The King was virile, a patriarch, Abraham on Viagra;
his people, on the other hand, were on Prozac.
Everywhere the eye looked was money. The nose
hit only sweat: acrid, pugnacious, pervasive.
Most of the boys I knew sucked Butane, smoked,
saved up for whores, waited for their parole in the summer.
Each back to his own country. Come September
the dissatisfied returned: misfit mutts, at home everywhere
and nowhere. A friend compared cosmopolitanism
to being stuck at summer camp, waiting for parents
who never showed up. In the thirty-third year of his smile,
the King finally died. His mausoleum is a meringue: wavy,
white, and empty. His sons have gone on squabbling, playing
whose is biggest with bricks. One by one, they die in car crashes.
Days of heatstrokes, kif and bloodthirsty Ferraris.
Vanishing Act
Only two out of ten people die in Abu Dhabi; the rest simply fail to have their visas renewed. They are bagged, tagged and placed on the next available flight to wherever they first came from – the one-way ticket experience par excellence. Every edifice on this island is crafted by these almost-nothings. In death, at least, there is solace: never again to queue for days on end, never again to have their fingertips inked and pressed by intolerant hands, their blood screened for undesirable illnesses, their flesh seared by a sun that wonders what the hell they are doing here.
Jumeirah Janes
A hill-station breeze blows through the café:
the ladies are dressed for high tea and the waiters
polish the windows that keep the hot sand at bay.
Life here has left a bitter film on their lips,
which they purse whenever one of them mentions
how her children have gone home and her husband
works six-day weeks even during the summer.
As if that weren’t enough, the servants are lazy …
Then there are the locals, who are ignorant, venal,
tasteless, and, even worse, lucky. The ladies
are lonely: they want to go back to the You-Kay.
‘But then,’ one says, ‘we’re so comfortable here’ –
at which point all conspiracy dies. Like
moody nuns, the ladies nod in acknowledgement;
their talk drifts back to the weather.
Mina Zayed
It’s late afternoon and the market looks like a used-car lot.
I watch men conduct business from the backs of their trucks;
there’s not much on sale today: spices, pots, bags of nuts,
cracked ceramic ashtrays. A few customers stroll by,
but it’s too muggy to haggle. The sleepiness of the place
is broken only by the stinging, oddly invigorating smell
of diesel in the air. The port lies just a short distance from here,
and the ships on the horizon rise and dip like the humps
of a great caravan of steel, slowly winding its way
from the West to the Rest. An entire country
is being built from scratch: there are cargo containers
as far as the eye can see. The sun sets, while the market
rear-guard of the past, or an inscrutable prototype of the future.
The Foreign Correspondent
‘I do not like the taste in my mouth.
To remonstrate would be better,
to keep my mouth shut would be best.
I can count. I know how many
lost their nerve at the sight of his smile
and how many more died in silence
sliding down the slick wall of his teeth.’
Wanted Man
for my father
For the first time in years, your phone calls stopped.
You were always out of town, or stuck in meetings;
by the time my mother told me, you’d been inside
the best part of a month. One night they came for you
and forty days later, you limped home, your clothes
three sizes too big. Money went missing. While
the thieves took for the hills, you stayed put, oblivious.
By the time the Law figured it out, you’d discovered
how men can be made to fit together like jigsaw pieces
when forty share a room designed for eight.
Months after your release, you wore the confused look
of a character actor left without a part. On the upside,
you ‘finally understood the appeal of Johnny Cash.’
Sehnsucht
for my mother
Our family has become a government-in-exile;
visiting you is
like paying my respects
to a kindly downhearted minister who
is equally fearful of past, present and future.
Two small rooms to eat and sleep in; only
the essentials escaped being boxed up
while awaiting their destination. Still they wait.
This is home for now – a little town
outside Florence where the streets are lifeless
and the old stick their necks out of windows
like turtles keeping an eye out for vultures.
When apart, we speak only a little:
a pair of talking heads in a penumbra.
I look at you: a housewife without a house,
without a husband too. Pondering it all,
I chew anti-acids with a sovereign indifference.
Your younger son, your adjutant, or aide-de-camp,
shuts himself in his room all day and shoots aliens,
Nazis or terrorists on his console, almost
as if training for a war to reconquer our lives.
Stopover
What city stays still like a glass-cased princess?
I wish this one did. All that hate and here I am.
My whole life, I’ve hoped to show somebody
this strange town, and now that you’re here
I just sit by the creek and mumble something
incoherent in disbelief. Little to do now except
list the sights in a Guinness Book of Records way,
or explain how the cafés where I emptied cups
have turned into beauty salons, how the houses
I once lived in are no longer there. Narrow boats
sail past the bright hotels. This whole country
is like a hotel – or a ride in a glass elevator:
sweat, heat; at the ding of the doors, my escape.
The Return
I get stamped in like a tourist. It’s seven a.m. and my father’s waiting for me at arrivals. We drive along the impossibly wide highways, over the bridge to the island of Abu Dhabi. Sixty years ago, there was almost nothing here: a single mud-brick fort, where the ruler and his family lived, a few brackish wells, an air strip, and a handful of huts. Now it accommodates one and a half million people from just about everywhere on Earth and hosts a Formula 1 Grand Prix. My father pulls up in a parking lot in the middle of Bateen, a residential neighbourhood. On entering the three-storey building where he and my mother live, I spot a succession of bright red crosses spray-painted on nearly every wall, door and hallway. It’s Passover at King Herod’s. My father explains that an official from the Municipality inspected the building last week and ordered all the partitions torn down in accordance with new planning regulations. Most of the building is held up by light interior walls that sound like ripe watermelons when you rap your knuckles against them. The Municipality has given my parents two days to knock down the walls, or they’ll cut off their gas, water and electricity. Over the years, my family has acquired a breath-taking proficiency in paring their lives down to the bare essentials. Living in the United Arab Emirates is like assembling a Jenga tower, then nervously trying to remove as many blocks as you can without the entire edifice collapsing on you. Once the walls are gone, my parents will get a reprieve from the city authorities, like the rest of their anxious fellow tenants: at which point the game starts all over again.