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In 2021, I travelled to rural parts of Marwar, a region in India’s mammoth, desert-clad state of Rajasthan to research the histories of cyclical famine; what people of the region call ‘akal’. Too harsh to memorialise, too brutal to recount, ‘akal’ in the region turns up most frequently in rhymes, songs and ‘muhavras’ or metaphors that make-up everyday speech. Throughout my trip, I heard poetry recited of lightning-like floods that washed away livestock. I heard stories turned to song, of how the nomadic tribes of the region survived harsh climates and harsher neglect from imperial governments and rich kings. But I also heard other tales that told of resilience: a rhyme about how to sour milk in a large mud pot, of short instructional couplets that held fleeting balms for great hunger; like foraging wildflowers, cooking tree barks into bread.
When I first read these four poems that make up today’s ‘Food and Injustice’ newsletter; I thought about the people of Marwar and their songs of survival. I thought about how history only honours the powerful and buries harshness in order to serve capital greed. But in these poems today, injustice is articulated — the greed of corporations, the desolation of land grabs and forced conversion, the neglect of those that grow our food everywhere is remembered and spoken aloud. But even so, within them, there is hope. It is the hope that comes from remembering, from making histories and weaving them into time. Within them, there is a resistance to forgetting and being forgotten about. SD
Thanks so much to Modern Poetry in Translation for initially publishing these poems. You can buy the latest issue on food here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/
Poem by Jhio Jan Navarro. Translated by Eric Abalajon from Hiligaynon.
1 .
Three sugar mill smokestacks stand sentry in Central Ma-ao.
Like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, watching over
people from Elga up to La Plata, from Kawilihan down to Guba
reminders of a time past when in the lands of the Araneta clan,
‘Money can be picked and shoveled from the ground’.
2 .
The smokestacks are giant cigars made of rolled brick
wrapped with iron sheets. But the foundation
that sucks and puffs out has long run out of breath.
Thus, as clouds are widowed by smoke,
the towers are being married by rust.
And in the lands of the Araneta clan it has long been accepted
that, ‘For money, even the pick and the shovel must be pawned’.
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Poem by Lupita Perez. Translated by Ryan Van Winkle from Spanish.
Some days
life fits into a coffee cup
Some days
surviving the streets
is good enough
I pay my rent and eat
a couple times a day
Sometimes, some days
the sun shines slick as a self-help book
people challenge their fate
and injustice, corruption,
exploitation, starvation
are distant as an eclipse
But, by only my third sip I insist
the cup is already half empty
I cry
for no reason
for the coffee going cold
and the skinny kid
picking beans
serving the corporation
the slumlord of our world
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Poem by Abdellatif Laabi. Translated by André Naffis-Sahely from French.
Let’s talk about this hunger strike
It’s a form of resistance
that men in my situation
have experimented with throughout the long history
of mutilations
Sure it’s a passive act
but when you’ve got nothing but your naked chest
against Fascist arsenals
the only weapon we have left
is this irrepressible
breath still inside us
which we push to the furthest of limits
risking its death
to safeguard our dignity
When you’re hungry
the sun looks bleached
and the sleepless nights are freezing
We think about so many
weighty or funny things
When I was less serious I admit
I was tormented by the idea of earthly delights
I imagined such a bunch of tasty treats I could eat
that I ran through the gamut of my gastronomical knowledge
but there we have it, I’m not ashamed of such thoughts
because what prevails
during this wait
this journey towards the unknown
is the feeling of immense strength
at the heart of weakness
how he who resists is superior
to him who oppresses
Yes life is a formidable weapon
that will always frighten
the armies of cadavers
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
What tortures the hungry
is this vile putrid taste in the mouth
those cold bulging eyes in the fog of the day
the despairing emptiness
that makes the guts clench and twist
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
The ideas that cut through the night
become tangible things
they belong neither to me
nor the other, not to another still
but are the property
of all those excluded from the light of the sun
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
because our hunger
isn’t conjured by mirages of El Dorados
isn’t the lust for supercities that kneel
before the golden calf and debauchery
our hunger belongs to a new world
peopled by new men
to a sun that is shared
without thought of profit
to an irreversible sense of peace
to the chagrin of the builders of inequality
Furthermore
during these days of abstinence
it makes me proud
that going hungry
means I get to unsettle
the perverse complacency
of those who starve my people
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Poem by Sabeer Haka. Translated by Nasrin Parvaz and Hubert Moore from Farsi.
Have you ever seen
mulberries,
how their red juice
stains the earth where they fell?
Nothing is as painful as falling.
I’ve seen so many workers
fall from buildings
and become mulberries.
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Modern Poetry in Translation is literary magazine and publisher based in the United Kingdom that specialises in translated poetry. To buy their latest issue on food in poetry, please view their website here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/
Jhio Jan Navarro was born and raised amid the sugarcane fields of Brgy. Don Jorge L. Araneta, Bago City, Negros Occidental. He writes poetry in English, Filipino and his mother-tongue, Hiligaynon. His works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, TLDTD, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere.
Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the UP Visayas, Iloilo. His works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Footprints: An Anthology of New Ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022).
Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan writer and translator. In 1966 he cofounded the journal Souffles, which considerably influenced the b by cultural world of North Africa. Politically engaged, Laâbi was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for over eight years. When he went into exile in France in 1985, Laâbi developed a writing style marked by great humanity and devotion to the struggle for justice and freedom. Laâbi conceives of poetry as the ultimate weapon to express dignity and bear witness. He received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2009 and the Grand prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française in 2011.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His writing appears regularly in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler and Poetry (Chicago), among others. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.
Sabeer Haka was born in 1986 in Kermanshah, Iran. He is a worker and lives in Tehran. Two of his collections of poetry have been published in Iran and in 2013 he won first prize in the Iranian Workers’ Poetry Competition. ‘I’m tired,’ he says in an interview, ‘I’m very tired. My tiredness goes back to before my birth. I was a worker since my mother carried me in her womb while working, and I felt her exhaustion. Still her tiredness is in my body.’
Nasrin Parvaz became a civil rights activist when the Islamic regime took power in 1979 in Iran. She was arrested in 1982, tortured and spent eight years in prison. Her books include ‘One Woman's Struggle in Iran, A Prison Memoir’, and ‘The Secret Letters from X to A’, (Victorina Press 2018). Nasrin’s poetry, stories and translations have been published in different anthologies. Among other writings, Nasrin published a novel in Farsi about the massacre of prisoners in 1988 in Iran, to which she was an eye-witness. She has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries. Her paintings were accepted for inclusion in the exhibitions, Calendar and for postcards. She studied for a degree in Psychology and subsequently gained an MA in International Relations. She then completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Systemic Theory at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, where she worked in a team of family therapists for some time. http://nasrinparvaz.org/
Hubert Moore is a widely published British poet whose 13th collection entitled ‘Hello dear’ appeared in April 2023.
Lupita Perez is originally from the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. She has lived in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon state, for decades. A postgraduate in Public Management and Human Resources by UANL, Mexico, Pérez is a poet, cultural promoter, university professor and a member of CONARTE, an association of Mexican writers. She has participated in numerous literary festivals and conferences in México, the USA, Spain, Chile and Colombia. Her work has been included in important Mexican and foreign anthologies. She has published two books of poems “El Demonio y Otros Amores", (2011) and "Reincidencias" (2016)
Ryan Van Winkle is an author, artist and producer based in Edinburgh. His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Schools Writer in Residence for the Citizen project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland. He was awarded the Jessie Kesson fellowship at Moniack Mhor in 2018. You can find him on Twitter at @rvwable
The illustration is by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of their work on https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop and Instagram.
Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.
