In the Net by Mahmoudan Hawad

Author:Mahmoudan Hawad [Hawad, Mahmoudan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE007000 Poetry / African
Publisher: Nebraska

3

Azawad,

you must still gird

your memory.

In the north of Ajjer

to Tin Gantouren, stump land

your people’s skeletons,

Algerian explosives and their masks

blew up the mausoleum sepulchers

of the martyrs and their masks

to secure the foundations

of their gas factory.

Your martyrs

by voice of bones and shards

resounding death rattles

pain deception

deaf and cold complaint,

complaint of the forgotten,

awake sleep.

The sacrificed bind the throat in lava

magma of annulled memories,

whetted tone wailings

distressed sounds redoubling

the chorus and the echo’s call.

But the voice of shards and bones won’t

blend associate or mingle with the crowd

panic concert uproar

of lunatic trance powers,

that in the mausoleums

hidden in the gas factory

come face to face, in mortal combat,

soldiers and their trained dogs.

Kicks.

They kick bite aim strike one another.

Explosions insults yelps,

they bray Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar,

Allahu is ours,

Allahu is yours,

Allahu you,

Allahu to bar.

You must attack,

attack, by God,

to bar to bar!

Rubbish, pool balls, crude lumps,

disorder obscenity’s debris violence

guttural grumblings

in one-eyed Koranic Arabic

squatting and metamorphizing

places altars

in brothel butchery,

gas factory in flames.

At Tin Gantouren

what voice

of horror and fear

won’t have brayed at the stump cadavers

of our fleet fighting camels

thrashed twice over?

The skull is at In Amenas [Camel Skull]

but the brain of the Camel Ancestor

transformed into combustible

gas oil fuel

flows in the furrow streams

gorges of our defeats,

beyond the desert and the sea.

And it turns fertilizer for lard hills

grease heaps,

states with army and obese joints,

disaster!

Azawad, don’t say:

“Aye! Azawad, I’m beat.

Is it really me,

the mutilated and tortured Tuareg here

in search of a spare self,

some substitute slated for destruction

rather than the Tuareg

I still am?

Is there no other me that I

might curl up behind?”

This one, Azawad,

this Tuareg,

it’s you,

you alone.

Beyond yourself, there’s no

surrogate Tuareg

for you to hide behind.

Azawad, it’s just you,

the first one,

who is exposed

under your annihilation.

The Tuareg has four souls

but none can serve as

substitutes for the others

before its turn.

After you bury the steps

of the next one, you’ll make it rise again.

It’s your silhouette

that gives it form and meaning.

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