Autorentext

Mohammed Khelef Ghassani was born in 1977 on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar. He studied translation at the Open University of Tanzania, where he received a master's degree in 2014. He now works as a reporter and editor of the broadcasting company Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany. He is the author of seven previous collections of poetry in Swahili. Meg Arenberg is a scholar and translator with specializations in Anglophone African, Indian Ocean, and Swahili literatures. Her work has won recognition from the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Literary Translators Association.

Klappentext

I Have a Home, There Is a We, whose original Swahili edition was in 2015 the first book of poetry to win the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, brings the acclaimed verse of prolific Zanzibari poet, journalist, and cultural changemaker Mohammed Khelef Ghassani to English-language readers for the first time. The book explores the poet's life as a migrant in Germany: linguistic and cultural alienation, nostalgia, and longing for his homeland on the island of Pemba. These poems form a catalog of sorrow and love addressed to the family he left behind, to the children whose roots "he tore forcefully from the ground" in hopes of offering them a better life, and above all to the country he calls home, using the deeply resonant Swahili term "kwetu"—our place—named over and over again as Zanzibar.

Utilizing the structured verse forms of traditional Swahili prosody, the collection is modern, unique, and innovative, speaking to a global diasporic experience even as it draws deeply on an idiom specific to the poet's tiny island home. A ripple of political defiance suffuses the poems as Ghassani positions himself against layered forms of oppression and marginalization both at home and abroad in this synthesis of love song, lamentation, and freedom declaration.

Inhalt

Translator’s Note
Author’s Introduction
I Have a Home
Too Many
In the Name of My Country
She Is Called Zanzibar
The Lord Taketh
Receive This Tear
I Remember
Dream
It’s Already in Pieces
Your Equal
I’m Coming Home
I’ve No Choice but to Go
It Will End
We Have This Tree
The Voice of My Country
Don’t Make Me an Orphan
The Butterfly Fish
But She Wasn’t the One
We All Have Our End
Zenj, My Dear
How Can I Stop Crying?
My Country Is Bereaved
Dreams Fly
If Nurturing Is Beyond You
Greetings to My Mothers
Alhamdulillah
What Goes Around Comes
If You Knew That I Know
Dove, I Blame You
Tears, Spill
If You Don’t Have It, You Don’t Have It
Release Me
Wasted Soul
A Pot Won’t Lack for Soot
These Days I’ve Matured
We People of This World
When You Fear People You Don’t Act
Where Are They?
Get Caught and Remember Me
The World Isn’t Pleasure
Popobawa Has Returned
Isolation Cradles
Generosity Won’t Be Repaid
Little Half My Heart
Giving and Receiving
Bequest
Be Tolerant
This Is How I Am
When a New Thing Becomes a Wound
The Choice That Can’t Be Chosen
Life Is Love
My Khadhira, Hush Now
We Will Arrive
How Can You Drink the Sauce First?
The Hot Sun of Night
Peacock in a Cage
There’s No Growing Weary of Getting
Love Is in the Tease
Shoes Come in Pairs
Their Country, Their Tongue
Home O Home
The Pens Should Roam
A Broad-Shouldered Man
Don’t Desert Your Camp
I Am Yours
I Don’t Need a Spectacle
Take Advice
This Is How They Are
The Way I Love You
Today’s Eater, What Does He Eat?
Had It Been Knowable
For Whom Do You Wear It?
My Children, Forgive Me
I Won’t Blunt My Knife
Attacking the Jinni
Where Are You, Joy?
Some Things You Shouldn’t Ask
Judgment of Man
If Things Go Bad
I’m Afraid of Becoming Lost
The Ones Who Search for You
Ballot
The Bones of the Migrants
I Am a Leaf
While the Clay Is Wet
Building a House from Afar
You Are the Ones Who Love Me