Butterflies Are Born and Amber Oozes Forth: Selected Poems

Translated from Arabic by Mayada Ibrahim

Author:
Najlaa Eltom: Post Date:
14 Oct

Azza El Siddique, *In the place of annihilation, where all the past was present and returned transformed* (2022) [detail]. Installation view: List Projects 25: Azza El Siddique, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2022. Photo: Mel Taing.

In 2019, the year I began translating Najlaa Eltom’s work, a revolution took place in Sudan and the dictator was toppled. What soon followed was a counter-revolutionary war that has abruptly ended or upended the lives of many, including our loved ones, and interrupted the radical change that was on its way. Reflecting on this selection of poems, composed between 2007 and 2018, I’m struck by how their meaning has refracted over time. The line ‘truth strikes us at our places of assembly’ reminds me of the makeshift brick barricades constructed by demonstrators across Khartoum in 2018 and 2019 to protect neighbourhoods from the violence of the military and the Rapid Support Forces militia. It brings to mind an image, one of the less viral ones, of a girl with a flower in her hair reading a book in front of barricades. In the poems there are descriptions of the annihilation of the self, meant in the Sufi sense of finding unity with the divine, which I now can’t help but read as relating to physical death as well: ‘Instead of seeing myself,’ Eltom writes, ’butterflies are born and amber oozes forth.’ These poems are gathered from two published volumes as well as previously unpublished works. Nūn, the first collection of Eltom’s work to appear in English, is forthcoming in my translation from trace press in the spring of 2027.

- Mayada Ibrahim

Najlaa Eltom is a Sudanese poet and literary translator. She is the author of three poetry collections in Arabic: The Doctrine of Thinness (2007), The Immortal Felony with Earrings (2019), and Melodies of Speed (2021), as well as numerous short stories and essays. Selections of her work have been translated into Swedish, English, Romanian, and Finnish. Her first book-length collection in English translation, nūn, translated by Mayada Ibrahim, is forthcoming from trace press in the spring

Mayada Ibrahim is a writer, editor, and literary translator based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London, working between Arabic and English. She is a MacDowell Fellow and recipient of the inaugural PEN Presents x International Booker Prize grant. Her published and forthcoming work can be found with trace press, And Other Stories, Yale University Press, and Willows House in South Sudan.