Poetry in Translation: Wadih Saadeh’s ‘The Suicides’

This translation initially ran in our Summer 2019 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

 

Who stormed checkpoints, taboos and fears, who conquered the darkness of the tunnel

as they passed through it like a flash of lightning. The suicides – our saints. Who were

too large for life, so they made space for themselves in death. Who could not own a life,

so they took possession of a death. Who were too sublime for charitable donations, for

hospitality that was incidental, for dinner tables where they dish for consumption, so

they slammed the door shut behind them and left. Who left the seats and prattle of

promises, and went to their silence. Who dissolved the salt of the spirit and pushed it

into the waterfall. Who tossed the bread of redemption to the fish. Who silenced the

vicious rustling of the brain and became still. There was some mix-up that brought us

here, they said, and a mix-up will take us away, so let’s just go on our own. Let us be the

mix-up ourselves. They left those at work to inherit and be the inheritors, and went to the

void. The void that stands high above, above all property or legacy. The void, dark and

frightening, which lit up their passing and made friends with it. The void, where the

suicides have a spot, a seat they can rest on. Where they have a home, trees and land

no one knows. There, they have a rooftop in nothingness where no one but the dead

can sit, a tall jasmine tree in front of their home, whose flowers they cannot smell unless

they become air. The suicides have sheep that got lost, who they go to tend. There,

they celebrate their wedding, without bride or groom, nor any children. They celebrate

the impossibility of mating, of the vanishing of their progeny, of the land gone extinct.

Every time one of them falls into the water, a new wave is born. Every time one drops

into empty space, a fresh breeze blows. The suicides invent new seas and winds.

When they dangle from ropes, they fill the empty distance between the ceiling and the

floor tiles. They bring something into nothingness. And when their corpse is carried, the

carriers find what they thought was behind them to be walking in front of them. They

find the dead corpse ahead of the living body, the past walking after the future and

death preceding life. They find that life is in the corpse, not in the body. Only those

brimming with life commit suicide. Those so full of it that it spilled over. Only those who

rise above death commit suicide. Those who become its masters. Suicides gift meaning

to death. They conquer it. Those who commit suicide leave two blots. One on the face

of life and another on the face of death. They leave traces of their dominion. And can

there be any other dominion? But to be masters is not the suicides’ demand. Erasure is their demand.

The erasure of the supremacy of life and that of death. The supremacy of

those who brought them and of those who take them away. The supremacy of the other

and of the self. The erasure that is the supremacy of existence is an act of liberation.

The suicides are our saints, the masters of erasure, masters of the void. And as they

relinquish their spirits to the void, they are not relinquishing a life but instead are

delivering a condemnation. Instead of relinquishing a corpse, they deliver the name of a

killer. Instead of giving up redemption, they hand over particles of dust. When they

relinquish their breaths, they relinquish emptiness.

Wadih Saadeh is a Lebanese-Australian poet. The judges of the 2018 Argana Prize, which Saadeh won, cited his unique contribution to “bringing about a change in the path of the Arab prose poem.”

Suneela Mubayi earned her Ph.D. in Arabic literature at NYU, where she completed a thesis on the intersection of classical and modern Arabic poetry. She has translated poems and short stories between Arabic, English, and Urdu, which have been published in Banipal, Beirut39, Jadaliyya, Rusted Radishes and elsewhere. She wishes to re-establish the position of Arabic as a vehicular language of the global South, the role it played for many centuries.