Poetry
تذاكر للجحيم
Not translated into English
Mohamed Shaltami · 1970
Synopsis
Poems of revolt written under the gaze of the jailer: the prisoner is ordered to smile at his wound, soldiers trample blood that is still warm, and the speaker sees his own name become a charge in an indictment. The incantatory verse returns again and again to the cell, to the guards and to the fear that spreads among those outside, until the hell of the title becomes the ordinary place of a country.
Context
The volume was distributed with an issue of the review Jil wa-risala, which gave it readers from the outset that the Libyan edition alone did not reach. The verses speak of shackles at the wrists, breath counted by the guard, warm blood wetting the soldiers' feet, and the paradoxical order to smile at the wound. One line announces that the poet's name spreads everywhere like an accusation, and it is perhaps from this that the title under which the text has sometimes circulated elsewhere comes. It was reissued in 1974, then in 1998.
Who it is for
A short collection in Arabic, never translated into French. The tone is incantatory and the subject political: jail and surveillance are everywhere in it.
Prizes and reception
Sadeq al-Neihum placed its author among the four best Arab poets of his time, with Nizar Qabbani, Abdelwahab al-Bayati and Mahmoud Darwish.