Contemporary International Writers

Mubtadiyah
by Leila Chatti

(Arabic) Beginner: One who sees blood for the first time.
“And indeed, [appointed] over you are keepers, Noble and recording;
They know whatever you do.”
—The Holy Quran 82: 10-12

Hidden in a dim stall as the muezzin called
all worshipers to prayer, I touched privately
the indelible stain. And watched, with a nascent sense
of kinship, the women washing
through the interstice of the door,
their veils slipping off like water, water
spotting their clothes like rain.
I thought the thought only
children and the pious believe, that I was, just
like that, no longer
a girl: the blood my summons, blot like a seal, a scarlet membership
card slid from my innermost pocket. I was newly twelve and wise
enough to be frightened. I had read The Book and so understood
my own was now opening, alighting
onto my shoulders like some ethereal bird flapping
briefly immaculate
wings, and understood, too, that I myself engendered
the ink with which, on its pages, my sins would forever be
written (not literally but
this was how I imagined it, metaphor, as the blood brought
God’s recorders like sharks to me,
menarche a bright flare, a matador’s crimson cape)
—I had not been good
all my life but until this first vermillion drip
I lived unobserved, my sins not sins
because no one looked. And now,
above like a lamp suddenly
ablaze, God’s reproachful
eye turned my way, a searchlight eternally
searching, and seeing and seeing—
I was as good as I would ever be. In the dark, the ruddy
iris stared back at me.

Beginnings
by Mahtem Shiferraw

This is not how it begins
but how you understand it.

I walk many kilometers and
find myself to be the same—

the same moon hovering over
the same, bleached sky,

and when the officer calls me
it is a name I do not recognize,
a self I do not recognize.

We are asked to kneel, or
stand still, depending on which land
we embroider our feet with—

this one is copious with black blood
or so I am told.

Someone calls me by the skin
I did not know I had
and to this I think—language,

there must be a language
that contains us all
that contains all of this.

How to disassemble
the sorrow of beginnings,

how to let go, and not,
how to crouch beneath other bodies
how to stop breathing, how not to.

Our fathers are not elders here;
they are long-bearded men
shoving taxi cabs and sprawled
in small valet parking lots—

at their sight, my body dims its light
(a desiccated grape)
and murmur, Igziabher Yistilign—
our pride, raw-purple again.

We begin like this: all of us
walking in solitude
walking a desert earth and
unforgiving bodies. We cross lines
we dare not speak of; we learn and
unlearn things quickly, or intentionally slow
(because, that, we can control)
and give ourselves new names
because these selves must be new
to forget the old blue.

But, sometimes, we also begin like this:
on a cold, cold night
memorizing escape routes
kissing the foreheads of small children
hiding accat in our pockets,
a rosary for safekeeping.

Or, married off to men thirty years our elders
big house, big job, big, striking hands.

Or, thinking of the mouths to feed.

At times
we begin in silence;

water making its way into our bodies—
rain, or tears, or black and red seas
until we are ripe with longing.

About This Poem

“It is difficult to contain the plights of the nomads, the immigrants, in a language. It is filled with displacement, disarray, a thick grief. It is lonely. It is humbling. It breaks us, slowly, slowly. But we can talk about it in bits and pieces. And part of being an immigrant is having to start over again, having to begin in a new land, a new life, without forgetting the old one. Having a new identity, a new name, a new self. To begin—without a home, walking in solitude; to begin in silence. This poem is an attempt to give space to that.”
—Mahtem Shiferraw