De Amerikaanse dichter, schrijver en essayist Kazim Ali werd geboren op 6 april 1971 in Croydon, Engeland. Zie ook alle tags voor Kazim Ali op dit blog.

Uit: Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water

“On our drive, I am captivated anew by the quality of the northern light. It always looks like it’s been raining: the yellow-white golden color of the dry grasses; the muted green of fir trees and the wet black of their trunks, with pale, dirty-white paper birches interspersed; blue smoke of the clouds, and then luminous and dark gray, the soft heavy sky billows pulsing with incipient light above. The lake–broken branches rising here and there above the water–seems resentful, treacherous, resigned.
At Jackson’s direction, Donald pulls over and we clamber out of the car. “Okay, now close your eyes,” Jackson instructs, then guides me across the road to its shoulder, facing the lake. “Now open your eyes.”
Jackson is holding up a photograph in front of my face. I can see the actual lake to the left and right, and he is holding the picture so I can see the continuous shoreline and a small sandy beach with a promontory of three large boulders. “This picture is from ten years ago,” he says.
“Now look.” And his arm drops away so I can see the shore now.
“The whole beach is gone!” I exclaim. “Those protruding rocks too.”
“They’re all underwater,” Jackson says, pointing in the direction where the rocks lie submerged.
During construction of the Jenpeg Generating Station, Manitoba premier Ed Schreyer promised that water levels would not change beyond the negotiated limits, and this provision was written into the Northern Flood Agreement. During a 1975 press conference announcing the plan, he famously held up a pencil to reporters and vowed that the water level would only fluctuate the length of that pencil. Forty years later, in response to the 2014 occupation of the Jenpeg Generating Station and the Pimicikamak council serving eviction papers to the province and Manitoba Hydro, Premier Greg Selinger issued a formal apology for the economic and social damage from hydroelectric development, acknowledging that the province had vastly underestimated the impact of the dam. Jackson Osborne commented at the time, “The premier should apologize to the muskrats, to the beavers, to the fish, to the moose.”

 

Ramadan

Je wilde zo hongerig zijn, dat je in takken zou breken,
en tussen de negentiende, eenentwintigste en drieëntwintigste avond

van de hongermaanden zou moeten kiezen.
De liturgie begint zichzelf te herhalen en waarom doet het ertoe?

Als het grondwater te schaars is kan men netten spannen
in de lucht en de mist oogsten.

Honger stelt je open voor analfabetisme,
dorst maakt het hongerpatroon duidelijk,

de dikke nacht is zo stil, dat de spinnende spin pauzeert,
de engel moment ophoudt met fluisteren –

De geheime nacht kan al voorbij zijn,
je zult heel aandachtig moeten luisteren –

Je zult nooit weten van welke nacht de mond in heiligheid reciteert
en van welke nacht de recitatie in het geheim louter wind is –

 

vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 6^e april ook mijn twee blogs van 6 april 2019.