Sofia Belimova

Memory’s Underworld

By LOUIS-PHILIPPE DALEMBERT 

Translated from the French by NANCY NAOMI CARLSON and CATHERINE MAIGRET KELLOGG 

Introduction

Although author Louis-Philippe Dalembert was born and raised in Haiti, this story takes place in French Guiana, a French territory located on South America’s northern Atlantic coast. Sharing borders with Brazil to the east and south, and with Suriname to the west, the region is also known for the Kourou Space Center, where the European Space Agency conducts satellite and spacecraft launches.

Some of the language used throughout the text reflects diverse historical and geographical influences, drawing from French, Guianese and Caribbean French Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish. Métro is an informal French term to describe someone from metropolitan France. Hexagone refers to mainland France, because of its shape. Carbet, a term used in the French Caribbean, refers to an open shelter where community members may gather. Domien refers to people from the French Overseas Departments. Hideputa is Spanish for “son of a bitch.” Tapouille is a sailboat or schooner. Garimpeiro is a Portuguese term referring to a gold miner. Clandestinos is a Portuguese term referring to illegal immigrants. Jinetero is a male prostitute. Tarlouze is a pejorative term used to refer to a gay man.

Memory’s Underworld
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Review of “I Will Not Fold These Maps”

By MONA KAREEM

Translated from the Arabic by SARA ELKAMEL

Reviewed by SUMMER FARAH

Cover of Mona Kareem's I Will Not Fold These Maps, orange cover with white writing.

My first encounter with Mona Kareem’s work was not her poetry, but her essay in Poetry Birmingham on the trend of Western poets “translating” from languages they are not literate in. Kareem brings attention to what she calls the “colonial phenomenon of rendition as translation,” in which a poet effectively workshops a rough translation done by a native speaker or someone who is otherwise literate in the original language. Often, this is the only way acclaimed writers reach Western audiences. I was excited, then, to see that I Will Not Fold These Maps, Kareem’s first collection translated to English, defies this trend. Presented with the original Arabic alongside the English translated by Egyptian poet and journalist Sara Elkamel—for whom this work is a debut full-length translation—this book is a mixture of Kareem’s previously collected work alongside brand new poems, presenting a great overview of her work. I Will Not Fold These Maps’s execution as a collaboration between Arab poet-translators only strengthens the experience of reading it, filled with poems that vividly explore exile, grief, and writing and its relationship to resistance.

Review of “I Will Not Fold These Maps”
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Colin Channer and the Diaspora of Dub

By NOAH BERLATSKY

Cover of Colin Channer's Console—rubble and an old bicycle.

“My way is so long, so long, but my road is foggy, foggy,” reggae legend Winston Rodney, aka Burning Spear, chants on his 1980 song “Road Foggy.” The beat sways underneath him like a horse plodding on a mountain track, and the horns sound muted and distant through the mist. It’s a song about the song as journey, a track that feels like it’s never meant to end. You travel not to get to get to the end of sound, but to luxuriate in it. As Spear said in an interview, “If I walk away from music, I walk away from myself.”

Colin Channer includes that quote and the line from “Road Foggy” in several poems in his recently released second collection Console (FSG). The volume is suffused in dub and reggae recordings he loves from his homeland. Dub is not just something left behind, though. It’s also a metaphor for the way that Channer’s own experience and existence makes Jamaica live in his new home of New England, and vice versa. Music creates an imagined space in which disconnection is its own coherent landscape. The consolation is that the places you go are both where you’ve been and who you are.

Colin Channer and the Diaspora of Dub
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Sentences Worth Keeping: Melody Nixon Interviews Sara Freeman

Sara Freeman's headshot: woman standing on a balcony against the background of apartment buildings

SARA FREEMAN‘s arresting, lyrically economical Tides has been generating buzz from the likes of Time Magazine, The New York Times, and Lit Hub since it was released last year. The Guardian calls this fragmentary, feminist novel “an experimental study in grief.” But what does it mean to write a feminist novel, these days, and to dwell in your characters’ grief? And how do experimental writing forms intersect with feminism?

MELODY NIXON sat down with Freeman, her graduate-school colleague, to discuss Tides; its liminal setting; what it’s like when we hear our characters’ voices in our heads; the ways that novels might ruin our lives; and the anxiety “of near-constant potential narrative collapse” that Freeman navigated while writing this extraordinary debut.

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The Story of a Box

By JEFFREY HARRISON

Marcel Duchamp's Boite: a box that folds out to reveal miniatures of various art works.

PARTIAL VIEW OF RESTORED HARRISON BOÎTE. MARCEL DUCHAMP (AMERICAN 1887-1968), BOX IN A VALISE (BOÎTE-EN-VALISE) FROM OR BY MARCEL DUCHAMP OR RROSE SÉLAVY, 1963 (SERIES E ). CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM: GIFT OF ANNE W. HARRISON AND FAMILY IN MEMORY OF AGNES SATTLER HARRISON AND ALEXINA “TEENY” SATTLER DUCHAMP, 2016.305 © ASSOCIATION MARCEL DUCHAMP / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY / ADAGP, PARIS 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROB DESLONGCHAMPS

 

“Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.”
—Marcel Duchamp, Life magazine, 1952

For many years I hardly told anyone that my grandmother’s sister Teeny was married to Marcel Duchamp, and before that to Pierre Matisse, the art dealer son of Henri. Friends I’ve known all my life have stopped me in disbelief when these facts have come up in passing—a disbelief arising not from the facts themselves but from my never having shared them. The first time I ever mentioned the connection to anyone outside the family, I was in college, sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue with my professor, the poet David Shapiro. “Wait,” he said, “Teeny Duchamp is your great aunt?!” I was surprised he knew exactly who she was.

The Story of a Box
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Friday Reads: May 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Happy May! Our 25th issue launches on Monday, bringing you a portfolio of unforgettable writing from Kuwait, poems about rodents, car washes, and colonization, and prose pieces about art, religion, albatrosses, and snowcats. In this installment of Friday Reads, Issue 25 contributors reflect on some of their favorite books. 

Cover of James Fujinami Moore's "Indecent Hours:" a black and white drawing of a man with his head leaning over a container.

Friday Reads: May 2023
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April 2023 Poetry Feature

April Is Poetry Month: New Poems By Our Contributors

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN, DAVID LEHMAN, and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA (translated by the author and OLENA JENNINGS)

 

Table of Contents:

Mark Anthony Cayanan

—Ecstasy Facsimile (These days I ask god…)

 

David Lehman

—The Remedy

—A Postcard from the Future

—Last Day in the City

 

Yuliya Musakovska (translated by the author and Olena Jennings)

—Angel of Maydan

—The Sorceress’ Oath

April 2023 Poetry Feature
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Friday Reads: April 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Things are finally warming up here in Western Mass: old snow banks are melting and fuzzy buds are popping up on the trees. Our spring issue—which features a portfolio of stunning fiction from Kuwait, apocalyptic poetry, a Ramadan romance, and a story about a dog in a Texas barrio—launches in just a few short weeks. If you’re wondering where these writers get their inspiration, look no further than this round of Friday Reads. 

 

Cover of Jane Wong's "Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City" with a picture of a colorful crab on beige background.
Friday Reads: April 2023
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The Common Young Writers Program Opens Applications for Summer 2023

Students with issues of The Common

Applications are now open for The Common Young Writers Program, which offers two two-week, fully virtual summer classes for high school students (rising 9-12). Students will be introduced to the building blocks of fiction and learn to read with a writer’s gaze. Taught by the editors and editorial assistants of Amherst College’s literary magazine, the summer courses (Level I and Level II) run Monday-Friday and are open to all high school students (rising 9-12). The program runs July 17-28.

The Common Young Writers Program Opens Applications for Summer 2023
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Friday Reads: March 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Welcome to the March round of Friday Reads! As we wait for the weather to warm up (and for our twenty-fifth issue to come out), The Common’s Literary Publishing Interns bring you book recommendations that explore love, identity, hope, and flaws.

 

Coco Mellors's Cleopatra and Frankenstein: painting of a woman with a black eye.

Friday Reads: March 2023
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