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Take Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic, where xenophobic demagogues have been allowed to turn the law-abiding workers who prop up their economies into barbaric freeloaders, all simply to further their nefarious ends.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

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Andre Naffis-Sahely
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More quotes by Andre Naffis-Sahely

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Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land, and my poetry is a versification of that personal history. History is all I have.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Abdellatif [Laâbi] was wildly popular with his students and it wasn't difficult to see why: like them, he knew that average Moroccans were hungry, jobless and desperate. They also knew they were ruled by a paranoid king who was more comfortable with Parisian financiers than his own subjects.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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I'm mostly surprised by the fact he's still alive given that people have been trying to silence him for almost fifty years, he really shouldn't be. Aged thirty, Abdellatif [Laâbi's ] was kidnapped from his home in Rabat by plainclothes policemen, bundled into the back of an unmarked car, driven to a dingy gaol, and tortured for days on end.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to gag him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled The Poem Beneath The Gag.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Meanwhile, the disgruntled natives of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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The real question should be: what makes a good political poem? The possible answers to that question are both obvious and yet still a little too subjective for anyone to ever fully agree on. What do I most wish to see in a political poet? Sublimated rebellion.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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The West is anxious about becoming another Africa, and it has dug deep moats in the hopes of preventing that, but it's too late: it has already become another Africa.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.
Andre Naffis-Sahely