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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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Andre Naffis-Sahely
Middle
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More quotes by 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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I came to poetry at fourteen, in the middle of a booming oil-rush town in southern Arabia without a single public library: Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. All the wealth in the world and not a single intelligent idea as to how to employ it.
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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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 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
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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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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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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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I can't quite see the point of poems like Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest. I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.
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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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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I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
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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As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems set to turn vast swathes of humanity into the Negros of a new racism.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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Translators who choose to work on canonized writers can usually lean on an extensive critical apparatus around either the author or the book in question, especially in the case of writers like [Honore] Balzac and [Emil] Zola.
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