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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
Poetry
Either
Middle
Real
Life
Pulses
Aborted
Pulse
Ground

More quotes by 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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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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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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I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.
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