Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Andre Naffis-Sahely
Stills
Poet
Still
Question
Sublimated
Littles
Answers
Subjective
Ever
Possible
Rebellion
Little
Anyone
Poem
Real
Wish
Fully
Good
Makes
Obvious
Political
Agree

More quotes by Andre Naffis-Sahely

Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
Image
Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
Image
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