The Promised Land Read online

  André Naffis-Sahely

  * * *

  THE PROMISED LAND

  Poems from Itinerant Life

  Contents

  I

  Disposable Cities

  San Zenone degli Ezzelini

  Escaping East

  Lead, Kindly Light

  An Island of Strangers

  Vanishing Act

  Jumeirah Janes

  Mina Zayed

  The Foreign Correspondent

  Wanted Man

  Sehnsucht

  Stopover

  The Return

  Home After Five Years

  Infidelity

  Flying on New Year’s Eve

  The Promised Land

  II

  A Kind of Love

  N16 8EA

  The Translator

  Forward March

  The Carpet that Wouldn’t Fly

  This Most Serene Republic

  Auroville

  Mounting Mileage

  Feast of the Sacrifice

  Postcard from the Cape

  Through the Rockies

  Brief Encounters of the Hopeless Kind

  In the Shadow of Monadnock

  In the Catskills

  III

  The Other Achilles

  Atticus

  Patience

  The Crisis of the Third Century

  The Pagan’s Lament

  Put Not Your Trust in Princes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PROMISED LAND

  ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY was born in Venice in 1985 to an Iranian father and an Italian mother, but raised in Abu Dhabi. His poetry has been featured in Ambit, Areté, The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015), and Swimmers, among others. His non-fiction writing has appeared in such publications as Poetry, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and The Independent. He has been awarded fellowships from bodies including the MacDowell Colony and the Dar al-Ma’mûn Foundation. He is also a literary translator from Italian and French; his Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, winner of a PEN Translates award, was published by Carcanet in 2016.

  for my parents, my brother and my wife

  I

  * * *

  Petroleum changes human nature.

  It ignites people even before it has left the ground.

  JOSEPH ROTH

  Disposable Cities

  They begin as blips on the horizon of prospects, rumours, snippets of exaggerated talk, too fabulous to believe, but too alluring to forget. Something has been found: gold, silver, uranium, coltan or oil. Before long, the prospect of immeasurable wealth drowns all incredulity. The migration begins. The engineers in their hard hats and linens are the first on the ground, and with them come derricks, drills, platforms and dry docks. Pipelines sink their tentacles into every lucrative crevice marked on the map. The maps are kept secret.

  A handful of shacks are erected to provide a few basic services. Soon enough, the handful swells into a hamlet, then a village, and finally a city. Such cities are the perfect sort of settlement for the modern world: everything is shipped in, everything is easily assembled. Their primary and overriding purpose is to extract, process, and distribute. Just like a motorized pump draws water out of a well, they start inhaling people from all over the world, one desperado at a time.

  At first, these fresh arrivals find their new homes unsettling. They find it difficult to adjust to the weird climates and are frazzled by the confusion of languages. No one is under any illusions. They are ephemeral guests, non-citizens; belonging is a dream best forgotten or deferred. Most have come empty-handed, having traded their old lives for grubstakes. Lots of money sloshes around, but most of it is spent simply surviving, and when it runs out, people watch their lives fall apart. Everyone exists in a heightened state of awareness: one false move and they’re gone. The poorer they are, the more modest their gambles, which more often than not make them poorer. ‘Beggars don’t build homelands,’ they tell themselves, fantasizing about the day when they might return home and become somebody.

  The myth, meanwhile, has travelled to the four corners of the planet. More than cities, these El Dorados are a state of mind, places where people come to reinvent themselves and realize their most eccentric fantasies. All conurbations live out their lot and die, but the disposable cities are special. They thrive in areas of the world generally deemed inhospitable or uninhabitable, in Greenland, Siberia, the Amazon, the Yukon, or the Empty Quarter. They are mushrooms of greed, requiring no loving care or attention, they simply erupt and flourish.

  Yet their fame is fleeting. Once bled dry, these cities’ roads go raw with potholes, chickens roam loose in the opera houses, power lines sag, and rot seeps in, tarring all in sight. Only those unlucky enough not to make it stay in town for the decline. One day, the wind howls and the last tent comes undone. The lie has moved on to the next disposable city. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me that lies had short legs, and thus could not get very far. Somebody lied to her.

  San Zenone degli Ezzelini

  There was only a church, a school and a bar

  where old men sipped spritzers till dusk.

  A dual carriage-way cut through the town,

  but nobody ever stopped. Now and then,

  there was a car crash; an elderly couple

  once burned alive inside their Ferrari

  after hitting a lamppost. Their obituary

  in the local newspaper read: OUT-OF-TOWNERS,

  DEAD. San Zenone was where my father

  had taken up carpet-selling: his office

  was a storehouse of dust and debts,

  with a samovar in view of the window.

  The town had once belonged to the Ezzelini,

  ruthless warlords who preyed on the weak

  in the wastelands between the Pope and the Emperor.

  Their most famous son, Ezzelino III, the ‘Terrible’,

  once won his father’s soul during a game of dice,

  and refused to give it back. In 1254, six years

  after he was excommunicated, Pope Innocent IV

  yelled ‘Let the tyrant die!’ and launched a crusade against him,

  the only one ever declared on a single man. It was

  the beginning of the end. After months of retreats

  and failed sieges, a lone arrow pierced Ezzelino’s ankle,

  and brought him down at Cassano. Foreseeing

  his own doom, Alberico, Ezzelino’s brother,

  assembled his mercenaries in San Zenone’s tower

  and waited. From its heights, Alberico watched

  as his sons were killed and dismembered,

  and his daughters raped and burned. Sometime

  before the inevitable, Alberico was told

  how Ezzelino’s dying breath had betrayed him.

  A final act of brotherly love. The tower is featured

  on San Zenone’s coat of arms, where a giant snake

  peers out of the stones, its tongue red and snarling.

  ‘What is that?’ I once asked my primary school teacher.

  ‘It reminds us of the poison that lurks in our families.’

  Escaping East

  It was like going on holiday, permanently.

  Even though I was six, I steered my own ship –

  or pretended to, perched atop suitcases,

  rolling along the corridors at Frankfurt International.

  While half the world swept west,

  we trickled eastward, one by one,

  single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:

  Abu Dhabi, where my father had a j
ob

  and money, for the first time in years.

  Our house was squeezed between

  the Russian embassy and a cemetery –

  the latter the healthier-looking of the two.

  The embassy was a model of the Yeltsin era:

  that nauseating smell of rot and booze,

  the officers swaying either side of a gate

  with a hammer and sickle’s silhouette

  still legible in the wood. When bored,

  I would ring the bell just to hear a drunken ‘Da?’

  bellow from the other side. The gate stayed shut.

  I watched the guards from my mashrabiya,

  our first-floor balcony, as they cursed the heat

  and loosened their belts. Like them, I put on weight;

  everything seemed edible in this city. Everywhere

  you looked were fast-food outlets – the vanguard

  of globesity. There was so much food, in fact,

  that the streets were sticky with its stains and residues.

  Each evening, the grocer nearest us left crates

  of unwanted mangoes and limes outside his shop;

  within hours, they fermented into chutney, leaving

  gooey puddles where the cats would feed and fuck.

  One day the cemetery gate was left ajar: without

  hesitation, I snuck in to breathe some air, a bit of clean air.

  Lead, Kindly Light

  The school was an hour south of the city, in the middle of nowhere, but the compound was walled and guarded. Our headmaster was a retired policeman, and the windows of the bus were criss-crossed with bars. Submission was the order of the day: you have been given your place in the world, and now you must pay for it. We didn’t study much; our books were outdated and censored. As for the rules, they were eminently negotiable. Everyone kept to their own, just like in prison. Suspicions fluctuated with hormones. We knew nothing of the country we lived in, save that our presence was temporary. Our hosts were calm and indifferent. One day, when the subject of oil arose, an Emirati classmate exclaimed: ‘My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I will drive a Lamborghini, and my son will drive whatever he likes – but my grandson will ride a camel.’ The day the USS Cole was bombed in Aden, a large Israeli flag was set on fire in the playground. The white kids were nowhere to be seen.

  An Island of Strangers

  The rooftop was the place to be. I was fifteen

  and in love with ash-cans, pigeon coops,

  women hanging their laundry. There was a fifty-

  foot portrait of the King by the sea,

  overlooking a busy junction – always smiling,

  like an ad for toothpaste, or mouthwash.

  At night, the shore on the west side of town

  was the quietest, where hotels, Natashas and haram

  coalesced into parties. Every half-lit room

  was a sure sign of orgasms and the passing

  of money from stranger to stranger. Anything

  interesting and pleasurable was haram. I envied

  the King, and his sons, all eighteen of them.

  The King was virile, a patriarch, Abraham on Viagra;

  his people, on the other hand, were on Prozac.

  Everywhere the eye looked was money. The nose

  hit only sweat: acrid, pugnacious, pervasive.

  Most of the boys I knew sucked Butane, smoked,

  saved up for whores, waited for their parole in the summer.

  Each back to his own country. Come September

  the dissatisfied returned: misfit mutts, at home everywhere

  and nowhere. A friend compared cosmopolitanism

  to being stuck at summer camp, waiting for parents

  who never showed up. In the thirty-third year of his smile,

  the King finally died. His mausoleum is a meringue: wavy,

  white, and empty. His sons have gone on squabbling, playing

  whose is biggest with bricks. One by one, they die in car crashes.

  Days of heatstrokes, kif and bloodthirsty Ferraris.

  Vanishing Act

  Only two out of ten people die in Abu Dhabi; the rest simply fail to have their visas renewed. They are bagged, tagged and placed on the next available flight to wherever they first came from – the one-way ticket experience par excellence. Every edifice on this island is crafted by these almost-nothings. In death, at least, there is solace: never again to queue for days on end, never again to have their fingertips inked and pressed by intolerant hands, their blood screened for undesirable illnesses, their flesh seared by a sun that wonders what the hell they are doing here.

  Jumeirah Janes

  A hill-station breeze blows through the café:

  the ladies are dressed for high tea and the waiters

  polish the windows that keep the hot sand at bay.

  Life here has left a bitter film on their lips,

  which they purse whenever one of them mentions

  how her children have gone home and her husband

  works six-day weeks even during the summer.

  As if that weren’t enough, the servants are lazy …

  Then there are the locals, who are ignorant, venal,

  tasteless, and, even worse, lucky. The ladies

  are lonely: they want to go back to the You-Kay.

  ‘But then,’ one says, ‘we’re so comfortable here’ –

  at which point all conspiracy dies. Like

  moody nuns, the ladies nod in acknowledgement;

  their talk drifts back to the weather.

  Mina Zayed

  It’s late afternoon and the market looks like a used-car lot.

  I watch men conduct business from the backs of their trucks;

  there’s not much on sale today: spices, pots, bags of nuts,

  cracked ceramic ashtrays. A few customers stroll by,

  but it’s too muggy to haggle. The sleepiness of the place

  is broken only by the stinging, oddly invigorating smell

  of diesel in the air. The port lies just a short distance from here,

  and the ships on the horizon rise and dip like the humps

  of a great caravan of steel, slowly winding its way

  from the West to the Rest. An entire country

  is being built from scratch: there are cargo containers

  as far as the eye can see. The sun sets, while the market

  grows ever more deserted, as if it were the ragged

  rear-guard of the past, or an inscrutable prototype of the future.

  The Foreign Correspondent

  ‘I do not like the taste in my mouth.

  To remonstrate would be better,

  to keep my mouth shut would be best.

  I can count. I know how many

  lost their nerve at the sight of his smile

  and how many more died in silence

  sliding down the slick wall of his teeth.’

  Wanted Man

  for my father

  For the first time in years, your phone calls stopped.

  You were always out of town, or stuck in meetings;

  by the time my mother told me, you’d been inside

  the best part of a month. One night they came for you

  and forty days later, you limped home, your clothes

  three sizes too big. Money went missing. While

  the thieves took for the hills, you stayed put, oblivious.

  By the time the Law figured it out, you’d discovered

  how men can be made to fit together like jigsaw pieces

  when forty share a room designed for eight.

  Months after your release, you wore the confused look

  of a character actor left without a part. On the upside,

  you ‘finally understood the appeal of Johnny Cash.’

  Sehnsucht

  for my mother

  Our family has become a government-in-exile;

  visiting you is
like paying my respects

  to a kindly downhearted minister who

  is equally fearful of past, present and future.

  Two small rooms to eat and sleep in; only

  the essentials escaped being boxed up

  while awaiting their destination. Still they wait.

  This is home for now – a little town

  outside Florence where the streets are lifeless

  and the old stick their necks out of windows

  like turtles keeping an eye out for vultures.

  When apart, we speak only a little:

  a pair of talking heads in a penumbra.

  I look at you: a housewife without a house,

  without a husband too. Pondering it all,

  I chew anti-acids with a sovereign indifference.

  Your younger son, your adjutant, or aide-de-camp,

  shuts himself in his room all day and shoots aliens,

  Nazis or terrorists on his console, almost

  as if training for a war to reconquer our lives.

  Stopover

  What city stays still like a glass-cased princess?

  I wish this one did. All that hate and here I am.

  My whole life, I’ve hoped to show somebody

  this strange town, and now that you’re here

  I just sit by the creek and mumble something

  incoherent in disbelief. Little to do now except

  list the sights in a Guinness Book of Records way,

  or explain how the cafés where I emptied cups

  have turned into beauty salons, how the houses

  I once lived in are no longer there. Narrow boats

  sail past the bright hotels. This whole country

  is like a hotel – or a ride in a glass elevator:

  sweat, heat; at the ding of the doors, my escape.

  The Return

  I get stamped in like a tourist. It’s seven a.m. and my father’s waiting for me at arrivals. We drive along the impossibly wide highways, over the bridge to the island of Abu Dhabi. Sixty years ago, there was almost nothing here: a single mud-brick fort, where the ruler and his family lived, a few brackish wells, an air strip, and a handful of huts. Now it accommodates one and a half million people from just about everywhere on Earth and hosts a Formula 1 Grand Prix. My father pulls up in a parking lot in the middle of Bateen, a residential neighbourhood. On entering the three-storey building where he and my mother live, I spot a succession of bright red crosses spray-painted on nearly every wall, door and hallway. It’s Passover at King Herod’s. My father explains that an official from the Municipality inspected the building last week and ordered all the partitions torn down in accordance with new planning regulations. Most of the building is held up by light interior walls that sound like ripe watermelons when you rap your knuckles against them. The Municipality has given my parents two days to knock down the walls, or they’ll cut off their gas, water and electricity. Over the years, my family has acquired a breath-taking proficiency in paring their lives down to the bare essentials. Living in the United Arab Emirates is like assembling a Jenga tower, then nervously trying to remove as many blocks as you can without the entire edifice collapsing on you. Once the walls are gone, my parents will get a reprieve from the city authorities, like the rest of their anxious fellow tenants: at which point the game starts all over again.