Tamazight – an Amaziɣ’s poem

Sand is no longer captured

by the litham covering our faces.

The cloth remains unsullied

as if never used.

We wander the Maghreb,

speak, and are misunderstood

in tongues other than our own.

Our mouths, forever dry.

What would it be like

if I spoke only to myself?

What could I say?

What sense would I make?

My mind empties

like one half of an hourglass,

dripping obstinately into the other

that is the Sahara.

My throat is serrated with desire.

I want to tell you of the Fezzan,

of its wadis, of its waters sweet as dates,

of the tattoos that make our women.

You meet me halfway, in your voice:

every greeting, every civility

mediated by the monoglossia

of your shrunken world.

Tamazight  is the language of the Amaziɣ’s , a community formerly given the derogatory name- the Berbers, who are found in dwindling numbers all over northern Africa. Their language is one on the border of extinction.

By Mustansir Dalvi

BIO

Mustansir Dalvi is a poet, translator and editor. He has three books of poems — Brouhahas of Cocks (Poetrywala, 2013), Cosmopolitician (Poetrywala, 2018) and Walk (Poetrywala, 2019/Yavanika Press, 2020). His poems are included in the anthologies: Converse: Contemporary Indian poetry in English – (Sudeep Sen, editor, Pippa Rann Books, 2022) and Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji, editors, Red Hen Press, 2022). His poems have been translated into French, Croatian, Gujarati and Marathi. Mustansir Dalvi’s 2012 English translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s influential Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa from the Urdu as Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer (India Penguin Modern Classics) has been described as ‘insolent and heretical’ and makes Iqbal’s verse accessible to the modern reader.  He is the editor of Man without a Navel a collection of new and selected translations of Hemant Divate’s poems from the Marathi (2018, Poetrywala). Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay. He teaches architecture in Mumbai.