Solio

by Samira Negrouche, Nancy Naomi Carlson (translator)

Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures.

 

In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that “all life is movement,” where “time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them.” The “I” is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux—including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders—as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N’Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with “restless” verbs. In the end, the “I” takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.

Genres: Poetry

131 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2024

Reviews

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please read this. It's an incredible work. Absolutely in love with Negrouche's work.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

As translator Nancy Naomi Carlson writes in her translator’s note, Solio by Samira Negrouche mixes “music and mystery.” Negrouche thinks through the physical body and the body politique of an Algerian female writer in observing the “taut bodies dappled in white and momentum,” even when “you know they’re not white.” The sun “that’s reborn in the fresh surface of a silent winter morning / where I want to think about the nothingness that opens / where I want to think about the space that remains,” serves both to literally let in light but also to burn. This double take of color and of the meaning of heat is why Negrouche’s speaker “d[oes]n’t blame the dust for burning [her] nostrils, it reminds [her] not to sleep, that [her] attention is incomplete, that all crowds deserve full attention.” We revel in this deep attention, repeatedly, as we burst into laughter at the encounter with her “virile” “guardian angel” who hates “pink” and “canary yellow.” For what the poet reaches toward through this character is “a place, a country, a border, a layer, a dream or an impossibility.”

This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in The Los Angeles Review.