Thus Spake Sara Elkamel
BY BAZEED
Hyun Jung Ahn, Helpless Humble 01, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Thus Spake Sara Elkamel
as told in Field of No Justice
BAZEED | Feb 2022 | Issue 13
Nay!
For when the earth is flattened flat (21)
And your Lord is Arrived
with the angels
rank upon rank (22)
and the Day of Hellfire is Brought,
and Man parlays with himself in pointless remembrance (23)
Oh! Had I but put forth for my life! (24)
for on that day will His torture be his alone (25)
and His yolk bind him alone (26)
[but,
to the righteous it will be said]
O! Reassured Soul! (27)
Return to your Lord,
well-pleased, well-pleasing (28)
Enter into My righteous servants (29)
and enter into My Paradise! (30)
Sura 89:
Al-Fajr, The Dawn, Verses 21–30.
i.
The name I gave my body I thought meant dream but it doesn’t it means
this small thing.
ii.
I was already ghost.
Our bodies thaw in pools around our legs—
the blue of one ocean would replace another:
a form of mercy. What’s the point, now?
Ghosts cannot cross water so here we are
dropping fruit after fruit after fruit
bargained for by orphans
in the throes of noon;
I cannot picture them ripening.
iii.
Though they will be reborn
each morning with the sun,
as prayers rise like steam
from below,
the prayers I whispered into the walls bounced back.
// if heaven is in fact gated and it is waiting //
How does one enter stone?
iv.
God made everything to pass and perish.
God made everything to pass and perish except stone.
v.
O, the young gods of our nation!
Sing to me! Sing the border song.
O, the young gods of our nation!
They have misplaced our lives.
O, the young gods of our nation!
Do we forget their prison
used to be a garden?
O, the young gods of our nation
sing so embarrassingly soft…sing
the nightingale’s prayer
sing so embarrassingly soft…sing feed me feed me feed me.
Blue bird, gone-bird, come-bird
not-my-bird, rare bird, red-crowned crane, nightingale—
alone, bird. Sorrow exhausts you, bird.
vi.
Imagine darkness without a god.
vii.
Give me a mouth; I want to talk!
To curse _______ and watch
the dead turn to gold.
I made a remedy for remembering and drank one half in the morn-
ing and one half at night.
I am not pure, I am not pure, I am not pure, I am not pure.
I crave dirt.
I carve a house out of salt.
I feed my liver sugar to purge old blood.
viii.
If the cold rust in my chest is omen
or birthmark,
if it’s the last day on Earth // and there’s no light left //
if everywhere there are rats that look like figs
and if we squint we see heaven
full of light that is disappearing
over so many godforsaken clouds //
[What stars, where?]
// inside we stitch sorrow
doll after sorrow doll and beat them against the floor.
We swim like we were born breathing water—remember
what we did in the womb. Swimming,
I am not pure, I am not pure, I am not pure, I am not pure.
My clay heart envied goslings their nests.
My clay heart licked the milk off the mouths of little children.
Smothered every fire before its hour.
ix.
What did the Bedouins used to sing? I dance from me to me
and I journey from me to me.
x.
Eye, go out in search of June. Love, let me
block the desert
like a door.
In some language, a wildflower
is a demon,
but have you been
to the museum of our mothers?
I know every dream is a fiction of the world.
Every year the mother of a virgin bride swallowed stones red and
silver,
girl for flood,
like fruit. We talk about our mothers and
walk for days toward the sea.
When they describe sugar
they say it looks
like salt. Feels the same when
bitten.
Maybe I could bury our bodies
Maybe I could bury our bodies in sugar.
xi.
Every time I leave I imagine returning
and upon returning, finding the door to
heaven is only the future;
just these bodies
becoming something else.
We never meet God.
In the next world bring me back
sugar from the sea.
In the next world bring me back
my mother so happy to be alive. 1
1 The line in the original poem is, “my mother was so happy to be alive.”
A Note on the Text: This poem is a cento, composed from at least one line from every poem in Sara Elkamel’s chapbook, Field of No Justice.
The translation of the Quranic verses are Bazeed’s own.
This cento is part of a larger collection in progress entitled “thus spake Zulaïkha,” gathering in centos the work of Arab writers who are making a home in the diaspora of English.
Bazeed is an Egyptian immigrant, writer, performance artist, stage actor, and cook living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed on stages in the United States and abroad, including Kilo Batra: In Death More Radiant, presented in December 2021 at the Arab American National Museum. Bazeed is currently at work on a book-length erasure poem of the hyper-racist text, The Arab Mind; The Sunshine School Songbook, a solo cabaret sponsored by late-stage capitalism and the algorithms of Gulf Labor dystopias; and the second draft of their so-faggy-it’s-in-the-title! play, faggy faafi Cairo boy.
Hyun Jung Ahn is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist from Seoul, South Korea. Through her work, she investigates enigmatic abstract forms. She begins by drawing from her visual diary, which captures feelings, personal connections, and emotional states of being. She then translates these notions into minimalistic drawing and sewn painting. She has attended residencies including Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, and Trestle Art Space. Ahn graduated from Duk-Sung Women’s University, Seoul (2010 BFA and 2013 MFA). She received a second MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute and currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Seoul.