SAFAA FATHY

Foot in the Cordoba Maze

Building a platform in ugly places

Plates of Platine within

Bones of ice, skeletons of glass

Lines of stone around a gushing fountain

Do you know that Shireen’s corpse still fights the occupation?

Duende donde dije digo Diego

As I lay on the ineffable wordy horizon

Margret was waiting to be buried.

As I dogged my entrails for lost love

Ramon writes an apology of his shame to the wrong email address.

The hollow mother stares in the space vacuum

Where right in its middle lies the limits of any event

Look beloved past, to where the flower is silenced

Implore me frontwards, where I did face the police and the multiple uniforms, always hopscotching on one single foot,

Entreat me onwards to where I will be not, even upright.

Here now in Cordoba.

-What has ceased?

Hundred years to go and You never come back

************

Under the rainy whereabouts of that sky, there is Europe, middle and away, there is Jerusalem, where I did stay, where the coffin dances on mourners’ feet, where mothers give birth to fatherless sons, where the Andalous dances on its duende and walks on its meres of pouring tears, “Donde dije digo, ahora digo Diego”. Whence do you grow bastard of the sun, bastards of noon?

In the Southern lane beneath the new lune, disappearing, down the solar globes, to whom reverence is due

Forty days of hunger strikes, forty days of a hunger strike, forty nights of grief, forty is the number that begets and bereave.

Shireen’s last road of rain to Jenin cracks into my face to face Coffin to face shoulders hands voices, voiceless face to face armed occupation, among silk Margret is, cashmere, wool, cotton, florae, she awaits inhumation as love has gone within the planet that dangles around Sagittarius A*,

Holds onto the broken bones of Cordoba.

Sat next to a mushroom

A gaze of October

is nothing yet lasted for merely that time

The years are yours; I am far too young to be…,

the clouds that do gather

Into my ever vanishing lucidity.

Sagittarius A*

What a nombre they gave me

or

gave to that black hole in the middle of our galaxy

has it been a loaf of bread

or a spoonful of honey

or a plate of sea weeds

or even pillars that stood there in the colour

infinity has a door and a patio

little stones spread over an ancient city

a fountain springs here and there

yet I have a deal

a bond,

a clear cry

a candle that I lit every day on the altar of a nocebo

cast, cast, caso to cast the hoo ho hoho ho hoho ho hooho ho

fondre, smelt, in one way or another, here it goes the missile, or the shell or the word

then have a walk

a long walk,

6000 steps at least to be fit

***********

Reach the Guadalquivir river, turn right to the mosque, move to where the Maimonides statue sits, go ahead, turn, turn, turn, go past the casa Andalusi, leave it there to its writing workshop and nod farewell to the owner you never met, return back to the Alfonso XIII to the curdled milk, to the silent outrage, to the field of the mother of God, and wait there for your disaster.

************

Just across the faculty of Law Business and Economics has the sounds, resonances, screams hounds, and whispers in the Magdalena. In the Carmen Calzado Convent in Plaza Puerta Nueva . Young mothers died in childbirth and are still crying, there right there in front of the Madre de dios 6. No it is her field not her street. It is a campo and a calle before the Madre de Dios even appear. Go to the roof. Pace the ochre, watch the bones that fall on the Sahara sand, bend not until you fall.

****************************

-Perfecto este cobijo

-fue estableido en el epoca Romana

-Caerse

Who ¿

Who had the line of life and left it to the fall back unto the sea.

In Cordoba there is no sea, there are only feet and toreros.

Ah…HOO Ho, HOO, Ho

The sea is lying in wait, lies in wait, and there has been a line and it did break, beneath, right beneath the versatile oakum.

Go ahead, turn, and turn to the source of las Duenas to whom you now belong.  A mother and girl say and you sit, they make you coffee that you drink. They say the procession of the schools goes past the Duenas and you should assist.

Safaa Fathy is an Egyptian/French poet, documentary filmmaker, playwright, and essayist. Born in Egypt, she moved to France in 1981 and obtained her PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1993. She was Program Director at the International College of Philosophy from 2010-2016. Fathy is the author of the plays Aquarius, in Sillas en la frontera, and Ordalie/Terreur (with an introduction by Jacques Derrida), and co-author with Jacques Derrida of Tourner les mots: au bord d’un film. Her books of poetry include  Where Not to be Born (Litmus Press), Al Haschische (Pamenar Press), Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel) and A Name to the Sea (Dar Al Nahda). 

Fathy's films include Mohammad Saved from the Waters, Derrida’s Elsewhere, and a film poem Nom à la mer, all available on Tamaas website. She also experiments with the visual texture of poems in filmic forms and participated in the Poetry Project with a short piece titled "I Would Like to Say." Her most recent essays are Au nom de la Murale (Europe N. 1053-1053) and De mur en mur (rue Descartes N.92). Other than Egypt and France, she has lived and worked in Germany, Mexico, and the United States.