طال النوى

Notes

1. Nawā is the classical word for separation and the distance between lover and beloved, a staple of the Arabic lament for absent homes and loved ones. The title, Ṭāla al-nawā, 'the parting has grown long', is taken from the poem's own cry to the homeland, where nawā is paired with buʿd, 'distance', to double the emphasis. ↩
2. Tuzjīhā, 'drives it gently onward', echoes the Qur'an, 'Have you not seen that God drives the clouds onward (yuzjī saḥāban)?' (24:43). The cloud is the poet's messenger, but it is carried by an unseen hand; the image recalls the classical convention of sending greetings to distant loved ones with the wind or the rain clouds. ↩
3. ʿUhūd al-ḥubb are the 'pledges' or 'bonds' of love; ʿahd also means an era, so the phrase carries both the vows once made and the days when they were made. The mīthāq, 'covenant', of the next line strengthens the pledge: the exile asks whether his bond with the land still stands. ↩
4. The line recalls the Qur'anic description of Paradise, 'and cups set out, and cushions ranged in rows' (wa-akwābun mawḍūʿa, wa-namāriqu maṣfūfa, 88:14–15). The poet borrows the word maṣfūfa, 'set in rows', and the cups of Paradise, to picture the homeland of memory as a garden of bliss. ↩
5. Asmār (singular samar) are the talks and tales that friends share into the night, a cherished custom of Arab and Somali social life. Layl al-uns is a night of intimacy and good company. ↩
6. The dawn prayer, ṣalāt al-fajr, is marked by long recitation of the Qur'an; the Qur'an itself calls it qurʾān al-fajr, 'the recitation of dawn' (17:78). The 'dawn throng' (fawj al-fajr) is the company of worshippers who go to the mosque before sunrise. ↩
7. Taʿruk, from ʿarak, is to rub hard or grind, as a millstone grinds grain; in Arabic one says that hardships 'ground' a person, meaning that they toughened and wore him down. The children of memory are still untouched by such ordeals. ↩
8. The line admits two readings. The children drew so eagerly, in the fervour of their dreams, that they broke their pens while their fingers never tired; or, with bitter foresight, their dreams were cut short, since breaking the pen (kasr al-qalam) signals an end to writing and learning. The later question 'Where are the dreams, and the pens?' favours the darker reading. ↩
9. Ḥītān, 'whales, great fish', also has a figurative sense in modern Arabic: the 'whales' are the powerful and voracious who swallow up everything. The sea that once lapped the green shore now pumps out blood and predators alike. ↩
10. The Arabic spells the word al-ādhān, with a long vowel. The source note explains this as the Somali pronunciation of al-adhān, 'the call to prayer'; but ādhān is also the plural of udhun, 'ear', so the line can be heard both ways: the bomb's roar has taken the place of the call to prayer, and it is all that the ears now hear. ↩
11. The 'eyes of the walls' are the windows, which the bazooka blows out. Faqaʾa ʿaynahu, to gouge out someone's eye, is a violent image, and it gives the houses a human body that is maimed. ↩
12. Surat al-Raʿd, 'Thunder', is the thirteenth sura of the Qur'an. Yurattil means to recite the Qur'an in the measured, chanted manner called tartīl. The bazooka's thunder is a grim parody of the dawn recitation earlier in the poem. ↩
13. Abjad is the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet, so the 'abjad of poetry' is its ABC, its most elementary material. Daʿd and Hind are stock women's names in classical Arabic love poetry, the conventional beloveds of the old ghazal. The bazooka frightens away even the gentlest and most familiar themes of verse. ↩
14. Al-aḥlām wa-l-aqlām, 'the dreams and the pens', is a near-rhyming pair (jinās) that picks up the children of the schoolyard, who drew their dreams on the walls and broke their pens. ↩
15. Al-ṭilāl, in quotation marks in the Arabic, appears to be a local name for a shade tree. It chimes with ẓilāl, 'shades', in the next line, so the trees seem named for the very shade that no house now enjoys. ↩
16. Yujarriduhā jarād al-ḥiqd: the verb jarrada, 'to strip bare', and jarād, 'locusts', share the same root, so the locusts do exactly what their name says. Hatred is pictured as a locust swarm that leaves the fields bare. ↩
17. Baidoa is a city in south-western Somalia, the centre of a farming region. It suffered some of the worst fighting and famine of the civil war in the early 1990s. ↩
18. The usurper who seized the threshing floors, that is, the farmland and its harvest, now also 'feeds' the poet's livestock: he has taken the herds as his own. The bitter irony lies in the verb, which suggests care where there has been theft. ↩
19. Fa-shallat tilkumu al-aqdām, literally 'and those feet were paralysed', uses the past tense as a curse, as in the familiar Arabic formula shallat yadāhu, 'may his hands wither'. ↩
20. Tasawwara, 'he scaled, climbed over', is the word used in the Qur'an of the two disputants who 'climbed over the wall into the prayer chamber (tasawwarū al-miḥrāb)' of David (38:21). The echo makes the thief's intrusion a desecration of a sacred place. The miḥrāb is the niche that marks the direction of prayer; the minbar is the stepped pulpit from which the Friday sermon is given. ↩
21. Bardan … salāman, 'cool … and peace', echoes God's command to the fire into which Abraham was cast: 'O fire, be coolness and peace (bardan wa-salāman) upon Abraham' (21:69). The poet hopes his rain will do for the burning wounds of his homeland what God's word did for the fire. ↩
22. Muntaẓir, 'waiting', is masculine, while the cloud is feminine throughout, so the voice here is taken to be the speaker's own: he sent the cloud, and its rain is his. The lines can also be read as the end of the cloud's speech. ↩