(extracts)
at close range and profane the Inviolate Sing Umm Kulthum in full cybernetic flower Sing the Nile The spectacular dams Your pyramids and ours The hearts of the centuries of posterity Crazy love Dangling quaternaries Do not be afraid to accumulate clichés My gazelle of the perfume niagaras Oblivion beading its rosary of love songs Traces of the camp-site and horses The eye rises Bursts into glances of glassy tarantulas Abysses traversed by flows of honey Through canals of sacramental milk Sing a little if not for the actual funeral then for the procession Sing so that I may write the Book of the Dead The oral testament of the enslaved races So I may lift the curse that beat us to the summit of the graft So I may impose on Creation an exemplary defeat So I may disgrace the dense misery of internal jungles Sing your voice tears us apart and makes us laugh at the pinnacle of pleasure
« the people have come to a stop to witness how in my singularity I laid the foundations of glory »
Sing the arid Crescent Sing the wall of wailings while I hug the wall of shame Sing the star of the Orient risen from the earth fallen into disrepair Sing a little so that I may give you my eyes Your fetish for the fleet-footed for an Africa raped in cyclical ceremonies Sing the impossibility of the arm grasping the tool The impossibility of the hand grasping the body The impossible pride of your defeated race
Cry of the nightingale of imbecile poets Cry of the flashing rage of pockmarked meteors Cry of the entrails on thresholds of abattoirs Cry of the secular shambles that hints at a Dead end
cry of the bulimic concentrations of money
cry of the miraculous treasures dangling from sorcerers
cry of the learned charlatanism in the shadow of power
cry that greets the haunches of genocide
cry medieval light of dark times
cry as I skate on the rails of chaos
cry the wind will dwindle and gesticulating locusts will rise
cry packed with the dregs of memory-cum-living organ
cry of the Continent as the gong covers us with voices
cry throat that holds nothing but the most laughable of my outbursts
cry I am more than a man something someone in a tragic expansion
cry incandescent flow of mine
cry I will drown this planet with an asphyxiating poem
rock-drill natural gases I reserve
cry I know how to speak but not to the powerful
cry d i s s e n t e r
cry the betrayal of a friend of a spokesperson that lies
cry of the sickening rounds of torpor
cry the regurgitated bile of the heightened quadrangles
cry the prostitution of the wind-up monkey of a musician
cry the critical-philosophical morgue
burying us in our living names
cry that sons of bitches like us should be damn well left alone
cry Enough
shameless diva Old courtesan Scalping us in feverish blood Bamboozling us Leaving us a wisp of straw at the brotherhood of sensory delirium Of a lyricism that we fail to employ to transform all faculties Slapping our common thighs and backs Purring the idiotic refrain of the brotherhood of exclusion Sing Umm Kulthum your voice tears us apart and makes us laugh at the pinnacle of pleasure
carnivore fossil Sister of overwhelmed mammoth But incalculable
s t r e n g t h
Extracts of Race
Translated by André Naffis-Sahely