By TREY MOODY
My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti
while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
and Ida B. Wells, well, frustrated
the engenderment of the official record;
crisscrossed the country interviewing
poplars that had been accessories to atrocities,
By TAHIR ANNOUR
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
Dew
Uncle Musa died. A year after his passing, my father headed north. He said he would be back in a month.
It all happened so fast I barely caught it, like a migratory bird resting in a dark corner of the forest, like all the things that crowd my memory. No sooner do they appear than they vanish. When I try to recall the details, to understand what happened, none of it makes sense. Time lures the mind into letting go, submitting to the abyss, but I know the mind is capable of reaching into the well of the past. All these memories, from time to time they pierce through the pitch-black darkness. They gleam and fade into the shadows of this exile, of this rotten world.
On one of the shadowy days before his departure, I accompanied my father to the farm. It was the afternoon. Our farm was just outside the village. People were drying their earthenware in the sun: cups, bowls, pots, censers, jars. Children ran around them and erected little churches. They waded deep into the mud, sinking their hands in as if into spilled blood—the blood of an offering, perhaps—smearing their faces and tossing it at one another. They yelled and called each other names. Their clothes were the color of rust, their faces crocodile-like.
The days seem kindlier near sunset, easier
when they are softly falling away
with that feeling of sad happiness
that we call moved, moved that we are moved
and maybe imagining in the dimming
all over town of hurry and resentment
that difficult loves rekindle
This poem is excerpted from Eh, No Talk Li’dat.
Eh, No Talk Li’Dat, an anthology forthcoming from Kaya Press, is centered on Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The following poem is excerpted from this anthology.
Pidgin began as a dialect of trade between Native Hawaiians and Western seafarers and merchants and evolved as a Creole language in the sugar plantations in the 1920s and ’30s, yet, until today, it is deemed substandard by school administrators and is not recognized as a Creole language by the State Department of Education. It is the only language I can think of in the U.S. that was co-authored by the various ethnic groups in the islands: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga), sugar planters and migrant laborers from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines), Portugal (Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Rico. Recent speakers and innovators of Pidgin include transplants from Micronesia. In addition to the poems, stories, and excerpted plays, all written in Pidgin and contributed by over forty of Hawai‘i’s writers, the genre-defying Eh, No Talk Li’Dat includes archival materials, newspaper articles, transcripts of televised comic skits, and comic strips.
Da Japs, my strange kine relatives,
wen jes bomb Pearl Harba.
Ebery nite from den on, each house
had only one black-out light with
a puka in da center.
People had fo tar dea windows
and craks unda da do-uz
had fo be stuf wid rags,
scolding da lites dat dare fo show up.
If not, da block checkas go come,
jes like termites come aroun da lites.
And those who broke da law,
going hea banging on dea do-uz
and if you one Jap,
you gotta be careful cuz
dey can sen you
to one jail kine camp,
somewea in Colorado.
One nite, one woman wen go into layba
wen was real hot unda the black-out lite.
Into this dark-kine time, one baby wuz born.
Da baby was me. One black-out baby—
nosing aroun in the dark
wid heavy kine eyes,
and a “yellow-belly,”
filled wid one real angry cry!
Juliet S. K. Kono is a poet and fiction writer born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. She is a survivor of the 1946 tsunami. She has written extensively about the Japanese American experience across the generations. Author of four books, including Hilo Rains and Anshu, she is retired and lives with her husband in Honolulu.
I tried to get in touch with my inner knowledge.
Turns out I have no inner knowledge.
I used to think I did.
Could sit on a rock contemplating the frog, the river, the rotisserie chicken
and know that everything is connected to everything else.
Or, that I had a messed-up childhood and never fully left the home.
Or, that abandonment was a product of eating too much candy.
But then the dog saw the squirrel.
If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.
Longing to make his life compact as sushi, my shame
borrows the saint’s apron, shackles his swivel in her cincture. My shame
walks the earth with an electric blanket, goes to the gym to window-shop with
it, heads for the hills where he takes selfies meditating. To the person
on the bus who inquires, my shame
By ANN INOSHITA
This poem is excerpted from Eh, No Talk Li’dat.
Eh, No Talk Li’Dat, an anthology forthcoming from Kaya Press, is centered on Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The following poem is excerpted from this anthology.
Pidgin began as a dialect of trade between Native Hawaiians and Western seafarers and merchants and evolved as a Creole language in the sugar plantations in the 1920s and ’30s, yet, until today, it is deemed substandard by school administrators and is not recognized as a Creole language by the State Department of Education. It is the only language I can think of in the U.S. that was co-authored by the various ethnic groups in the islands: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga), sugar planters and migrant laborers from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines), Portugal (Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Rico. Recent speakers and innovators of Pidgin include transplants from Micronesia. In addition to the poems, stories, and excerpted plays, all written in Pidgin and contributed by over forty of Hawai‘i’s writers, the genre-defying Eh, No Talk Li’Dat includes archival materials, newspaper articles, transcripts of televised comic skits, and comic strips.
March 16, 2021
Trump blamed China fo COVID-19
calling da virus Kung Flu and da China virus,
so get pleny people from pleny states going afta Asian Americans
blaming Asians fo da pandemic.
Translated by SAWAD HUSSAIN
Note: The following story contains graphic language related to war and sexual violence.
News of the clashes poured into the Gudele district police station from everywhere, not least from the general headquarters of the People’s Army, conveyed by the intermittent, staccato rattling of Kalashnikovs and DShK heavy machine guns, and the roar of tanks that left gutter-deep tread marks on the main roads in their wake. Thick, dark columns of smoke soared skyward from the city of Juba, visible from a distance to Colonel Franco just as he was ending his call with his sister Christina, who told him of how their youngest sister, Rebecca Majok Majak, the doctor working in Bentiu hospital, wife to a Nuer tribesman, was at risk.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.