I shall plough
everywhere
and move on
Out of your soul’s press
and your body’s distillery
I shall be drunk on your last breath
In the palms of your hands
I shall place all of me
All time will pass
Me and you
everywhere
we shall be
- -
And while we are aware of our profound sadness
we force our bodies to pass through infinite tunnels
where the world is preoccupied with perfecting its plans
to eliminate our children
Q: You are an Arab artist?
A: Me? God forbid! I am a criminal, thank God. God was merciful and kind to me.
The mornings green, yellow
and honey hued
In the time of the apricots
The smell of burning sugar
Children playing in the dust
while my mother makes coffee
and milk and tea
My mother
In the time of the apricots
Always my mother
source: https://www.shaeirat-project.com/by-the-time-of-the-apricots Kotob Khan ed., Cairo, 2019 – translation Youssef Rakha
In the Time of the Apricots is a tour de force. A cycle of poems, it embraces the entire life experience of a woman poet who happens to be Palestinian. We can find, without being able to disentangle them, daily life and politics, desires, childhood memories, motherhood. The insistent memory of the mother is like the refrain of this long and finely chiselled song.
The variety of poetic forms is brought into play and their meticulous arrangement into an ode to life recited in an almost natural voice by this duet of splendid readers, each in her language, is a drama in stereo where anger, sensuality, reportage, elegy, fantasies, the infinite tenderness of mothers, heady melancholy of this season of apricots and the smell of Turkish coffee all mix.
biobibliographical note:
Carol Sansour is a poet from Palestine whose first book, في المشمش, In the Time of the Apricots, appeared in a trilingual edition in 2019 in Cairo by Kottob Khan ed. The French translation has been published in Geneva by Héros Limite ed. in May 2022, coupled with her second collection, Jamila.
She co-manages the Shaeirat Project and is the director of the Athens Palestine Film Festival. Her work is translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and German.