[APPLAUSE]
Hey, everybody.
It's my great pleasure to welcome
poet and translator Charif Shanahan to the Poetry Center
and to Tucson.
Charif is the author of "Into Each Room We
Enter Without Knowing" and the recent "Trace Evidence."
His work has been recognized and supported
by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship,
the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford,
a Fulbright senior scholar grant to Morocco, as well
as with residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation,
Hawthornden Foundation in Como, Italy, the MacDowell Colony,
and others.
Born in the Bronx, Shanahan traces his lineage
on his mother's side to Morocco, a country that
has been the site as we might hear tonight
of some of Shanahan's most pivotal living
and studying and writing.
To honor that lineage, I want to start with a few lines from
francophone Moroccan poet Mohammad Khaïr-Eddine.
These are some of the opening lines
of the book Scorpionic Sun, sometimes translated
as Arachne Sun.
And this version is from the French
translated by Conor Bracken.
"I'll start again at zero if I have to.
Here is a window opening on me, an eye
open, showing this vast and wasted land."
Another Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun,
counted Khaïr-Eddine along with Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire
as the three writers who most, quote,
"grabbed hold of the French language with a violent
passion, who were able to rattle and enrich
the colonizer's tongue."
No, decolonizing is not a metaphor,
but it is a proposal emerging from the place
where land and consciousness meet.
Not in ownership, but in relation.
Charif Shanahan's "Trace Evidence"
shows me that to get closer to that place,
poets will find their own way to rattle the colonizer's tongue.
Quietly, deliberately, directly, Sharif starts again and again
at the same zero where Khaïr-Eddine finds his footing.
Quote, "to inhabit the present moment that agitates me
into fleeing," Charif writes.
But he knows well enough that the coping scripts we learn,
the scripts of mindfulness, for example,
are sometimes not enough to pacify the zero of witnessing
or the zero of exile.
As Charif writes, "Home was not a place
in any sense, an idea defined by its absence."
Khaïr-Eddine writes, "Here is a window opening on me.
That window's transparency and visibility
can let in the light, but they can also
mark a body's availability to surveillance."
Charif rattles a language without having
to do violence to the syntax or grammar of its surface.
He rides a language to enter the most intimate grief
of a colonized and racialized and gendered person's
experience.
Quote, "I prepare for the hour I lose by preparing."
I'm going to read that again.
"I prepare for the hour I lose by preparing."
Few lines of verse have rattled me more than that one,
naming so succinctly the way surveillance becomes
internalized as vigilance, and the grief and helplessness
of marking how much living has been lost to that labor.
And where Khaïr-Eddine writes, quote,
"And I open showing this vast and wasted land."
I think of Charif reminding us that an officer's chokehold
seeks to induce, quote, "an unconscious state, even death."
Charif is open.
Open enough to stand in the overlap
between the unconsciousness, the state
would force on a body it seeks to dominate,
and the unconsciousness Charif himself
courts as a state of mind that would
hold the news of such violence at bay.
Charif loves us enough, respects us enough to not end
"Trace Evidence" with resolution.
Charif opens his spirit in ours to show us
the vast and wasted land inside and to remind us while we're
all there, we are not alone.
Please welcome Charif Shanahan.
[APPLAUSE]