Carol Rumens's poem of the week

Poem of the week: Sudanese Saying by Pierre Joris

Short, stinging lines convey the pain and injustice of the 2016 demolition of the Calais refugee ‘jungle’

Carol Rumens

Monday 12 August 2024

Sudanese Saying

One of the non-
bourgeois of Calais
on one of the last days
of the Great Emptying
I.E. the Shameless Hiding
of the “eyesore”
Calais refugee camps
called “the jungle”
where “jungle” is a translation
of Pashto “dzhangal”
meaning “forest”,
one of these non-
bourgeois of Calais
reported
a Sudanese saying
to object to their,
the refugees’ dispersal,
a saying that says
solidarity
alleviates pain,
& this is how
It goes:
“if we die all together,
death is a feast.”

This week’s poem is from Pierre Joris’s Interglacial Narrows, published in 2023. Joris is a writer whose work I knew, before reading this collection, only from his Paul Celan translations and scholarship. Part III of Interglacial Narrows is indeed a poet’s journeying with and around Paul Celan, “the man who brought me to poetry,” Joris writes “when I heard his most famous work, Todesfuge, recited in a high school class in in 1960 or 61 in Luxembourg” But for the Celan homage, you’ll have to get the book. Sudanese Saying is from another part of this richly varied collection, Loess & Found, where I met an unexpected facet of the Joris persona, both politically idealistic and urbane.

 The encampment whose “Great Emptying” is at the protesting heart of the poem, was built on a once-polluted landfill site, and opened in January 2015 to house refugees and immigrants hoping to travel from France to Britain. Known as the Calais Jungle (from the Pashto “dzhangal”, as Joris explains), the encampment had the support of a range of writers and artists, among them, Banksy, who painted one of the walls with a telling image of Steve Jobs. The inhabitants numbered about 10,000 when they were evicted and the camp demolished in October 2016.

Joris converts an artistic allusion, based on the verbal connection between “bourgeois” and “burgher”, into what might first seem an ironic understatement, designating the refugee-protagonist “one of the non- / bourgeois of Calais”. The reference is to the Rodin sculpture, The Burghers of Calais.

The repetition in lines 12 and 13 of the subject of the poem’s single sentence (“one of the non- / bourgeois of Calais” is grammatically useful, but also a marker perhaps for the Rodin sculpture perhaps to be reconsidered. The Sudanese “saying” that “one of these non-Burghers / of Calais” has reported (note the shift to the greater immediacy and collectivity of the demonstrative pronoun, “these”) concerns the “refugee’s dispersal” (again, note that it’s a “dispersal”, to remind us that displaced shelterless migrants would still be scattered along the Calais shores).

Resisting the rhetorical in its diction more determinedly than ever as he begins to unpack what the saying “says”, Joris concludes with six resonant lines, first explaining the aphorism’s interpretation, “solidarity / alleviates pain” and then, at last reaching the aphorism itself, ringing all the stronger for its quotation marks: “if we all die together, / death is a feast.” And so a quality of heroism enters the character of “these non- / bourgeois of Calais,” now closer to Rodin’s Burghers than we first realised. Text from the Rodin Museum explains the events behind the sculpture. “In 1346 the English king Edward III laid siege to the French port of Calais. Eleven months later, Edward demanded the surrender of six of the town’s leading men, or burghers, in return for sparing its citizens. Rodin’s sculpture commemorates this episode and emphasises the internal struggle of each man as he walks toward his fate wearing a sackcloth and rope halter. The burghers were later spared thanks to the intervention of the English queen, who feared that their deaths would bring bad luck to her unborn child.”

The single, carefully nuanced sentence of Sudanese Saying controls the anger that almost emerges in the revision of “Great Emptying” into “Shameless Hiding” and in the borrowing of the inappropriate designation “eyesore”, just as it controls the choppy, rhythmic lines, and the amount of information they deliver. Poems that put the case for the rights and dignity of refugees often adopt a refugee’s persona. It’s remarkable that Joris’s carefully distanced manner and elegant precision are able to make a statement as powerful – one at whose climax the translated “Sudanese saying” burns into the mind like Rodin’s masterpiece.

THE GUARDIAN