Placing the details
Sometimes all a poet needs to do is place the details on the page and let them speak for themselves. They accumulate and do their job.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad is particularly good at letting this happen. The details that create warmth and atmosphere belong to the city of Khartoum, where ‘Al fatur — Breakfast’ tastes something like this:
Tamia — nuggets of gold,
fluffy and round.
Feta, hard squares,
salt to the tongue.
Jibne muddaffara — braided cheese,
curled on the plate.
There is more for breakfast. Much more. The richness of mixing languages, spellings, visual evocation: all of this begins to create a world, into which the reader is welcomed with carefulness and courtesy. Even the cleaning, in ‘Cleaning Tips’ becomes curiously exotic:
Clean the cooking range
before preparing the meal:
kisra, moolah, lahma,
bamya, salata.
In the absence of hot water,
lather the soap bar well, attack
the grease-laden dishes.
Rinse, stack them to dry in the air.
The language is simple, the method direct. It looks so easy. But it’s not as easy as it looks to create poems that are welcoming and open, poems that call you in. The method seems to me to reflect the culture and atmosphere of the city it celebrates. Somehow it makes me long to be there, much as (I imagine) the poet sometimes does herself.
So I’ll conclude with the last stanza of ‘The University of Khartoum”:
A throng soon gathers
waiting for classes to begin.
Salaam, the greeting given
with open hands and heart.