Letters to the "once and never was"
Artwork by Kriss Li
From Deann, Selection Committee Member:
To be in a community means to show up. Show up with your ancestors, show up to be seen fully by future generations. This means examining who we are at present and being courageous enough to show the tenderness of our vulnerabilities; our mistakes, our missteps, our cringe, our complexities, our earnest showings of love. There are concepts that are consistent and coalesce with the temporal rhythms of our worlds. This is what I felt while reading these works. Ones that stood out most are the ingenious fingerprints of care. Care as guidance. Care as holding. Care as testimony. Care as heirloom. Aside from hope, it is our finest gift. This is what the writers have so generously offered us.
Harira
Greetings/Salut/Salam/Azul (ⴰⵣⵓⵍ) habibi,
Thank you for visiting me in my grief and for opening the door to your memories, allowing me to leaf through them. My bones and cells, as portals. I re-member that time is not linear, but a vast, interconnected web we share. You are always here. Thank you for receiving me, as I let my body sink into the soil. Flesh descending in the somber depths, dissolving into the ground, metabolized into nourishment for living ecosystems of earthly kin inseparable from me. I feel your presence, your guidance. You are H O M E.
I sense you in my gut, with a tender grin on your face, as you artfully stir a cauldron of Harira*. The transgenerational soup of tomatoes, lentils, and spices, flowing like a river of Eros, rippling through the Land; body, and Earth alike. Each stir nourishes the collective.
How could I blame you, as your memories, our memories, reveal the wounding that hide behind every misstep. Your children and their children, inheriting civilizational umbilical fracture from the Mother of all, timeless ancestor of Life itself. Her compassionate embrace is here, as we enter the dark path to her womb. Let us be covered with the liquid healing nectar of sacred love.
I see you. I feel you. I forgive you. I love you. I am you.
- by Mona Calvet
*Harira, a traditional Moroccan soup, is deeply tied to my indigenous and SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) ancestry and cultural heritage. It embodies not only nourishment, communal connection, and care but also the intergenerational act of sharing, and remembering as a culinary ritual passed down to bind us to the Land, each other, and Life itself.
Gen bote nan mache yo
There is beauty in the markets.
In the billowing skirt with bright purple pockets.
On the dust covered toes
In sandals with worn out soles.
In how, hunched over wicker baskets,
Sitting on patchwork blankets,
She laughs yellow, orange, and red
Here, there are only shouts, nothing said:
Bon manger! Bon prix!
Bananes pesées, Lambi!
It is a kite made of a trash bag
Flying by a billboard covered with a Digicel model.
At its tail, the red and blue flag.
It’s a toy car made of a used water bottle, With its wheels that are plastic caps.
It’s polka dotted hair wraps
And dark green tank tops.
Machete chops
Sugar cane.
All praying for rain,
But not too much.
(Too much could mean mudslides.)
On Delmas, all cars are in a rush.
There is so much this island hides.
The abundance of color,
Overflowing with culture.
Its fresh fruit, its waterfalls.
That feeling as the ocean calls.
Its mango hanging, swinging
Dropping, rotting from trees
The men, qui font la bise,
And their strong colognes
Its vast lands that no one owns.
It is the water and plantain chips
Sold on the streets.
Raras and Carnivals,
Fetes in the streets
Boat rides
On uplifting waves
Its unexplored caves.
Car rides
Down winding routes
Bumping over unearthed roots
It is a cold Prestige on the public beach
Places the car can’t reach
The roads are too steep.
It’s basins, blue and deep.
It is history
Whispered to me
By my father
The martyr.
There is beauty
In the melting,
Burning tires in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
- by Sylvia Mondestin
In their words
James Baldwin told us that love, whether romantic, familial or friendship-based, is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. And Ursula K. Le Guin told us that ‘Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.’ These times we are living are indeed trying. The viciousness of capitalism and imperialism has left some of us barely surviving, some of us numb and unbothered, and some of us angrier than we ever were. Some of us did not make it.
I am reminded of my friend, the luminary, Roya Hassan (رؤيا بالألف), whose life was lost after the war in Sudan started. A few days ago, she would have been 35 years old. Roya, true to the meaning of her name, was a true visionary and warrior who is now in the ranks of the beloved ancestors. She used to always remind us that revolution is an ongoing act. bell hooks told us that ‘To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.’
Oh, how hard it is some days, most days, to imagine any possibility outside of the unimaginable horrors wreaked by empire. But in the words of June Jordan, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We, the people, we, the earth, we, the ancestors guiding us and we, the future generations that will continue till victory.
- by Duha Elmardi
Salut
Je suis vraiment contente de pouvoir t'écrire, je n'aurais pas pensé avoir cette opportunité là. C'est parce que, je suis désolé, j'ai oublié ton nom et j'ai oublié ton visage. Mais une chose que je n'ai jamais oublié, ce sont tes mots. Tu chantais avec ta guitare et, ça fait tellement longtemps, je ne me rappelle plus des paroles sauf du refrain. Tu chantais :
Mais moi je crois
Qu'un coeur à la fois on peut changer le monde
C'est pas compliqué
C'est simple comme bonjour,
Faudrait juste plus d'amour.
Ce refrain là je ne l'oublierai jamais. Je le savais quand j'étais une enfant, mais aujourd'hui je comprends à quel point ton message était important. Je le chante à mon petit neveu de temps en temps. Il va grandir et j'espère que lui aussi, il va se souvenir de ce refrain, et le chanter à ses enfants. C'est que, moi aussi, comme toi, je fais partie de ceux qui croient que ce dont le monde a le plus besoin, ce n'est ni de la richesse, ni de la gloire. C'est de l'Amour.
- by Catherine Dufort
Before Confederation
Dear great-great-grandmother Marie-Jeanne,
What a great woman you were.
How much you did see!
I'm sorry your son died in that great war.
I'm sorry your grandsons lied about who they were.
I've seen a picture of you, and for that I am grateful. That I met Uncle Kip before he passed on will forever mean the world to me. I've been tying to find out how to say ""I will miss you"" in Michif. I'm assuming you spoke the southern dialect, but it also could have been the French! The census says you spoke ""French"", but then what else would they call it? And one of them calls you ""Bengal""... No self- identifying words are recorded, of course. Your husband, great- great grandfather, passed on much before your 108 years were up-
to have the chance to see him too...
Your name has been carried down in our family, as Mary-Jane. His name is still a signifier of our people. My cousins and I, and it would be my name too, of course, are proud to carry it.
What a time to be alive it was for you then, as it is for me now. To see how heartily you saw it all through, in that photo, holding that baby that could be dad, with my grandfather in the middle.
That's my nose...
When she called, that night, I told her who
her father was.
I had all I needed
because of you.
Your great- great grandson,
maddison
- by m.Kipling
