Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [0]
English translation copyright © 2011 Lazer Lederhendler
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
This edition published in 2011 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343 Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca
An excerpt from the draft of this translation was previously published in the online journal Carte Blanche.
The epigraph is from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish titled in English “My father.” The translation is by A. M. Elmessiri and can be found in The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, collected and translated by A. M. Elmessiri (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1982).
The excerpt on page 156 is from the poem “Birds Die in Galilee” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, and can be found in The Music of Human Flesh, a collection of poems by Darwish selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980).
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Awumey, Edem,
[Pieds sales. English]
Dirty feet / Edem Awumey ; translated by Lazer Lederhendler.
Translation of: Les pieds sales.
eISBN 978-0-77089-044-2
I. Lederhendler, Lazer. II. Titre. III. Titre: Pieds sales. English.
PS8609.D45P5313 2011 C843’.6 C2011-902216-8
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover photograph: Cosmo Condina/Getty Images
Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Nado and Kéli,
tender lands
To Martine Verguet,
for the sustaining words. — E.A.
For Izja Lederhendler, my brother, whose lifeline
traverses many boundaries in time and space. — L.L.
And my father once said,
As he was praying on the stones:
Avert your eyes from the moon
Beware the sea, and journey not!
Mahmoud Darwish
“My Father”
1
ASKIA WOULD recount how in her final delirium, his mother had kept on about the letters that Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, his father, was supposed to have sent from Paris. Along with some photos. Which he had never seen. But then one day Askia went off on the same route as the absent one. He did not leave to find the missing father. He could live with gaps in his genealogy. He left because of a strange thing his mother had said: “For a long time we were on the road, my son. And wherever we went, people called us Dirty Feet. If you go away, you will understand. Why they called us Dirty Feet.”
Paris. He was standing in front of 102, rue Auguste-Comte that afternoon because three days earlier, in his taxi, a passenger had intimated that she had once photographed Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed. Scrutinizing his face in the rear-view mirror, she had said, “You remind me of someone. A man with a turban who posed for me a few years ago.”
This was not the first time a passenger had used the you-remind-me-of-someone line on him, just to make conversation. Often enough an exchange of words would turn into a physical exchange, as an antidote to boredom. To the emptiness deep in the skin and the dark night. But that evening the girl had mentioned a turban, a detail echoing the distant words of Kadia Saran, Askia’s mother. Yes, it was the same refrain: “You look like him, Askia,” his mother had said. “Exactly like him. If you wore a turban, it would be almost as if he’d come back. Almost. Because he won’t come back.” He was