Sudanese proverb
One of the non-
Citizens of Calais
on one of the last days
the Great Emptying
IE the shameless hiding place
of the “eyesore”
Refugee camp in Calais
called “the jungle”
where “jungle” is a translation
from Pashto “dzhangal”
Meaning “forest”,
one of these non-
Citizens of Calais
reported
a Sudanese proverb
Objections to their,
the dispersion of refugees,
a saying that says
solidarity
relieves pain,
& how it works
It is said:
“If we all die together,
Death is a celebration.”
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 translations and scholarly work on Paul Celan. Part III of Interglacial Narrows is indeed a poet’s journey with and around Paul Celan, “the man who turned me on to poetry,” Joris writes, “when I heard his most famous work, Death Fugue, recited in a high school class in Luxembourg in 1960 or ’61.” But for the Celan homage, you’ll have to get the book. Sudanese Saying is from another part of this varied collection, Loess & Found, where I got to know an unexpected facet of the Joris personality, both politically idealistic and worldly.
The camp, whose “Great Emptying” is the focus of the protest poem, was built on a once-contaminated landfill site and opened in January 2015 to house refugees and immigrants seeking to travel from France to Britain. Known as the Calais Jungle (from the Pashtun “dzhangal”, Joris explains), the camp had the support of a number of writers and artists, including Banksy, who painted one of the walls with a telling image of Steve Jobs. Residents numbered around 10,000 when it was cleared and the camp demolished in October 2016.
Joris transforms an artistic allusion based on the verbal connection between “bourgeois” and “citizen” into an initially ironic understatement by calling the refugee protagonist “one of the non-/citizens of Calais”. The allusion refers to the Rodin sculpture “The Burghers of Calais”.
The repetition of the subject of the poem’s single sentence (“one of the non-/citizens of Calais”) in lines 12 and 13 is grammatically useful, but also perhaps a hint that perhaps the Rodin sculpture should be reconsidered. The Sudanese “proverb” that “one of these non-citizens / of Calais” reported (note the shift toward the greater immediacy and collectivity of the demonstrative pronoun “these”) concerns the “dispersal of the refugees” (note again that it is a “dispersal” to remind us that displaced homeless migrants would continue to be scattered along the Calais seafront).
Joris resists rhetoric in his diction more resolutely than ever as he begins to decipher what the proverb “says.” He concludes with six sonorous lines, first explaining the interpretation of the aphorism: “Solidarity / eases the pain,” and then finally coming to the aphorism itself, made all the stronger by its quotation marks: “If we all die together, / death is a celebration.” And so the character of “these non- / citizens of Calais” lends a heroic touch that is now closer to Rodin’s citizens than we first thought. A text from the Rodin Museum explains the events behind the sculpture. “In 1346, the English King Edward III laid siege to the French port city of Calais. Eleven months later, Edward demanded the surrender of six leading men or citizens of the city in exchange for sparing the citizens. Rodin’s sculpture commemorates this episode, emphasizing the inner struggle of each man as he walks toward his fate in sackcloth and rope. The citizens were later spared thanks to the intervention of the English queen, who feared that their deaths would bring misfortune to her unborn child.”
The single, carefully nuanced sentence of the Sudanese proverb controls the anger that almost comes out in the revision of “Great Emptying” to “Shameless Hiding” and the adoption of the inappropriate label “Eyesore,” just as it controls the choppy, rhythmic lines and the amount of information they deliver. Poems championing the rights and dignity of refugees often take on the role of a refugee. It is remarkable that Joris’ carefully detached manner and elegant precision are able to make such a powerful statement—one at the climax of which the translated “Sudanese proverb” sears itself into the memory like Rodin’s masterpiece.
