Litro #113 Double Dutch Teaser by Litro Magazine

RAMSY NASR NYK DE VRIES JUDY DARLEY CHIKA UNIGWE SANNEKE VAN HASSEL MILLA VAN DER HAVE

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FROM THE EDITOR

WELCOME TO ISSUE 113 OF LITRO

Welcome to the first in Litro’s World Series of issues in translation: the “Lekker” Dutch issue. Litro once again steps into the breach to bring you a great selection of contemporary stories and poetry from the Netherlands. Much has been made recently of the struggles some of the great Dutch writers have had to reach a wider audience because of the general lack of translated Dutch literature during the postwar era. It’s only recently that much modern Dutch fiction has been available in English; we ourselves published a Dutch issue in 2010, bringing to Londoners stories from the likes of Cees Nooteboom, perhaps the greatest living Dutch writer. We also translated for you the opening of Louis Couperus’s great novel Eline Vere, as well as featuring some of the Netherlands’ current crop of great contemporary writers, including Tessa de Loo, Otto de Kat and Abdelkader Benali.

In this issue we continue where we left off, bringing a flash of bright Dutch orange into a dull English February. We have poetry from Holland’s National Poet and Poet Laureate Ramsey Nasr, as well as a piece of biblical flash fiction from up and coming poet Nyk de Vries translated by award winning translator David Colmer, whose translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin won him the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Celebrated Nigerian-Flemish writer Chika Unigwe brings us a beautiful and poignant tale from Nigeria of sex, religion and gender relationships, and more. Continue reading online at www.litro.co.uk to find hand-picked writers in our Ones to Watch section, where we’ll also have the winner of the special Dutch-themed short story competition, who’s bagged the top prize of a stylish vintage Dutchie bicycle.

The special Dutch issue and the Olympics have also inspired us to host a free Dutch sports and literature festival: Double Dutch all day on the 28th of February at The Serpentine Bar and Kitchen in Hyde Park. So don’t fear the winter greys, we have plenty of colour to send your way! We hope you enjoy the issue, that you’ll come and say hello at our festival, and most of all that you’ll continue to read and love Litro. Particular thanks to the Dutch Embassy, London and to the Flemish Literature Foundation the VFL, Litro would also like to the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in London.

Eric Akoto Editor in Chief February 2012

Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in London

CONTENTS

08 09 12 19 25 29 30 34

PROSE POEMS NYK DE VRIES TRANSLATED BY DAVID COLMER I WISH I WAS TWO CITIZENS (THEN I COULD LIVE TOGETHER)

Ramsey Nasr

GIRLS IN THE WINDOW JUDY DARLEY

SAVING AGU’S WIFE CHIKA UNIGWE

WHITE FEATHER SANNEKE VAN HASSEL

SUNSET ALEX VANNINI

BEFORE THE FLOOD MILLA VAN DER HAVE EVENTS LISTINGS Alex James Robin Stevens

Wednesday 29 February – Saturday 3 March 2012

Relating Cultures

A series of events at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), free and open to all, exploring the relationships between the academic cultures of the arts and social sciences, the interaction between global cultures, and the art of communication and language with award-winning authors and academics.

Justin Cartwright

Amit Chaudhuri

AS Byatt

Elif Shafak

Michael Rosen © Micjael Trevillion

Claire Tomalin

Jonathan Powell

John Lanchester

Full details and ticket information online

lse.ac.uk/spaceforthought

St Andrews 14–18 March

Keston Sutherland Lavinia Greenlaw Kathleen Jamie Kwame Dawes John Burnside Matthew Hollis Joe Dunthorne Rozalie Hirs Jackie Kay

more than 90 events more than 70 poets & writers

poetry ∙ performance ∙ music ∙ installations conversations ∙ workshops ∙ films∙ exhibitions

www.stanzapoetry.org

brochure@stanzapoetry.org

w w w. l oc an d aottoem ezzo.co.uk

PROSE POEMS NYK DE VRIES TRANSLATED BY DAVID COLMER

PROGRESS

HAMSTER

A small group was passing through the street with Bibles in their hands. My father was standing next to me, grinning. He said, “Those people still believe in God.” He probably stopped to think about what he’d just said. The word “still” implied progress. “Those people still believe in God.” It suggested levels of increasing insight. My father sniffed and mumbled, “We still believe in progress.” Silently we watched the slight figures until the small group had disappeared around the corner. Then I looked to the side and behind me. There was no one there.

Nyk de Vries was born in Friesland, a province in the northern part of the Netherlands. He is a writer and musician. Since 2000 he has written two novels and a collection of flash fiction, Motorman & 39 andere prozagedichten (Motorman & 39 other prose poems). He is currently working on a new collection and an album, the CD version of his Motorman collection. Nyk de Vries lives and works in Amsterdam. David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator who lives in Amsterdam. He has won several prizes for his translations of Dutch literature, including the 2009 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize for his body of work and the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (with author Gerbrand Bakker) for THE TWIN. His most recent book-length translation is Dimitri Verhulst’s THE MISFORTUNATES, published by Portobello in London.

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I WISH I WAS TWO CITIZENS (THEN I COULD LIVE TOGETHER) RAMSEY NASR and this is my poem, come on in donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be afraid, ignore the echo let us begin in emptiness welcome to my crater of light once we gathered, you and I, remember revived by the cool gleam of a rummer our shadows like finest crystal our fame as glancing as the light that falls on a letter read by a woman becalmed we were gold dusted pale, almost translucent with love lowering our eyes before each other and we loved to do penance if someone asked how we were we answered truthfully ashamed to our boots, sir firmly convinced that we ourselves had scourged our very own lord and crucified him personally the certainty of the apocalypse was branded on our retinas what happened in the few short centuries we looked the other way? I hoped to show you a fatherland formal, pure and with sustained metaphors moulding a poem about us, but when I began I had to look on while one nation spontaneously wiped out the other like two irreconcilable republics how did we move so fast from humble to rude from a glimmer to an omnipresent shrieking crew? how could careful caterpillars give rise to this hummer tribe?

09 | LITRO

GIRLS IN THE WINDOW JUDY DARLEY I first noticed the boy in Vondelpark. It was our second day in Amsterdam and I still felt I’d yet to see the heart of the city, feel its pulse against my own. You’d chosen our hotel with such care, situated in the Museumplein district far from the scrambling mass of coffee shops and girls in windows. I did my best to hide my disappointment at being so far from what I felt to be the true life of Amsterdam, following you through the spacious rooms of the Van Gogh Museum, edging surreptitiously closer to the masterpieces to sniff their oil paint-scented exhalations. The park warmed me inside and out in a way the gallery failed to; something to do with the way it didn’t try, but just was. We ambled along the paths, pausing to hear the skin-shivering strains of a violin echoing beneath a bridge. You grasped my hand, your sense of timing as out as ever, pulling me abruptly from my reverie. Deeper into the park, we walked through a fragrant avenue where white flowers starred hedges of waxy green leaves. “What a wonderful smell!” I exclaimed. “It reminds me of something …” As always, you were ready with an answer, sniffing hard then declaring: “Honey.” I breathed in, catching a note of something richer, almost buttery. Honey wasn’t right – it was caramel that caught in my throat. But despite everything, I wanted to be kind to you on our anniversary, so I just smiled. We reached a lake surrounded by sunbathing tourists and locals, bikes lounging in the grass like heat-hungry metallic lizards. You bought us ice creams to eat as we strolled, wet in the way Dutch ice cream always seems to be, as though the process of melting began long before it was scooped from the freezer onto its cone. Small birds shot overhead from tree to tree, silhouetted against the brightness with occasional flickers of colour showing through. “Parrots?” I asked disbelievingly. You thumbed through the guidebook, finding no answer between its pages.

LITRO | 12

SAVING AGU’S WIFE CHIKA UNIGWE “So Yaradua goes to Israel on an official trip. He gets sick there and dies. His entourage is told, ‘Well, you’ve got two options. Your president was a Muslim and so must be buried quickly. We can bury him here at no cost to you since he was our guest, or you can take his corpse home but that would cost a lot. Thousands and thousands of dollars.’ Yaradua’s men beg for a few hours to think about it. Five hours later they come back to the Israelis. ‘Well?’ the Israeli president asks. The head of the entourage clears his throat and says, ‘Your offer is very generous but we’ll turn it down. Thing is we all know the story of the famous someone, the son of a carpenter, who was buried here and who rose after three days. We don’t want to take that risk!’” The laughter that filters in from the kitchen distracts her for a moment and she shakes a lot more salt than she intends to into the simmering pot. A raised voice says over the laughter, “That’s not right. Muslims are not buried. They are cremated. For their sins, they are burnt. You’ve not told that story well.” The voice is loud in the way people are when they are drunk, but the words are not slurred, so she is sure whoever it is is not drunk, which surprises her, the amount of beer they have been drinking. She can’t say whose voice it is. All the men sound alike. That’s what this place has done to them, she thinks. It has made their voices the same, almost as if they were clones of each other. Their stories are not that different either. They have all escaped from something: religious riots, poverty, deadend lives, and are hoping to resurrect now. But the resurrection is a farce. The promise this place holds out never materializes. Some have, like her, university degrees, but those degrees mean nothing here. The men hold down jobs picking strawberries and harvesting chicken gizzards. They will do anything but clean. “That’s a woman’s job,” Agu said once when they saw a vacancy for a cleaning job at a time when neither of them had work. It would emasculate him to do that, and how could she have thought he would apply? “Why do you want to spoil a good joke?” another voice asks. She recognizes this voice. It is his. Her husband’s. Agu’s. Perhaps he sounds distinct because she has known him the longest. He has a beautiful voice. No. He had a beautiful voice. Deep. Like Barry

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WHITE FEATHER SANNEKE VAN HASSEL

ARMY BOOTS The first time it got me in its grip was on a Sunday afternoon in the tram. I’d got in at the Koningsplein. About three o’clock. I’d pushed my way through the crowds in the Leidsestraat. It was months since I’d been in a shopping street and the heavily laden fellow humans trudging next to me seemed like members of a different tribe. That morning I’d been to a coffee-concert given by a few of my ex-colleagues. I’d taken an early train. John was still asleep, I left a note for him and crept out of the house. It was a decorous concert. The quartet had played Haydn and Mozart, nothing by the modern masters that used to feature in our repertoire. I decided to make my way back to the station on foot. Walking was good in my condition. As I crossed the canals I couldn’t get Eine kleine Nachtmusik out of my head. After less than a kilometre my steps became more cautious. Cramp stabbed at my lower back. A small group of people was standing at the tram stop. Within ten minutes I could be at the Central Station. I took my place in the waiting herd. Unfortunately I was wrong. We waited and waited. The one small bench at the stop was occupied by a monster of a man. For a fraction of a second he glanced round. His look so fierce that I too remained standing, belly towards the tram tracks. He was small of stature. Army boots, long-unwashed jeans, a khaki-coloured jumper. Hint of ginger hair, shaved to stubble. Hairs on his wrists and hands. Hands made to ball up into fists. Fists of squatters’ pamphlets, black-and-white posters on demonstrations. Bear paws. I stroked my belly, rehearsed the gesture, reminded myself something was in there, a life. I’d pulled my skirt up high, it was of that elastic fabric they make tracksuits from. Ever since I found out, I’d been wearing gym shoes and clothes that clung to me like pyjamas. At night I felt it moving, scraping the wall of my abdomen. I pressed at the swelling, encountered something hard, something round.

25 | LITRO

Sunset by Alex Vannini

29 |LITRO

BEFORE THE FLOOD MILLA VAN DER HAVE Of course it wasn’t just Holland. Granny Oudewater knew better than that. She’d encounter them anywhere. Those sideways glances. The offhand remarks. They’d do it in any country. Probably. Then again, she lived here. It happened here. Here, they bumped into her at the supermarket, when she was blocking yet another aisle, immune to the unholy hurry that seemed to posses anyone else. Here, they casually cut in line. And here people thought of her singularity, her not fitting in, as something close to a criminal offence.

That morning another letter of complaint had arrived, standing out amidst the endless stream of brochures and leaflets for toys. As always, it focused on her inability to take care of herself. On the smell, that apparently bothered her neighbours. Granny shrugged and buried the letter in the leftover papers meant to serve as kitty litter. Despite their sensitive nasal faculties, she was sure that when she died the neighbours would only discover it after weeks, if not months. That much they cared. Plus, as far as she was concerned, people with such a horrible taste in music weren’t allowed any complaints. At all. Just then, another one of them cranked up the volume. Within minutes, the numerous pictures framed on her walls would be trembling to the all-devouring bass. Unfortunately, this time, she would have to deal with them, now that they threatened to get a social worker involved. She knew how that would go. The woman would take a quick look around and still manage to produce a voluminous report. She’d give special attention not only to Granny’s collection of aquariums, without fish these days, but serving as large drinking bowls for Ottawa, her cat, but also to the frames, especially to the default images of happy families and playing kids still in it. She’d look Granny up and down and would end up putting her away as some freak, better off in a retirement home, where she could be supervised. Well, Granny Oudewater wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

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LISTINGS FEBRUARY

It’s not just the season where we remember lost loves and new ones, but a chance to embrace a whole array of fantastic literary-inspired events, from Gothic dinners to getting lost in a pleasure garden. From festivals run by children to a new exhibition where all innocence is lost by one of the most controversial artists of all time.

Tropical Extravaganza Festival All of February: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 4 February - 4 March 2012 Celebrate all things bright, beautiful and tropical at the Tropical Extravaganza Festival, where exotic orchids, tropical flowers and foliage displays will dominate the Princess of Wales Conservatory. The theme for this year’s festival is Forces of Nature, and how plants and fungi interact with the four forces of nature - earth, fire, wind, and water. Throughout the festival, there will be volunteer guides in the conservatory who will be on hand to answer questions on the displays and Kew’s global work. Ongoing, She Stoops to Conquer @ The Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, South Bank, London, SE1 9PX. 7:30pm daily. Tickets from £5. One of the great, generous-hearted and ingenious comedies of the English language, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer offers a celebration of chaos, courtship and the dysfunctional family. A brilliant new production of a classic play. For more information, visit http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/68378/ productions/she-stoops-to-conquer.html 10th February onwards, Drawings @ Paradise Row Gallery, 74a Newman Street, London W1T 3DB. 7pm-9pm daily. Free. Drawings is a group show based on the idea of drawing, drafting and illustrating stories. The show includes works on paper, moving image, photographic prints and light works by Diann Bauer, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Jake & Dino Chapman, Shezad Dawood, Margarita Gluzberg, Kirk Palmer, Guillaume Paris, Barry Reigate and Douglas White. For further information on the exhibition, visit http://www.paradiserow. com/exhibitions/67/overview/ LITRO | 34

Imagine, Southbank Centre, 11 - 26 February 2012 With over 50 ticketed and free events over two weeks, including concerts, plays, comedy and appearances by many of the UK’s finest children’s authors, it will be the biggest Imagine festival yet. For six days, between 13 - 19 February, children take over the running of Southbank Centre, from managing the cloakroom to selling programmes and making sure shows start on time. Festival themes include a celebration of Roald Dahl and an exploration of children in care in literature. Imagine truly takes over every corner of Southbank Centre, from the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of The Jungle Book in the Royal Festival Hall and an audience with the legendary Jacqueline Wilson to intimate, one-on-one performances of The Incredible Book Eating Boy. Picasso and Modern British Art, Tate Britain, 15 February - 15 July 2012 In February 2012 Tate Britain will stage the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain. The exhibition will examine Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition will explore Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated. 23rd February, Literary Supper with Simon Callow: Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World @ St Pancras Grand Brasserie, Upper Concourse, St Pancras International Station, London N1C 4QL. 6:30pm-10pm. Tickets are £40, including a three-course meal and a welcome drink. In association with the Museum of London, this is Foyles’ first literary supper of 2012. As London celebrates the Dickens bicentenary, beloved actor, director and writer Simon Callow will discuss his biography of the literary legend. In discussion with the Museum of London’s curator Alex Werner, Callow will look at Dickens’ life through the lens of the theatre, reflecting on the importance of the stage for such a master storyteller. To reserve for this event please call 0207 870 9900 email stpg@searcys.co.uk For more information visit http:// www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Events/Detail.aspx?eventId=1393

Events compiled by Alex James & Robin Stevens 35 | LITRO

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LITRO | 113 DOUBLE DUTCH

“He has a beautiful voice. No. He had a beautiful voice. Deep. Like Barry White’s. Meant for serenading (and indeed he had done a bit of singing) but having been through what they have, it has developed a jarring roughness. These days, he always sounds angry. And really who could blame him? But she has suffered too. He must not forget that. She has suffered as much as he has. Come to think of it, they all have. Every one of them in that overcrowded sitting room with its mismatched chairs and wooden crates that serve as side tables; every one of them drinking out of the jam jars she washes out has suffered. No one can claim a monopoly on suffering. Certainly not Agu.” - Saving Agu’s Wife by Chika Unigwe Page 19