From "America, America"

Saadi Youssef (translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa)

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island

and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.

I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.

I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.

But I am not American.



Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age?

. . .

America:

let's exchange gifts. Take your smuggled cigarettes

and give us potatoes.

Take James Bond's golden pistol

and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle.

Take the heroin syringe under the tree

and give us vaccines.

Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries

and give us village homes.

Take the books of your missionaries

and give us paper for poems to defame you.

Take what you do not have

and give us what we have.

Take the stripes of your flag

and give us the stars.

Take the Afghani Mujahideen beard

and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with

butterflies.

Take Saddam Hussein

and give us Abraham Lincoln

or give us no one.



. . .

We are not hostages, America

and your soldiers are not God's soldiers ...

We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods,



the gods of bulls

the gods of fires

the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and

blood in a song...

We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor

who emerges out of farmers' ribs

hungry

and bright,

and raises heads up high...



America, we are the dead.

Let your soldiers come.

Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.

We are the drowned ones, dear lady.

We are the drowned.

Let the water come.



by Saadi Youssef