Iman Mersal

Trans. by Robyn Creswell

MAp Store

Imagine him coming back from a war—
one of those wars that happen elsewhere, 
from which some people return with memories enough
to make a film that almost feels realistic—
coming back, as I say, from a desert in North Africa
and opening, with his newfound expertise in thirst,
a juice stand.
He was dropping some ice into those freshly-squeezed 
beverages which became at the end of the forties 
an emblem of the new Pax Americana
when he discovered water puddling under the cooler.
He imagined a sea, a mainland, an island
and in this way there grew within him 
the vague idea of what geography is.
Later, a grandson who had never been to war
converted the juice stand into a map store. 

If you pass by it some day
on a blocked artery in the heart of Manhattan
you’ll see people who aren’t from here
coming and going and rarely buying anything.
I once saw a woman brush some dust off a mountain
and a girl trail one of her braids over a lake
and I heard one man try to describe to another
the location of his distant house in a distant village close to a distant city
which appeared as a tiny dot on the map of his distant country.

I pass by this place
not to share these strangers’ griefs
nor to pour water into the Nile, which appears as a motionless snake
on the picture that hangs facing the door,
nor even to contemplate the aura that must have been there
just above the right knee of the store’s original owner
whom I now see in a portrait wearing his uniform and medals
but with no sign of his wooden leg
and no trace of the water that leaked from his cooler.

Truly, I don’t know why I pass by this place
but I can see now with my own eyes
the map seller
terrified, perhaps for the first time,
living through a war he had no time to sign up for—
because this time the war came to him. 

Robyn Creswell is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). A former poetry editor of The Paris Review, he currently is an editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers.

Iman Mersal is among the most celebrated contemporary poets in the Arab world. She is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, a hybrid of cultural criticism and personal memoir.