High Desert

André Naffis-Sahely

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781780376202
• eBook ISBN: 9781780376219
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast's wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely's reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region's hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision. High Desert is André Naffis-Sahely's second collection, following his debut The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator, and editor of Poetry London. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis, in the US.

I

Peregrinations

11

The Last Communist

There are, it is true, still a few Marxists around.

Washington Post, November 6, 2017

‘We drank no milk for months, maybe a year,’

my mother told me, ‘they poured

a famine’s worth down the drains;

all talk that summer

was of nuclear clouds

and acid rain.’

Then came the crumbling of the Wall,

and my father’s tears –

my childish vision of him

as the last communist,

bathed in the blue

glare of defeat,

the revolution having been televised

and discarded

as yesterday’s news.

Three decades and two

recessions later,

the old man

is gone and I sit and sift through

the souvenirs of the cause’s

demise: Deutscher’s

Prophet, expired

union cards, some

sepia photos

and his final Iranian passport, the Islamic

Republic’s seal printed atop

the Shah’s lion, history’s manner 12

of illustrating how horrors

beget only

more horrors;

I weep at the sight of his prison diaries

memoirs of my journey to hell,

his miniature scrawling

consuming whiteness

with a convict’s

passion for parsimony.

I am tired of murder; each day brings a new Peterloo

and all over the Earth, the fog

of infallibility touches

the ground and threatens

to stay. it is better

to live one day as a lion

than one hundred years as a sheep. Perhaps;

but I’ll always choose to side with the flock,

for I know that one day

the veldt will be empty

and even the lion

will go hungry and die.

13

The Other Side of Nowhere

Thirty feet above the ground, in a warehouse

in the industrial outskirts

of a city we’d never lived in,

I knelt inside the near-empty container

to contemplate our nomadic misery:

mismatched chairs, kitchen appliances

older than me, baby clothes,

framed diplomas, books in a language

my father never taught me (it would

have stunted my assimilation)

and in my head, an email from my mother

that read, ‘we’re doomed, save what you can’.

So there I was, on the other

side of nowhere in sunny Italy… Despite

the technological changes around us,

disasters still travel in telegrams: Bankrupt. STOP.

Sorry. STOP. Homeless. STOP…

Remember, brother,

when our parents calling us

‘global citizens’ inspired great hope?

But the world proved too tribal for us

and so your suitcase shall be your only friend

while Shi Huang’s fantasy of a Godly Wall

proliferates across the planet.

Weeks ago, two cops in Catania

stung a sixteen-year-old boy from Darfur

with cattle-prods to impart the following lesson,

‘whatever the government says, 14

you’re not welcome here.’

As if one needed the reminder…

All across the boot, the green-

shirted faithful lift their pitchforks

to chase the monster of Otherness,

so don’t ask me why...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I: PEREGRINATIONS
• II: THE CITY OF ANGELS
• III: HIGH DESERT
• IV: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WEST
• V: CODA
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright