a talented storyteller in the tradition of his
Zaza roots.
“This book is a collection of stories
about everyday people, written by a politi-
cian fighting for freedom and equality, after
being unjustly imprisoned by an authoritar-
ian regime. It contains short fragments from
my own past, which have resurfaced in my
memory while I’ve been here in prison,”
Demirtaş wrote to preface Dawn.
The solitude of jail has not impeded
his resolve to participate in social change.
The first story in Dawn is titled “The Man
Inside.” It reflects the cold, hard reality that
grounds people who endure life in maxi-
mum-security prison. His unadorned prose
has a black humor, of a man left to his own
devices, with nothing but the ephemera of
his mind.
The second story is the title piece,
“Seher,” a female name common across the
Middle East. The story of Seher is that of
an honor killing. Its unspeakable tragedy
is delivered with pithy sentences, like that
of a witness on the stand. “One evening
in a forest, three men robbed Seher of her
dreams,” wrote Demirtaş. “One night in
an empty field, three men robbed Seher of
her life.” These are likely some of the most
potent lines in all of translated contempo-
rary literature.
Matt A. Hanson
Istanbul, Turkey
Esthela Calderón
Los huesos de mi abuelo /
The Bones of My Grandfather
Trans. Steven White. Madrid. Amagord
Ediciones. 2018. 281 pages.
Los huesos de mi abuelo teaches me things
about our terra, flora, and fauna that it
seems I have only passively understood.
“The sound of the first word was made by a
tree,” Esthela Calderón tells us in her poem
“History,” to which “the animals and waters
answered.” For those of us dwelling in con-
crete forests, it is all too easy to forget what
goes on beyond the veils of so-called civili-
zation and mass corporatization; what had
to happen for everything to be just as it is.
In fact, Calderón shows us a mere corner
of humanity’s wrongdoings in the poem
“The Price of What You See,” in which she
writes: “Squatting on its clay, a ceramic jug
cries. / Inside, its lament is not tears, not
water, / but the memory of extirpated gods,”
reminding us that in everything there is life,
and inevitably, many of those things are
sacrificed to the idea of progress. What have
we as humans left behind and forgotten in
this race to colonize, dominate, and own as
much as we possibly can? When we think of
preserving our history, we look upon rem-
nants of robbed graves and stolen artifacts
as if we have done them justice by encasing
them in glass. “History,” Calderón writes,
“frowns in museums. / And, for those who
were defeated, there are no more numbers /
that serve to count their dead.”
Calderón examines Earth’s ecosystems
and history through the poems in Los hue-
sos de mi abuelo, both instructing and chal-
lenging her readers. She shows us that we
have “fabricated a God / and clung to the
story about image and likeness” to hide our
guilt of burying the truth. Calderón bleeds
love for this land, the ancestors, and all thatgrows. Between high notes of love and low
notes of grief, she compels us to understand
that “Darkness has been our greatest contri-
bution” to the universe; that though we may
be “Intelligent, even wise, administrators of
tragedies, / we mutilated the ideals of Jaguar
and Panther.”
These poems shake our sensibilities
into awareness of all the ancestors and just
how inextricably linked we all are to other
living beings. Her poems pace back and
forth between reserved simplicity and wide
swaths of thick, expressive words to show
that each plant and animal has conscious-
ness, like when she says that “flowers are
born from their memories / and live without
thinking of death.”
I heard someone say once that every
poem is a love poem, in that each poem
should have love at its core. Calderón’s
dynamic use of language, through Steven
White’s translations into English, gives way
to easier absorption both of pure adoration
of everything in our universe as well as an
interrogation of humankind’s penchant to
destroy it.
Sarah Warren
University of North TexasRodrigo Rey Rosa
Chaos: A FableTrans. Jeffrey Gray. Seattle. Amazon
Crossing. 2019. 197 pages.Rodrigo Rey Rosa might be the least well
known of our greatest living writers. His
books give us a cacophony of voices that,
like the Sirens, tempt us away from known
territories and onto strange and wonder-
ful shores. His latest novel to be translated
into English, Chaos: A Fable, pulls its reader
into the dreamlike landscape of Tangier,
Morocco, a place Rey Rosa knows well.
The novel, translated by Jeffrey Gray, is an
important, though brief, excursion in Rey
Rosa’s oeuvre.
The basic premise of Chaos is simple: a
Mexican writer named Rubirosa returns to
Tangier after many years to attend a bookBooks in Review
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