شعری برای ژرار دو نروال / For Gérard de Nerval

For Gérard de Nerval
and the silent death of errants in Amsterdam

A rope snakes up the “Vrankrijk”[1‎] building’s wall, toward my bed,
Its other end deep in the water, hangs from a mouth of a sad, scaly goddess
“Aurelia”[2], through this rope, sucks the foggy night from my jugular vein.
Beneath the window, in the canal,
I hear our ancestors roar in boats,
Wine in hand, each body is a duality, battling itself.

And I hear double of mine’s howl in a domestic court,
In the heart of Africa,
“Doklaan”[3] Street.
My double shadow confesses to my other self.
And many from history’s labyrinth, in foreign tongues, assault me, my shadow, my double, and my shadow’s double,
that evil shadow, or perhaps it’s me, now inseparable.

And the foreign crowd, among whom familiar faces appear,
And I, or perhaps my better double, whom I see among them,
Each is varied,
In the same time they are their mothers, fathers, and their children,
Sure, from those few who have branched out from themselves and their shadows,
One is a queer, another is a priest.

And as they assault me,
They assault their own doable,
And with their bloody fingers, they sign humanitarian declarations,
And cry out for freedom.
And I see my shadow’s corpse adrift on Amsterdam’s canals,
And that other shadow of mine waits in the Mediterranean Sea,
And recites the prayer “amman yujibu”[4],
And crosses its chest,
And aims a rifle at a Palestinian child’s head,
And rapes women in Myanmar,
And signs “Verishe”[5]‘s death sentence,
And wants to save the world from itself
And at the same time, boats sink in its mouth.

I walk down a street that leads to “Jean-Jaures”[6] Square,
In a Sunday market that smells of wild greens and mulled wine,
Women in Chanel and red lipstick laugh,
Children, dazed and amazed, age amain in front of my eyes, and their bones fly up with a kite,
But the birds wear bowler hats,
And a woolen cloak with the French flag clumsy decorated on it.
Zionists drink to the sun and soil,
“But Christ is no more!”[7]

Suddenly everything turns to ash without catching fire,
And I have passed through the fire
From the eighth floor of hell,
The invisible, fireless fire,
The fire of my shadow and the shadow of those who were shattered into a thousand pieces over the canal,
And burned the sirens,
And burned the Mediterranean’s loneliness,
And the azure horizon of Gaza turned to ash,
Without catching fire.

And I hear behind me the buildings collapsing with a monstrous sound,
I’m afraid to look back,
I run towards “Piroozi”[8] Square,
A woman screams in my temple,
My feet,
Are wet and sandy legs of a red crab[9],
A teenager pours sweet soy sauce on me and chops my arm from my chest with chopsticks and puts it in his mouth,
“There’s something around here I haven’t paid for!”[10]

I smell my mother,
From the sunlit kitchen of a Zoroastrian house in “Yazd”[11],
-My mother has never been to Yazd-
She’s cooking a traditional dish,
I’m twelve,
Hungry,
The smell of cinnamon and lemon fills the squat[12],

Amsterdam has a steep invisible slope that falls into the depths of the Surinam valley,
And there, at the bottom of the valley, slaves mine pure gold,
And the white masters who are afraid of heights
Pull up the gold with a large steel rope,
Not by human hands
With artificial arms that have fantastic intelligence,
“and i could actually see, treading its way through one of the apertures in the door, a shadowy procession of the declining generations of future races.”[13]

I’m forty-six[14],
I run towards the Zoroastrian kitchen in an old squat in Amsterdam,
My mother is boiling in the pot,
And the end of the rope that grew from Aurelia’s mouth
Swings my head over “Singel”[15] Street,
In you,
In your lunacy,
Nerval!

— Niloofar Fouladi (Nila)
January 2025- Amsterdam

Footnotes:
1- The name of a building in Amsterdam
2- The name of the female character in the story of Aurelia written by Gérard de Nerval
3- The name of a street in Amsterdam
4- What is amman yujibu? It is simply a confirmation that Allah Subhanahu wa Ta ‘ala is the only One who truly listens to the soul that is distressed and removes for it all afflictions.
We recite amman yujibu directly from the Qur’an.
5- Verisheh Moradi, Kurdish activist who was sentenced to death by the court of the Islamic Republic.
6- A square in the city of Tours in France.
7- A sentence from the novel “Aurelia”
8-  It is the name of a square in Tehran, it means victory.
9-  Gérard de Narval lived with a crab.
10-  A sentence from the novel “Aurelia”.
11- A city in Iran.
12- the occupation of unused or derelict buildings or land.
13-  A sentence from the novel “Aurelia”.
14- At the age of forty-six, Gérard hanged himself from the window of his room.
15- A street in Amsterdam.