FROM THE TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD:

These poems were written in the spring and summer of 2020, shortly after Rania Mamoun found asylum in the United States. After years of bravely writing and organising against the regime of Omar al-Bashir, she was finally driven to flee with her young daughters. From the heart of a popular uprising in her home country she was transported to an American city in the early throes of a pandemic. Confined to her home, she began writing poetry daily. 

The resulting volume is a distillation of those months of stillness and upheaval through the eyes of a familiar stranger. Time, exile, memory, motherhood and insurrection, intimacies and boundaries — all themes circled, worried at and returned to in poems that extend passionately across distance, picking flowers from loss, clinging to life. Forged ‘in the long to & fro / between despair and hope’, this is the odyssey of a buoyant mind sifting through the wreckage to find breathing spaces, and in language to find home. 

PRAISE FOR SOMETHING EVERGREEN CALLED LIFE:

“Rania Mamoun speaks to us from the ledge of fear... Yasmine Seale’s exquisite, crystalline translations of these poems sing out from the soundless cavern of vertiginous depression born from the loss of country, the loss of countless loved ones, and the loss of one’s own body… Documenting the grief of exile at both its tender, melancholic fray and its bladed, revolutionary edge, Rania’s astonishing and minimalist lyric voice enters the narrowest crevasse at the steepest, most sheer face of unrelenting loss and finds in that place the luminance of friendship, the warmth and wetness of maternal fertility, and profound evidence of what life can still grow from stone. I have returned to my purpose as a poet more fully, and with a deeper sense of gratitude for poetry as an aid to survival, because of this book.”

— Divya Victor

“Yasmine Seale’s translation is luminous and precise.”

— Poetry Foundation

“We read Mamoun’s poems like the revelations of a close confidant; because she writes without shame, there can be no judgment. It is in this unrelenting vulnerability that Something Evergreen Called Life finds its power… Yasmine Seale’s translation retains the fluidity and lyricism of Mamoun’s writing.”

— Asymptote