Metonymy Press

Grace Kwan’s The Sacred Heart Motel deals with grief, place and placelessness, and memory

Sophie Dufresne — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:51:18 +0000

Kwan’s lyrical imagery and confessional poetry in Sacred Heart Motel makes readers question their own experiences and surroundings.

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“Joy among the fury and grief:” a Q&A with El Ghourabaa editors

Sophie Dufresne — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 17:47:51 +0000

Metonymy Press’s latest release, El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Collection of Oddities, had its Montreal launch on Saturday, June 15th at Brique par brique’s offices in Park-Ex. This anthology was edited by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of award-winning books The Good Arabs and Knot Body, and Samia Marshy, who has been editing for years but for whom this is her first publishing experience. The two talked to me about how they navigated putting El Ghourabaa together in the midst of “Israel’s” latest genocidal campaign while they and several contributors were grieving, what it means for them to be able to include the late Etel Adnan in their anthology, and the highs and lows of the publishing process. Answers have been edited for clarity. Sophie Dufresne: In the introduction to El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Collection of Oddities, you state how the anthology “started as a project to celebrate the fullness of queer Arab and Arabophone identity. As we endure months of dehumanization and violence by the media and the colonial nation-states, it feels more important than ever to assert ourselves, even if we are not in a celebratory mood. Our existence is resistance.” What is your hope for El Ghourabaa’s impact on the literary community and beyond? Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch: I wanted to do this project for a long time; since, I would say, 2016. So it’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I always thought, “Eventually I will do this.” I did a Jeunes volontaires project and began working on this anthology, and Ashley [Fortier, Metonymy co-publisher] was my mentor. I worked on the project alone for about a year and a half before I decided that I wanted to bring in another editor, so I asked Samia. There was this original idea of what I wanted that kind of changed as we collaborated, because that always happens when there’s more than one person involved. It didn’t change drastically, but you know, it was nice to have another person’s perspective. Then October 7 happened while we were still working on [El Ghourabaa]. And obviously, that shifted things and slowed the process down. We wanted to be working on this project, but also we wanted to make a lot of space for people to be in anger and grief, including us, and not rush the project. So the project was definitely delayed, which was a good thing, ultimately. Samia Marshy: With everything going on, I think it would have been a mistake, and just really hard emotionally to try and put the book out in the fall, which was the original plan. [We wanted] to make space and respect the terrible thing that was happening. El Bechelany-Lynch: Yeah, and we felt weird, sending emails being like, “Please send us your bio!” when people were grieving, and in shock, and organizing, and upset, and all these things. But then, it felt nice to have this project to work on once things continued, and we were in a different place than that initial shock and grief. We’re not necessarily in a celebratory mood, but also, [we’re] in a space where queer people, and especially queer Arabs are being utilized by “Israel” to— Marshy: promote a genocidal agenda. El Bechelany-Lynch: Yeah, it feels important to be like “No, fuck that.” Marshy: We make our own space. El Bechelany-Lynch: Yeah, and that’s not being asked. Queer Arabs and queer Palestinians aren’t [saying], “Yes, please do this on my behalf.” We can be like, “Fuck you, this is for us.” You know? We also donated our advances to an organization in Montreal, Mubaadarat, who’s been doing a lot of stuff with queer Arabs, and to a queer organization, alQaws, in Palestine because we wanted what little money we made from this project to be able to be helpful. We didn’t want to profit from this genocide, from this weird moment where people really want to read Arab work. I mean, anthologies don’t make money, so it’s not like we were like, “We’re gonna rack in the money from this.” But I think we want it to be explicitly anti-colonial and anti-genocidal, which, you know, shockingly, is somehow not the baseline. A book that was in opposition to a lot of harmful things, and also celebrating the beauty of queer and trans Arabness and queer and trans Arabophones too. Marshy: I think one of the things that we talked about a lot when we were envisioning what kind of pieces we wanted and what we wanted the book to look like was that we didn’t want necessarily an anthology that was [asking,] “What does it mean to be queer and Arab?” Because I think there’s a lot of think pieces around [those identities] for people from all kinds of diaspora. And that’s kind of the stereotype: that it’s hard to hold both of those identities. But no, it’s a given that there [are] queer Arabs, and we want to know what you’re thinking about, what you want to write about, and [we want to] see your art. [We wanted to hear from] people who are coming from that positionality but [who] aren’t necessarily conflicted about that positionality. El Bechelany-Lynch: Yeah, and how do you incorporate your queer or trans Arabness into your work without having it have to be a think piece, which is such a white hetero demand of racialized people and queer people to be like, “Tell us about yourself!” Marshy: It’s a request for legibility while simultaneously othering. What if we [say], “Actually, we are the standard.” It’s a given that these identities coexist, so then what? El Bechelany-Lynch: We’re both interested in work that pushes the bounds and is explicitly weird, and tries to fuck with genre and fuck with language and is really playful. And we got so much good stuff. “It’s a given that these identities coexist, so then what?” -Samia Marshy Dufresne: Yeah, I’m excited to read it again! El GhourabaaLire la suite »“Joy among the fury and grief:” a Q&A with El Ghourabaa editors

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$10,000 donation to Metonymy Press in memory of Graham Clegg (1970-2019)

Ashley Fortier — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 05:59:06 +0000

Graham was a gifted screenwriter who had the good fortune of spending several decades writing for top Canadian TV shows. He was nominated for numerous awards in recognition of his work, including a Gemini.

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The Rage Letters: ‘I believe that every choice made by a translator is a form of creolization, ripe with political potential’

Ashley Fortier — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:22:41 +0000

On November 21, Metonymy will be releasing its first translated work—The Rage Letters by Valérie Bah. In this post, translator Kama La Mackerel shares what stood out to them about this work (which was published originally in French as Les Enragé·e·s by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection) and the nature of the collaboration that brought this new version to life. ‘I think what surprised me the most at the time was that I had not yet read a work of literature in French where Blackness and queerness are both written in such an unapologetic manner’ In reading just the first few stories, I felt seen in ways that I had never experienced through a francophone literary work before. Sure, it was about these characters who reminded me of myself, my friends, and my communities—us learning to love, to resist, to stay alive while running anti-oppression workshops during the day and working call-centre jobs at night. But more than that, there was something happening with the language: it felt haunted, as if a ghost was attempting to manifest itself in between the words. It felt like it wasn’t exactly fully French, but at once something more and something less. It was clear to me that Val had managed to address the power dynamics inherent to the French language; they had managed to shape the language into being unapologetically Black and queer. It was only after my first couple of readings of the book that I started delving deeper into the linguistic and literary form that Valérie Bah had composed. I found out that Val had actually first birthed versions of these stories in English, before roughly translating them into French, and then working with and within the language. This amazed me. It turns out that my writing process in French is very similar: even though I am a native French speaker, my first drafts of anything—be it creative writing, love letters, or grant applications—are always in English. It is as if when I attempt to conjure my feelings and thoughts in French first, I stumble on my words. Writing then becomes a demanding exercise in drafting, moulding, and sculpting the language. In English, however, my third language, there is a sense of freedom and permission that I seem to have right from the outset. I didn’t know anything of Valérie Bah’s writing process when I first read Les Enragé·e·s, but it was still palpable to me that the French language had been “creolized,” which compelled me as both a reader and a translator. We often think of the work of translation as an activity tied to purity: that of being able to transpose the content and form of a work of art from the purity of one language into the purity of another language. There is a long lineage of translation theorists who claim that a translator should always erase themself in the act of translating, that they should not leave any trace of their presence within the translated text. I, on the other hand, believe that translation is a recreation in which the translator injects their subjectivity into the literary voice of the author. Translators are always faced with the question of choice: which expression best represents, captures, and carries the weight, meaning, aesthetic, feeling, impact, rhythm, etc. of the text being translated. I believe that every choice made by a translator is fundamentally “impure,” it is a form of creolization which, I further believe, is ripe with political potential. Although I had only translated literary works from English to French so far in my practice, I thought taking on Les Enragé·e·s as a translation project into English would be a rather exquisite challenge. What I did not know yet is how arduous the process would be. Throughout, I was enwrapped in doubt as to whether I was fully capturing all the nuances of Valérie Bah’s literary language. I was also constantly faced with the question of relevance regarding certain literary choices in French that I found revolutionary, but not so much once I started reconstructing them in English. (In English, there are already more rooted lineages of Black, racialized, and LGBTQ+ writers who have written and continue to write against the empire.) I felt haunted by the creolité of a language that I was trying to capture and express in another language (both colonial), and where most of the time, I felt like I was failing. A project like this one required that I reimagine my task as a translator, that I unlearn everything I thought I knew in order to find my way to a different translation process. Valérie Bah soon joined me in co-developing the manuscript in English. We spent countless hours pondering the initial choices I had proposed, whether these captured Val’s original intentions, whether my choices were leaking into new aesthetic and semantic spaces, and whether the latter supplemented or impaired the integrity of the text. In addition to Val, Esi Callender, and the co-publishers at Metonymy Press, Oliver Fugler and Ashley Fortier, also sank their teeth into the text. By the end of it, even though my name is featured as “the translator” of this work on the cover, it was really our ten hands together that massaged this text into being. As I now look at the final version of this work in English, I cannot help but think that the translation of a literary text like this one could only be honoured through a collective, hybrid, and creolized process. (excerpted from Kama La Mackerel’s full translator’s note, published in The Rage Letters, out November 21, 2023).

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