Carol SANSOUR

In the Time of the Apricots

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​A bilingual reading of the entire cycle of poems In the time of the Apricots by the author, Carol Sansour (Arabic) and actress Christelle Saez (English)

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In the Time of the Apricots is a tour de force. A cycle of poems, it embraces the entire life experience of a woman poet who happens to be Palestinian. We can find, without being able to disentangle them, daily life and politics, desires, childhood memories, motherhood. The insistent memory of the mother is like the refrain of this long and finely chiselled song.

The variety of poetic forms is brought into play and their meticulous arrangement into an ode to life recited in an almost natural voice by this duet of splendid readers, each in her language, is a drama in stereo where anger, sensuality, reportage, elegy, fantasies, the infinite tenderness of mothers, heady melancholy of this season of apricots and the smell of Turkish coffee all mix.

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Festival d'Avignon 2022

 

 

​In the Time of the Apricots

Kotob Khan ed., Cairo, 2019 – translation Youssef Rakha

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I shall plough

everywhere

and move on

Out of your soul’s press

and your body’s distillery

I shall be drunk on your last breath

In the palms of your hands

I shall place all of me

All time will pass

Me and you

everywhere

we shall be

- -

And while we are aware of our profound sadness

we force our bodies to pass through infinite tunnels

where the world is preoccupied with perfecting its plans

to eliminate our children

Q: You are an Arab artist?

A: Me? God forbid! I am a criminal, thank God. God was merciful and kind to me.

-- -

The mornings green, yellow

and honey hued

In the time of the apricots

The smell of burning sugar

Children playing in the dust

while my mother makes coffee

and milk and tea

My mother

 In the time of the apricots

 Always my mother

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