Bazar Oriental

By Shqiponjë Ahmedi

A Bazar Oriental is a corner shop, regularly disorganized, packed with school supplies, toys, electronics, pet food, kitchen utensils, birthday decorations, and an intense plastic scent that lingers on your outfit long after you've left the store. This collection of poetry resembles a chaotic bazar of moods and sentiments, of being disoriented, of not being able to distinguish homesickness from falling in love. It is a voyage divided in three parts, the present reality (Of Gibsons and Other Hurricanes), the past leading to the present (Of Bazars) and the last part, which is the ultimate yearning and goal (Of Home). Throughout the collection, the author is constructing the means to make it home unbroken.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666744019

Shqiponjë Ahmedi

Shqiponjë Ahmedi was born in 1992 in a charming, idle village in North Macedonia. Her name has been mispronounced in the most imaginative ways. Her father wrote her poems when she was a child and has been reciting Drtitëro Agolli for as long as she can remember. Throughout her childhood she would spend time in the school library, where her mother works, “borrowing” books. The books would later be found by her mother and returned safely to the library. She has recently obtained her doctoral degree in psychology of communication and change at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

Book preview

Introduction

Dear A.,

After the war everything was different. What was left of my uncle’s house were blackened walls pierced by bullets and butterflies. The cold basement was a bedroom and a kitchen, there were no more pickled jars stored in there. Only people and their limping hearts. My friends were different too, they were quieter, their eyes matched their worn-out clothes and bare feet. We didn’t play in the fields anymore, we played in the ruins. Hide and seek was no longer a game. The asphalted road we used to take to the ice cream shop had turned into a dirt road with leftover pieces of concrete and mourning. The tanks ate it mercilessly my uncle said. I did not know what mercilessly meant, but I heard that word a lot that summer. The grownups would talk softer when we were around, they said only one little girl survived, they said the soldiers let her live on purpose so she can tell of all the horrors. Fifty-eight to be exact. They said she hid on the bread granary. I kept imagining her tiny body crumpled like aluminum foil. It was a good summer, with the exception of the allergies I developed from the burned-down houses that served as our playground. It was the summer of freedom, although bleak, it was difficult to grasp it. First you had to peel off the anguish like old-fashioned floral wallpaper, you had to scrub it away like a sticky bar floor and dust off the rags still glued to our skins, but it was there, in our veins. It was there like sheep’s flowers blooming in my childhood village. I do not recall the origins of the name; it was what we called the first flower before spring. I would carry warm bread and cheese that mother used to make and went hunting for this flower, the first sign that warmer days were lying ahead. This saffron yellow flower would bloom, proud and sweet, before the snow melted. Just as we love again, before the hurt is gone.

Dear, forgive this digression, it is the thirteenth day of wildfires. My words like dew disperse before reaching you. The island itself is covered in flames, there isn’t much any of us can do. Buckets of water are pathetic. In vain I call you to my succor. In vain I wait for you to arrive. People have started to recognize fear; they are holding their belongings close to their chests and pray. There’s a lot of praying. Their tedious tumult, their devotions, overwhelm me. I have nothing dear to hold to my chest. Except for the lavender-scented ink and the dip pen with two falcon nibs that you gave me on Three Kings Day. I am trying not to waste too much paper because it is running out everywhere. That is why, aesthetics aside I am writing on both sides. My impious fingers are lilac now and they smell of lavender. It feels so long ago that they were pale and touching yours, laughing at the story of the mouse that drowned from its tears inside a perfume bottle. I wonder what has become of you. I wonder