English followed by une version en français y una versión en español. There are also Terminology notes in English. Comme c’est souvent le cas, une partie de ce texte a été révisée après la première publication. Dans le cas présent, le français a été remanié dans un souci de clarté (et pour corriger quelques erreurs !). And it may be that, after all this reworking, the French version has become better than the English original.

Permettez-moi de noter que, dans ce cas-ci, le premier défi était de communiquer bcp d’info en très peu de mots. Il y a 4 anecdotes complexes communiqués en 250 mots ! Si la poésie n’était que la concision, ce serait un très bon exemple.

En cuanto a la versión española, observo que a veces un autor puede sentir que un texto está acabado, al menos por el momento, porque, en cierto sentido, le ha derrotado.

English

My not quite nephew in my kitchen explained

My not quite nephew in my kitchen explained

To the suburbs he’d gone to visit a friend,

Her comfortable family, a perfect four,

La petite amie . . . clearly her father’s child,

But the sister seemed . . . of other stock.

A circumstance his friend had not realized,

Though by Karim’s remarking was she surprised?

My nephew has two grandparents pieds-noirs

And une grandmère belge out of wedlock born,

Left in northern France with some kindly nuns,

Later by her own mother – ever anxious

To preserve both child and reputation –

Adopted and then, teenaged, finally told:

Her foster mother the mother she’d so long missed.

And so I went to lunch with a friend berbère

Whose daughters were conceived with a white French man

Whose mother in Poland was born a Jew,

In France off’ring her beauty to a Fire Chief

Whose task well-performed was to put out the fire

Of a birthright, religion threatening her life,

Lives of children, grandchildren growing un-despised.

Half-Jewish I to a Spanish book club go!

This month’s theme: Peruvian intermarriage,

Or exploitation, shame and expropriation;

A father two wives ; daughter equally split,

As if there were something noteworthy in this.

In fact, the chola author simply described:

With bigots, secrets, confusion all of us live.

Terminology notes

From Wikipedia, Wiktionary and a French site on “Les Berbères d’Afrique du Nord”

[1] Les pieds-noirs (French for “Black Feet”) are people of French and other European descent who were born in Algeria during the period of French rule from 1830 to 1962. Many pieds-noirs departed for mainland France as Algerians of longer-standing gained power. (Capital finding that small, “independent” entities were easier to exploit than colonial empires?)

In France, with a population of about 60 million people, approximately 5 percent, or 3 million people, have been pied-noirs, and there are also their descendants, such as my wife’s nephew Karim, whose father’s parents both had to flee Algeria in the midst of the Algerian War (1954 to 1962).

[2] Were I to speak of my own ethnic origins, this would be a long story, and would include not only Jews from “beyond the Pale,” but also English Pilgrims and Moravians (German-speaking Protestants), as well as Huguenots who had to flee France after the 1685 revocation of L’Edit de Nantes, which led to a mass exodus of Protestants from France, many of whom came to the northeast coast of North America. I like to say, however fancifully, that in France our family name was “Basse”—which suggests peasants of quite modest status (bas = low). Once in the “New World,” the name became Bass, as if we were a kind of fish.

Distinguished fish (!), as Basses have long been prominent in New Hampshire politics. And, before this, one wandering Bass married into one of Chicago’s first families, was one of Abraham Lincoln’s campaign managers,  and bought an apartment in some chic part of Paris (dans le huitième, j’imagine).

[3] The word berbère is derived from the Greek barbaroi, which was retained by the Romans in barbarus and then recovered by the Arabs in barbar and finally by the French with berbère. The term was primarily used to designate “people whose language is not understood”, i.e. foreigners.

Berbers (Arabic: بربر) or the Berber peoples, also called by their contemporary self-name Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Arab migrations to the Maghreb. Berbers are principally identified by their use of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible. The term Amazigh means a noble or free person.

I suppose I might further note that one of my ancestors, the American General William Eaton (1764–1811), is famous for having engaged a band of Egyptian missionaries to attack the Barbary pirates (of the Berber Coast), who were preying on American and others’ ships. These corsairs acquired revenue from raiding merchant vessels of their cargo, ransoming their crews or selling them into slavery.

[4] Cholo/chola is a loosely defined Spanish term which has had various meanings. Originally it meant a person with one indigenous parent and one Mestizo parent. It has come to be a somewhat derogatory term for people of mixed-blood heritage in the Spanish Empire in Latin America and its successor states.

The term’s use to describe a caste is first recorded in a Peruvian book published in the early seventeenth century, the Comentarios Reales de los Incas. The author, a Hispano-Quechua mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writes (in Spanish) that cholo comes from the Windward Islands (an area that now includes Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Saint Lucia and Grenada). De la Vega states that cholo means a dog, and not of a purebred variety, but of very disreputable origin. He says the Spaniards used the term for insult and vituperation.

In the Spanish book my book club was reading, Huaco Retrato (2021), the Peruvian-born author Gabriela Weiner, whose most famous ancestor was an Austrian Jew, uses the term chola to describe how she is perceived or feels in Madrid.

[5] As this poem was being developed, I came across this fascinating, gruesome bit in the wonderful Wiktionary’s discussion of the term miscegenation:

Coined by American journalist David Goodman Croly in 1864 from Latin miscēre (“mix”) +‎ genus (“race”) +‎ -ation, and first used in an anonymous pamphlet he coauthored, which claimed to be written by a person who believed in the inherent unity of all racial groups, that marriage between blacks and whites would create a better race, and that the American Civil War was a fight for the latter idea. Later, it was exposed that the pretext of the pamphlet was false and that it had actually been written by a group which hoped to inflame anger, particularly against then-US President Abraham Lincoln who was up for reelection.

Français

Mon neveu pas tout à fait dans ma cuisine m’a expliqué

Mon neveu pas tout à fait dans ma cuisine m’a expliqué :

Il a passé un week-end avec une nouvelle amie,

Chez les parents et la sœur, à l’aise en banlieue.

Et quoique sa copine l’enfant de son père lui semblait,

Les traits de la sœur… d’une toute autre souche.

Une circonstance dont son amie ne s’était jamais

Rendu compte. Et, donc, le constat de Karim… ?

Lui, pour grands-parents, a deux pieds-noirs,

Et une grand-mère belge née, pendant la guerre,

Hors mariage ; laissée à Lille, chez des nonnes

Charitables ; puis adoptée, rapatriée par sa propre

Mère, soucieuse de la garder bien et de leurs réputations.

Quinze ans plus tard, la mère avoua à la fille

Que c’était elle, la chère mère qui lui tant manquait.

Et puis j’ai déjeuné avec une amie berbère,

Dont les filles furent conçues avec un Français blanc,

Dont la mère juive-polonaise, en France a immigré,

Offrant sa beauté à un chef des pompiers, qui s’est

Bien acquitté de la tâche confiée : éteindre l’incendie

D’une longue ascendance qui menaçait sa vie

Et celles de leurs enfants – qu’ils grandissent sans mépris.

Et moi (à moitié juif), un institut espagnol fréquente.

Le métissage péruvien : le livre, le sujet pour ce mois-ci,

Ainsi que la honte, l’exploitation, l’expropriation,

Et un père aux deux épouses, et deux pour sa fille, après lui.

Comme si dans tout cela, il y avait du remarquable !

Mais que faisait l’auteur chola à part nous rappeler

Les secrets, l’intolérance et le fouillis

Où coulent toutes nos vies ?

Español

Mi sobrino no del todo en mi cocina explicó

Mi sobrino no del todo en mi cocina explicó

a visitar a una amiga, a los suburbios había ido;

su acogedora familia un cuarteto tranquillo,

y su novia claramente la hija de su padre;

pero la hermana parecía… de otra estirpe.

Una circunstancia ignorada por la amiga querida.

¿Aunque por los comentarios de mi sobrino Karim… ?

Por su parte, mi sobrino tiene dos abuelos pieds-noirs

y una abuela belga nacida fuera del matrimonio,

dejada en Francia con unas monjas bondadosas,

y después de algún tiempo por su propia madre

-ansiosa para amar y preservar su reputación-

adoptada, repatriada. Mucho más tarde, se lo dijo:

Su madre adoptiva… la madre anhelaba.

Así que fui a comer con una amiga bereber,

cuyas hijas concebidas con un francés blanco,

cuya madre en Polonia había nacido judía

y dio su belleza rubia a un bombero católico,

cuya tarea bien cumplida era apagar el fuego

de una herencia que amenazaba demasiado su vida

y las de sus hijos: que crezcan sin desprecio.

Y yo (¡medio judía!) a un club español voy.

El tema de este mes: el mestizaje peruano,

o explotación, vergüenza, expropiación.

Un padre con dos esposas, su hija dos también.

Como si hubiera algo digno de mención en esto.

Pero, ¿qué hacía el autor chola, aparte de recordar

el desorden, la intolerancia y los secretos

¿en que vivimos?

— Poem(s) and electronic creation by William Eaton.