Hopscotch

Fatemeh Shams is a Persian poet and scholar, whose chapbook, Hopscotch, translated by Armen Davoudian, traces the uncanny route of an Iranian exile through Berlin:

I walk in you
beside Picasso’s women, their shattered faces
past the swans and dismal mice of the Landwehrkanal
on an ex-Bolshevik sidewalk
clad in black leather, a full-time loner

In the titular poem, the chalk lines on the street behave like a boundary between the present and the past—with each hop, the prospect of reaching inside a memory increases:

Another hop and I might reach him
I might see him
I might hug my father, still twenty-nine
and about to be a father for the first time.

In the same poem, Shams writes about “the elsewhere of being thirty-eight” and imagines hopping “three squares back to the seven-year-old girl.” For Shams, time and space are pliable—they can be folded and layered to create ever denser versions of the present—and are simultaneous with the current reality. From “Ghosts”:

I thank the ghosts of this city who walk beside me every day
[…]
They remember
the date of my final departure
the color of my suitcase
the colorless face of fear
and the woman who every evening rehearses her estrangement
     on the long streets of this city.

Shams’s feverish peregrination brings to the surface Berlin’s own bloody history, public and private specters twisting through the streets:

for the lake that fills the stretch of death between two walls
for the coffeeshop seated comfortably on bones of terror
for a city that tattoos the names of its residents on its skin
feet lisp on Stolpersteine

Shams inhabits the city as if it were continuous with the self, whether dancing at Berghain or walking with the ghosts. At the same time, as an exile, she does not take intimacy with the city for granted:

[…] surgeons cut the
whorled lines at the ends of my fingers. I’m thinking of
the last border checkpoint my intact fingerprint triumphed
over.