“I wring my heart out,” writes Alara Adilow in the collection of poems Myths and traffic lightswhich was awarded the Herman de Coninck Prize 2023 in Antwerp on Tuesday evening. The 35-year-old debuting Somali-Dutch poet thus wins the largest poetry prize in Flanders, worth 7,500 euros, with a collection that is “uncomfortably […] a new place in the language”, according to the jury.
That new place is hard-won, because conforming to the language used in the world is for the I in Myths and traffic lights not possible. It does not fit within the norms and at most finds common ground in the unusual, the mythical – a tragic recognition, because myths usually contain monsters that are out of order. She is stopped by traffic lights, which can be symbolically read as barriers imposed by the world. Myths and traffic lights is an identity quest in the language.
The story of this first-person narrator echoes Adilow’s autobiography: she is of Somali descent, migrated to England, then learned the Dutch language and currently lives in Antwerp. “I have lost my country in someone else’s language,” reads one line in the collection. In addition, Adilow is a trans woman – an experience that, she said in interviews, inspired her to take up poetry. And so the outsider, which she was in several ways, takes shape in poetry that is dirty and painful, that is sometimes straightforward and sometimes deliberately confusing, in language that wants to wring, scratch and pound.
From the said wrung heart drip “rain, thunderclouds, syntax/broken laws, slow jazz music,” says the title poem of the collection. It is run-down and dingy there, in cities full of dark alleys, on the raw seamy side of the society that is evoked in the poems. Life is a drug and sex intoxication: “When you have a sex addiction and a drug addiction/ and you can’t remember whether you take drugs for good sex/ or whether sex is a by-product of drug use.”
Sex with the Prime Minister
A brusque, uncomfortable and somewhat cross-border highlight of the collection, which has already been praised in various reviews, is the poem in which the first-person narrator, a trans woman, tells of the sex she has with the Dutch prime minister. At first she is grateful for this, “because he has beautiful white buttocks that are soft and radiate innocence.” But ultimately Rutte is “ecstatic and wants more”: the balance of power has been reversed. The poem can be read as a criticism of the establishment – personified in Rutte – that is self-indulgent and indulges the underprivileged, but has no eye for the subordination of those who do not belong to the dominant, ‘normal’ group. Only in art, namely in this poem that puts the ruler in his shirt, can revenge be taken.
“I found in poetry a wallowing expanding, a feeling of sprouting”, is the hopeful conclusion of the title poem. “As if I were a crop in language. As if I were more than a coffin / full of discourses stored in a body’. In addition to Adilow’s collection, the jury of the Herman de Coninck Prize 2023 nominated three other poetry debuts – Fold by Babeth Fonchie Fotchind, Primeval deer from Astrid Haerens and shoreless by Nisrine Mbarki – and also the new collections by previously awarded poets Iduna Paalman (Proof of custody) and Mustafa Stitou (Where’s the lamb?). According to the jury, Adilow’s language, which is “fresh, clear and new”, stood out: “The poet clearly has many important things to say and is far from finished.”
Alara Adilow: Myths and Stoplights. Prometheus, 112 pp. €19.99.