I wrote
necropolitics
scavengers
all-powerful scavengers

social death
physical death

I wrote
newspeak
all day & all night
for over a century

newspeak    joint-of-the-prison-walls
official lexicon justifying killing machine


& if social death weren’t enough     may physical death come


newspeak of the Powerful sitting on
the thrones of the world
scavengers always ready to
condemn us for words
offensive to their ears & offer
all kinds of help & mercy
to the new Khans dreaming of erasing
our fathers’ & children’s
names     our thousand-year-old
history

                                                to the point of
making our existence
a
          fiction

like the ground
we walk on

 From Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (Cambourakis, May 2025).

Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who lives in his native Réunion Island. He has published French translations of Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel). Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’s Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023). He is finishing the translation into English of her third book, This Mount Overlooking the Sea (Cambourakis, 2025).

 

ai écrit
nécropolitique
nécrophages
nécrophages tout-puissants

mort sociale
mort physique

ai écrit
novlangue
à longueur de jour & de nuit
depuis plus d’un siècle

novlangue     joint-des-murs-de-la-prison
lexique officiel justifiant machine à tuer


& si mort sociale ne suffit pas     que mort physique advienne


novlangue des Puissants assis sur
les trônes du monde
nécrophages toujours prêts à nous
condamner pour
mots offensants à leurs oreilles & offrir
toute aide & mansuétude
aux nouveaux Khans qui rêvent d’effacer
le nom de nos pères
& de nos enfants    notre histoire
millénaire
                                                jusqu’à
faire de notre existence
une
          fiction

à l’instar du sol sur lequel
nous marchons

Extrait de Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (Cambourakis, mai 2025).

A French-language poet from the Palestinian diaspora, Olivia Elias was born in Haifa in 1944. Until she was 16, she lived in Lebanon—where her family had taken refuge in 1948—and then on three continents. Elias only began publishing in February 2015. Since then she has published Ton nom de Palestine (Éditions Al Manar, 2017), Chaos, Traversée (La feuille de thé, 2019) and in May 2025, Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (Cambourakis). In 2022, she made her English-language debut with Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), a bilingual and expanded version of Chaos, Traversée, followed in 2023 by Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry). Translated into several languages, her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in France and abroad. Chaos, Crossing was a finalist for the Sarah Maguire 2024 International Prize For Poetry In Translation.

Read Olivia Elias interviewed by Jérémy Victor Robert.