Read By: Lila Azam Zanganeh

<p><em>Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection:</em></p> <p>Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a century after his death. He is also, in my eyes, the great poet of agency, and of promise: "there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest," he writes in <em>Return to My Native Land</em>. "We know now... that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth without limit." Exit old ghosts.</p> <p><a href= "https://archipelagobooks.org/book/return-to-my-native-land/"><em>Return to My Native Land</em></a>, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger at Archipelago Books</p> <p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0</span></p>