Babeth Fotchind
- The Netherlands -
Babeth Fonchie Fotchind is a poet, writer and human rights lawyer. She regularly reads at venues and festivals, and has published poems in magazines De Revisor, De Groene Amsterdammer, DW B, De Gids, the FD, ELLE magazine and Lilith Mag, among others. She was selected for the writing residency of deBuren and the Slow Writing Lab of the Dutch Foundation for Literature. She was voted Next Talent To Watch by VOGUE, and was nominated for the Harpers Bazaar Women of the Year Award and elected literary talent by Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.
Her debut poetry collection Plooi (‘Fold’) was published in June 2022 by publishing house De Geus and received rave reviews. Plooi was shortlisted for both the C. Buddingh' Prize and the Herman de Coninck Prize.
She is currently working on her debut novel and second book of poetry.
To fold or be folded: on Babeth Fonchie Fotchind’s poetry
By Mina Etemad
A fold can be intentional and neat, but a fold can also be something that accidentally occurs along disordered lines. Most of the time, folds leave marks and change the structure of an object permanently.
On the cover of Babeth Fonchie Fotchind’s collection of poems Plooi – translated for this essay and referred to as Fold – a picture of an oval object is to be found. It is made of translucent golden paper that seems to have been crumpled; you could say it consists of numerous different folds. Within all those creases, a human face can be discerned, for example in the many folds that resemble a mouth or a nose.
How did the folds come to be, one might wonder. How are we, as humans, shaped? Do you make your own folds? Or do other people fold you? These questions emerge while reading Fotchind’s work. Her poems employ various images and language styles to explore how our self-perception is constructed, how our relationships with others shape us, and what influence society has on forming our identities.
In an interview with Dutch newspaper Het Parool, Fotchind shared her perspective on the title of her book: ‘Plooi has several meanings; to straighten something, to shape something, to crumple and make something uglier, to adapt oneself. I also find it beautiful that it is both an imperative verb and a noun. That’s the tension you see in my collection as well: an individual is who she is, but her environment wants to change her. She wonders: do I want to go along with this? Who am I? What is my essence? Do I even have an essence?’
In search of that essence, Fotchind often goes back to the moment of birth or even the time before that, when a person is merely cells, yet already integrated into a family dynamic. In ‘even before you’ve got here’, she writes: ‘you wonder if even before becoming a human / grain edges of a wound, pus juice with potential / photic zone, you belong to a family line’ (translation by Michele Hutchison).
An individual is born with wounds, traumas that are passed on to them by their family, Fotchind seems to suggest. However, everyone harbors the potential to let life flourish in the light, to be the catalyst for change in their family.
This is true for the lyrical subject in Fold, although she has been creased by her parents before she was born and during her upbringing. At a certain time, a pivotal moment put a distance between them: her coming out as queer. It is at that point that she loses the bond with her mother: ‘the voice memo / explaining why sexual orientation is not a choice / doesn’t come in at her frequency, the connection / is lost’ (from: ‘this captcha-code is not designed to be cracked’, translation by Michele Hutchison).
Despite the lack of contact between her and her parents from then on, the lyrical subject cannot entirely detach from them – in many poems, their presence and their influence are unmistakable. Sometimes, she still tries to be what they want her to be, as in ‘February 16th’ when she writes about her father: ‘would he be proud / of how she folds away her boundaries’ (quote translated by me for the purpose of this essay).
This smoothing out of folds is what her father supposedly encouraged, but these phrases also reveal another theme of Fotchind’s: our continuous efforts to conform to societal norms. In the quoted phrases, the lyrical subject fears setting boundaries with other people and instead tries to erase those boundaries to blend in.
It is especially her queerness that makes the lyrical subject stand out. This leads to the outside world trying to reshape her. When she travels to Cameroon, the people in her birth village attempt to eradicate her deviant sexual orientation through torture. At the same time, the west proves to be unsafe as well, as she faces conversion therapy there.
Despite these moments of her identity being rejected, there are times when the lyrical figure finds a community or acceptance from the outside world regarding her sexuality. At the end of Fold, she even starts her own family. Therefore, society is never unambiguously safe or unsafe, welcoming or unwelcoming – it is multifaceted, just as the lyrical subject is.
The influence of the outside world is also evident in the diverse language registers Fotchind uses. She demonstrates that we are shaped by both the vocabulary we use ourselves and the terms others use to describe us.
A poem like ‘profile upon arrival’ reads like an official form from a regulatory organization that registers immigrants. While humans are not solely defined by words, this language and these institutions provide us with the necessary documents to live as part of society – we do not exist officially if we are not defined this way. By incorporating this formal language in her poems, Fotchind highlights the alienating, limiting, and painful experience of being determined in such a manner.
Simultaneously, many poems are full of banal, everyday language, such as in the four poems titled ‘well-intended pieces of advice’. They are a collection of sentences people have told the lyrical subject in an attempt to help her. We do not know why she has collected them; did she think they were important to remember, or did she find them absurd and is that the reason she wrote them down?
We also do not know if the lyrical subject has implemented the advice. After all, it is not ‘good advice’, It is ‘well-intended, which means it can actually be bad advice. When analyzing this advice, one might even question its effectiveness in truly helping the lyrical subject, since it focuses predominantly on self-improvement. The societal issues she struggles with cannot be resolved with advice like ‘let go of your negative feelings – letting go as you exhale (usually) helps / challenge yourself today’ (translation by Michele Hutchison).
All in all, advice is always an attempt from the outside world to alter your inner world. If you heed the advice, a fold can start to form. Since it is unclear if the lyrical subject carried out the advice, we do not know how it has shaped her. But she has remembered the advice, so they are somehow part of her.
Through reading Fotchind’s work, we ultimately learn that an individual is shaped by numerous dynamics. Being multifaceted means both folding yourself and to be folded, whether intentionally or even involuntarily by all the forces that were there before you were born. Through all these folds – in what we could call an essence, but one that could never be truly defined – a crumpled human shape can be discerned.
Poetry
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tipping point / kantelpunt
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profile upon arrival / profielschets bij aankomst
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even before you’ve got here / nog voordat je er bent
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turn tackling loneliness into a project / maak van de aanpak van eenzaamheid een project
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advice from my best friend who is also damaged / advies van mijn beste vriendin die ook beschadigd is
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a floating house / een huis dat zweeft
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find us here / vind ons hier
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freedom is / vrijheid is
