Simone Atangana Bekono

- The Netherlands -

Simone Atangana Bekono (1991) is a writer of prose and poetry. She has written columns and essays for various newspapers and magazines and is an editor at the literary magazine De Revisor. In 2016, she graduated from the Creative Writing program at ArtEZ with a collection of poems and letters titled hoe de eerste vonken zichtbaar waren (how the first sparks became visible), which was reissued by Wintertuin Publishers in collaboration with Lebowski Publishers. In 2018, hoe de eerste vonken zichtbaar waren was awarded the Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee. In 2019, she received the Charlotte Köhler Stipendium for her poetry. The collection has been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Turkish, among other languages.

 

Her debut novel Confrontaties (Confrontations) was published in 2020 to critical acclaim and won the Hebban Debut Prize, the Anton Wachter Prize, and the Best Book for Young Adults award. The novel was shortlisted for both the 2021 Libris Literature Prize and the Bronze Owl (De Bronzen Uil). In March 2022, it was announced that Confrontations would be published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail in January 2024. The Bookseller reported on the deal, which was brokered by Lisette Verhagen of Peters Fraser + Dunlop. A US deal with Bloomsbury USA was also secured. The German translation was published in January 2023 by Beck Verlag (via PF+D).

 

In 2022, Simone collaborated with literary production house Tilt to write the Brabants Boek Present. The novella Zo hoog de zon stond (As High as the Sun Stood) was released in a limited edition, available only through booksellers in the Dutch province of Brabant. A trade edition was published in December by De Arbeiderspers and was widely praised. Zo hoog de zon stond was longlisted for the 2023 Libris Literature Prize.

 

 


We Retch Up Sincerity: The Poetics of Simone Atangana Bekono

by Egan Garr

 

The words “militant”, “assertive”, and “difficult” often accompany descriptions of the celebrated Dutch writer Simone Atangana Bekono’s work. But these kinds of adjectives are code, an attempt to deflect from an uneasiness around a queer Black woman’s poetry. Underneath: the implication that a violence has been done to the historically tidy and polite – and white – Dutch poetic line. It is a safeguard for Dutch letters to place Atangana Bekono and many of her contemporaries in narrative confrontation to the legacy’s otherwise dependable whiteness. Look! they say. These poems are angry and hard!

 

Atangana Bekono’s poetry does stand out, but not because it’s mad or uncooperative. Her poems, rather, are a meticulously controlled experiment – but she isn’t necessarily testing herself. In her 2017 debut hoe de eerste vonken zichtbaar waren (Wintertuin and Lebowski Publishers), published in 2021 in David Colmer’s translation How the First Sparks Became Visible (Emma Press), Atangana Bekono is a chemist, recounting personal histories and identity under the force of fire’s three stages: friction, kindling, and spark. In her second collection released last year, Marshmallow (Arbeiderspers), Atangana Bekono is now an archeologist sifting through the ruins of eros. In both collections, she controls the narrative – and therefore us, the reader – with a deft hold over the line, a deliberate push and pull across each break that hinges the poem, and collections, together.

 

This hinging seems to have frustrated some critics, who have evidently struggled to do the work required of advanced readers of poetry. Take this review of Marshmallow from De Lage Landen, for example:

 

 

You try to find your bearings as reader, but all of the open spaces in the poetry force you to fill them in yourself or just accept the chaos…This gives the poetry an unfinished character. It seems Atangana Bekono jotted down several options while writing and couldn’t decide which one to use in the final versions.

 

 

There are a handful of such facile commentaries out there, relegating Atangana Bekono’s poetics to a “raw” and “stream of consciousness” realm. Thankfully, though, not all reception of Atangana Bekono’s work is written in code or reductive in its assumptions about her choices or skillset. Her graduation portfolio from ArtEZ, in fact, was circulated throughout the Dutch literary world in a kind of awe, quickly elevating her to almost famed status, and became her first book, hoe de eerste vonken. In De Groene Amsterdammer, the reviewer and acclaimed Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer clocked what she’s doing in both that first collection and her second, Marshmallow:

 

 

[It] is left ostensibly nebulous on purpose, making it an effort to decipher these long poems quickly. And thankfully so: Bekono does not write support-group poetry or selfie lyricism…[These] poems are not particularly interested in one-on-one confessional poetry…[They are] untamable.

 

 

Part of what makes Atangana Bekono’s poetry so interesting is how she commands ambiguity within the very context of expectations of what she should be doing as a Dutch poet. One reading of Bouche D’or/Kitty, translated here in this folio, is as an erotic ars poetica within the violence of poetry’s legacy: how the poet is forced to absorb that legacy and what she does with it – because of and despite it. While she might love the canon and its masters, she’s also a tool in their machine. She knows that she is both unseemly and the perfect poster girl.

 

 

I still completely believe in

all my gods but more importantly

all my masters are patient with me

 

I haven’t discovered a man

but an ampersand and it’s perfect

and therefore brutal

 

I kneel and despite my

repulsiveness am so innately pure

like a sacri-fice

 

 

But don’t be fooled. This poet is a siphon. The gods have given her the tools, and she will use them perfectly: “no one can glow / so pious in this circus / like me”. This poem and others in this folio, in fact Atangana Bekono’s entire oeuvre up to this point, prove she’s right. Throughout her poetics, Atangana Bekono displays incredible enjambic precision, a grasp of breaks and pacing reminiscent of poets like Kim Hyesoon and Shane McCrae: 

 

 

even filled to the brim

tears in our eyes when they

push deeper our throats

flood until (and sometimes

asking us

to do tricks too)

we retch up sincerity

that’s when they push

until their armpits

and hands have vanished 

into the melting pot of organs that’s when

they wrap their fist around something

that even my beloved couldn’t reach that’s

when they hit lower deeper and

I sob in pious ecstasy  

 

 

Lines can be read autonomously or in relation to the one after or before, building layers of meaning across the poem. The fact that this poem is right-justified gives such enjambments added weight. The poem’s sonics, its syllabic urgencies and how breath works here, also seem to carry more weight on this side of the page – we are at the ends of lines, not the beginnings. 

 

This is what we should be looking for in Atangana Bekono’s poetry: how she has dislodged the tidy Dutch poetic line from its long-assured footing. And she has done so with a mastery that has been rewarded; her list of prizes and accolades is long and growing, the pantheon of Dutch letters thrown wide. As her work continues to find its way into translation, I suspect we’ll see her techniques elevating the poetic line far beyond the lowlands.  

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. Where’d the Stallions Go? / WAAR ZIJN DE HENGSTEN?

  2. BOUCHE D’OR/KITTY / BOUCHE D’OR/KITTY

  3. NO MORE THAN A SLAVE TO THE LARD IN YOUR GENES / NIKS DAN KNECHT VAN DE REUZEL IN JE GENEN

  4. WJ / WJ